Agreed, it cost me at least $10,000 because I had to pay fancier accountants to do all the R&D calcs. Not to mention the interest lost, my time spent figuring it all out, etc.
The same Unity jerk targeted my small educational software company and shook us down for $5000/year industry licenses because we have a grant. I had to let one of my devs go.
When I originally wrote the grant, we had budgeted for $80/month Pro licenses (what I was paying at the time). I've had a Pro license since 2011. It's alarming that they're in such a bad spot to try to draw blood from a stone in this way.
No not all talented scientists are independently wealthy or have the charisma to raise VC funding. What you're advocating for is the return of the era of the "gentleman scientist" where the only people allowed to do science are those lucky enough to be born into wealth (or some other privilege e.g. extreme good looks).
Once I looked at the comments for a disgusting AI-generated tiny house picture to see if anyone else knew it was AI-generated and then all it showed me were more disgusting AI-generated tiny house pictures no matter how many times I tried to block it.
Before I disabled it for my organization (couldn't stand the "help me write" prompt on gdocs), I kept asking Gemini stuff like, "Find the last 5 most important emails that I have not responded to", and it replies "I'm sorry I can't do that". Seems like it would be the most basic possible functionality for an AI email assistant.
The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things. This has resulted in what we have now: A subject where the prerequisite to understanding is the ability to read long passages of text littered with jargon and visualize what that might represent. Even if everyone's reading skills were where they should be, the second part is not a super common skillset.
It's one of the reasons why I work in visualization for life sciences education: I think we're missing out on people who might otherwise make massive contributions to the field because they failed to memorize what the "endoplasmic reticulum" does. Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes (at least at a basic level like what a middle schooler might be taught). Once you're exposed to the fascinating complexity of life at that level, for many people it can be interesting enough to build the motivation for the memorization/etc.
> The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things.
More to the point, the field of biology is so complex that for the longest time we could only name and classify things. Understanding came later, when we'd accummulated enough data and had hints from chemistry and other fields.
The problem is that once we gain that understanding, we add that as one more chapter to our textbooks, one more lesson tacked on, instead of rethinking the curriculum around our understanding.
>Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes
But even that's besides the point of the fact that all these things are nothing more than abstractions created by humans, and ultimately it's all one giant soup of interacting molecules.
The use of latin doesn't help either. "Cytoplasmic net" (or better yet "plasma net") is a lot easier to understand, visualise and remember than "endplasmic reticulum".
If you are an English speaker. If you are native in a Latin-based language, "reticulum" is pretty clear (reticolo, retículo, réticule etc). So, it's just a point of view and dictaded by the most used language within research/education at a particular point in time.
While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay:
“I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
dunno if it is this plain.. the regulatory capture in the last 30 years is not null. Especially in very niche, very profitable sub-corners of big-S Science.
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
Yes. If you are genuinely unaware and not just asking a rhetorical question, yes socialized medicine is a major goal of the progressive left. We came close in 2010 but the votes in congress weren't quite there. The only reason major parties don't pursue it is because progressivism doesn't have the votes. You can definitely vote for it though especially if you participate in primaries.
So is democracy not real? I find it funny that when things do right it's because of our superior system of people choosing their leaders, and when things go wrong it's because people don't have any choice.
Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor flawed example.
Despite the founders being anti-party politics and wanting a spectrum of representatives each representing a block of the broader population and hammering out consensual deals that most can live with, the US has devolved into a two party system in which neither party especially represents 50% of the population despite both butting up against the median of actual voters.
This is the doom spiral of iterative FPTP and Hotelling's 'law'.
Other democracies have many parties, larger parties mixed with smaller parties, greater voter engagement, various forms of proportional voting systems (there are several), etc.
US democracy is just one example of many global democracies.
EU also has freedom of movement, but vastly different social security systems.
Language is of course an extra barrier, but how much people will move is overrated. And maybe you could restrict supposed benefits to people who have lived there in a few years.
Obviously IANAL, but i am thinking - seems like you generally hate your government no matter who it is, so maybe states should be a bit more independent.
Sure, but the math doesn't work out. Vermont and California have both tried in various forms.
> EU also has freedom of movement, blah blah blah
They also coordinated the laws between the member countries. That's exactly what the federal government would need to do in this case, very good! The EU system doesn't work particularly well either, because it's loosely confederated. The US government has far more ability to coordinate the States.
Sarcasm detector has to be pretty high to catch this one ;)
But you've touched on the problem: any attempt to reform is immediately cast as "communism" (also without really understanding communism and equating it with soviet authoritarianism, but that's another topic).
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100 billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only 2.5x.
The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.
Yes, your anecdote about one person out of 300 million has convinced me that the statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve about the entire population are clearly incorrect.
I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our problems.
But killing the golden goose will not help solve the inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more expensive and difficult to get into universities with top research programs.
