The 2,700 year history of the United States begins with Romulus killing Remus on the banks of the Tiber; China was still ruled by steppe nomads when the Wright Brothers invented the airplane.
Matt Yglesias is a blogger. He is guy with a bachelorโs degree who posts his opinions about things on the internet. His standing is exactly the same as Roman Helmet Guyโs, which is: His writing is influential to the extent people find it persuasive.
We no longer live in a world where some people are arbitrarily designated as the good and important opinion-havers, and those people become the columnists and are real thinkers and intellectuals, while everyone else is just the schmucks on the โletters to the editorโ page.
The walls of Old Twitterโs garden have been torn down. Vox has been sold for scrap to Rupert Murdochโs second-favorite son. Anyone can put on a Roman helmet and build a platform now, and their opinions are just as good and can be just as influential as Matt Yglesiasโs or Nick Kristofโs.
I don't think I'll ever trust Chinese hardware when their products can contain spyware chips that cannot be defended against.
These are smaller than the lead of a pencil, and about the size of a small SMD capacitor or resistor on a board. A lot of sensitive hardware is on the U.S. Entity List and the export bans list.
Even though it hasn't been definitively proven to be the case that this hacking chip is real, there have been documented cases of Chinese-made IoT devices "calling home" and sending packets of data to an unknown remote server in China.
Although they say that it's all in the firmware/software level, I just don't trust it when a known vector exists beyond root-level hardware hijacking, dual-use chip microphones, and various other things.
The part that drives my skepticism up the most is that Chinaโs National Intelligence Law obligates companies to assist state intelligence when asked... and they have NO option to opt-out.
https://t.co/75pmpK1SOP
Lewontin's Fallacy: Lewontin argued that because 85% of variation is within populations and only 15% is between them, racial classification is meaningless.
Edwards proves mathematically that this is a fallacy because it ignores the correlation structure of the data. While a single gene might not distinguish a European from an African, looking at many genes simultaneously reveals distinct clusters. He demonstrates that with enough markers, the probability of misclassifying an individual drops to near zero, even if the average difference between groups is small. He states, "The information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data".
supply chain stopping us from making dozens of huge safe reactors you say, we can't make pressure vessels you say, we need heavy forgings and machining centers you say. this could be built in <2 years with <$2b. many such cases.
Amount of shit spacex threw into the ocean is like 60-80 of 600+ rocket stages spacex ever launched, thats just 10% thrown into the water, SpaceX even reuses their fairings
(Not counting second stages cuz they largely burn up and dissipate)
ULA has thrown 100% of their rocket stages into the water (172/172 full stacks aka 500+ first stages+boosters+fairings)
Arianespace has thrown 100% of their rocket stages into the water (300/300 stacks aka 1000+ first stages + boosters + fairings)
CASC has thrown 100% of their rocket stages into the water (500/500 stacks aka 1500+ first stages + boosters + fairings)
An estimated 6000-12,000 rocket stages and side boosters have been thrown into the ocean since 1957
SpaceX literally makes up an estimated less than 1% of it
I was PURGED from NASA in about 2013 and lost a grant bc the team was "overly white."
They spent the money we'd wanted to FLY A ROCKET PLANE ON MARS on global warming satellites.
You don't understand just how DEIed NASA is unless you saw it from the inside.
Petraeus: The U.S. has not remotely learned the lessons it should from Ukraine.
This is the future of war: Ukraine alone uses 10,000 drones a day, and 90% of Russian casualties are caused by drones. That should force institutional change. 1/
@shadowcrewtroll@cthorrez@pronounced_kyle "America is attriting mostly legacy unmanned systems at a slow rate, ayatollahites have only lost all their top leaders several times over. Iran is #winning!!"
"When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment.
When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.โ
โIllinois Senator Barack Obama, 2006
โThe natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes, or tornadoes, or earthquakes; it is Lyme disease,โ says MIT associate professor and pioneer in genetic engineering Kevin Esvelt, describing the severity of the tick-borne illness in the Northeast. https://t.co/AanzUFbMEU
This insistence that crime and disorder aren't really issues in American cities, when in fact many cities just basically decided to stop doing law enforcement post-2020, just feels very Orwellian and tone deaf.