Joined 16 years ago
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
Crime is down, mic of the city is gentrified and the total number of homeless in CA and SF is roughly in the same range it’s been since Reagan was governor.
A lot of this BS about CA and how bad things are seems to be from people who haven’t been here long or people overdosing on right wing media which has Non-stop been attacking CA for 30 years nightly, all the while it has continued to become more and more dominant economically.
Public safety is an externality. The air and water are externalities.
Private industry can't effectively compete to optimize a cost which is not "priced in". That's the whole point. If you can pollute, damage public safety, et al, it amounts to a free subsidy, you are externalizing costs which should show up in your balance sheet.
It's like people read Ayn Rand, or some cliff notes version of free market capitalism, but don't read any of the deep philosophical economic arguments in the literature, and then parrot slogans around.
In the same way that people think low-flow toilets are why their sh1t doesn't flush, instead of the proliferation of multi-ply super-thick toilet paper that are almost as bad as paper towels. It doesn't matter how much flow you have, if you flush a wad of cellulose that won't instantly dissolve like single-ply or thin-two-ply, you'll need to break out the augur.
And really, if you don't have a Toto Washlet or Japanese toilet, you're missing out. You barely need any toilet paper at all, and don't walk around with fecal particles wiped against your skin all day.
And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?
You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.
We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?
The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.
This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.
Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?
C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.
While debanking may be a problem, there’s a false populism in these disingenuous VCs, pretending that their troubles are the same as everyone else. These guys want to operate in grey areas that enable laundering, illegal gambling, buying/selling contraband, and straight up rug pulls, and not be subject to any risk or oversight.
He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.
He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.
He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.
The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.
All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.
This stuff is all designed so that even an employee with physical access to the machine would find it very difficult to get data. It's encrypted at rest by customer keys, stored in enclaves in volatile RAM. If you detached the computer or disk, you'd lose access. You'd have to perform an attack by somehow injecting code into the running system. But Shielded VMs/GKE instances makes that very hard.
I am not a Google employee anymore but this common tactic of just throwing out "oh, their business model contains ad model ergo, they will sell anything and everything, and violate contracts they sign to steal private data from your private cloud" is a bridge too far.
