If a masked person, that doesn't first identify themselves clearly as the police (which is difficult since, well, they are masked) breaks into my house, that's a lethal attack for sure.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
For the ones that didn't read the article, it says there. The problem is that the state takes more and more away from the workers wages:
"The biggest flaw: It uses gross income, not take-home pay
One of the biggest issues with the 30% rent rule is that it’s based on your gross income—not the amount of money that actually lands in your bank account on payday.
To illustrate this flaw, let’s use some real-world numbers. According to the latest FRED data, the median household income in the U.S. is about $84,000 per year, or roughly $7,000 per month before taxes.
Under the 30% rule, you could theoretically spend about $2,100 per month on rent if this is your income.
But let’s take a look at what your take-home pay could be with this salary. "
It may say the problem is taxes take too much money so you can't pay landlords, but how do we know the real problem isn't that landlords take too much money so you can't pay taxes? Or Comcast takes too much money so you can't pay landlords and taxes?
We know it, because during the last 50 years, already adjusted to inflation the USA government budget increased by 2.48× per capita.
And unless your argument is that public services are 2.48x better now, then yes, I know that the problem is, as usual, that the government is taking workers money away to do as they please.
Well, unfortunately, this is completely normal in science and it happened, basically forever.
Scientific projects, especially the massive ones, go through several cycles, and they get completely stopped or even canceled during their life, and then later, sometimes decades later, they do restart.
This happened with the LHC, ISS, James Webb telescope, the Hubble telescope, ITER, etc, etc, etc
Now, I know that in certain circles is very common these days, to go around pretending that the likes of many current decisions never happened until now and that whoever is governing the USA is doing something unheard of and absolutely terrible that nobody else would even think of. But it's not, this is something normal (I'm not saying it's good, but it is quite normal in science).
> Applying for highly competitive grants with limited funding is what scientists have always had to do to carry out the science—a flawed process with few alternatives. But arbitrary cancellations and delayed disbursements are unprecedented. And justifying them on the basis of politics—prohibiting, for instance, grants that include language referencing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—was unheard of until now.
Research in progress to address these issues was cancelled by DOGE because "melanin content of the skin." "Do your own research" if you care to, or fuck off.
Just to show how DEI works at NASA, I share a DEI plan we wrote for a proposal just before the change of administration. This plan was rated highly by the agency. Which parts are "appealing discriminatory practices"?
Inclusion Plan
Both PIs and collaborators recognize the negative effect that systemic barriers have on academia and the importance of facilitating the full participation, belonging, and contribution of different groups and individuals within our work environment in general and the proposed project in particular. The proposed project is small in scope with few paid contributors and a well-defined group of collaborators, but it is always important to have a strategy in place to develop a positive and inclusive work environment. The PIs identify three areas where systemic barriers may affect our working environment or where questions around inclusion are critical:
1 Hiring strategies.
The most obvious barrier against inclusivity in academia and STEM is bias (whether explicit or implicit) in recruiting staff and students. They will work closely with the recruitment and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices at their respective institution to create recruitment strategies which are as unbiased as possible. One of their affiliations is a minority (Hispanic) serving institution – a transformative engine of social mobility – that offers a remarkable opportunity to (i) ensure student recruitment plans include underrepresented individuals and (ii) increase participation of a diverse and inclusive talent pool in climate change science. Both PIs will also participate in hiring workshops and training offered by their respective universities. Finally, they will leverage each PI’s background and earlier experiences by providing feedback in recruitment strategies and hiring decisions to each other, along with collaborative feedback from the associated offices at their institutions.
2. Work relationships with Post Docs and between collaborators
It is also critical to create an inclusive working environment between PIs and Post Docs, enabling a positive collaboration between all members of the team. The two PIs will work with the hired Post Docs to write a career development plan during the first three months of their employment. They will also actively promote external mentorship for the Post Docs, either informally or via established mentorship programs, including AGU-endorsed programs Mentoring365 (a free and global mentoring platform for the Earth and space sciences community) and Mentoring365-circles (a peer-to-peer group mentoring program that allows early-career scientists to build skills and grow their network around common interests and objectives). Finally, they will ensure that the Post Docs are informed about how to report discrimination and how the University can support them during onboarding.
Both PIs have participated in management leadership training and have experience in organizing the kind of collaborative work that the proposed project requires. They will continue their learning process by participating in leadership workshops with a focus on DEI provided by their institutions.
3. Interactions with stakeholders.
Inclusivity in stakeholder interactions is critical for a successful result. PI 2 will be the main lead for working with stakeholders, and as such leverage their experience and expertise from earlier projects where stakeholder inclusivity has been a critical component.
I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
> Yet again, who is paying for this? This is a modern witch hunt.
Since this can only mean the DOGE witch hunt we all clearly remember, I think Elon Musk was paying for it? But now it's just taxpayer money (if there is anything left after "contributing" to all of Trumps many funds).
> The grants should go the best proposals, not to those with the proper genitalia, melanin content of the skin, and correct religion of those applying.
I'm confused. At least at the NSF, about 60-70% of their awards go to white men. Are those the appalling discriminatory practices, or what do you mean?
You know you can't just put one topic into the grievance bucket (science funding), shake it around, then pull out a different topic (orchestral hiring practices) and expect to have a conversation, right?
> Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, blind tests did exacerbate
> this issue, so, far left ideologues started calling to an end to
> blind auditions since they ended up making orchestras "less diverse"
> instead of more
You should really shouldn't subtly misrepresent the argument. The article states that blind auditions made orchestras much more diverse in some categories, but did not make much of an impact in others.
As far as I can tell nobody except Anthony Tommasini is calling for blind auditions to go away. His position position is just weird and using it
to represent the opinions of most of the left is more than a bit disingenuous.
I've been thinking a lot about this and my personal take right now is that at some near-medium future the models abvailable to run at home and the hardware needed to use them will be enough.
My baseline is sonnet 4.6. I think it's good enough for most tasks sincerly. So, from what I see, we are already at a point where we don't need frontier models for serious coding and debuging. Give it a couple of years and that level will fit 120B models.
At the same time, we saw the rise of direct acess memory systems like DGX or Stryx Halo that will allow to run models of this size for "cheap" in the medium term.
That's what I'm betting in. That in 2 years I can buy a system for about $2500 that will run a model that's similar to Sonnet 4.6 locally.
I might be spectacularly wrong though. But I'm willing to wait and use subscriptions/API calls for now.
Strange, I reckon I installed Tahoe just a while ago and still didn't have a similar issue, but I remember on previous MacOS versions the error message for unotarized binaries, was to warn that there was indeed a security issue with the binary, not that it was simply "damaged".
They weren't handing a paper published in the journal (which implies some kind of scientific paper); they were handing an opinion piece titled :Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!
So you're concerned about my use of the word "paper." That's fair I guess.
But the editorial in question was in fact published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Just so that we're all clear on the facts:
- The editorial was published in Diabetes Care, Volume 49, Issue 6. [1]
- Diabetes Care is a publication of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). It is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with an IF of 16. [2]
- The paper being distributed was an editorial, not research. [3]
- Steven Kahn, first author of the editorial and one of those thrown out of the conference, is the editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care. [4]
- The conference in question was The American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions. [5]
The important question: Should the distribution of an editorial published in an ADA journal be considered a code of conduct violation at the ADA conference?
And right at the top of that editorial piece, it says:
"The opinions expressed in this editorial are the personal views of the authors (S.E. Kahn, C.A.M. Anderson, J.B. Buse, and E. Selvin) and do not represent those of the American Diabetes Association or the authors’ employers..."
So, the bottom of this seems to be that a journal was hijacked by editors who are interested in doing politics instead of research, used their power to publish political opinion pieces and have them show up with what is apparently the ADA stamp of approval (although the text has to state that's not really the case... but who reads the little text anyway?) and then, not being happy with all that, they still tried to hijack a research conference to do political stunts.
The journal regularly includes commentaries and editorials on political and economic topics [1][2]. Political talks regularly occur at the conference [3].
In fact, the trigger to all of this was a scheduled talk by Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the NIH and a controversial political figure.
It seems silly to imply that politics are to be excluded from the conference at all costs when the ADA regularly invites political speakers to that same conference.
Do you believe that handing out copies of this editorial constituted inappropriate behavior? If so, why?
They were not handing an Article, they were handing an opinion piece titled :Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!
If they wanted to be political in a scientific conference, they could have done so by handing the opinion piece outside the venue at the entrance. Whoever wanted to get into their politics could do it, and whoever wanted to be left alone and be there for the science could do it as well.
It's extremely disrespectful to be pressuring the other people in the conference with their ideology.
> They were not handing an Article, they were handing an opinion piece
They were handing out an editorial published in the flagship journal of the ADA. This is incredibly normal. It's increasingly abundantly clear that the conference organisers broke their own code of conduct and then later sent CYA e-mails.
I've been going to scientific conferences about more than 20 years now. I never, ever, saw anyone distributing scientific articles unrequested (most authors will gladly provide them on request, but surely not hand them out unrequested), much less anyone carrying around copies of opinion pieces to distribute unrequested.
Never. And that's the norm in a scientific conference.
It wasn't in any way an article, and much less an article about diabetes.
They were distributing an Opinion Piece which title was (yes, this is the full title): Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?