Invertebrates all over the world have enabled the current situation. People and governments have to stop clutching pearls and start organizing and calcifying their spine.
Local goods, regional goods, choice of international goods are there for the picking.
Gee, they could call such an effort “the voice of America/X”. Pity they killed the very mechanism they now propose to create. Planning and past history is a b*tch, eh?
The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes.
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
When the aches, pains and symptoms of growing old appear, you’ll appreciate having somebody to share the load with. This doesn’t have to be a spouse or a life partner, but having a strong friend or two, or a strong roommate relationship will greatly help things out. You can go your own way together as it were, helping each other over the bumps but not restricting their choices.
I agree. But I don’t think friends can be a substitute. Most friendships disappear with time, as life goes through different phases. And when you have difficulties especially, friends quickly disappear. Family is different and is more likely to support you when you need it.
That’s why I mentioned roommates. People can share the cost of housing and the rest and be there when needed. But it lacks the full attributes of marriage (good and bad). There are things that really need somebody to help out with and as as you say, there has to be some commitment to be there. Can’t always go where the family is and it might not have the closeness you’d like.
Nobody will care if the conference isn’t held in Philly. Holding it elsewhere will probably make it a little easier and possibly a little cheaper for people to attend. I doubt mathematicians are part of the 1%, so cash and travel hassle should matter. And given today’s Internet, there’s going to be remote attendance which can happen most anywhere.
While it’s still convenient to gather together to discuss a field, it’s not crucial as it was in past times. Easier to do what’s best for the largest number of people.
It's just grandstanding.They are mathematicians not political activists. If they want their organization to slide into irrelevance, getting involved in left wing (or right wing, but with academia it's usually left wing) politics is a great way to do that.
Anyone can be a "political activist". An activist is just an ordinary person who has had enough. Unless you believe the only valid way to influence political discourse is with money.
Sure, anyone can be an activist but it is clear that academia has been turned into an activist training centre. It is also remarkable how these supposedly intelligent people go astray when it comes to the causes they support, from supporting Hamas to defending those who'd throw them off high buildings or putting them against the wall if they got their chance.
Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.
Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.
Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.
My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM.
It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine.
For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100.
Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess.
It’s enough for everything I need, and I don’t see a reason to ever upgrade. Unless my hardware starts failing, of course.
I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case there are readers who don’t take it that way:
* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.
* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.
In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television.
The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).
At the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat rare/expensive.
Emphasis on "somewhat" - I was able to build a 10GB backbone for my NAS and such for less than $200 or so with a CRS305 and some direct connect cables; looks like the CRS304 would have made this even easier ...
To be fair, I only started this because the dock I got had 10G - https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-pro-dock and I saw some 10G cards on eBay cheap and my old Nortel switch had a 10G uplink and ... well, you know how it goes!
How would it “know” not to do this. It can only provide you with a synthesis drawn from its training data. If your problem is within its training set, it’s not really research (which is what I assume “science” means). If its outside its set, you’re getting statistically generated noise.
Local goods, regional goods, choice of international goods are there for the picking.
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