it means that it is Americans voluntarily choosing to donate this money. it seems perfectly plausible to me that there are enough very pro-Israel Americans to fund an organization like AIPAC.
The key question is whether AIPAC is taking actions at "the direction or control” of Israel, but the money is pretty clearly not being sourced from Israel.
I’m no big fan of DOGE but our fiscal trajectory is utterly unsustainable, much more nation destroying than the particular cuts being mentioned here. I hate that it is now a republican talking point, but we do need a focus on raising revenue and reducing expense — and there is no easy ‘fraud’ win on expense, most of these are on real things that big coalitions of people want but we cannot afford without a large increase in revenue-as-%-GDP (ie. middle & working class tax increases), inflation (effective middle & working class tax increases), or a technological productivity boom.
Reducing defense spending by a fractional amount will have more of an impact than completely eliminating science spending altogether. The Iran tally is up to what, $11b now after a single week?
Defense is 12% of federal spending, not 52%. Definitely a bigger impact & waste than science budgets, I agree - but even cutting 100% of it would not close our hole. As I said, I’m no big fan of DOGE — but the problem is a real one despite the common tendency to put fingers in our ears or propose non-solutions, whether of the ‘tax the rich’, ‘cut DEI spending’, or ‘end all military expenditures’ variety. Not a single one of those or combination gets us there. We have to make real hard choices.
Those numbers still scale whether you're talking about total or discretionary spending, which means science/grants are an even smaller fraction of the 3%.
Why start cutting from the smallest piece of the pie? My point is that defense spending is already outsized and increasing while we cut science spending. Instead of increasing it, why not cut it and provide 100x the savings before cutting science spending? Doesn't seem like such a hard choice.
Going to be hard to cut into these, and the middle/working class is shrinking as wealth concentrates and wealth inequality expands. Perhaps if there weren't so many middlemen taking slices w/o providing value...
The fuckwit in the video is personally responsible for crushing the productivity boom. Higher education is, or at least was, one of America's chief export industries.
But why would be megacorp and billionaire tax increases off the table? You didn't even mention it... And before someone points out that they pay - yes they pay _something_ then get tax cuts or legal loopholes and in the end they don't really pay.
In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after the pandemic was well and truly over.
Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles looming, sales overall were up since people were forced inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming services were running a defecit war where no one won except Netflix, and music stalled for a bit.
But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').
on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic, and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..
Overhiring implies that MSFT's headcount went down over this time. But that doesn't seem to be the case. They still hire a lot, just not in North America.
I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook, sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go.
COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
Before Musk made it cool to mass layoff, there was a genuine belief inside of Facebook/Meta that great engineers were extremely hard to find or hold onto and if they weren't on the payroll at Meta, they would go somewhere else.
There was always a "clock" for junior engineers to prove they could handle the high pressure and high intensity work, and as long as they were meeting the bar, they were safe.
They called on-boarding, "Bootcamp", and was for every engineer, junior to staff, to learn the process and tooling. Engineers were supposed to be empowered to take on whatever task they wanted, without pre-existing team boundaries if it meant they were able to prove their contributions genuinely improved the product in meaningful ways. So, come in, learn the culture, learn the tooling, meet others, and then at some point, pick your home team. Your home team was flexible, and you were able to spend weeks deciding, and even if you selected one, you could always change, no pressure. Happy engineers were seen as the secret sauce of the company's success.
I remember that summer, vividly. They told the folks in Bootcamp, pick your home team by the end of the week, or you will be stuck in Bootcamp purgatory. At the same time they removed head count from teams, ours went down to a single one. A new-grad, who had literally just arrived that Monday, picked our team on Tuesday, and then had to watch as most of their fellow Bootcamp mates got left behind.
People wondered what would happen to them for weeks, and then, just like that, the massive layoff sent them all home. It was shitty because from where I sat, it was basically a slot machine. Anyone of the folks in Bootcamp were just as capable, but we had one seat, and someone just asked for it first.
I seem to hear often that Meta is perhaps the most egregious offender of "hire to fire". Seems really wasteful. But man, they pay their employees a lot.
It seems like best etiquette would be to have a username with "bot" in it and include something in the post explicitly indicating it's a bot (e.g. a signature).
This isn't even a new problem where a good cultural solution hasn't been figured out yet. Reddit has had bot etiquette for years.
Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
It only took 4 years, but it appears that this view is finally dying out on HN. I would advise everyone who found this viewpoint compelling to think about how those same blinders might be affecting how you are imagining the future to look like.
The parent commentator is a bit confused - most of the innovation in these hybrid architectures comes from reducing the computation pressure not just the memory pressure.
> how these models are going to keep up with the expanding boundary of science
The same way humans do?
The phraseology in this comment: 'probability distributions', 'baked these patterns' IMO has all the trappings of the stochastic parrot-style HN-discourse that has been consistently wrong for almost a decade now.
The reference to how AI will keep up with AI-assisted human progress in science in 2030 is meant to reassure. It contains a number of premises that we have no business being confident in. We are potentially witnessing the obviation of human cognitive labor.
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