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I responded to your question about the funding of palaeontological studies in good faith only to discover that your OP was more of a vehicle to peddle conservative fiscal propaganda. Or at least take its dogmatic assumptions at face value. Okay then: In general, private commercial enterprise requires a supply of well-educated young recruits (including palaeontologists and rocket scientists) but is too short-sighted and avaricious to fund public education themselves. Relying on the population to fund their own individual education creates fundamentally unstable, self-perpetuating tiered societies where the majority are denied access to good education and the better-paid jobs that follow on from that due to lack of means. Most of the more successful economies fund universal education programmes through progressive taxation policies leveraging preferentially on commercial profits and the wealthier sections of society to maximise the opportunities for all to realise their full potential. This latter option carries the additional benefit that a better-educated majority is more likely to appreciate the fairness and political stability of such a system, and less likely to indulge in armed insurrection for example. Of course, there are those who prefer the privileges they gain from less fair systems of wealth distribution. Funding for palaeontological studies for example is under constant pressure from religious fundamentalists for example as its findings tend to belie their underlying mythologies.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that at the coming Super Bowl only Law enforcement will be allowed in with guns. Kind of like most towns in the "Old West". "Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,” says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. “Today, you're allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren't.” Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/ Somehow everyone buying tickets seems to agree it makes sense..,Go figure!

I think with Big Pharma the problem is the Cinderella areas. They can make billions out of cancer but some of these 3rd world conditions barely get a look in because there's no money in it for them. We obviously need both approaches.

Oops. You are right. Corrected.

This Smotrich guy? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/12/31/israeli-minister-reiterates-calls-for-palestinians-to-leave-gaza Not the Defence Minister-the Finance Minister and excluded from the War Cabinet from my cursory knowledge.

You routinely make such statements with no context or explanation. Do you get a kick out of being purposely vague? This is my thread. Please stop. Telepathy is not one of my talents. On topic: I think the true long term intent of the present administration is clear in the Defence Minister's statement in answer to the US's statement admonishing the settler's current exploitative tactics in the West Bank:

If it does not generate profit, they won't do it. If it generates profit, then it will take precedence over insights. As such, companies are really not suited for explorative research, but they do well in the applied field. The insights will take a back seat every time (also addressing potential harms, because they want to the public to pay for that).

I really object to this statement. I think it's narrow in vision, cherry-picks a few incidents while ignoring overall protocols, and also ignores all the redundant systems crafted and the success ratio in the harshest environment known. I think this statement sadly fails. I don't object to private companies, but I think the laws regulating them have eroded too badly in the last several decades, and space is something we need to be absolutely sure about. We can't afford to let Jeff Bezos complete the transformation into Lex Luthor without some stiff rules about human behavior and rights while off our home planet.

Absolute insanity, and EXACTLY what I've been afraid of- Corporations shirking their responsibilities by trying to designate their products as AGENTS, thereby putting the liability on MACHINES! What the actual fuck. I can't believe this shit is happening so soon. Didn't think this nightmare would be happening any time soon when I wrote that part near the end of my article about this exact thing. The text of the law is bat shit insane. It's giving a machine LICENSE to drive as OPERATOR. Think about this BS for a moment... Granting machine the right to drive. Who is at fault for an accident? The machine is, officer! /hysterics

We have to watch Taylor and her secret government mission. I like a description given to these people as Not-Too-Swifties. The hard RW are becoming quite comedic in their accusations.

But we need armed militias to prevent the Government from 'fixing' the outcome of the Super Bowl ... It's a Constitutional right.

Occams' razor suggests that bigfoot isn't people wearing bigfoot costumes, it's bigfoot hiding by wearing black bear costumes.

As for restricting home computers (the OP) - the deaths of innocent victims from AI are hypothetical, and even more hypothetical from home computers. Deaths of innocent victims from misuse of assault rifles are not hypothetical. Not sure many home computers can even support the kinds of AI that can (hypothetically) be dangerous; AI as a tool used nefariously by military and intelligence services (including by despotic regimes) seems more likely to me than rogue AI. But assault rifles are designed for one purpose - injuring, maiming and killing people. I'd prefer that power to use such force be in the hands of trained people who understand proportional and appropriate responses as well as operate within the rule of law. (Which I would want to be the case for government agencies using AI as well). In functioning democracies with rule of law armed citizens rising up to support and protect their government and institutions when attacked by enemies, including insurrectionists makes more sense than as a standing tool, just in case, FOR insurrectionists. Without an existing, credible threat and absence of military capability to face it there seems no good cause for a standing armed populace. No government as better - Libertarianism - is delusional; the solution to bad governance is better governance, not absence of governance - and a lot of nations with high levels of personal freedom have made their institutions, like independent courts, their bulwarks against tyranny. From outside the USA it looks like the day the armed populace there rises up will be the nation's ruination - those weapons are for use against other Americans and the designation of "enemy of America" for those with different politics, religion, ideals as promoted through free speech and voting will be self serving justification at best. The historic Revolution may be the aberration, where the winners did not put themselves above the rule of law - eventually - once those who supported the King were ousted, or summarily executed, or had their property taken or were forced to flee (to Canada). The kinds of insurrection the US faces now doesn't look legitimate in any sense, and unlikely to result in greater freedom or prosperity even if it succeeds.

It really depends on which level you are looking at it. Undergrad? Not so much. There can be differences in how the technical labs are equipped, though in the US (and elsewhere) labs are getting cut because of cost. This trend is less so in countries in which Universities are not funded by tuition. I will also add that having tuition as a significant part of the university budget often creates perverse incentives and often also leads to administrative bloat. Examples include having offices who are actively trying to recruit and attract students, which is largely absent in entirely publicly funded institutions. Likewise, there is more incentive for student retention, which is associated with higher grade inflation. From a student perspective the experience can be better as there is more support (incl. recruitment, accommodation, living space, guidance and career counseling, as well as easier to grieve grades). But it does not mean that the education is better (often the reverse, actually). On the graduate level, that depends more on individual researchers than the university per se. I.e. individual profs can run successful groups regardless on which university they are working in. However, there are disparities between countries. The US provides quite a bit of funding for research, but there are quite differences between European countries. Highly ranked universities are often also flush with money and often support profs more with resources to establish successful research programs. That being said, there are many moderately or low ranked universities with good researchers and successful (research) graduate programs. Things are a bit iffier when the University primarily sees itself as a teaching university. There, Profs struggle to maintain a program as they get virtually no support (e.g. no lab space). They therefore rarely have successful programs in natural sciences (though they might have social science programs).

Interestingly though, it has spawned a few questions: 5, and counting...

Single place or single time makes no difference to Heisenberg. Singular place means infinitely indeterminate momentum, and singular time means infinitely indeterminate energy. Either way, that electron cannot be confined. Hawking radiation is generated just outside the event horizon, and Heisenberg Uncertainty applies everywhere, as it is a fundamental aspect of nature.

(This will merge into above reply but touches on a topic that gets mentioned quite often on LinkedIn- Gary Marcus reposted Subbarao Kambhampati's LinkedIn post (ex-President of AAAI) which was itself a repost of one of his tweets:) Explain-it-like-I'm-5 summary: It's the training material, stupid

It was not just one post; this was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Your previous responses in the thread were flippant. You answered yes to a question and when you were asked for a citation you simply posted a picture of a magic 8-ball showing ‘yes’ Despite your claim here, there were serious responses in the thread. Elsewhere you had posted a stock discussion in quantum theory. You’ve posted pictures in other threads that did not contribute to the discussion. I recall trying to give you feedback about this, which you rejected. We reached saturation with that behavior. You can learn from it, or not

By now it should be pretty clear to you that the type of behavior you exhibit is not appreciated here and will result in pushback. Either change your behavior or accept the response you get. If we have to put up with what you post then you have to put up with how we respond. Whining about it in a separate thread is waste of time.

It's also important to have the astronauts best interests at heart, something NASA has sadly failed at in the past. But we are going in that direction, of having space commercialized just like it always happens when new avenues of exploration open up to us. It happened with sea travel and exploration of the new world, at first it was just explorers such as Columbus and Cortez that would go on long ocean voyages to explore, and then after the Americas were discovered and settled by the white man, sea travel became very much commercialized with so many people wanting to travel over there. No doubt that will happen with space as well.

In the distant future that could very well be a possibility. True, just like a higher level of regulation was required when automobiles replaced horses and carriages, and when airplanes replaced trains and ships at sea, but we've made such adjustments before so we can do it again. From what I've seen in terms of technological advancements it appears companies do lots of research with the advancements they make. You see it with cars, computers, you name it. Burning through failed rockets, provided they're unmanned, is how you learn from mistakes so you can make better rockets. Granted you shouldn't burn through rockets carelessly but every rocket launched, whether its failed or not, is an opportunity to learn and so the more such rockets you have to burn through the better. Otherwise you have disasters such as Challenger and Columbia, Columbia which happened twenty one years ago today. Imagine if such a disaster happened with SpaceX where people were killed, imagine how it would hurt SpaceX, as such SpaceX would be smart to avoid such stuff at all costs. Let's say there's a car company that produces cars with faulty breaks and it leads to people being killed. Would you buy a car from that company? I sure wouldn't. I've seen it happen with other companies, where their products have turned out to be dangerous, how its hurt the companies. That's why I would want multiple companies not just a few. I would much prefer a monopolistic competition over an oligopoly. Perfect competition would be ideal but that's a pipe dream. State funded still means it's funded by tax dollars so to get more funding that would mean cutting back on other stuff or raising taxes. You do know that both Challenger and Columbia were avoidable, don't you? Especially Challenger. But in both cases NASA knew of the danger and ignored it. But in the past explorative research has been done by companies or by private individuals, the expansion of the USA for instance.