My American post-doc prospects are bleak. My best post-doc option right now is a lab in China, and I’m probably going to take it. I don’t know what that’s going to do to my career prospects. All I can do is keep doing research.

Not a physicist, but after reading I’m pretty sure they said it creates an whole bunch of possible positions, which is distinctly different from creating a whole bunch of new particles.

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Voting exist to give the veneer of legitimacy to oligarchy. All of the systems around voting to make sure the results come out “right” are apart of the same system. If you want to participate in that system, you should have a solid understanding of how it works to undermine the populous and participate in ways that undermine the oligarchy.

For example, rather than registering with whatever party more closely aligns to your ideals, register with whatever party has gerrymandered your district then vote in their primaries for candidates that actually support systemic reform. Similarly, your vote means nothing in almost every district of general elections. Assuming you don’t know for certain your in a competitive district, you shouldn’t bother voting for a main party candidate. The more votes third party candidates get, the more funding they get and thus the greater opportunity for systemic reform.

The entire system is built to convince you to give up your agency by insisting that you have to choose the lesser of two evils then insisting that you consented to be governed by that evil. Consent cannot involve coercion. Consent requires the ability to say no.

Most nations are governed by an electoral oligarchy. As fa as I know, an Electoral Democracy has never existed.

We should have a lottery, like a true democracy.

Florida elects manatee claiming to be mermaid in AI generated ads.

Is it just me / my-algorithm or is there a ton being done on exoplanets recently?

I’m only just learning, but my approach is to essentially built a bunch of functions around every prompt. I just too many stories of AI deleting everything to trust it to run without checks upon checks upon checks.

The rich dream of starving masses? Do they imagine different outcomes than what’s historically observed or are they suicidal masochists?

I mean, I don’t want to detract from what they’ve done, but this sounds like pretty standard wafer fabrication research. I’m not in the field enough to comment on how significant of an advancement it is or isn’t, but it’s clearly lithography and deposition not some sci-fi nanotech that makes me look up who K. Eric Drexler is.

I mean, where are we drawing the line here? If he makes a stirling engine that stirs the pot that works that works by… you know, however stirling engines work.

The “It’s not clear who’s doing it” section is what’s baffling to me, like I’m very far from into networking and I’ve definitely done some crude scraping the few times I’ve needed it, but even I am pretty sure I could do better than this. Makes me think someone with more money than sense hooked up an “Agentic” AI and told it to gather data to train the next AI then just let it decide how – except not because I’m pretty sure the AIs would have more sense. It’s really weird.

This is like the old-school EM guys building electron microscopes in their garage. I’m more into the DIYbio sphere, but I love to see it.

No, I can’t “prove” to you that a “beneficial” institution would not survive because if I name an institution that I think is beneficial, like universities or research institutes, you’ll either argue it’s not beneficial or argue that it would survive via some other mechanism. Either way, it’d miss the point that there are in fact institutions that do good in the world that are built on the current systems and need some means of transitioning or surviving your radical change. You’re clearly uninterested in those arguments, which basically means no decent people (i.e. people who are intent on minimizing harm) are going to be interested in working with you.

Honestly, I don’t even really want to write this comment because I’m struggling not to assume you’re just some angry kid. Like maybe you’re someone who broadly agrees with me but just hasn’t worked through the practical math of whole percentile wealth taxes on institutions or who doesn’t yet appreciate that endowments effectively serve as a decentralized wealth re-distribution for public good causes. We’re probably both positively inclined towards notions of wealth limits and income limits for individuals, but we clearly have very different views on how institutions and organizations should function. I don’t really want to engage in an argument about that with someone who seems perfectly willing to see everything burnt to the ground in the name of “progress”.

Do you know how you make progress? You gain a deep understanding of how things work and then you tweak, modify, and twist bits and pieces – this doesn’t result in marginal effects either because these modifications aren’t just cumulative but synergistic and ultimately transformative. Institutions like academia have real problems, no doubt, but a few simple rules could dramatically improve them: limiting the ratio of administrators to other employees to combat administrative bloat, incentivizing use and teaching of FOSS to prevent corporate software entrenchment, addition of lotteries to application processes mitigate alumni advantages. There are lots of ideas that won’t destroy every humanities department or every independent scientific research institute in the country by making endowments nonviable.

I see no compelling reason to maintain the institutions

Okay, so you’re not serious about change to your supposedly better system.

Tax the shares themselves.

Hmm, you’d have to dramatically decrease the tax rate for it to be worth investing at all. My investments make ~5%/yr if taxed on the shares rather than the change in value 5%-3% for tax-3% for inflation = -1% per year. That’d literally destroy all financial assets, the entire finance sector, every university and research institute endowment, and the concept of retirement. So, let’s assume you did reduce the rate: 5%*3%= 0.15% or $150 tax per $100k invested or 1.5mil/bil. Honestly, this rate I’m fine with as it’s functionally equivalent to taxing the increase.

The issue is you’re still incentivizing people to put money into higher returning investments rather than investing in more stable and assets, like bonds. I think your intent was to make investing in stocks “fair” but something that unstable should come with costly risks. It’s not something sensible people should be investing into. We don’t want the government bailing out the stock market at the cost of everything else every five years. People need to be deterred and those markets need to face consequences.

We can exempt $10 million from the portfolio of any natural person

Unless you’re lowering the tax rate as I suggested, you’d have to add a lot of exceptions to not destroy most of the world’s established institutions, and those exceptions would be used as loop holes. I think it’s unwise to add exceptions at all. People should just get over paying taxes. It’s literally the foundation of money having value (the demand for money).

What happens when someone fails to pay back their bond? Do I get a tax refund?

Yeah, we should fix that, but it’s still pretty bad because it incentivizes investments in stocks (an inherently speculative asset that destabilizes the world) over bonds (a contractually defined asset that more effectively resists speculation and destabilization). Sure, they’re both financial assets, so there’s a certain amount of nonsense built in, but I’d much prefer a society filled with people who invest in bonds and incentivized to demand financial regulation.

Also, we should treat stocks like dividends and tax them at the same rate. You get money every month from dividends and you choose whether you want to re-invest it or not. You’re effectively auto-re-investing with stocks, so it’s not meaningfully different. You should have to pay on the yearly difference in value, and if that means you have to sell some to pay the tax then you should just get over it.

Depends on what you want. You’d be surprised just how appealing increasing that monthly dividend is – If I have just a little more invested I could do X, Y, or Z. For me, the more freedom / agency / financial independence I get, the more I want and so the more I save.

Having little with no obligations is very appealing. Having a bit more with no obligations is even more appealing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV8H8HVD with linux mint installed.