You can't legislate that people will be "intelligent," but it might be possible to go after root causes. Why are not more people getting vaccinated? A small percentage don't for defensible reasons related to their immune systems and such. But the majority have been influenced by propaganda.

Propaganda today is fed mostly by two disciplines: psychology and data science. From psychology we get cognitive biases. One important lesson about cognitive biases is that you can't get rid of them! They are just part of being human. Psych professors sometimes teach a class this way: Do a survey in the classroom that reveals some illogical bias. Teach about this bias, where else it is seen, and other effects of it. Then do another survey. Will the now-educated and smarter class be immunized against this bias? Nope! There it is again.

So it's not as simple as "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Free speech is highly valued in the US, and I agree it should be. But propaganda is a kind of Guerilla warfare against a democracy. Weaponized speech should not be tolerated. I don't know what is possible to be done about highly-partisan media outlets. And partisan social media influencers are even more difficult to deal with.

Much like the evolving virus strains you're worried about, I'm worried that the US has no long-term path to victory against Guerilla-style disinformation.

Oops I cannot edit on Slashdot. I meant to edit before submitting that. Anyway...

A few weeks ago a young guy brought an AR15-style rifle into a supermarket and mowed a bunch of shoppers down. This was about 15 miles from where I'm typing this. The city (Boulder CO) allows concealed carry, and I have friends here who carry. One of the victims was a police officer, who was obviously armed. The shooter was not deterred by fear. I don't know any of the victims, but I do know people who regularly shop there.

I also know of former officers who choose not to carry because they don't trust themselves, that they wouldn't ever overreact to a negative situation. I think these people are displaying a deeply honest self-knowledge.

You're making a few assumptions here that I'm skeptical of.

• Perpetrators of gun violence, at the time they are doing the homicide, would be rational and would be deterred if they knew that others nearby were carrying.
• Guns protect people from bullets. If the victims were armed, they would not have gotten hurt.

• Most people are good, and good people never have bad days. They behave in a controlled, rational way 100% of the time.

I want to nit-pick about this bit:

After the call to bar, foo can still access the string -- no unsafe{} needed. foo gave bar a mutable borrow, so the assumption is that the string may have changed. Maybe you're referring to rules about only one mutable borrow in use?

Using iterators vs bounds checking: Rust makes using iterators easy, but also provides bounds checking for array element access. Often that's an O(N) versus O(1) issue. One place Rust feels inconvenient is indexing strings. To be safe, you must use iterators for that because of UTF-8 and stuff.

And you can opt-out of bounds checking in Rust if you're inside unsafe{...}. But the idea is to use "unsafe" as little as possible, and to isolate it in packages that have thorough unit testing. No language can prevent all bugs, but Rust is designed to catch a lot of the more common programming foibles at compile-time. It seems to me that it's all a matter of degrees.

Good programmers aren't immune to writing bugs. But they learn habits and tools that reduce the frequency and severity of the bugs they create. One such tool is to program in Rust! (Where it makes sense to, anyway.)

How do you propose doing this? Annex K? Even if that were all it was intended to be, it would not begin to scratch the surface of what Rust accomplishes in safety. Rust's approach is so fundamentally different than C, I don't see how one could mold either language to be even a little bit like the other.

I love programming in Rust! Well, except when I'm shouting obscenities at the compiler. Not sure which is more common. But it has successfully prevented me from doing more than a few stupid things that I was sure initially were correct. And in most cases it makes the due diligence of error checking very ergonomic. For example, instead of zeroing and then testing errno, you can often just add a "?". Rust makes this kind of error checking both mandatory and easy.

If I were to complain about the language, I'd gripe that it's often difficult to modify or refactor code in ways that perhaps ought to be more natural.

I've looked at trade surplus and deficit numbers, but have not seen any evidence that Trump's trade policies have had a positive net effect on the US. I think he did what he did for "optics." If you look for actual studies on the impact, I think you'll find a consensus that Trump significantly damaged the US economy. Here's an example.

There are a number of valid criticisms of Trump's personal handling of the pandemic. I'll list some, but also I need to admit that I haven't seen any good quantitative estimates of the effect of these.

Trump was slow to take the pandemic seriously. Travel restrictions were enacted later than recommended, and manufacturing and distribution of things like face masks and ventilators were botched, in part because of Trump's personal state of denial. You can't blame this entirely on hindsight, because he was generally ignoring his own experts.

In the same press conference where mask-wearing was revealed to actually help reduce the likelihood of spreading the disease, Trump gave the clear message that mask-wearing is optional and that he, personally, was not going to do it. That suddenly created a new arena of political division for absolutely no good reason. The right-wing media went along with this, decrying mask-wearing and labeling it the "mask of fear." Which is ironic of course because it's not actually effective at protecting the wearer. It's main effect is to help protect others from the wearer. This created a fascinating (however grim) study in human nature.

Trump continued to misinform the public about pandemic information, failing to offer clear and correct information about what practical things we can all do to prepare for the future and slow the spread as much as possible. Character does matter in this kind of situation, because if you can't admit that you're wrong on occasion then you cannot have the public trust needed for good leadership.

Support of heath agencies: Trump proposed reducing CDC funding in his 2020 and 2021 budget proposals, but these reductions did not go through. Similarly a reduction in NIH funding was proposed by Trump in 2018, which again was tempered by congress. Still I suspect that if Trump's initial proposal had supported these agencies better, it may have had a real effect on our preparedness and participation in vaccine research. Trump initiated backing out of the WHO, though with Biden taking office that is likely to be reversed. While our economy continued to grow, deficit spending skyrocketed. We had sound reasons to improve our preparedness for some kind of pandemic. Why attempt to stifle funding and preparedness? CDC funding did indeed grow slightly over the past 4 years, in spite of Trump.

You've debunked one particular funding and tech estimate from the 1970s, but you have not disproven the suggestion that with some amount of funding in past years, fusion would have been possible by today. That's very hard to disprove because we haven't given it a number yet. It does not look like fusion technology is impossible. In fact it still seems likely, to me anyway, to be an achievable goal given our current manufacturing and computing technology. Now I'm not involved in any current efforts here, though some of my former colleagues are. I'm no expert by any stretch. As such I cannot even estimate the costs of achieving a practical fusion reactor, or of future power plants. Still here's two broad things I do know:

1) Steady funding is far more effective than the equivalent average of year-by-year funding would produce. I worded that badly, sorry. Large funding fluctuations generate waste. And to attract good talent, gradually-increasing funding, after adjusting for inflation, is necessary. This kind of research involves multi-decade programs. If funding gets zeroed any given year (Feinstein-style), nearly all previous funding has just been thrown away. EU collaborations like ITER and the LHC make progress because they are allowed to "bank" a certain amount of funding from one year to the next. Generally speaking, US-based research programs lose any unspent funds at the end of the year. This restriction very nearly guarantees failure.

2) Any reasoned estimate is likely to be an underestimate. You don't know what you don't know. Some programs beat their initial cost estimates, but not by a large amount. Other programs exceed their cost estimates, sometimes by a very large amount. It's a kind of distribution with a long tail. Fudging numbers, artificially inflating estimates by some percentage, does not reduce risk as much as one would think. All research is a risk-reward proposition.

They could have, but did they? It's certainly true that the Paris Accord does not solve climate change. But it's a global-political problem and not only does dropping out send the wrong message to other countries, but by relaxing industry regulations and reducing alternative energy funding afterwords, Trump clearly believes that climate change is a hoax. I'd support dropping out too, but *only* if doing so allowed us to be more pro-active at slowing greenhouse gas emissions and/or improving sequestration in ways that the Paris Accord would somehow have prevented, and in a way that more effectively encouraged other countries to follow suit.

I agree with this, and want to add that it adds incentive for US consumers to purchase things that are sourced in-country. If a higher cost of shipping from overseas as passed on to the consumer, that allows the consumers to correctly account for that in their decision-making.

But ... this comes from the Trump administration! I can't get my head around that! Up to now, every action from that administration boldly demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of any topic related to policy-making or diplomacy. What's the catch here? The only thing that worries me is the phrase "self-declared rates" which implies that the rates are policy-driven, not market-driven. I would like to have read much different wording there, and maybe that's where the dysfunctionality you've come to expect is hiding.

Sounds to me like Arp's research falls into a category termed "pathological science." Sometimes a scientist becomes so enamored with an idea that they try too hard to make everything fit into their world-view, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Contrary evidence is either ignored or the pet theory is made more elaborate and, to others, less tolerable.

It's a little unfair just to brand scientists with this label, because it's sometimes a matter of degrees and also an unfair judgement after-the-fact. We now can explain the granular redshift distribution, but that explanation was not available at the time Arp was formulating his theories.

But on the other hand, there are some cases that are obvious and the telltale signs of pathological science serve as a useful warning not to take some claims seriously. Cold fusion, for example, falls here. At the same time you might be able to say the same thing about both supersymmetry and string theory, which have both certainly experienced cronyism and certain signs of pathological science -- always a position to retreat back to in the face of negative evidence. But here I'm more forgiving since most of this research has been done with a good amount of empiricism and expectations that were not completely unmotivated or unreasonable.

Finally, I'm again cautious to apply such labels to scientists because we're comparing recent scientific development with an idealized and polished version of past scientific history. Most students learn about science history in the context of learning the science itself, and a simplified narrative of history serves the professors well in this case. It's not taught with all of the hairy, messy details that would better characterize what research was actually like at the time, with all of the heated arguments, politics, and dead-ends of the day.

I think mainstream scientists going astray isn't, perhaps, all that different from fringe scientists going astray. A healthy scientific program needs a blend of ideas and personalities, and to foster creative approaches. We have a terrible stagnation going on today in basic science, and group-think and witch hunting seem to underlie this.

Ack I hit submit too soon. Forgot to add a criteria that they don't use but that's pernicious, which is a filtering bias. What stories do you publish? If you only publish stories that put your favorite political party in a good light or all others in a bad light, you're being manipulative and dishonest even if the stories themselves are accurate. I think most moderate news outlets have some filtering bias but they will still publish stories both for and against any and all political parties. I could not find any examples of unfiltered/counterspin articles in any of the "junk" sites listed in this study.

Their list of junk news sites seems reasonable to me when I spot-check it. Come on, people are actually defending Breitbart, InfoWars, hannity.com, and others like these? Really?

If I need to prove objectively that 100% of their list is indeed junk, I cannot. But a strong majority of them are obviously so. Browsing through their sample articles, the problems are unmistakeable.

But I do see a conspicuous lack of hard-left hyper-partisan news sites, which is a real problem. They most certainly exist. It's hard to imagine that there isn't a strong selection bias going in, before their criteria is applied. I don't see how they came up with an original list, though I suppose it could be derived from twitter and facebook posts. Regardless, the lack of alt-left sites is conspicuous.

I've heard this argument before in recent months, but it's not true. I took a look at the ratio of population to electors in our various states and there isn't all that much spread.

If you research it, I think you'll find the original motivation behind the electoral college had several facets, but rural representation was not one of them. Part of it had to do with the three-fifths compromise, part of it was simple practicality in the 1700s, and part of it was the idea that electors, being reasonable and educated people, might reject a popular but un-presidential candidate. The last part might seem like a virtue, but historically this has never become a factor.

I've recently enjoyed learning about various voting systems, which generally do not work well with the electoral college. These systems are being studied carefully these days in terms of a variety of criteria, how often those come into play, and how gameable the various systems are. Currently I like the idea of STAR Voting -- see for example www.equal.vote. This seems tangential at first, but it leads back around to the electoral college.