I see where Oreskes says politically-driven science isn't inherently bad. I wholeheartedly agree. But. People tend to make the assumption (and you know where that leads) that politically-driven science is wholesome and rewarding, whereas financially-driven science isn't.

Thing is, if either fail the tests of actual, you know, science, then they don't deserve the appellation. Such tests being reproducibility, peer review, publishing the actual data for independent analysis, etc. If you're not willing to share how the data for a test is "manipulated" or "corrected" or "adjusted," then you guessed it -- your results are going to be suspect. Especially so when you have enough examples of "government science" getting the benefit of the doubt when it affects citizens, but "independent science" having to go through government approval before anything can come from it.

...most cheating on consoles has been eradicated...

lolwut? Whoever wrote that must not be playing any popular online console games.

It was not designed to be a welfare program for big companies.

You haven't been paying attention.

Don't be disingenuous. "Designed" in this context meaning "originally intended." You aren't perhaps an H1B candidate, are you? ;)

I'll go ahead and name names: I used to work at cisco. I have said many times that I could walk down the hallway at any random cisco san jose building and for most of the day, not hear a single word spoken in english (in hallways or breakrooms). ...
if I go thru an interview and hear 'not a cultural match' one more time, I swear to zeus I'm going to go postal. I'm nearly at the end of my rope, here....

"Not a match for culture" from a group that has a similar cultural background to yourself is code for "We think you're an asshole."

Reading comprehension not your strong suit? Just sayin'...

Hulu has captions. Amazon Prime Video has captions. It's not like you're being completely denied the joys of interwebs TV.

How, pray tell, would a gas pump identify you as gay or Jewish or atheist and then refuse service? How also would a supermarket identify your beliefs?

I have a Samsung XP941 (the "proprietary" drive that you can easily buy) and a regular 840 Pro in my desktop. You can benchmark the difference easily, but I don't notice it, at all, in day to day operation, in my particular use-cases; yours might noticeably benefit from it depending on what you're doing with the system.

Fixed that for ya.

Depends on how that money is spent. In a more socialist setting it would most likely be spent on a social program to help take away some of the cost of living on the low income population thus freeing up the money to spend on the increased prices of the companies... Even someone with a rudimentary understanding of economics knows that government spending does help to spur the economy if spent on the right thing.

Now if they take that money and blow it on military invasions and other money sinks with low RFI for the population, then it does hurt overall. Bottom line turns into, which ass hole do you distrust less the businesses or the government?

There's a variable missing from your equations: Government Efficiency (or lack thereof). Self-motivated people are almost always going to be more efficient at figuring out how to do things than a government that's spending everyone else's money, at least for governments that don't have balanced-budget and/or term-limited constitutions. Add the additional variable of "Social Justice" into the metrics and it gets even more messy.

If a "rich" person spends 500x what a poor person spends at their shop, and giving them a deep discount still means you made 40x the profit you'd have made from 5 poor people, would you consider that injustice or another form of marketing success?

We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.

Yes, I realize that's a bit of cherry-picking examples but all too often logical fallacies are used to justify when these things happen. I'd suggest it's an ethics crisis rather than a science crisis.

I guess by "people" (with quotation marks) you mean corporations.

Yes, let's not have any rules or oversight on "people" who were born in a lawyer's office, can potentially live forever, are motivated purely by greed, and will gladly break the law when it suits them. What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, let's put all of the authority into the hands of a few people who were born in a lawyer's office, bought their way into public office, can potentially live forever, are motivated purely by greed and power, and will gladly break the law when it suits them. What could possibly go wrong?

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Then research on the other side of the coin is invalid as well. You can't have it both ways.

Also, "New York Times study" lol.

I have two family members that use new Blackberries. One has a model from about 14 months ago and my brother just got one about a month ago. They are both somewhat limited in terms of apps but conversely, they both have stupid amounts of battery life and they Just Work(tm). They're business phones so obviously they aren't getting stressed with Youtube/Netflix/etc. Still, it appears to be a solid product, if probably unsexy to the people always on my lawn.

You may have already realized this but engineers operate on facts/empirical evidence and it is absolutely critical to identify screw-ups (both individual cases and as a per-person trend) and call them out so we don't repeat the same mistakes. Far too often, I've worked with people who were more concerned with negative perception than with shipping product. Understand that we who are trying to produce care less about your feelings than your work product. Constructive criticism only works if the person being criticized can personally accept responsibility for failure. Without that bit of introspective honesty, we who can are not going to be predisposed to helping you find yourself.