I think that exchange encompasses well the friction between the idea that the market is about finding equilibrium and the idea that the market is about decreasing the cost of capital.

In a world where money is in practice an unlimited resource, time is the resource we lack, and what we should optimize toward.

Part of the point of all this is that shorts have the effect of suppressing investment into companies. I think we need to reset our understanding of the purpose of a stock market, which should be to drive investment into companies. In prioritizing financial return ahead of financing work, we've put the cart before the horse. Of course, people in the financial industry don't like this concept.

There is a place for shorts. People should be allowed to have short positions. However, such bets should be treated in every respect as the gambles they are.

Why would they publish a correction? Because it's nice? Because it's right? Those are not reasons for newspapers to do things.

Journalists are good people, but newspapers and newsrooms are in the business of selling clicks now.

This looks like Penn State is doing some contract research for the Department of Energy and they wrote up a paper that is not quite a proof of concept. There are many steps between this and "developing" in the context of an actual battery used in a car.

(Yes, I know this is the normal way things go, I'm a scientist. This habit we have in science of saying "look, I did the first step, the rest are easy and cheap!" is really annoying.)

It's hard to know if you're joking here. You do realize the research conclusions purported in TFA are impossible.

The claim in TFA is: For people who have no symptoms, and for which no test can detect sickness (meaning they have no virus inside them), they can predict that you will have virus in you in up to 9 days early. This is, of course, absolute BS.

Now, the Stanford study referenced in TFA is open access, you can go read it. In their article, they don't claim anything like what's in the article. They claim to be looking at known symptoms (elevated heart rate and uneven heart rate are known symptoms of being sick with COVID as well as bunch of other things).

(Before we get to their data, there's some very serious statistical chicanery going on as they split their data up by quartile, but draw their graphs and report a p-value as if they're using more rigorous statistics. I've published in this journal, and the reviewers I had would never have let something like that slide by. This is poor science to the degree that they should make a correction to the paper.)

They tested 5262 people. Of that, 32 people ended up testing positive for COVID. Of that, 25 people reported symptoms. Of that last group, they found 16 people who reported symptoms later than their algorithm started flagging events, although it's not clear at all that this would have been actionable, because there was no statistical difference with the healthy cohort.

They also found 15 people sick with something else.

They found no symptoms via smartwatch in the 7 people who tested positive but reported no symptoms.

They found no symptoms via smartwatch in the remaining 5232 people who either didn't get tested, didn't report symptoms, or got a negative test.

That's not exactly great.

I would argue very strenuously that private organizations working together to set expectations of behavior in "the commons" is our system working as intended.

If that strikes you as inherently evil, you probably shouldn't live in a representative capitalist society, but some other form of government where social norms are not driven by a profit motive.

If you'd like a perfect libertarian society where free speech means no private limitations on what you can say, then you're talking about a society where people are not allowed to "vote with their wallets."

I'm sure managing a grocery store isn't exactly easy in regular times, but I'm also pretty sure no one signed up for anything like this.

California spends a bit more than $11,000 per student on schools, while Utah spends a bit more than $9,000 per student. It's not likely that Park City had more funding than wherever you were in California.

The actual revenue the state gets has grown significantly over the last 40 years, it's not a poor state. In fact, this year, there's a budget surplus. That happens every 5-10 years, but the state can't ever bring itself to save any cash.

See our problem is that we have a lot of "feel good" policies, but not a lot of "do good" policies. We allow our companies and government agencies to ignore labor laws, environmental laws, financial regulations, you name it. As long as you say the right things to the media and support the right people in office, you can get away with some evil shit here.

It is arguable that the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is a cabinet level position representing science. Obama used Secretary of Energy in this capacity.

However, the general scientific advisor role that has been in place via OSTP and originally OSRD as you point out has never been a cabinet position. This is not a return, but something new (never mind that the position isn't vacant right now).

I worked as a scientist inside the government during the Obama administration, when OSTP was fully staffed. At that time OSTP was seen as a bunch of political tools with no budget, no vision, and no purpose. They would periodically show up for a photo op or feel-good story. They had no authority to tell us what to do, no understanding of how contracts and grants were actually written, couldn't keep track of the widely varying approaches to source selection, and no budget to fund their own projects. We had to be nice to them, because the political appointees at the top of our agency wanted to avoid getting yelled at, but that's all the authority they had. Keep in mind, this was at the historical high point of the office. They knew this, we all knew this. The actual job of OSTP as far as we in science were concerned was to prove to the politicians that science policy was worthy of their attention and support.

Now, is that going to change? Is there going to be an actual portfolio for Lander? If this is just about him going to cabinet meetings, then this is BS. OSTP needs something to do.

OSTP could be set up like the Department of Education. The Department of Education sets policies for some $100 billion in loans and grants that go through other departments. OSTP could do the same, setting policies for what is "scientific research" for federal contractors, as well as required policies around things like employment, performance, IP, and reporting. This is the actual "policy" part that OSTP has had no capability to enforce in the past.

Alternatively, it could be like the US Trade Representative or National Security Advisor, someone with authority to take actions independent of the larger departments either focused globally or to fill in blind spots. This is probably the easiest approach, but it would be less useful, as we already have sub-agencies that do a good job of these things (for example, the Jasons). Of course, it's hard to see that because there's no national coordination on any of this stuff.

The last possibility I can think of is also the most unlikely. That would be that OSTP becomes like ODNI (Director of National Intelligence). This would subordinate some or all of the major scientific granting institutions under OSTP. It would certainly require new law from Congress.

Like most other universities, University of Florida is governed via a democratic process. I don't mean the state of Florida, I mean the University of Florida Faculty Senate. The University of Florida has a Constitution, that lays out how the Trustees, State, and Faculty Senate share governance, including how the Senate has the right to adjust on campus rules and policies via legislation.

Ok, so your representative government has decided that it is critical that you perform part of your job in person, put in place a way to gain an exception if it would be particularly dangerous for you, denied you that exception, and now put in place a Stasi style tool to track your compliance.

Even though UF is a giant school, it's not that big. I have no particular insight into UF, and no affiliation, but it took 5 minutes for me to look up their faculty senate website, check their constitution to see that the Faculty Senate can change the rules, and find the email address of the chair (a med school professor, Dr. Sylvain). The email addresses of all of the Faculty Senate are easy to find.

If you're a UF faculty, and you don't like this new policy you're just now hearing about, you have a choice. You can go to twitter or the media to badmouth your community and highlight the stupidity of your leadership... OR you can email the representatives you have in campus governance and ask them to change the rules or remove the leadership.

These professors are the people who are supposed to be teaching our kids how to thrive in the world. If their response to a problem is a tweet with a poop emoji and "let's do better", I doubt they're able to really teach kids how to be mature and effective in making arguments. We can hope this is just a Florida thing.

There are plenty of people at Intel who should be able to do this.

I'm a condensed matter physicist and nanotechnologist. When I look at the network of people I've worked with and interacted with over the last 20+ years, Intel is the company that employs the largest chunk of those people. This is not a secret. There's a wide pipeline of scientists from good PhD programs into Intel.

It's time to see if Intel's investment in many of these niche fields will pay off.

It may be too late, or the culture could be too "big company" to allow real innovation to flourish. If they only bring in new managers at the top (C-level) and do nothing about technical leadership (I'm looking at you, Intel Fellows program), then nothing's really going to change. Essentially, their technical leadership program is built to emphasize making incremental improvements in their existing technology, and works too much like a "lifetime achievement award" than something designed to spur growth and creativity.

I'm with you 100% on that free speech can be taken literally. One valid meaning is that you can say what you want, have the opinions you want, be crazy and absurd... up to the point of inciting violence, making false medical claims, and the other carve outs we've collectively decided are a good idea and enshrined in law.

There's another aspect of "free speech" that deserves the same protection, which is that it also means we have the right to freedom of association. No one and no company is required to associate with Parler, any of the people spouting nonsense, or anyone saying anything they don't want to hear.

The internet is a way for us to associate with each other. If people and companies on the internet don't want to associate with you, that's their right. If a condition of association is that you refrain from saying certain things, that's their right.

The government does not control this. If EVERYONE on the internet puts speech conditions on their association with you, that's their right. The government does not have the right to tell us such action is wrong.

Reading through your comments, I think you would be with me on feeling really uncomfortable with the government specifying what kind of people any person or company either must or must not associate with. Freedom goes both ways, people have the right to say something and the right to refrain from saying something.

Critically, what we've all learned now is that it's a right you can't give up or ignore. More than a right, it's a responsibility. There's no "neutral" perfect libertarian position here. If you choose not to filter any of your associations, you choose to associate with everyone and accept the consequences to your relationships that come along with that. I'm reminded of that Rush lyric: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

It is critical that we understand the actual and moral differences between that a government driven ban and a collective societal decision. No one is going to jail just for being a fan of Parler. (Some people WILL be going to jail, but because of their actions.) Our system insists that we use "bottom up" social action by private people and organizations to set conditions on speech, rather than criminal prosecution. The system is working as intended.

We should address WHY this feels like government imposed speech limitation - it's because we have allowed ourselves to think of and act as if the tech companies are a kind of government. Many of us (myself included) at some point thought they could and should behave like the government - passing the rights of speech and association to us and staying out of it. This was our mistake. The companies are NOT the government. They do not have the ability to do that. The tech companies are just companies, with the same rights and responsibilities we all have here, no matter how powerful they seem to be.

It comes down to the energy efficiency of carbon reduction. Biology does this almost always through RuBisCO and has an efficiency generally less than 2%, existing industrial systems do this at about 10% (and have done so for a long time now).

The Earth gets about 6 kWh per square meter in sunlight. It will require that we cover an extra 2600 square kilometers with plantlife for each gigaton of CO2 we want to remove from the atmosphere per year.

If we use solar panels and industrial conversion, we need 520 square kilometers per gigaton per year.

I've worked in the US government helping to draft the contracts that govern the grants and contracts that lead to most published scientific research (from the US, at least). For a few decades, there have been clauses in nearly all of these contracts that the reports generated will be made freely available to the government and the public, and that the government maintains rights to use the intellectual property generated via the grant - which includes copyrights. If you look at patents generated on these grants, they always contain this clause, why have we dropped the ball on similar carve-outs for copyrights? It always annoyed the shit out of me when a publisher put up a paywall to access something I helped the government pay over $100,000 to generate.

Publication costs? The government paid to establish and support the original open access repositories like arXiv and PubMed. Nearly every grant includes funding to cover publication costs as well, even though this is one of the least supported costs (from an accounting justification point of view) in these kinds of grants and contracts. If we're paying $5000 on a grant specifically to support publication costs, why do people still need to pay to access the paper?

As a working scientist, I know the reality that the writing, figure creation, graphics creation, layout, and editing are done by scientists not employed by the journals.

The whole system is amazingly stupid and it is incredibly frustrating that the government does not make more attempts to assert its right - OUR right - to access the work we have all paid for,

Ok, that has very little to do with Twitter banning Sci Hub, but it's a close enough excuse for this rant.

So clearly Google is making arguments here with very little respect for the intelligence of the government or other people who may care about these regulations. It's a poorly disguised attempt to lock in a scale-based monopoly at the expense of common sense regulations.

I think a lot of us here remember fondly the days when companies like Google cut through this kind of BS coming from Microsoft and they simply provided useful services fairly. It's... sad to see the culture that was developed 20 years ago so completely dead. Just like then, someone else will come along to trim Google's empire down to size (just as was done with IBM, Microsoft, and a host of other examples) and, once again that will be done by having an improved attitude. Too many people think "better technology" is the key to competition, but that has never been the case.