The utility of money is not linear, it is logarithmic. Let us not pretend that human inability to count properly is a valid measure of what is right.

You are an idiot. Really.

Repeat after me "the market is not a magic wand". Some things, such as roads and bridges are natural monopolies. The private sector will do even less than the government to keep these up. For a higher price, too.

You think the government is inefficient, but this is only because the government is really bad at hiding what it does poorly: it is massively more transparent than private sector corporations. Fact, the private sector s even more wasteful, because on top of the laziness and incompetence, profits need to be extracted.

Simply, successful companies have evolved really good abilities at giving the illusion of efficiency. It's called marketing.

Also, the tax burden in the US is really low. I mean really, really low -- not so much the taxes on labour, which are more or less on par, but all the rest. Whenever I travel there, I think to myself "ugh, the infrastructure is like that of a third world country, also houses are made out what seems to be cardboard". And then I shop, consider the taxes and think "well, duh, they pay as much as in an undeveloped country".

It is because of people who think like you that there is an isotherm of truth in companies. The grunts know. The middle managers suspect. The upper echelons are completely out of it. Eventually, the company drowns in its own shit.

It needs not be like that: this dev did a great and good thing for MS: it made it impossible to ignore the truth. The truth was always there, knowing it changes nothing, except that you can now work on it.

Incidental rant: private sector companies are much better at covering up the shit than public sector ones, thus the myth of private efficiency. But in reality, it is all about people like you who cover up the shit -- whereas in the public sector, you always have some incentive to uncover the problems: you can always blame your predecessor for political gain.

you are allowed to (and should) put pre-prints freely accessible on the web.

I mean, yes, Elsevier are scum, but only because their profit margins are too high for the quality of the service they provide. As an editor responsible for the copy-editing and typesetting, they suck.

I think it is a good thing that grad students review papers rather than the profs: they are less politically motivated, and closer to the experimental reality.

Also, they don't yet know the people from whom they are reviewing the papers, and therefore have a more neutral stance.

If only they let me do the typesetting... I usually submit beautifully typeset documents, and some idiot editor retypes the math into word and it comes out fugly. They also add mistakes to our manuscripts.

I have nothing in principle against outsourcing, but it has not improved the quality of the editorial process at Elsevier...

In many cases, you are allowed to offer the pre-prints on your personal website. This is commonly done in more technological fields, but frequently biologists for example will not do so because they simply don't have a website :). Not everyone has the time or expertise to curate a very-low-traffic blog.

It is becoming more common, and google scholar provides the link to the freely available version if it exists. So if you want people to access your work without hassle, do that!

New in this version is precisely overhauled and improved support of Python...

Bitcoin will never "win". as currency, it is worse than useless, not being backed by a central bank and being deflationary by nature. And don't give me any crap about deflation being good... And the OP is right, it basically is a Ponzi scheme.

You could imagine a crypto currency where certificates would be emitted by a central bank holding a master key against which they would be verified. It would be designed in such a way that any number of certificates could be printed. You could even have negative interest rates that way.

It would be anonymous, work like some electronic version of cash, and make sense economically.

You are wrong, for two reasons:
  - You assume there is such thing as a total money amount. There isn't; rather there are measures of the amount of money flowing in the system.
  - You further assume all money is available to buy all assets. This is not true. Although any dollar can be exchanged for any other dollar, it remains the case that depending on the distribution of money, not all goods and services produced can be bought. Capital reserves of banks don't count, for example.

If there is no credit and houses are worth a fixed 1000 dollars, and the median American has 900 available at any time, not all houses can be bought, and the amounts of dollars is worth all goods produced minus houses divided by the available money. Now, if you print money and give Americans each 100 dollars, suddenly, you have simultaneously increased the value of money and the number of dollars!

This is how stimulus works...

Even as an AC, I will not give references, sorry. But I will say this: people do not verify their model/claims against the right control, which is random() with an appropriate probability distribution.

In general, some people consciously or unconsciously in competitive fields try to have as little controls as they can get away with. And infuriatingly, the reviewers don't want to see that either, depending on the authors. My advice: big papers from small groups are way more trustworthy than big papers from big groups... And if it comes from Boston, it is oversold (any field).

in matlab, you cannot do (some-complicated-expression)(i,j), whereas in octave this is valid. To me, this syntax is orthogonal, because there is such thing as the (...,...) operator, which applies on anything which returns a matrix. Matlab thinks some things are matrices, and some not, even is they are. Thus some things which should be the same are treated differently as a function of context.

"Objects" without tolerable syntax is not object -- or rather it is completely pointless. Otherwise you might as well claim GTK has objects (warning, troll inside)...

As for plotting, if you are into baroque languages, I find R to be far better.

Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.

People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...

Let's put it this way, the most common adjective used to described MDs from my biologist friends -- some of whom work in Boston -- is "useless".

They are overpaid, underqualified, have an exaggerated sense of their own importance and most importantly, are really bad at science, seeing everything from the point of view of clinical outcomes. Which are truly not important when trying to understand biology. Even in a hospital: once you understand your topic, there will be applications. Looking for applications in a topic you do not understand is just delaying them being found.