We wouldn't care about science if it weren't "useful" in the sense of providing value. It would be just another random bit of epistemology.

Which isn't to say that all science has to provide value immediately. We never know what's going to come in handy. Some sciences can go centuries without ever turning over anything of interest to the layman. Many are "useful" only in the sense of giving us some sort of feeling of understanding.

But that feeling of understanding is fake if you never actually apply tests to it. The evo psych stuff is a good example of that. It propagates as myth rather than as science: poorly-performed tests result in poorly-stated and overgeneralized rules that mislead rather than inform. There is, at core, something to that science, but the popular conception of it (as, sadly, with many sciences) is more wrong than right.

They don't need it. They want it. Every dollar they save in taxes is a dollar that their shareholders (including Musk) get to pocket. And the state gives it to them willingly, in the hopes that it brings jobs to the area. Tesla really is a "jobs creator", unlike a lot of other self-proclaimed masters of the universe, and so the tax breaks really are win-win. It's not zero-sum because value is being added: raw materials come in and batteries go out.

That's what business looks like when it's working, and states compete to be in on it. Nevada won, this time, and one can hope that they're not being ripped off in the process. A lot of other companies have been lured with tax breaks in return for promises of economic value that they fail to provide. Often, it was obvious that they'd fail to provide it, but legislatures and governors can be pretty gullible when it comes to "jobs jobs jobs". I've got high hopes for Tesla, since Musk actually is interested in making money by making stuff, but we won't know until it's underway.

The scam in this case involves more expensive items, in the $1,500 range. (The limit is $1,000 rather than $100; I assume that's just a typo, but it's still above that range.)

And apparently the scammers are also on that: they're starting to work up fake money orders as well. I gather that's used more on stores than on Craigslist buyers, where the store can't validate the money order before they hand over the merchandise, but I assume it'll develop.

Yeah, like that's gonna help. If they had the faintest bit of intellectual curiosity they would have found it themselves. They're just going to continue to believe what Fox News tells them. I don't really know how they live with the cognitive dissonance, but apparently they manage it very well. Every piece of data that contradicts them is somehow tainted, so they can live in their own perfectly smooth ball, untouched by any outside information.

That "you can't see the data" lie has been going around for years, and it's so trivially refuted with even the slightest effort. I applaud you for tilting at that windmill, but it is still a windmill.

Unfortunately, it was a very poor kind of science, and that's one of the things that really irked me about the series. The potions (chemistry) class was especially bad. They were taught things by rote, and they learned only that if they didn't follow the procedure then they'd get bad results. Often, interestingly bad, but they thought of them as simply "the wrong thing" to be discarded rather than investigated.

The wizards looked down on "muggles", but they had an awful lot to learn from them. Applying muggle science would have made them vastly better wizards than they were. And they could have done a lot of good for the muggle world as well: people suffered and died needlessly.

I know, it's just a kid's book, and I'm putting too much on it. For drama, Rowling separated the magical and non-magical worlds in a rather unlikely way, and you were supposed to just chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. But I had kinda hoped that the series would go in a direction that realized this. I think it would have made better drama.

The problem, as I see it, is with the uselessness of such studies.

The whole point of falsifiability is that for a scientific finding to be "useful", it has to have the potential to be wrong. You have to be able to say, "If this theory isn't true, then this thing that I want to do will fail." If it couldn't fail, then nothing you do would change whether it were true or not. It's only the possibility of failure that makes success meaningful.

So when I read that these studies aren't repeated, what I hear is that the studies aren't useful. If they were useful, then people would have built on them to make more elaborate structures, and when those structures failed, we'd know that one of the underlying theories was wrong.

Evo psych is rife with conclusions that are popularly held but not actually useful. The myths persist, but never feed into more science. Unfortunately, an awful lot of people who are nominally scientists buy into them, which means that it could be argued that they just plain aren't practicing science.

Wow. That is an extremely disturbing graph.

"American English is the largest group of English speakers".

But the consensus is not always right. 8-)

This isn't your usual 419 scam. They're not offering millions of dollars to suckers.

What they're doing is buying stuff from Craigslist sellers with bogus checks that look awfully real. There's another step where they send a too-large check and ask for a partial refund. The checks are so good that they clear, and the fraud isn't discovered until weeks later, at which time your bank yanks the money back.

There's still hints of the usual 419 stuff in there, but you don't have to be either gullible or greedy. You simply have to misunderstand the idiotic system under which checks are processed, which is most of us. The idea that a certified check could fail, a month after you deposited it, is baffling to the majority of people who think of a certified check as practically good as cash.

The checking system is so screwed up that most sellers need to treat all checks with suspicion. But credit cards are expensive to process, and Paypal... is Paypal.

there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts.

I remember spending hours untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code. One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text. Cheaper does not mean better. People over there can work for peanuts because they live in cardboard ghettos. Maybe we want our people to have indoor sanitation, running water and electricity.

Maybe we should be considering trade barriers instead of feeling like we need to compete with starvation wages in every third world hell hole on the planet.

All our hopes and dreams revolving around deflecting asteroids and comets all hinge on being able to detect them far enough out to make an intercept. Makes me think we should really reconsider the priority we put on manned space missions, particularly generational missions. Otherwise we stand a good chance of getting snuffed out as a species if we hang around here long enough. Asteroids and comets are not even the most dangerous threats we face.

Sorry, 3.1, not 95. Though a similar one was present in the 95 line.

This article is about the Win95 BSOD, not the NT one. The 95 BSOD showed up for plenty of application hangs when you didn't need to reboot the whole system and could use it to just kill that process -- or at least, delay rebooting long enough to save and close anything else open.

... when I was a child technology hadn't been invented.

There are estimates of the cost, and they are considerable. The error bars are wide, but they are enough to at least start to move forward on some kind of system that will allow us to price in the effects that aren't being accounted for. Insurers are accounting for the effects, but not manufacturers or energy-producers, who can continue to produce as much CO2 as they want with no pricing effect at all. In fact, the possibility that there might be future costs encourages them to burn more now, raising the final future cost.

You can be skeptical of government, but I'm equally skeptical of CO2-producing industries, for which there is even less supervision and even more imperative to create short-term gains at long-term costs. Government is the only mechanism that exists to affect the behavior of these companies, and since it's effectively undeniable that they are causing some sort of global cost there is reason to begin at least talking about regulation. Talks which don't even get started because of the various stages of denialism which insist on "nothing, ever, and we'll come up with reasons for it later." There is an opportunity cost to waiting, and it only goes up.