Fortunately, not only did the founding fathers author the Constitution, they also transcribed their struggles in each side fighting for what they believed belonged in the Constitution. These were called the Federalist Papers, and demonstrate how completely wrong you are.

Not to mention the numerous state constitutions at the time that were worded more bluntly regarding the individual right to bear arms.

greatest humanitarian stories in history??? Do you remember just how many TENS OF MILLIONS of people died [paulbogdanor.com] during the communist takeover and resulting purges? Or the famines?

I think the GP was referring to the post-1980 era, which really was a great humanitarian story, especially compared to the 30 years preceding it. The Economist magazine uses phrases like this all the time, and there's never any question about what they're referring to.

Crop growers need bees. Beekeepers supply bees. When bees die, beekeepers make more. Maybe crop growers pay more and prices increase a little.

If pesticides on crops are killing bees, crop growers might have to decide whether they want the benefit of the pesticide at the cost of paying more for bees. It's probably not a hard calculation for them.

This is only "alarming" for drama people.

I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.

Strictly speaking, this is correct, but there certainly are serious scientists arguing for peer review taking place after publication, not before - under this scheme, we would simply post our raw manuscripts online (i.e. arXiv or similar server). But the ultimate goal is to have more peer review, not less, with the participation of the entire scientific community.

a way to fix this by his own term is to stop contributing ... bravo ??? Shouldn't he contribute more instead...that would be better instead of the "fuck it, I quit" attitude

Schekman is the editor-in-chief of eLife, a new open-access biomedical journal (so it's a bit personal for him - not that I disagree with his message). Previously he was the editor of PNAS, one of the better publications by non-profit publishers.

You can get almost all of the same games for the PC you're using to emulate the console. They're probably much cheaper on the PC. The PC versions will probably work better than the console versions plus the emulator. The online functions of the consoles will probably never work on the emulator.

It seems like a lot of effort to build something inferior.

You are low. You need to also include Homeland Security, parts of the FBI that do surveillance and para-military operations [i.e. HRT], as well, in my opinion, the VA. This number is discussed often. For example here. Additionally, it does not include any "black" off budget operations, including a big part of the NSA and CIA budgets, perhaps $50B. You simply can't look at only the defense industry.

The fact that it is declining in terms of GDP percentage doesn't mean that defense is shrinking, it means it's not growing as fast the overall budget or the economy. Which is to say, it's still growing in real dollars in most years.

Thanks for correct on Medical GDP. I apparently have not updated that number in my head since the last 1990's. Healthcare is another huge topic.

The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to think that the US would go to war based on the advocacy of any single company, or even the defense industry.
And this is because it's not the single biggest sector in the US economy? It is a huge boondoggle, with millions flowing through the government to private industries. And it's highly political. The defense industry has outsized influence.

The problem is that you were a small part of an evil system. You didn't create it, you didn't make it, and you weren't responsible for it.

I mean it's not an unfair criticism. They are doing the job that the Administration asked of them.

The problem is that not enough people resigned. That is how you show the world you are unhappy. From the top to bottom, when Pres. Obama or anyone else asked them to do something that was illegal, or lied about it during routine oversight, there should have been waves of resignations. Waves.

When the order goes out to do something illegal, or without appropriate authority, then it should be met with cold silence and the sound of thousands of keyboards typing out letters of resignations.

c.f. - yes, but not all of those operations would be illegal. There are all sorts of intelligence gathering operations that are perfectly legal that states conduct against each other all the time.

And the same is true for the other direction, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) spying on U.S. politicians is illegal in the U.S..

Not necessarily. If the BND is using open sources, and having it's official diplomats observe and report what they see, they aren't doing anything illegal at all. Instead, that is the privilege of a soveign state credential for diplomacy in the United States (and all civilized states).

The US is breaking the law by intercepting communications. As far as you know the BND is not doing so. For example, imagine the response in the US if it was revealed that BND was listening to Michelle Obama and Barrack Obama's personal phone calls. There is a non-zero chance that we would nuke Berlin.

The truth is you don't know what the national security state is costing us. It's too secret to disclose.

But the broad strokes are that it has direct budged and non-budgeted costs in the range of $1T a year. On top of those expenditures are the revenues that are generated by selling weapons systems overseas. In some years that's tens of billions more. That's on an economy of ~$15 trillion. So that's on the order of 6.5% of the entire economy is directly involved in this sector.

That is not small. It is not tiny. There are few sectors that are as big and probably none that are bigger. The entire auto sector - manufacturing, sales, advertising, exports, imports, repair shops, parts shops, the whole supply line, shipping, trucking, etc is 5-6%. The entire healthcare sector including every doctor, every nurse, every insurance agency, R&D, the drug industry, every drug store, all the drugs, the pharmacy items in the drug store, that entire supply chain, heavy medical equipment, home health care, hospice, hospitals, hospital construction, medical tourism, advertising, medical lawsuits, lab services, medical schools and everything else lightly related to the medical business is about 11% of GDP.

Put it this way. If the national security industry was it's own country, based on GDP, it would be the 15th biggest in the world. Bigger than all of the entire South Korean economy, put together.

I saw the posters at my kids school and I am was unconvinced this is a good idea.

Programming / coding is a lot of things, and it's different to a lot of people. But the idea of teaching it by discussing game design really strikes me as a bad idea, for a lot of reasons:

1. Game design is inherently difficult. I mean, it's an art and science, and it is multi-discipline. After an hour, or ten hours, or whatever, you aren't going to have a lot to show for your efforts. Games designed and built by large teams of skilled programmers often fail to complete. Even a simple game requires substantial

2. Most programmers are not going to be doing game development. Or even game development. It's like trying to educate you on medicine by bringing in a surgeon to talk about remote micro-surgery. Sure, you could be the 1/100th of all doctors who are involved in that field. But chances are if you become a doctor it will be a GP.

3. The goal of getting more kids into programming, I would imagine, is to get kids to become programmers to do useful things. Games are a nice slice of entertainment, but in the big picture, except for the individuals, no one is really better off because of a new game being developed. If we as a country/specifies/whatever want more programmers, it should be to be more productive, to have a better economy, etc. We don't want/need more programmers for the next Candy Crush. That's a side benefit. Not a purpose.

its not easy to think of better quantifiable metrics

As someone else pointed out below, the actual impact of the research should be more important. I work in a methods development group where we tend to get very high citation counts for our most important papers, even though they're published in specialty journals. But we have it much easier than most basic researchers. The "high-impact" label is often self-fulfilling, because other scientists are more likely to notice and cite your work if it appears in one of these journals. I for one would love to be able to post a manuscript on arXiv and have that be the end of it, and have peer review done through some kind of long-term process (comment system, etc.). But I need to advance my career just like everyone else, which means occasionally publishing with companies I loathe.

I can think of many solutions to this but all of them would essentially require collective action on the part of the entire academic research community and the funding agencies. This seems unlikely to happen, although the larger funding agencies (public and private) have been notably effective in forcing the publishers to allow papers to become open-access after a relatively short period of exclusivity (typically 6-12 months). It's not ideal, but at least it's progress.

If I publish a paper in Nature that receives no citations, what good is it to the scientific community and why should I get rewarded for that? If I publish a paper in PLOS One that gets hundreds of citations, isn't that more important than the publisher I chose?

Yes, but the problem is that it's much easier to get hundreds of citations (especially in the short term, which may be more important for grant applications or job searches) if you publish in Nature than if you publish in PLoS One. And the effects are broader: since high-profile papers are even more important for junior scientists (Science/Nature/Cell publications are essentially mandatory for tenure-track positions at big research universities), labs with a track record of high-profile publications will have an easier time attracting the smartest and most ambitious postdocs, etc. It is a truly lamentable situation but not easily solved.