This is a really dumb way of thinking about how the government spends money. A corporation does not need to make a profit: it needs to make a profit now. And not just now, but also high enough.

Governments are special in that they can finance things which bring in enormous profit in the very long run (fundamental research, very large infrastructure projects) or which have very large positive externalities (free roads). Without governments, you could not build dams: large ones become profitable after 50 years. No bank, no insurance company will accept such long-term risks: they may well not exist that long. Only countries can be reasonably certain of existing within such stretches of time.

TL;DR; it is an essential function of governments to fund long-term, high-risk projects.

About the old ideas, you are right. However, I still think that grad students actually make good reviewers in that the (good) ones have a keener sense of what is bullshit (as in "this suspiciously missing control is not suspiciously missing: you were afraid it would disprove your oversold message").

But yes, supervision is useful, because there is value in experience. BTW, when I say "grad students" I mean students vying for PhDs who already have at least a master's degree. It is a bizarre (to me) Americanism to call grad students people with only a bachelor.

If find it a bit sad that you think that students will steal ideas from the papers they are reviewing. On the other hand I find it heartwarming that you have students good enough to scoop papers already in review :)

Right, because the FED trebling the money supply just caused 300% inflation. Oh,wait, it didn't.

Also, no studies ever show that happiness correlates with the log of money. Oh, wait, they all do. Perhaps more tellingly, the probability density of income within countries (and amongst countries) is log-normal. So yes, the proper way to count the utility of wealth is in log.

Remember kids, libertarianism only makes sense if you ignore reality.

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.