Delete those and I'll go another 10%.

I am not against lab grown meat in the sense that I would refuse to eat it, what I am against is calling it meat. The definition of meat is the flesh of an animal. If it is grown in a lab, it is protein approximating meat, but is NOT meat. They should not be allowed to call it that. In the same vein, frozen dinners and restaurant food should not be able to call beef, chicken or fish or any other thing those things unless the things are 100% those minus spices. If there are any substitutes or fillers or meat glues, they should be forced to call it something different. In reality it is pressed and formed meat like substance that started with the real thing as a base.

Intel carefully launders the money through irreversible foreign LLCs and then successfully sues to get their shares back. The cash winds up in the pockets of the CxOs and Board as they wind down operations and convert to a patent troll that lives in a lawyer's filing cabinet.

I don't think it is even that. I think it is just company Kool-aid that is soul crushing. I have always been a self motivator and have excelled in my career, but when company Kool-aid stuff starts happening it makes me want to run for the hills. If people don't want to work without this stupid shit, FIRE THEM, but don't make the rest of us who are working and doing well without that crap have to partake in it. It is demeaning and insulting.

Or any non-self hosted cloud in general, get what they deserve. We are using internally hosted Zimbra collaboration and Nextcloud. Screw Microshaft. We are happily saving hundreds of thousands JUST ON EMAIL ALONE.

Graft, at least in the US parlance, is when a government official provides government funding to enhance the viability of a private enterprise, while simultaneously investing in that enterprise themselves, and making a killing on the return from that investment, through leveraging the stability and exclusivity of the government's financial contributions to the success of that enterprise.

Why it is bad:

Investing in companies in this manner creates necessary exclusivities which gives unfair market advantages to the recipient of the graft's financial capital. It also creates a quid pro quo relationship between the government official that created the deal, and the enterprise that accepted it, which can be exploited in any number of truly devious and heinous ways.

Now--

If the government wants to support struggling American chip foundries, they can universally invest across the board, while simultaneously imposing a hard rule against *ANY AND ALL* public servants privately investing at the same time.

This, at least in theory, removes the majority of the reasons why the dealmaking is *BAD*. (not all, just most).

Since our legislators balk at the idea of ANY AND ALL forms of *restriction* to their investment activities while in office, and since Pres Trump seems *incapable* of understanding that Quid Pro Quo is *BAD*, I have to come out very much against the government *INVESTING* in companies in this manner.

Hosted SaaS always has been and always will be a scam. On-prem, self provided web services are fine. I bend over backwards to avoid putting anything in hosted cloud services and it has worked well. In my current company, which is a huge fast food franchise, we were given approval to do our own thing. In 7 years we have saved over $6.4 million by doing everything in house.

There's also data showing that Millennials and zoomers are not getting more republican as they get older.

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

However, there *IS* evidence that an unsettling number of zoomers are straight up redpilled.

Picking winners in a such a shockingly open way is the pinnacle of open governance!

Using the office of the presidency to support a company, while heavily investing in them, so that it succeeds and you make lots of money is certainly not illegal!

No, not at all! Certainly not GRAFT, No, THAT'S A CRIME!"

This is PROTECTING AMERICAN INTERESTS, Yeah-- that's it!

Surely!

This is the Prius hypermiler thing again.

Babies are impractical. They're noisy and they smell bad, except for their tiny pink toes which smell delicious.

If you mean the toxic hazard potential caused by PFAS, and other such compounds, then yes.

A basic rule of thumb, is that if a thing-- any thing at all, of any kind or nature-- is "USEFUL" or "PROFITABLE", but also has "But it will cause some horrible bad thing to happen if used", it will be used, and used heavily, 100% of the time, until its use is forcibly stopped. (and even then, it will be whined about, A LOT.)

Examples include such noteworthy entries as tetra-ethyl lead, C8/GenX, CFCs in aerosol sprays, plasticizers in polymer products, glyphosate and other herbicides, an abundance of insecticides, antibiotics in food animals, and if you want to get away from chemicals, you have things like, sub-prime lending packages, cryptocurrencies, gerrymandering, etc.

It is simply how humans behave when presented with these conditions. All of them are variations on the tragedy of the commons, and it is a very well known problem with human behavior.

Further causing frustration, is that a fair number of people ardently refuse to accept that it is even a problem *at all*, and that it should be seen as a valuable, predictable, and reliable feature to tap into for wealth generation.

This is the weaponization of security software against the owner of the machine that we have all said was coming. Security is nice, but security that works against the wishes of the owner of the machine is exactly the opposite of that and is, by definition, malware.

In many cases, the reason you cant do that, is because of the requirements of the seminal study in the first place.

Things like lifetime cohort studies, for instance, (where are you going to get another 5000 people to track for a lifetime study of a once in a lifetime event? A time machine?) or where very specialized equipment that costs a small fortune to produce (like the stuff at CERN) are at play.

Think about what you are actually saying, and then think more critically about the replication crisis, and then think about the current state of academia more like an experiment that is not performing according to expectations. (specifically, the expectation is that impact factor and impact scoring are sufficient controls to combat and control fraudulent papers proliferating and poisoning the credibility of the entire endeavor.)

Current processes are geared to explicitly maximize new work, even though the actual quality of that work cannot be verified, and is increasingly having problems with actual quality. (with perverse incentives on the rise to actually do the opposite: actively degrade quality. See for instance, the hackjob work done by private interests to undermine "undesired" findings, such as about our climate, and human impact thereon.)

Again, this is because of a fundamental failure to appreciate the value of boring replication work, which is exactly what I suggested.

Boring replication work combats both kinds of problem, but we do not give it the valuation it deserves.

The reason current polices are geared to maximize new work, is due to the resource scarcity with which to do meaningful work in the first place (it's very hard to get the funding to follow 5000 people for 50 years to see how the removal of tetraethyl lead from fuel has changed human behavior, for instance), which is another way of saying that there just isn't enough funding to study the things that need to be studied, let alone verify the findings of the things we can fund to study.

The people holding the purse strings are still politicians, since they set the size of the award pool to start with.

So far, your arguments have been "Refusal to see the forest, for the trees" and "Insisting nothing is wrong, even with alarming evidence to the contrary in your face."

Am I saying that your course of action is incorrect, given your position? No. You are and have been doing what is necessary in the face of resource scarcity, to get as much science done as possible with the best quality you can manage with those resources.

But does it create the replication crisis? Yes. yes it does.

Scientists are humans, and humans are prone to certain modes of mental derailment. There is a very strong bias that the current system is functioning well, even when many outstanding measures indicate it is not. (this study from the summary, and numerous others, for example.)

Why is that, I wonder?

Why do you insist that nothing is wrong, or that dedicated replication teams are so unglamorous, as to be worthless to academia-- or, in your words, "The things you give undergrads" ? (as if it is work "beneath actual scientists" rather than a valuable and indispensable tool in that process)

More pointedly, you assert that things are fine as they are, since "We still catch fraud"-- even though the data suggests that fraud is INCREASING, and catching it is falling behind, which would indicate a failure in methodology...

In fact, recent studies have indicated that its becoming so common, that its become an actual industry, and increase at a rate that very clearly indicates that this is NOT being adequately controlled:

https://www.science.org/conten...

Yet you insist that the methodology is fine-- Why is that?

Again, I would conjecture, it is because there is a startling degree of disdain for "mere replication of findings", combined with an awards system that actively prices that work out of the process, with no system in place that *ADEQUATELY* polices the problem. ("Adequately", because this rate or error is increasing at this very alarming rate) This is abundantly clear from widespread findings in the academic field, like the study I just posted a story about-- its just one of many.

Impact scoring (including impact factor), is very clearly not a sufficient control for this process. If it was, this result would not be appearing.

The scientific process would suggest that this is an observation, and that the next step is formulation of a hypothesis for testing.

I have provided one for you, and it can be tested. Why has this kind of thing not been proposed and examined with the appropriate process?

I can appreciate that there are precious few resources to allocate, but this kind of thing can be tested in small scales for performance quality measures.

It's what's called for by the scientific process, so why has academia resisted it so much?

Or, does academia think its own policies are somehow above the very process they use to wrest truth from bias? (again, scientists *ARE* humans, and humans *DO HAVE BIASES.* Things like "Sunk Costs Fallacy" and pals, spring instantly to mind, given the battle to attain tenure and recognition in a field. "Appeal to authority" also comes to mind, with rhetoric about Impact Factor and Reputation Scoring, in clear contravention of very observable trends.)

Try to be more objective about the degree and severity of this problem, and the outstanding need your vocation has to maintain its rigor and value to mankind.

Especially in the face of a very well funded, concerted effort to undermine that work.

Impact score is literally the number of times a paper is cited by other papers.

Instead of pretending it's magic, instead realize what happens when studies are *not* replicated.

A single study is conducted, and because it is the seminal paper, it gets lots of citations in related works.

Assuming an academic forger is smart, and does not make outlandish claims that break ancillary studies, they can go undetected for decades.

Like the work behind the amyloid hypothesis.

The methodology currently employed grants awards to very skilled fraudsters, in increasing quantity and severity, as suggested by this study, and supported by the observable lack of replication being done.

The politcians I mention provide an insufficient financial resource to provide for the degree of replication needed, replication scientists dont get near the impact scores of seminal paper authors, and conversely, through the the process you laid out, dont get funding approved, leading to them getting even less funding, because you cant realistically do science on a 0$ budget to get the impact scores you need to be awarded that funding. You've created a singularity.

To have competative impact score ratios, there would need to be dedicated 'refutation firms', that predatorially kill published findings, and get citations for doing so. Those firms would need good premises and equipment equally on par with the vanguard, and in many disciplines, that's an equally costly outlay that may require a fed budgetary line item.

We dont have those, and we dont have those for reasons related to the insufficiency of impact score as a proxy for merit, combined with generally insufficient funding overall.