PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

... How working in an office was the standard for centuries but somehow in the last 5 years has become a necessity.

All I ever hear is bitching and moaning after Ukraine blew up the Nordstream pipeline about how energy availability is out of control and causing German companies to close or relocate to America.

But now that we get the real story: the green push has worked well. Germany is on the other side now and permanently off Russian gas. Not another eurodollar for them.

Ukraine is kicking their butts and refuses to give up a single hectare of land no matter how much Trump and Putin gang up on Zelensky the hero and try to force him to surrender.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

The entire place is a swampy echo chamber.

Paid for by taxpayer dollars. Oh, and the public funding drives.
(which of these is "the most important" depends on who's begging in front of whom) ...oh and $2.5 million per state? So a flat $125 mill annually?

"The commission's decision to drop PBS membership is a blow to Arkansans who will lose free, over the air access to quality PBS programming they know and love,"
IT'S CLEARLY NOT FREE.

Who needs school when we have TikTok?

Now that they've gotten rid of this woke DEI nonsense, they can spend 10x as much on some more wholesome and less-indoctrinating educational materials! /s

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

"The chances of someone being born with excellent skills is equal everywhere"

This is a nice rhetorical assertion, and one I'd like to agree with, but it's (unfortunately, for both the skilled and those in less advanced areas) provably false.

Skill directly correlates to IQ at a population level. The IQ of European-native peoples, Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish peoples is in the 100-105 range average. Africa, India, and the Middle East (to a lesser degree)? Not true at all. A full SD or more different. You've got a huge problem with inbreeding throughout India and the Middle East, for instance. This means that your average person is not going to have the same chance of being "born with excellent skills".

Of course, this is also not without discounting things like upbringing and environment, and it undoubtedly has some play in the matter.

As for this policy, it has absolutely nothing to do with letting the best and brightest immigrate. It's clearly reactionary due to unfettered refugees and other unskilled immigrants who can't speak the language, don't want to speak the language, and bring obscene levels of crime to what would otherwise be an idyllic socialist utopia.

In what ways do you find it superior?

For me, Grok has been pretty consistent at making some pretty wild code recommendations and not following specifications.

It's not like Gemini, which will get stuck implementing things and then get into a histrionic panic loop, but it's not nearly as good as gpt5.1 in implementing correct, complete code per specification.

Slashdot is a US site. You have freedom of speech here. You can say Trump is a piece of shit.

It's the same in Europe. You can go online and say Trump is a piece of shit, too!

I thought the US was under a tourism boycott already. Remember those German prostitutes who got deported from Hawaii to Japan?

America is closed. Don't come. Tourism economies suck. You don't tip, either, which is why you get spit in your food and poor service.

Tell all your friends America is closed, too. Stay home. We built a Disneyland in Paris for this exact reason.

I don't think it's possible to make a less nuanced and less coherent argument than this. At best, you're telling on yourself.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

Please link to the post you made Feb 6 2023 when Blinken decreed the use of Calibri for also-stupid reasons.

Because calling this a wasteful bother and not that just means you're in ignorable tendentious hypocrite.

Thanks for playing.