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Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 1) 166

It goes back further than that. During the 19th Century, it was found by Congress that the US was funding a ton of primary research through various grants. (I have no idea how they didn't know about this, considering Congress has the power of the purse in the US.) This lead to the short-sighted cancellation of a lot of research funding the in the US in the 1880s. People with most foresight managed to secretly keep funding basic research, mostly through the military. That's why the US Naval Observatory and the Army Corps of Engineers have their names stamped on so much research from the period between 1890 and 1930.

During the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal funded a surprising amount of research by funding colleges and universities. The national labs founded during WWII continued the tradition. In the post-war period, the NSF and ARPA/DARPA brought back direct funding of basic research.

So, you see, the US government has always heavily funded scientific and technological research and development in the US.

Comment Re: That was entirely predictable (Score 1) 29

I refer you back to my premise that MBA and Economics graduates aren't actually that smart and the courses aren't all that academically rigorous. Your average Humanities major has a much more difficult academic career than your average economist. "Smart for a MBA student," is damning with faint praise.

Comment Re:It's going to use training data (Score 1) 27

This is not interesting. Humans are notoriously bad at picking stocks. This is because the stock market is a random walk. You can't use data to predict future prices. That's why the best and most efficacious investment strategy is to buy a diverse portfolio of stocks, diversify into real estate holdings, bonds, commodities, and precious metals. (Whether you invest more in bonds or real estate depends on what the market is doing at the moment.) Preferably through a low fee index fund. That's more or less how Warren Buffet made his fortune. The only thing that made him special is that he had a lot of cash behind him and the discipline to never go chasing snipes in the market.

Comment Re:The Human Brain... (Score 1) 54

No, it doesn't. Your brain isn't a computer. It doesn't "process" anything. It holds not data. That's not how it works.

Further, we don't actually know how the brain stores memory in the first place. But we do know that human memory fundamentally is a creative process; most of what you "remember" is made up by your brain on the spot as it is remembering something.

Comment Re: That was entirely predictable (Score 0) 29

At the college level, academic fraud (read: cheating) has been rampant for decades, if you could afford it. It's actually more common at elite universities as the populations of those schools have more access to resources (read: money) to do cheating. Further, there are academically rigorous degrees and then there are cultural reproduction degrees. Athletes tend to get shunted into communication and geology (frequently referred to as "Rocks for jocks") that don't require much effort so they can keep doing their actual job as a professional athlete in the school's minor league sport franchise that pulls in millions annually. Wealthy students also have degree paths that let them get a degree from an elite university even though they're stupid. These are things like business degrees, economics, and again communications. A reminder that George W. Bush had a business degree from Yale.

TL;DR He didn't get those degrees because he's smart. He got those degrees because he was born rich. Which is also where he got access to the capital to start this company.

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