And I tried to impart them on my kid. They didn't listen because kids don't listen to their parents.

The thing that makes my kid better off than their friends is that they don't have any student loan debt because I paid their way through college and I also gave them several thousand dollars to get them set up when they were entering the workforce.

So for example my kid had a couple of really shitty jobs at the start of their career that they were able to quit because they knew they could go without working for a little while if they absolutely had to.

Now strictly speaking that isn't nepotism that's just generational wealth. My kid would be much better off if I was in a position to help them with nepotism. But that said there is a lot of nepotism out there...

Had to turn down a role in season 2 because the money they were paying her wasn't enough for her and her family to live in London.

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 worst threat to the US automotive industry is the US automotive industry.

In 2016, over a quarter million people put down $1000 for a Tesla Model 3, with no firm date for delivery from a company which wasn't producing even 100,000 cars a year. That should have told the US automotive industry something. Today, it's sibling, the Model Y, was the fourth best selling car in the USA in 2024. The US automotive industry has been completely incapable of building a similarly attractive vehicle, although it has made a couple of really good ones that just haven't caught on. The most exciting competitors to Tesla have been Kia and Hyundai, both South Korean companies (which, coincidentally, is where GM's 2017 Bolt EV was designed).

Why haven't the Detroit guys been successful? Answer that question, and you'll know why they're their worst threat.

You want Trump to be impeached right? I mean there is a laundry list of corruption charges waiting for Trump so you're going to start advocating for the impeachment and removal from office for that airplane he got from Qatar or the billions of dollars in crypto bribes or when he openly admitted he took money for pardons right?

Look I get it you are not emotionally capable of feeling the combination of shame and self-awareness that is associated with hypocrisy so you aren't actually capable of being a hypocrite because you will do anything for your side to win.

And I'm not actually addressing you because you're probably just a bot. A shitload of right-wing numb skulls are training their chat bots here on slash Dot.

But I know there's a bunch of old mean-spirited boomers who voted for Trump here. Did you know Trump is going to use AI to deny your Medicare claims? It's going to let the companies running the AI keep the money that they save.

All I'm saying is I think we're all fucked and I think you're fucked too. Have fun dying of a heart attack when they take away the pills keeping you alive.

During the black lives matter protests right? Of the two police stations that burned down both of them were burned down by right wingers who were trying to cause more trouble. Look it up. You are big boy you got Google you can find it it's not hard.

Also the guy who killed Kirk was the right wing extremist and his motive was like the idiot that tried to shoot Trump they were both trying to cause a civil war. It turns out when you engage in stochastic terrorism it can backfire on you.

I mean these people are smart enough to know that if somebody were to shoot Bernie Sanders or AOC that the left wing would just mourn and move on. They go after right winger is because they're expecting numbskulls like you to have a knee-jerk reaction that can be used by extremists.

The fact that you have so little critical thinking skills that you can't figure that out is why they are kind of right.

So I like the fact that nuance is completely dead. And I don't mean even complex nuance I mean the slightest amount of nuance.

So on the one hand we have hardcore racists losing their jobs because they are hardcore racists and the companies that employ them don't want to take the risk of them either pissing off a customer by being a hardcore racist or worse opening them up to civil rights lawsuits by, again, being hardcore racists...

On the other hand we have people quoting a right-wing extremists right-wing extremism and then getting fired from their jobs often for political reasons since a lot of them were College professors and there is currently a attack on colleges by the right wing and billionaires..

That is not a complex nuanced thing. We made racism a crime because that was the only way to stop the racists from doing racism and we all know racism is wrong it's just some of us enjoy it and want to do it anyway. Like how you're not supposed to drive 60 mph in a 40 mph zone but some idiots will do it anyway and occasionally kill a kid.

So there isn't really any nuance here per se but there is a very very very very tiny bit of nuance in the sense that we have people who are dangerous to the company they are working for and kind of terrible and refusing to acknowledge that terribleness and we have a bunch of billionaires using a political assassination conducted by a right-wing extremist hoping to start a civil war to seize a tiny little bit more power...

And even that bit of nuances too much for a lot of Americans.

I don't necessarily blame the education system itself I blame the sabotage that's been done to the education system for the last 60 years.

Wealthy people don't like capitalism and they don't like critical thinking. They wanted dismantle capitalism and they want to do away with critical thinking. There are a lot of people who can't think critically and can't figure that out and nobody has figured out a way to explain that to them

You might wake up to the smell of bacon only to find a cop installing a key logger dongle on your DragonflyBSD machine.

Companies never innovate. The government builds new technology using taxpayer dollars and companies build products off of that after the government has done all the expensive work.

That's because of what a margin is. The margins on research and development are really shitty. Truly innovative technology more often than not takes decades and decades to pay off. So if you are investing there is no way in hell you are going to put money behind something like the internet because you're looking at spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a payoff you're not going to see in your lifetime when you start at the investment.

It's like how we've got all these billionaires getting into rockets after the government did the really expensive work of developing the tech and then acting like they are all innovative and shit...

Another good example is that fancy insulation. It was developed in the 50s but there wasn't any way to make it affordably or economically. It wasn't until I think the 2010s that there was even a way to manufacture it in a way that was worthwhile for any applications outside of the space shuttle.

Try to imagine something to takes 60 years before you can even think about an affordable way to manufacture and monetize it. That's how most technology actually is. And that's why most innovations come out of public universities and public research grants.

The Reason China is ahead of America is because their government is still pouring money into basic research. They can do this because their economy is still growing rapidly as they use up the excess population they got from a couple of big baby booms.

America Can't do that because our economy is in growing fast enough to satisfy the greed of our ruling class and also maintain a functioning civilization. It's kind of like how Japan is stuck in a permanent recession because they don't have enough resources and money to simultaneously maintain a ruling elite that can hang with guys like Elon Musk and a functioning working class.

Basically your economy needs to be able to support mega yachts while also supporting a small middle class on top of research and development and you need a super fast growth cycle to pull that off that isn't sustainable. Give China a few years and they're going to have the same problem everybody has. Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't acceptable to people (and no China is not socialist or communist they have a private Health Care system for fucksake).

I've said this before but given the capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't emotionally acceptable we need to figure out a third option or we need to get comfortable with intense poverty for everybody except about 10,000 people.

If you're reading this you are not part of that 10,000

Fun fact the reason your grocery prices aren't going down thanks to antitrust law enforcement is that companies don't bother demanding enforcement and instead just Sue the monopolies and trusts themselves and get a payout every few years. McDonald's for example got 170 million from suing the four major meat packers.

You will be shocked to learn McDonald's isn't passing those savings on to consumers.

The Biden administration was knee deep in preparing antitrust actions before they lost the election. So a major source of consumer price relief just went away. Ironically because consumers were chasing lower prices...

Also in other news Democrats really really really suck at messaging...

I'm fucking embarrassed by our lack of use of the metric system, but...it's never changing. In the list of priorities and issues with the USA, I don't think that makes it into the top 100. For a few years, I tried using metric for weather because my coworkers are 95% international. Even the Europeans and Asians thought I was being a douchebag when I talked about the weather in Celsius.

While it is correct that it's not a very tangible problem, it seems so easy to solve. Additionally, there are additional consequences, such as tools. You want to buy a wrench set? In the USA, we have SAE and Metric...so you need both a 1/2inch wrench and a 13mm one. NO ONE FUCKING USES SAE fasteners...but every goddamn tool kit sells them. For the past 5 years, I've been looking for a compact tool kit for consumer use...non one sells them in metric only. I don't want an additional set of wrenches and hex wrenches and sockets for SAE fasteners I'll never use....but you want something with a nice case?...you gotta buy them. It's almost impossible to buy decent tool sets in the USA with just metric....so I have to pay more to get extra tools I throw in a box in my basement and never use...and they buy 3rd party cases ....why??...I don't even fucking know. It's just stupid and wasteful and pretty much unavoidable.

Yeah...1st world problems, but FFS....it's just stupid and pointless. I am sure Europeans and Asians don't have to deal with that shit.

This is entirely about economics. As long as it's more profitable to scam investors with LLM fake claims than work in biotech, our research community will lose talent. As long as it's more profitable to invest in real estate than develop a cancer drug, the research community will constantly lose talent. Are scientists selling real estate?...no...they committed 8-12 year of their lives for that job. However, science is not done in a vacuum. A drug company require many white collar workers for logistics, funding, marketing, management, etc....as well as leadership roles. Not to mention the young...you're 22...you can go into pharmacology and spend 4-8 years in school for to earn 1/10th of what you'd get working for OpenAI.

What China does well is that a central power allocates resources based on long-term planning. As academics say, the most efficient form of government is a benign dictatorship, which China was historically in the 21st century and mostly is today. Yeah, I don't like the Taiwan saber rattling, authoritarian censorship, treatment of minorities, etc....but what you can't argue with is that China is pretty good at getting shit done when they want to. They are a credible player on the global stage economically and scientifically. We should equally celebrate their success and criticize their misdeeds.

I know Fox News or whatever echo chamber you're in told you it's because of our liberal policies, but those are totally irrelevant. I work in big tech and live in one of the best biotech hubs in the world. I meet elite scientists regularly, some are my neighbors. They don't give a shit about the trans community. They're laser-focused on their job and earning money and securing funding. To put it your way, they're serious people. They don't get distracted by the fat weirdos with full beards in dresses and high heels insisting everyone call them "they" instead of "he."

Any social unrest was not caused at universities producing top scientists. MIT has been consistently running things as usual. Harvard?...yeah, there was some drama. I would argue it was due to external factors instigating them rather than homemade stupidity, but either way....everyone in the area knows that Harvard produces mostly managers, politicians, lawyers or leeches of various occupations who gain immense wealth. MIT produces innovation and advancement.

If you think seeing a chick with a dick changes anything in life, you've got trans dick on the brain. It's OK if you're attracted to trans women. There's really no shame in it. Give it a try, you might like it.

Weird! How could this happen. All we did was freeze or remove federal spending for education in every decade since 1980. And suddenly we're behind after 45 years. I wonder why feeding colleges and universities thousands of unprepared students should have such a negative impact on our higher education and research programs. Well, we better tighten up our borders and stop accepting immigrants into our universities just to be sure...

Companies no longer invest in r&d because it doesn't generate instant profits. We'll never see another Bell Labs.

Because that's only open to nepo babies.

If you're wondering why Hollywood movies suck so much look at who is making them and who their parents are.

Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age or a Hollywood screenwriter why his parents' names are blue on Wikipedia.