Has to be the USA government, I mean 30 billion yearly... serious money.

This has been going on in China since before the pandemic. Five or six years ago it was already a common occurrence to find taxis that didn't want cash. Even street food vendors wanted to get paid electronically.

It's certainly an interesting way for Big Brother to have the ability to know EXACTLY where everyone spends their money AND to have the ability to instantly cut someone off if they want to.

No thanks.
 

"MIT's business school"?

Is that like the Colorado School of Mines' culinary school?

They've been pushing this, C. P. Snow Two Cultures-style, for some time now. Codifying the meaning of 'creative' to film, music...whatever. This coercion of language use is all a bit Eloi vs Morlocks for my liking.

It's not true. And I say that as someone who plays and writes music too. Toolmaking can be creative. Software design can be creative. I'm less well versed in physical industrial processes but I'd be more than willing to bet that there's creativity going on there too. On the other hand, acting is only sometimes creative as well, music often written to a formula...these 'creative industries' are often not very creative. And they often don't create, they use the output of some tools they were given.

I hate the language. I'm clearly not saying that all film making or music is bereft of creativity. I'm more saying that creativity as a word shouldn't be relegated and codified in this monstrously industrialised and high-handed manner so dismissive of everyone else.

Indeed. A big fat "So what?"

Best,

It has been brewing for a long time, if someone declared to be Napoleon, he would have been assessed for schizophrenia. Today when a man declares he is a woman, he is be offered a way to transition (mutilate himself) and his experience is glamorized and presented to children as a heroic act of self discovery that should be admired and followed. It is not only that we don't treat mental disease, we celebrate it. What else can one expect from society that promotes body positivity as a way to justify unhealthy behavior? If someone is obese, a doctor should suggest that it is not healthy and propose a treatment plan, society should help, not goad the person into showing it off in a weird and sick exhibitionist parade.

That is crazy. Which is exactly what the majority opinion was so critical of Jackson's dissent. There is nothing constitutional at all about a District court judge preventing the executive from taking action against complainants not before them. There was no history of first rung judge halting policy beyond their regional jurisdiction in US law or common law prior to 20th century either.

They even carved out the case of class action suits, that could still result in nation wide injunctions. District judges don't deal with broad questions of law appellate courts and the Supreme court do.

The Constitution establishes three co-equal branches of government, there was nothing equal or little 'd' democratic about one judge being able to cause the policy choices of the other two branches to be brought to a screeching halt. All the present system did is enable agitators to go shopping for venues where advancing their pet legal theories are most likely to succeed. Conservatives and liberals alike have played these stupid games and it was long past time to put a stop to that nonsense.

Law and medicine are advanced degrees.

Engineering is not.

Engineering is the most lucrative bachelor's degree.

Those who continue to law school, medical school, or an MBA are most successful when their undergrad degree was engineering.

I can see the difference. The Trumpist populist wing of the party has done a lot more for the middle class - that expanded child tax credit alone... than DemoRATs have in decades.

That is not say every policy choice they make is great but still 100X better people that are not on the dole already. Basically if you actually work and earn a living, Trump is good for you, he may be even better for you if are 1%er and enjoy a bunch of investment income but that still waaay better than higher taxes and more expensive health care democrats CONSISTENTLY deliver to the middle class.

Let's do a study! No, on second thought, sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's institute a eugenics program based on astrology and blood type.

I think it is more the derivative, smarter people are better at modeling or training.

Look at the contributions that have really shaped science. Observations are important but the really high IQ individuals (sometimes the same making the observations sometimes not) are the ones that have given us models that fit those observations and of course prove their correctness and usefulness by correctly predicting future observations.

Think about atomic models, obviously this is a case of refinement vs pure insight but Dalton's recognition of the greek atomic model took us from what was really more alchemy to basic chemistry. It explained a lot of things about distillation etc and really enable a lot of industrial process. By the time you get to the Bohr model you can explain most ordinary chemistry and create a lot of industrial process without having to 'just try it'.

The more complex model produces better predictions. The neurosciences people have long thought there is a limit to the number of 'propositions' we can think about at once. Our slower whited friends might be limited to four things, many people around five, really smart people more like 7. We 'tokenize' ideas, your wife's phone number starts out as 7 digits or things, but you eventually combine them into "Jenna's number". Perhaps after some intermediate steps of 'the local code' and these 4 digits, (five things). What that means though is a smarter person is going to be able to model faster, because they can reason about situations they understand less well. The smarter person can immediately work with a more complex model that has larger quant of inputs. Where as the 'rest of us' need either to develop a lot of familiarity with the subject first to abstract certain ideas or simple discard the smaller drivers, leading to poorer results.

This experiment had people answering questions about subjects they were just researching. I wonder if we found experienced members of a professions, bucketed them by IQ and asked them make estimates related to their work, if we would see as much stratification in the various vs actual calculated results. My guess is still some but significantly less.

I don't much care for measuring people's "intelligence".

First of all, what does that even mean? All your definitions end up circular. The intelligent people are the people who scored higher on the test that measures intelligence. The score doesn't predict, in any meaningful way, whether people will behave wisely in everyday life, or make significant artistic contributions. It doesn't even predict if they'll be able to beat you at chess.

Second, the mostly meaningless conclusions that you do draw are always misused to promote some system of gender-based or racial hierarchy, sometimes by the researchers themselves, but always by the kind of shitheads who are out combing the web for more hate fodder. And of course the shitheads always end up on top.

I kind of wish we could just stop it. Some people act dumb. Maybe humanity would be better served by spending our time and resources teaching them to act smarter.

I feel you need to elaborate a little further on that. The book lays out sources, equations and testable hypothesis. Interestingly it rarely suggests actual policy. Page 5 of the Motivations sections also laws out why - it is as scathing of campaigners as it is of incumbents.

That aspects are outdated 17 years after its last update does not surprise me. That it is fundamentally incorrect however...given the sources and calculations, I think you'll need a to provide a little more reasoning than "you should fee bad" (sic.).

Fair point, but there are a lot of large and influential companies that don't pay any dividends, because they invest their profits directly into growth and development. For example Nvidia.... well, they seem to pay 0.03 % of the current stock price, so essentially zero. The only economically sensible reason to invest in them is speculation; if there's some "useful economic activity" involved, the only way you'll get a piece of it is by buying low and selling high.

Cryptocurrencies have the same utility as banks, and many banks have been working on their own blockchains for years, for example JP Morgan: https://fintechmagazine.com/ar...

The stock market comparison is really just a side effect of what cryptocurrencies are all about, which is transferring money in ways that traditional banks can't do -- pseudonymously and independent of governments or businesses. Store of value and speculation is one thing, but you can't send NVDA shares (or gold, or tulips) across the globe with this kind of speed and freedom. Cryptocurrencies have value because they provide this service, you don't really pay just for the store of value.

As someone who has had a strong interest in this area for a while now, not professionally - just following along, it's been fascinating to watch almost every single prediction from the 1990s UK government advisor come true. These recommendations were, in 2015 this was put up as a web site - Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. This is not a political book, the "without the hot air" bit alludes to that. This is a quantitative book with the maths to back up all assumptions and recommendations.

In it, David McKay makes comments about future energy mix. If you look at the full PDF, the idea of a cable from northern Africa to elsewhere is explored starting page 178. Bear in mind this book was written late 90s/early 2000s with the last revision being 2008 (the author has sadly passed). Generating from Morocco appears on page 181.

Thoroughly good read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the mechanics and figures behind energy transitions. Clearly some will now be outdated...but it's surprising how little. A lot of what he suggested is now unfolding.