Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

There is one objective fact that supports that axiom: no matter who makes the observations, what direction they look and when, they get the same results. This strongly suggests that what we are observing is objective reality, not some subjective vision that can vary from one observer to another.

Biochemist here. I've done genomics, I've done proteomics, I have customers in diagnostic medicine currently. My PhD was on protein-protein interactions, which is a big part of how our immune system works.

A lot of people are quick to jump on the fact that the Theranos system didn't work, and many others claim that it was impossible and never could have worked. While indeed their system didn't work, that doesn't at all disqualify the principle.

For one case study of how far we've come in recent times I point to genomics. The first draft of the human genome took more than a decade start to finish and cost over $1B. Now we can sequence full human genomes on a commercial scale for $500 or less, and it's done in less than a week with far better resolution than the first draft.

From genomics we went to proteomics; classifying proteins in a organism instead of just genes. This tells us more about what cells are doing (although transcriptomics can bridge the gap to a certain extent). Proteins are often better disease markers than genes as well for a similar reason. When proteomics started getting off the ground we were cataloging proteins from large amounts of cellular extract. Now we can catalog and in some cases quantify proteins from individual cells. We can also use protein staining and imaging mass spec to show which cells from a biopsy are expressing aberrant proteins (again as disease markers); we've reached a point where we can do this in real time on live tissue.

One of the biggest faults in the Theranos system was in the fact that blood is not the best serum for disease markers. Yes there are markers in there but not everything goes in there, and not always in quantities that are easy to observe. Blood is great because of how much is in there but lots is missed there as well.

I think you two are both correct here. The company was mostly funded by very wealthy investors, those folks lost money and are getting their pounds of flesh back by way of seeing her rot in jail. As you point out there were also actual patients who had tests ran (uncertain now what tests, where, by whom) and received crap results; those people of course are getting nothing back because they don't have enough money to be considered worth anything in the courts - even if they died as a result.

...you have functional illiterates like Trump.

Functional Illiteracy means that somebody is barely able to read, not that they can read fairly well but don't like to or don't bother. Do you have any citable evidence that Mr. Trump is functionally illiterate, or is it just your TDS getting the better of you again?

In that case, you'll be pleased to know that that site is now 404 compliant.

You're not wrong that the democrats are run by a bunch of cowards. They propose a plan, and reliably fold on it as soon as the MAGA party comes up with a (not at all) clever insult that invariably tears the plan down to a single word bite. The democrats do have ideas, they just have no spine to actually push them through.

That's a chicken and egg thing.

Not completely, I can imagine potential customers telling the factory owner that they need to get their prices down and in the long run, building a rail line is the best way. Of course, I'm assuming that the auto part factories aren't the only ones using it so that the costs get spread around.

If they had to truck parts back and forth to/from the middle of Africa, that would be different.

If there were that much trade, there'd soon be a railroad to take the product from the factories to the nearest port.

Whoosh!
Get your mind back into the gutter where it belongs!

Doing it discretely is a a piecewise approximation of that curve.

And what do you get if you do it indiscreetly?

About 4 years? No. Try ~6 instead. It started when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and ended when Japan surrendered in 1945.

...I don't think anyone at CERN has their particle accelerator control system plugged directly into their ISP's router.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that systems like that are completely air gapped and that updates/updates are administered via removable media.