Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

I mean, this thing does not even have good download-numbers. And a download is not a user.

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.

Today's AI is useful for some things, tomorrow's AI will be useful for more.
Unfortunately, AI is the fad of the day, and marketoids are rushing to cram immature AI into anything they can imagine.
While it's plausible that some of these ideas will be useful, most are annoying slop and worse.
If something is good, people choose it voluntarily and even pay for it.
If something is impossible to turn off, it's most likely not good

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

And than you look at the US doing this crap for far, far longer. Bug-planting by law-enforcement has a long, long tradition in the US. The difference is that in Germany, so far, this was completely illegal for law enforcement. Whether this will stand in Berlin remains to be seen, but I doubt it.

There will be for sure a review by the Bundesverfassungsgericht. So far, the surveillance-fascists always lost.

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.

Do you have trouble with reading comprehension? I specifically answered to "How many countries have banks the size of Credit Suisse?", nothing else. And, as it turns out, that insinuation was complete and utter nonsense.

You are just an asshole trying to move goalposts when your bullshit gets called out. How repulsive.

Why should I follow your cheap manipulation strategy? After I have pointed out your 2nd core argument is bullshit and manipulative, you want me to ignore that one?

You are a complete asshole, nothing else.

USA: 4,453,908 Muslims. Funny. Incidentally, Germany has more Muslims per capita than Switzerland.

And what does LGBTQ rights have to do with whether "Islam has always been an integral part of the Swiss experience"? Are you mentally challenged?

All I see here is that you are full of shit.

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

Every graduate is not identical
Talent is real. Effort is real.
A talented student who works hard will do better that a not so talented student who slouches through college socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams
The line "fruitful area for policy intervention" is especially troublesome, as it assumes that government can somehow make the inferior students succeed as well as the best

Yes. And when the "think of the children" lie has run its course, they will just continue with one of the other horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

These are malicious people, plain and simple. They want everybody monitored and dislike anybody having freedoms. And they will stop short of nothing to get there.

It is a lot of historic reputation. But I actually know 3 (!) Swiss numbered account systems personally (don't ask). They used to be anonymous a long time ago. They are not these days. The identity of the account holders has to be verified carefully in each case and has to be given to the government. The reputation of the Swiss banks refers to a situation that does not exist anymore and has not existed for quite a while.