> In the normal trajectory of a life in science, Morgan would be planning to set up his own laboratory conducting groundbreaking research designed to win the war on superbugs. But with an ongoing hiring freeze at NIH, his options are limited.

That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.

True. Morgan could also end up running pipettes and 96-well plates in Foster City for $45000/yr.

Morgan (or someone else)

The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.

Well, he might be planning to set up a lab. Probably wouldn't, though, statistically.

> That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.

I think you misunderstood, since that's not about optimism. Years ago, smart students from all over the world could hope for a successful career in American research. Now, in the USA many doors are closing in most academic domains, and few (potential) researchers dare plan any success story.

Didn't they find something similar for herniated disc a while back? Meaning they were treating people for herniated discs with back pain and then eventually figured out that lots of people with no pain also had herniated discs?

hold up. 40 million dollars over 5 years for an open source VPN?

Supposedly that only covers "user carrying costs" too.[0]

They claim to have 3 million weekly users[1], I have no idea if that's a realistic cost for running a VPN of that scale?

Notably applicants for these grants don't have to be non-profits[0], which seems a little odd?

[0]https://www.opentech.fund/funds/surge-and-sustain-fund/

[1]https://psiphon.ca/en/about.html

This is a weird hill to fight and die on. I have no problem with the FCC applying their equal-time rule to late night shows if they run on local television. Seems like its a healthy thing for democracy.

Apply it to conservative talk radio first, and then we'll talk. As applied now, it's clearly the gov't chilling speech.

Weird how you are against giving another democrat equal time.

Read my comment again, and then think about it.

Who do you think would need to be given equal time on conservative talk radio?

What would be the other outcome of the change to the rule that I am proposing? Also I am not even against the rule being applied to talk shows, I just want to see it applied non-hypocritically.

So you see general entertainment TV shows as the same as literally conservative radio? If a conservative radio show gave equal time to Jasmine Crockett who would even listen? If Hannity gave equal time to Joe Biden, probably hours of equal time, who would even want that? Or take it seriously? That's like a Mosque giving equal time to a Rabbi. That's not the spirit of the rule. Late night entertainment shows were getting around the rule by claiming they were news shows that are exempt.

you're asking them to enforce the rule. I'm asking them to enforce the rule consistently if they're going to enforce the rule.

Otherwise it's a first amendment violation. I'm opposed to violations of the first amendment.

I don't care "who is going to listen to it?" if it's a rule, it's applied consistently or not at all. No "special case" for conservatives.

> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will want to pay for.

Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.

Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.

> Because drywall is a dense and uniform mixture, hanging anything off the wall (from pictures to heavier items like shelves, TVs, or even cabinetry) is a trivial exercise, either a simple nail for a small frame, plaster anchors for medium loads, or toggle bolts for the real heavy hitters.

yikes

That's inaccurate for standard thickness drywall sheet, which is usually a 20kg maximum parallel load (e.g. vertical for a wall) regardless of fixing method. Orthogonal load is even less. You might be able to attach a TV or cabinet but it would definitely not be safe, any additional weight or dynamic load would quite likely rip it off the wall with no warning.

The recommended approach for anything with moderate weight or above is to anchor to the studs and never rely on the drywall itself for retention.

I suspect they are meaning because it's uniform you can easily find the studs through it and fasten things directly into them.

An uneven wall material (plaster on lathe, or even plaster on drywall as we have in most of our house) can be quite a hassle to find the actual timbers/studs behind.

Modern plaster has the same properties, and works well with stud finders.

On a related note, if you can find a strong rare earth magnet, you can use it as a stud finder. It'll be attracted to the nails used to hold up the drywall / plaster backer boards. They sell purpose built ones with felt backs + built in bubble levels if you want to get fancy.

Very yikes.

Also wrong:

> By eschewing the lath lattices, buildings now have way more room in wall cavities for improved insulation and conduits

The cavities are exactly the same size, plaster+lath, or drywall.

Most residential construction won't use conduit anywhere, and commercial construction would never bury a conduit inside a wall, regardless of wall covering.

These are weird things to get wrong.

You mean the gas power stations that are already built?

every wind/solar farm on the grid needs backup gas turbines, whether its already built or not, which costs money either way, but those are never included in the cost.

In the UK, demand has been steadily going down. We don't need new gas power stations to cover increased usage.

you aren't getting it. You need to match, on demand, any solar or wind generation. On demand means gas turbines, because nothing else can power up quickly enough. X amount of power generation from a wind farm needs X amount of capacity sitting around waiting to come online.

I am getting it. I'm saying 10 years ago demand was X and we had the gas capacity we needed. Now demand is X-10. We have 10 too much capacity without building any more gas generation.

I haven't even gone into the presumption that it needs to be gas. What about batteries, hydro?

And that's going on the assumption that all wind and solar is going to suddenly drop to zero. And yes it might go low but not all at once without warning.

So yes. I get it. It's you that doesn't seem to.

> We have 10 too much capacity without building any more gas generation.

YOU STILL HAVE TO RUN THEM. Maintenance, upkeep, crews, and then you have to subsidize any loses they have for sharing the load to keep them online. Basically any wind farm is TWO power plants, the wind farm and its backup. They never count that backup in these cost assessments.

You do realise that the last 2 times the GB grid had major glitches (since 2000) part of the issue was thermal (nuke, gas, coal) plants going down in big chunks beyond the overall system capacity to cope.

1) The system works as a system

2) Big single plants going down (eg 'tripping') are more hazadous to grid stability than smaller individual generators

3) All generators have to be 'backed up' by spare capacity, especially big thermal

4) Yes this stuff is priced in, especially as in some grids some of the time it is over 50% of the generation

This is getting flagged?

Of course, because this is a democratic place for open discussion (irony)

Car manufacturer websites are one of the worst things on the web.

Why do they think we want to look at snail-paced scrolling, stuttery animations?

have you ever visited an auto dealership website? 10x worse.

I want to throttle whoever decided that scroll driven animations should be added to CSS/browsers. Just a load of gee-whiz bullshit

The more popular it becomes for coding, the more likely a model collapse will occur.