From knowing many different types of engineers, not only does software engineering fall pretty neatly within that group of jobs but also software is an integral part of their engineering practices. I know some people who are designing planes and if software isn't an engineering discipline I guess I need to tell them they recently became not engineers (though maybe because they occasionally use physics equations the author would say they still are. It's a silly distinction). The argument seems mostly based on their personal definition of engineering, which doesn't seem useful to me (a quick reading of a dictionary would make it seem that software engineering false very neatly within definition 2b https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)
Overall though I found this post incredibly hard to read. It's incredibly long and wordy though that's par for the course for these petty semantic arguments.
They are winning recall votes and getting a lot of pushback at in person city council meetings. People keep saying it's astroturfed (and I do expect a lot of communication online to not be in good faith) but you can also see the real grassroots pushback. I mean the article is talking about recalling mayors, you don't get that without pretty extreme local opposition.
I've found that everyone has some hypocrisies that they cling to (it's really hard to see it in yourself). I believe I do a better job of it that Facebook employees, it would be really hard to be more blatantly hypocritical than this, but it's not like I don't make similar errors all the time.
Especially on a post about them doing something decent, I can accept they are obviously hypocritical and just not be concerned with it right now.
Edit: for something like this I think about the advice "don't punish someone for doing what you want them to do". This is Facebook employees publicly signing a pro-privacy document. It's obviously self serving so it would be weird to really praise them as people who protect privacy but I'm happy to support them in this regardless.
People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life.
Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frustrating but it's sort of like getting mad at a dog for barking through a fence (dogs gonna dog) so I personally don't find it hard to be sympathetic still.
I haven't bothered to keep up with all the frontier drama, are the latest Anthropic models more dangerous or easier to get around safeguards than other models?
He was a top Democrat donor (the article says he was their number 2 individual donor in 2022) so I doubt he could buy one. Not that he seemed particularly left leaning himself and he also donated to Republicans but 5.2 million publicly to Biden seems like a dealbreaker.
I don't think it's odd for a middleman to have some functions in a market (as long as they aren't actually producing anything) but also the definition of a middleman is unimportant to me. I am just highlighting how he glides over a lot in this article (some of which are actually common progressive critiques of the insurance system) and I don't come away from it sympathetic to medical insurance companies at all.
When arguing that health insurance isn't that inneficient he talks about "But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.". 22.6% for a middleman is not insignificant! Also providers have to spend a lot dealing with insurance so it's certainly an undercount of their total cost. This makes the burden of insurance seem like a huge % of the total medical costs in the US, which seems like the opposite of what he's trying to argue.
Overall, there are lots of nitpicks with this article but my personal takeaway is: if this is the best defense people can make for the US medical insurance system then that shows how bad it really is.
At that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now.
I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).
My statistics isn't great but reading the study more it looks like they control the rate of false positives via the q values so my initial concern may be unwarranted. I'm surprised that it keeps so many barely significant results with so many hypotheses. I'll have to look it up when I get time.
For point 2: I don't think there's really good or bad places to study it, it might not generalize to sunnier places but the reverse is also true. Presumably the scientists working on this can understand these things (I know in my field I'm aware that studies in the tropics will find different things than studies in Canada).
For my own point: in this study they have like 22 test values but still use the 95% confidence interval. Even on random data there will be a significant result like a third of the time so I think it's easy to interpret these result as more definitive than they are. Not that it's a bad study though (no study will be everything, baby steps like this are important in science).
Through the magic of Googling "Persian Gulf salinity" it seems like it's more that it's a shallow Gulf in a dry area so it has significant evaporation. Desalination does effect it but it's only a few percent of the total evaporation (which is still surprisingly big) and doesn't sound like the main driving factor or an imminent ecological concern.
So firstly there's been a lot of progress. I know people that grew up vegetarian in the 80s and there are so many more animal and environmentally friendly alternatives and people care more now than ever before.
Secondly, these things will change. If you look at the history of activism often there are people advocating against things hundreds of years before we see large changes (there is activism against forced labor in the Americas in the early 1500s even). So I've found it useful to accept the idea that we'll pass down this fight to the next generation and they'll probably pass it down to the one after that. It could be three decades or it could be three centuries but eventually things will change.
My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).
My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.
Human land use is incredibly inefficient. As a simple example, in the US the vast majority of corn production is ethanol or animal feed (which is incredibly inneficient on a calorie basis). Then when you take into account low density residential and their endless lawns (turf grass has by far the most acres of any crop in the US) and a million other poor uses of land and there's a lot we can do, even at 8 billion people, without destroying every forest.
The issue isn't that the problem isn't solvable, there are tons of things that have huge environmental benefits. The problem is that these generally require some sacrifice (e.g. denser housing with much smaller lawns, eating more resource efficient foods like lentils, moving away from fossil fuels) but there's not sufficient collective will for actually doing these things.
Basic science is often cheap, I don't know where you're getting it's generally expensive. I've yet to meet someone whose equipment costs as much as any of the stuff my friends design for defense contractors. Even the head of the lab I'm in is making less than my friends are making as engineers and the lab equipment is pretty cheap compared to the stuff my friends are designing (we have a radar that cost maybe a couple hundred thousand but that's the majority of the equipment cost for the past decade).
Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).
What really puts all of this into perspective for me is I work in academia and one of my friends works for a defense contractor. He told me the maintenance cost per flight hour of F-35 was a bit more than $40k, which is significantly more than I make in a year as a grad student. It's crazy basic science is what's been the focus of so many cuts while it's so cheap.
For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.
Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.
I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).