onetimeusename

그저께discuss

It wasn't really a trade union. It's purpose was to stop the re-emergence of something like the Nazis and to prevent wars. I don't think it's instincts were ever really democratic.

onetimeusename

3일 전discuss

"liberals vote so much more by mail-in"

They do. See page 4. (https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-...)

onetimeusename

6일 전discuss

Something I don't understand about this argument, which has been made before, is you can tie JavaScript to a specific hash with SRI. So you release the cryptographic code in public where it can be audited and then what runs in the browser verifies that was what loaded.

The host could inject malicious JavaScript from the host or change libraries but I feel like this is an avoidable problem because it can be audited much more easily than expecting users to audit JavaScript every time. People could even build known, trusted, web frontends. So I think there are mitigations if not ways to assure the browser is running trusted code.

onetimeusename

8일 전discuss

I wasn't referring to the Florida lawsuit and don't know anything about it. I was referring to the Alabama lawsuit which was dismissed without prejudice[1] because it was premature. The relevant constitutional issue is the redistricting balance since it has to follow the "one person, one vote" principle.

[1]: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...

onetimeusename

9일 전discuss

That's not what I said or implied it is. I said there has been criticism of using differential privacy and linked to it. I also mentioned the reconstruction attacks on coarsening. Those two things can be true at the same time.

onetimeusename

9일 전discuss

There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.

The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...

[2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283

onetimeusename

9일 전discuss

Yep look at what they wrote

     It must be that the Gypsy element is to be added to our political 
     agitation, so that hereafter the Negro alone shall not claim our entire 
     attention.

As I said, the 14th Amendment Clause 1 was primarily centered around whether enslaved people and their children were citizens and it seems the question of whether literally anyone born here was not taken very seriously. This question actually came up in a later case a few decades later and the court affirmed it. But I don't think there is any evidence the people who wrote this ever expected large numbers of "anchor babies". They literally dismissed that scenario as a way to prevent formerly enslaved people from being citizens.

So then it just depends how you want to interpret the meaning of this law under the present. The UK, with common law tradition, abolished birthright citizenship decades ago to combat exactly the problems we are having with it now. So what was intended by jus soli birthright citizenship in 1866 could be viewed differently now.

onetimeusename

9일 전discuss

Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...

onetimeusename

10일 전discuss

That's what the justices said. That has generally been how modern courts interpret it, with a textualist interpretation. But that was not the original intention of the law which I already stated. So to go back to my original point, it's not an obvious conclusion.

onetimeusename

10일 전discuss

I don't think it's obvious. Like why do you think the dissenters are wrong to question what is meant about being "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? The intention was to prevent former slaves from being deprived of citizenship so what is an argument to say this obviously includes someone who arrives for birth tourism? Why doesn't this include children of diplomats, as one example, if it's such an all encompassing law?

onetimeusename

10일 전discuss

There's a difference between textualist and originalist. There isn't a dichotomy between textualist and living-constitutionalist frameworks only but the two former may overlap. Also the same reasoning you are using applies to people who are living-constitutionalists and suddenly become textualists.

https://pacificlegal.org/originalism-vs-textualism-vs-living...

onetimeusename

16일 전discuss

I don't think they are serious about privacy and even if they were I don't even want to distinguish between "children" and "adults" on the internet. Things seem to have worked fine up to this point, there doesn't appear to be a public demand for age verification, rather some murky corporations/NGOs/agencies pushing for this. I think it's pretty clear there is some other intention besides protecting children that is the goal here.

onetimeusename

18일 전discuss

I don't know. I won't even comment on this because I have no insight besides personal observation.

onetimeusename

19일 전discuss

I have suspected the influence is real. For a reference point, the majority of students at top tier US universities are Asian at this point, broadly. Not every top tier university but there's a trend to have about 30-40% Asian American students and then roughly 1/3 international which is heavily weighted toward China and India. This constitutes the largest group usually. So it's quite likely that universities adapt to this and hiring practices begin to reflect an intense interest in exam taking and credentials.

The thing about it is I view it similarly to how in the past "well-roundedness" and "leadership" was part of hiring and admissions. We laugh at that now but my understanding is the SAT score can be improved with long term studying. So intensive SAT studying seems like a new thing that isn't evenly practiced among people in the US. So at worst SAT score usage seems like a way for an elite group to preserve and replicate itself. I have no SAT score so I feel somewhat outside of this debate and have no experience with it.

onetimeusename

19일 전discuss

Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.

onetimeusename

24일 전discuss

Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.

At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.

onetimeusename

24일 전discuss

Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.

onetimeusename

24일 전discuss

I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.

onetimeusename

24일 전discuss

They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?

The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...

onetimeusename

24일 전discuss

I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.

I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.

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