291–300 of 349 posts
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Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.
In Science, global standards matter. Such as Metric and Celsius.
Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand embarrassment.
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Celsius is useful if you're a beaker of water. Fahrenheit is useful if you're a human.
Humans cannot reliably determine the difference in one degree c, even though it's bigger... Fahrenheit is too fine grained, and has no interesting points relative to the things I interact with. I freeze an boil water often, however
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There were a bunch of headlines last week about DOGE firing half of NOAA then rehiring them. I don’t think you should consider anywhere sacrosanct.
To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.
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Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work. This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?
> Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work. Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.
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And potentially organized human life collapses
Is that possible? Can you describe the chain of events that would lead to that? Seems vanishingly unlikely to me, on the face of it, but I admit I am not read up on all the possible doomsday scenarios.
Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.
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It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I disagree with) has been brought on by Republican governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is the easiest way to pay down the debt. Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out. Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pre…
Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response. Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to the monstrous military industrial complex. I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the…
But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.
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"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory…
Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen: "Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California…
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
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sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview. In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
Indeed. In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading. https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/
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"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory…
Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen: "Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California…
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.