Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works.

A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'

One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is very unusual that he managed to be both a psychiatrist and a prolific blogger and he quit the psychiatry job before he had children or other care responsibilities.

I have a "frequent post" section of my blog and a "deeper" section. Unless you're interested in the frequent posts they aren't in your face on my blog. It's kind of a best of both worlds type thing.

The frequent posts also let me quickly try out new methods of telling stories or presenting information or new techniques. I think this tends to speed up how often I post larger effort things cuz I can practice skills with frequent posts.

A good comparison would be a youtuber with a patreon. The youtube gets the produced media, whereas the patreon gets "cell phone in the moment" updates.

but i totally agree that when folks are finding things to post about that can be problematic and annoying.

> frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing

it might be true, but there are exceptions, like acoup (history-focused), which is written by ancient history professor.

In any serious engineering operation, a failure like this is time to shut down everything and redesign until the same failure cannot happen. We all read Feynman's essay on Challenger right? But these companies want credit when their products work as advertised, but push the blame on users when they emit plausible lies or demonic advice. Taken too far that leads the police walking into HQ, arresting the board of directors, and selling the company for scrap. Just as often that leads to strict regulation so you can't be a cowboy coder or turn any loft into a sweatshop any more.

No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?

Are most US grad students not getting health insurance? I would find that surprising.

Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).

This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.

I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!

None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.

AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.

They correctly point out that useless parasites like the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that I also mentioned to you, are a quite big part of your drug price problem. Yet you seem to refuse to acknowledge it

The system is packed with opaque middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, many of which are making big rents

If you really believe that Congressmen in the US thought they were subsidizing foreign nations while their own citizens suffer out of their goodness of their hearts, and not because some Lobbyists donated huge sums to their campaigns and "convinced" them in some meetings, Boy I do have a Bridge to sell you.

American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation

Especially the Republican ones, which have blocked and still trying to block all efforts to bring drug prices down by negotiation.

They are known for being very caring people. Especially for the poor and disadvantaged

The lobbyists probably said something like "it is good for drug companies to make profits so they can innovate new drugs for global benefit".

Same way the defense companies probably said something like "it is good to deter Russia so that Europe can remain free and democratic".

Hilarious, isn't it?

Anyways shouldn't you get back to work so you can afford all the new weapons you're going to have to buy?

"American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation." Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it. Now we're done.

* Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it*

You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll.

I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran (pre-Mullahs) and other countries that were gifted with democracy were also other selfless endeavours by the Americans.

"You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll."

Europeans always imply that NATO is some sort of vast American conspiracy. But they are hardly ever able to give compelling examples of American benefit. The US benefit from NATO always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I suppose if we were more educated on European geography trivia, like you guys, that might help us understand why the US needs NATO so badly.

"Vietnam"

Yes, that was seen as analogous to another very recent war in Korea. If it wasn't for us, the state known as "North Korea" would cover the entire peninsula.

"Iraq"

One of the worst dictators in history, that Saddam Hussein. Europeans laughed at us for our opposition to him. It's why we now have little interest in opposing Putin, who is a herbivore by comparison.

"Afghanistan"

Depending on who you ask, we are either imperialists for displacing the Taliban, or complicit for allowing them to displace us right back. Typical double-bind.

"Iran"

You mean the country which is at this very moment crying out for American intervention, asking the Americans to protect protesters? It's fascinating to me how certain Europeans can simultaneously beg the US for protection, and also assume that the US must be up to no good in other countries where the US gets begged for protection.

Hopefully you can see why I support Massie's bill to withdraw the US from NATO at this point. I'm tired of it all. I want a Swiss foreign policy for the US. Do you also support Massie's bill? Maybe that's something we can agree on.

It seems that you have great difficulties with reading comprehension. I was mentioning Iran (Pre-Mullahs) where the UK and US overthrew a democratically elected president because of Oil. Leading to the current theocratic and oppressive government.

Also your reasons to invade Iraq were made up Lies about Weapons of Mass destruction, and the US propped up the Taliban against the Soviets in the first place.

Both were quite liberal states compared to today, after they were blessed with US intervention

Classic double bind. If we support the Taliban, we are evil for "propping it up". If we oppose it, we are evil for "destabilizing it". The implication is that everything would magically be fine and dandy if it weren't for the US. Of course, your critique does not engage much with the actual reasoning or decision-making process of the US in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter). But caricaturing the US as an evil empire was the point, after all.

I think your narratives are oversimplified or inaccurate, but ultimately it doesn't matter.

The important point is: Since US intervention is so bad, according to you, can you understand why I want to withdraw from NATO? Can we at least agree on that? Don't you want to save your continent from the evil US intervention such as all the billions we've sent as support to Ukraine?

If you wouldn't have propped them up in the first place against the Soviets you wouldn't need to fight them afterwards...

Why do you think we propped them up against the Soviets? Oh yeah, it was an effort to bring down the Soviet Union so Germany could be reunified, hermanzegerman. Arguably, a rather successful effort. And a huge mistake in retrospect. Germany should've stayed divided. Berlin Wall should've stayed in place. Not our problem. We unified Germany and got 9/11 as thanks.

See why I want out of NATO? The Swiss stay perfectly neutral, they never had a 9/11, everyone loves them. No one blames them for the situation in Ukraine (they contribute little) or anything else. That's what the US was like pre-WW1 with regard to Europe. I want to go back.

> Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it.

Have you thanked the French for getting involved in US wars?

And when you say "we", does that include yourself?

No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710

My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.

A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

Its worse than that. Someone wants to set him up with a lab in Austin TX. Its the CCP which thinks "maybe we should not let the mad scientist out where someone will let him continue his experiments." (A later story says that he will direct assistants in Texas over the Internet). https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3271952/chin...