Do you think if you mass drop all the important physics paper and maths paper on nuclear physics in syria - then somehow ISIS will be able to create a nuclear weapon ?
It takes an intellectually advanced society to understand another intellectually advanced nation.
If science produced in the US was actually superior, demand for US scientists would sky-rocket globally.
US education would have higher value.
And other countries will try to match the US in science funding.
> Do you think if you mass drop all the important physics paper and maths paper on nuclear physics in syria - then somehow ISIS will be able to create a nuclear weapon ?
I don't know about this particular example, but I do know that some scientific works are kept secret because they do have obvious military applications. I have only one example I'm sure of, the Orion project, but I'd be surprised if there are not lots of others.
Yes, this is a great achievement. But there are precedents - the Singapore PM is a Senior Wrangler [1], a former Indian president was a rocket scientist [2] - oh, and some nasty fellow in the middle east was an ophthalmologist in London [3], lest we forget.
I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.
> I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.
I don't. Many Asian nations (including Singapore, China, etc.) are largely governed by engineering majors and I do believe this has been helpful for improving administrative effectiveness. This stands in stark contrast to countries where governance is dominated by either lawyers (the US) or military members (many other developing nations).
I don't think any meaningful correlation can be drawn from what a head-of-state or high ranking politician studied in college or where they went to college to their aptitude/competence for governance.
Our last two presidents have professional degrees from the same institution (Harvard) and they do not govern in the same fashion in most areas other than counter-terrorism. China also doesn't choose it's politicians via elections, thus someone who is highly technical and let me stereotype here for a second... most likely not charismatic and/or having developed a sense of political empathy... facets that a lawyer or career manager (MBA) are more likely to develop, would be able to move up in the ranks (in the CCP in this case).
However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern, comparing China vs U.S. is apples and oranges because you can't legitimately protest the CCP, this isn't the case of the major parties in the U.S. Thus the policies will be molded to some extent of popular opinion, which is normally not true in a dictatorship.
First of all, in the world scheme President Obama and President Bush are quite close together in their governing strategies and policies. That's the nature of the kind of politician we elect in the United States.
However, it extends far beyond the head of state. All levels of government in Chinese government are dominated by engineers instead of lawyers or career politicians.
> However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern
Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy. There are dramatic differences and if you don't think that then I'm curious why you delved into perpetrating negative stereotypes about engineers.
I don't agree that Bush and Obama share governing strategies. For example GWB was very comfortable out-sourcing large problems to his lieutenants, whereas Obama seems to do it only if he feels it'd result in a better outcome if he wasn't personally involved. Items such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the VP/Rumsfeld, Mortgage crisis to Paulson/Bernanke, etc... Contrast this to Obama where he held multiple cabinet meetings with regard troop levels in Afghanistan early in his presidency. On foreign policy they also differ where GWB seemed to be very decisive (or overly depending on who you ask). Whereas Obama to this day exercises extreme caution, at least publicly. I could cite a lot of examples, but of course this is more the realm of opinion.
On my somewhat poorly worded point about engineers on average being less interpersonal than a typical lawyer/mba. I don't view such attributes negatively; my intention was to point out that engineers' day-to-day jobs don't normally involve work oriented social interaction with people they don't know(i.e. someone other than their team). Putting it another way a lawyer/manager without strong interpersonal skills has a lower career ceiling than an engineer with personality trait. Thus it isn't unreasonable to assume said fields attract different types of people. Thus governance being a partial function of what subject someone opted for in school would in my opinion act as a very small variable in contrast to why X person choose said subject.
> Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy.
It's an apples to oranges comparison if it's China(or Singapore) vs. the U.S. The governments of the former don't have anything close to real representation for it's people(More China than Singapore), thus the policy makers don't have to seriously consider popular opinion outside of keeping the populace from revolting, which is a far cry from the American system where an individual politician can be unseated within a short time frame.
Law and politics warp your view of the world because everything becomes a subjective, debatable matter of opinion.
Politics is especially dangerous because the definition of a successful argument is one that increases your power. Facts are tangential at best, distracting and unwelcome at worst.
The corresponding problem for people with STEM backgrounds is a lack of understanding that this is how politics works. If your approach is based on facts, model-building, and reality testing, it's incredibly easy to be blindsided by a career politician - or career manager - who only cares about public opinion, and is perfectly prepared to lie professionally if they make more money and/or gain more power from it.
I agree with the conclusion of the last paragraph. My problem with STEM majors is that the softer virtues, like humanity, mercy and a certain large-heartedness which are needed to govern a large group are missing. ("Govern a large country like you fry small fish" - Lao Tzu, meaning govern with minimal interference)
I have found this disturbing view among many of the bay-area programmer friends I have - that life is a cut-and-dry game in which the losers in life deserve nothing - which I do not agree with. The animosity that the programmers face as a community in SFO may be down precisely to their view of others.
I don't think you should stereotype to all STEM majors (internationally) based on a small collection of your programmer friends.
Plenty of STEM majors appreciate soft virtues and are large-hearted. In fact, I'd argue that lawyers are far more likely to see the evil in everyone (it's practically their job_ and to be oppose to mercy.
Of course in those asian nations you describe there is also a stronger tendency to view society as something to be "engineered". Herbert Hoover was the US's most prominent Engineer-president, and although history has been revised to make him seem like a laissez-faire president, he was (especially compared to his predecessor Coolidge) an economically interventionist president. The Hoover presidency did not turn out so well.
> Of course in those asian nations you describe there is also a stronger tendency to view society as something to be "engineered".
Indeed.
It's important to keep in mind that a technocratic leader will likely not do well or have effective results in a political system dominated by lawyers (as Hoover shows).
There is a growing theory that the majority of working middle class retirees will reverse mortgage their homes in retirement in order to supplement their cost of living (and pay inflated nursing home, health care, and end of life costs), leaving their kids with much less than expected inheritance. This would also exacerbate the inequality gap as wealthier families would have no need to go into debt and would rather continue to accumulate assets. Watch for Wall Street and associated marketing channels to put out financial products that make it ''stupid simple'' to qualify for and execute on a reverse mortgage as the start of this trend.
They will also live 10+ more years than projected government estimates, further exhausting Social Security and other benefit programs. It's been well acknowledged in the financial planning world that many will run out of their nest egg halfway through retirement, and die in debt.
Tapping in to a homes equity requires a loan, and yes, those loans will be transferred to their children.
EDIT: Yes I meant the loans stay with the estate which services the debtors. The house that is typically handed down to the next generation is now sold to make whole the debt.
Pennsylvania for example does have filial responsibility laws where under very specific circumstances debt incurred by the parents can be transferred to the children. One example is nursing home/end of life care, regardless of whether or not the child had any role in it.
Source: I live in PA. My elderly parents live in PA.
This really doesn't have anything to do with inheritance, especially so since his mother wasn't (and presumably still isn't) deceased. It has to do with some states having laws requiring parents/children, who have the means to do so, to support their child/parent who is poor or otherwise incapable of supporting themselves.
In this court case, the child was found to be financially capable and also legally liable for supporting his mother. Because of this, he was found responsible for paying off the debt, but only as he was capable of doing so.
If the son in this case only made the national median income, had a large family to support, and didn't have any wiggle room in his budget, he very likely would not have been found liable for this debt.
Unless the contracts are dumb, the house will be the security for the loan, so it 'transfers to the kids' in the sense that they don't get the house, but it would be really stupid to allow reverse mortgages or home equity loans to be attached to anything other than the house.
What other asset do most middle-class retirees have? Social security and pensions aren't inheritable, and much of what liquid assets they have will go to medical care.
I dunno, I just felt like the phrasing was unclear.
That the parents are in a situation where they decide to sell their house to support their lifestyle is perhaps worth examining, but that's the problem, not that the contract they enter into has to be settled.
My first degree was in "Theoretical Math". I took classes in subjects like Number Theory, Topology, Analysis, Non-commutative Ring Theory. The subjects were about Math not how to do Math to solve other problems. We studied proofs not applying math to solve word problems.
As an example, I wasn't very good at solving differential equations, a very important part of math used to solve many real-life problems. Instead I studied things like the Lebesgue Integration which extends the notion of integration to a larger set of functions for which the more familiar Riemann integral wouldn't be defined. That was taught in my second semester real analysis course that had these prerequisites: Real Analysis I, Complex Analysis I, Differential Equations, Calc I and Calc II. A lot of work to get to an interesting subject, but a subject of interest to Mathematicians not engineers using math.
An undergraduate degree in Applied math, in contrast to theoretical math, would probably have involved learning more about, say, differential equations.
Usually this is called pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics.
On the other hand, applied mathematics might also involve some pretty technical "theoretical maths", which though being applied, can be studied for its own interest without the application.
So in some sense, "applied maths" sometimes means maths that is applied, rather than maths that can be applied. For that reason it perhaps makes sense to instead use the term "theoretical maths", though I am not sure if that is standard terminology or not.
In math, this means that we've established that he exists, but we haven't found him yet. Last I checked, they established a lower bound on his street address of 6325.
I think you were misinformed about the purpose of Make. It should not be used as a programming language. You can write a short makefile by hand, reasonably, which compiles a few source files, but anything larger should probably be automatically generated by CMake or your own scripts or whatever.
Abstractions are perfectly possible, you just do it in your own script (Python or whatever) and this way you don't have to learn a new language. Ninja is a better alternative to Make, and it is even less expressive (which is one of the reasons why it is better, IMO).
Or in other words, we build abstractions in Make by composing it with other tools, rather than creating a huge monolithic Makefile syntax which can do anything you want.
After loathing make for decades and doing my best never to waste any time thinking about it, I spent a week digging in hard and learning it in detail, as though it were a programming language I actually wanted to use. It turned out to be just as terrible as I always thought it was, and I really don't want to use it - but I learned how to make it do the straightforward thing I have always wanted it to do, which I have often fumed and sputtered and groused at it for not doing, and I wrapped that knowledge up in a set of recipes which I now copy into every project I work on. This lets me take advantage of make's ubiquity without having to remember and worry about all of its odd awful corners.
Nice summary! It is indeed often missed but rathar important point that make syntax is generator-friendly. It allows to easily script make files or even glue them together from several generators.
This ability to write and compose is a rare feature today. Json is pretty opposite to it and even Yaml is rather bad at it as to compose pieces one have to parse them first.
The problem with generated Makefiles is that you start to debug the generation step, if possible, if you want to tweak things, whereas a Makefile written by a human is usually easy to edit. Alternatively the generated Makefile could use overrides from an optional .mk file to be sourced, but that's not what I've seen with automake or cmake.
CMake can't generate anything, it only generates a few different types of files. Make is the most well-tested output, and there is only one alternative generator for CMake for the Linux command line anyway (Ninja, which is even less expressive than Make).
It's like saying that "Why use assembly at all? GCC could generate anything." Well, yes. But you're on an x86 machine and there's an assembler right there for GCC to use, and GCC has been using that assembler for decades.
Make is really fast, and it's good at doing parallel builds (you just have to specify -j). You could try making something better in Python, but it would take a long time to write and Make is already here. You apparently had the opposite experience from me. I hate NPM build systems like Grunt and Gulp because they're hard to debug. Make is easy—keep the files around and tweak the command line until it works.
I will, sometime in the next week, hold me to it. I've actually got something working. So far I've got a hardcoded list of rules and styles and it works, even if the page content changes dynamically. I have to make all changes in code and manually reload the extension every time but it's not bad since I don't need to change things often.
Already happening at the top end. The smart money is talking about moving elsewhere, especially after the recent tax changes.
The top end - flats worth a million and up - has a long way to fall, because there's a glut of new build coming onto the market.
The mid and lower ends have a lot more latent demand, but the end of cheap buy-to-let will force at least some landlords to sell up.
Prices would usually level off, but if sterling keeps drifting lower foreign money will dump a lot of its speculative holdings. That could crash prices by big numbers, and also drop rents because many speculative buys are currently left empty.
Many people have totally lost faith in establishment politicians... our system is constantly exploited by business and even "good" politicians have shady support (through lobbying/superpacs/etc). If a mainstream politician is implicated in this mess, it gives the public concrete evidence to improve the status quo.
It's like the Snowden leaks. Many knew about the NSA conspiracies years before his information came out. For all those years the public was blind to their rights slowly slipping away as precedents were set, while those that knew were ignored as paranoid nutters. Now we can see the light.
edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about any specific politician here.
Some people don't care what it takes to get their guy to win. If she has corrupt dealings, I hope they are exposed, but I don't hope she has corrupt dealings (though many would already say she does).
It takes an intellectually advanced society to understand another intellectually advanced nation.
If science produced in the US was actually superior, demand for US scientists would sky-rocket globally.
US education would have higher value.
And other countries will try to match the US in science funding.