Nobody has controlled the Senate since ‘09. The veneer of bipartisanship created by the filibuster meant that Congress has done nothing since ‘09 (outside of a few stimulus bills and the Green New Deal which was probably a good bill in the long run hampered by bureaucracy). It turns out that’s great for the party that wants to do nothing, and really bad for the party that wants to do something.

You could say that Dems should’ve killed the filibuster. But there was no appetite for it until Trump 2 because things weren’t going great but they weren’t going belly up

I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.

There is some kernel of value to seeking out information from diverse sources. But groups like Ground News pervert that to mean that the left and right are on equally good terms with fact and reality (nevermind that collapsing politics and news media down to left and right is balderdash)

But in terms of the letter of the law unfortunately he couldn’t be held accountable for much of it because it was legal! The US legal system has largely agreed that the president, especially with a bloodthirsty Congress behind him, can torture, kill and maim as much as he pleases so long as it’s outside the border.

The most corrupt things Biden has done were: 1. Hide the extent of health issues. Par for the course in politics at this point for some reason. This is broadly just downstream of him believing he could continue before a precipitous health decline as election season began 2. Pardon his son who was teed up by the Republican world to be target number 1 for low level drug and tax charges.

Trump on the other hand has made literally billions of dollars since starting his presidency, not to mention the fortunes of his family and various associates. 100x is not even just a few orders of magnitude off.

But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.

It’s true that MIT and a few other organizations have more influence than others simply because they employ more developers with time/scope to work on the language. Just like every programming language.

But this becomes less true all the time. And most of the direction that is “paid for” is an unadulterated good: JuliaC ahead of time compilation has been requested for over a decade and has made enormous progress.

There are some real issues in the ecosystem. Specifically there is a high proportion of “gradware” because much like other scientific languages there is a high proportion of graduate students doing their projects and then moving on.

The language also encourages relying on packages which can break. But juliaup makes this easy enough to solve by downgrading.

Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.

The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?

There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.

That’s a really fantastic capability, but not super surprising.

These processes are intentionally labyrinthine

> Tech Labs will provide entrepreneurial teams of proven scientists the freedom and flexibility to pursue breakthrough science at breakneck speed, without needing to frequently stop and apply for additional grant funding with each new idea or development.

This sounds great, but has a few issues. #1 only funding proven scientists risks destroying the training pipeline which is the crucial edge that the US has over any other country in the world. It's also something that can and should be applied to universities as well. Lab groups or centers should be given much more runway than they are now.

> coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to achieve success

There are two places where this can really happen today: universities and national labs. The NSF should be fostering more cross-disciplinary and product engineering research across different departments at universities which already have deep talent pools across the board.

> The Tech Labs initiative will support full-time teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers

This sounds great, more university labs should have full-time researchers attached. Research Software Engineers are one somewhat common example in the computational sciences.

In general I support the overall mission statement but I am extremely wary of this kind of rhetoric from this government. They have failed to walk the walk on the sciences in any domain. This seems like a Trojan horse to transfer more money from the research apparatus into industry.