Analysts read the decision as the US government sending a stern warning to counter the calls for independent nuclear armament that have recently been surfacing in South Korea.

Here’s the real reason.

True, but I feel like abuse would be fairly obvious and grant panels would know if someone is gaming the system. The panels, at least in my former field, are composed mostly of people who know who’s doing what in their field. If they saw a high citation count they would know if that was legitimate. If anything, faking citations would be shameful and embarrassing for most people.

Your peers would know and they’d think you’re pathetic. There’d be nothing to gain.

And Wuhan actually has a lab that was studying the COVID virus.

Ya got a source for that one?

I think so. Journals are only in use today because that’s how scientific reporting was done before the internet. They’re still around because institutions and academics need some way of keeping score. What’s the point of it all if you can’t say you’re better than someone else?

Journals could be replaced with something like Wikipedia, but more sophisticated and editing would be a highly controlled process that requires reproducible data and peer review.

Score could be kept with citations. You’d be required to list the work you built on, as we do today, and the authors would receive credit. No citation would be worth more than another. If you published something useful for a particular field or made a major discovery that opened a new field, then your citation count would reflect it.

Perhaps competing labs could both receive citation credit if their results essentially showed the same thing. If nobody could scoop anyone else’s work, then cooperation may be encouraged over competition.

The entire wiki would be a public good, funded by governments across the world, free for all to read and for those with the relevant credentials to publicly comment on.

Negative results could also be published. “We had this hypothesis, we tried this, it didn’t work out.” It’d probably save time and these works could be cited as well. Imagine making a very important mistake that saves everyone time and effort and being rewarded for it.

I also feel like there is opportunity here to expand a particular field’s community. Since the wiki would be more free and open, academic silos may have more metaphorical doors, allowing more cross-field dialog.

I could go on, but I think the tools we need already exist, but we’re not using them because… tradition. It would be easier, more efficient, and flexible to use some kind of wiki structure than what’s currently happening.

Edit: I thought of one more thing. Searching for information could be so easy. Instead of finding a dozen papers (some slightly off topic, some of questionable quality, some poorly written, some your institution isn’t subscribed to, etc) and review articles, all of the information could be easily compiled into review wikis. The level of detail could be easily changed depending on what you want and it would all be right there.

But there are enough. If there aren’t, then stores can put limits on how many you can buy.

Implement fucking price controls before you beg for European eggs ffs

The river was the best option?

What a dumb story, there’s nothing of interest on the calendar.

In January, Sennott attended a 15-minute meeting on DOGE recruiting. Less than two weeks later, he attended a meeting instructing “special government employees” (Musk’s official designation) about the federal ethics rules that applied to them.

That’s it.

Toasted white bread

Any good places where one could stream this?

but they have a different goal: they want drivers to feel like they’re making progress instead of actually improving things.

Sorry but I want a source for that claim.

Okay, how then would you generalize this trait? We would expect an intelligent species to be social to some degree? It’s hard to imagine how a species could evolve the capacity to achieve technological advances without cooperation between individuals.

A beak falls under “some kind of appendage”

Yeah… no, I don’t think that can evolve naturally

I understand the sentiment, but there must be some number of common attributes all advanced intelligent species across the universe have. Tool use, for example, would require that the organism have some kind of appendage that can manipulate things.

Why does it often seem like only China is using modern tech to make real quality of life improvements? It’s the opposite of the US. Seems like that same modern tech is making everything a bit worse day after day.

I never said Ukraine would collapse, but they’re not winning for the reasons I already mentioned

First, Rubio is parroting a wildly accepted fact. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/16/7455980/

They’ve run out of youthful soliders and are drafting older men now.

Second, I’d imagine the pace of losses would accelerate once Ukraine started drafting the elderly and children, but it won’t come to that. Also a lot of Ukrainians have already left to dodge the draft.

Lastly, why are we even piddling about troop numbers? They seem insignificant given the larger problems Ukraine is facing. Let’s circle back to my original points.

The main, possibly only, glimmer of hope in the article was “assets in and outside Russia had strong evidence that Russian arms production during 2025 has flatlined and is likely to contract, because of parts and labor shortages,” and Russia is drafting 100,000 fewer men than last year. That seems well short of “starting to win,” unfortunately. Ukraine also appears to be losing 1/3 of their military support if what Zelensky said in the article is true.

Russia is fighting a war of choice but is continuing on with callous disregard for it’s own troops. Their arms production is slowing down but so are their drafting efforts. North Korea is providing artillary shells and rockets. Ukraine is losing 1/3 of its military support and its army is aging. Unless they figure out how to fight in a new way that restores their ability to maneuver, then all they can hope for is a negotiated settlement.

Here I have a source too, one that’s a bit more specific: https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-army-war-attrition/

Relevant quote:

"The problem that Ukraine is facing is not that they are running out of money, [it] is that they are running out of Ukrainians,” U.S. `Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during his confirmation hearing.

My opinion: They’re not going to win. Also it’s disingenuous to say they’ve been holding back a Russian invasion for 11 years.