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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • You are very close. Government owned does mean its owned by the people who control the government. 100%. But who controls the government? In the west, government is largely controlled by the wealthy (industry lobbying is an easy example). So then how do we have a government that is controlled by the masses?

    This is where the type of government called a socialist government comes in. Communism, on the other hand, is some distant future where humanity no longer has to worry about scarcity, and all ideas of money and state are gone.

    So a communist party is named thusly to say “we wish to work towards that goal, but recognize that there are steps required to get there”. For example: increasing the democratic control of a country, both politically and economically, while decreasing the influence of capitalists, whose interests are in contradiction to the interests of those who work for a living (or need to sell their labour to make a living, since labour is the only commodity most of us control).





  • I started reading and was like “okay, sure buddy” then I remembered I have developed a lot of the same skills, including tracking wildlife.

    And then I remembered the time I learned to identify clay deposits and to separate out the clay so I could build stuff with it.

    So I thought: “wth, this is so weird! Ohh, they have ADHD too… That explains a lot”.

    I wasn’t diagnosed at the time, when I was learning to find clay, but that should have been a sign lol


  • No one said zero publishable results. Besides, to get to the stage of a publishing scientist (I mean a primary investigator) you have gone through a Bsc, Msc (maybe published, but definitely a thesis), phD (usually 1+ publications), post docs (at least 1 which may last between 6months and 5 years, and would be expected to publish), a probation period at a University/Research Institute or other organization (where you would be expected to publish).

    So if you make it through that entire process and are incapable of publishing, the entire system failed you.


  • That is the argument, but when those with more publications get more funding than those with better publications, the drive is to produce more.

    Don’t get me wrong, there are still good publications out there, but the incentives and pressures move the needle to the quantity side. How do you measure goodness? I dont know. But what we are doing now isn’t working, which is evidenced by, well how everything is going at the moment.

    Of course we could moralize it and say something like “ohh well scientists are just greedier and lazier than they used to be” but that is thought terminating and no solution can be found that way.



  • As someone within that community: it demonstrates the “publish or perish” mindset. Without enough publications it becomes impossible to get funding to do your research. Thus, the incentives are there for producing more publications and not better research.

    Unsurprisingly, encouraging greater throughput results in greater throughput. And without proper support quality suffers. For example, a large portion of research is done by underpaid graduate students.


  • Its that using an extra step in the process (producing energy + CO2, then using energy to remove CO2) is going to increase entropy more than not producing CO2 in the first place.

    Economic viability is separate and sometimes related to things like this.

    Its irrelevant to the economy (in the short term at least) whether a process is efficient in terms of energy or resources. What is relevant is whether or not something can be done for either small sums of money, or sold for profits. More likely both in a capitalist style economy.

    Note that it does happen in some cases that using less energy/resources is more profitable, but the driving force, again in a capitalist style economy, is the profit.