This is the million dollar question. If you want a long-term career in academic research, you pretty much have to strive towards running your own lab; you can’t string together 2-3 year contracts, scattered all over the globe, for your entire life. Even if you were willing to, there are all sorts of stupid institutional barriers to doing this. In particular, there’s a ridiculous bias towards funding recent PhDs and funding is very hard to find after ~4 years.
I would wager that one experienced researcher at $70k easily trumps 2-3 Masters students at $25k each. However, there are lots of mechanisms for funding studentships, but few for paying for experienced employees. The NCI had experimented with something like this, but there were maybe 100 positions total. This is a shame for many different reasons but seems depressingly unlikely to change any time soon.
if that were the definition of racism today, 99% of the articles written about it in the past 10 years is false. Racism today is defined by actions, not beliefs.
While the goal is laudable, this is surely racist and sexist. The language-control group wants to avoid the label, because then those weaponized words will lose their impact. It remains racist and sexist for a good purpose.
Why would anyone do that? They're trading partners. They provide lots of seafood at good prices, cheap biofuel, some light industrial work, and they're attractive tourist destinations.
Nobody's raided the Cayman Islands yet. I don't know whether seasteads would end up being offshore financial centers, but plenty of island nations are providing all sorts of financial services to criminal organizations without significant consequences.
The U.S. Government forced the Cayman Islands to expose people using the Island Nation as a tax haven, thus negating the benefits of the islands and large parts of the clientele have gone elsewhere. Since these are only expected to be a half mile offshore they are going to end up being subject to whatever nation-state they are offshore of. Were they to try this in the deep ocean I suspect rogue waves would be an issue. Either way this isn't likely to succeed politically, although I see no reason why technologically it wouldn't. It's more likely going to end up being a playground for the ultra wealthy to sometimes visit and say they have property on.
It could end up being a wealthy playground, but the people doing this stuff would consider it an utter failure if that's all they accomplish. What they really want to do is sequester billions of tons of carbon, provide billions of tons of food, and provide an economic opportunity for a billion of the world's poor.
I think whether that's possible depends mostly on how cheaply these things can be built at scale.
The Cayman Islands are a British Overseas Territory. A seastead isn't going to be an overseas territory of a significant power in its own right that is also a NATO member and permanent UNSC seat holder.
True, but there are other offshore financial centers doing the same thing, which are not under the British umbrella, including several small European nations, several in the U.S. sphere of influence, Asian centers such as Singapore, and independent oddballs like Uruguay and Somalia. None of them have faced serious consequences of any sort.
technological advancements for defence, like Laserturrets.
And the fact, that nuking is considered a crime against humanity even when you target libertarians.
Does not mean that it will not be tried, though, as soon as they will be seen as a threat to any big player established. But there are lots of easier options, than plain nuking - "terrorists" for example. "A previous unknown generic terrorist group just has hit Seastate X, how tragic"
If they get the slightest possibility to do so, yes.
Like, "they support a digital currency, which disrupts our economy, also they support people who write software, which is used by terrorists to communicate, therefore terrorist supporters = terrorists"
What? No one has "bullied" libertarians and ancaps out of anywhere, the choice to construct this settlement as it is and to move there is entirely voluntary.
> It's sad that libertarians / ancaps are bullied out of the real world
Uhuh. Though they just call that "thinking".
There is no "real world" form of utopianism. It's a dangerous adolescent form of thinking which requires purifying one's environment until it is All Good according to a single set of criteria.
All society-level attempts at this measure their results in millions of deaths.
By that standard we should have stuck with absolute monarchy. (you might want to think it over. I 'm sure the ancient romans said the same things, as did imperial russia)
Every change which has occurred has never resulted in a single pure ideology characterizing a civilization.
All change is plural and incremental, even so-called "revolutions" really just exchange the set in power for another set. They leave the plurality of really-existing power structures in place, whilst disturbing only a small number.
This is simply an incremental shift in power at the very top.
Utopian projects take pluralities of lifestyles and pragmatic political systems and attempt to unify them under a single consistent set of criteria.
It's something for the mind of an adolescent, to which this mode of thinking is common.
Society cannot be characterized by a coherent set of ideological principles. It is the behavior of human beings, which is highly plural and inconsistent when formalized.
There is no ideology to "leave in tact". By destroying the government you do not "uncover" some latent capitalism, you take the ways everyone is behaving -- have them repeat that behaviour -- but now without a government.
Yeah, nothing worse than believers of "greed is good" who literally have no concern for society at large being told that their ideas are bad and that we don't care much for them.
that doesnt explain anything though, it just kicks the can a bit further down. He's not clear whether the problem is facebook, the fact that majority of voters are gullible idiots, or democracy itself?
There's a distinction between changing someone else's political views and inflaming their existing views via outrage, fake news, etc.
If one is easier than the other, then this article does indeed explain things. Cambridge Analytica may be unable to change political views, but it may have been capable of mobilizing a select group of disenfranchised voters that it carefully selected.
Given low voter turnouts, you can increase chances of your candidate winning by merely improving turnout for a select group.
Also via politicizing their identity, their gender etc. Taken to the extreme, anything that has emotional impact can manipulate people. Taken to further extreme, such an argument means that democracy is useless and based on very flimsy and wrong assumptions about human nature. But we can be reasonable instead of extreme.
