WaPo, NYT, et. al. are tied to DOD and the intel community. They are the anonymous sources that provide many of their story ideas as well as quotes and sourcing. That doesn't come for free.
You seem appropriately skeptical for my purposes. Free answer time my man. What's your take on a major national lab investing big money into technology based on physics that is 100% wrong, according to what is publicly known? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.06133.pdf (please note equation 15).
It means the guys a Lawrence Livermore are investing a LOT of money into technology that is based on physics which directly contradicts Einstein's general relativity, the best tested theory humans have. In my academic experience, government funders are unbelievably risk-averse, and I bet the ones who run major DOE labs are too. They know that equation is actually right, or are extremely certain that this thing will work even without a perfect understanding of it, or they wouldn't invest the cash. More fun facts: that equation contains a term that Jack Sarfatti has introduced (check citation 29 and the first paragraph of page.3). Jack Sarfatti is a UFO researcher, he studies UFOs seriously and writes physics papers on how he thinks they work. So DOE is pumping serious money into tech based off actual UFO science, which contradicts Einstein. Does this mean aliens are real? No. It does looks very suspicious though.
This isn't a theory: either that paper is right, or the US taxpayer is being defrauded by DOE to develop tech based off junk science. One of those things is actually true. Do you pay US taxes?
Thank you for this. If the paper is right, it should be celebrated as a scientific achievement but instead, we got a boatload of national security state propaganda about ufos instead.
I posted this once before and it got no traction. I decided this time to make the title more descriptive of what is actually afoot here. I'd like people to note the level of engineering in this reactor concept demonstrates a long term commitment of serious resources by LLNL to a modified Einstein field equation (equation 15 in the paper), which states that electromagnetism can affect the curvature of spacetime under certain conditions. Given that the method of operation for the reactor explicitly requires these effects, I also believe they must be substantial in magnitude and that they have actually demonstrated this experimentally to justify this level of commitment. I personally think this paper is a decade or more of work by LLNL. I hope this gets looked at this time, please upvote if you think this is interesting. I look forward to hearing everyone's take on this.
I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?
Because at the end of the day its whether your shipping something worthwhile that matters. Not how much you code, nor the brain farts of execs.
Paying for someone who can increase the efficiency of a bunch of other highly paid people is a sound investment. Not that this happens often in reality! A shit show is a shit show even with a paid cat-herder. But it can work very well given the right circumstances.
In most companies, PMs make roughly the same as engineers at the same level, so your wife’s situation likely has other factors. Did she make the jump to another company? If so, that’s why, not the ladder switch.
Also, PM requires real skills too, as you can see from a lot of the comments here. Unfortunately most PMs don’t have those skills, so I don’t blame people who don’t know that.
This is far from universally true. If it's junior dev to PM then it makes sense you are defining the work of large swathes of people. That said, one of my pet peeves is junior PMs because the role requires significant skill, expertise, judgement and maturity. If you're just talking in meetings you're doing it wrong.
a good PM or Manager has much higher value than a good coder. the problem is to be a good PM or Manager in tech you need not only good soft skills but also strong technical background. a lot of people in positions dont have either.
I also moved to Germany and bailed after 6 months. Unlike this article, I didn't care about the people or language, I was there to make some money and move on, so it wasn't a place I wanted to integrate into to begin with. The people in Germany, on average, don't like foreigners and don't want them around. That's true in Europe in general and definitely true for Germany, so I'm not sure what the article's author is really surprised at. That said, what made me move after such a short time though is that I'm 100% sure the same bunch of old money that supported the Nazis is still there today running things. Once you meet a few of the rich ones and see how arrogant and stupid they are, you realize immediately that their society is structured so that these people will remain on top no matter what. And from this fact you know all you need to about who you are really working for, and by extension, who their grandparents supported.
A lot of people have remarked that the government couldn't keep a secret this big for so long. This is correct but misses the point that this secret wasn't kept. I've heard this story multiple times in my life, it's been a staple of US lore for decades and numerous whistleblowers have come forward in the past to retell it. All have been discredited and often smeared as nuts and the media has reported as much and moved on. If this really is true and they really do have a massive disinfo campaign to protect it, we have no choice but to admit that they have never kept a lid on this through secrecy, they have done it through character assassination and control of the media narrative, turning anyone who speaks up into a lunatic off his meds, a liar, and so on, and then moving the public's eye onto something else. That this strategy has worked so effectively and for so long is scarier than aliens, IMO.
There is the fact that Grusch gave sworn testimony to congress on it, he's going to prison for perjury if he's lying. Doesn't prove it, but it's more than just saying it in an interview.
People lie to Congress all the time without any consequences. That depends more on the political necessity of having a scapegoat/figure to tar and feather than the actual law.
"does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
"No, sir."
"It does not?"
"Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."
So, do people lie to Congress all the time? Not wittingly, but in the sense that this phrase means "absolutely yes, all the damn time."
Assuming this is legit, what makes you believe they understand anything about this tech? They might literally have been scratching their heads all this time with this stuff. We might simply not understand the physics by which it operates and have no ability to do anything with it except dust it off periodically and let another team of eggheads strike out. I can't think of any major technology we currently have which doesn't have a totally legit origin story and which the prevailing scientific and engineering ability of the time didn't enable, so I doubt any real advances have ever come out of this.
