How well did Wisconsin’s deal with FoxConn go? Politicians gave up something in the 7 figures per job that was ostensibly created on that project, but the state went into debt to do lots of the infra and the properties sit idle.
The F-35 is a defense project, but more than that, it is an unkillable jobs program distributed throughout nearly every Congressional district.
Politicians cite jobs created as if every “job” held equal weight. In fact, we have lost lots of salary jobs with benefits in the past decade, mostly replaced with independent contractor hours. Politicians don’t care because they are optimizing for the metric most commonly looked at.
Also, it creates a perverse incentive where no politician feels like they can ignore the bad metric because it is the good sound byte (a la “tough on crime” rhetoric when being consistent on crime is far more effective). Instead of working on healthier long term goals, they work on junk food goals.
depends - what if they favor a small industry over larger ones? (in the US the quintessential example is the coal industry vs. almost any other because of the insane way the government is elected)
This fellow (Eagleworks guy) was told in no uncertain terms by his PhD thesis committee at Rice that this was a bad idea and forced to rewrite his thesis. He clearly doesn’t know when to take a hint.
Yes there are commonly clever people that know how to play organizational ladders with minimum amount of work in every sufficiently large organization. Also a fair amount of "morons".
Arthur C Clark has addressed this general point in his first law:
“ When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
It didn't happen with industrial revolution, I doubt it will happen now. Robots will not replace plumbers, waiters, teachers, barbers - at least not in the nearest future.
Got locked out of Amazon account weeks ago, requires a phone call to fix. That tiny bit of friction has gotten me off my last few Amazon purchases and I’m grateful for it.
It sounds like it means "there were a few things that I still used Amazon for, but now that my account is locked I don't even do that". They've stopped buying from Amazon altogether.
Yes, this is an important point, thank you. The research award goes to the university, not personally to the researcher (at least so says the award information at [1]). Nevertheless, I think this guy will have other opportunities and this grant isn't going to make or break him.
