• 1 Post
  • 370 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle


  • I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.




  • Multiply anything by a billion people and it’s going to be a big number - food waste, plastic grocery bags, paper napkins. It can be a way to encourage people to think about their own contribution to environmental problems, but it often ends up distracting people into making a big deal of, and demanding personal lifestyle changes over, something that’s actually a small contributor to the real problem.









  • They only need to throw one or two counties - Fulton or Dekalb - into chaos, and they’ve got the groundwork laid. After 2020, the legislature voted themselves the power to take over county boards of elections and immediately started investigations to show that Fulton’s board were incompetent. The state board now lets and random county official contest certification, more or less guaranteeing chaos and calls for the legislature to take over. Throw out Fulton County, and Georgia goes back to solid red.





  • I don’t know about this specific case, but it’s common for the big name researchers not to do any actual research or play any direct part in generating their images. That’s often done by kids - 25 year old grad students, even 20 year old undergrads - or other trainees. Those people may not appreciate how easy it is to detect image manipulation and are still learning what kinds of ‘refining’ of imagery and datasets is acceptable, while the PI that pays their stipend or sponsors their visa rages at their inability to get an expected outcome or replicate a previous result.

    Not saying there aren’t people out there just flat-out frauding, but these are group projects with a structure of trust and pressure that can muddy assignment of culpability. Like any committee or corporate action, it can be tough to say that any one individual is the guilty party or which people where just going along with the group.