Martin Keegan

On most New Build estates There's a budding Alan Bates ...

@Gaurab as my director used to say ... "not for LOSS, either"

@Gaurab "Jack Welch turned GE from an industrial research company into a financial engineering shop and donated RCA's research lab to a nonprofit" Right but the non-profit in question was SRI.

The transistor, Unix, nylon, Teflon and the laser all have one thing in common: They were a result of the golden age of corporate R&D. In 1985 IBM had 400,000 employees but only 8 called "Wild Ducks." They could break all the rules, pull people off other projects, get budget on demand, and reported directly to the CEO. Bell Labs alone produced 11 Nobel laureates and 28,000 patents. Its budget came from American phone bills. Fortune 500 companies won 41% of America's top innovation awards in the 1970s. By 2006, that number dropped to 6%. Here's what killed American R&D: 1. The hostile takeover wave of the 1980s pushed executives toward short-term results 2. The AT&T breakup gutted Bell Labs from 26,000 to 19,000 3. Venture capital gave the best researchers a better deal than staying inside a corporation 4. Offshoring broke the feedback loop between making things and understanding them 5. Jack Welch turned GE from an industrial research company into a financial engineering shop and donated RCA's research lab to a nonprofit 6. The 2017 tax law penalized R&D spending so aggressively that some companies faced 4x higher tax bills for doing more research Today the U.S. spends nearly $1 trillion a year on R&D, but two-thirds of it goes to incremental product improvement. The labs that built modern America are gone. I'm reverse-engineering what made them work. And what a modern skunkworks looks like.

Congress is doing nothing on AI because legislatures worldwide are doing nothing on any subject. Legislatures are doing nothing because their powers have been usurped by apparatchiks, judges, and executives. These powers have been usurped because the *source* of a legislature's power is that it represents the will of the people. The people had power to delegate because when the world's best weapon was a single-shot gun, the people in arms could and did win pitched battles against top-tier armies and topple governments. But since then superior, very expensive weapons have been deployed in the hands of career soldiers answerable to the state which can defeat the people in arms using the best amateur weapons available. Which means the people are no longer a military threat to the state. Which means the legislature has no fundamental source of power except for tradition and nostalgia. Which means that other actors can safely usurp their powers. And so they have. x.com/BernieSanders/…

This!!! 👇 Every tomdickandharry gets access to my medical records, but *I* have to jump hoops to get them. B/c godforbid, seeing my record with my own eyes (rather than told in the rushed 10min appointment by the Dr verbally), may discombobulate my gentle disposition. In the minds of the imbeciles and busybodies that demand & inflict the retarded data and information rules & laws onto us. DELETE DELETE DELETE is the right thing to do. Too bad it's too obscure for any normies as a political demand. People die of preventable causes that were never communicated properly to the ones with power to help them. The majority policy people invested in this obscurity are lunatics of the 'wifi / mobile masts / organic / nature / bottled vaginal farts' naturalist proclivities, that somehow morphed into anti-data/compute/AI, ultimately anti-human.

Would systemd add a "totally optional" race field just because some white supremacist shithole country wanted it? Of course not: doing that would be sending a very clear message of racism. An age field is not harmless. It's a very strong political message of support.

There's a very strong argument to be made about how this sort of thing is inevitable, that the NSA/CIA/FBI/etc have already backdoored every CPU on the market today. I don't care. I'm not homeless today because I was able to install an OS on my machine, create a login account, read a pile of documentation, and gain computer literacy to a degree that I got paid work for it. We have an immutable, inalienable obligation to ourselves, each other, and our descendants to fight this tooth and nail, everywhere it manifests. Because this only helps tyrants, and robs the innocent of things they have an inviolate right to: the right to think for themselves and speak their mind. If that isn't enough, you only have to look as far as England, Australia, or the EU to see the absolutely catastrophic impact these ID laws have had, and how quickly they've escalated from "Stop Children from seeing scary things" to "You said true things about the current ruling regime." It happens in a matter of weeks or days. Every time it happens. Fight it. Fight it while you still can. This is no time for moderation.

@pastasnack_e Often it is the same young people who are gleefully engaged in the total pathologisation of any kind of communal or cooperative activity

Lots of people's social & romantic lives could be vastly improved if it was normal for young adults to live in college dorm-style accommodation in city centres until they were ready to set up home properly. Why doesn't this exist? I think there would be a market for it!

I’d honestly be prepared to contemplate a ban on social media for under sixteens (if it could be done without compromising anonymity) as part of a grand bargain aimed at restoring the social conditions of the 90s (including vastly greater personal freedom for teens). Britain is currently a country contemplating a ban on non alcoholic beers for under 18s in case they lead to a Rake’s Progress-like descent into alcoholic beers. This is not the sort of place where freedoms of any sort will be restorable for quite some time.

@Danjsalt It'll be used to finish off the idea of parliament having even formal control over taxation and expenditure, and may trigger the postponement of the next general election (much easier once the Lords has been nobbled).

Yep, I think so and I also think it would be the kindest thing, it would force the political class to make choices, it would also likely finish off this dire Labour government

"As with almost everything that is unsatisfactory or dispiriting about modern Britain, the public’s reluctance to confront crime or anti-social behaviour is downwind of our legal culture"

Let Me Explain How a State Actor Could Perform a Denial-of-Service Attack on the Entire UK Government in the Wake of Ofcom “Online Safety Act” Client-Side Scanning

@gokulrajan_ I believe many share the same sentiment. we need better infrastructure for independent research. this is a huge civilizational bottleneck

One of my favorite things on the internet was @slatestarcodex writing about Cost Disease; basically, how the costs to do anything have basically tripled, completely disconnected from labor costs, material inputs, or inflation. No economists have an explanation for why costs have gone up so much, it seems like some dark force is acting on the US economy so that - while the Europeans can build lavish infrastructure, the US is stuck at 5-6x costs to build literally everything... and this underpins our fundamental debates about everything. The Interstate Bridge is an excellent example. Back when this was killed the 2nd or 3rd time (I forgot which), the *studies* performed to explore the new bridge cost ~$200 Million. I did the back of the napkin math and those studies cost 3x, inflation adjusted, what the original entire bridge cost to build. I think the dark force economists cannot detect is a combination of things, primarily though? Grift. You need to pay off the environmentalists, you need to pay off the labor unions, you need to pay off local interest groups. Those are the grifts that use social concerns as a cover... But the real grift is the Professional Managerial Class. All the various technical entities involved in the production of anything are 3 people who know anything about the subject encased in small to large organizations where 80% of the headcount has nothing to do with the task at hand. It is a baked-in, structural grift that underpins almost the entirety of the American economy. Vast swaths of the white collar economy are basically riding the coattails of a small - eroding - segment of SMEs who do actual work.

Amusing how much the knowledge economy is being held back right now because we settled on crappy legacy formats like .ppt, .xls, .pdf, .docx and so on

@katesineed @LKPleasehold @CommonsHCLG @tpi_online I know there are calls for regulation of MAs in other countries, but UK regulators of every industry I can think of have failed consumers / patients miserably. That's why flat leaseholders must have right to hire and fire MA on annual contracts = most effective regulation.

@DanicaPriest The key phrase is in the MP's response "current planning legislation". The proposal has always obviously required its own act of Parliament, so the fact that it doesn't yet have one is beside the point.

I did the figures and now I understand this email even more. Forest City is quite literally impossible

Kill switches phones, kill switches on cars. Kill switches on everything we own. Let's create a society where everything we rely on to live our lives can be deactivated on a whim by corporate or political overlords. It's not like they would or could ever abuse such power.

@ChristianHeiens Heien's Corollary: "The government is an organisation"

A major red pill is concluding that Robert Conquest’s Second Law applies to the government itself. “Any organization not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

Who suffers the most in the absence of Section 230? Small businesses, innovators getting their start, the “little guy” who doesn’t have the bandwidth, money, or lawyers to navigate a world without the protections of Section 230.