The key is that blibbe is talking about switches. Modern switches can process packets at line rate.
If you're working in AWS, you almost certainly are hitting a router, which is comparably slower. Not to mention you are dealing with virtualized hardware, and you are probably sharing all the switches & routers along your path (if someone else's packet is ahead of yours in the queue, you have to wait).
"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.
But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
The word “political” is rife with confusion. Careful discussion requires slowing down long enough to make sure different people are talking about the same thing.
One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.
Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.
P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?
> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.
1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.
2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.
3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.
Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.
I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.
OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.
I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.
"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.
I am arguing against this definition of "political".
Here, I'm thinking out loud. Are "Everything is political" and "There are no apolitical institutions" are functionally the same thing?
When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".
When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".
I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.
> tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature
I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.
The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.
Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?
I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.
Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country
My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not.
Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.
But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?
I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution.
Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.
This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.
Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant.
I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?
> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies
'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?
I read tpm's core points as (1) all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form) and (2) Therefore, don't take institutions for granted; they rely on compatible upstream governance. I think tpm most wanted to impress the second point upon readers.
When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.
Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.
"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"
It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.
And so on.
That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."
The important distinction is that it is possible, and should be the expectation, that you can study beetles and publish the results without any sort of political motivation or bias.
In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".
Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.
Yes, neutrality is an important principle: we want a study to proceed without outside influence.
Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.
>> "Simply do the research and publish the results"
> And then you don't get any grants anymore.
This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)
> When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"
Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.
> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.
Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.
> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism
And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that.
Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.
Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political.
Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.
I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
> European and American calls cost the same on non-dividend paying stocks
All else being equal, I would prefer to buy an option contract I can exercise at any time vs one I can only exercise on a certain date. It doesn’t make intuitive sense they would be priced the same, can you please elaborate?
The parent is assuming that you can always sell your option to someone else for its fair value. If that's the case, there would never be a time where it's optimal to exercise a call option, because the optionality will always make the option value higher that the value of owning the stock.
This is shown in the article: the curved lines representing the option value are always above the straight lines of the final option payoff (the value if exercised).
This is not necessarily true for put options or for call options if the stock pays dividends. In those cases the option value can be below the payoff line and early exercise would be better than selling the option.
I think being a good engineer requires some amount of "soft skills" like project planing, documentation, understanding user requirements. Its more than just being good at writing code (but that's most of it).
Writing a working program of any kind requires those in some capacity. You can do it poorly and minimally, but you can't escape it entirely. Indeed, a highly proficient developer will do those things well.
Are you willing to consider that filtering out the people who are extremely sensitive about having their feelings hurt and being as inclusive as possible is actually a good thing? Linux is a roaring success, after all. Maybe focusing on the tech instead of feelings is the right governance model.
Have you considered the possibility that Linux could have been even more successful if it had a more inclusive environment? I can't see how your elitist "filtering" philosophy is necessarily a good thing.
And of course, my comment that is purely based on facts and about professionalism is now all about sentimental and "feelings".
That's why we can never have a productive discussion on this topic.
P.S. looks I hurt some people's feelings by using this Linux example. Maybe you guys are the ones that are most vulnerable and sensitive.
Genuine question: does "cooling" the center of the Earth via geothermal power plants have any sort of ramifications?
If we converted to using 100% geothermal power, what kinds of effects would that have on the Earth's core?
We are operating on such a tiny sliver of the crust that worries about the core temperature are many orders of magnitude away from being a problem.
However, there are some side effects. Iceland heavily invested in geothermal power plants and as a result their natural geysers are dying out. This is also why the US doesn't run geothermal power plants in the Yellowstone caldera, because the danger to the tourism industry outweighs the potential gains, at least for now.
Geothermal concentrates the thermal flux to the geothermal energy site.
What happens in practice is that such sites end up being rate-limited by either the thermal flux of the surrounding rock, in the case of dry holes which are bored and take out heat directly, or by depleting the groundwater and/or hydrothermal reservoir which feeds a "wet" geothermal project (as with California's Geysers).
Dry holes end up having a limited effective life of a few decades, based on what I've seen, after which there's insufficient thermal energy to drive electrical generation (though it may be suitable for other lower-grade heating applications). Wet holes vary in response depending on how rapidly groundwater is replenished. I believe that the Geyers has dried up numerous wells. In places with ample water infiltration (e.g., near coastlines or in wet climates), I speculate that intrusion of fresh cold water might cool the geothermal reservoir somewhat.
But the source heat, which is radiating from the Earth's core though the mantle and crust, has an effectively fixed flux. There's only so much heat radiating outwards, and a few localised pinpricks and steam generators won't effect that measurably. Volcanoes are far larger and similarly have little overall effect.
The heat is coming out one way or another. It already traveled 6500 km to the surface unaided, we're just helping it up the last 1 km or so. Frankly, I'd be interested if the core would notice an effect from the removal of the Earth's crust in it's entirety. My money is on "no for any human-relavant-timescale."
For reference, the interior of the Earth works out to about 50 TW of heat. Today, humans consume about 20 TW. The Sun delivers 173000 TW.
I had no idea about the Puna geothermal plant! I'll read up on it!
My "minimal" remark was intended as a response to the question of our effect on the Earth's core; I should have made that more clear. I'm sure we'll uncover all manner of consequences to the upper crust.
Having read into your comment a bit, the USGS doesn't agree with you. :(
There's a nearly-negligible amount of heat being created from simple radioactive decay, but essentially all of the heat is just leftover from the formation of the planet.
Which is just nuts to think about. The core is that hot and it has been for billions of years. Incredible.
Emitting heat technically. Imagine rocks warmed by a fire or those in a sauna, they cool off very, very slowly. At earths core is a giant chunk of super compressed and super heated lead. I don't recall if the core is the size of the moon, but you could imagine a solid ball of lead for your sauna that is the size of the moon and so hot it would melt if it were not under extreme pressure.
When I looked into this the numbers suggested that energy-wise we'd be extracting a drop in the bucket. There are concerns for local effects though (e.g. earthquakes).
Roughly equivalent to the rise in sea level because of displacement from offshore oil drilling platforms and wind turbines. Which is to say, immeasurable.
Geothermal doesn't cool the center of the Earth; it cools the crust around the wells. The effect farther away is miniscule on any reasonable timescale. Think of it as mining crust heat.
A strong West-allied military in the Middle East is extremely valuable.
If France started a war of aggression, the US would also 100% stand with France, especially if it started with France being hit with a terrorist attack. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.
"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.