Making Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual research being done are publicly funded or receive large public tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.
Too much bureaucracy is often at fault, but seems very unlikely in this particular case. Are all the other countries mentioned in the article less bureaucratized or regulated? There seems to be a strong correlation between countries that have good public transit and invest heavily in public transit and countries that are perceived as having too much regulatory red tape (EU, East Asia). If that's the case, how could this possibly be the problem here?
According to the chart in the article the EU seems to be building at about the same pace as Russia, so I'm not sure it is a great example for the success of bureaucracy. And is East Asia particularly bureaucratic? The idea that I get is that building a train line over there isn't going to be held up for years in environmental review and lawsuits, but I could be wrong.
"A base of 2 is useful because there are several small positive integers whose base-two logarithms are also integers." What? No! Base 2 is natural in exactly the same way that base e is natural, except for discrete domains instead of continuous domains. There is a unique family of functions for which the rate of change of the function is equal to the current value of the function everywhere. On discrete domains it's some scaled translation of 2^x, and on continuous domains it's some scaled translation of e^x. "Some scaled translation" here is accounting for the fact that the function is only uniquely exactly 2^x or e^x if we also add the constraint that f(0)=1.
The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant.
For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
The reason that pay transparency laws (which probably don't apply to this position, but exist in other states) require salary ranges and not a specific number is precisely to account for the fact that different applicants with different levels of qualification may merit different compensation in the same role based on the impact they can have. So "depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant" is kind of besides the point; a wide range can account for that.
"I'm not the King of Hiring" is fair though, if you're in a jurisdiction where there is no transparency law and you're not setting policy for your company, you may well be required not to provide this information publicly and that's just how it is.
This was a really remarkable way to undermine your argument.
It's possible to make a strong philosophical argument that government regulation of salary transparency is unnecessary or harmful. This is not that.
The fact that there exist some types of private information for which we recognize a right to maintain privacy does not at all imply it is morally wrong for the government to recognize a public right for some other type of information (salary ranges). In the US there exist both the Freedom of Information Act and the Fourth Amendment guarding against warrantless search. It's obviously clear that the government recognizes the right to demand public transparency for some types of information and the right to protect privacy for other information. You've made no attempt whatsoever to explain why this type of information should fall in one category or the other, just gestured to the existence of one of the categories and implied that this proves that the information in question belongs there.
You underestimate the laziness of most humans. To be clear, screenshots are still not trustworthy. But the "negligible" relatively more effort could matter in practice.
Cryptography sometimes seem to rely on a stronger version this too. With enough computing power, you can brute force a lot. Some authentication seems just expensive enough that only a nation-state actor would have enough resources to break it, and then rests on the assumption that the small subset of people who could put in enough effort won't care enough to do anything worth being concerned about.
This is also why, say, people lock their doors even if they have windows.
The author definitely has an agenda to push. They equate saying personal responsibility is the way out of poverty to calling poor people morons. I suspect that the author has specific policy proposals in mind but is intentionally being vague because other people will likely find them extreme.
I don't know what OP is referring to here, but from discussions like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4417485
It seems like circa 2010 folks were referring to JavaScript as "fast" because it was more performant in some ways than other interpreted languages like Ruby and Python and those were the only major popular options at the time that people would consider for some use cases.
The event loop model of JavaScript led to some creative use cases for having a single-threaded application handle many highly parallel requests that require very little CPU usage or computation but a large amount of blocking I/O, which I think was also pitched as "fast".
But I think it's always been uncontroversial that interpreted languages like JS, Ruby, and Python are all "slow" compared to compiled ones for CPU heavy use cases.
