China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.
But that has nothing to do with the development, maintenance, or enforcement of the standards, since the corporations have no involvement in any of the standards, and are probably opposed to their existence at all.
It's a great counterexample to "corporate money and influence are required to develop, maintain, and enforce standards", because it shows that it sprang up on its own in the absence of money and has persisted for decades.
What makes you think the decline is _mainly_ due to this, and not due to other events this year that could plausibly have a significant effect on the value of the dollar?
I'd say the gold price (the OP topic) sudden rise after being very consistent for several decades is mainly due to the recent ending of petrodollar.
Somewhat related is the Turkey-Iran "oil for gold scandal" where gold is being used to bypass the sanction against Iran for oil and gas transactions [1].
When there is no petrodollar arrangement then as this scandal has shown, gold is naturally the most trustworthy "currency" for the oil and gas transaction, easily worth several billions per year for a single country like Turkey.
On the very basic, economic is all about supply and demand, with gold is on higher demand for the lucrative oil and gas transactions, then the demand of the alternative USD is naturally lower compared to during petrodollar era.
What does this have to do with anything here? The only common thread is that it's related to PhDs. You just have a bone to pick with our higher education being so desirable that people upend their lives to come and participate in it at great expense? This has been a significant source of soft power for the US, as both a self-reinforcing function ensuring we attract and retain top research talent, and by seeding American-educated intellectuals back to their home countries to increase our global influence. Nothing about this was bad for any party involved.
Of course, with the rampant anti-intellectualism burning a path through our institutions, we're currently doing our best to kill that and make sure we fall behind in every respect.
It has everything to do with it considering where things are with current admin. Also why do you think people are sacrificing so much to study in the US? It’s mostly funded. They even get stipends. We are basically paying them to get their degrees here. But you seem to think that they’re doing us a huge favor. What an odd way to think about it.
Do you think it is charity? The PI hires a student and the student works for them, typically 3-5 years on a salary of around $35,000, often very extensive hours. If the student is talented and dedicated you can conduct more and better research than if they are not. A large proportion of the most talented and dedicated candidates will not be American. It is not a 'huge favor' it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
> We are basically paying them to get their degrees here.
If they are the best and brightest of the world and typically stay back and contribute significantly above the median employee to US industry or even start their own companies, why is it framed in such a negative way?
I'd like to know about your experience in modern academe. I've gone to top-ranked schools in America (UT Austin, Stanford). My experience with the average foreign graduate student is not "top research talent." Most of the time you have a mid-level grifter that wants a green card, a work visa, or something else that simply lets them immigrate here. The work that they produce in exchange for that is low quality. The decline in the quality of graduate degrees may in many ways mirror the issues that tech workers have had with H-1Bs: they were intended to attract high quality talent, but became a corrupt racket.
Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?
Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...
something something "things I don't find funny are objectively bad and wrong and you're a bad person, be a boring serious miserable adult like everyone else" something something
I feel like there's confusion regarding the word "mature". It's supposed to mean that someone has lots of experience and draws knowledge from it, but in reality often people use the word "mature" to describe a certain specific societal ideal of a person that we're supposed to grow into.
The problem is that societal consesus is often wrong, and that image of a perfectly mature person actually does have a lot of problems with it. Every generation discovers this, and redefines that ideal.
40 years ago in my country a "mature man" was expected to take part in alcohol drinking contests until blackout. Nowadays a "mature man" is expected to drink as little alcohol as possible.
Neither attitude is actually about learning and forming a personal, informed opinion, both of them are about following whatever is currently in fashion.
I'm not following your reasoning. Your only objection is that this technology has the potential to meaningfully replace meat production? And therefore, because it is so amazing, no one should be allowed to profit off of it after they do a big chunk of initial R&D?
This legislation is not doing anything at all to help the research go further. It's a bare-naked stifling of a technology that threatens to thin the wallets of a few rich, loud constituents with lobbyists in the building, and probably a healthy dose of emotional whining about some kind of values or tradition being under attack.
Make sure no one is cutting corners in a way that will poison people when food is involved, but otherwise, just let the free market do its thing. I thought that was meant to be the American way.
Yep, innovation shouldn't be blocked just to protect old interests. What happens if labgrown meat replaces traditional farming?
Right now, anyone can raise animals—even a few chickens or cows—with little money or tech. That's how small farmers, rural families, and backyard producers have fed themselves for centuries. It's about independence, not just food. It's about control over your own livelihood.
Lab-grown meat is different. It needs expensive tech, sterile labs, patents, and big investors. If it becomes the main source of meat, only a few corporations will control the whole system.
Worse, future laws could ban personal animal farming—citing environment or health reasons—and make lab meat the only legal option. Suddenly, you can't raise your own food anymore. You can only buy it from a company.
That's not progress. That's a takeover. We're trading decentralized, accessible food production for a centralized, corporate-controlled model most people can't join.
We shouldn't stop innovation. But we should make sure it doesn't erase the ability of ordinary people to grow their own food. Regulation isn't about protecting tradition; it's about protecting choice, fairness, and food sovereignty.
Let innovation thrive, but not at the cost of our freedom to feed ourselves.
"hey, speeding down the highway 35mph over the limit could kill you, especially if you are fat and old. you SHOULD drive under the speed limit, but you don't have to."
No, the point is that it could kill other people. Speed all you want when you're on your own private roads.
Laws are generally meant to ensure public safety and the ability for us to live and cooperate together with mutual trust. They usually do end up restricting your personal freedoms to that end. Deal with it.
Someone just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time.
Despite the attractive purity of this worldview, modern technology and prosperity has only been possible because of the wide spread of reason, empathy, cooperation, and mutual respect on a global scale. Greed and consolidation of wealth are a much more ancient tactic that has in fact been tried many times over, usually to utter ruin. The only reason billionaires thrive so much right now is because we are all thriving much more than ever before in history, and the only reason THAT has happened is because we finally arrived at decent societal compromises and universal guarantees. It was meaningful sharing of power and respect for each others' ideas and differences that enabled all of this - the core tenets of democracy, for one. And yes, it was and still is 'socialist' ideas like building shared infrastructure and societal safety nets that establishes and actively enables the environment in which capitalism is able to succeed.
Stop trying to distill things down to a one-dimensional, teenage view of the world. It's much more complex and beautiful than that.
> Stop trying to distill things down to a one-dimensional, teenage view of the world. It's much more complex and beautiful than that.
Are you thinking more of Narendra Modi or Donald Trump when you you say that? Democracy tends to be more of the one-dimensional teenage view of the world; ye olde voters do not do well when presented with complex ideas. They don't have the time or interest.
This is one of the cases where it seems more justified than usual. This is not a website intended for end users, maximizing for performance and conversion rate. It's a design showcase by a typographer, for typographers. Every pixel is crucial, and the intended audience would rather wait a few seconds to be able to scrutinize the output with the required detail.
I don't know which demo you mean exactly, but 'analog' qualities can be achieved in a number of simple ways in the digital realm (without even getting into advanced modeling). A few of them:
- Focusing on upper harmonic content. Starting with a saw wave gets you far here, as it starts with _all_ the odd and even harmonics which you can then gently trim away. In particular, even harmonics in the mid range are often described as 'warm.'
- Using resonant filters. These too contribute to a sense of richness and warmth, especially if the resonant peak is closer to the mid range.
- Adding a sub oscillator below the primary one to give it a subtle low hum.
- Adding more oscillators and detuning them slightly with respect to each other for stereo width and play in the harmonics.
- Modulating pitch and filter parameters with slow, gentle LFOs.
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