Primary Investigators—the professors who both teach and run research labs for a university—make very good money, especially if they have a steady grant stream or an industry connection willing to fund their projects. Most probably don’t go into the field out of greed, since it’s nonstop hard work until tenure, but…

People in the US tend to forget that the US postal service is far and away one of the most reliable pieces of national infrastructure in the world. Even among developed countries, the idea that you can bring a box or envelope with a stamp on it to a box on the side of the road and expect with almost 100% certainty it…

While “private companies don’t have to protect speech” is a simplified statement, so is this rebuttal. Private restaurants aren’t required to provide anyone a platform, and are entirely in their rights to kick someone out if they stand up on a table and start shouting. They just can’t refuse service due to things out…

Like most chat filtering, it’ll likely get smarter as time goes on. I image Ubisoft wanted to start off painting with wide brush to be sure to catch more early on. There’s almost certainly some algorithmic system behind the banned words, and it’ll be easier to add exceptions than it is to write a more nuance-sensitive…

The crew has said this was expected to be the last season going in, but they got one more, so there’s two more episodes in the current season and a single season after that. Unless CN hands them another in the meantime, the show is definitely reaching its conclusion.

Domestic animals have been bred for thousands of years to be as easy to manage and multiply in the quantities we do. They aren’t really comparable to wild rhinos. If there were a mechanism to easily increase the number of rhinos in the world, this problem wouldn’t exist in the first place.

You can’t really avoid interacting with Facebook or Google even if you make an effort not to use their services—aside from the fact that they own multiple competing services themselves, both are heavily embedded in all corners of the internet. Google in particular can probably get a few threads into you from most…

I wasn’t aware firearms background checks were all that unique. Good to know.

His background check wouldn’t have come up clean, though. It would have listed all of the threat of violence charges and restraining orders that should be on his record. I think the point being made is that despite all of black marks this guy had, there still isn’t a mechanism in place to so much as discourage the…

On the contrary, many of us have been saying the DHS and its mostly unchecked enforcement arms are problematic since the appeared in the Bush administration. We’ve been saying for years that this kind of thing was bound to happen. During Obama many of us spoke up about it when ICE started to be used as a mass…

The correlation that’s most helpful in understanding it is that poor communities are less likely to carry ID, because in most States an ID costs money and, like voting places, are difficult to get to and are only available during standard business hours when people are working. And poor populations heavily overlap…

Previously, the policing part was done by plain old state and local police, and perhaps more relevant, up until a few years ago unsanctioned border crossing was mostly only handled as civil cases, not criminal ones. It’s also only a misdemeanor with a maximum first-time fine of $250 and the possibility of brief jail…

Or, you know, we could do what we’d been doing for most of the last hundred years and once families pass the first couple asylum tests, they’re allowed to find proper residence in the States provided they agree to regular immigration check-ins and understand that their asylum status could be lost at a further point in…

You say that, but if a handful of mid-level engineers quit, they’ll probably have comparable work lined up within a week or two, while it will take months for Microsoft to have new staff of the same level as productive as their established members who know the systems their working on inside and out. That’s a pretty…

People weren’t happy about the Obama administration’s immigration policies, either, but the mass, systemic separation of children from their parents at the border is new, and it’s that in particular that’s sparked this public outrage.

I think part of the problem here is that immigration is being considered in the same breath as “ensuring the safety of US citizens,” when the two don’t really have much of a relationship. Before we can even really consider what’s fair immigration policy, we should probably move it away from the DHS, since they don’t…

The students doing the protesting are exercising their freedom of expression, too. The universities are their space, where many of them literally eat and sleep, so their voices seem pretty relevant. A state government passing laws punishing students for protesting a speaker is a straight up violation of that freedom,…

The argument could be pretty easily made that having a more diverse playable cast, especially in a franchise that leans so heavily on its multiplayer, is also a conceit of gameplay, as it allows a wider range of players to enjoy the experience of their WW2-themed gun game through a better facsimile of themselves.…

We already pay based on bandwidth—that’s the current accepted model pretty much everywhere. For logistic and technical reasons, this is pretty sensible. The concern is that ISPs will start to charge content providers for special treatment as well.

Several of these autopilot crashes have been fatal, though, so clearly it isn’t doing a great job of mitigating damage, either.