A lot of the discussion about COVID’s impact on the labor market (“Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle”) misses the longer demographic trend. The growth rate of the U.S. population is the lowest it has been in over 120 years. We have been losing workforce for years relative to the total population due to increasing average […]
Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows […]
A lot of technology products claim to use “blockchain” and “AI”. This is generally bullshit but they are expected to use these terms like adjectives on ketchup bottles (“23% spicier! With AI!”) to keep up with their competitors. I was recently pitched a startup that claimed to be using AI in a market that is […]
The prospect of CRISPR-Cas9 germline editing has many wondering how it will be used on humans. Will there be more Chinese experimental babies? Will there be super babies? Yes, obviously. It is inevitable. How will future generations of cultures interact when some can bestow advantages of health, strength, and intelligence directly to their progeny? It […]
A friend of mine brought an article to my attention about untraceable ‘unemployed’ donors. It raises concerns about potentially fraudulent campaign donations. The article shows that, according to FEC records, ActBlue is receiving many donations from the unemployed, more so than another PAC, WinRed. The article goes on to suggest that many donations may have […]
A standard software engineering practice in Java and other languages is to use a unit testing framework like JUnit and develop tests in a separate file that exercise the public API of the class being tested. While this is a fine practice, I tend to embed a lot of tests directly in classes. This way, […]
The recent boom in machine learning has led to a lot of misuse of the term “artificial intelligence“. This term was invented in 1955 when computer scientists were first starting to grapple with machine representations of human cognition. For decades, it meant trying to understand and render into algorithms what only humans could do. This […]
The last two big U.S. elections have rekindled discussion of voter fraud. There have been claims that non-citizens are voting, of people voting more than once, and of dead people voting. I wondered if any of these claims could be tested by analyzing publicly available data on voter registrations and history. To this end I […]
An interesting meme in the gun debates in the United States is that “assault rifle” is a made-up term created recently by the left for political purposes (e.g., Twitter). Having encountered the term often enough in other contexts, I was surprised by this assertion. According to Google Ngram Viewer, which can search many older texts, […]
There is an interesting gun meme in the United States. I started noticing it a few years ago and now I see it everywhere. The meme has the following structure: “There are already over 20,000 gun laws in the United States. How will adding more laws help?” (Other common variants use 21,000, 22,000, 25,000, and […]