Reading

And thinking otherwise is tiresome and delusional. From Nature:

Young Chinese scientists who got their PhDs overseas and returned to China as part of a state-run talent drive published more papers after their return than did their peers who stayed abroad. The productivity bump can be explained by returnees’ access to greater funding and an abundant research workforce, according to the authors of an analysis published in Science¹. The findings come as geopolitical competition between the United States and China mounts.

The Truth About Corporate Subsidies

Why won’t big American corporations do what’s right for America unless the government practically bribes them?

And why is the government so reluctant to regulate them?

Prior to the 1980’s, the U.S. government demanded that corporations act in the public interest.

For example, the Clean Air Act of 1970 stopped companies from polluting our air by regulating them.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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This started off with me doing a joke about the Dostoyevsky quote, in which humans, knowing that all things are permitted, are depressed to find their behavior unchanged.

When Elon Musk suggested that he would step down as CEO of Twitter due to widespread dissatisfaction with his leadership within and outside the company, many hoped for a seasoned executive to replace him to steady the ship. Now, due to a series of tweets from Mr. Musk that included a photograph of himself next to a floating orb, an artist rendering of cranes hatching inside the orb, a string of indecipherable glyphs, and the sentence, “You will obey Them,” we know that isn’t the case. Our advice:

Don’t panic

If you are like many Twitter users, you are asking yourself several questions. What does the orb want from me? When will the cranes be born, and when they are born, what will they know? How many Orb Units must I acquire to advance in my profession? These are all important questions, but until we know more about what dimension the orb came from, and the true identity of the crane lord, we won’t have answers. So sit tight and try not to catastrophize simply based on the horrifying events of Cranecon 2019.

The post Banning Noncompetes: A Groundbreaking Step for Worker Power, and What Must <span class="dewidow">Come Next</span> appeared first on Roosevelt Institute.

Guantánamo Bay “is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” the letter argues.

The post More Than 150 International Organizations Call on Biden to Close Guantánamo on 21st Anniversary appeared first on The Intercept.

Here is a clip from one of our live songwriting sessions on our Twitch channel. We just turn on the camera and try out ideas and see where they take us.

This clip from one of those sessions we posted to our YouTube Channel.

Play a hypnotic keyboard (Live Stream Clip)

I had a hypnotic keyboard part I was messing around with.

I wanted to try it out with the band to see if we could come up with anything for it that we might be able to use for a song.

-Tom

Conspicuous Consumption in the US & Germany

By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.

I am a policy expert and analyst who studies how governmental investment in science, technology and innovation improves social welfare. While a country’s scientific prowess is somewhat difficult to quantify, I’d argue that the amount of money spent on scientific research, the number of scholarly papers published and the quality of those papers are good stand-in measure…

Today, China is second only to the US in how much it spends on science and technology. Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering PhDs in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent year…

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative – and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific paper…