(It took me forever to find that site when I was first looking. I don't Swanwick was making a prescription version then. Or maybe they were, but I didn't like the style.)
No, he's implicitly claiming that the crimes are disproportionally committed by immigrants and refugees, who are disproportionally not Christian. The following article (note the URL), after mutch hemming and hawing, manages to spit out the sentence:
According to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents.
Rapidly qualified by statements about income of course: In a later study, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up in Sweden.
Crying RACIST! at everyone who points this out may be effective in silencing them but it doesn't make it any less true, and it doesn't make the pro-immigration side any less obligated to explain why Sweden is obligated to accept this. It may well be that it's the right thing to do, but using accusations of racism instead of actual moral reasoning, such as, "if we didn't accept them they would be persecuted" is intellectually dishonest.
Nope, he said the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by one group, not that one group is disproportionally represented in the violent crime statistics. Big difference, and it makes him completely wrong and it either reflects poorly on your reading comprehension or you're somehow trying to polish his blatantly racist statement in dishonest ways.
Do you know what he thinks of 1Password? e.g. I've seen this comment [1] on 1Password, but do you know what his actual thoughts are? He's not fond of it, but does he have anything concrete to say about it as to why? I have friends using 1Password and I would like to be able to tell them and give them concrete reasons to switch to KeePass if there are security issues with it.
There aren't security issues with 1Password really, but there are other issues, mostly around the company AgileBits. From my other comment on this thread:
These days AgileBits(the 1password people) are doing everything they can to get everyone onto a subscription plan, and are breaking local vaults slowly. Most people don't seem to recommend it anymore.
The only security issue really is the online vault(which isn't a security issue per-say, but is a security weakness since your passwords are no longer under your direct control). This may or may not be an issue for you, depending on your security posture.
Thanks! So would you know what he meant with that tweet? Was he just annoyed at the subscription plan...? It seems out of place given that he's a security researcher from what I gather?
No, and that tweet was from Aug. 2016 with nothing further from him about 1password, unless I missed it, so clearly he didn't feel compelled to either continue his research or he didn't find anything worth disclosing. Your guess as to which is meant.
But other researchers have played with 1password and most have historically had good things to say about it, except recently when they started pushing everyone to the online vaults like I mentioned.
I just tried it and the lack of plugin or sync support was a deal-breaker for me. I have plugins for syncing to cloud storage, for browser integration, for OTP generation, etc., none of which it seems to support?
KeepassXC is the active fork of KeepassX. KeepassX/C are cross-platform Qt apps that use the same vault format as Keepass, a Windows app that apparently will run under Mono as well.
It's frustrating to keep seeing people use the phrase "buyback" when they mean "confiscation". In the US, at any rate, a "buyback" is voluntary. For linguistic comparison, the taking of land by eminent domain includes compensation, but one certainly would not say the government "bought" the land.
"You may sell the thing that's about to become illegal for you to possess to the government for a price set by the government" stretches the definition of voluntary.
Classes of firearms were made illegal. Do you mean the newly illegal classes were grandfathered and those owned before the ban could be legally kept by their owners?
You are correct but from lawyer perspective (IANAL btw) it is important they use the word "believe". As I was explained by a friend who is attorney, if you never had experience with certain law, like in this case perhaps never been subpoena for records by US, then you have a right to say you "believe" something is not the case. This is still not deceiving statement. But the moment you have been proven wrong by US Gov for example, your claim would have to be removed.
on FastMail alone I did not like how slow it is. I was testing them and Protonmail at the same time and was very impress how simple it is to setup my multiple domains/users on Proton and how fast encryption/decryption works. And Protonmail "[...] is outside of US and EU jurisdiction, only a court order from the Cantonal Court of Geneva or the Swiss Federal Supreme Court can compel us to release the extremely limited user information we have.[...] [1]
Full disclosure: I don't work for Proton; I'm just their happy mailer :)
EDIT: Slow I mean their GUI comparing to Proton. It might be more the number of extensions I have to block or limit different shenanigans such as AdBlock etc.. but needless to say, Proton does not have that problem.
> We do not participate in, or co-operate with, any kind of blanket surveillance or monitoring. (We also point out that Australia does not have any equivalent to the US National Security Letter, so we cannot be forced to do something without being allowed to disclose it.)
So while they cannot harvest data and then share it in bulk, they can access data in individual cases and share it with law enforcement.
I don't know if it will answer their specific claim, but you can read Protonmail's explanation for being based in Switzerland here if you're curious: https://protonmail.com/blog/switzerland/
They can get the data, but the data is encrypted so there isn't much that can be done. (unless they can guess your password, which is possible but hard).
At the very least, anything that the US would try would be noticed by someone who is not subject to US gag orders. Potentially they can get Australia to provide those orders, but now it is an international thing, which is more difficult than the US going alone.
Actually, he addresses it quite clearly, and points out that there are also attempts to reduce universities' other source of income, the "overhead" portion of grants.
FTA: Note that the Trump administration has already ("already" links to: https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/22/trump-budget-research-gr...) made tightening overhead rules—i.e., doing the exact opposite of what would be needed to counteract the new tax—a central focus of its attempt to cut federal research funding.
The point is that this is the system and it has been for decades, and everybody involved knew it and knows it. And the tax changes are a deliberate attack on the system i.e universities.
If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed, well, you're free to believe that, but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.
> The point is that this is the system and it has been for decades, and everybody involved knew it and knows it.
This system is also why I didn't get much from my grants because the university took out the "tuition". So just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.
> but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.
Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed". This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.
This system is also why I didn't get much from my grants because the university took out the "tuition".
I don't know the particulars of your situation so I can't comment specifically. But the grants in questions are primarily from the federal government and they are sized with the understanding that universities will deduct this "tuition" from them. If you're talking about a typical NSF, NIH, or DOD grant made to a typical research university, then the "tuition" portion of that money was intended to go to the university all along.
just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.
Scott's counterpoint to this view is that destroying something that has problems doesn't mean something better will pop into existence. Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air, and it's hard to believe these changes are intended to help rather than to hurt.
Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed"
That argument supports "the system is bad" but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed to work that way. I don't know how much the cost of research would increase if grad students were paid more. If it were practical to raise their stipends I would be for it. But the changes discussed in the post will not help grad students, even if the universities stop charging the fictitious tuition.
This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.
Addressed in the post: "except for the richest few universities, they’d have to scale back research and teaching pretty drastically" yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.
> If you're talking about a typical NSF, NIH, or DOD grant made to a typical research university, then the "tuition" portion of that money was intended to go to the university all along.
They know and add extra expecting it is going to go to the tuition and the lab and grad student won't even see parts of it. The university can also then "know" that graduate students have to pay taxes now so they should accordingly pay a more competitive salary for research.
> Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air
I don't think research is going to stop. Universities will have to find a way to be more competitive, spend more money on stipends, limit the number of PhDs they accept. Some might have to reduce administrative costs, dip into their endowment to provide fellowships or tuition endowments.
> yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.
I can see that point and it is unfortunate, but it is also unfortunate that this expensive research had to be hidden behind a tuition "charade" (universities skimming a good part off of grants) and a tax loophole. Some of the tuition taken from the grants were not even going to the labs, they ended up supporting the administrative bloat.
Without having any insight into the reasons for this specific legislation, I am speculating that it might target two things: 1) Rising tuition and administrative bloat. Maybe it is trying to force universities to become more fiscally conservative. 2) Reduce overall the number of PhDs. I maybe misremembering but I've been hearing how we pump out too may PhD candidates compared to the available positions for them. Maybe PhD positions have to become more competitive and accept only a fraction of the students they accept today. I remember my classmates wanted to do a PhD just because the market was slow after a crash so it was a way to postpone graduating for a few years. That just didn't seem quite right. Also on an interesting side-note, the same universities that admit a larger number of graduate students, then turn around and limit tenure track positions. At some point, after a few decades of that, something has to give, it's not sustainable.
I don't think that sentence at the end of his article is particularly clear; it doesn't give the question much attention. I'm not even sure the linked article supports the point that Aaronson is trying to make with it; my mental model of this could be wrong but it seems to me that the NIH overhead tightening is saying that more money must be spent on direct research (researcher salaries, reagent costs, etc) and less on overhead like facility operating costs, administrators, etc. So after the tightening there should be more money for direct research costs and less for overheads.
But the student tuition fee laundering scheme that we're discussing is not about the split between overhead vs. direct research costs as far as I can tell; it's about taking the direct research spending pot and laundering it so that it can be spent on anything, such as a new campus, which wouldn't be covered by the NIH grant at all.
If the laundering scheme goes away, then the university can't spend the direct research or overhead earmarked funds on a new campus, and so the campus just won't happen. And if the direct research portion of funding grows, then there's actually more money that can be spent on students, not less.
If that's right, then there's definitely a question about whether universities can adapt to be more efficient and lower overhead, and if they can't then research could well be disrupted, which would not be good -- but that's a very differnt concern than "the destruction of graduate education in the USA".
> If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed
I'm not sure where you got that impression. I think that it's worth trying to improve the system so that grad students are treated more equitably (and that will have to be at the cost of the administrative class). I'm not sure that this tax change will have a net positive effect on students' wellbeing, as I already mentioned, and I think that's a bad thing.
But most importantly, I don't think we should give universities or anyone else a free pass to make this a "Trump VS Students" story, when it's more complicated than that.
