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2024-03-27 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Energy , 306 references
[Comments enabled]  

Well then build solar "farms" in places where hail shows up and watch an enormous amount of capacity (which you don't happen to have laying around as spares) get destroyed.

By the way Texas is not a rare place for such to happen and incidentally, solar panels contain all manner of nasty toxic chemical and while in their "encapsulated" form they can't get into the environment being pummeled by golf-ball and larger hailstones breaks all that up and hammers it into the soil!

Contrast this with a natural gas, coal or nuclear plant which is unlikely to take any such damage at all and, if it does take some it typically is the sort of thing you'd expect if your roof got hailed (that is, there's roof damage and maybe some water that gets inside, but its manageable and quite-easy to fix.)

Green energy eh?

Wouldn't you prefer resilient and reliable energy?

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This opinion piece is, no surprise, authored by someone who has a "solution" to peddle.

Debates about testing often focus on how different socioeconomic or racial groups compare within the system, questioning why wealthier students get better SAT scores than poorer or if the ACT favors Whites and Asians over Blacks and Hispanics.

This focus on disparities makes us blind to a much more vital question: Do these tests even measure what’s important?

Ok, which ACT and SAT?

The ones we have now or the ones I took?

You see, there are in fact universal languages.  There are two and one is derived from and dependent on the other.

The first is mathematics and the second is physics (of which chemistry is a subset.)

Next, there are two forms of reasoning: The factual use and capacity to master the first two universal languages which requires you to have about a 115IQ or thereabouts, which is the threshold requirement for modern society.  That is, without sufficient people in that basket you don't have modern society.  If you think that is wrong I direct you to Rwanda and dozens of other examples (including Haiti) and you can look to South Africa which had it, drove out most of their higher-IQ population and now is losing it because they cannot maintain what those people built -- there simply aren't enough 115IQ people remaining to maintain and expand what they require for modern life.

But there is a second element which is where the further-to-the-right area of human mental capacity arrives, and that is abstract and spatial reasoning.  These are relatives but not the same, and some people are very good at one and not so good at the other -- but to be good at either you have to be in that rarified atmosphere up above the 115+ IQ realm.  It is simply not possible to be good at either if you don't have that much mental firepower.

It is that second realm where all great discoveries relating to our physical world derive.

All of them.

115 isn't that rare -- about 15% of the human population is in this basket.  That 15% of humanity is responsible for everything we enjoy today when it comes to technological advancement and its maintenance, and always has been all the way back through history.  It will never be otherwise.  Virtually all actual collegiate-level work requires this capacity; it is the lower threshold for abstract and spatial reasoning and if you can't get there you cannot do actual college-level work because actual derivation from prior knowledge requires this capacity and that is the definition of "college level achievement."

This is an old SAT of about 1100, a new (current) SAT of about 1280 (yeah, it's that different) or an ACT of about 26.

If you're not there then you're not and if a college is handing out degrees to people without that capacity then they're certifying that which is not true in terms of real expectations that society requires to maintain and advance itself.  I don't care who argues for what in "equity" or whatever; society absolutely has to have that 15% of people to maintain and operate our modern world and it also needs people with at least the next 10 points, up to 125-135, to advance.  It is those people who are in fact qualified for degrees that allegedly require you to break new ground in-field (that is, a Masters or PhD.)  We have wildly violated that premise over the last 30+ years in that now regurgitation of prior work and even word salads survive a thesis defense -- and as a result a Masters or PhD no longer proves anything.

This doesn't mean you can't train someone without either capacity to perform a task and/or trade.  You can, of course, but they are not capable of the inductive and deductive reasoning to advance the state of knowledge.  You can train someone as an electrician, for example, to follow the National Electric Code while wiring your house or perform as a lineman stringing and maintaining electrical transmission lines even though their IQ is bog-standard 100 and you can probably do so with someone down to about an IQ of 90.  But said person will never understand why the NEC specifies a given thing at the detail required to understand why it was and is written the way it is; they can apply said knowledge but cannot generate it as they simply do not have the intellectual chops to do so.

The entire point of testing is to provide that filter in a way that is reasonably-repeatable and to put forward standards for American society that are prerequisites for same.  The often-hated "analogies" section of the SAT (I personally found it quite easy) was one of these until they removed it in 2005; without a good mastery of English you cannot score on that part of the test and some people argue that's "racist" in some way.  That criticism is nonsense; it is not "racist" for a society to require fluency in a given language and if you can't get there for whatever reason as an individual you simply don't have the intellectual chops.  The point of that section is to test your capacity for inference and to do so you must have both a good understanding of English and the ability to draw said inferences.  What replaced that section doesn't do that at all, nuance is not inference with the latter being a materially-higher intellectual function.  Note that if you choose not to gain both in your educational journey despite the capacity then any screaming about "racism" is flat-out BS since nobody has the right to demand that you coddle a personal decision to refuse one's own advancement.

At the core of the question is what are tests of this sort supposed to demonstrate?

The only reasonable answer is "personal intellectual achievement in the context of intellectual capacity."  Both are highly individual; one you're born with and the other you put effort into.  This isn't about "inequality" because no two people are equal and therefore an attempt to "work around" that is not only futile its foolish.

In the context of higher education there has to be some means of gating for those unlikely to possess either the personal drive or fundamental intellectual chops required to complete college-level work.  To admit students who lack either, say much less both, is to exploit them as they will either not complete the work (and thus wind up wasting the money spent on it, plus the time they put in which can never be recovered) or worse the college, in an attempt to "satisfy the student" will pass and confer upon them a degree when it is unwarranted which now causes a person to go into the workforce unable to do the work for which they claim to be qualified.

Molding a test to compensate for what boils down to unwillingness to personally exploit one's intellectual gifts, or worse cover up for the lack of fundamental intellectual chops in the first place, is both unwise and risks destroying any value such a alleged credential would otherwise have, all the while enabling colleges to continue to collect money from those who simply cannot, and never will be able to, do the work.

We must do better.

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2024-03-24 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Podcasts , 195 references
[Comments enabled]  
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Beware.

I have reason to believe there is an infrastructure compromise specifically targeting TLS session negotiation and a technique that is not only commonly used it is basically required to do secure redirects within a set of domains or other similar situations across the Internet.

This is not, from what I can determine, in end-user equipment (e.g. your PC or personal router such as your WiFi access point) which is extremely bad because that means it is in the provider's infrastructure and they obviously do not know it is there.

If you get a security warning and hard-stop when you try to log into a site or travel around it (e.g. your brokerage, bank, etc.) do not, under any circumstance, permit the connection to proceed or override it.  If you do the odds are nearly 100% you just gave away an authentication cookie that is valid to get into your account to an unknown party.

If you have gotten such a warning in the last couple of days immediately go to all of the sites where you got it, sign in, log back out immediately and then go into your browser, find the cookies for that site and delete them to force the site to regenerate them.  "Better" sites will kill them in your browser when you sign out, but not all do.  All should by the way.

If you get the warning again the attack is still active.  Do not, under any circumstances, approve an override of the warning in your browser.  The browser's certificate chase is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and preventing you from having your credentials robbed.

This may be a false alarm (there are specific routing-related problems that could cause this) but I don't think that's what is going on, and it is targeting a very specific sequence of events that only occurs in one set of circumstances and does not have any sort of innocent explanation related to a mistake in someone's network configuration.

It therefore looks like an active attack and it appears it was targeted at network infrastructure providers and was successful being inserted and in active use for a material period of time.

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2024-03-22 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 433 references
[Comments enabled]  
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I didn't believe it.

I do now.

Yeah, people did a lot of dumb things.

I believed you were ****ed.  There was no way out, you were just ****ed.

I was wrong, and last night, I saw proof.

The peak is, in at least one case, never past.

Steve, you proved it and by God, I'm unbelievable happy I saw it in person.

It was almost as good as sex.

Almost.

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