The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.
I'm fond of telling people that Krishnamoorthi called me personally, on the phone, twice, to raise money in elections he ran unopposed in. Each time he had a story for why it was important I donate to him and not some other Democrat in a contested race.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.
Your statement is one of those "not even wrong" pedantic ploys that falls apart at the lightest sneeze in its direction.
Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.
> Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives
It’s not. Every piece of state and federal legislation I personally wrote language into passed before I was wealthy. Showing up is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Being decent and eloquent when you do is impossible for the rest.
I’ve donated to get power and gotten involved. The latter absolutely smites the former, to the point that donors are almost being taken for a ride outside a few idiot candidates who unfailingly lose.
You should consider finding other employment or at least another manager. If this is an example of how you are being evaluated in that organization, it can only get worse.
Because most tablets are intended to be as thin and compact as possible while being too large to wrap a hand around. Imagine the complaints if Apple told people to buy a case so they could hold the product. Imagine putting a ledge on one side to hold it oh hey, it's a Kindle Scribe (and still ALSO has a bigger bezel than the iPad Pro.)
This just accelerates the Balkanization of the Internet, which already is segregated by China and Russia. Maybe it was inevitable. Corporations benefit the most from open access and as they have demonstrated with unrestricted AI scraping they obey no morality, ethics, or law they are not compelled to by force.
This has already been on the table for over 6 years now - Stratechery (a tech blog most decisionmakers read) posited the Four Internet theory all the way back in 2020 [0]
The Quanta article on the paper was considerably more breathless in describing a fine piece of work in mathematics. The author here points out that one of the things that makes Dijkstra's result iconic is that it could be used practically in a straightforward way. As an engineer, beautiful mathematics is useless if I can't convert it to running code.
Actually there's a whole bunch of mathematics which I find useful as an engineer because it tells me that the perfection I have vaguely imagined I could reach for is literally not possible and so I shouldn't expend any effort on that.
e.g Two body gravity I can just do the math and get exact answers out. But for N> 2 bodies that doesn't work and it's not that I need to think a bit harder, maybe crack out some graduate textbooks to find a formula, if I did hopefully the grad books say "Three body problem generally not amenable to solution". I will need to do an approximation, exact answers are not available (except in a few edge cases).
> Actually there's a whole bunch of mathematics which I find useful as an engineer because it tells me that the perfection I have vaguely imagined I could reach for is literally not possible and so I shouldn't expend any effort on that
That's actually given as a reason to study NP-completeness in the classic 1979 book "Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness" by Garey & Johnson, which is one of the most cited references in computer science literature.
Chapter one starts with a fictional example. Say you have been trying to develop an algorithm at work that validates designs for new products. After much work you haven't found anything better than exhaustive search, which is too slow.
You don't want to tell your boss "I can't find an efficient algorithm. I guess I'm just too dumb".
What you'd like to do is prove that the problem is inherently intractable, so you could confidently tell your boss "I can't find an efficient algorithm, because no such algorithm is possible!".
Unfortunately, the authors note, proving intractability is also often very hard. Even the best theoreticians have been stymied trying to prove commonly encountered hard problems are intractable. That's where the book comes in:
> However, having read this book, you have discovered something almost as good. The theory of NP-completeness provides many straightforward techniques for proving that a given problem is “just as hard” as a large number of other problems that are widely recognized as being difficult and that have been confounding the experts for years.
Using the techniques from the book you prove the problem is NP-complete. Then you can go to your boss and announce "I can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people". The authors note that at the very least this informs your boss that it won't do any good to fire you and hire another algorithms expert. They go on:
> Of course, our own bosses would frown upon our writing this book if its sole purpose was to protect the jobs of algorithm designers. Indeed, discovering that a problem is NP-complete is usually just the beginning of work on that problem.
...
> However, the knowledge that it is NP-complete does provide valuable information about what lines of approach have the potential of being most productive. Certainly the search for an efficient, exact algorithm should be accorded low priority. It is now more appropriate to concentrate on other, less ambitious, approaches. For example, you might look for efficient algorithms that solve various special cases of the general problem. You might look for algorithms that, though not guaranteed to run quickly, seem likely to do so most of the time. Or you might even relax the problem somewhat, looking for a fast algorithm that merely finds designs that meet most of the component specifications. In short, the primary application of the theory of NP-completeness is to assist algorithm designers in directing their problem-solving efforts toward those approaches that have the greatest likelihood of leading to useful algorithms.
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