DroDro

I watch a few right-wing Facebook pages and still see the "WaPo offered $1,000 for a Moore accuser" memes spread daily. By now, they have been stripped of any details for fact checking (they don't embed the tweet, for instance, and just make the assertion) so it is very hard to try to refute it. I alternate between trying gently to show the other commenters that it is incorrect, and just ripping into them for being gullible rubes supporting stolen valor (from the twitter account's identity appropriation).

It feels pointless to try to engage. Fake news is so asymmetric in that it is so easy to make, easy for some to believe, and nearly impossible to remove. 1) How do you deal personally with being targeted by fake news and 2) any ideas on ways to stop it?

Here is a dumb question: it looks like you are in a country with just over 5 million people. But that country has to have all sorts of national systems and departments (defense, health care, etc). In the US we have trouble finding competent people to run things at the state level and even the national level, and many states have much bigger populations than 5 million. So it seems to me that a small country has extra needs for politicians and technocrats since it doesn't have the federal support that US states depend on, but then has to find all these competent people in a small population. So are things hard to run well in a small country, or do idiots rise to the top everywhere no matter the scale so it is all the same?

The problem here is that 20kadjunct brings in plenty of tuition dollars from the six courses (i.e. produces value), and has devoted years to specialized training and yet is not paid at a level that other value-producing, highly-trained professionals are paid. The reason for this is that salary is not set by value (other than creating a ceiling of how high it could go), nor by training, but by replacement cost and scarcity.

There are plenty of people qualified to be adjuncts, and the consumers (students) are more affected by sports teams and branding than a slight drop in teaching quality if new adjuncts are brought in each year. So there is little incentive to increase costs by paying more. Over time, adjuncts may become scarce as the poor outcome after years of investment become more apparent, but like a football playing hoping to make the NFL, it is easy to think that it'll work out, and the life is pretty good in the meantime.

I think it is still an area that is difficult to evaluate. The quote measures confidence, but I think that donating to research organizations doing basic research into energy and health can have the greatest impact on the world, but such research is risky and a small contribution may increase the odds a very small amount. But increasing the odds by 0.000001% is still huge when a positive advance could affect billions right away.

People call the frisbee a "disc" for the same reason.