A gift-based economy does feature reciprocity, but it is very different from one based on bartering. In a gift economy it is implicit that those that lack the ability to contribute as much are also not expected to reciprocate to the same degree.

The Planck constant [Js] was introduced to find a way around the UV catastrophe. The Planck length [m] is defined as \sqrt{\frac{\hbar G}{c^3}}, where G is the gravitational constant and c the speed of light in vacuum.

The Planck units are a choice of natural units relevant to cosmology. They aren’t the smallest or largest of anything. The Planck mass is roughly the same as that of a fruit fly.

In our current established theoretical framework, there is no reason to presume that either time or space are discrete, nor is there experimental evidence for it.

But being competent in your field doesn’t make you a good manager or leader.

Except it kind of does. Surviving in academia requires being able to sell yourself well, and to be able to network and set up collaborations with other groups. Stereotypes and some exceptions notwithstanding, professors usually have good social and management skills.

Well, the hiring process for professors varies by university, but usually other professors and the dean or similar role (typically also someone with an academic background) play important roles.

One of the positive aspects about a career in science is that HR essentially has no role in hiring decisions. The hiring is done mostly by professors, who are usually highly competent in their field.

This article is about some professors (and other supervisors) being toxic. The world of science is extremely cutthroat and competitive (much more so than the world of business), and the kind of people who survive in it long-term tend to be extreme workaholics. I was personally lucky with my supervisors during my time in science, but some of them can put a lot of pressure on grad students and postdocs and expect them to be the no-lifers that they themselves usually also are.

…that was a British colony.

Independent state or not, there certainly was no instance of a “Palestinian” people “govern[ing] themselves” (whatever that may mean - the majority of the world, including Israel/Palestine, has never had anything resembling a democratic government).

The Ottomans themselves were by definition a small dynastic elite that ruled over a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire. They didn’t give a shit about what “Palestinians” thought about the governance of this area except insofar as it suited their own perceived interests.

The Ottomans didn’t officially call this region “Palestine” in its own administrative divisions though that name existed as an unofficial designation for the rough area.

The Sykes-Picot borders were drawn from the rectums of some drunk European aristocrats who barely knew the region. On which sides of those borders people ended up is largely a historical accident.

It’s bullshit that countries should be able to deny entry to people arbitrarily, but your history is also a bit off. There never was a Palestinian nation state; there weren’t even nation states as we know them today hundreds of years ago (when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and before that the Mamluk Sultanate).

Except for the ones in South Africa, with signs like this one.

any advice welcome

1. Don’t go back to Reddit.
2. Read Rule 5 in the sidebar.

European carmakers have dozens of EV models on the market, and they are dominating the EU market though selling poorly outside it.

While rapidly shrinking, the ICE market in the EU still accounts for about three quarters of the market. This is why some EU carmakers (notably Stellantis) have shifted to a Kodak strategy in an attempt to make short-term gains over the coming decade.

Your idea is to not have insurance. This makes sense for expenses you can cover from your own savings. It makes less sense for expenses you can’t cover from savings. This is why insurance was created, it is a way to pool catastrophic risks where the majority who won’t need it (as much) cover the costs of the minority that does.

For health insurance specifically, it doesn’t make economic sense to not cover the entire population, which is why top economies implement such a system in various ways.

I didn’t really look into what this startup did, but it doesn’t surprise me. Elon Musk has a very similar kind of story, bullshitting his way to being a billionaire. The system is very heavily stacked in favour of dishonest people.

How is this guy a fucking CEO?

Wealthy background. Dropped out, got lucky with a startup and sold his stake for a decent sum, gaining enough momentum to keep failing upward.

The guy is absolutely clueless, which can be mathematically proven on the basis of the fact that he invested in a crypto firm.

Not an argument - a request for you to substantiate that claim.

No, that’s not obvious at all. If that were true, you’d expect a correlation between corruption and the size of parliaments/city councils/etc. and to my knowledge no such correlation exists.

Besides, there is no need to keep things secret when there are plenty of legal pathways to (what elsewhere might be considered) bribery, as is currently the case in the USA.

How exactly?

There are a couple of ways to go about it. A common way is open party-list proportional representation. Each party puts forward a list of candidates. The number of elected candidates depends on the proportion of votes with respect to the total (e.g. 10% of votes with 100 total seats means 10 seats for that party), where those candidates who received the most votes within the party list get elected.

I read the article, but don’t follow the argument. Add some seats, and then each representative will represent fewer voters. So what? How does that fix gerrymandering or make elections more representative?

The easiest solution is of course proportional representation. Can’t gerrymander if there are no districts.

But if you must have districts for some reason, then… just don’t put politicians in charge of drawing them.