> The most direct way that the U.S. government can control inflation is via layoffs of federal workers.
I'm not sure what you're claiming here. Civilian employees are less than 3% of federal spending, so it won't have a measurable effect on spending. Some employees, like IRS employees, bring in revenue.
Whether the facility is built there or 50 km away, it's going to have to draw people from more than a few km away. The entire Taltal district only has about 11,000 people.
Emo Philips once said "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, whoa, ‘look what’s telling me that’."
There seems to be this naïve view among some philosophers that what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"!
I say: look what’s telling you that! I mean that very seriously.
I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel things going on at the same time and we have some limited awareness of these things and some ability to coordinate and direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be rather limited. It can't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing our thoughts down to the slowest parts.
I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how some people thought that it disproved "free will"— whatever that could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized, sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind" was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or before the impulse to move the finger. What???
Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to driving. But just normal driving requires an enormous amount of processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts of the brain.
There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of consciousness.
Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have to share, especially actual experiments and not so much philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.
> some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"!
For anyone who thinks this, what happens if you start thinking a thought in words, and then stop partway through the sentence? When I do this, I understand the meaning of the full sentence even if I stop after a single word. Because, how could I say something without first knowing what I was going to say?
For me, that meaning is the real thought. The words are just a representation of it.
> how could I say something without first knowing what I was going to say?
Maybe it’s just me, but it is not that uncommon for me to start to say something that I thought was clear in my head, only to realize that it was not. It happens even more when I write, and especially when I write programs.
They're also jumpstarting a nationwide charging network via the infrastructure plan.
But that's in the future, I mean today. I can't buy a hydrogen vehicle if I wanted to. I can't fill it up if I wanted to, not even at the dozen Toyota dealerships around me.
Many decades ago I read a book which had an anecdote of some military officer taking an important message to the White House and he was told to take it right to President Johnson in his bathroom. The President came out of the shower to accept the message and the officer noticed the shower shooting water from several angles.
The President saw the officer staring at the fixtures and asked, "Son, do you have a shower like that?"
The officer replied, "No, sir!"
President Johnson said, "Then, boy, you got a dirty ass!"
I'm a little stunned by this suggestion. I've worked in quite a few different context for application systems, e.g. retail, manufacturing of fiber optic cable, manufacturing of telecommunications equipment, laboratory information management, etc.
I wouldn't even know what you mean by "app" in this context. There may a dozen or more classes of users who collectively have hundreds, even thousands, of different types of interaction with the system.
Sometimes there were natural divisions where you could separate things into a separate database. For example, the keep/dispose system for laboratory specimens, which tracked which specimens needed to be kept for possible further testing, where, and for how long. But most problem domains were not like that.
And sometimes we had to interact with other systems because they were for a separate division (because of mergers and acquisitions). But those kinds of separations made for more limited functionality and more difficulty in managing change, not less.
It's in the title of the work, though, which may be different than appearing in the work, though. And it's in Japan, where the law may be different from US law.
I'm not sure what you're claiming here. Civilian employees are less than 3% of federal spending, so it won't have a measurable effect on spending. Some employees, like IRS employees, bring in revenue.