We have a way to measure this, it's called the Gini Coefficient, and it spiked in the 80's under deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. Since then, it's been out of whack with Western norms and now more closely resembles Latin American wealth distribution.
It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts.
Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either.
So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them?
Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.
It seems like we need to use forceful language with these things now. I've had copilot censor everything I asked it. Finally I had to to say, "listen you cracked up piece of shit, help me generate a uuid matcher. "
My view- she, like many, has been conditioned by social media to optimize for clicks by having contrarian and anti-establishment views. She's not positioned to have a particularly well-researched opinion on 95%+ of the topics she covers (which is understandable considering how many hundreds of videos she has made). I watched her for a bit, but stopped when I researched a topic deeper and found her analysis very superficial. Physics is a huge field. Think it is always better to find experts in a particular subfield and hear their views, rather than follow the feed of someone who repeatedly expresses the "everyone else is wrong" schtick
Every time I tried to listen to her she was peddling a book. Her stick is it to criticize current research, first in her field (where the mainstream seem to disagree with her), but now in more and more fields of physics/science. She clearly has an agenda.
I agree. I enjoyed her physics content. Then she made a few videos about AI, a field where I have more expertise than her, and I found her opinions very shallow and without much nuance. Ever since, my trust in her other videos went down as well. She is just trying to be overly sceptical and everything that is done in science is some sort of conspiracy.
> I listened to her a lot recently because YouTube decided ever “next video” bump while I drove should be her.
I hope there was _any other criteria_ at play here? Why would I not be surprised that the answer is "NO" for 99.9% of the population? The world is really doomed...
Sadly, it absolutely 100% is. She's an amazing case of this. I'll spend the next 2 years gently walking people down from her clickbait, and I'll end up with net-negative karma for it.
I honestly had given up entirely until I saw a subthread about a month ago where people who knew the area were exchanging info of lesser-known youtubers who come and clean up her messes after.
The sad news is, they are getting more and more attention (I saw one over 400K+ views), but a lot of that just comes from being loud, proud, and aggressive, as well as having 30 minutes of video to justify the up front "hey, she's at best a not even wrong contrarian, and honestly, lets be clear at this point, shes a liar for views!!!!"
Thankfully I'm old enough to see this stuff happens in waves, within 2 years it'll become common wisdom that she's X, Y, and Z, and even if I disagree and just think she's misguided, that'll be enough for the tide to ebb.
Note I'd never say she was a fraud but I also don't know what to do with someone who has grown into being Not Even Wrong regularly. This might be the only way, fire with fire, but it makes me squeamish.
1. claiming it is a proton collider[^1 source] designed to look for new particles [^2 comment].
2. false equivalence between China putting in their latest 5 year plan to make a plan to make something that will transition to being a proton collider. And it's worse than that:
If they immediately started after the plan was complete and on schedule, they'd be done in 2048 and transition from e/p to protons in 2066.
CERNs plan is to be done with e/p in 2042 and transition to protons in 2070. That's 4 years later, but it's comically irrelevant. That's not getting done sooner, that's just transitioning to doing stuff we already can do faster, the cool thing and why both are interested in building one is the electron/positron collider stuff, not scaled up proton collider stuff.
Content:
- The project would transition to a proton collider at the end of its lifespan as a novel tool, in 2070.
- It is proposed to operate by 2042, assuming funds dispersed over 12 years, starting in 2030.
- It will operate as a electron-positron collider for the intervening ~3 decades before transitioning to essentially LHC with 4x power.
- Electron / positron is a unique collision form, chosen to allow for more precise measurement, such as the LHC discoveries of discrepancies in the Standard Model.
- This is very important work. The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any.
[^1 source] Via Sabine link: "CERN wants to build a new particle collider which will smash protons together at roughly 6 times the energies seen at the Large Hadron Collider."
[^2 comment] This is the undercurrent of the whole criticism, I cannot explicitly source it to one sentence. It's also bizarre: I can't remember the last time experimentalists got to discover something without the theorists telling them where to look. It's cheaper that way! LHC was a failure too by that standard. There simply aren't any candidates in the theory that are accessible at humanities near-term energy levels, the Standard Model's worked beautifully, modulo these tantalizing discoveries at LHC of small discrepancies that electron/positron collisions let you explore.
[1] Sabine says "It’s a two-phase project, the first one, called the FCC-ee would collide electrons and specifically measure the properties of the Higgs boson." approximately 20 seconds into the video.
"This is very important work." is just an opinion.
"The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any." Sabine's point is that there are countless theories and parameters that can be changed to fit any measurement. New results will eliminate some, but it will not reduce the total number of possible theories, as others will be constructed to fit the results without having any reason to think one is more true than another.
I'm not sure why you're addressing me or telling me I didn't watch the video, but I humbly request, on behalf of the community, that next time you've figured out what someone else did and want to announce it, you pause and reflect on: A) exactly what and whose words you're taking umbrage with B) if you are attempting to mind read.
Concretely:
If you don't think OP got the right understanding from the video, so their questions were fundamentally Wrong and Shouldn't Be Asked and Impugned Sabine by their very nature of being asked, that's fine. Own that.
If you think it's unfair of me to quote Sabine without quoting the entirety of a 30 minute transcript, well, more power to you.
But that doesn't mean I didn't watch it or whatever other crock is being imagined.
Just ask! :) Curiosity and discussion are why we're here. :)
it seems to me that you're implying that Sabine is not disclosing the fact that it's a two stage project. And I'm pointing out that it's one of the first things she says in her video.
Why is this work important? To me it just feels so distant from my reality. At the core of this, is there an answer to the "who cares?" attitude?
Because if the answer is that we might incidentally create new useful technology in the build up of a new collider, why not just diversify the investment and put that money into a bunch of smaller projects? Hedge your bets sort of thing.
Why support this and not allocate more into high temperature superconductivity for example? I don't understand what is the justification that entitles such a large amount of money to a singular project.
There is a lot of interest. It may not be the most efficient use of money, but people like the feeling that scientists are trying to unravel the most fundamental nature of the universe.
People got so excited about the Higgs boson, despite having no idea what it really means. They kept asking if it had an application, but seemed to accept that the answer is "no".
I'll admit, I too would rather put the money into an array of different sciences. But the money goes where you can get interest, and a lot of other science happens in the margins.
First thought: I'm not the greatest at coming up with a stirring polemic justifying pushing out boundary science.
Next thought that come to my head is, how do I boundary-test this. ex. work my way backwards, what was the last collider worth building?
It's perfectly rational and intellectually honest to say "whichever one gave us something that got commercialized / helped people / etc."
As far as high-temperature superconductivity, I'm virtually certain if there was consensus a $XXB facility would concretely advance that, I assume it'd get funded.
I'm not certain, but I believe someone with more wherewithal / had skin in the game would argue that there's no reason to think this isn't that facility. (in that, advancing the boundary of physics tends to bring breakthroughs down the pipeline)
> what was the last collider worth building?...It's perfectly rational and intellectually honest to say "whichever one gave us something that got commercialized / helped people / etc."
It seems like the LHC wouldn't pass this test? In which case, continuing down the path wouldn't make sense under this criteria.
(the thing is, "continuing down the path" is a Not Even Wrong (in the Pauli sense) description of what's going on. It's a hopelessly confused. At least, I have given up hope: I wrote a quite detailed post, with both a TL;DR and longer, linking out to an approachable article, explaining this.)
It seems accurate that this is an expensive proposed experiment with less expensive alternatives, with very real debate about costs and benefits.
I'm in the "spend more money on theory first" camp. You keep saying that theorists should guide experimenters, but you seem to mean that in the limited sense of poking a little harder at the Standard Model and hoping it breaks.
Meanwhile there are all kinds of open questions where fundamental theory around and parallel to the Standard Model is underdeveloped.
It might well be better to spend a few billion on doing something about that first, then designing experiments to test whatever falls out.
Be careful when rushing. Your viewpoint as expressed is perfectly rational.
However, you know that both of these claims asked about are blatantly false, and were distracted by the idea that saying those claims is false also implies all alternatives proposed are based on lies.
To wit, the ask was "Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or discarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning."
Both of those things are clearly false.
The Chinese part is blatantly false, to the point it can be worked out by a laymen who knows years ascend.
The Standard Model itself is in question, modulo semantics about proven/disproven and the philosophy of certainty, by any reasonable definition, theory is at stake.
As far as I know, there isn't much theory behind the "important work" being done here, just "let's smash stuff at higher energy and see what shakes out." Science is supposed to go the other way. You are supposed to have a theory or a set of theories and then use experiments to test them. If this experiment can falsify the standard model in a meaningful way, that's cool, but it's a lot better if it can actually prove something else. Still, it's not clear that the something else is worth the massive expense and effort.
Do we have $X00 billion worth of theories to test here?
There is the scientific method of course (what you're talking about), but I think it isn't entirely insane to sometimes just do a ton of experimenting and see where you end up. Edison did a lot of the latter.
I think that view is a bit over the top. He built his own research lab and was responsible for something like 2000 patents. We're all aware of the Tesla story, but being a shrewd businessman and collosal jerk doesn't prevent important contributions.
I hope this doesn't seem abrupt, and when/if it does, that it comes across as coming from a place inviting further discussion and appreciating your curiosity.
That's one of the effects of the pitch framing by Sabine: the design intent is not about smashing stuff at higher energy, despite the basis of the critique requiring that it is.
My comment above is really long, but tl;dr the impetus for both facilities is smashing electrons and positrons and specific features of those collisions that let physicists hone in on the discoveries made at the LHC, not moar energy leading to new particle observations that theory never predicted.
Electrons and positrons have been smashed together before. It has been done at CERN before, too. The premise of this experiment is to do it at higher energy than has been done before.
The scientific goals of that experiment are somewhat more unclear, though. The LHC had a landmark scientific purpose, finding the last particle in the standard model. There is, as far as I can tell, no specific experiment that can be the headline for this new machine because the LHC pretty much did its job (modulo some error) and string theory et al need higher energy. There are a bunch of guesses about the higgs field and about dark matter that failed to materialize at the LHC, so now we want moar energy to see if that fixes our problems.
As to the theory they will be proving, maybe there are a few minor ones about the higgs field, but that's pretty much it at this point.
No, not quite. The electron-positron collision will allow more precise measurements. The goal is precision, not higher energy range, where a proton-proton machine would be much better. The goal is not to go beyond LHC in energy to see if something new shows up because of moar energy. The goal is to go to high energy with electron/positrons to measure stuff more precisely.
The FCC-ee is an intermediate goal, which will probe similar collisions as the LHC but at higher precisions. It is also a direct successor as the LEP which was housed in the LHC tunnel, so in this sense it is very much about "moar energy" than the previous electron-positron collider that CERN had. They're also hoping against hope that maybe they'll identify some rare collisions and even dark matter at the energy ranges that they couldn't probe before (at the LEP) with such high precision (at the LHC).
Then, when the tech for it is ready, the FCC-ee will be replaced by the FCC-hh, which is the successor of the LHC and can probe energy levels that are completely unaccessible at the moment - at about 5-6 times the energy level of the LHC. This is the true goal of the FCC project, and the biggest reason for building such a huge tunnel in the first place. But this requires significant advancements in magnets and other components which won't be available for several decades. So, they're filling in that time with the FCC-ee.
I lay out above, the IEEE article linked lays out, and you come across to me as having domain knowledge to understand that having electron-positron collisions at the same energy level of LHC lets us nail down the hints of what we saw at LHC -- persistent deviations in the standard model that require new theory.
When we get new theory, then we go hunting new particles, presuming its physically possible (as you point out with the incorrect idea that this might be being built to look for confirmation of string theory)
I understand the idea this won't find new particles, is it worth it?, but the idea this is unclear, confusing, misguided, or hoping for an outcome are trivially verifiable as false.
Things like:
- "The scientific goals...are unclear" (they are very clear!)
- "(modulo some error)" (reducing the error in the glimpses of deviation from the standard model is the interesting part, 5 sigma or bust, because that lets the theorists know how to progress. This isn't just "oh we'd like to reduce error bars, a less-entitled discipline would just get some grad students on SPSS", this is "holy shit...looks like we found something is fucky in our fundamentals here, but all we know is its off. we need to figure out by how much to give the theorists more data")
- "string theory et al" (I worry very much about the effectiveness of my communication if this is coming up, to be clear, no one is attempting to verify string theory, and it doesn't come up at all even in Sabine's arguments, no?
)
The IEEE article lays out this is not about discovering particles.
No one thinks new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not based on speculating new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not based on bad theory that new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not to find a sneaky way to hopefully accidentally find new particles.
Investments in colliders in general haven't been spectulatively looking for new particles in decades.
As both the IEEE, open source information, and my comment lay out above, they are specifically for nailing down these previously-assumed-settled values in the standard model. Because getting more data on the things theory can't explain leads to informed revisions in the theory. The next pendulum swing after that data would be theory to tell us a narrow band of energies to look at for any new particles theory needed to fix the standard model.
I don't care about Sabine and I'm not defending her. There are lots of other people who think this is a bad idea, and Nature has quoted "dozens" of them.
The error they saw isn't interesting unless it leads to something. There aren't even good theories about what it might lead to, other than some extra significant figures on some constants that nobody uses. Surely you can see there is a problem with doing science this way.
Theory precedes experiment. It always has, and you can't call what you're doing "science" unless that is true.
If it's just Dark Matter, and Matter/Anti-matter asymmetry, what theoretical framework is it going to explain it? Will it explain it, or will it just do "Your asymmetric partners are in another Order of Magnitude collider"? Or maybe there are actually 34 dimensions and not like four.
Blatantly false. Plenty of FCC docs from CERN itself mention the possibility that new particles could be discovered, from dark matter to axions. They even think they could help gather data to guide searches for supersymmetric partners.
> In addition to the dark matter examples given before, Volume 1 documents the extraordinary sensitivity to less-than-weakly coupled particles, ranging from heavy sterile neutrinos (see Fig. 5, right) down to the see-saw limit in a part of parameter space favourable for generating the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, to axions and dark photons.
> Future searches at lepton and proton colliders would further constrain any viable scenarios and put progressively tighter bounds to SUSY candidate particles. Searches could profit from data collected at the FCCs as they will allow better discrimination of the Standard Model backgrounds but also deliver more information for event reconstruction.
Supersymmetry is on its last legs after the LHC didn't find any supersymmetric particles. WIMPs and other dark matter particles are now no longer speculated to be on the menu because they are too light for this energy range.
There's lots of "could" in your own post and your sources. Very little "will" - as in "will test X theory."
The poster above was claiming, in several posts, that the people at CERN and experimental particle physicists more broadly are being unfairly represented by claims that they are including possible new particles in the case for building the FCC. They even found an IEEE publication about it that (apparently) made no such claims and stuck to well motivated physics.
I was merely showing that there is nothing unfair about it, as all materials about the FCC, at least from CERN, come with beliefs about the chance that new particles could be found. Sure, they don't make hard claims that they will be found. But even these claims that they could be found are unfounded. It's just as likely that I'll spot a WIMP in my oven if I look carefully while it's pretty hot as WIMPs being found at the FCC. This speculation has no place in serious discussions about this level of spending and human effort.
If this were an abstract discussion at a panel and someone was asking "what are some speculations about what we could see at the FCC", it would be perfectly fine to go on about SUSY and dark matter detection and axions and whatever else. But this has no place whatsoever in official documents about the scientific purpose of allocating billions of euros to this project. It is blatant speculation to pad out an otherwise pretty thin motivation. It's like writing a proposal for a new build system at your company and including speculation that it might detect security vulnerabilities automatically, or it might reduce build times a hundred fold.
You are being extremely disingenuous. The aim of the FCC is very explicitly to be a bigger hadron-hadron collider than the LHC. The FCC-ee that you mention is presented in all of CERNs papers as an intermediate goal, a use for the gigantic tunnel they'll need for the FCC-hh (the FCC), while the technology for actually doing the most important work is being developed [0].
What's more, much of CERN's own literature on the FCC references fanciful ideas like finding WIMPs, "ruling out many classes of dark matter particles", finding/limiting the search space for axions, or in general, putting boundaries on theories that have no specific basis and no fundamental bounds on their parameters beyond "we havent found them yet, so they can't be this large/small/strongly interacting/etc". Here you'll find at least some claims currently up on CERN's FCC site about probing dark matter [1].
> A key recommendation of the 2020 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is that Europe, in collaboration with the worldwide particle physics community, should undertake a feasibility study for a next-generation hadron collider. (emp. mine)
> The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV in the search for new physics.
> However there is a very broad class of models for which theory motivates dark matter candidates with masses in the range of GeV to few tens of TeV. The FCC would break new ground in the search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, by covering a wide array of potential signals predicted by either production of dark matter, or production of the particles mediating its interactions with ordinary matter. FCC-ee and FCC-hh offer complementary ways to search for dark matter that could consist of lighter particles (i.e. sterile neutrinos) or could be produced in the decays of the Higgs boson.
I like how you talk about them like there is any "game" involved. Neither individual knows what the hell he's doing. Just greedy self-serving bulls in a china shop.
Also you were outvoted because the Dems didn't have a reasonable alternative. Mrs Harris was incompetent. She was a poor public speaker, which further made her look incompetent given her previous role as a prosecutor. Further, the Dems didn't offer her as part of an open primary. They forced her on everyone.
The US presently suffers from future shock and stilted political process. We need more parties and better voting options both in the HR department and the mechanical process like ranked voting.
Since both parties benefit from the status quo, we shall see no change.
Paragraph 3 is a cynicism I don't yet fully buy: There are enough liberals and so-called Democrats that care about this country that perhaps they will be open to ranked-preference voting and the opening of our "political markets" to save the country.
Partial on paragraph 1. Biden should have left a lot sooner, and Harris, loyal to the president and unable/unwilling to break with him on anything of value, should not have been the "pick".
But she was and is infinitely better for this country than Trump in every manner, unless we're into accelerationism. I don't think she is incompetent. She was unwilling.
It’s harder to do in a Western world. For example say that it’s cheaper to live in Indiana. The cost of moving from Texas, if you do it yourself, is about $4k. For many people that is considered too expensive. As a result they stay in place, which causes them to mentally collapse into anxiety or depression.
Another issue is the trend of return to office. There were people who moved to less expensive locations. They are now being required to come into the office. One guy with whom I work is spending about $1k a month on gas to do this. So now he is effectively losing $12k per year to keep his job. If he moves, he loses his lifestyle and his 3% mortgage. This puts him in a tight spot.
Congress probably allowed the bombings in some overly large bill that gave expansive power to the administration to interpret threats to the US as it sees fit. The war equivalent of the Chevron ruling.
Remember when a bunch of people were complaining that tons of that legislation was dangerous crap that handed way too much power to the executive? Yeah, they were 100% right.
