Einstein might be good at physics, but he is the last person you would ask on ecology.

Einstein was no expert on ecology, but he was well-informed about general matters. Trump is profoundly ignorant when it comes to basic knowledge you’d expect the average 12-year old to know. Like, who doesn’t know what health insurance is?

That’s fair enough. But Trump’s Project 2025 buddies have the intention to undermine Europe. Unfortunately, when America sneezes, everyone catches the cold.

Yeah, they’ve been at it even today, with JD Vance cheerleading for Orbán Viktor.

If Trump and Musk are stupid, they would be poor

This type of thinking is known as the just-world fallacy. It’s very tempting, because people prefer to believe that things happen “for a reason” and not just randomly. Yet there is no basis in reality for this type of thinking. Trump is stupid, and many of his comments can’t be explained by mere showmanship and playing to his base. The only reasonable explanation for forest raking, or negative GDP, or look, having nuclear etc. etc. is that he is a clueless idiot, and he is.

Musk is evil, and certainly no genius, but also not stupid. He has an undergraduate degree in physics, whereas Trump merely has an MBA of negligible academic standard, which certifies basic literacy at best.

The existence of markets naturally leads to an upward flow of capital from the have-nots to the haves. One of the interesting things researchers have found is that simulations with identical agents (i.e. all equally smart) and simple market mechanics lead to the emergence of extreme inequality. You can find the details in the economic literature if you’re interested.

Plenty of famous intergenerational wealthy families eventually lose their status because their descendants squander the fortunes handed to them.

As it happens, Trump did squander his inheritance, but managed to claw back his fortune, first by money laundering for Russian mobsters, then by using his political office for personal gain. Fake it until you make it very much applies here.

You may not be politically active, but they know already that you’re possibly anti-Trump because they took your social security details and other public records, and fed it into their surveillance system.

Well, call me naïve, but they are pretty cautious around this kind of stuff in Germany, I doubt the US government has access to these kinds of records.

Nazis are leading in the polls in the UK, perhaps they figured West’s antisemitic comments would make for a good selling point.

Putin wasn’t the only KGB colonel before he became the president of Russia. He had peers and were given equal footing as him. But he had proven to be more cunning and ruthless than them so he gained power.

Putin isn’t in the category I mentioned. Even so, Putin rapidly rose up the political ranks and in the chaos of the later Yeltsin presidency ended up prime minister largely by chance.

Those low level conning salesmen you mentioned, they probably weren’t savvy enough.

The numbers don’t add up. Suppose there are a million savvy conmen. How can they all become major players on the international business and political scene? There just aren’t enough of those positions.

However, if they had been as savvy as the most successful con salesman, Elon Musk, then their fates would have been different otherwise.

Elon Musk started with a heap of money (as did Trump), in an oligarchic system heavily favouring those with money.

And well, who lived until the ripe old age of 70, while the other was murdered in cold blood with an icepick?

Not Lenin, who died of an unknown illness. I think you mean Trotsky.

Never underestimate the opposition.

My opposition, personally? That would be practically all politicians, ideologically, to some degree or other. I am not a member of any political organization.

One should also not overestimate them.

On the one hand, I think it is true that a certain kind of skill is required to read and manipulate people - the same kind of skill a conman or used car salesman needs to do their work, and that kind of skill obviously doesn’t need knowledge of quantum physics or even a rudimentary understanding of how the world in general works.

On the other hand, one shouldn’t give people like Trump, Berlusconi and Idi Amin too much credit. They ended up where they did largely due to historical happenstance, and millions of other conmen and used car salespeople stayed small-time.

Single-transferable vote with multi-member districts is not really a proportional system. Due to the necessarily small number of seats per district, it favours the larger parties, though not by as much as first-past-the-post or STV with single-member districts.

If you consider the political dynamics of systems with open-list PR, closed-list PR and MMR, the difference actually isn’t all that significant. The average person doesn’t have the time to investigate the merits of each candidate, so in these systems most people vote according to party preference, perhaps also considering the charisma of its leader. Of these systems, MMR is probably the least effective, since it requires an electoral threshold (5% is chosen in both Germany and New Zealand) to keep the system workable. This electoral threshold again favours the larger parties, and skews the system away from proportionality.

The top of the global quality-of-life rankings is dominated by countries using open and semi-closed PR.

Do you think this is helpful advice for someone who has already decided they want a photographer and have budgeted for it?

I think it’s good advice, which is unlikely to be followed in this case.

It’s cool that you didn’t feel the need for photos. I will point out that physical photos are one of the first items people try to grab when there’s a fire or other disaster that forces them from their homes.

All the more reason not to have them.

Different people will place different priorities on wedding events. It’s ok for OP to want to have photos of their wedding.

I think it’s OK for OP and anyone else to ignore my advice in this case.

Just don’t have one and save some money. My wife and I never miss having a wedding photo album. We also didn’t have a wedding, which helped mitigate the need for a photographer.

Frankly, this is something that already should be, and to a large degree is, manually checked by editors and referees.

While this is a problem that should be taken seriously, it’s also something that mainly affects trash-tier journals. You won’t find many hallucinated citations in Nature or Science (I doubt there has been a single one), and authors have strong incentives to prevent it from happening as they risk their reputation (and with it future grants).

Make citations hyperlinked and publicly accessible.

It’s already the standard in many journals that citations should include a hyperlinked DOI.

And if the research is mega paywalled, well… perhaps we should do something about that, too.

That’s also increasingly the standard, for example all of my publications (and I left science years ago) can be accessed in preprint format without a paywall.