John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

Hi everyone @Science !

I'm in the process of writing (and hopefully aggregating contributions for) short scripts to help academics/researchers do various things more effectively. This is still very much in its infancy, but considering how often I tend to automate things, I expect it to grow at a pretty steady pace.

Current examples include short API wrappers to query different journals for given search terms and date ranges to pull pdfs directly, and a modular RSS helper to redirect to papers directly from your feeds. I'm currently working on scripts for remote cluster execution, traversing and executing code on git experimental branches and more!

I've started a repo here https://github.com/johnabs/ASR, and if anybody has ideas for scripts that researchers could use to help with their workflow, that would be awesome, and it would be great if people are willing to contribute.
#Science #research #coding #automation

@freemo (because I saw your boost of @nyvoter 's post)

I know this is a bit off-topic for this particular instance, but I've been thinking a lot about politics lately, and I would seriously love to hear anyone's feedback/opinions. Please let me know what you think below, and I'd be happy to discuss with you.

I am becoming increasingly concerned with the erosion of rights by the various appellate and supreme courts in the United States. I also find it concerning, that many people are increasingly unaware of this information, and are pushing for new rights, while their current rights are already under siege from, at the worst malevolent, and at the best incompetent/impotent, judiciaries/legislature. For any who want to know more, check out the most recent YT video from the Institute for Justice. They regularly attempt to fight clear instances of governmental over-reach, but with limited success due to decades of immoral precedents.

This, along with laws which are clearly not designed to be equally efficacious across the various income strata, makes me increasingly concerned about the necessity of governmental re-structuring, preferably by people who are results oriented, rather than "media" or "re-election" oriented.

AOC is an excellent example of someone who, despite wanting to align with *some* of her policies, I find it nearly impossible to due so with her consistent alarmism. Trump is yet another one of these individuals, both elected due to their ability to "clap-back" and their "anti-establishment" views. However, this clear disdain for the establishment on both sides of the aisle, somehow continues to produce state/local election results of the same incumbents with the same mentality, and accompanying impotency. They create laws based on special interests, and serve platitudes on a silver platter to the rest of their constituents that they're screwing over, all while maintaining the razors edge of getting as many corporate lobbying dollars as possible, yet maintaining re-election potential for the next year.

I realize I've placed myself in the precarious position of "it's easy to smell a rotten egg, but difficult to lay a better one". Thus, I'm hoping to provide some interesting perspectives that may improve the legislative process/precedents. Unfortunately, the judicial system at the moment is much too far gone for me to even comment on.

1. Results based laws. All (non eminently moral) laws must have a specified goal, a way to measure that goal, and must be repealed if satisfactory progress is not made toward this goal within a predetermined amount of time. If it fails and is repealed, it cannot be re-enacted until a sufficient number of election cycles have transpired. Hopefully this will force legislators to be more considerate and careful, and this allows people to see how poor a job these legislators are doing at actually governing the country. E.g. Gun control. Reduce homicides/improve citizen safety by 50% within 3-5 years (10% per year benchmark). If the implementation fails, too bad, you've had your shot until 2 more re-election cycles, do better next time.

Corollary: this same category of laws with no measurable effect, should be removed (no whale fishing on Sunday in Ohio, for example).

2. Laws passed must be of sufficient length to convey the context, and any and all statues passed within a law must be co-related. I.e. no more massive "pork" bills where random legislators shove random crap into the bill, or change a small piece of preexisting law, to scratch the back of their lobby buddies, or divert tax payer dollars to a bailout while saying it's actually for "Covid relief". All issues within the bill MUST be evaluated on merit, individually if necessary, to achieve the necessary result.

3. Principle: Violating the rights of individuals cannot and will not be tolerated, and any and all state, local and federal officers must be able to be held accountable for their actions. There is a massive difference between perpetrators not being held accountable, and victims having zero recourse to begin with. It is incredibly unfortunate that prosecutors are often unable or unwilling to press charges against other governmental officials due to the supreme court sleight of hand that is used to give various agents nigh complete immunity.

Finally, I would like to make a philosophical point here. I think the current philosophy of modern culture lies precariously at the edge of belief in absolute truth. Without this fundamental axiom that truth exists and we can (at least try to) know it, we reach a world-view where interpretation is everything. E.g. the constitution being a living document.To some, this means that it was designed to be changed over time if necessary, but to others means it is up to the will of the interpreter what, if any, of the constitution needs to be considered for a law to remain on the books.

If the latter is the case, then any supreme court majority has the right to usurp power from the legislative branch at any given time, and rule any law unconstitutional just because they don't like it, and can "cite" their own subjective interpretation of the document. Interpretation of any meaning that exists, must be done with the author's intent in mind, or you're simply projecting yourself onto the canvas. It goes from an instruction manual of how to run the country, to modern "art".

To conclude, I think we are losing rights, being fleeced by the government to divert tax-payer dollars to special interests which rarely, if ever, impact the common person, and are having our liberties restricted by people who "know what's best" when, in fact, they barely know anything, other than how to con people into keeping them in power. I understand this is not the case for many individual politicians; however, the composition of the political network seems hell-bent toward this (possibly emergent) reality. I hope that conversations like this one will help to get people thinking about ways we can impact the political climate for the better, and get people in office who actually care about the freedoms of their constituents, even if it makes them somewhat unpopular.