numbers_guy (u/numbers_guy)

numbers_guy commented on Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11495... · Posted by u/dargscisyhp

francasso · 25 days ago

Maybe it's time to move to Europe or China

numbers_guy · 25 days ago

There is nowhere to run and hide. Europe is worse than the US on this front. China also demands party loyalty. In a sense this is just the human condition. The ruling faction demands loyalty. Only a very advanced human civilization could move past that and allow criticism of the ruling class. Maybe the US had achieved that for a brief movement in the past or maybe it was just an illusion.

EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

stonemetal12 · 4 months ago

>Isn't the pope infallible, by definition?

No, the Pope isn't infallible by definition. Catholics believe he is capable of making infallible statements, but it isn't a 24/7 eats breakfast infallibly superpower and not every statement is infallible.

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

No the Pope is not infallible and you can disagree with the Pope. Sure. But you cannot use that as a cop out to turn Catholicism into an arbitrary Protestant sect where you make up moral values as you go based on your political inclinations. The whole point of Catholicism is that you have a whole institution whose job it is to guide the Church. If you believe you know better than the clergy on every single topic, you are by definition a Protestant. Lots of these Protesting Catholics have worldviews that are entirely incompatible with the fundamentals of Catholicism, but they do not want to drop the Catholic aesthetic, because it gives them an air of superiority over their fellow Protestants which they look down upon.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

kelnos · 4 months ago

> No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did.

I'm not convinced that every Catholic you know constitutes a representative sample of Catholics worldwide.

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

If you look at my other posts, I acknowledge this and I am only replying to posts who pretend to speak for the whole worldwide Church.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

ZeroClickOk · 4 months ago

According to the rules in the first post, I cannot talk about politics in this thread, but the summary is, the political inclinations that he displayed were "uncomfortable".

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

Said political inclinations were written in the Catechism before any of us knew who Pope Francis was.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

swat535 · 4 months ago

Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word.

As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.

His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.

He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.

- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

Please stop talking in such general terms. No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did. I have been educated in a Catholic school, which also served as a Catholic seminary, and I never heard Pope Francis say anything that was not in line with the catechism that we were taught back then.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

contrarian1234 · 4 months ago

Right of course. No female Protestant priests whatsoever. Definitely not a policy issue

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

That female clergy is only a thing in dead Protestant churches exactly illustrates my point.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

The real (non theological) reason why women are not allowed to be priests is because if you take a random mass of humans and you let them elect a leader, in 100% of the cases that leader will be a man. So don't blame Catholics for the faults of humanity.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

yodsanklai · 4 months ago

> .. even as an atheist

lots of christians didn't like him, considering he was too progressive

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

Only American Protesting Catholics had issues with him. The same ones that post Deus Vult memes on Facebook.

numbers_guy commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

jjude · 4 months ago

Pope John Paul II was also extremely popular across the world.

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

Since I see a lot of people commenting on this topic, I would like to offer a different perspective.

Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.

None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.

There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.

numbers_guy commented on How the U.S. became a science superpower steveblank.com/2025/04/15... · Posted by u/groseje

cs702 · 4 months ago

Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:

> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.

> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.

> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”

> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.

The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:

> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.

numbers_guy · 4 months ago

I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.

The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.

Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.