You parsed that one specific incident correctly, but sems like you also missed key parts of the article that helped bring a bit more nuance into the discussion. I thought this rather short Nature article was actually pretty balanced. Two key quotes are:
* "“The rules have not changed” under the Trump administration, Grode says."
* "The hazardousness of the materials that the scientists sent will need to be assessed in each case, as will the scientists’ intent in using the materials, but their lack of transparency will make their cases more difficult, Grode says. “It’s not so much what was being sent, __but the effort to conceal what was being sent__,” he says."
Nor nuance in the Director of the FBI personally getting himself involved, to tweet falsely about this student's "pathogen [sic] smuggling". There's no nuance in those words—words that incited three thousand conspiratorial-minded comments, by the way—three thousand commenters who sincerely, truly believe this C. elegans scientist is a bioterrorist. (Read them for yourself if you like). Where's the nuance in any of that?
IANAL, but I think it goes even one step beyond that, which is that the item and derived works can't even be used to support a commercial enterprise, even if the (derived) work isn't being sold or seen by the outside public.
Seems like 1-3 above could be answered/tracked with some plumbing pipeline elbow grease leveraging tools like open source edgartools[1] (just a happy user) or sec-api[2] paid proprietary service.
4 would be a heavier lift because it goes beyond the basic skill set of an average data/junior analyst.
You have to go back more years to see the trendline. BLS has a different chart showing the male participation rate dropping while female participation rate has remained fairly constant over the past decade.[1]
By my rough estimation that's ~7M men unaccounted for by simply not participating in the 'traditional' labour force. Keep in mind that it could also 'simply' be that a lot of those unaccounted men are working but in ways that the government(s) at different levels are unable to reliably track.
There have been some articles and attention picking up on this trend over the past few years.[2]
[2] is an interesting article, but it doesn’t go into why male participation rates are going down more than female rates, outside of the fact that men are much more likely to be convicted of felonies which makes work prospects worse.
Anecdotally what I have seen most in men are the shut in NEETs who live with their parents and/or collect disability and play video games all day. Why this is uniquely a phenomenon for men is unclear to me, but on the other side I know of lots of trophy wives who just go to yoga class and salons all day and do not produce economic value, and they are not put under the same microscope as NEETs.
>>What's even less clear to me is why the apparatus of state seems so willing to go along with these whims of the executive.
Can you expand on this a bit more? Are you suggesting that government employees should quit in protest? For better or for worse, the American President is in charge of the executive branch and (most? all?) US government employees are part of that branch.
Clearly they aren't as that would have implied Biden could have simply dictated that the DEA reschedule marijuana, which seems to have been effectively halted by stalling until Trump got in office by stalling the hearings until one day after swearing in.
Except that many NYC public schools have yellow buses that park in the narrow streets during pickup or dropoff which are the cause for 20 minutes of gridlock along those streets. "A couple of hours" seems to be rather unusual.
>>I've been fighting trying to chunk SEC filings properly, specifically surrounding the strange and inconsistent tabular formats present in company filings.
For this specific use case you can also try edgartools[1] which is a library that was relatively recently released that ingests SEC submissions and filings. They don't use OCR but (from what I can tell) directly parse the XBRL documents submitted by companies and stored in EDGAR, if they exist.
>>I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them.
It's very sobering when we realize that we too will one day be just like them.
Right now my default reaction to phone call from unknown number is to ignore it instead of picking it up. Hopefully this will stay with me as I get older.
(my parents are notably different in this default)
Caller IDs can be easily spoofed. For example, you may receive a call from what appears to be your bank's fraud department. The person on the other side of the line may warn you of some (fake) suspicious activity and "send you" a one-time security code to verify your identity. In reality, the scammer has already gained access to your email account and is now trying to log onto your bank account, for which they need the one-time code.
There is an existing scam that goes something like that. I probably got some of the details wrong.
I'm like your parent commenter and I would expand on what they call "unknown number".
I don't take calls from "unknown or unexpected caller id". I had someone call me recently that I was actually expecting to call me. But their caller id had their personal name instead of the company I expected it from so I didn't take it. They can leave a message. And they did.
If "my bank" calls me but I don't expect it, the caller id can have my bank's name all it wants. They can leave a message and I'll call them back at a number I find on my card / online.
What might work is if I was expecting my bank to call me and then a scammer calls me with bank caller id. But they'd also need to know what it's about. I've also found that if you're already in contact with large companies and they call you back they very much don't user caller id at all. All their outbound calls say "unknown number". Had this while troubleshooting a phone number transfer.
If I do expect a call from an unknown number and thus take them, I still don't take phone calls with my name. I say things like "Hello". That's it. Then they many times ask "Is this so and so" without explaining who they are, which I find pretty rude and dumb. So my answer to that is: "The question is who you are and what you want". I've had many encounters where the answer from them then makes it clear they are legitimate and they probably thought I was rude but I'd rather be rude than out of my savings. Training for when I'm 80.
by "unknown numbers", I mean "not at my address book", which is pretty small. So this excludes my bank's security department - why would it be there?
And if scammer spoofs my friend's number, I should be able to recognize it's not my friend, or at least understand thar my friend won't need my bank code.
(Sadly modern phones don't make it easy to tell if the label is from your address book or from external syatem. Adding personal prefixes to end of names, like "John (from NY2020 party)" helps a lot with this.)
It won't be phone calls. We don't trust them. Our parents / grandparents did.
It might be a brain interface pushing intrusive thoughts. Our grandkids will quietly ignore these thoughts like zen masters because they recognized spam. It might be a perfect video chat from your spouse, all spoofed by AI. People will adapt but not us because it'll be new and emerging when we're already crystalized in our patterns.
>>Maybe the military is just that good at filtering out those types during psychological testing, or maybe belonging is far more important than ideology.
The more mundane reason is probably because it's more appealing to use those skills to enter law enforcement or become a private military contractor than knowingly and overtly breaking away from society to form and maintain an organization that uses violence to achieve specific political aims.
You parsed that one specific incident correctly, but sems like you also missed key parts of the article that helped bring a bit more nuance into the discussion. I thought this rather short Nature article was actually pretty balanced. Two key quotes are:
* "“The rules have not changed” under the Trump administration, Grode says."
* "The hazardousness of the materials that the scientists sent will need to be assessed in each case, as will the scientists’ intent in using the materials, but their lack of transparency will make their cases more difficult, Grode says. “It’s not so much what was being sent, __but the effort to conceal what was being sent__,” he says."