The solution seems simple:
"I can't, I'm busy right now."
That's what people say when someone asks them to do something they don't want to, or where the cost outweighs the benefit.
1,175 karma · joined October 21, 2016
"I can't, I'm busy right now."
That's what people say when someone asks them to do something they don't want to, or where the cost outweighs the benefit.
From a technical perspective, this is clearly untrue.
I've lived in a couple of US cities now, it's very hit or miss. San Jose, CA? Plenty of neighborhoods without a park of usable size within walking distance, and the intellectual and financial investment in equipment is fairly limited. Boston, MA? Feels like you can't go 3 blocks without hitting a park, and many of them have great equipment.
In theory your statement is true, but the reality covers a spectrum that may or may not be acceptable.
My first career was in education, I worked with and saw many kids with a breadwinning parent who was absent most of the week, and they generally developed on the same spectrum as parents of equally present two parent households.
Anecdotally, my mother worked extremely long hours from her first child (I'm the youngest of my siblings by a decade) until I was a teenager, I routinely only saw her to say goodbye in the morning and on weekends. My siblings and I all ended up pretty far ahead on any developmental scale you choose, even though we basically only saw her on weekends.
Depending on necessity and value they can typically engineer more precision, but it gets very expensive very fast.
Pedantic but important - the final product wasn't usable even after spending an obscene amount of money customizing it to the task
It's very odd that you consider this a breach of contract, because these contracts are pretty heavily policed by regulators and the courts. Check every ticket you've bought, the contract of carriage includes terms specifically about overbooking.
For instance, here's United's Rule 4G:
All of UA’s flights are subject to overbooking which could result in UA’s inability to provide previously confirmed reserved space for a given flight or for the class of service reserved. In that event, UA’s obligation to the Passenger is governed by Rule 25.
First, at this point it's reasonable to expect passengers in the US to know that their booking is subject to availability in some limited number of edge cases. It's not particularly common but it's also very public knowledge that it sometime does happen.
Second, both parties have a cost to rebook - passengers pay a rebooking fee, airlines pay a bump fee (in a voucher if the passenger is foolish enough to accept that). Additionally, the rebooking fee for a passenger is significantly lower as a % of ticket cost than it is for the airline.
Note that this behavior is extremely, unbelievably rare. N=1 over hundreds of millions of flights rare.
There is a lot of other discontent regarding bumping on oversold flights, but the existence of a cash minimum doesn't by necessity lead to assaulting passengers.
Retained students (the current terminology for "held back") are much more likely to stop attending school early, and on average do not see larger academic gains in their year retained than their equivalent peers who are not retained.
The ONLY effective intervention is dramatically increased services for that student, delivered rapidly once the deficiency is detected. Many high performing charter school networks actually use this systematically, but only by overworking their teachers and generally burning them out within 5 years (retention rates at 5 years are frequently <10%, compared to 50% in the broader profession). Most teachers in mainstream district schools are covered by union contracts that limit their required working hours, so for the vast majority of schools even this isn't an option. Actually delivering these services in a sustainable manner is a financial burden American taxpayers appear largely unwilling to shoulder.
The tools themselves aren't the issue, the only thing specific to these tools is a complete mapping of proprietary error codes. If manufacturers were forced to release a list of all error codes and their meanings as part of the owner's manual this would be a non-issue.
He spent a bunch of years working on his skills and doing his own work, but now just subcontracts all the labor (mostly to immigrants), deals with legal/zoning issues, and keeps the client happy.
I suspect the old system (start at the bottom, amass skills & capital until you're on top) won't work anymore, because the capital arrangement strongly favors people with a money connection over skills. But time will tell.
I'm interning at a recently (12 months ago) acquired standout in the e-commerce provider field, and yesterday I was at a talk where the CTO/co-founder attributed their now multibillion dollar business to the exact same thing.
There are plenty of dumb problems that people just want to not worry about.
I will say, the downside is they spent about 7 or 8 years before going public, and another 4-5 before being acquired (for about 4.5x their IPO price). It wasn't quick money, because you can't prove stability in a year or two, but it is a very powerful business model.
I don't know the specifics of this particular plant's security procedures, but it's unlikely he was in a position to do any significant damage to the plant, and his clearance process was likely much less involved than would be for someone who is in a position to do real damage.
> Elsewhere, they’ve been using cool ground water to cool some of the stations. An experiment at Victoria station was the first, as water from the River Tyburn was used to cool the air in the station. This was only an experiment, but at Green Park, a permanent version was installed in 2012.
I'm really curious about this - what innovation does Arduino stifle?
From my position with some school level dabbling in embedded, it seems like the industry is quite healthy and that there is a lot of innovation happening in terms of hardware outside Arduino, especially on the commercial side of things, where the perception is that Arduino has next to no market share.
See pg 2
Susan Fowler can file a civil case and get a copy of the full report to read to a jury, but Uber's lawyers and outside counsel would have to be incompetent to let them release the full report publicly.
I don't see how non-competes are a desirable alternative, because they're orthogonal to the training costs problem.
University degrees have two levels of value: social signaling ("I have a degree"), and proof of knowledge & skills. From an instructional standpoint, social signaling isn't a program goal, it's just an outcome. It's good to realize that degrees are social signals and that has an effect on who applies and is successful in these programs, but the instructional aspects of the program are pretty much entirely focused on knowledge and skills.
So cheating really means that students who are cheating either value the knowledge and skills less than they should, or that the test is a poor method of assessing the knowledge and skills. The student values issue is complicated, and is really more about student selection criteria than anything else - if the school is only selecting students who want to socially signal, that's an issue that needs to be addressed in a systematic way.
Conversely, if the issue isn't a social one but rather about skills, the professor probably isn't doing a good job teaching the material, and there are plenty of ways to remediate that - lower stakes, higher frequency assessment, improving instructional materials and time, etc. In general, both of these problems are pretty well solved by having a more diverse assessment set than just standardized, proctored tests. Even if you can cheat your way through a 2 hour midterm/final, doing the same for a 2 month long course project is much harder. I haven't taken any of the GT course,s but based on their udacity listings (which mirror the MS courses), I would guess appears they are doing fairly bespoke projects on complex topics (i.e. machine learning), where cheating is harder to hide.
> The simple solution would be to require that candidates sit the test in a room which is physically supervised by someone who is responsible to the university.
Beyond the fact that a motivated individual can also cheat on an in-person exam (something like 60% of US college students admit to cheating sometime in their college career), that would create a whole other layer of logistics and cost. It's a lot easier just to have good instruction throughout the program than to spend huge amounts of time trying to catch people who are willing to cheat on their tests.
Since everyone basically agrees that Levandowski downloaded these files from google, Occam's Razor suggests that the guy who knowingly stole the files provided them along. Doesn't rule out a different sort of malfeasance, but certainly it's worth exploring that avenue to the fullest.
No one has yet implemented a real point-to-point autopilot, and there are none in the pipeline for certification. It's possible there are engineers working on them, especially at Boeing/Airbus, but given airframe lifetimes at the major commercial carriers pilots are here for at least another 20 years with them, and probably 30-40 years at cargo carriers.
The facts of the situation were this:
1. United offered vouchers up to $800 - this is the volunteer phase.
2. They received no volunteers.
3. Moving on from the volunteer phase, they selected 4 passengers to be removed from the flight.
4. They informed those passengers they needed to get off the flight (so now they're covered by the DoT minimum compensation, which is unrelated to #1).
5. Mr. Dao refused to VOLUNTARILY leave his seat, but 3 other passengers did.
6. Police were called, video was taken, lawsuits were started.
"Voluntarily" in the sentence you're quoting doesn't refer to #1 above, it refers to the fact that Mr. Dao, after being told by a gate agent to leave the plane, did not do so. It does not have any relationship to the DoT "volunteer" rules, it has to do with whether he was willing to leave the plane after being told to do so by a person who was empowered by their employer to get people to leave the plane (although their exact legal right to do so remains somewhat grey).
edit: your -> you're