bryondowd

Presumably, if you have unlimited resources, you can create most, if not all, of what makes that land in NYC valuable. You could create enough city districts to meet demand.

There's lots of factors that go into the value of land. Available amenities, jobs, being near other people, quality of schools and other resources, transportation, etc. But those all seem to boil down to scarce resources being pooled in one area. If you could mass produce amenities, buildings, school supplies, etc, then NYC wouldn't have any inherent value, because its equal would exist everyone someone cared to plop one down where there was enough demand to fill it with people.

I didn't go to school for it, but I did manage to apply for an opening, get through the initial screening, and go to the academy as a trainee. Washed out in the finals by a few points.

From what I saw of the entire process, the biggest issue they have is the strictness of their hiring process. It's very bureaucratic, in the interest of fairness, but also very harsh. They get tens of thousands of applicants, but only have enough throughput at the academy for a few thousand students per year, and they wash out around 50% of those students. Then more wash out at their respective facilities.

The kicker is that when they bring in current/retiring controllers to act as instructors at this academy, they put them through the same course, with the same final, and only about 2/3 of the instructor candidates pass. In other words, their program is so strict that a third of people actually doing the job couldn't qualify to even start the job at a trainee level.

I was told, while there, that the final exams simulate a level of traffic somewhere between a level 9 or 10 tower. Trainees who complete the academy get sent to towers below level 8, and have to succeed there before being able to transfer to a higher level tower.

If I gave them some benefit, I'd say the idea was to get the best of the best into the low level positions so that as many as possible would progress up to the top levels, but when they can't even fill their low levels because they are cutting half their hires at the academy, it seems like they might be overdoing it.

List of facilities and their levels, for those curious what kind of airport warrants a given level.

[1] https://123atc.com/facilities

Yep, my dad spent his entire career as first a contractor for the FAA, and later an FAA employee. Modest pay compared to private sector, but the stability balanced that out. Worked in the same place around 30 years, in a low cost of living area.

When I finally got around to getting my CS degree, I took my first job offer, in a private industry. But the first chance I got, I took a contractor job for the FAA, to chase that same stability.

Now, my dad's working for no pay, and I'm watching contractors around me getting laid off or having their hours reduced to 12 or 16 per week to stretch the leftover contract funds through the end of February. I got only a small cut myself, to 36, but the ax could come down any day. So much for stability. I'm not looking to jump ship and find a private sector dev job, but my 5 years of experience is with technologies and tools that the private industry has largely left behind, or in niches that also require domain specific skills I don't have. I feel like I'm almost having to start from scratch if I want to get my income out from under the capricious nature of modern politics. My dad on the other hand has pretty much resigned himself to accepting things as they are, since he doesn't think there's much of a market for 55yo project managers who only know about air traffic systems.

All that said, I expect a lot of contract workers in particular are going to start avoiding government contracts in the future, and considering they already don't seem to be getting much of the best and brightest, I wonder how they are going to manage to maintain any momentum in developing new technologies for air traffic safety.

My experience with a BS in CS degree was that 60% of the classes provided no career value at all. There's all the general ed classes meant to make you well rounded, and then there's classes in the core that are either useless (Calculus, very few CS grads will ever use it) or provide history/background about the field that is nice to know, but not generally useful or necessary.

Out of the remaining 40%, the level of overlap and repetition was just absurd. It seemed like each class spent the first half of the semester re-covering things that were covered in prerequisite classes. So maybe 30% of your actual class time is spent on new concepts, skills, etc.

Of those, probably 1/3 involve very basic things, like bubble sorts and the like, which help you build basic problem solving skills and language familiarity, but not much else. Then you get another 1/3 of CS related stuff, like architectures, patterns, SDLC, etc, which is probably the stuff that separates the degree holders from the self-taught in most cases. Then, if you're lucky, you get a couple of classes that are elective and teach something moderately interesting or useful. As I recall, the only classes I had in that category were a class on Computer Graphics (which ended up just being a bit of Java Swing and a bit of math to explain some of it), Web App Engineering (neat class using ASP.NET MVC), and an AI class that really just covered some solvers and search algos, topping out with Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing.

Point being, I could definitely see someone being able to learn all the same CS stuff in a year, if they were self-motivated enough. A few good programming books, a few good CS concepts books, and you'd be covered. Honestly, you could probably cover CS with both more depth and breadth in a year than I got in my degree, if you put a full-time effort into it.

And all that is ignoring the fact that half my class graduated with virtually no ability to actually sit and write code of their own beyond just copy-pasting snippets from online examples until they had something that worked well enough to pass. The only real value of a CS degree, as far as I can tell, is to signal to employers that you can show up and put in at least a minimal effort at something for years without giving up. I guess that makes for a useful enough filter to keep employers using it and keep colleges in business.

While I knew of Carmack and Torvalds, I only recently read a bit about Kernighan and Ritchie. And that was only because I got roped into doing some maintenance on a rather old system, programmed in C, which used a syntactic style that I hadn't encountered before. A bit of research on some of the structures I saw lead me to pre-ISO standardization of the C language, where the closest thing to a standard was a book written by those two, and the resulting pseudo-standard referred to as K&R C.

I bailed out of that project as soon as humanly possible, by the way. Not just because of the ancient language, but the entire organizational structure of both the codebase and the team itself.

Most of the places here in the US seem to have gone to chip only for small payments, with a signature on amounts over some limit, dependant on merchant. Wish we'd catch up and use pins.

Interesting, I've been using a Discover as my primary payment method for a couple years now, and I think I've run into maybe two businesses in that time that accepted Visa/Mastercard but not Discover. Perhaps it's regional?

To play devil's advocate, any unnatural pattern would suffice. You could tap out 'shave and a haircut, two bits' and probably more people would recognize it. Bonus, you could tap the first part, and many people would probably think to tap the ending back to you.

Presumably, the second was shorter, rather than the day was longer.

EDIT: More specifically, if you take an average rotation of the Earth as 86164.1 seconds, and divide by 10, then 100, then 100, you get 0.861641, which would be the conversion from our seconds to the metric second in that scenario. Likewise, the metric minute would be 86.1641 of our seconds or about 1.43607 of our minutes, the metric hour would be 8616.41 of our seconds or 143.607 of our minutes or 2.39345 of our hours. The day would be slightly shorter than our day, reducing the need for leap seconds to keep our time aligned with the sun.

I think the idea is to counter one artificial construct with another. It's been shown that otherwise identical resumes are less likely to be selected when the name is clearly female or minority rather than a common white male name. That would indicate a hiring bias that has nothing to do with ability. Since it's virtually impossible to fix that bias, a common solution is to introduce an opposite bias. Not perfect, but I've never seen a better solution posited. "Just have better hiring managers/practices" doesn't seem to scale.

That would seem to indicate that reducing civilian loss wouldn't be a likely result of targeting improvements. After all, we ended the war in Japan by intentionally inflicting civilian casualties to force surrender. Seems likely future leaders would make the same calculation. So, the strategy would likely involve destroying the opponent's ability to retaliate add then start massacring civilians until you get an unconventional surrender.

You do, however, see them tell the engineers they can't have product X they requested, because product Y is the same thing but about a half million bucks cheaper. Then the engineers have to add a year of extra development to make product Y actually work, costing about half a million in development salaries and who knows how much opportunity cost from delaying the project by a year.

Then again, I shouldn't complain. People like that mean there's always lots of work available for people like me.

I doubt anyone is driving out competition with free product, but using free product to hook a new client is definitely a thing that happens.

That's not too say that there's guys on street corners offering free drugs to random passersby. Rather there's lots of dealers who just deal to aquaintances, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, etc. In that case they can spread a few hundred dollars worth of product around to non-users within their social network in hopes of picking up another client or two, who will end up generating reliable profit for a long time.

Have to remember the world population was much smaller. Maybe 150 million in Alexander's time and 400 million in Ghenghis Khan's. They'd have had to do a much more efficient butchery to reach the same raw numbers.

That said, a little googling seems to indicate that the Mongols do, in fact, win that competition. They were pretty big on genocide.

If you don't pay, it destroys your credit rating, which in many areas means you won't be able to rent a place to live from anything but a private party. I believe they could also potentially get an injunction against you and garnish your wages, but I'm not certain about that. Your college also may withhold your transcript, which can impact some employers who require that.

Lots of ways they can make your life just as miserable for not paying.

What math are you using? By my understanding, women are able to reproduce for around or close to half their lives.

First result[1] I found while googling defines women of reproductive age as 15-49, and claims that group makes up 24% of the overall population, which would line up with my intuition.

[1] PDF http://www.who.int/management/UsingDataToImproveServiceDeliv...

EDIT: Ah, reread your comment, looks like your math lines up with mine, just misunderstood. Thought you meant 7% of the population were women of reproductive age, not that 7% of the population were women of reproductive age on the pill.

Although it also makes me wonder if a sizable percentage of women outside reproductive age are on the pill. Either because they are fertile longer than average, or as treatment for other conditions.

He didn't say anything about making it more valuable, just that it would increase liquidity. In other words, the idea would be to prevent property from sitting dormant in a bad market, as an owner who has no profitable use for the property would be forced to sell it to someone who does, to get at least some value out of it before the tax eats all the value.

Perhaps something like an abandonment tax could accomplish this. Force owners to either sell it or use it. Even if they aren't using it optimally, just requiring some minimum usage to avoid a heavy penalty tax could go a long way to eliminating properties that are just tied up by someone hoping the value goes up eventually.

I would think zoning laws would get in the way there. You'd have to get the area re-zoned from commercial to residential. Which gets into whatever the local politics of that happen to be.

That's twisting some assumptions of the comparison. The comparison was to casinos, which do not bet decades of profits on a single day's gambling. The equivalent would be investing in your index every payday for decades, not suddenly moving it all at once. That's where the mathematical near inevitability comes from. You aren't betting on one day, one spin of the wheel, you're betting on a general trend across ten thousand spins/days.

Exactly. Seems to me it would be more plausible for a candidate without deep pockets backing them to be able to run a competitive campaign on issues the district cares about. Simply because they could just go around knocking on doors. A candidate and nine helpers each talking to 100 people a week for ten weeks could theoretically cover the entire district. Not to mention being able reach a good chunk of them by just hanging out at a local grocery store or visiting local bars and other hotspots. Throwing money at a hotspot race would have rapidly diminishing returns compared to a race with several hundred thousand people who can only be reached in numbers by broadcast ads or a truly massive campaign force.

EDIT: Although I suppose the tactic could at that point be turned to buying voters more directly. Spend a ton of money on something that benefits everyone in the district and make it clear that it'll keep coming only if they vote for your candidate, and you might have the same effect.

That would result in Wyoming congressmen having less than 2,000 constituents each, while Californian congressmen would have over 127,000 each. Wyoming voters would have about 65x as much power as California voters in the house.

Removing wealthy 'special interests would probably have some interesting effects. Off the top of my head, I expect we'd have better regulations on banks and the like. And perhaps Mickey Mouse (and everything else more than 75 years old) would be public domain.

Ok, but who gets to decide where to draw the line between harmful behaviors and nonharmful ones. One could argue that just about everything we do has some degree of risk, some more than others. As you say it's a continuum. Should we ban unhealthy foods? Should we ban contact sports? How about extramarital sex? The values of the person you ask will dictate whether any given thing is a vice or a pastime.

What right do you have to say whether the enjoyment someone finds in a vice is offset by the damage it does to their health or finances or social life? And for any given vice, usually the ill effects are a function of how heavily one uses the vice. So does a full ban to save the few who overindulge balance against depriving the rest of the option to make small trades against their own lives for some pleasure? Should we ban alcohol to save the alcoholics at the cost of everyone else being able to unwind with a beer? We tried that and it didn't go very well.

Evidence seems to point to education and access to treatment being far more effective than bans. And it's very difficult to get any kind of long term results by involuntarily treating someone, so I'm not sure there's much to be gained by criminalization with enforced treatment instead of just punishment.

At the end, you pretty much have to let people make their own informed decisions. Anything else sounds like a step toward an authoritarian state dictating everything you do.

There's a clear difference between gambling/drinking/smoking/drug abuse and the crimes you mentioned like embezzling and human trafficking. The former are self victimizing while the latter directly victimize others. That's the rationale behind legalization and why nobody would suggest it for regular crimes. Essentially it's giving people the freedom to make their own mistakes as long as they aren't hurting anyone but themselves. Instead we tailor the laws to protect others from being hurt by collateral effects (no smoking in public buildings, no stealing for drug money, no advertising cigarettes to kids, etc) and we raise money, often to support programs to educate people about the risks of those behaviors and help those who want to recover.

From what I've seen from places that have legalized various vices, it seems to always end up doing more good than criminalization.

I usually consider gambling a form of entertainment. By that note, it's no more impoverishing than anything else people blow their money on for their own amusement. Some people have a gambling problem and spend more than they can afford because they expect they'll win eventually, but unwise spending is hardly unique to gambling.

Either all three must be lying, or all three must be telling the truth, right? So wouldn't you have to discard the probabilities of them disagreeing? There would be a 1/27 chance of all lying, and wouldn't there only be an 8/27 chance of all telling the truth? The other 18/27 would be a mixture of lies and truths. So really, if we're just comparing the odds of those two outcomes to each other, would the probability just be 8/9 that it is raining in Seattle?

Been a while since I've done anything with probabilities, so perhaps I'm way off here.

18 maybe for physical appearance, but mental maturity and brain development completes in the early-mid 20s. I would definitely be the odd one out at my current age if I were stuck with 17 and 22yo me, unless you were just using physical appearance, in which case yeah, I guess 17 would stand out.

My school didn't allow us to use the showers after PE. First period PE meant you could either minimize your participation or be sweaty all day. The showers were only available for the sports teams after school.

Don't know how common that is.

Well, if transmission charges factor in losses during transmission, then the generation cost would influence some part of the transmission cost. If generation was an order of magnitude cheaper, then presumably the amount of power lost between the generator and the end user would cost a negligible amount, whereas I would assume it's currently a good chunk of your distribution costs.

ianaEE

Being able to use the same amount of energy cheaper is only half the equation. I'd be more interested in what we can do with 10x as much energy at the same price, or 100x. Could open up entirely new industries or make things that are currently infeasibly expensive novelties into commonplace materials.

One obvious win would be desalination plants to allow mass scale water production in areas with little or no fresh water but access to ocean water. Right now that's only economically feasible in limited cases, to my understanding.