1,438 karma · joined January 8, 2019
Noting the existence of theft throughout the ages is not an endorsement.
My point is that we should be careful who we ask to pay for enforcement. It's expensive to maintain a system of courts and jails for petty crimes. Rikers is a rather egregious example, but almost $1 billion per year where 85% of detainees are pretrial!
I think it's legitimate to ask to what exent the community should cover the enforcement cost.
I guess, but conversely I'd argue that organized retail theft has been around pretty much as long as supply chains have existed. That's the mob's bread and butter. The phrase "riding shotgun" is in common use. Perhaps mass shoplifting from the store is a new tactic, but personally I look at this situation and ask, "what has changed"?
For one, we've sort of collectively realized how terrible modern jails are (Rikers anyone?). And that's good.
A second conclusion I draw is that retail stores have been gutted... walmart-ized... every ounce of efficiency wrung out of them. Have you ever been to one of these massive retail outlets and had trouble finding anyone that works there? A few months ago everyone was clutching pearls about some 150 yd stretch of train track in LA that was continually being robbed... and I can make a wild guess that this was the result of 1) skeleton crews, 2) minimal security on the ground and 3) shipping containers that are running with sub-standard defense mechanisms because they're simply too much work (slows down loading, probably break a lot, etc.).
Yes organized crime should be punished, but these companies seem to throw up they're hands and say "Gee golly, we have no idea why $20 million dollars of merchandise watched by 5 overworked, low wage employees and 1 loss prevention officer is such a target! It's a mystery!"
I don't hate mega corporations (ok maybe a little), but they definitely have a hand in creating this situation. And it's rarely commented upon when discussing the recent rise in shoplifting.
(Edit: I forgot my favorite shoplifting fact... up until recently, reports showed that both shoplifting and wage theft "cost the economy" around $40 billion per year. Comparing prosecution rates of the two crimes is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Not to be "that guy" but any linear, translation-invariant operator can be written that way. This is the essence of harmonic analysis.
I actually studied dispersive pdes (Schodinger, KdV, etc.), though not with a computer. In that study, the properties of the Fourier transform on L2-based spaces are very important.
The other joke is a that I do software now, so of course the phd was useless, haha!
Water. A slight increase in global temperature means more water sloshing around in the atmosphere. Of course "the weather" is partially a result of how that water is distributed around the world... but in conjunction with a more "dynamic" atmosphere, this can lead to things like: weather events occurring in places they usually don't or more severe weather events or stranger timing than usual.
The tooling is the #1 reason I'd like to learn rust. I have not kept up with C++ and I'm not sure I ever will... sometimes plain C seems more straightforward. But those languages (C++ especially) have suffered from lack of standard tooling, in my opinion.
Even C# being a few years younger than Java seems to have made a huge difference in tooling availability (I'm sure having a single corporate driver during its lifetime made a difference, too).
I'm excited by the prospect of a compiled language with modern tooling.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=304
(I haven't looked at the paper linked in the title.)
What I find absurd is the re-badging of appliances. A clothes dryer or a gas furnace is a very simple device. So simple, in fact, that you will find the same control board inside a wide variety of seemingly "different" products.
https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2010/12/28/spaced-math-re...
https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2011/03/10/space-math-rep...
And an example of some of my cards:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z714xpq36nvn3o1/rudin.pdf?dl=0
If I'm being honest, I went overboard. Like I said, I literally memorized entire books. Entering cards into the system was the most difficult part. But it absolutely works! Had I stayed in academia, I would have loved to developed a set of flash cards to go along with course material.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
The qualifying exams were difficult until I reached some "critical mass" of knowledge. Then I could regurgitate proofs and even attack novel problems easily.
There's an analogy here somewhere to the "leetcode" style of software engineer interview. On one hand qualifying exams and leetcode questions are a stupid gatekeeping mechanism, but on the other hand the best researchers/engineers I know have a huge number of facts and examples memorized and ready at their fingertips. I didn't think I needed to do so, but perhaps there is something to suffering through the rote memorization phase to make what comes next that much easier.
On the other hand, new fruit varieties are bred all the time. Human breeding programs can produce huge variations in a few decades. I have pluot trees that are hybrid species developed very recently.
And think: 650 years ago, Europeans barely even heard of the tomato and potato!
Human pressure on agriculture can both speed things up and slow them waaay down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem
[1] https://clgiles.ist.psu.edu/papers/NC-2000-learning-chaos-nn...
d^2/dt^2(sin kt) = -k^2 sin(kt)
This idea is used in the study of partial differential equations, especially dispersive.
Depends highly on the field. I knew some materials science PhD students who were relatively well-funded to work in the lab (~$35k per year), but often spent nights and weekends baby sitting experiments. But there was no undergraduate materials science program, so no teaching!
I was in the mathematics department where most people worked as teaching assistants for $22k per year (summer work available) but otherwise did as they pleased. I would maybe meet with my adviser for a few minutes per week? And after you've taught calculus five times, you can kind of coast.
I then spent some time in the Swiss system as a postdoc... night and day! I went from the "American Riviera" (UCSB) to the "Swiss Riviera" (EPFL), and so living costs were about the same. But PhD students were paid more than twice what I was paid in the US.
Also much less teaching at EPFL, but that was probably due to differences in the "type" of institution.
(And what is a riviera?!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Remember that Google and Apple were caught trying to control the employment marketplace. Keep 'em happy, but not too happy!
Geez, as someone who doesn't actively watch TV (whatever the tween children or my millennial wife is watching), you're making me feel even worse about wasting time slogging through the entirety of the most recent season.
My partner reached out to a few small business development centers but, while they were very eager to help, we ultimately received only very minor feedback and a general thumbs up. I'd say in the two years it took us to hone a winning technical proposal, my partner was able to become somewhat of an expert in the rules. During that time we also applied for a non-SBIR government grant, unsuccessfully, where we lost a lot of points for being a 2-man team. If you're willing to put in the time, it's very doable to write an application which follows the rules.
In fact, I'd say one thing we ran into was finding ourselves "inventing" rules because we were overly cautious with our compliance to what we thought were the rules. The application truly is the most difficult part of compliance for a SBIR Phase I.
The problems with our Phase I were purely technical. We weren't able to advance the state-of-the-art enough to be able to write a convincing commercialization plan. And I don't think there was any consulting firm we could have hired to fix that problem.