forkandwait

I am amazed by the pervasiveness of the assumption that most of the human race is inherently just too stupid to become upper middle like us.

So why can't we invest enough time and money in these people to make them engineers and technicians? Then they might be able to start shops that make and distribute the tourist trinkets mentioned by another poster. Why is the only solution that a large company that someone else creates moves in and provides low skill jobs?

Isn't that a one off class? Cool, but an organization needs maintenance to be activated well in a pinch.

Well, the national guard aren't civilians or local, plus they get sent to fight in wars and shit.

I am thinking more like a level below volunteer firepeople, with some regional and national coordination.

I wish there were a disaster militia, with something like quarterly weekend trainings, with some FEMA sponsorship but still independent. It would be fun to practice ham communications and boat rescue anyway, and a little bit of practice could have a huge impact when the shit is truly hitting the fan.

Not free but cheap and great, David Morin book on classical mechanics: https://www.physics.harvard.edu/node/386

Are there any organizations you would recommend for such a class?

Out of the 100 or so people I know my experience is very typical.

It is a great system for the professional class...

... so I would say the problem is "we need to educated blue collar people better so they take advantage of the opportunities to advancement offered by the educational system". That is very true. But, in general, blue collar people get fucked over in multiple ways and this is just one way.

That is very different than "college is a waste" (jesus, what an idiotic thing to even say out loud...)

> Wasting four years is a huge cost.

At college I: learned calculus, computer programming, advanced mathematics, urban planning, how to communicate like a grown up, and those are just the big topics. I also took acting classes and learned social skills and made lifelong friends. When I graduated, a professor arranged my first professional job which was an order of magnitude better than any blue collar gig I had ever had. Now I have an interesting job that I feel good about, make 90k a year with benefits and a pension, and go home at 5:30 every night; this job would not be possible without college. I took out 20,000 in loans to go for the last two years after transfering from community college (with no loan for that).

So, ... what the fuck did you do at college that you are calling it a "waste"? My life is completely different because I went to college, and the same is true for everyone I know.

Now, I think there is a problem when naive, often blue collar people, go to college and don't know how to make the most of that experience: they don't know how to talk to professors so they get their help and friendship, what courses to take, how to study, how to schedule their own time and not spend it getting wasted, or how to use their degree to get professional jobs afterward. Even though I was a returning student, I grew up in a very educated professional world, and that was not hard for me.

Probably doesn't matter, but I got a BA in math from a mediocre regional state school as returning student, graduating at the age of 30 or 31 (I don't remember).

I work for a social services agency, and my guesstimate is that 70% of the managers think that zip codes are the answer to all their spatial analysis problems -- they are very easy to collect, and they feel right. These managers don't really have any training in geography, so it isn't exactly surprising, but I think there is a pretty strong committment to zip codes as the unit of analysis because it is the one thing they know and think they understand.

For the folks who in this thread say "just use a point map of occurrences and you would have seen the problem" you are right in this case, but it isn't really enough in most cases.

For one, the boundary of the city limit needs to be shown to see the correlation; perhaps one should map the point occurrences a la Snow, and then overlay all the boundaries you have (mosquito district, city boundary, water district boundary, county, etc...).

Additionally, a point map doesn't tell you rates of occurence, for that you need a denominator, or you can't calculate things like number of occurences divided by total population. One poster mentioned Census Tracts, and I would agree those should be the default boundary, subject to more investigation -- tracts correpsond well to "natural" boundaries, they are mostly consistent over census decades, they are mostly consistent with population (~5k), they nest perfectly with other census boundaries, and they are the smallest geography for which you can get mostly the full suite of population characteristics like education from the ACS.

For some reason tracts feel just wrong to people. I have managers who reject zip codes, but then fixate on weird systems like pixels or equal area hexagons or whatever for which you can't get denominator data and which don't correspond to anything real. I don't understand, though I don't think in public policy / social work education anybody bothers to teach you shit about GIS or Census data unless you know to ask specifically.

I am trying to teach myseful CUPL on Atmel 16v8's as a cheap, super basic way to get my feet wet in the FPGA/ CPLD/ GAL world. I have a breadboard half wired up to blink lights based on input, etc. I like older technology, but hope that what I learn applies to more modern FPGAs.

Is there a suitably geeky, well written (worthy of HN) article on hemp as a fabric?

A down to earth hemp clothing website would be cool; like if Costco sold hemp clothes...

Can anyone recommend an actual abacus to buy?

"Language in Thought and Action" by S. I. Hayakawa.

The Hutterites have been going strong for 500 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

Any confirmatory lab would have to be licensed in order to get grant money for it. Just like CPAs who do an audit. Sure there is some corruption and drift toward hiring more lenient firms, but it basically works.

Side note: it is weird to me that everyone talks about whether researchers can afford to pay for confirmation, but researchers never pay for anything, grants pay for everything. The granting institutions might even be excited to try a confirmation process.

> Most researchers probably can't afford to pay an outside lab to duplicate their research.

This cost would be built into the grant that funds the lab, and I bet everyone would get used to it after a few years of complaining.

As a Marxist who works for a social service agency, I have become convinced that the two original sins of civilization are (1) forced labor and (2) the controlled fermentation of alcohol. At some point, a local entrepeneur figured out that he could get serfs to stay on the land and give him a cut of their produce if he bashed a few heads in. Probably at the same time, he figured out they would less effective at leading a revolution, and a little more content with their lot in life, if he let them get wasted when the work was done. Hell, said entrepeneur probably sold them the beer itself... Add a spectacle like a gladiator fight, and voila! Fast forward to Coors Light, working at a Target warehouse, and the SF Niners on TV. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose....

(I think of poor people as the originary arbitrage... Yes, I know what micro economics says about the existence of arbitrages, that's the point.)

Also interesting that I don't think they mentioned cider (paywall preventing me from re-reading), which was a huge thing in America at least until prohibition.

"the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" -- Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto.

In this debate, we should look to cities in other countries. As I understand it, Paris/ Vancouver/ London/ Tokyo etc have never been subject to the "rule" that young couples move to the suburbs once they are ready to raise families. Nor are they subject to the rule that cities are dangerous and have bad schools. If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.

I have now bought two cars through a broker, in my case "Autoland". I got a price over email, we chatted on the phone to confirm, they delivered the car to credit union where we signed papers on the pre approved loan. No bullshit, took 45 minutes I think to transfer the car, which was exactly to spec. Will never buy a car any other way.

Ok, so why don't we work on fixing that? ... Oh wait, it costs money, time, organization...

This argument is more palatable than the truth it masks, which is that we are unwilling to spend money and time making nice things like the Nordics do, and many wealthy people like it that way because it keeps their taxes low.

Whenever a discussion of Amish comes up, I have to link to my favorite hard core Anabaptist sect, the Hutterites. Unlike th Amish, the Hutterites love technology. They choose what technology to use as part of a very strict church system, like the Amish, but are very much into diesel engines and the internet and the like (note the link below). See [1] and [2] below.

They also live communally in farming colonies of about 80 people (half Dunbar's number) in very remote parts of Western Canada and the Northwestern US. Historically, the Hutterites have pissed off the local non-Hutterite farmers because the colonies are successful and can buy up local land from the non-communal/ religious/ pacifist local farmers; they were run out of South Dakota for their success combined with their pacifism in the early 20th Century.

They are pacifist, just like all Anabaptists (Mennonite, Amish, etc). Unlike English variants of Anabaptism (Quakers, etc), Hutterites and other German derived sects drink quite a bit of alcohol, I think. I think they have a great a-capella singing ritual tradition. I bet their food is great, too. I heard they like hockey.

The ~1900 Hutterites are also famous among population theorist/ demographers because their historical data provided the baseline of the highest possible, yet realistic, human fertility society. They married early (probably with quasi-arranged marriages), had lots of babies (much cheaper to raise in a communal setting), were healthy with relatively low mortality, and kept great records (German heritage...).

They are very much a going concern today, continuing to found new colonies even a few years ago, one in Oregon 14 years ago [3] below. I have always wanted to visit a colony, but I live in the urban Puget Sound and the closest colony is about 3.5 hour drive away. I have read that they are quite welcoming, as long as you are quite respectful in return (a fair trade, to my mind).

[1] http://www.hutterites.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

[3] http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...

I wonder if the Gates Foundation could fund journals or otherwise try to help fix the (fundamentally rotten) academic publishing ecosystem.

Anybody have a pet octopus and can comment on what that's like?

In retrospect, sure, but Annie Hall is a really really important movie as well.

Personally I don't think Maxfield Parrish rates Crissy field, but opinions differ. But a nice big lot next to Lake Merrit seems about right.

Seems like part of the problem is that he insists that the museum be located some of most highly prized real estate in the entire world. Of course it would be hard to get it built on Crissy Field! Duh. Why not Columbus Circle NYC or Trafalgar Square or the Champs Elysee? Kind of stupid to even ask.

I think it would be a great museum for undeveloped land in Tacoma or Oakland, though.