mfringel

There are more than a few times that I have had to comment to someone "I have not followed your evolution as a programmer over the past 15 years, therefore I can not read your Perl code."

Being needlessly blunt is like throwing a grenade with a message attached. You can tell it's delivered when you hear the KABOOM, but you can't guarantee anything else.

In my experience, being kind has the advantage of reducing the probability of side-effects. There are typically no bonus points awarded for causing someone to get defensive, when your only goal was to correct their mistake.

There might be a net increase in available resources for each student, but there's no evidence to support that there would be net increase in available spots.

e.g. Donating $25MM for a gym clearly gives students a nicer gym. It does not necessarily enlarge the size of the undergraduate matriculating class, year over year.

I don't think I've flown with a homemade dropper-converted pen. However, I've flown with (and used on the plane) a fully-filled Moonman M2 (~$25 on Amazon), which is built as an eyedropper pen, and I enjoy writing with it.

Agreed. To be clear, I'll travel with them... I just won't use them on the plane.

I started using fountain pens a couple of years ago, and still do for my daily writing.

I write rather a lot; I don't bring my laptop into meetings unless I need to. Combine that with my handwriting being relatively neat, small, and stylized, and I needed something with a sufficiently fine nib, and ink that would flow well through it.

It turned into a fascinating optimization problem, during which I ended up down the rabbit hole of nib sizing (European nibs tend to run wider than Japanese nibs), notebook paper (there are plenty of good notebooks that are fountain-pen friendly, and that Moleskine notebooks are both comparatively expensive and the paper just isn't great), and different types of ink (which brands run "wet" or "dry", etc.)... and all of this is before getting into eyedropper-conversions, nib repair, and all of the other craft-related things one can get into.

I started with (and still have) a Pilot Metropolitan and a Platinum Preppy that still see use, although I've gone over to a Kaweco Special FP and a Pilot Vanishing Point (both with extra-fine nibs) for daily writers.

The current "daily writer" tuples are:

1) Pilot Vanishing Point (extra-fine nib), Pilot black cartridge ink.

2) Kaweco Special FP (extra-fine nib), Faber-Castell Carbon Black ink.

...preferred notebook is the Kokuyo Campus High Grade MIO notebook (A5 paper, 80 sheets, ~$6.50 each).

That all being said, I still use ballpoint pens on airplanes; the Pentel BK77 Superb (fine point, black) works just fine.

I feel like banks and students should get a choice. A couple of assertions:

A) Interest represents risk as well as the time-value of money

B) A non-dischargeable loan is risk free to the lender.

Given those, there should be two products:

1) Offering a loan dischargeable in bankruptcy, at whatever rate the market will bear.

2) Offering a non-dischargeable loan, with interest capped at the current rate for a 10-Year Treasury Note.

If there's no risk, a bank doesn't get to add it in, and the money is cheap enough that the student can pay it back.

If there's risk, a bank gets to charge whatever they can, and a student has recourse to bankruptcy.

You used a universal quantifier in your initial statement. That is, all of human history, implying all governments at all times. This is trivially falsifiable.

With your current statement, you're attempting to modify that to all governments in human history, at a single point in time for each of them. In the most charitable case, that's vacuously true.

You chose the hill you wanted to defend... it's a bit late to complain about the location. The question stands.

Can you restate your assertion in a way that can not be trivially torpedoed by a single existence proof?

By posting this comment, you're saying "I'm a genius, and you're all idiots, because I've figured out this obvious thing that has gone over all of your heads."

Now, you might actually mean that, but it might be more useful to explicitly spell it out in that case.

It also has no wireless and has less disk space than your Archos.

But that's not what happens.

I recommend reading "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby Payne. It's a really insightful book on the cycle of poverty and the incentives at work... anti-social punishment really isn't part of it.

It appears you're saying that only "100%" and "0%" states are distinguishable from each other, and that the universe of the superposition of states boils down to "some do and some do not", which are all indistinguishable from each other.

Can you clarify that that's what you're asserting? That's what it looks like, and I sincerely hope I'm wrong, because that's a very weird hill to defend.

The OP's strategy to fight, while clearly a valid approach, has the twin problems of survivor bias, and absolving corporations of their actions.

[IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.

Now I'm wondering if they would have to make all of the salaries part of the court record if they tried using that defense.

I'm disappointed. I was hoping that the author would go into the structural issues with transport in the SF Bay Area.

One of the primary issues with the SF Bay Area is that it's 60 miles north-south, and getting across the SF Bay is a major undertaking, both in time and money.

Unlike cities like NYC (large and dense + a mostly functional transit system), and Boston (small and dense + a vaguely functional transit system), travel times are much more non-deterministic in the SF Bay Area, especially if plans require people from multiple locations.

Ergo, the chances of people bailing on plans because some random traffic incident will add 90 minutes to their travel time (and possibly miss most of the event) is much higher in the SF Bay Area.

It appears that you have conflated "hating America" with "hating the current President and his policies". Can you say more about that?

It is my duty to inform you that the musicians in Band Of Horses are not actually horses.

"Sorry, sir. Your spouse's living will restricted emergency care provider vendors such that she was unable to receive care in time. With our CareWatch(tm) package, we can give you geo-fence alerts with response times that would be outside your living will provider preference range. Press one to be connected with a sales associate."

And yet, a for-profit company getting free consulting time under the aegis of an interview strikes me as unethical.

One of the big protections in there is that a noncompete can not be enforced against someone who is terminated without cause or laid off.*

There are certain kinds of maneuvers that Just Shouldn't Work. Laying off someone and then invoking a non-compete against them is one of them.

---

* The one exception being if they put in a non-compete as part of a severance payment.

What does "dick move" mean to you, in this context?

It appears you're conflating two things.

1. "Pension funds", which include stuff like TIAA-CREF, who administer 401(k)-like plans for tax-exempt organizations. Those are definitionally fully funded because the annuities that retirees receive are only based on the money they put in over time.

2. "Pensions" as in the old-school corporate-owned "you work for us for n years and then we give you an annuity for the rest of your life, based on a percentage of ending salary." Those have a lot of problems with funding, for a load of reasons including life expectancy, and because bankruptcy relieves companies of a lot of those obligations.

Either way, a shareholder owning a comparatively tiny amount of stock has neither a duty nor the impetus to align their interests with that of the corporation in which they hold stock.

I know people who were exactly not like that.

Anecdotes cancel out. Do you have a point, or a strawman?

I'm glad that worked for you.

Survivor bias is not your friend, there.

So, can you give a definition of a non-typical and obtrusive hobby where MA would exercise prior restraint? Given that MA is made up of 352 municipalities (all of whom hate each other), and no significant county government, I'm finding it difficult to understand the statewide prohibitions (with the noted exception of fireworks) that you find limiting.

Also, as I'm sure you know, while MA gun laws are statewide, issuance is done by the local police department, which means that you don't even have to get outside of I-95/MA-128 to find a "shall issue" town.

It appears that you had an utterly miserable experience living in Boston, and that's unfortunate.

In my experience, the only people in New England who call it "Taxachusetts" are the same people who would use the phrase "On the free side of the NH line."

MA doesn't even make the top 15 in terms of total state tax burden (property, income, sales).[0]

-- [0] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...

Precisely. "Living paycheck-to-paycheck, but with bigger numbers." is not wealth.