squozzer

I live in a regular house in the burbs. Not a spring chicken age-wise. Here's what it would take to get me into denser housing -

1) Privacy - sharing a wall or floor should NOT give my neighbors privy to my arguments, love-making, or guitar playing.

2) Personal transportation != pedal-pushing. I gave that up when I turned 16. I'll take a scooter.

3) Reliable public transport for long-distance travel. Meaning well-maintained, to useful destinations, and not subject to wage strikes (probably meaning automated.)

I've taken economic stats with a grain of salt for some time - one because I think after the Carter presidency, the executive branch had a huge incentive to fudge the stats.

The other because macro numbers such as CPI and unemployment rates only tell a high-level story, not the one that mattered - which is, what is happening to ME?

But it should be hypothetically possible nowadays to compute a useful individual CPI based on individual buying habits.

Same goes for taxes - it should be possible to determine how much of one's spending power goes to taxes - income, sales, inclusive taxes such as excise/VAT, etc.

Regarding jobs, it might be possible to develop an "employability" stat based on one's current job, age, and maybe location.

There's another side to this that isn't discussed and that is - at least for me - the easier and more lucrative path was to take my bachelor's degree in physics and get a corporate job.

My GRE / GPA wasn't going to get me into Princeton anyway.

But the road to a PhD in Physics in 1994 was basically 1) Probably 8 years of study + teaching assistant work and 2) a quality dissertation.

That gets you in the CV pile for the next phase.

The actual career of being a physicist includes 1) multi-year post-doc(s); 2) University job, which would have been associate professor then, adjunct professor now; 3) "Publish or perish"; 4) Hustling grants; 5) Managing TAs and RAs.

For peanuts (unless those grants are fat money) compared to a corporate job.

For foreigners, the difference between academia / corporate work probably isn't as stark economically.

Probably not, but it has a history.

I dig the sentiment. But why not use "leader" and "follower" instead? Multi-tiered hierarchies might use military ranks (private, sergeant, etc.) or titles of nobility (king, earl, duke, etc. which would probably confuse a lot of people)

So thinking past the sale for a minute, which day (assuming US Monday - Friday) would you make an off day?

Friday? Give the phrase TGIF some bite? Friday, Are You In Love?

Monday? Like Bob Geldof, do you dislike Mondays? Do Rainy Days and Mondays bring you down? Making Monday an off day might wreck a huge part of pop culture.

Wednesday? Why not? 2 on, 1 off, 2 on, 2 off?

I would kill for a chance to study physics at Göttingen.

Essentially, the loans act as subsidies for colleges. For the student, it's a different story.

And as with medical care, the response to price increases has been to shovel more money.

>Ultimately, college is expensive in the U.S. for the same reason MRIs are expensive: There is no central mechanism to control price increases. “Universities extract money from students because they can,”

Let me rephrase - There is no mechanism of any kind to control price increases.

Wouldn't an invalid patent still be considered prior art?

For some reason, probably coincidence mangled with early-stage dementia, I found this article remarkably similar to https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-desperate-q...

We should keep in mind that under the current system, goods are made before they are sold. Meaning that not buying so much now might have future benefits later, but at the price of throwing away unbought stuff.

And just-in-time manufacturing (e.g. 3D printers) looks awfully slow.

Good points, I'll just add a pinch of comment.

1) Art criticism probably plays a role because it helps define art fashion - e.g. when realistic painting gave way to abstract art, it opened the door to people making millions painting triangles (after 37 years of study) and squiggly lines.

2) G. Calling yourself an "artist" probably works as a pick-up line in more bohemian parts of the West.

3) Supply and demand.

4) I think identity politics succeeds in helping artists and customers find niches. So far it hasn't translated into huge successes in popular culture, probably because marketers try to spin such things as originality. Han Solo is a pansexual? Big deal, Captain Kirk slept with a green alien in 1967.

I found the article funny. My problem has to do with the concept of "mediocre" - which is an insulting way of saying "average". Though the writer also uses the term "boring", which has a lot to do with individual taste.

For instance, imagine a field with only one practitioner. Is that person mediocre or excellent? Both, really. I'll leave the proof as an exercise for the reader.

I think Ms. De Wilde's colander is simply smashing, it's hard to distinguish from a proper bowler.

Frankly, religion has Western courts and other institutions in a tizzy. It seems everything established after The Protestant Revolution has to pass a higher bar, probably to discourage undesired behavior masquerading as "freedom of religion."

As someone whose cohort is either X or Boomer depending on the meaning of 1965, the "millenials are dumb" argument will pass once your successor generation is old enough to make adult mistakes.

Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.

Most software people I know aren't particularly persuasive. One trait noticeably missing among them is the ability to simplify a complex topic without losing too much relevant information.

But even if some are, ways exist to undermine an expert's credibility about a complex topic.

For example, when Robert Oppenheimer began warning people about the dangers of nuclear war, the attacks came. Once the government felt comfortable enough with Edward Teller, it could proceed with revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance.

That said, not sure a paper receipt actually helps because it's certainly possible for a voting machine to spit out a receipt, then change whatever data the receipt was supposed to capture. And unless the change was drastic and massive (e.g. Trump wins California) then it will probably go undetected.

I will argue in favor of preserving "libraries" but let's first point out some flaws in author's reasoning.

>But libraries are not just a place to find books — they’re one of the few places that provide a number of free services to the American public.

Tax-payer funded != free.

>Some two-thirds of our regular patrons fall into one of three categories: homeless, struggling with addiction, or recovering from addiction.

Homeless shelter / addict sanctuary != library.

>Libraries are irreplaceable. Either discuss providing more funding for the invaluable work we do, or leave them alone.

I find the author's position a little binary or maybe unimaginative. What might help everyone - including taxpayers - is to re-think the community center model.

If the library building is primarily a convenient refuge for addicts and indigents, then we should optimize for that. Fewer books, more bathrooms.

If we still want to have publicly-accessible book repositories, could we combine them with other forms of community services, such as recreation?

I would argue for a more holistic approach.

Sure, optimize current resource consumption and even bring technically inferior but more practical batteries to market, but also do not assume the electric vehicle end-state = swap electric for internal combustion.

For instance, would we have a possible resource crunch if US car ownership went from >1 car / person to 0.1 car / person or lower? That could happen in a few years now, with Uber / Lyft running on fossil fuels.

What if self-driving, electric vehicles come to market not as personal transport, but instead as transportation-as-a-service?

For your discussion - can we use this hypothesis to evaluate the behavior of ourselves and others we know?

This article has appeared in several guises - such as exposure to T. gondii causes impulsive risk-taking behavior more generally.

I have several friends who have been highly exposed to cats, but not sure how many of my other friends have not, so no control group AFAIK.

America is in too much danger to take any chances. The 28 positives should be held indefinitely until they can prove they're innocent.

Presumption of Guilt is the new normal, isn't it?

>Russia actually got inside the voting systems of seven states, including 4 of the 5 largest states in terms of electoral votes—California (55) Texas (38) Florida (29) and Illinois (20).

And yet two of those states listed went for Hillary. Maybe the Russians didn't want to be obvious.

Author spends a lot of time on Georgia, with its "D" rated voting system and its 16 electoral votes.

>Georgia’s systems would have been an “ideal” target for Russian hackers because the state doesn’t use a system with a paper trail so there is no way to audit the system.

Let's accept that for the sake of my next question - would a paper trail actually help? Maybe, depending on who gets the paper. Does it mean the voter gets a receipt? That might cause a few problems of its own.

For instance, a group of well-armed people acting as a "voting integrity militia" might decide to inspect people's voting receipts for any "errors." One can only imagine how the article's writer would characterize that.

Now let's pretend some of all of the states admit their systems had been compromised. Should we trust the results of any election, or just the results we don't like? We can reasonably guess the author's answer to that question.

Despite my misgivings - we should probably attempt to colonize Antarctica and the continental shelves before other planets - I think it's a good idea to colonize at least one other planet before a truly global government bans space travel.

Why? Because one thing governments hate is competition.

Think of the European colonial powers - they lost all of their colonies eventually, some quite violently (e.g. USA, South America, Indochina, some Africa), and others out of political / economic necessity (most of Africa.)

And sometimes the colonies are more powerful - USA v UK, Brazil v Portugal, Mexico v Spain (maybe) - which makes them threats, especially in the near term after a secession.

I think some of the notions regarding space colony threats is overblown - after all, space is huge, huge enough to spread political or economic competition pretty thin.

I offer the following hypothesis - competition for entry into "the best" colleges, competition for "free money" through scholarships, and competition for "good jobs" after college has driven parents to micromanage their children's school "career."

The margins for "error" - i.e. achieving suboptimal grades and cultivating interests outside of "school stuff" - have shrunk since I was a kid.

This is, of course, in addition to the need for parents to acquire bragging rights about their children.

Fridays off is the best argument for giving Islam greater influence in the US. And the US can water down just about any religion, though the public might enjoy a beheading.

I rarely put stickers on my laptop, but when I do it's not for the latest tech fad.

I'm not sure we can do much to understand the role of authority without understanding the role of conditioning in what makes people act.

For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

I have a co-worker who is Chinese. He has his own set of stainless steel chopsticks. Could we not apply a similar logic to straws, i.e. buy and bring your own?

The straws they sell at head shops are a bit too short IMHO.

Designer straws, the official fad of 2019.

Whatever you do, in the beginning, has to provide enough interest for you to want to improve.

Beyond that, all I can tell you no matter how passionate you feel about something now, you will feel more passion about it some days, and on some days (considerably) less.

To me, that's a sign you're on the right track.

I could no longer suppress the urge to troll on twitter. Before doing so, I read maybe 100 tweets on a thread. It was a political tweet, so the standard of truth was not that high.

Guess what I found? 100% of the tweets were not falsifiable. They were as reliable as tarot reading, probably less scientific than same, and certainly less entertaining.

I am not sure what historians / sociologists call it, but there seems to be a window of time where artifacts / philosophies become not just obsolete, but are considered deserving of obliteration.