throwawayjava

> Any kind of analysis such as this one relies heavily on _ceteris_ _paribus_ --assume everything else is the same

That's not the assumption made by this report.

Of course, predicting alternate futures when humans are in play is always a non-trivial task, but they did put some effort toward controlling for the obvious stuff:

"A summary of the regression results is presented in Table 1. We find that as the share of units listed on Airbnb goes up by one percentage point, rental rates in the neighborhood go up by 1.58 percent, after controlling for neighborhood level demographic and economic changes. The result is statistically significant at the 1-percent level. Coefficients of other control variables including household income, population and share of college graduates are positive and statistically significant at 1-percent level. Employment rate is not statistically different from zero."

* A by-choice stay-at-home parent. There are like 10 million stay-at-home parents in the US (c.f., our entire labor force is ~125 million!)

* A contract worker/consultant, as well as employees in seasonal fields such as construction, many of whom make very decent 12-month wages but might be "unemployed" if you ask at the wrong moment.

* Anyone with a severe disability (mental or physical) which makes work difficult or impossible.

* Someone younger than retirement age (40s-50s) who has retired early by choice (e.g., no kids, dual high incomes for 20+ years, non-extravagant lifestyle; particularly relevant for this forum...)

If you counted all of these, I have no doubt our unemployment rate would at least double, if not triple. But that would be a ridiculously stupid number to even think about -- none of the above people want a job (or want a 12 month job); why should we try to organize society around forcing them to work when they don't need to and don't want to?!

I'm not claiming the current definition of "unemployed" is perfect, BTW. But IMO it's WAY better than yours...

> Micron’s new Automata Processor (AP) architecture exploits the very high and natural level of parallelism found in DRAM technologies to achieve native-hardware implementation of nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs). The use of DRAM technology to implement the NFA states provides high capacity and therefore provide extraordinary parallelism for pattern recognition. In this paper, we give an overview of AP's architecture, programming and applications.

[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/wang_APoverview_...

Also, there are strategies for managing the time problem. 20 minutes is a bit fast for understand => ask questions => implement => test on this problem. But you can organize the code so that if you run out of time it's still clear you knew how to solve the problem and can code your way out of a wet paper bag. E.g., I would pass an answer that got everything correct but didn't get around to implementing isPalindrome() or isSoCS() before the 20 minutes was up, especially if the candidate could give a ~1 minute description of how to implement those functions. (I would also give more than 20 minutes.)

Oy... talk about (not quite) winning a battle but losing the war.

Also, this whole methodology toward argumentation just reinforces the top-level critique. The important word in "start with the data" is not "data", it's "START". I.e., begin by understanding the problem. Then solve the problem. Don't walk around with a hammer trying to bash things.

> By your link we're 52nd in doctors per capita. That's not great.

I think this sort of argument is innumerate. Statistical sciences provide us with many ways of testing the correlation between "value of care per dollar spent" and "average doctor salary".

None-the-less, I am tempted to point out that Cuba is #2 on this metric ;-)

Regarding the rest of your post, consider actually reading that New Yorker piece. The things you think it says, it DEFINITELY does actually not say.

> there are still fewer medical schools today than there were 100 years ago... it may get the number right or it may get the number wrong... And it's a major part of the explanation why US doctors make 2x+ what their counterparts in countries like Germany make.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Physic...

> Most of the differences in outcomes between us and other wealthy nations amount to lifestyle/culture much more-so than affordability and availability. Americans are very obese. Not having to pay a copay to visit the doctor is not going to change that. But obesity means we'll have more problems with newborns, lower life expectancy, etc.

https://obesity.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0043...

> During the New Deal era regulations wage caps were put on workers in the hopes of staving off inflation. Employers, wanting to entice good employees to work for them sought to get around these wage caps by offering health insurance. This then spread like wildfire, coincides with the time healthcare inflation separated from general inflation, and began the trend towards a lack of price transparency.

Except, of course, in the countries where it didn't spread like wildfire. Why all this crazy post-hoc history-building when you can just... empirically observe how the natural experiment played out?

Your modus operandi in this thread is the start with an ideology and then derive conclusions that are often wholly inconsistent with observed reality. There's nothing wrong with premises or theory-building, but when the data flatly contradict your conclusions... well, that's the difference between reality and fantasy.

Enforcement requires a beneficient panopticon.

soru's comment on this thread provides one nice rational model that tries to explain why. But the much more important point is that our rationalizations are slaves to the empirical data. Not the other way around.

As all of these cities aptly demonstrate, plumbing and auto mechanic jobs aren't a panacea for disappearing factory jobs.

Aside from the "nuh uh; uh huh" nature of this exchange, I really don't understand what your position.

> I didn't say you don't own the photo, I said you don't have control over it. Those are two very different things.

I'm not sure what youre definition of "control" is, but based upon the arguments you've made about "control" above, I assume you mean it in some absolute sense.

Ownership definitely implies control. He can use DMCA to compel a third party to stop publishing his photo, for example. How is that not "control"?

Your definition of control seems to be somehow about capability or power, rather than normative ethics or legal right. Which is a rather absurd way of talking about this issue.

In that sense of control, I don't even control my own body. Someone who is stronger than me can hurt me; can rape me; can even kill me. I have no control.

Of course, for normative reasons, we make laws against other people controlling me in certain ways even though they have the power to do so.

Data privacy is no different. The discussion is not about what degree of control a party is physically capable of exerting. The discussion is about what degree of control the government should grant to each party.

The fact that someone somewhere is capable of hoarding my data, does not imply that this outcome is just or optimal. Your position is a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy.

I'm not sure what this means.

My claim is that educational programs designed for the top 1% of students are not well-suited to educating the next 10%. And vice-versa. (E.g.: A Chicago math student is often not well-served by the sort of "calculus for engineers" courses you'll find at state college branch campuses. Also, a college senior struggling through their Calculus requirement is not at all well-served by Chicago's honors mathematics program. Neither approach is better in an absolute sense; but in each case, one is clearly better relative to the particular student.)

This is not some sort of tautology. It's a serious pedagogical hypothesis with decades of empirical research probing its truth value.

> They are showing up to civil war reenactments with tanks and planes.

I can't speak to Purdue specifically. In the cases I know about, the very explicit purpose of these alternative degree programs is to build a department by admitting students that the name-brand program rejects, or who fail out of the weeder courses. The "old timers" aren't in a huff about it, because they had no interest in admititng those students to their existing programs in the first place.

Well... obviously not! But:

1. learning to struggle successfully is far more important than mastering the chain rule.

2. If you start with excellent students, then you can set those students up to struggle on much harder and deeper questions.

My point, really, is that a curriculum that manages to not "lose" anyone will also fail to strike a good balance between "struggle" and "hand-hold" if 90% of your students start off as "Excellent".

The hardest part about designing a course is figuring out when students should struggle, and when to hold their hands. The answer will vary depending upon the quality of the students. Excellent teaching aimed at excellent students looks very different from excellent teaching aimed at mediocre students. Differentiating instruction is Teaching 101, and differentiation in universities often happens at the institutional or program level.

E.g., are Khan Academy's descriptions of the product rule better than Chicago's Math 160? For certain students, yes. For others, emphatically not! Neither option is "better" in an absolute sense, but each is definitely "better" for any given student.

There is nothing wrong with a course of study that's designed for the top 1% of high school graduates. And admissions mistakes do not equal bad teaching. On the contrary, torpedo'ing the entire curriculum to make sure that every student makes it through would be grossly irresponsible.

You have it all wrong, IMO. Successfully clawing their way out of the dark is by far the most important skill they're learning.

The School of Engineering, in this case, is trying to teach something more than just domain knowledge about engineering disciplines. The goal is to take those "18 year-old polyglots" and turn them into world-class problem solvers.

You see this is every elite educational program. Mathematics at Chicago. Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. Engineering at MIT. Their programs have a difference in kind, and are very intentionally not built for "the average college student".

It's good that there's an alternative path within the same institution for those students who need to focus their efforts on baseline competence. But it's also good that strong programs expect more out of their students.

No.

> Because they have an interesting article [1] disallowed in their robots.txt that was added a while after it was published.

Oddly, it's a different seemingly benign story for me:

        Disallow: /sections/health-shots/2013/03/11/173816690/new-voices-for-the-voiceless-synthetic-speech-gets-an-upgrade

The point is very simple: removal != retraction. Removing without retraction is erasing history. Issuing a retraction is not erasing history.

And obviously, in this context, "erasing history" means the thing it means in standard vernacular English. Not the thing it means in git terminology.

> Furthermore, the best policy would be to retain a complete edit history of the story online... I can't see a reason for not making the edit history public other than reducing embarrassment of NPR.

1. How does showing the edit history reduce embarrassment to NPR?

(e: Ironically, if reducing embarrassment were their goal, they would've found a way to keep the story as in-tact as possible. "Look, we weren't 100% wrong. We just had to change a few paragraphs". IMO a full retraction is far more embarrassing than trying to weasel out of it by keeping as much of the story in-tact as possible.)

2. Some real downsides to this approach are already debated down-thread.

...this is a retraction?

I think the salient point is that there's a huge difference between a silent removal and a public retraction. The practices that NPR indicts in your original post obviously refer to the latter. Removing without retraction is certainly an attempt to "erase history". Publishing a public retraction and discussing it at length is not "erasing history".

NPR's executives have even explained why, in this particular case, they chose to remove the article: Turpin said, "In order to fix the problems, we would have essentially had to construct a different story," a process that he said would have been "intellectually dishonest. There comes a point that you can't fix a story appropriately." He said the decision was not made lightly; "we believe strongly we don't want to disappear material for any reason if we can possibly keep from taking it down."

edit: Essentially it's the difference between a ghost edit and an "edit: I changed xyz in my post". Do you really believe that silently /dev/null'ing an article is equivalent to a public retraction?

If the only way to get people to behave reasonably is to not issue building permits, then everyone loses. What you're suggesting is that California should choose the defect/defect quadrant of a game. But there's a more optimal solution -- just tell people like Khosla they're not allowed to defect on this question.

In other words, why should I be prohibited from owning certain types of land or having the chance to purchase into certain types of developments just because Khosla's being an ass about restrictions he knew about when he bought the property? What you're proposing is the "if I can't have it then burn it all down" solution. Which I guess is a way to vindicate Khosla in a sort of pyrrhic way, but everyone else loses.

You can't own the beach. And you can't de facto own the beach by buying all the land around it and then restricting access. These were both well-understood when Khosla bought the land. He knew exactly how California interpreted land rights in this particular case.

Land purchases regularly come with both private (contractual) and public (statutory) limitations/restrictions on use.

Landowners are not kings, and private properties are not sovereign borders.

> But then, the state should not have allowed the sale, right?

I guess that's one way the state could react to these sorts of lawsuits. That would be unfortunate, because it'd probably end up meaning that one asshole prevented a whole bunch of reasonable people from buying beachfront views with their hard-earned money.

Modest for who?

Social Security: There are an absolutely insane number of people who didn't plan for self-sufficient retirement because they planned on social security checks. They shouldn't need it, but they do. Those people are a far larger problem and constitute the bulk of avoidable liability. The problem with SS is people who need it but shouldn't have, not the people who actually don't need it.

Military: Here's a truth that doesn't win elections: blind patriotism is the only palatable way to sell any absolutely enormous jobs program to the US public. A lot of these folks don't have the education or skills required to operate in a private sector unbuoyed by gov't spending. And to the extent that they do, they'd be entering newly saturated job markets with low barriers to entry.

Gas taxes: Carnage for the lots of folks who can't afford to true cost of driving but already sunk 30+% of their annual gross into a car as a 10+ year investment.

The policies you're suggesting -- at least, most of them -- would leave an enormous amount of human suffering in their wake.

Still justifiable policies / good ideas? Well, that's another discussion. But let's be realistic about the impacts.

Come to think of it, 90% is pretty low for a course of totally unnecessary chemotherapy that cold've been avoided by a human doctor noticing, as humans often do, how dumb the provided explanation was. So maybe even as a patient this isn't an obvious choice.

More generally, I'm super amused by the idea that the Master Algorithm will fall out of the brilliance at few big tech companies, but only if they could have access to my purchase history or porn viewing habits from the past decade.

Worth pointing out that this function doesn't work for inputs much higher than $150k or so, and doesn't even work at points like $140k depending on the particular candidate.

This way, the answer begins to change as your family size grows. Which I think is accurate.

Of course, these definitions are silly and depend on tons of things. A teacher making $60k with difficult-to-lose jobs and a great pension might be better off than a construction worker making $80k. The latter will have a shorter career at that salary, is more exposed to cycles, and will have a tougher time planning for retirement (assuming, of course, the teacher's pension is well-run).

A teacher making $40k with no dependents and no desire to reproduce is practically upper middle class compared to a software engineer making twice that but who's a single mother with 4 kids.

And a teacher making $60k in rural midwest is basically in a different economic class than a teacher making $60k in a coastal city...

> plumber or electrician can earn more than that even in rural areas

Sure. Class isn't just about income; it's also about value systems and educational attainment. Which is definitely classist! But then, we are literally discussing class...