$10/hr is the minimum, not the average or median. Also, it's not much below median individual income in a lot of "flyover country". E.g. in Mississippi, the median hourly wage is $13.76/hr ( http://www.bls.gov/oes/current... ). A bunch of states have below $15/hr. It's not too surprising that Walmart clocks in below that. In short, "slave/subsistence wages" are very common in "flyover country". The anecdotes about your friends are out of date. That's not a good thing, but it is what it is, and it's not Walmart's fault.
Speaking as a grad student who makes the equivalent of $10-$11/hr in a place with a higher cost of living than "flyover country", it's not "subsistence" wages. (Although I do get good benefits and don't have children.)
If they have a copy in the store, when you buy it online for in-store pickup, someone just wanders down the isle, grabs it, and brings it to customer service. There's not even any shipping. I agree that the system is weird, but I imagine that it works. If you're online, you're shopping around. If you're in a store, you're probably not.
They're getting out of the "slave/subsistence wages" business model. Walmart is in the process of upping their minimum wage to $10/hr (and taking a large financial hit along the way http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... ). They've already raised it to $9/hr. Moreover, it's not like Amazon warehouse workers get treated well. In fact, some say it's worse that Walmart: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/2...
(That said, I still get a lot more stuff from Amazon than Walmart.)
The main feature of Walmart (and Target) is that you can get stuff today and sometimes without much schlepping. Wandering around the store takes time, but you can purchase in-stock items online and pick it up from customer service later in the day. If you pass a Walmart or Target on your daily commute, you can just pop in and pick up your order quickly -- not much schlepping required. Granted, that doesn't work if the store is out of your way.
you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one... Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
But many people DO have trouble picking a jar of jam. From TFA:
In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
I think part of the problem is confusing "not wrong" and "optimized". Yes, you know when you dislike a jam, but excluding bad jams doesn't mean you've optimized your choice. Most people probably find a few jams that "aren't bad" and stick with them (sampling only a few jams along the way), which defeats the purpose of having 30 types of jam: if the selection were 15 types of jam, then you'd still find a few jams that "aren't bad" and you'd be in about the same boat.
The more types of jam you try, the better you can optimize. A larger selection doesn't mean better optimization per se: having more options doesn't help if you don't try them. Optimizing 30 types of jam is daunting, so maybe you try 5 before finding a few that are "not bad" and stopping the optimization process. Optimizing 10 types of jam is less daunting, so maybe you'd try all 10 -- meaning you are likely to have done a _better_ job optimizing. That's the idea here. The problem described above isn't rational, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
The idea is that there is an optimum amount of choice: we definitely need choices, but there is such a thing as too much choice. This shouldn't be a surprise: there's an optimal amount of everything, and the optimal amount is usually finite.
So yes, we need more choices in high speed internet. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to have too many choices; it's just hard to imagine since we're used to having too few.
We're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't totally rational (surprise!) and adjusting their offerings in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest. In short, just because we're in a free-market economy doesn't mean everything is already optimized. Optimization is a continuous process, and just because it means fewer choices doesn't mean it's communism.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices! So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Have you really tried all 100 typed of jam and optimized to just 3-4? Have the other jam shoppers?
It's indisputable that there are too many choice of jelly, because some are basically identical jellies with different labels. Smucker's grape jelly/slime is functionally identical to the store brand grape jelly/slime. Hell, maybe they're even made in the same place. I've found the same with a variety of jams, jellies, and fruit preserves. A grocery store I often go to started carrying a (surprisingly good) store-branded line of organic jams/fruit preserves, and they taste the same as some of the name brands. Again, they may even be the same in the same plant.
If the store really has 100 choices of jam, then I find it hard to believe that you have truly narrowed it down to 3-4. Unless you're a taste savant, your taste memory simply isn't that good, and your preferences will have changed somewhat by the time you sampled enough of them to make a call. (God, I just tried 20 strawberry jams, and now I can't stand strawberry jam!) I'm guessing there are a bunch of jams that you'd be equally happy with, but you've simply found 3-4 of them and stuck with that because sampling all 100 is too much of a chore.
As for me, I've tried a lot of jams and fruit preserves at my local super market. (I don't really like jellies.) I'm happy with a lot of them, and like I said, many can only be differentiated in a careful side-by-side comparison. I've tried because I am familiar with the paradox of choice (not a new idea -- Barry Schwartz's book came out in 2004), so I made a deliberate effort to see what I'm missing. The answer: we're often choosing between indistinguishable choices. I'd loose very little if the store cut down the number of choices. (Unless they decide to cut the cheap brands, which would suck.)
Side note: a lot of people are likening a lack of choice to communism, but we're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't really rational and adjusting their stocks in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest.
If you only make a single choice (and then simply stick with the choice), then your choice is basically arbitrary and defeats the purpose of having a wide variety of options. That's one of the arguments in the article: more choices aren't always better.
Word of mouth is also useless if others are making arbitrary choices and then simply sticking with them. It reminds me of a comic's (forget who) routine about getting advice on traveling. People who had been to a city once and only eaten at one restaurant would heartily recommend the restaurant even though they had no baseline for comparison. ("Yeah, I know this great restaurant in Toledo!")
Now, maybe you're making the argument that you only have to go through the process of choosing once (which will involve testing more than one selection), but few people do that. Mostly, they do what they decide above and just try a variety or two, say meh, and arbitrarily stick with their choice. How many varieties of peanut butter have most people tried? I'm guessing that mostly people have tried a smooth and a chunky (and maybe a natural), but I doubt many people have really compared brands. Why do "choosy moms choose JIF"? (Their advertising slogan.) Because moms have enough shit to do, so at one point in the past, they grabbed a jar of JIF and then just keep getting it because why not?
Even for a much bigger mess like Chernobyl, radiation leakage causes few cancer cases, either among people involved in the cleanup or bystandards. For example, see this World Health Organization report on Chernobyl:
Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukaemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators. No such increase has been clearly demonstrated among children or adults resident in any of the contaminated areas.... While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl.
So the people who get a large dose of radiation are twice as likely to develop leukemia, which sucks, but leukemia isn't that common to begin with. Among bystanders, the only measurable increase in cancer was thyroid cancer, and that happened because the USSR did a crappy job (no surprise there) and fed a bunch of kids contaminated milk (see previous link). In short, the thyroid cancer could easily have been prevented -- especially because potassium iodide pills are supposed to be an effective way to prevent thyroid cancer caused by radioactive materials. Thankfully, thyroid cancer has a very high success rate for treatment. (I forget the number, but IIRC it's something like 95%.)
Not surprisingly the "elevated levels of child cancer" linked to in the description applies _only_ to thyroid cancer. Moreover, it's not clear that thyroid cancer in children really spiked. For example, see http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...
Considering that Fukushima was much more contained than Chernobyl, I doubt that we'll see that many cancer cases from Fukushima.
I did some reading on Chernobyl several years ago, and going in, I expected that the disaster would have caused a lot of cancer deaths. I was surprised to learn that it didn't, but it makes sense now that I think about it. Yes, a lot of radioactive material got released, but the world is a _big_ place. One reactor's worth of radioactive material diluted over a large area isn't _that_ big a deal. Yes, it's a big enough deal that it's probably unsafe to live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but the effect beyond that is quite limited. Even if a reactor goes pop every few decades, it'll still probably cause less environmental damage than all the coal we use in the same period.
Even if you use UW facilities for research? That's doubtful.
Doubt all you want, the facts are the facts.
Here's WARF:
UW–Madison faculty, staff and students are not obligated to assign their intellectual property to WARF, unless required to do so by federal law or the terms of a sponsored research agreement with a third party.
he UW is unique among U.S. universities in that it does not claim ownership rights in the intellectual property generated by its faculty, staff, or students, except when required by funding agreements. UW inventors do, however, have an obligation to disclose all inventions created while carrying out university duties, using any university funding, or using university premises, supplies, or equipment. It is the role of the UW–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education to perform an equity review for each UW–Madison invention disclosure to determine what obligations may attach to each invention and who may have rights to the invention.
Note that you have to disclose the invention to WARF. However, you don't have to give it to them. You have to disclose it because some (but not all) outside grants require inventions be assigned to the university, and WARF wants to make sure you're following the terms of the grant. However, that is not the University's fault. I speak as someone who has disclosed an invention to WARF. They looked it over, determined that it was not covered by a grant that requires I give up the invention, and told me that I could do what I wanted.
WARF and lawyers are the middleman
By that standard, it doesn't matter who owns the patent: any time there is a patent lawsuit there are middleman because lawyers are involved. Of course, that's a silly standard because they don't "make all the money" as you claimed a few posts ago. WARF doesn't really make money since it's a non-profit, and as noted above, despite your disbelief, you can cut WARF out of the loop.
Using WARF is _voluntary_; UW researchers don't have to go through them. They can patented inventions on their own and take all the profit if they'd like (and pay all the filing costs, pitch it to companies, sue infringes, etc. on their own). Moreover, what middlemen take the money? The money returns to the university one way or another -- mostly as research grants within the university, not pocketed by a CEO.
In terms of endowment per student, that's practically nothing (relative to other universities). The endowment is meant to generate income on interest -- not to be spent directly.
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
That is simply false. Researchers here aren't required to go through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to get patents. If the researchers decide to, they make a contract with WARF where the researchers get a cut of the profits. Even grad students often get a cut.
I don't know how it works at other universities, but universities aren't for profit corporations -- at least not yet. If universities didn't give faculty a cut of patent revenu, I'd imagine they'd soon find their strong, patent-generating faculty going elsewhere.
The money goes to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). The university isn't allowed to own the patents directly. That means that the university and state can't just raid the money as they see fit, which is probably a good thing.
WARF doles out the money in various ways. Much goes to research on campus, some goes to "faculty retention" (i.e. when another university tries to poach a strong faculty member, WARF steps in with money to keep them here), some is administrative costs (WARF assists university personnel in getting patents), some gets returned directly to the university, some goes to the people who did the research to get the patent, etc.
In short, the answer is "all of the above and more".
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the people who actually hold the patents (the university isn't allowed to have them directly), did a similar thing to Intel not all that long ago (5 years?). I guess I can't complain since WARF funds my research (and a lot of research on campus -- having an internal funding mechanism is great). However, I recall that a bunch of the Intel money was supposed to go to the college of engineering (COE), which seems to have spent the money redecorating Engineering Hall (which, admittedly, is super ugly) and cutting ECE teaching assistant positions. It would be nice if the COE got a chunk of this and actually put it to good use...
You raise a valid point. Yes, it would be nice if those costs were taken into account, but "We don't know all the costs therefore it's a bad idea!" is not a strong argument unless we truly know very little. Do you have any data to suggest that the backup costs are significant relative to the costs of the generated solar and wind power?
While we are on the subject of "things we don't know about the cost of solar and wind", here are some more questions that I'd like to see answered:
Are the fossil fuel plant maintenance costs simply the costs we already have for our existing fossil fuel plants? Is it possible that wind _lowers_ the maintenance costs of fossil fuel plants relative to their current levels? (If fossil fuel plants get less use, wouldn't they require less maintenance?) If wind and solar plants are distributed across the country, how much variation in total output capacity is there? (And by extension, how much fossil fuel backup capacity is really needed?)
In short, yes, you have brought up a cost that is not included in the analysis. However, there are many benefits and costs that are not included in the analysis. The math will always be "fuzzy" because no models include everything. Demanding that is unreasonable. As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Yes, there are a lot of very talented and driven international students who come to the US. I know many of them. Power to them. I'm happy to have them stay.
The issue here is jobs that don't require very talented and driven people. The article is about outsourcing accountant positions. We're not talking about MIT trained engineers; we're talking about run-of-the-mill, white-collar jobs that many people can do.
You're talking about the first category, but the article is about the second category: the H1B system was meant to bring in people from the first category, but the system is being abused to bring in people from the second category. The american education system is irrelevant to this discussion.
the taxes I've saved by writing off my mortgage interest and property taxes
A number of republican presidential candidates want to ax the mortgage interest and/or state tax deductions. Power to them. The rest of us shouldn't be subsidizing your houses.
The treaty is clear, and I imagine that most of us agree with the spirit of the treaty, but the treaty goes too far. It effectively bans any permanent settlement on the moon. If that ever becomes practical, this treaty will be mincemeat. We should make a better treaty now before the current one gets dumped -- possibly without a replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
$10/hr is the minimum, not the average or median. Also, it's not much below median individual income in a lot of "flyover country". E.g. in Mississippi, the median hourly wage is $13.76/hr ( http://www.bls.gov/oes/current... ). A bunch of states have below $15/hr. It's not too surprising that Walmart clocks in below that. In short, "slave/subsistence wages" are very common in "flyover country". The anecdotes about your friends are out of date. That's not a good thing, but it is what it is, and it's not Walmart's fault.
Speaking as a grad student who makes the equivalent of $10-$11/hr in a place with a higher cost of living than "flyover country", it's not "subsistence" wages. (Although I do get good benefits and don't have children.)
If they have a copy in the store, when you buy it online for in-store pickup, someone just wanders down the isle, grabs it, and brings it to customer service. There's not even any shipping. I agree that the system is weird, but I imagine that it works. If you're online, you're shopping around. If you're in a store, you're probably not.
They're getting out of the "slave/subsistence wages" business model. Walmart is in the process of upping their minimum wage to $10/hr (and taking a large financial hit along the way http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... ). They've already raised it to $9/hr. Moreover, it's not like Amazon warehouse workers get treated well. In fact, some say it's worse that Walmart: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/2...
(That said, I still get a lot more stuff from Amazon than Walmart.)
The main feature of Walmart (and Target) is that you can get stuff today and sometimes without much schlepping. Wandering around the store takes time, but you can purchase in-stock items online and pick it up from customer service later in the day. If you pass a Walmart or Target on your daily commute, you can just pop in and pick up your order quickly -- not much schlepping required. Granted, that doesn't work if the store is out of your way.
you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one... Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
But many people DO have trouble picking a jar of jam. From TFA:
In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
I think part of the problem is confusing "not wrong" and "optimized". Yes, you know when you dislike a jam, but excluding bad jams doesn't mean you've optimized your choice. Most people probably find a few jams that "aren't bad" and stick with them (sampling only a few jams along the way), which defeats the purpose of having 30 types of jam: if the selection were 15 types of jam, then you'd still find a few jams that "aren't bad" and you'd be in about the same boat.
The more types of jam you try, the better you can optimize. A larger selection doesn't mean better optimization per se: having more options doesn't help if you don't try them. Optimizing 30 types of jam is daunting, so maybe you try 5 before finding a few that are "not bad" and stopping the optimization process. Optimizing 10 types of jam is less daunting, so maybe you'd try all 10 -- meaning you are likely to have done a _better_ job optimizing. That's the idea here. The problem described above isn't rational, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
The idea is that there is an optimum amount of choice: we definitely need choices, but there is such a thing as too much choice. This shouldn't be a surprise: there's an optimal amount of everything, and the optimal amount is usually finite.
So yes, we need more choices in high speed internet. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to have too many choices; it's just hard to imagine since we're used to having too few.
We're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't totally rational (surprise!) and adjusting their offerings in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest. In short, just because we're in a free-market economy doesn't mean everything is already optimized. Optimization is a continuous process, and just because it means fewer choices doesn't mean it's communism.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices! So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Have you really tried all 100 typed of jam and optimized to just 3-4? Have the other jam shoppers?
It's indisputable that there are too many choice of jelly, because some are basically identical jellies with different labels. Smucker's grape jelly/slime is functionally identical to the store brand grape jelly/slime. Hell, maybe they're even made in the same place. I've found the same with a variety of jams, jellies, and fruit preserves. A grocery store I often go to started carrying a (surprisingly good) store-branded line of organic jams/fruit preserves, and they taste the same as some of the name brands. Again, they may even be the same in the same plant.
If the store really has 100 choices of jam, then I find it hard to believe that you have truly narrowed it down to 3-4. Unless you're a taste savant, your taste memory simply isn't that good, and your preferences will have changed somewhat by the time you sampled enough of them to make a call. (God, I just tried 20 strawberry jams, and now I can't stand strawberry jam!) I'm guessing there are a bunch of jams that you'd be equally happy with, but you've simply found 3-4 of them and stuck with that because sampling all 100 is too much of a chore.
As for me, I've tried a lot of jams and fruit preserves at my local super market. (I don't really like jellies.) I'm happy with a lot of them, and like I said, many can only be differentiated in a careful side-by-side comparison. I've tried because I am familiar with the paradox of choice (not a new idea -- Barry Schwartz's book came out in 2004), so I made a deliberate effort to see what I'm missing. The answer: we're often choosing between indistinguishable choices. I'd loose very little if the store cut down the number of choices. (Unless they decide to cut the cheap brands, which would suck.)
Side note: a lot of people are likening a lack of choice to communism, but we're talking about for-profit supermarkets. They're figuring out that humans aren't really rational and adjusting their stocks in response to maximize profit. It's capitalism at its finest.
If you only make a single choice (and then simply stick with the choice), then your choice is basically arbitrary and defeats the purpose of having a wide variety of options. That's one of the arguments in the article: more choices aren't always better.
Word of mouth is also useless if others are making arbitrary choices and then simply sticking with them. It reminds me of a comic's (forget who) routine about getting advice on traveling. People who had been to a city once and only eaten at one restaurant would heartily recommend the restaurant even though they had no baseline for comparison. ("Yeah, I know this great restaurant in Toledo!")
Now, maybe you're making the argument that you only have to go through the process of choosing once (which will involve testing more than one selection), but few people do that. Mostly, they do what they decide above and just try a variety or two, say meh, and arbitrarily stick with their choice. How many varieties of peanut butter have most people tried? I'm guessing that mostly people have tried a smooth and a chunky (and maybe a natural), but I doubt many people have really compared brands. Why do "choosy moms choose JIF"? (Their advertising slogan.) Because moms have enough shit to do, so at one point in the past, they grabbed a jar of JIF and then just keep getting it because why not?
Arbitrary choices are not a good solution.
Even for a much bigger mess like Chernobyl, radiation leakage causes few cancer cases, either among people involved in the cleanup or bystandards. For example, see this World Health Organization report on Chernobyl:
http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...
Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukaemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators. No such increase has been clearly demonstrated among children or adults resident in any of the contaminated areas. ...
While scientists have conducted studies to determine whether cancers in many other organs may have been caused by radiation, reviews by the WHO Expert Group revealed no evidence of increased cancer risks, apart from thyroid cancer, that can clearly be attributed to radiation from Chernobyl.
So the people who get a large dose of radiation are twice as likely to develop leukemia, which sucks, but leukemia isn't that common to begin with. Among bystanders, the only measurable increase in cancer was thyroid cancer, and that happened because the USSR did a crappy job (no surprise there) and fed a bunch of kids contaminated milk (see previous link). In short, the thyroid cancer could easily have been prevented -- especially because potassium iodide pills are supposed to be an effective way to prevent thyroid cancer caused by radioactive materials. Thankfully, thyroid cancer has a very high success rate for treatment. (I forget the number, but IIRC it's something like 95%.)
Not surprisingly the "elevated levels of child cancer" linked to in the description applies _only_ to thyroid cancer. Moreover, it's not clear that thyroid cancer in children really spiked. For example, see http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...
Considering that Fukushima was much more contained than Chernobyl, I doubt that we'll see that many cancer cases from Fukushima.
I did some reading on Chernobyl several years ago, and going in, I expected that the disaster would have caused a lot of cancer deaths. I was surprised to learn that it didn't, but it makes sense now that I think about it. Yes, a lot of radioactive material got released, but the world is a _big_ place. One reactor's worth of radioactive material diluted over a large area isn't _that_ big a deal. Yes, it's a big enough deal that it's probably unsafe to live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but the effect beyond that is quite limited. Even if a reactor goes pop every few decades, it'll still probably cause less environmental damage than all the coal we use in the same period.
undoing mod
Even if you use UW facilities for research? That's doubtful.
Doubt all you want, the facts are the facts.
Here's WARF:
UW–Madison faculty, staff and students are not obligated to assign their intellectual property to WARF, unless required to do so by federal law or the terms of a sponsored research agreement with a third party.
http://www.warf.org/about-us/f...
Here's the official UW Policy:
he UW is unique among U.S. universities in that it does not claim ownership rights in the intellectual property generated by its faculty, staff, or students, except when required by funding agreements. UW inventors do, however, have an obligation to disclose all inventions created while carrying out university duties, using any university funding, or using university premises, supplies, or equipment. It is the role of the UW–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education to perform an equity review for each UW–Madison invention disclosure to determine what obligations may attach to each invention and who may have rights to the invention.
https://research.wisc.edu/proj...
Note that you have to disclose the invention to WARF. However, you don't have to give it to them. You have to disclose it because some (but not all) outside grants require inventions be assigned to the university, and WARF wants to make sure you're following the terms of the grant. However, that is not the University's fault. I speak as someone who has disclosed an invention to WARF. They looked it over, determined that it was not covered by a grant that requires I give up the invention, and told me that I could do what I wanted.
WARF and lawyers are the middleman
By that standard, it doesn't matter who owns the patent: any time there is a patent lawsuit there are middleman because lawyers are involved. Of course, that's a silly standard because they don't "make all the money" as you claimed a few posts ago. WARF doesn't really make money since it's a non-profit, and as noted above, despite your disbelief, you can cut WARF out of the loop.
True. I should have said that _public_ universities aren't for profit corporations.
Using WARF is _voluntary_; UW researchers don't have to go through them. They can patented inventions on their own and take all the profit if they'd like (and pay all the filing costs, pitch it to companies, sue infringes, etc. on their own). Moreover, what middlemen take the money? The money returns to the university one way or another -- mostly as research grants within the university, not pocketed by a CEO.
Chill out.
In terms of endowment per student, that's practically nothing (relative to other universities). The endowment is meant to generate income on interest -- not to be spent directly.
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
That is simply false. Researchers here aren't required to go through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to get patents. If the researchers decide to, they make a contract with WARF where the researchers get a cut of the profits. Even grad students often get a cut.
I don't know how it works at other universities, but universities aren't for profit corporations -- at least not yet. If universities didn't give faculty a cut of patent revenu, I'd imagine they'd soon find their strong, patent-generating faculty going elsewhere.
The money goes to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). The university isn't allowed to own the patents directly. That means that the university and state can't just raid the money as they see fit, which is probably a good thing.
WARF doles out the money in various ways. Much goes to research on campus, some goes to "faculty retention" (i.e. when another university tries to poach a strong faculty member, WARF steps in with money to keep them here), some is administrative costs (WARF assists university personnel in getting patents), some gets returned directly to the university, some goes to the people who did the research to get the patent, etc.
In short, the answer is "all of the above and more".
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the people who actually hold the patents (the university isn't allowed to have them directly), did a similar thing to Intel not all that long ago (5 years?). I guess I can't complain since WARF funds my research (and a lot of research on campus -- having an internal funding mechanism is great). However, I recall that a bunch of the Intel money was supposed to go to the college of engineering (COE), which seems to have spent the money redecorating Engineering Hall (which, admittedly, is super ugly) and cutting ECE teaching assistant positions. It would be nice if the COE got a chunk of this and actually put it to good use...
You raise a valid point. Yes, it would be nice if those costs were taken into account, but "We don't know all the costs therefore it's a bad idea!" is not a strong argument unless we truly know very little. Do you have any data to suggest that the backup costs are significant relative to the costs of the generated solar and wind power?
While we are on the subject of "things we don't know about the cost of solar and wind", here are some more questions that I'd like to see answered:
Are the fossil fuel plant maintenance costs simply the costs we already have for our existing fossil fuel plants? Is it possible that wind _lowers_ the maintenance costs of fossil fuel plants relative to their current levels? (If fossil fuel plants get less use, wouldn't they require less maintenance?) If wind and solar plants are distributed across the country, how much variation in total output capacity is there? (And by extension, how much fossil fuel backup capacity is really needed?)
In short, yes, you have brought up a cost that is not included in the analysis. However, there are many benefits and costs that are not included in the analysis. The math will always be "fuzzy" because no models include everything. Demanding that is unreasonable. As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Yes, there are a lot of very talented and driven international students who come to the US. I know many of them. Power to them. I'm happy to have them stay.
The issue here is jobs that don't require very talented and driven people. The article is about outsourcing accountant positions. We're not talking about MIT trained engineers; we're talking about run-of-the-mill, white-collar jobs that many people can do.
You're talking about the first category, but the article is about the second category: the H1B system was meant to bring in people from the first category, but the system is being abused to bring in people from the second category. The american education system is irrelevant to this discussion.
the taxes I've saved by writing off my mortgage interest and property taxes
A number of republican presidential candidates want to ax the mortgage interest and/or state tax deductions. Power to them. The rest of us shouldn't be subsidizing your houses.
"Functioning" is a pretty low standard -- just like the standard of living for many people in those countries. We shouldn't settle for "functioning".
No.
The treaty is clear, and I imagine that most of us agree with the spirit of the treaty, but the treaty goes too far. It effectively bans any permanent settlement on the moon. If that ever becomes practical, this treaty will be mincemeat. We should make a better treaty now before the current one gets dumped -- possibly without a replacement.
has released a new 3D printer that is supposed to be more reliable and higher quality than its predecessors.
I'm glad they haven't started to release products that are less reliable and lower quality than its predecessors; that's the sign of a mature field...