If you're middle in USA you're 1% in the world. If you have friends that are surgeons or lawyers then you have friends in the top 1% of the USA. It's not as far out of reach as the protesters would have you believe. Now if they were talking about the top 0.1% or 0.01% then maybe you're at a level where the money conveys political power, but 1% is only around 280k/year, a nice salary but you aren't taking a helicopter to work.
No liquidity is a problem. There has never been a time when a stock market was totally illiquid. Most of us can't get a transaction through in under 24 hours anyway, so I don't exactly see the benefit of millisecond-level liquidity.
Problem being that a real work environment and an interview are very different situations. Most of us have stress levels during interviews that wouldn't exactly be healthy over long periods of time. An interview like this is the opposite of no supervision. Unless your idea of 'no supervision' is having someone constantly looking at your code over your shoulder as you write it. The issue isn't that I got wrapped up in it, the issue is that screwing up something that you know is straight-forward towards the beginning of an interview will throw you off, because it's only an hour and you don't have opportunity to recover. Never mind that Google's interview methods are poor from the start, with no attempt to get the candidate excited about the job, or even less nervous, or ensure that they aren't trying to code in a cheap MS Word clone.
Also, as I said, most Google employees I talked to either joined right out of university, or required multiple tries at the interview process. From what I've been told Google knows that their process has a very high level of false negatives, and they're ok with that. Which is fine, but I disliked the process enough that when they start spamming me to interview again next year I'll be politely turning them down rather than rolling the dice again.
Here's the problem with quiz-style programming questions like Google's. My ability to solve them varies greatly on how close they are to the work I happen to be doing at work during the past couple months. As an example, I had an interview with Google a few months ago. One of the questions was to write a UTF-verifier. The interviewer gave a quick description of what valid UTF looks like, and I had to write a function that verified if a given byte array was valid UTF. I hadn't done that kind of low-level bit-fiddling in a few years, and so getting the low-level stuff right (how do you check if the first bit is 1 again?) slowed me down significantly and really threw me off the larger view of the problem. During the past couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of that level of stuff at work (in PHP no less, bit-fiddling in a language that will replace your nice int with a float when you overflow to what would be a negative integer is an interesting experience) so the stuff that threw me off would now be second nature. But in a year I would have to really think about it again and once again the little details would distract me from the larger problem.
On a related note, everyone I know who has gone to Google after working somewhere else (not as a new grad) has told me that they tried for 2-3 years, and eventually they just hit on a series of questions they could handle. Had they been asked the questions in year 1 that they were in year 3 they would have probably gotten the job then.
I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
We asked my kid's allergist about that once. He told us there were a few prevailing theories as to why food allergies have increased recently. One is that there were a bunch of really nasty viruses that went around about 100 years ago and the genetics that predisposed people to survive them may be related to the genetics for allergies. The other is that the average person now gets zero parasites in a year, where the normal used to be about 12 parasites a year for most people. Maybe a lack of parasites leads to our immune system incorrectly believing some food is bad. The stats certainly don't lie however, there are a lot more people with potentially lethal food allergies than there used to be.
I had a great prof that pointed out that everyone is legally liable for mistakes they make in areas they claim to be an expert in, but only engineers require a course in their undergrad to tell them so.
Look up 'stationary engineer'. It's a factory position, requires a 2-year college program, and the people who do it can call themselves engineers without a P.Eng in Canada. Also I do know people doing software that requires P.Eng, mostly industrial-control type stuff. There are also routes to a P.Eng if you have a degree that isn't in applied sciences, so long as it's fairly close (science or math generally), and you're willing to jump through some interesting paperwork hoops.
Despite what they tell you in school, engineering in Canada, and the P.Eng designation in particular, isn't limited to the ivory tower few.
So you think the richest 3.5 million or so people in the country control everything? That's not so bad, it only takes something like $380k annual income to make the top 1%, specialist doctors and lawyers can make that much. I have a hard time believing that the pediatric neurosurgeon I know, who certainly makes in the top 1%, would screw up the country.
Water covers most of the planet. Desalinization is mostly a problem of not enough energy. Food production also gets a lot easier if artificial lighting makes economic sense - you could literally build a skyscraper and grow food on every floor. Similar to what marijuana growers do when they bypass the electric meters.
Growth in energy consumption would still be capped by how much electricity we can actually transmit and use. As in, the wires coming to your house probably can't deliver more than a couple hundred amps to every house. Upgrading and maintaining that infrastructure isn't free, so you will still pay for electricity. Even if everyone had a generator at home you still need to pay to maintain the generator itself and all the wiring. And all the gadgets that use the power aren't free.
This is solar thermal, not photovoltaic. The basic idea is to grab a large area where the sun is pretty much always shining during the day (you do have a desert or two, you know), set up a lot of mirrors, and heat the top of a tower. Fill the tower with some form of salt that will become liquid at high temperature, and will hold heat well (solving the night time issue), and they use the heat from the salt to power a conventional steam generator. There are a few installations of this sort, and it works well. They're just looking at how to make it a little cheaper.
So far as I know you are. You can't use Mastercard or Visa to do it, but those are proprietary networks for moving money around, they get to say who is allowed to use their network. Is there anything stopping you from sending a cheque, or a money order, or any other form of money that doesn't rely on a third party?
When was that standard? It wasn't on the microwave I bought in the 80s, or the one in the 90s, or the one I just bought a couple weeks ago. Every microwave I've ever used used some form of duty cycle for reduced power levels.
Depends on how you define 'poor'. If we could guarantee shelter, clothing, and sufficient food to everyone wouldn't that mean that no one is truly 'poor'? There's always going to be a range of how much people have, but if we can get the bottom of that range up to a level where the most necessary needs are met then I think it would be fair to say that no one is poor.
Every car I've ever driven has a key position between 'on' and 'wheel lock'. On most cars it's the accessories position, on my current car it seems to be 'off but wheel unlocked'. I haven't driven a Jag before but I doubt turning off the engine puts you right into the wheel lock state.
I would add some form of old-age government-guaranteed pension. People who think they may rely on their kids for money when they become infirm in old age are still going to have more kids then if they're pretty sure they'll be able to cover the essentials themselves.
Except, given the current rate of change of population growth, the UN expects us to never make it to 10 billion people. Unless something major changes in the next 100 years, the population will never be double the current level.
The 'regulation' in this case is the inability to have the debt cleared by bankruptcy. A bank will never provide a young person with an unsecured loan for education because there is absolutely no good reason for someone just leaving college not to declare bankruptcy as soon as they have secured a job. If you have essentially no assets aside from a degree which can't be sold, why would you accept having debt if there was a way to get rid of it?
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If you're middle in USA you're 1% in the world. If you have friends that are surgeons or lawyers then you have friends in the top 1% of the USA. It's not as far out of reach as the protesters would have you believe. Now if they were talking about the top 0.1% or 0.01% then maybe you're at a level where the money conveys political power, but 1% is only around 280k/year, a nice salary but you aren't taking a helicopter to work.
Because some of us would like to run servers from our house, and NAT makes that a bit inconvenient.
No liquidity is a problem. There has never been a time when a stock market was totally illiquid. Most of us can't get a transaction through in under 24 hours anyway, so I don't exactly see the benefit of millisecond-level liquidity.
What do you think Amex is?
Problem being that a real work environment and an interview are very different situations. Most of us have stress levels during interviews that wouldn't exactly be healthy over long periods of time. An interview like this is the opposite of no supervision. Unless your idea of 'no supervision' is having someone constantly looking at your code over your shoulder as you write it. The issue isn't that I got wrapped up in it, the issue is that screwing up something that you know is straight-forward towards the beginning of an interview will throw you off, because it's only an hour and you don't have opportunity to recover. Never mind that Google's interview methods are poor from the start, with no attempt to get the candidate excited about the job, or even less nervous, or ensure that they aren't trying to code in a cheap MS Word clone.
Also, as I said, most Google employees I talked to either joined right out of university, or required multiple tries at the interview process. From what I've been told Google knows that their process has a very high level of false negatives, and they're ok with that. Which is fine, but I disliked the process enough that when they start spamming me to interview again next year I'll be politely turning them down rather than rolling the dice again.
Here's the problem with quiz-style programming questions like Google's. My ability to solve them varies greatly on how close they are to the work I happen to be doing at work during the past couple months. As an example, I had an interview with Google a few months ago. One of the questions was to write a UTF-verifier. The interviewer gave a quick description of what valid UTF looks like, and I had to write a function that verified if a given byte array was valid UTF. I hadn't done that kind of low-level bit-fiddling in a few years, and so getting the low-level stuff right (how do you check if the first bit is 1 again?) slowed me down significantly and really threw me off the larger view of the problem. During the past couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of that level of stuff at work (in PHP no less, bit-fiddling in a language that will replace your nice int with a float when you overflow to what would be a negative integer is an interesting experience) so the stuff that threw me off would now be second nature. But in a year I would have to really think about it again and once again the little details would distract me from the larger problem.
On a related note, everyone I know who has gone to Google after working somewhere else (not as a new grad) has told me that they tried for 2-3 years, and eventually they just hit on a series of questions they could handle. Had they been asked the questions in year 1 that they were in year 3 they would have probably gotten the job then.
I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
We asked my kid's allergist about that once. He told us there were a few prevailing theories as to why food allergies have increased recently. One is that there were a bunch of really nasty viruses that went around about 100 years ago and the genetics that predisposed people to survive them may be related to the genetics for allergies. The other is that the average person now gets zero parasites in a year, where the normal used to be about 12 parasites a year for most people. Maybe a lack of parasites leads to our immune system incorrectly believing some food is bad. The stats certainly don't lie however, there are a lot more people with potentially lethal food allergies than there used to be.
I had a great prof that pointed out that everyone is legally liable for mistakes they make in areas they claim to be an expert in, but only engineers require a course in their undergrad to tell them so.
Look up 'stationary engineer'. It's a factory position, requires a 2-year college program, and the people who do it can call themselves engineers without a P.Eng in Canada. Also I do know people doing software that requires P.Eng, mostly industrial-control type stuff. There are also routes to a P.Eng if you have a degree that isn't in applied sciences, so long as it's fairly close (science or math generally), and you're willing to jump through some interesting paperwork hoops.
Despite what they tell you in school, engineering in Canada, and the P.Eng designation in particular, isn't limited to the ivory tower few.
So you think the richest 3.5 million or so people in the country control everything? That's not so bad, it only takes something like $380k annual income to make the top 1%, specialist doctors and lawyers can make that much. I have a hard time believing that the pediatric neurosurgeon I know, who certainly makes in the top 1%, would screw up the country.
Water covers most of the planet. Desalinization is mostly a problem of not enough energy. Food production also gets a lot easier if artificial lighting makes economic sense - you could literally build a skyscraper and grow food on every floor. Similar to what marijuana growers do when they bypass the electric meters.
Growth in energy consumption would still be capped by how much electricity we can actually transmit and use. As in, the wires coming to your house probably can't deliver more than a couple hundred amps to every house. Upgrading and maintaining that infrastructure isn't free, so you will still pay for electricity. Even if everyone had a generator at home you still need to pay to maintain the generator itself and all the wiring. And all the gadgets that use the power aren't free.
Oh it's pretty easy to prove for yourself. The hard part is telling everyone else which way the proof went...
It used to be 2 checked bags for free, domestic or international, on pretty much any airline (we're talking past 10 years, not dark ages).
Have you shopped for an airline ticket recently? I don't think price can be nailed down very easily either...
This is solar thermal, not photovoltaic. The basic idea is to grab a large area where the sun is pretty much always shining during the day (you do have a desert or two, you know), set up a lot of mirrors, and heat the top of a tower. Fill the tower with some form of salt that will become liquid at high temperature, and will hold heat well (solving the night time issue), and they use the heat from the salt to power a conventional steam generator. There are a few installations of this sort, and it works well. They're just looking at how to make it a little cheaper.
So far as I know you are. You can't use Mastercard or Visa to do it, but those are proprietary networks for moving money around, they get to say who is allowed to use their network. Is there anything stopping you from sending a cheque, or a money order, or any other form of money that doesn't rely on a third party?
When was that standard? It wasn't on the microwave I bought in the 80s, or the one in the 90s, or the one I just bought a couple weeks ago. Every microwave I've ever used used some form of duty cycle for reduced power levels.
In terms of Cesium-137 maybe, but it's the uranium and plutonium around Chernobyl that are really dangerous.
Depends on how you define 'poor'. If we could guarantee shelter, clothing, and sufficient food to everyone wouldn't that mean that no one is truly 'poor'? There's always going to be a range of how much people have, but if we can get the bottom of that range up to a level where the most necessary needs are met then I think it would be fair to say that no one is poor.
Every car I've ever driven has a key position between 'on' and 'wheel lock'. On most cars it's the accessories position, on my current car it seems to be 'off but wheel unlocked'. I haven't driven a Jag before but I doubt turning off the engine puts you right into the wheel lock state.
Also harder to fix when you find an issue with 18000 delivered units.
I would add some form of old-age government-guaranteed pension. People who think they may rely on their kids for money when they become infirm in old age are still going to have more kids then if they're pretty sure they'll be able to cover the essentials themselves.
Except, given the current rate of change of population growth, the UN expects us to never make it to 10 billion people. Unless something major changes in the next 100 years, the population will never be double the current level.
The 'regulation' in this case is the inability to have the debt cleared by bankruptcy. A bank will never provide a young person with an unsecured loan for education because there is absolutely no good reason for someone just leaving college not to declare bankruptcy as soon as they have secured a job. If you have essentially no assets aside from a degree which can't be sold, why would you accept having debt if there was a way to get rid of it?