Telsa had the foresight to ensure its battery and magnet raw material supplies for the next 20-50 years
50 years is a long time. Given battery improvements are happening constantly, Li-ion may not necessarily be the best chemistry for the next 50 years.
As an investor, that's just another risk that should ideally be factored into the price. But since most independent Tesla investors are the ideological sort and will probably continue to support it even in the case of stock dilution, those kind of risks are being ignored.
False comparison. Nobody can to do a controlled trial with water, but they can for glyphosate. If the glyphosate group had higher incidence of cancer than the control group, then it's valid to say there's a potential link between the two.
That would be suicidal on the part of the fire truck driver. Not to mention by the time they noticed the problem, the plane was already on the runway so a truck would've had no chance of catching up.
All things considered this situation ended pretty well. No one on the ground was hurt and the guy got what he wanted in his final moments.
That's just a matter of adjusting the cost scale. You can start with $1 for the first year and double it every year thereafter. It's a reasonable $1024 after 10 years and a much more costly $1,048,576 after 20. Disney might have a deep wallet, but they don't have an exponentially deep wallet.
I believe there should be a grace period of a few years or something, and if a company no longer sells or licenses their "property", they forfeit it and it should go public domain
Pretty easy to get around that restriction, just charge $10^100 per copy.
Yes, garbage collection allows people to write less code, but they still need to understand memory management. Otherwise you'll have people who try to load GB-sized files into an array or use hash tables to store everything because "it's fast".
The actual reason people think less about memory nowadays is because computers have so much memory. You can implement "cat" by loading all of the input files into arrays, calling "strcat" N times, then writing the result. And 99% of the time it will work just fine.
The problem is that it's impossible. The complexity of software comes from the complexity of the underlying problem. No matter where you move the complexity, whether it's from the frontend to the backend, or from an application to a library or to the OS, it still exists. Someone needs to understand that complexity to create working software for it.
Lay people, especially managers, like to think "if we just used library X" that could take care of all the hard stuff. The reality is, using library X now becomes the hard part. It could be bugs, performance problems, bad behavior for certain edge cases, incompatible API changes or security problems. In many cases it could be worse to work across an abstraction layer like that, since the business-destroying bug you're running into is just one of thousands that the upstream developer has to deal with.
If it's cost of living, then why should new teachers be excluded from it?
Their base pay goes up over time, too.
All I'm saying is, everyone should be receiving 2% cost-of-living raises (or whatever it is in their area), including new positions, and it should be on top of performance based raises. Otherwise current teachers will receive the adjustments, but new teachers will see lower and lower initial pay, eventually resulting in a shortage of teachers (which is what we see happening right now).
Unless your question is "Why do people with no experience not get paid as much as people with twenty years' experience?" in which case the answer is "twenty years' experience".
That wasn't my question, and I agree having no experience means they won't be as effective. However, I don't think the same applies if you're comparing someone with 10 years and someone with 20 years experience.
In order for a teacher to improve, they must be continuously experimenting, evaluating and improving their teaching methodology. They must keep up with new information coming out of academia. They must be always be learning. Unfortunately though, most people are not life-long learners. After a few years, they get good enough at their jobs and stop looking for improvements. This is especially true in a seniority system that doesn't reward (or even acknowledge) improvements.
Besides, I'm sure there are teachers with 5 years of experience outperforming some with 20. How is it fair for them to receive less pay, despite doing better work?
Being bad at measuring performance is not a valid reason to avoid measuring performance. It's a reason to find better performance metrics.
I agree in principle. In practice, though, it is much harder than you think. If you use student performance as a metric in isolation, you risk teachers teaching to the test, which doesn't inspire students to learn, but if you use student perception as a metric, the teachers who teach least are most popular.
In practice, we've allowed politicians to decide the metric, which has never worked in any other situation either. The metrics (more than one) can't be written into laws. They need to be much more flexible and therefore difficult to game. They will probably need to change frequently until a really good set is found. And some of it will probably have to include subjective measurements.
Both student performance and student perception are good metrics, but no metric is going to be sufficient on its own. Just by combining both, it's already much more effective and much more difficult to game. You can add a few more such as parent perception, evaluator perception, randomized sampling of students to test deeper understanding, swapping teachers around to see if students get a boost and so on.
When most people hear "multi-million-dollar classroom", they're expecting you to be talking about spending millions of dollars on what is in a classroom. Those are just very expensive buildings, in large part because land and construction prices are exorbitant in greater NYC. And even then, if you actually look at the cost per classroom, I doubt any of these actually exceeds $2 million per room unless you treat shared spaces like the gym, cafeteria, theater, bathrooms, hallways, etc. as being free.
For me, "multi-million-dollar classroom" means the classroom itself cost more than $1 million. In the example I cited, they paid more than $2 per classroom, which is literally a "multi-million-dollar" classroom. In my opinion, if a 1500 sqft. private home costs $300,000 to rebuild, then a 1500 sqft. classroom in the same area should cost $300,000. If anything it should be less since you're building a large number of classrooms at once and there should be volume discounts. I can see science labs costing a bit more since
Agreed. I think eventually this will evolve into remote diagnoses and treatments. There's no need to physically interact with a patient if you can have a set of remotely controlled robotic arms do it instead.
Seniority pay is what most other people call "cost of living adjustments".
If it's cost of living, then why should new teachers be excluded from it? If anything, they should be paid more since they probably have college debt and no savings.
The best thing that could happen to teachers is to bring back the respect people had for them back in the old days. None of this "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" crap. But that change isn't going to happen if the system keeps promoting mediocrity.
I've encountered more than a few who can be replaced by a cassette tape. It doesn't diminish my respect for my better teachers, but for the occupation as a whole, it really drags down the average.
Should performance be a factor? Probably. Should it be the only factor? No. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that in the often highly political world of academia, a pure seniority pay scheme without any adjustment for performance other than firing people who severely under-perform produces better outcomes by reducing salary biases that otherwise would favor the teachers who suck up over the ones who actually do a better job.
Being bad at measuring performance is not a valid reason to avoid measuring performance. It's a reason to find better performance metrics. Also, if you have district or intra-district level evaluators who's only visiting the school once a month or so, they're not going to be so easily convinced by teachers sucking up to them.
At a bare minimum, a performance-based scheme requires independent evaluators, which means more administration, whereas you want less.
I want less overall, not necessarily less in every category. You can cut a lot in other places and add a few for evaluation. I mean, how many do you really need? A team of 5 can probably serve half a dozen districts.
Multi-million-dollar classrooms is almost always an exaggeration.
Realistically, schools build buildings because they have exceeded the capacity of the old ones or because the cost of maintaining the old buildings has gotten so high that it is cheaper to build a new one and pay for it over thirty years than to maintain the existing one over that same time period. Cost-cutting on construction inevitably leads to higher maintenance costs in the long run, which over the life of the building ends up cutting into funds that could have been used to pay more teachers.
Do you have a source on the maintenance costs of older buildings? I don't remember seeing any work being done on them when I was in school, and we had some pretty old buildings.
What we need to cut down on are the people who work outside the schools at the district level (except teacher evaluators). To the maximum extent possible, we need to replace them with automation. Hire computer programmers to write tools that can handle those administrative duties automatically. Hire temp workers for short-term data entry tasks like keying in student enrollment forms at the start of each school year, or outsource it to a call center in India
That would be nice. I'd also like to ask what exactly are they administrating and whether that work needs to be done at all.
Most of the disparity in public school quality comes not from how well the system is run, but from how high the average property taxes are in the areas that feed those schools.
We don't actually know that. Property taxes in the area also strongly correlates with education level of the parents, which is by far the biggest predictor of scholastic success.
...passing a law making it illegal for cities to provide additional funds for their schools, and req
What are you talking about? Singapore is a lot nicer than SF and has subsidized housing for the not-so-rich folks. If SF could end up like that, it'll be a positive change for most people.
The government has no reason to regulate where a restaurant can be. They do need to regulate food safety and smoking, both of which can cause health issues, but the location isn't causing harm to anyone.
If the city really wanted them to not have in-house cafes, they should've put that in the contract, not retroactively creating laws after the companies have already moved their offices there.
I also consider myself a socialist, but I understand that backstabbing people will not end in long-term prosperity. Pushing for these dumb laws only gives socialism a bad name and reduce political support for more important issues such as universal health care or UBI.
Besides, if the choice comes down to restaurants, which are entirely profit-oriented, and tech companies, which are more socially conscious, I'd rather have more of the latter. And if the dramatic rise in food prices are any indication, the restaurants are doing just fine right now.
Forcing integration doesn't work since people will just move a few districts over. There are lots of good public schools in the Bay Area for them to choose from. And no, busing kids around doesn't work either. Nobody wants the kids to spend 2+ hours in traffic every day.
No, the best way to fix bad public schools is to end seniority pay, cut administrative staff, stop building multi-million dollar classrooms and put that money into teacher salary and subsidized housing. And fire the principal while you're at it. I looked into becoming a teacher once and let's just say I like having my own room and not eating ramen every day.
That's a valid concern. However, given the numbers people are throwing around for UBI, such as $500 a month, it's going to take many decades for it to get anywhere close to luxury even if had popular support. It's much faster to simply get off your ass and work for it. Besides, the last thing people on UBI want is for the system to collapse. They depend on it for their livelihoods after all.
Contrary to popular opinion, the ability to self-organize is not a genetic trait. It is learned just like any other skill. By weeding them out without trying to teach them first, you're losing out on a lot of potential talent.
Likewise, finding a competent partner to work with depends on your charisma and luck. Both are good to have, but plenty of people find success despite not having either.
And then there's all the private coding "bootcamps" in the US which does exactly what you described. They start with a bunch of assignments designed to weed out everyone except those who are already good at coding, then they put these people through the course without teaching them much, and finally claim all the credit when these people find good employment. As far as their value is concerned though, I put them at the same level as a decent book on the subject.
Given that as of today only 60% of people 16 and older work, needing 50% to sustain mere livelihood seems unreasonable.
While I agree the current agricultural model needs support from various others, I do think the remainder 8% employed is sufficient (approximately 20 million people). This is mainly due to how little support agriculture actually needs.
For example, there are 5.9 million working in "Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations", and of those, only 42,000 are "farm equipment mechanics and service technicians". Much of the remainder, such as auto mechanics, would not be necessary in a world where 90% of the people don't need to work and thus don't need cars.
Another way to look at it is that the service industry employs 125 million out of 156 million workers. No matter how you slice that, most of them will not be necessary to keep the farms going, especially given modern agriculture predates most of those jobs.
Of course, any number between 0% and 90% would be possible, depending on the amount UBI provides and human psychology. Neither of which we know right now, and the latter being impossible to know until we actually try it.
Slashdot Mirror
Telsa had the foresight to ensure its battery and magnet raw material supplies for the next 20-50 years
50 years is a long time. Given battery improvements are happening constantly, Li-ion may not necessarily be the best chemistry for the next 50 years.
As an investor, that's just another risk that should ideally be factored into the price. But since most independent Tesla investors are the ideological sort and will probably continue to support it even in the case of stock dilution, those kind of risks are being ignored.
If he wanted to kill people, there were plenty of planes right next to him that are full of passengers. No need to fly to Seattle for that.
False comparison. Nobody can to do a controlled trial with water, but they can for glyphosate. If the glyphosate group had higher incidence of cancer than the control group, then it's valid to say there's a potential link between the two.
That would be suicidal on the part of the fire truck driver. Not to mention by the time they noticed the problem, the plane was already on the runway so a truck would've had no chance of catching up.
All things considered this situation ended pretty well. No one on the ground was hurt and the guy got what he wanted in his final moments.
Nah, even paying gamers like myself still pirate. So do 90% of all gamers if surveys are to be believed.
That's just a matter of adjusting the cost scale. You can start with $1 for the first year and double it every year thereafter. It's a reasonable $1024 after 10 years and a much more costly $1,048,576 after 20. Disney might have a deep wallet, but they don't have an exponentially deep wallet.
I believe there should be a grace period of a few years or something, and if a company no longer sells or licenses their "property", they forfeit it and it should go public domain
Pretty easy to get around that restriction, just charge $10^100 per copy.
Because this hasn't been implemented.
Have you never heard of BitTorrent?
And guess what? People still pay for games.
Yes, garbage collection allows people to write less code, but they still need to understand memory management. Otherwise you'll have people who try to load GB-sized files into an array or use hash tables to store everything because "it's fast".
The actual reason people think less about memory nowadays is because computers have so much memory. You can implement "cat" by loading all of the input files into arrays, calling "strcat" N times, then writing the result. And 99% of the time it will work just fine.
The problem is that it's impossible. The complexity of software comes from the complexity of the underlying problem. No matter where you move the complexity, whether it's from the frontend to the backend, or from an application to a library or to the OS, it still exists. Someone needs to understand that complexity to create working software for it.
Lay people, especially managers, like to think "if we just used library X" that could take care of all the hard stuff. The reality is, using library X now becomes the hard part. It could be bugs, performance problems, bad behavior for certain edge cases, incompatible API changes or security problems. In many cases it could be worse to work across an abstraction layer like that, since the business-destroying bug you're running into is just one of thousands that the upstream developer has to deal with.
Their base pay goes up over time, too.
All I'm saying is, everyone should be receiving 2% cost-of-living raises (or whatever it is in their area), including new positions, and it should be on top of performance based raises. Otherwise current teachers will receive the adjustments, but new teachers will see lower and lower initial pay, eventually resulting in a shortage of teachers (which is what we see happening right now).
Unless your question is "Why do people with no experience not get paid as much as people with twenty years' experience?" in which case the answer is "twenty years' experience".
That wasn't my question, and I agree having no experience means they won't be as effective. However, I don't think the same applies if you're comparing someone with 10 years and someone with 20 years experience.
In order for a teacher to improve, they must be continuously experimenting, evaluating and improving their teaching methodology. They must keep up with new information coming out of academia. They must be always be learning. Unfortunately though, most people are not life-long learners. After a few years, they get good enough at their jobs and stop looking for improvements. This is especially true in a seniority system that doesn't reward (or even acknowledge) improvements.
Besides, I'm sure there are teachers with 5 years of experience outperforming some with 20. How is it fair for them to receive less pay, despite doing better work?
I agree in principle. In practice, though, it is much harder than you think. If you use student performance as a metric in isolation, you risk teachers teaching to the test, which doesn't inspire students to learn, but if you use student perception as a metric, the teachers who teach least are most popular.
In practice, we've allowed politicians to decide the metric, which has never worked in any other situation either. The metrics (more than one) can't be written into laws. They need to be much more flexible and therefore difficult to game. They will probably need to change frequently until a really good set is found. And some of it will probably have to include subjective measurements.
Both student performance and student perception are good metrics, but no metric is going to be sufficient on its own. Just by combining both, it's already much more effective and much more difficult to game. You can add a few more such as parent perception, evaluator perception, randomized sampling of students to test deeper understanding, swapping teachers around to see if students get a boost and so on.
When most people hear "multi-million-dollar classroom", they're expecting you to be talking about spending millions of dollars on what is in a classroom. Those are just very expensive buildings, in large part because land and construction prices are exorbitant in greater NYC. And even then, if you actually look at the cost per classroom, I doubt any of these actually exceeds $2 million per room unless you treat shared spaces like the gym, cafeteria, theater, bathrooms, hallways, etc. as being free.
For me, "multi-million-dollar classroom" means the classroom itself cost more than $1 million. In the example I cited, they paid more than $2 per classroom, which is literally a "multi-million-dollar" classroom. In my opinion, if a 1500 sqft. private home costs $300,000 to rebuild, then a 1500 sqft. classroom in the same area should cost $300,000. If anything it should be less since you're building a large number of classrooms at once and there should be volume discounts. I can see science labs costing a bit more since
On the other hand, the dirt was in the air before it got stuck to the oil, so you're breathing less dirt now.
Agreed. I think eventually this will evolve into remote diagnoses and treatments. There's no need to physically interact with a patient if you can have a set of remotely controlled robotic arms do it instead.
Ah you're right. I missed that part.
Seniority pay is what most other people call "cost of living adjustments".
If it's cost of living, then why should new teachers be excluded from it? If anything, they should be paid more since they probably have college debt and no savings.
The best thing that could happen to teachers is to bring back the respect people had for them back in the old days. None of this "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" crap. But that change isn't going to happen if the system keeps promoting mediocrity.
I've encountered more than a few who can be replaced by a cassette tape. It doesn't diminish my respect for my better teachers, but for the occupation as a whole, it really drags down the average.
Should performance be a factor? Probably. Should it be the only factor? No. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that in the often highly political world of academia, a pure seniority pay scheme without any adjustment for performance other than firing people who severely under-perform produces better outcomes by reducing salary biases that otherwise would favor the teachers who suck up over the ones who actually do a better job.
Being bad at measuring performance is not a valid reason to avoid measuring performance. It's a reason to find better performance metrics. Also, if you have district or intra-district level evaluators who's only visiting the school once a month or so, they're not going to be so easily convinced by teachers sucking up to them.
At a bare minimum, a performance-based scheme requires independent evaluators, which means more administration, whereas you want less.
I want less overall, not necessarily less in every category. You can cut a lot in other places and add a few for evaluation. I mean, how many do you really need? A team of 5 can probably serve half a dozen districts.
Multi-million-dollar classrooms is almost always an exaggeration.
No, it's not an exaggeration.
Realistically, schools build buildings because they have exceeded the capacity of the old ones or because the cost of maintaining the old buildings has gotten so high that it is cheaper to build a new one and pay for it over thirty years than to maintain the existing one over that same time period. Cost-cutting on construction inevitably leads to higher maintenance costs in the long run, which over the life of the building ends up cutting into funds that could have been used to pay more teachers.
Do you have a source on the maintenance costs of older buildings? I don't remember seeing any work being done on them when I was in school, and we had some pretty old buildings.
What we need to cut down on are the people who work outside the schools at the district level (except teacher evaluators). To the maximum extent possible, we need to replace them with automation. Hire computer programmers to write tools that can handle those administrative duties automatically. Hire temp workers for short-term data entry tasks like keying in student enrollment forms at the start of each school year, or outsource it to a call center in India
That would be nice. I'd also like to ask what exactly are they administrating and whether that work needs to be done at all.
Most of the disparity in public school quality comes not from how well the system is run, but from how high the average property taxes are in the areas that feed those schools.
We don't actually know that. Property taxes in the area also strongly correlates with education level of the parents, which is by far the biggest predictor of scholastic success.
...passing a law making it illegal for cities to provide additional funds for their schools, and req
What are you talking about? Singapore is a lot nicer than SF and has subsidized housing for the not-so-rich folks. If SF could end up like that, it'll be a positive change for most people.
The government has no reason to regulate where a restaurant can be. They do need to regulate food safety and smoking, both of which can cause health issues, but the location isn't causing harm to anyone.
If the city really wanted them to not have in-house cafes, they should've put that in the contract, not retroactively creating laws after the companies have already moved their offices there.
I also consider myself a socialist, but I understand that backstabbing people will not end in long-term prosperity. Pushing for these dumb laws only gives socialism a bad name and reduce political support for more important issues such as universal health care or UBI.
Besides, if the choice comes down to restaurants, which are entirely profit-oriented, and tech companies, which are more socially conscious, I'd rather have more of the latter. And if the dramatic rise in food prices are any indication, the restaurants are doing just fine right now.
Forcing integration doesn't work since people will just move a few districts over. There are lots of good public schools in the Bay Area for them to choose from. And no, busing kids around doesn't work either. Nobody wants the kids to spend 2+ hours in traffic every day.
No, the best way to fix bad public schools is to end seniority pay, cut administrative staff, stop building multi-million dollar classrooms and put that money into teacher salary and subsidized housing. And fire the principal while you're at it. I looked into becoming a teacher once and let's just say I like having my own room and not eating ramen every day.
That's a valid concern. However, given the numbers people are throwing around for UBI, such as $500 a month, it's going to take many decades for it to get anywhere close to luxury even if had popular support. It's much faster to simply get off your ass and work for it. Besides, the last thing people on UBI want is for the system to collapse. They depend on it for their livelihoods after all.
It's called foresight. Even the blue-collar folks have it, which is why disability insurance is a thing.
Contrary to popular opinion, the ability to self-organize is not a genetic trait. It is learned just like any other skill. By weeding them out without trying to teach them first, you're losing out on a lot of potential talent.
Likewise, finding a competent partner to work with depends on your charisma and luck. Both are good to have, but plenty of people find success despite not having either.
And then there's all the private coding "bootcamps" in the US which does exactly what you described. They start with a bunch of assignments designed to weed out everyone except those who are already good at coding, then they put these people through the course without teaching them much, and finally claim all the credit when these people find good employment. As far as their value is concerned though, I put them at the same level as a decent book on the subject.
Yeah... if you're panhandling.
There's the option of going to a foreign school too. Some of those are decent quality and are pretty cheap by comparison.
Also, the Coast Guard doesn't fight in foreign wars, though getting shot at or murdered at home is still a possibility.
Given that as of today only 60% of people 16 and older work, needing 50% to sustain mere livelihood seems unreasonable.
While I agree the current agricultural model needs support from various others, I do think the remainder 8% employed is sufficient (approximately 20 million people). This is mainly due to how little support agriculture actually needs.
For example, there are 5.9 million working in "Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations", and of those, only 42,000 are "farm equipment mechanics and service technicians". Much of the remainder, such as auto mechanics, would not be necessary in a world where 90% of the people don't need to work and thus don't need cars.
Another way to look at it is that the service industry employs 125 million out of 156 million workers. No matter how you slice that, most of them will not be necessary to keep the farms going, especially given modern agriculture predates most of those jobs.
Of course, any number between 0% and 90% would be possible, depending on the amount UBI provides and human psychology. Neither of which we know right now, and the latter being impossible to know until we actually try it.