There are many species of small flies called "gnats", some of which bite. Many of them have aquatic larval stages, so changes in river levels can affect their populations. Some of them, as well as larger biting flies, live in damp, organically rich soil which also means that low rain levels can suppress their populations.
Also, farms are potent sources of many kinds of lies. The closure of a nearby farm, or even a modest change in husbandry practices can have an effect on fly populations.
Where the show was designed by the actor's race and sex instead of a plot and a casting call. Because blatant sexism and racism is good so long as it isn't favouring white males!
Congratulations. You have now recaptured a little bit of what it was like for the 1967 audience to experience the original series.
I spent many years in the mosquito control field. Trust me, they're coming. You just need rain followed by a warm spell.
Animal and plant species vary by how well they deal with disruptions. Species which deal well with disruptions and which have a high reproduction rate is a weedy species and thrives when we screw things up. Specie that reproduce slowly and are dependent upon certain specific things in the environment are the ones that disappear.
Most mosquito species are weedy. The larvae live on rotting organic matter in water and the adults live on nectar from a variety of sources. In some species a gravid female can lay two hundred eggs after a blood meal, and do that a half dozen times a year in some places. This means they have immense potential for exponential population growth, provided they have sources of water, temperatures warm enough to breed, and someone to get blood meals from.
Ecological disruption doesn't always look like death; in fact quite the opposite it can sometimes look like a profusion of life, as in a polluted lake choked with algae. But you lose most of the food chain: the fish and invertebrates they feed on. Or in cases like this it can be subtle; you might not see it until you look and wonder why a certain bird species is gone. Then you look and find out that the things it lives on are gone too.
But don't worry about mosquitoes. Unless your climate gets drier and cooler, you can count on them coming back.
A joke, as a verbal utterance, has to contain both an idea, and some form of expression of that idea. The idea is not copyrightable, but the expression certainly is *if it is sufficiently original*, which means it has to be long enough to be non-obvious.
Take the joke, "I just flew in from Cleveland and boy are my arms tired," which was probably funny the first time it was ever used. The idea behind the joke is the confusion between two senses of the verb "to fly". This version joke is such a straightforward and minimal embodiment of that idea that it seems unlikely to me that it could be copyrighted.
Verbal jokes on the other end of length and complexity scales, like the Abbott and Costello "Who's on first" routine seem very likely to me to be copyrightable.
Likewise non-verbal embodiments of a gag may be copyrightable, such as a political cartoon or a physical slapstick. But individual expressive elements are likely too small to be copyrightable. For example if I depict the president as a baby in diapers -- that's been done before, but I'm on safe ground. But if I copy too much about how another cartoonist represents the president's character graphically then I've crossed a line, albeit a fuzzy one.
You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.
If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.
When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.
I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.
I have to agree. There's a big difference between leaking, and dumping troves of information. It could have been bad.
Fortunately it was nowhere near as bad as people were claiming at the time. None of the revelations were really that shocking except to people who were naive about war or diplomacy.
In a way the most shocking thing was the sheer breadth of information that was made available to a young person who was disturbed, alienated and psychologically vulnerable. Granted screening for people like that is never going to be perfect, but it's almost like they weren't even trying.
Well, in a nutshell because the effective discount rate for expected future performance is high for stocks.
Now it doesn't mean that people don't invest in assets that they hope to make a killing on after a few years, but GM stock ain't that kind of asset. It's supposed to pay quarterly dividends so if you're a stockholder you're very interested in how much cash GM has on hand next quarter, probably more interested than whether it will be doing well four years from now. For investors, timing is everything.
It's described that way to further an agenda. But characterizing it that way unjustly stereotypes people.
One of the things you hopefully learn with age is how little probative value an isolated piece of truth has. You can always find someone who fits a stereotype if you look, but you have to be cautious drawing inferences from that, even if you find a lot of people who fit.
Everyone has met guys who seem to believe being a man means acting like a jackass. If you've never met that guy, then chances are you are that guy, and if you're an adult the guys around you aren't agreeing with you, they're humoring you.
That's "toxic masculinity", and it undoubtedly exists. But it's not the whole story, or even most of the story.
Take sports. I don't care for spectator sports; ice hockey is the only one that I get any enjoyment from. I live in Boston, and the only player on the Patriots, Bruins, Red Sox or Celtics I can name is Tom Brady, and if he broke both his legs before his next game I'd think that was too bad, but I wouldn't feel it personally. I just don't care, and I don't feel the need to care. I don't think this makes me better than people who genuinely care about sports, but I do think it makes me better than people who pretend to care about sports so they won't be seen unmanly.
This is a trivial example, but the principle involved is the same as in so-called "toxic masculinity": feeling you have to be something you're not just to satisfy other peoples' pointless expectations. Of course women talk about those things from the point of view of how it affects them, but then why shouldn't they? From the point of men trying too hard to appear manly, life is too short to waste time on bullshit pretense.
The pressure to be fake is pervasive. It affects everyone.
"Professional" only means "doing it for money". Nothing else.
You know, I was going to note that the atmosphere was unprofessional, except that I suspected we've reached a point where people don't even know what professionalism means.
Of course contrary to your claim there are in fact many different definitions for the world "professional", the one I'm talking about is the antonym of "unprofessional", the one you're talking about is the one that's the antonym of "hobbyist". You are talking about people like professional competitive eaters; I'm talking about people like civil engineers.
Professionalism is performing a job in a way that maintains public trust and respect for people who do that job. There are certain vocations, like accountant, or physician, where public trust is essential to their very function. But anyone can act professionally, in the sense of being demonstrably worthy of trust. I once was IT director of a company and had irreconcilable differences with the COO. I could have done a lot of damage to that company, instead I resigned. I took my second in command to the CFO's office and removed an envelope from the safe there where I had put all my passwords in a sealed envelope for safekeeping. Then, with my back turned and the CFO looking on I walked her through revoking all the access I had to the company's systems.
It was deliberately theatrical, because as a professional you don't just have an obligation to do the right thing, you have to be seen doing the right thing.
Which is why boys need adult supervision. Men, specifically, to set an example.
A man acts with dignity, self-restraint, and consideration for others. He doesn't do shit just because the people around him are doing it, and he doesn't pressure other people do things without a good reason.
If none of that sounds like any fun, feeling obligated to impress other guys with bullshit isn't any fun either. It's a bigger, more joyless burden than acting like a grownup, you just haven't figured that out yet.
Of course by that argument murder doesn't really matter either.
Lives are extremely valuable, even though every single one of them ends in a relatively short time. Even an individual life is valuable.
Now it so happens that every policy ends up killing people. If you build a bridge, statistically a certain number of workers will die on the project. The difference between building a bridge and murder is that the bridge has social benefits as well as costs, and in fact some of those benefits are denominated in lives prolonged.
OK, I'll keep this short: the half life of nitric oxide in the atmosphere is 100 hours. So basically your observation that automotive emissions don't match global natural emissions of NO is true, but irrelevant.
By speaking to everyone familiarly, we've lost a kind of dynamic range in our language.
Speaking to everyone as if they were your friend doesn't automatically make everyone your friend; nor should it. A salesman cold calling me is potentially wasting my time. He should show deference in his language. It sets my teeth on edge when someone I don't know calls and asks for me by my first name.
On the flip side by pretending we're all buddies, we've lost the ability to express intimacy by changing the formal register of our language. I suspect this may have complicated the entry of women into the workforce as equals.
If anything, rather than going from two formality registers to one we should have gone to three, maybe even four. What a shift in formality indicates is a difference in expectations. There should be a very formal register indicating that you don't necessarily expect someone to take time to respond to a question ("Pardon me, sir, but how do I get to the museum?"). You need another for colleagues from whom you can expect certain things ("Mr. Jones, would you run this month's backlog report please?"). You need yet another for close friends and family who allow you to impose on them ("Jack, can you feed my cat while I'm in the hospital?").
Well, your argument depends on chronology. Palmer had her first record out years before she met Gaiman, and that was after she had directed her first play and had developed a local cult following. Gaiman was actually a fan before he was introduced to her.
Which is not to say there aren't rich dilettante women making a "career" out of spending their husbands' fortunes, but to fit Palmer into that mold you have to throw out the facts.
And she's exactly what you'd imagine Neil Gaiman's wife to be. The argument that people are "only" interested in her because she's married to Gaiman is kind of self-defeating.
The argument that she is not really "successful" depends on your definition of "successful". Knowledge of Taylor Swift is compulsory in our culture, and it's true that if that is your benchmark for "success" Palmer has never been successful, even with marrying Gaiman. But before she met Gaiman she had a cult following and was able to support herself with her work. That
Would you rather have Palmer's kind of "success" doing what you want, or Swift's kind of "success" doing Swift's kind of work? If you want to do Swift's kind of work, it's not a dilemma. But if you want to do the kind of stuff Palmer is doing, it's not really a dilemma either.
For some people success is being able to do what they want.
Well, in a way your argument is circular. How do you define "desirable"? By how much people are willing to pay.
And well it should be circular, because in addition to objective characteristics, a lot of "desirable" amounts to fashion. And fashion changes, and change is not kind to people without much money.
Also, it depends on how you define and measure "performance". It seems to me there are at least two relevant axes here: detection sensitivity and discrimination ability.
I was watching the first season of Daredevil, and I was struck by the anachronism of a Manhattan depicted as being full of working class immigrants who needed protection from greedy, ruthless developers. That battle was lost decades ago.
The average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Hell's Kitchen is $3400/month. Using the 30% of income rent rule, such an apartment would be affordable to someone who makes $136,000/year.
It's not just NYC. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in Boston; the current price of a 1 bedroom apartment on my street is now $2100. The three bedroom apartments that families with 5 or 6 kids squeezed into back in the day runs about $3000, affordable for a family making 120,000/year in a state where the median income is 68,000. I don't know where the janitors, garbage men, and laborers who used to populate have gone, but looking at a heat map of rent prices the likely places seem to be urbanized suburban pockets which, ironically, have poor transportation connections.
So instead of rich people driving through poor people's vivisected neighborhoods we have them settling in them and walking or taking public transit to work, while the people they displace have to spend hours taking a series of buses or else pay for a car while still paying half-again as much for an apartment as they can afford.
Now I've traveled around the country and having grown up in an urban neighborhood I always take an interest in them wherever I go. I've seen countless instances of the inane, destructive power of the 1950s and 1960s planners' mania for wiping the slate clean to clear the way for cars. It's not that cars shouldn't have a place in the landscape, but you can't organize a society solely around the needs of the car.
Fortunately we came to our senses and started to look at these things from more perspectives than just just automobiles... but it didn't really help the people who used to live in the places slated to be flattened, because it doesn't address the underlying problem: people in power don't care about them.
Sure. I've been saying this for years: given the fabulous cost/hour of any human labor you send to Mars, why have humans do anything that could have been done by robots prior to their arrival?
It's basic economics: accomplish things the cheapest way possible. Even assuming that there are things that could only effectively be done by humans, it still makes no sense to have humans do anything other than those things.
Following this rule could be the difference between a symbolic mission where an astronaut plants the flag and comes right back, and an extended mission where the astronauts spend a couple of years there before returning.
You can't reasonably everything anyone does to have an immediate effect on the entire population, and to do that instantaneously to boot.
Now I worked in non-profits for many years, so I know that the closest thing you can do to that is to give a substantial amount of money to an organization that is already working in the field and has a reasonable plan for using that money. But what you don't see is that such gifts don't usually come out of the blue, they're the result of a process of courting that takes months, sometimes years.
I often felt that one of the best ways to build a relationship with a donor would be to get them directly involved in something. If I asked you to donate a hundred bucks to address some problem in a nature area, you probably would think it's just another worthy cause. There are so many worthy causes out there most people don't donate to any of them. But if you'd gone out to the area with a volunteer group to do tail maintenance three or four times a year for the past ten years, a hundred bucks would be an easy ask. It'd wouldn't just be a worthy case, it'd be yours.
So anything that creates a relationship between people and a cause has immense potential. Anything that makes a problem seem near and concrete rather than distant and abstract. And you could do a lot more by providing employees with a chance to have rewarding engagement with the problem. This could be superficial, like taking part in fundraising events; hands-on, like volunteering in a soup kitchen, or deeply personal, like using your technical expertise to solve some of the problems homeless people have getting a job when they don't even have an address.
Getting, say, fifty capable, relatively affluent people involved in a local problem has almost incalculable potential, because you get access not only to their personal energy and resources, but also their social network. Depending on how this is managed, it could either be a nice but relatively small thing (and small things count), or it could be something the likes of which the world has not yet seen.
Sorry to be pedantic in return, but you aren't talking about "correct English", but rather English orthography, which assumed roughly its current form when the English court switched from Norman French to English (with a brief detour into German). That was before a number of major pronunciation changes, among other things before the Great Vowel Shift (1400 AD - 1600 AD). American orthography was subsequently reformed (partially) to reflect Modern English pronunciation, but Britain retained the pointlessly archaic phonetic spellings from a time when English sounded a lot more like Dutch or Frisian. In any case, orthography is merely an arbitrary convention for representing language, the most "correct" spelling in any objective sense would have to be the one that represent pronunciation most accurately. It could be argued that ignorant phonetic attempts to spell words produce more "correct" results than standardized orthography.
Now as to which dialect is more correct, we have to ask correct relative to what? Shall we say the English of Shakespeare's day? Sadly, I must inform you that Midwestern American English is closer, at least in terms of pronunciation, to what would have been spoken London in Shakespeare's day. Elizabethan English sounds like a cross between Midwestern American English and Ulster English. Many Americanisms are actually archaisms, for example our use of "fall" for the season which is from the early modern English "fall o' the leaf"; "autumn" is a French loanword.
If you read English commentators on language of the late 18th and early 19th Century, they decry the the slovenly pronunciation of the young toffs, which subsequently became Received Pronunciation and filtered down to the masses. Thus you pronounce "secretary" as "sec-ruh-tree", whereas Americans retain the all four syllables. On the other hand English commentators of the period also remarked on the "correctness" (e.g. conformity to early 18th C standards) of American speech, even among the uneducated classes.
I will however concede to the UK, however, on the matter of beer.
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There are many species of small flies called "gnats", some of which bite. Many of them have aquatic larval stages, so changes in river levels can affect their populations. Some of them, as well as larger biting flies, live in damp, organically rich soil which also means that low rain levels can suppress their populations.
Also, farms are potent sources of many kinds of lies. The closure of a nearby farm, or even a modest change in husbandry practices can have an effect on fly populations.
Where the show was designed by the actor's race and sex instead of a plot and a casting call. Because blatant sexism and racism is good so long as it isn't favouring white males!
Congratulations. You have now recaptured a little bit of what it was like for the 1967 audience to experience the original series.
I spent many years in the mosquito control field. Trust me, they're coming. You just need rain followed by a warm spell.
Animal and plant species vary by how well they deal with disruptions. Species which deal well with disruptions and which have a high reproduction rate is a weedy species and thrives when we screw things up. Specie that reproduce slowly and are dependent upon certain specific things in the environment are the ones that disappear.
Most mosquito species are weedy. The larvae live on rotting organic matter in water and the adults live on nectar from a variety of sources. In some species a gravid female can lay two hundred eggs after a blood meal, and do that a half dozen times a year in some places. This means they have immense potential for exponential population growth, provided they have sources of water, temperatures warm enough to breed, and someone to get blood meals from.
Ecological disruption doesn't always look like death; in fact quite the opposite it can sometimes look like a profusion of life, as in a polluted lake choked with algae. But you lose most of the food chain: the fish and invertebrates they feed on. Or in cases like this it can be subtle; you might not see it until you look and wonder why a certain bird species is gone. Then you look and find out that the things it lives on are gone too.
But don't worry about mosquitoes. Unless your climate gets drier and cooler, you can count on them coming back.
A joke, as a verbal utterance, has to contain both an idea, and some form of expression of that idea. The idea is not copyrightable, but the expression certainly is *if it is sufficiently original*, which means it has to be long enough to be non-obvious.
Take the joke, "I just flew in from Cleveland and boy are my arms tired," which was probably funny the first time it was ever used. The idea behind the joke is the confusion between two senses of the verb "to fly". This version joke is such a straightforward and minimal embodiment of that idea that it seems unlikely to me that it could be copyrighted.
Verbal jokes on the other end of length and complexity scales, like the Abbott and Costello "Who's on first" routine seem very likely to me to be copyrightable.
Likewise non-verbal embodiments of a gag may be copyrightable, such as a political cartoon or a physical slapstick. But individual expressive elements are likely too small to be copyrightable. For example if I depict the president as a baby in diapers -- that's been done before, but I'm on safe ground. But if I copy too much about how another cartoonist represents the president's character graphically then I've crossed a line, albeit a fuzzy one.
You know, I remember the 60s and early 70s in the US, before the Clean Air Act was amended to empower the federal government to regulate emissions.
If you are under 50, you would not believe how bad things got. Look at pictures of Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Hell, even Salt Lake City was barely recognizable. It wasn't just big cities, either; small cities like Birmingham looked like this.
When you look at an old movie or TV show from the late 60s early 70s and everything in the distance looks hazy, that's not the film. That's what cities actually looked like on a good day.
I bring this up because the decision to to do something about air pollution was a sign of how healthy our democracy used to be. There was a problem that was costly and complex to tackle, but we did it. And as today there were people who profited by the status quo, that allowed them to externalize their waste management costs. The difference is that their hold on politicians was a lot less, and there was more independent media. Had we not done something about air pollution in 1970, we'd be where Beijing is now, and we'd be just as powerless to do anything about it today.
I have to agree. There's a big difference between leaking, and dumping troves of information. It could have been bad.
Fortunately it was nowhere near as bad as people were claiming at the time. None of the revelations were really that shocking except to people who were naive about war or diplomacy.
In a way the most shocking thing was the sheer breadth of information that was made available to a young person who was disturbed, alienated and psychologically vulnerable. Granted screening for people like that is never going to be perfect, but it's almost like they weren't even trying.
Well, in a nutshell because the effective discount rate for expected future performance is high for stocks.
Now it doesn't mean that people don't invest in assets that they hope to make a killing on after a few years, but GM stock ain't that kind of asset. It's supposed to pay quarterly dividends so if you're a stockholder you're very interested in how much cash GM has on hand next quarter, probably more interested than whether it will be doing well four years from now. For investors, timing is everything.
It's described that way to further an agenda. But characterizing it that way unjustly stereotypes people.
One of the things you hopefully learn with age is how little probative value an isolated piece of truth has. You can always find someone who fits a stereotype if you look, but you have to be cautious drawing inferences from that, even if you find a lot of people who fit.
Everyone has met guys who seem to believe being a man means acting like a jackass. If you've never met that guy, then chances are you are that guy, and if you're an adult the guys around you aren't agreeing with you, they're humoring you.
That's "toxic masculinity", and it undoubtedly exists. But it's not the whole story, or even most of the story.
Take sports. I don't care for spectator sports; ice hockey is the only one that I get any enjoyment from. I live in Boston, and the only player on the Patriots, Bruins, Red Sox or Celtics I can name is Tom Brady, and if he broke both his legs before his next game I'd think that was too bad, but I wouldn't feel it personally. I just don't care, and I don't feel the need to care. I don't think this makes me better than people who genuinely care about sports, but I do think it makes me better than people who pretend to care about sports so they won't be seen unmanly.
This is a trivial example, but the principle involved is the same as in so-called "toxic masculinity": feeling you have to be something you're not just to satisfy other peoples' pointless expectations. Of course women talk about those things from the point of view of how it affects them, but then why shouldn't they? From the point of men trying too hard to appear manly, life is too short to waste time on bullshit pretense.
The pressure to be fake is pervasive. It affects everyone.
"Professional" only means "doing it for money". Nothing else.
You know, I was going to note that the atmosphere was unprofessional, except that I suspected we've reached a point where people don't even know what professionalism means.
Of course contrary to your claim there are in fact many different definitions for the world "professional", the one I'm talking about is the antonym of "unprofessional", the one you're talking about is the one that's the antonym of "hobbyist". You are talking about people like professional competitive eaters; I'm talking about people like civil engineers.
Professionalism is performing a job in a way that maintains public trust and respect for people who do that job. There are certain vocations, like accountant, or physician, where public trust is essential to their very function. But anyone can act professionally, in the sense of being demonstrably worthy of trust. I once was IT director of a company and had irreconcilable differences with the COO. I could have done a lot of damage to that company, instead I resigned. I took my second in command to the CFO's office and removed an envelope from the safe there where I had put all my passwords in a sealed envelope for safekeeping. Then, with my back turned and the CFO looking on I walked her through revoking all the access I had to the company's systems.
It was deliberately theatrical, because as a professional you don't just have an obligation to do the right thing, you have to be seen doing the right thing.
True, but seven tons to GTO is hell of a lot more impressive than 9 tons to LEO.
Because United is run by Assholes.
Which is why boys need adult supervision. Men, specifically, to set an example.
A man acts with dignity, self-restraint, and consideration for others. He doesn't do shit just because the people around him are doing it, and he doesn't pressure other people do things without a good reason.
If none of that sounds like any fun, feeling obligated to impress other guys with bullshit isn't any fun either. It's a bigger, more joyless burden than acting like a grownup, you just haven't figured that out yet.
Of course by that argument murder doesn't really matter either.
Lives are extremely valuable, even though every single one of them ends in a relatively short time. Even an individual life is valuable.
Now it so happens that every policy ends up killing people. If you build a bridge, statistically a certain number of workers will die on the project. The difference between building a bridge and murder is that the bridge has social benefits as well as costs, and in fact some of those benefits are denominated in lives prolonged.
OK, I'll keep this short: the half life of nitric oxide in the atmosphere is 100 hours. So basically your observation that automotive emissions don't match global natural emissions of NO is true, but irrelevant.
By speaking to everyone familiarly, we've lost a kind of dynamic range in our language.
Speaking to everyone as if they were your friend doesn't automatically make everyone your friend; nor should it. A salesman cold calling me is potentially wasting my time. He should show deference in his language. It sets my teeth on edge when someone I don't know calls and asks for me by my first name.
On the flip side by pretending we're all buddies, we've lost the ability to express intimacy by changing the formal register of our language. I suspect this may have complicated the entry of women into the workforce as equals.
If anything, rather than going from two formality registers to one we should have gone to three, maybe even four. What a shift in formality indicates is a difference in expectations. There should be a very formal register indicating that you don't necessarily expect someone to take time to respond to a question ("Pardon me, sir, but how do I get to the museum?"). You need another for colleagues from whom you can expect certain things ("Mr. Jones, would you run this month's backlog report please?"). You need yet another for close friends and family who allow you to impose on them ("Jack, can you feed my cat while I'm in the hospital?").
Less than half, but the idiots aren't uniformly geographically distributed.
Well, your argument depends on chronology. Palmer had her first record out years before she met Gaiman, and that was after she had directed her first play and had developed a local cult following. Gaiman was actually a fan before he was introduced to her.
Which is not to say there aren't rich dilettante women making a "career" out of spending their husbands' fortunes, but to fit Palmer into that mold you have to throw out the facts.
And she's exactly what you'd imagine Neil Gaiman's wife to be. The argument that people are "only" interested in her because she's married to Gaiman is kind of self-defeating.
The argument that she is not really "successful" depends on your definition of "successful". Knowledge of Taylor Swift is compulsory in our culture, and it's true that if that is your benchmark for "success" Palmer has never been successful, even with marrying Gaiman. But before she met Gaiman she had a cult following and was able to support herself with her work. That
Would you rather have Palmer's kind of "success" doing what you want, or Swift's kind of "success" doing Swift's kind of work? If you want to do Swift's kind of work, it's not a dilemma. But if you want to do the kind of stuff Palmer is doing, it's not really a dilemma either.
For some people success is being able to do what they want.
Well, in a way your argument is circular. How do you define "desirable"? By how much people are willing to pay.
And well it should be circular, because in addition to objective characteristics, a lot of "desirable" amounts to fashion. And fashion changes, and change is not kind to people without much money.
Also, it depends on how you define and measure "performance". It seems to me there are at least two relevant axes here: detection sensitivity and discrimination ability.
Yes, but what if you deduct the cost of football?
only for them to be destroyed by gentrification.
I was watching the first season of Daredevil, and I was struck by the anachronism of a Manhattan depicted as being full of working class immigrants who needed protection from greedy, ruthless developers. That battle was lost decades ago.
The average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Hell's Kitchen is $3400/month. Using the 30% of income rent rule, such an apartment would be affordable to someone who makes $136,000/year.
It's not just NYC. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in Boston; the current price of a 1 bedroom apartment on my street is now $2100. The three bedroom apartments that families with 5 or 6 kids squeezed into back in the day runs about $3000, affordable for a family making 120,000/year in a state where the median income is 68,000. I don't know where the janitors, garbage men, and laborers who used to populate have gone, but looking at a heat map of rent prices the likely places seem to be urbanized suburban pockets which, ironically, have poor transportation connections.
So instead of rich people driving through poor people's vivisected neighborhoods we have them settling in them and walking or taking public transit to work, while the people they displace have to spend hours taking a series of buses or else pay for a car while still paying half-again as much for an apartment as they can afford.
Now I've traveled around the country and having grown up in an urban neighborhood I always take an interest in them wherever I go. I've seen countless instances of the inane, destructive power of the 1950s and 1960s planners' mania for wiping the slate clean to clear the way for cars. It's not that cars shouldn't have a place in the landscape, but you can't organize a society solely around the needs of the car.
Fortunately we came to our senses and started to look at these things from more perspectives than just just automobiles... but it didn't really help the people who used to live in the places slated to be flattened, because it doesn't address the underlying problem: people in power don't care about them.
Sure. I've been saying this for years: given the fabulous cost/hour of any human labor you send to Mars, why have humans do anything that could have been done by robots prior to their arrival?
It's basic economics: accomplish things the cheapest way possible. Even assuming that there are things that could only effectively be done by humans, it still makes no sense to have humans do anything other than those things.
Following this rule could be the difference between a symbolic mission where an astronaut plants the flag and comes right back, and an extended mission where the astronauts spend a couple of years there before returning.
You can't reasonably everything anyone does to have an immediate effect on the entire population, and to do that instantaneously to boot.
Now I worked in non-profits for many years, so I know that the closest thing you can do to that is to give a substantial amount of money to an organization that is already working in the field and has a reasonable plan for using that money. But what you don't see is that such gifts don't usually come out of the blue, they're the result of a process of courting that takes months, sometimes years.
I often felt that one of the best ways to build a relationship with a donor would be to get them directly involved in something. If I asked you to donate a hundred bucks to address some problem in a nature area, you probably would think it's just another worthy cause. There are so many worthy causes out there most people don't donate to any of them. But if you'd gone out to the area with a volunteer group to do tail maintenance three or four times a year for the past ten years, a hundred bucks would be an easy ask. It'd wouldn't just be a worthy case, it'd be yours.
So anything that creates a relationship between people and a cause has immense potential. Anything that makes a problem seem near and concrete rather than distant and abstract. And you could do a lot more by providing employees with a chance to have rewarding engagement with the problem. This could be superficial, like taking part in fundraising events; hands-on, like volunteering in a soup kitchen, or deeply personal, like using your technical expertise to solve some of the problems homeless people have getting a job when they don't even have an address.
Getting, say, fifty capable, relatively affluent people involved in a local problem has almost incalculable potential, because you get access not only to their personal energy and resources, but also their social network. Depending on how this is managed, it could either be a nice but relatively small thing (and small things count), or it could be something the likes of which the world has not yet seen.
Sorry to be pedantic in return, but you aren't talking about "correct English", but rather English orthography, which assumed roughly its current form when the English court switched from Norman French to English (with a brief detour into German). That was before a number of major pronunciation changes, among other things before the Great Vowel Shift (1400 AD - 1600 AD). American orthography was subsequently reformed (partially) to reflect Modern English pronunciation, but Britain retained the pointlessly archaic phonetic spellings from a time when English sounded a lot more like Dutch or Frisian. In any case, orthography is merely an arbitrary convention for representing language, the most "correct" spelling in any objective sense would have to be the one that represent pronunciation most accurately. It could be argued that ignorant phonetic attempts to spell words produce more "correct" results than standardized orthography.
Now as to which dialect is more correct, we have to ask correct relative to what? Shall we say the English of Shakespeare's day? Sadly, I must inform you that Midwestern American English is closer, at least in terms of pronunciation, to what would have been spoken London in Shakespeare's day. Elizabethan English sounds like a cross between Midwestern American English and Ulster English. Many Americanisms are actually archaisms, for example our use of "fall" for the season which is from the early modern English "fall o' the leaf"; "autumn" is a French loanword.
If you read English commentators on language of the late 18th and early 19th Century, they decry the the slovenly pronunciation of the young toffs, which subsequently became Received Pronunciation and filtered down to the masses. Thus you pronounce "secretary" as "sec-ruh-tree", whereas Americans retain the all four syllables. On the other hand English commentators of the period also remarked on the "correctness" (e.g. conformity to early 18th C standards) of American speech, even among the uneducated classes.
I will however concede to the UK, however, on the matter of beer.