Yeah. Nobody cares unless its a resume of someone coming straight out of college. That said, lots of people do list their "latin honors" next to their degree if they graduated with honors, and at many schools that's based on GPA. Not having it probably doesn't hurt you, but having "summa cum laude" on there may create the impression that you're smarter than the average bear.
I was an officer in my school's ACM student group. It was not relevant to...anything, really. I agree that GPA is not all that important if you append "so long as its within the normal range". I'm going to look askance at someone with an extraordinarily low GPA. Not because it means they're dumb or unskilled, but because it may suggest they lack the ability to complete tasks and/or work on things they don't find intrinsically interesting.
Economic suffering is a pittance compared to human suffering.
Just wanted to comment on this. The two are one and the same, when human suffering is caused by poverty and lack of economic development. If going carbon-zero significantly raises the cost of energy and retards the economic development of "developing" countries then that could have real and significant negative effects on the well being of the citizens of those countries. Of course, so could unchecked global warming.
Not really. More argument from example. He likes to point out how virtually every climate model has fallen down, badly, during the current warming pause.
If he believes that (1) is true how can he know that (2) is true.
He believes #2 for the same reason he admits that CO2 likely has a warming effect. Scientists can both explain theoretically and demonstrate the mechanisms by which they occur.
He's not a skeptic of warming, but of our ability to model warming and it's effects and make predictions about future climate change. So he's more of a climate modeling skeptic than a warming skeptic per se.
The main skeptic with whom I dialogue holds the following beliefs:
1. Warming is happening.
2. CO2 concentration is atypically high.
3. CO2 concentration is atypically high due to man-made emissions.
4. CO2 concentration has some upward effect on global temperature.
However, he also holds these beliefs:
1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.
We're talking about public schools. Run by the government, at some level or another. So if "political debate" means "debate taking place in the context of government" then what they teach will always be a political debate.
I question why climate science needs to be part of the standards at all. It seems weirdly specific. When so many kids leave high school not knowing what an electron is, I'd say there are other areas where we might focus our pedagogical effort.
I'm off task probably half the day. Somehow I'm still able to be about as productive as my coworkers, who certainly seem to stay on task better than I do. Yay?
Back when I was in school, the consensus seemed to be that C was "about as fast" as FORTRAN. And when FORTRAN was really faster you could just write most of your code in C and link to FORTRAN libs. BLAS, LAPACK, etc. Just had to store your arrays in column-major order. If you look at the benchmarks at the Julia site, linked in the article, you'll see that FORTRAN beats C by a large margin in one benchmark, loses by a large margin in another benchmark, and is slightly faster in all the others. They state that they used gcc 4.8.1 as their C compiler but don't mention what compiler they used for FORTRAN. Also gcc 4.8.1? Kinda matters.
I think your stats are wrong. From wiki, here's a comparison of traffic fatality rates by country. Sort on the column "per 1 billion vehicle-km". The U.S. rate is 8.5. Among wealthy countries, South Korea, Belgium, New Zealand and Austria have higher rates. Canada is lower, but very close. The lowest rate is Sweden at 3.2, which is around 40% the U.S. rate. Now here is a comparison of countries by murder rate. No wealthy country has a higher rate than the U.S., in which murders are committed at a rate of 4.8 per 100k population. The lowest rate among U.S. peers is Japan at 0.3.
I get what you're saying, in theory. Its just that none of the companies where I've worked actually functioned like that. Maybe it's a function of a small sample size: three startups and one small software consulting firm. Two of the startups were in the financial space and one had a web app targeting construction companies. So not especially "sexy" stuff. Work days in excess of 8 hours were never the norm. There was an expectation was that in genuinely extenuating circumstances you should be willing to "do what it takes" but that these circumstances should be legitimately rare and not business as usual. Someone who regularly worked 16 hour days would be viewed as "the guy who might snap and shoot us all" and not a superstar who needs to be promoted.
Individual incidents aren't a big deal. The kind of stuff you'd see if there was no enforcement at all would be. You add a little enforcement and people respond by reducing the severity of their infractions. If you're already devoted some manpower to policing traffic stuff and one of your guys sees someone do something that, while minor, is still an infraction, you might as well have him cite it. Not like it costs the department (or taxpayer) any more. If you don't like people being cited for not fully stopping at a stop sign, parking past the limit or skateboarding then your primary problem is with the laws that make these things citable offenses and not the cops per se, who are only enforcing the laws as they exist on the books.
I think the danger posed by speeders is overblown, yes. That said, the current status quo is an equilibrium reached in the presence of traffic cops. Remove them entirely, i.e. don't enforce speed limits at all, and the new equilibrium might be meaningfully less safe than the current one.
It's not especially offensive to me. Get rid of traffic fines and my taxes go up, and there may or may not be more cops devoted to investigating stolen phones. If it helps, think of traffic cops as wholly separate from "crime-fighting cops". Think of them more as tax collectors for the city or county. How would eliminating a bunch of city tax collectors (and the tax revenue they collect) result in more cops devoted to investigating phone thieves?
I've worked at startups almost exclusively for the last nine years, albeit not in the Bay area. They've all been pretty reasonable when it comes to work-life balance. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Knowing some police offers personally, I can say with some certainty that they're not all "scum". That said, they work within a budget and have to prioritize. Someone losing a phone isn't exactly a "sev one" issue.
Possibly. But it's not like the Koch brothers are out there digging up coal with their own hands. Or, even, managing coal companies. Koch industries does oil refining, oil pipelines, and fertilizer, but I don't see anything about coal. So, to the extent they're in the coal business it's through investment of capital. That could easily be shifted out of coal and into renewables. Though, I guess they could be concerned about renewables eating into the oil business. Rooftop solar is all about electricity usage, though, and only a small fraction of U.S. electricity is produced from oil. Now, natural gas is another story.
The implication in the article is that the Koch's wield enough power (and money) to pick the winner. If that's the case, then why not pick renewables? Somewhere in the numbers it must be the case that "coal + Koch investment + Koch influence" nets more profit than "renewables + Koch investment + Koch influence". But I'm not sure why that's the case.
It's not immediately clear to me why the Koch brothers should be against renewable energy. I can certainly understand why they would oppose "incentives" (read: subsidies) for renewable energy, and if that's going on then there's nothing to see here. But if we suppose they're motivated by a desire to enrich themselves and not a love of coal per se, then why couldn't they just invest heavily in solar and then exert all their shady political influence to make that investment extra-profitable?
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Yeah. Nobody cares unless its a resume of someone coming straight out of college. That said, lots of people do list their "latin honors" next to their degree if they graduated with honors, and at many schools that's based on GPA. Not having it probably doesn't hurt you, but having "summa cum laude" on there may create the impression that you're smarter than the average bear.
I was an officer in my school's ACM student group. It was not relevant to...anything, really. I agree that GPA is not all that important if you append "so long as its within the normal range". I'm going to look askance at someone with an extraordinarily low GPA. Not because it means they're dumb or unskilled, but because it may suggest they lack the ability to complete tasks and/or work on things they don't find intrinsically interesting.
Dunno, I find recruiters pretty darn useful. Annoying when I have a job I'm happy with, but useful when I'm between jobs.
Just wanted to comment on this. The two are one and the same, when human suffering is caused by poverty and lack of economic development. If going carbon-zero significantly raises the cost of energy and retards the economic development of "developing" countries then that could have real and significant negative effects on the well being of the citizens of those countries. Of course, so could unchecked global warming.
Not really. More argument from example. He likes to point out how virtually every climate model has fallen down, badly, during the current warming pause.
He believes #2 for the same reason he admits that CO2 likely has a warming effect. Scientists can both explain theoretically and demonstrate the mechanisms by which they occur.
He's not a skeptic of warming, but of our ability to model warming and it's effects and make predictions about future climate change. So he's more of a climate modeling skeptic than a warming skeptic per se.
The main skeptic with whom I dialogue holds the following beliefs:
1. Warming is happening.
2. CO2 concentration is atypically high.
3. CO2 concentration is atypically high due to man-made emissions.
4. CO2 concentration has some upward effect on global temperature.
However, he also holds these beliefs:
1. The earth's climate is too complex to accurately model and predict.
2. There are feedback mechanisms that mute the severity of CO2-induced warming.
3. Even if warming happens at the predicted rate, we can't really know what the impact will be in terms of human suffering.
4. From #1 and #2, the dire predictions on future warming can't be trusted.
5. Even if warming were going to happen at the predicted rate and the consequences would be as dire as predicted, the economic cost of transitioning of fossil fuels on a global level would induce a huge amount of human suffering on its own,
6. Given the cost, there's no way the various world governments are going to come to an agreement and actually make a significant dent in fossil fuel usage anyway. So the whole discussion is academic.
We're talking about public schools. Run by the government, at some level or another. So if "political debate" means "debate taking place in the context of government" then what they teach will always be a political debate.
I question why climate science needs to be part of the standards at all. It seems weirdly specific. When so many kids leave high school not knowing what an electron is, I'd say there are other areas where we might focus our pedagogical effort.
I'm off task probably half the day. Somehow I'm still able to be about as productive as my coworkers, who certainly seem to stay on task better than I do. Yay?
Back when I was in school, the consensus seemed to be that C was "about as fast" as FORTRAN. And when FORTRAN was really faster you could just write most of your code in C and link to FORTRAN libs. BLAS, LAPACK, etc. Just had to store your arrays in column-major order. If you look at the benchmarks at the Julia site, linked in the article, you'll see that FORTRAN beats C by a large margin in one benchmark, loses by a large margin in another benchmark, and is slightly faster in all the others. They state that they used gcc 4.8.1 as their C compiler but don't mention what compiler they used for FORTRAN. Also gcc 4.8.1? Kinda matters.
I.e. Way more teenage drivers in the U.S., who are significantly more likely to be involved in fatal accidents.
Rates are per miles driven.
Oh, and by the way, I very much suspect that the high rate of traffic fatalities in the U.S. is due to a higher incidence of drunk driving.
I think your stats are wrong. From wiki, here's a comparison of traffic fatality rates by country. Sort on the column "per 1 billion vehicle-km". The U.S. rate is 8.5. Among wealthy countries, South Korea, Belgium, New Zealand and Austria have higher rates. Canada is lower, but very close. The lowest rate is Sweden at 3.2, which is around 40% the U.S. rate. Now here is a comparison of countries by murder rate. No wealthy country has a higher rate than the U.S., in which murders are committed at a rate of 4.8 per 100k population. The lowest rate among U.S. peers is Japan at 0.3.
I get what you're saying, in theory. Its just that none of the companies where I've worked actually functioned like that. Maybe it's a function of a small sample size: three startups and one small software consulting firm. Two of the startups were in the financial space and one had a web app targeting construction companies. So not especially "sexy" stuff. Work days in excess of 8 hours were never the norm. There was an expectation was that in genuinely extenuating circumstances you should be willing to "do what it takes" but that these circumstances should be legitimately rare and not business as usual. Someone who regularly worked 16 hour days would be viewed as "the guy who might snap and shoot us all" and not a superstar who needs to be promoted.
Individual incidents aren't a big deal. The kind of stuff you'd see if there was no enforcement at all would be. You add a little enforcement and people respond by reducing the severity of their infractions. If you're already devoted some manpower to policing traffic stuff and one of your guys sees someone do something that, while minor, is still an infraction, you might as well have him cite it. Not like it costs the department (or taxpayer) any more. If you don't like people being cited for not fully stopping at a stop sign, parking past the limit or skateboarding then your primary problem is with the laws that make these things citable offenses and not the cops per se, who are only enforcing the laws as they exist on the books.
I think the danger posed by speeders is overblown, yes. That said, the current status quo is an equilibrium reached in the presence of traffic cops. Remove them entirely, i.e. don't enforce speed limits at all, and the new equilibrium might be meaningfully less safe than the current one.
It's not especially offensive to me. Get rid of traffic fines and my taxes go up, and there may or may not be more cops devoted to investigating stolen phones. If it helps, think of traffic cops as wholly separate from "crime-fighting cops". Think of them more as tax collectors for the city or county. How would eliminating a bunch of city tax collectors (and the tax revenue they collect) result in more cops devoted to investigating phone thieves?
I've worked at startups almost exclusively for the last nine years, albeit not in the Bay area. They've all been pretty reasonable when it comes to work-life balance. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Tickets are a big source of their funding. Speeding related traffic stops more of a fund-raising activity than law enforcement.
Knowing some police offers personally, I can say with some certainty that they're not all "scum". That said, they work within a budget and have to prioritize. Someone losing a phone isn't exactly a "sev one" issue.
Possibly. But it's not like the Koch brothers are out there digging up coal with their own hands. Or, even, managing coal companies. Koch industries does oil refining, oil pipelines, and fertilizer, but I don't see anything about coal. So, to the extent they're in the coal business it's through investment of capital. That could easily be shifted out of coal and into renewables. Though, I guess they could be concerned about renewables eating into the oil business. Rooftop solar is all about electricity usage, though, and only a small fraction of U.S. electricity is produced from oil. Now, natural gas is another story.
The implication in the article is that the Koch's wield enough power (and money) to pick the winner. If that's the case, then why not pick renewables? Somewhere in the numbers it must be the case that "coal + Koch investment + Koch influence" nets more profit than "renewables + Koch investment + Koch influence". But I'm not sure why that's the case.
It's not immediately clear to me why the Koch brothers should be against renewable energy. I can certainly understand why they would oppose "incentives" (read: subsidies) for renewable energy, and if that's going on then there's nothing to see here. But if we suppose they're motivated by a desire to enrich themselves and not a love of coal per se, then why couldn't they just invest heavily in solar and then exert all their shady political influence to make that investment extra-profitable?