pmwhite

An important example would be a family with children where both parents could work but do not have to. From the GDP POV, it is a huge boost to have a second parent earning an income, even if most of the additional monies end up dedicated to the costs of outsourcing some parental duties. A stay at home parent might be producing as much or more value to the family, while not contributing to the GDP at all.

The small responsive unit of Delaware has an outsized effect on how corporations are run in all 50 states, and it cuts out the legislature of my state on certain aspects that were traditionally reserved to the states.

The framers never imagined that kind of commercial reach.

The federal gov't was designed to address such issues when they were proven to be significant, by those very framers, even if the framers themselves did not anticipate the specifics. That is what the commerce clause is about, among other things.

I could be wrong, but I would have guessed we were onto the next phase by now, that could be labelled: "Brilli-ant rhymes with grant"

That tenure would come from earning grants. Now keeping the grant gravy-train running smoothly does require churning out papers, but it is not the papers themselves that would be so important.

That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a 5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.

I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are quite high.

Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.

Sure. Self-taught systems put a lot on responsibility on the student. Apprenticeship systems are very mentor-time-expensive and/or put responsibility on the student.

If the students were already so great at this, they could make do with so-so teachers. We do not expect as much from K-6 at least, for good reason. And that will not change soon.

I wonder if hydrogen is practical to transport in large quantities. My guess is no.

Your idea of methane, if it could be done efficiently, seems more likely.

Plate tectonics is a candidate to go on that list, and it was controversial until good undersea maps were available circa 1970. That is 50 years ago, not 30.

True. But I presume that Asimov is answering the letter using the language of the same. Translating "wrong" to "incorrect" does not add anything, better to take the issue head on using the same language.

Better still would be to use "accuracy". But that presumes the audience is ready to understand the nature of the issue in a scientific and logical way. We want to get there, but we cannot start there.

To oversimplify the issue a bit, it boils down to which you believe is more auspicious for both the planet and humankind: (1) a mix of housing with more dense housing, or (2) a mix of housing with more suburban single family dwellings.

While there are many arguments for #2, I believe most of those arguments are more emotional than real. In fact, in the world of many young dual income families on the SF peninsula specifically, lots of families spend approximately zero time in their yards.

While I recognize that individual families should, of course, have the freedom to splurge their resources on dwellings that are underutilized, as a matter of social policy, it is foolish to promote a suburban lifestyle as some kind of ideal when it turns out the reality is very different.

(Due to a family health issue, I once had a year where I needed to be available at home, but I did have MUCH time to garden. It was shocking how extremely rarely most of my neighbors' yards were used. Even the majority of yards of families with children were unused, both weekdays and weekends.)

That only makes sense for absurdly aggressive speculators or people with the political connections to borrow money for 1% or less.

I have a fixed 15 year loan at 2.75%, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. Know where I can borrow a few hundred thou at 1%?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point, but that still sounds like a fundamental problem with the originator.

If you are lending money with the unspoken understanding that the note is likely doomed to be a loss unless the real estate market continues to go up, then you are not really in the loan business anymore. You are putting letting your capital ride on the real estate roulette wheel, while enjoying the fat fees in the short term. The fact their were enough greater fools around to move your capital from new bad loans to newer bad loans may let you bank a few more fees, but it still means the originator is choosing to screw up while hoping to be rescued by real estate market forces completely beyond his control.

In the SF Bay Area, the East Bay may relieve growth pressure to some degree. But fundamentally that can only go so far. If we cannot figure out how to develop wisely along the transportation spine of 101/Caltrain/ElCam, then we are pretty much doomed. Replicating a failing model in other places is likely to be a vast sprawling failure, rather than a success.

That is the fear, yes, but housing prices do not jump so quickly. They really are not likely to drop, as, perhaps, climb much more slowly.

It seems we have achieved a self-reinforcing civic virtue "anti-pattern", where middle class anxiety about high housing prices ends up squeezing the future housing supply. In other words, the negative feedback via anxiety caused by high demand may be greater than the usual positive correcting effect we expect from the "invisible hand", to add supply in the face of high demand.

IMHO it is a matter of homeowners acting on incomplete information. Sure, your house price going up seems nice, but it is only a significant benefit if you sell and move elsewhere for your retirement days. Those who actually like where they live and want to set roots have the practical problem of how affordable the place they live is now and when they retire. That is a death by a thousand cuts.

Regarding the future, I do hope to make the world a better place through my job. But in the practical world of the now, we need mechanics, teachers, grocers, plumbers, nurses, handymen, construction workers/contractors, waiters, etc. etc. or the SF Bay becomes an expensive hellhole.

Having enough people around who keep the community livable requires more affordable housing.

China was nearly crushed by the Mongols but absorbed the invaders into their society and rose again to great heights.

The Roman Empire cracked under the pressure of mass migrations of well-armed peoples forced to move West by climatic shifts.

Perhaps there is a lesson there.

That is not so clear. The Bitcoin network can easily be devoured by another cryptocurrency, if that other currency provides greater returns for a unit of work. The larger network within the crypto ecosystem may well have value, while affording zero tethering to any particular currency.

"California, an extremely liberal state, voted in a 72% majority referendum for the three strikes policy."

Incorrect. In 1994, when the three strikes legislation passed, CA was a purple state with a moderate Republican governor.

It is the anti-immigrant rhetoric around Prop 208 in 1996 that undermined the GOP in the state, by driving the majority of the young and non-white into the arms of the Democrats.

But it is not even "a lot". $5000 can be acquired by scrapping together $500 from family/friends and giving that to a bail bond company. Not all poor people can accomplish that, but many can.

If $5000 is a better bail for this person than $500, that is a lucky accident. It is not as if $50,000 would automatically be a better number either.

Risky individuals either need to be kept in jail (or perhaps closely tracked). Keeping bail bond profitable is not a successful strategy here.

The second. In the given example, if skilled programmers cannot find the bug in a couple dozen lines of code within an hour, it is not an Agile vs Better Agile vs non-Agile question. It is a question of whether there is a member on your team who has the "toolkit" to test concurrency scenarios sufficiently well to find this kind of bug.

Of course, the hard part is recognizing when to use formal methods and when not to. I do wonder if someone who had used TLA+ (frex) in the past could look at this code and know that now is the time. Or not.

Preferring a promise of $50 later depends on trust. Economists are much too emotional to understand that kind of thing.

"And if they were a "hero" and increased taxes to try and tackle it, they'd only get voted out next election, so someone else can come in, undo it, then spend all the savings."

George H. Bush is one of the few important fiscal conservatives elected in my lifetime, and he is despised for it, especially by people who like to claim they are fiscal conservatives.

In the traditional one room school house, once the student was beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, teachers did very little teaching as we know it.

If you think about it, that is completely obvious. How could one person prepare lessons in all topics when the students range all over the ages 7 to 15? The answer: they did not even try. In fact, you can look at older text books and see they were designed around the idea of a lot of self-teaching, perhaps with only a few pointers here and there (and if you were very bright and dedicated, you did not even need pointers).

The teachers primary job was to assess. The children were assigned lessons and expected to read that lesson several times until the teacher could get around to quizzing them. Good students the teacher might deign to allow to ask questions afterwards. If the student did poorly but was clearly trying hard, the teacher might offer corrections and advice. Otherwise the teacher had a free hand to beat the student for the crime of being stupid or lazy or both.

In the 19th century, there was nothing weird about so-so students dropping out at the 4th or 5th grade level. Even the dedicated were done at age 14 or 15, unless they intended to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, etc. The normal means of learning was through formal or informal apprenticeships: you were supposed to either educate yourself, or ingratiate yourself to a highly competent adult and learn at their elbow.

It is a modern fad to obsess over the teachers. In the old days of the one room school house, the teachers had to only meet a rather low bar of competence, and then the onus for learning was put on the student.

The missing ingredient from your description is: freedom.

It is not degrading for a parent to choose to prioritize family matters over income.

It is degrading for society to tell a person what their personal priorities will be based on a chromosome.

Yes, definitely true.

If (1) everyone is highly effective in getting tasks done, and (2) working on tasks that are reasonably well prioritized by both technical risks and business value, why exactly do you need to know more?

There are legitimate reasons that a business may need a date. But making sure people are working harder than hard by beating them over the head with a date coughed out by a gantt chart is not one of the legitimate reasons.

The US failed to achieve a South Vietnamese gov't that had reasonable support from the general populace, which was nominally on the list of US policy goals since the beginning, but was gamed at every step of the way.

Until such was achieved, we had _always_ lost the war. Winning battles, paid for with American blood, was only a means of temporarily staving off the likely collapse for another year or two.

As for "abandoned", what does that even mean? The South had: large material advantages in artillery, vehicles, and AFVs; a significant air force (2000 craft), plus >10 years of a huge US training effort.

It is a little handwavy, but perhaps the BG worked for generations to achieve key areas of hybrid superiority by honing pure breeding lines in these two families? Does not seem to be what the BG are doing, though.

Furthermore, one can now ask if the more perfect specimen for a given environment might be a chimera: this genome for nervous system, that genome for leg muscles, this other genome for internal organs, etc.

But your main point stands. The Dune series presumes that such a thing as breeding a superior human is not very difficult to manage on the scale of mere centuries. I am not sure how even define such a thing. And I rather doubt such a specimen would breed true with a similarly superior specimen.