Throwawayaerlei

If you're open to naked theft as so much of the US and world is today, that's going to have long term consequences you won't like. Water rights are a real thing in US jurisprudence, their abrogation by Federal judges, especially I assume in the 9th Circuit doesn't make them any less so. As I said, "if the rule of law still means something...."

Because you find them distasteful? It was the duty of California's political class to continue to provide water for its people and industries, and they decided also for reasons of taste to stop doing that in the 1960s. When Ronald Reagan was governor for eight years, very much a sea change from Jerry Brown's father Pat Brown who was governor from 1959-67 and previous governors and legislators (Jerry "Governor Moonbeam" at the time replaced Reagan).

> Dual-use agriculture + solar PV farms should get priority for water. PV can seriously cut evaporation and water loss while also providing power for (eventually) desalination or (immediately) to displace fossil fuel use.

This whole topic is about how desalination is not being allowed to alleviate one part of California's water shortages and we can assume in other locations (who else is going to even try after this debacle?). Solar provides neither baseline or peaking power, so if you want real power from it you've got to add $$$ storage systems. Also not sure how you can capture the sun's light for PVs and provide it to growing plants at the same time; what I was able to dig up searching just now is "use on marginal land" and other half measures.

California is demonstrably not interested in reducing fossil fuel use when it's forced or is forcing all its nuclear plants to shut down. One article I read not long ago credibly claimed a lack of serious power after the last plant shuts down soon may make it generally impossible to lift water to get to the LA region I think it was.

If you chose to deny any of these points, doing the math first will make your case more convincing, if you ignore science and engineering realities, as discussed elsewhere in this subthread you'll hit the brick was of the laws of nature.

That other parts of California's economy have gotten really big, high tech rather obviously for the HN crowd, doesn't mean its agriculture sector has become less important for the US and the world. Something we're going to become generally well acquainted with as fertilizer price rises due to unrelated political polices decease yields all over the place.

If they've indeed moved towards more water intensive crops, that doesn't change the terms of the original compact made with them and the urbanites that allowed these water systems to be built in the first place. If the rule of law still means something, as noted elsewhere taking their water rights away will not be cheap as it's a "taking" as used in the Bill of Rights, and our diets are going to change as these "more water intensive crops" are no longer available or at their usual prices.

This is just one of many examples where a "can was kicked down the road" for future politicians and the people they rule over to deal with, this mess was made certain in the 1960s. The unfalsifiable concept of climate change has nothing to do with it, except that the climate cycles were well known long ago.

More recently it's been discovered this is at least partly linked to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_...

"During El Niño events, increased precipitation is expected in California due to a more southerly, zonal, storm track. During La Niña, increased precipitation is diverted into the Pacific Northwest due to a more northerly storm track."

We realized El Niño was a thing no later than the 19th Century, and per a Wikipedia skim evidence has been found for the cycle going back at least 10,000 years.

You try to change this system and you'll open a _huge_ can of worms for all of the US west of the Minnesota to Louisiana border, the legal fights would consume the relevant courts for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right for a start.

The history goes from attempting to limit dueling, then disarming freedmen (black slaves after the Civil War), followed by new outside the Hajnal line immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, to extending the list of undesirables to the entire population except for the ruling class' Inner Circle like Dianne Feinstein who at one point held one of the only two concealed carry licenses issued by San Francisco county.

See my reply in this subthread for one stark bottom line: on January 1st, 2023 in half the states of the nation (25 out of 50 for our foreign correspondents) you will not need a licence to carry a concealed handgun. (The number today is 22: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry).

The "discussion" is at the margins, from weak sauce administrative fiat Federal regulations, to Purple or newly Blue states moving (more) anti-gun like Washington state, to the modern 8 slave states where legal concealed carry is non-existent or at the whim and/or bribery of local officials, and in Massachusetts and New York City that extends to mere ownership, and perhaps de facto New Jersey as well.

Your side will have to agree to disagree as the nation geographically further polarizes or try to force this with a civil war. I vote for the former option.

Alcohol and firearms are intimately intertwined in US history, from what sparked our revolution into a hot shooting one as the British attempted to destroy arms and ammunition stored in Concord, Massachusetts to the Whiskey Rebellion which started 16 years later.

One should not consider forcing a major social change without considering the consequences, the example of the lasting to this day damage done to the social order of Prohibition of alcohol being an excellent example. For example all but extinguishing the local tavern and replacing it with the speakeasy derived bar, massively damaging respect for the law, giving organized crime it's greatest period to entrench itself in the nation, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by "automatic firearms," but what you describe is limited to a very small number of states, albeit some of our most populous. Counterexamples are legion, 42 states have "shall issue" concealed carry, that's like 72% of the population before the COVID flee big cities demographic changes to the extent they're lasting, and so far this year three states are improving that to "Constitutional Carry," a total of half the states in the union!

For how we got here, "The American Indian foundation of American gun culture" is essential reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

You never know when you might need ... well, "countries don't have friends, they have interests," but here a non-hostile neighbor.

The MIT Press books describe IBM starting in the punched card data processing era, how the above intersected with IBM in the SAGE project, and much more. IBM defined a great deal of what was used for a long time by many companies due to a previous punched card anti-trust settlement which required them to FRAND license their patents. So their electromechanical wizzardry turned to computer systems like the half-inch reel to reel tape became ubiquitous, was still the thing in the first part of my computing career.

DEC also published some good books about its history, I can look those up if you want.

These are some of the topics I've found to be very interesting, there's of course lots more published by them and others. But I like to focus on what became wildly successful, or what caused a company like IBM to falter very badly like when it become dogmatic in the System/360 days that virtual memory was a bad thing and would not be supported, in one stroke costing them the high end academic market and eventually resulting in their becoming a niche player.

For DEC, a study of the PDP-6/10 and PDP-11 is a necessity if you want follow my interests, the former became a dominant replacement for IBM computers, the latter was the system UNIX first became big on.

I'm sure you realize it at some level, but as someone who's half again older than you, this is the 1970s at warp speed.

jcal93's comment below about eggs though is partly "transitory" inflation, we're having another widespread bird flu outbreak like in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_H5N2_outbre...

Obviously not universal, but if upper management has decided to spend a lot of time focusing on a marque building they're not focusing on the business itself.

As made by some of the original nuclear winter paper authors.

Mostly going from memory there's a lot that's wrong, unsupported, questionable, or nor longer relevant about the TTAPS paper. The easily unbalanced one dimensional model of the atmosphere, where there are no winds or oceans, particles can just go up and down. No support for the size range of soot produced. Very few cities in the US or USSR with enough fuel to produced real firestorms like the Tokyo one in WWII. And now many many fewer nukes in both nation's inventories.

Not quite, as I mention elsewhere they continued incompatible low end systems, most prominently the existing business 1401 series, and used 360 technology to make the affordable 1965 1130. I would assume the same for the 1969 System 3, which eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now, which internally is still by far the most sophisticated mass manufactured computer system architecture.

Going from memory and not counting the very limited 360/20, from the 8 bit internally 360/30 all the way to the 360/91 supercomputer you could run basically the same software. Which eventually solved a huge problem for IBM and the industry in general because not so much effort had been put into comparability in the early days, and IBM had two major lines of big computers, decimal ones for business and binary ones officially for science and engineering but by then often used by businesses.

Although stuff at the low end which somewhat like the 360/20 remained incomparable, the business 1401 series remained, also see the scientific 1130 which a lot of people including myself got their first start at programming on. It was a very clever design that used 360 technology to make an affordable system, for quite some time they'd put effort into that niche with the 650 and the CADET, Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, a backronym from how they based it on a big block of core memory which they were very good at manufacturing by then vs. the drum as used in the 650, and and used that with tables etc. to avoid including an ALU.

And leaders of the effort going all the way up to Tom Watson Jr. made a catastrophic mistake in deciding virtual memory, which they called dynamic address translation (DAT) was a bad thing, which hardened so much the first models of the System/370 which used "monolithic" circuits, ICs, didn't have it (and they didn't do right by their customers who bought those first models).

The affordability of the 360 series and their ability to make so many but much less than initial demand rested on their avoiding too new at the time ICs and using automation to manufacture small boards logic boards on a ceramic substrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology This was an era in which IBM still massively benefited from its electromechanical wizardry gained in the punched card data processing days.

This lost them the high end computer science community which I believe seriously harmed them in the long term, ultimately made what they now call IBM Z a niche product.

I'm not a standard case, have a inherited combined anxiety and depression problem that behaves somewhat like bipolar disorder without ever going manic (see below for exception), it's "refractory" but I've found the two last out of three generations of anti-depressants to be very helpful, although far from cures.

I have no idea whatsoever what convinced you "SSRIs and other anti-depressants" "have really bad side-effects for most people that take them." That was certainly true for the first generation MAO inhibitors and I knew someone on one who had the usual food problem, but is much less true for the second generation of tricylics, and not at all true for the third which started with the SSRI PROZAC/fluoxetine.

If after all you've gone through you're still literally willing to live a miserable life without at least trying a third generation anti-depressant I don't see what we can say that will convince you. You certainly might have a bad reaction to one or more members of this class of drugs as I and a friend have had (PAXIL/paroxetine made me hypomanic, a friend had suicidal ideation which she simply recognized and fixed by stopping taking the drug), and perhaps as others note you may have to try several to see if one works.

Note one of the biggest mistakes made in prescribing them is not moving to a high enough dose quickly enough if a smaller one is tolerated but doesn't have much of an effect. Everything else you need to know about them is well documented, although you'll have to find better sources than whatever has convinced you these drugs are simply too dangerous to even try.

Believer or not, there's a lot of wisdom in the Bible.

And reading between the lines, it sounds like MIT has another "lost class" or two. A few years after I was admitted to MIT, the Director of Admissions retired and was replaced by a professional in the field. And being a professional he followed the faculty's official findings on how to select applicants and all of a sudden MIT was getting calls from schools asking why their best students were no longer getting accepted while the next tier suddenly were. And rather quickly the physics faculty led a revolt because way too many of their students were having too much difficulty with the above above minimum core requirements.

I got to casually know one of these students, she was very nice and of course smart, but boy did she struggle with the required math based core curricula of her major unlike her female peers from my years and thereabouts.

Although this is not the OP's planned career path, he's planning on a startup after getting a Ph.D. and working a normal job for a while, which will also allow him to pay down the debt incurred in getting his undergraduate degree before the startup.

Another detail about MIT not yet mentioned: professors are formally allowed to work one day a week on things like their own startups. So "making a connection with a professor" includes the possibility of getting paid to work at such a startup which of course can be very educational about startups. And also get a different type of recommendation from "a MIT professor" that could also be useful in getting into a grad school.

I'm sorry, but we're running into a brick wall of your viewpoint of the capabilities of all undergraduates which does not match what happens at MIT or any other research university which also formally or informally has undergraduates or even high school students perform grad student level research.

I was in a NSF Summer Science Training Program in the 1970s and real research was an integral part of it, I did grunt labor a lab tech or beginning grad student would do, but learned a great deal about the general field from the Principle Investigator (PI, the professor who ran the lab) and the senior grad student who I directly worked under. In return they got free labor and payed their debts forward to the people who originally mentored them.

Move from eight man weeks in that program to what can be done at MIT in up to four months a year full time for pay, plus whatever can be squeezed in when classes are in session and you get paid in credit, and the system can easily turn out a mid-level or higher grad student equivalent with enough work under his belt to be in real papers published by legitimate journals that wouldn't be what you describe above. And be the basis of a very legitimate recommendation, grad students who turn out not to be able to do research are a messy loss to a department and the professor who finds this out the hard way.

We have no basis for discussion so this will be the end of my replies, but there's at least one other discussion on this system in this topic, and it's common enough knowledge in academia.

I've watched how MIT "processes" undergraduate students all the way through graduation, and this would require corrupting the Registrar's office to create a fake transcript and adding names to the list of graduates after the departments and that office submit their perfected lists to the people who handle the details of graduation.

It's theoretically possible, but strikes me as unlikely unless those rocks can do and apply the calculus; are you really sure that's beyond them?