jartelt

The vast majority of forest land in California is owned by the federal government and is National Forest land. California can't just go and run controlled burns in those federally controlled forests. That would need to be done in cooperation or under the direction of the US Forest Service and should be funded by the US Forest Service since they own the land.

If the federal government wants better forest management in the National Forests, they should increase funding for forest management and hire more employees into the US Forest Service.

You can certainly blame California for allowing people to build homes at the wildland urban interface and for not requiring homeowners to take better fire defensibility measures. The forests are a more complicated issue and the feds take much of the blame.

I don't know whether or not the 10 weeks of family leave will remain after the COVID-19 pandemic slows. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

The point is that the response to the pandemic was to give stressed parents up to 10 weeks of additional leave and to tell stressed non-parents to use their 3 mental health days (which parents also get). I don't think it's crazy for a stressed non-parent to look at that and feel like the company doesn't think (or doesn't care) that the pandemic affects them at all.

1) I think you are ignoring that it is possible for non-parent employees to be negatively affected by the pandemic as well. You seem to be dealing with it very well (which is great!), but others may be stuck working from noisy, cramped apartments and may be getting little to no social interaction. This is can definitely cause health issues and degrade happiness.

Those employees look at the large amount of family leave parents are getting and ask "why can't we get a little extra help as well?". If parents get 10 weeks of leave, how about you give non-parents 1 week of extra PTO or leave. It doesn't need to be exactly equal, but the pandemic is hard on everyone.

2) I think the non-parent employees are saying the company is showing little to no empathy towards their struggles. I really think it's less of "how dare that parent take extra leave" and more of "how dare facebook give parents all this extra leave and give non-parents nothing to help them cope with stress."

3) You choose to have children, but you do not choose to have cancer. I think your comparison there is misguided.

Time off would allow people to relax, work on a hobby, exercise, etc. If you are feeling run down after working from a crappy, crammed apartment for 3 months, it can be refreshing to get an extra week or so off work with no questions asked.

It is not necessarily just hostility to parents. I see it more as hostility to the HR policies in place at some of the companies. A new parent at facebook gets 4 months leave after the birth and then can take another 10 weeks of family leave.

Alternatively, non parent employees at facebook can take 3 days off to cope with stress or else need to take sick days. Otherwise they can take sick days, which probably would be frowned upon if overused.

Yes, parents have to deal with a lot more added stress during this pandemic. But, the difference between 10 weeks off (with no questions asked) and 3 days off (to "cope with mental health issues") is pretty stark. It seems like the tech companies could at least give those who do not take family leave an extra week of vacation or something.

I guess we just fundamentally disagree on some things here.

> The problem we're trying to solve isn't poor experimental design, it's a failure to publish "boring" results--a bias against uninteresting results which should cause us to distrust any interesting result.

I do not see the value in a quest to do boring and uninteresting research and publish it, even if the experimental methods are exquisite. The goal of PhD research is to explore and find something new or interesting to add to the scientific body. Graduates already cannot read all the interesting papers in their fields. If you add 10x more boring papers, they are never going to be read and will just be a waste of journal editor and reviewer time.

> An inconclusive result does provide insight. If you have 1 study showing vaccines cause autism and 37651 studies which are inconclusive, that starts to be pretty conclusive.

You can't add up 37651 insignificant results and say they equal a significant result. If there was a study with significant results showing no link between autism and the vaccine, it would get published (many such studies have been published). If your study just shows nothing, then most won't care because they can't learn much of anything from it.

> If the results produced are "utterly garbage", then that really shows us that the "beautiful experimental designs" weren't actually effective.

That is one of my points. Many experimental designs are beautiful and seem great, but then when researcher do the experiment many different issues can come up yielding little to no useful data. If you had to evaluate (for pre publication) every graduate students experiment ideas, you would run out of time!

> You publish the thing you agreed to publish, mention the interesting phenomena in the analysis, and apply to study it.

No one wants to read about the uninteresting experiment. They want to read about the interesting discovery and want learn about that. So, you publish the study of the interesting part and don't bother publishing the boring experiment.

> A journal of Null Results already exists, and doesn't solve the problem because it's just reversing the publication bias.

I guess I believe a bias towards publishing interesting studies with significant results is not a bad thing. Publishing inconclusive, uninteresting, or trivial findings does not add much value, if any, to the scientific body in my opinion.

> An experiment that gets a null result is not a failure. An experiment which fails to observe the variable under test is a failure. If science is working correctly, I would expect the majority of correctly-performed experiments to produce null results, because the obvious phenomena have already been discovered. The idea that "interesting result = success and null result = failure" is fundamentally unscientific and needs to be stricken from the human consciousness.

I don't believe "null result = failure", I believe many null results are not interesting and likely are not useful if published because many experiments do not produce useful data or significant results for a variety of reasons.

Sorry, but I think you are not on the right track here. Top tier journals typically publish results that are both interesting/novel and that have good experimental design. Yes, there are bad studies that get through now and then, but by and large you are much more likely to find good methods in a Nature paper compared to a low tier journal. As a graduate student, I rarely trusted results from low tier journals because those are the sloppiest and least likely to be replicated.

The idea of evaluating experiment design and committing to publish before seeing any data/results also strikes me as deeply flawed. Graduate students can sit around think up many deep questions and draw up tons of beautiful experimental designs. That is the easier part. The harder part is actually running the experiments properly and interpreting the findings correctly. If we are publishing experiment ideas, every graduate student would be submitting 100s of ideas to top tier journals. However, most of those experiments would end up producing inconclusive or utterly garbage results, which would provide little insight if published.

The other issue I see is that many interesting findings come out of serendipitous results that are not related to the initial experiment or hypothesis. You start out trying to answer one question and then stumble upon some else that is very interesting (so you then explore that). If you have already submitted one experimental design and are supposed to publish on that, what do you do if you stumble upon something else that is actually much more interesting? In my experience with research you don't often go directly from one question/hypothesis/method to an answer and then publish. It's much less linear than that with many dead ends along the way. It's just not something you can pre-publish.

All of that said, one area where I think we would agree is on publishing the results of well performed experiments with null results. I think it would be useful to the community if people published reports saying "we had this interesting question, did a proper experiment, and it turns out the hypothesis was null and there was nothing interesting there." In the current system, that will likely not get published. But, other researchers would benefit from seeing that result because they may have the same hypothesis and may waste time trying to explore the same dead end. A Journal of Null Results could be useful here. However, you do run into the issue of not knowing if an experiment failed because of a researcher mistake or error...

Basic IR beam solutions cannot tell the difference between someone going in the store vs someone going out, so keeping a real-time count of occupancy is difficult (or impossible). They also struggle with two people going through a doorway at the same time (counted as one entry vs 2).

In Redwood City, police officers start out at $120,000 a year (plus a pension). I know mechanical engineers in the Bay Area that start out making less than that and do not get a pension.

This is a very early step (phase 1). They are giving the vaccine to small number of healthy people to make sure it is safe in that population. From there they have to go on to larger trials that look at both safety and effectiveness. The phase 2 and phase 3 trials will take much longer.

Of the 20 employees listed on LinkedIn, several are just Mentors that almost certainly do not take home a full salary with benefits.

Wearing a mask helps block airborne droplets from the cough or sneeze of an infected person. That said, you need to aware that a mask is not perfect and you should still stay at least 6 feet away from other people. You also need to fit the mask properly and should avoid frequently adjusting the mask and touching your face with unwashed hands.

You likely will need to prove that your unemployment or lack of ability to work was caused by COVID-19. So doctors note, test result, order to stop work by governor, etc.

1) Decide what you are going to do with the time previously spent commuting. If you previously spent 45 mins driving to/from work, you now can either use that freed up time to work more or to do something else (relax, clean, etc.).

2) Be proactive about taking a walk or working out. If you WFH, you can often barely move all day. You will feel much better if you schedule a walk after lunch or take a break to work out.

3) Don't be afraid to take some 15 minute breaks to read or watch TV (or do something else). While at work, many people stop and talk to colleagues or do other things to relax at various times. You will not get these small distractions while working from home, so plan to take a few breaks.

4) Set your schedule and try to stick to it. If you don't want to work all night, leave your laptop in the home office and don't bring it to the couch.

Combination of favorable laws, good weather for testing, wide roads, etc.

Validation of Waymo's valuation provides data for Alphabet stockholders and (hopefully) shows that all the money Alphabet has poured into Waymo has generated significant value. If you never show this validation, some shareholders become angry and demand you stop pouring cash into other bets that just chew up cash.

Yea, smell issues are from transport of the food waste to the facilities. If you have a facility accepting waste, there will be trunks bringing in smelly stuff on a regular basis.

Industrial compost sites and anaerobic digesters are likely a bit smelly. People also may gripe about having a compost bin in addition to a recycling and trash bin.

This article is pretty off the mark. Yes, eliminating food waste will not solve the climate problem. However, eliminating food waste will absolutely help the climate problem as well as reduce needed landfill space, and provide valuable compost.

There is very little downside to encouraging people to waste less food and to divert food waste from the trash into compost. Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash. Food waste in landfills breaks down super slowly and releases methane into the atmosphere. This is not good. It's much better to use the food waste to make compost or to use an anaerobic digester and make carbon negative methane.

Similar for "all intensive purposes" vs "all intents and purposes"

Having a 10 year exercise window on options helps quite a bit. In most cases there will either be a liquidity event within 10 years or (for companies that are successful but stay private longer than 10 years) the company will have multiple huge fundraising rounds and can allow early employees to cash out some shares in a secondary round.

To be fair the CEO should either eventually push for a liquidity event or should be open to allowing employees to sell shares on the secondary market.

Most plans have clearly stated out of pocket maximums. That is the most you are going to pay in a given year.

Saying you want rents to come down (or at least stop rising) does not automatically mean you are against building more housing...

Many people arguing for more housing in the Bay Are are doing so because they want prices/rents to come down, and most NIMBYs want prices/rents to keep rising.

Yep, there are very often "learning curves" that can be used to accurately predict price trends as manufacturing volume increase. The same thing has played out with solar cells and led to big price drops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

Lead acid batteries are used in pretty much everything ICE vehicle and are used in large quantities as uninterruptible power supplies (data centers use a ton). It's a huge industry.

Even if they said how many models they looked at before choosing 14 models (and explained why they chose those 14), conspiracy theorists and people skepticalof climate science would still argue that it is not legitimate because of survivorship bias and several other reasons.

"You looked at 1000 models, but what about the 1000 models that scientists made and didn't publish. You didn't look at those!"

People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis. That doesn't mean you just stop ding the work.

Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.

Earlier this year Google e-mailed all employees and noted that accessing docs outside the scope of your job responsibility is forbidden and a fire-able offense. I think this policy change marked the end of the open culture you speak of.

Whether this was a legitimate policy change or a change simply made to find reasons to fire activists, I don't know. But, it was made clear many months ago that digging around to access docs outside your spec could result in a firing.

"...PART of what they do..."

One difference I have noticed is that in the midwest you can eat out and often spend less than $20 per person on the entire check. For even a mid range restaurant in the bay area, you are at $20 per person after food/drink (not including tax/tip). There are absolutely much better restaurants in SF compared to cities in say IL or WI. However, the prices are definitely higher in SF.

I imagine the retailer just cares about getting the sale and doesn't really care who they pay the 2% (or whatever) commission fee to? Shouldn't make too much of a difference whether they pay the commission to Honey or to some random blog.

It certainly sucks for the blogs and websites trying to fund their content with affiliate links though. Someone like Wirecutter can spend time and money on reviewing items and then can lose out on the referral commission in the end.