johan_larson

There is a wide variety of medical conditions that disqualify people from serving in the US armed forces.

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/disqualifiers-med...

Fossil hunting for money could be a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, there will be a lot more fossil-hunting, meaning more fossils will be found. But on the other, commercial hunters are likely to be much less careful with fossils than scientists would be.

Anyone know how the tradeoffs work out?

Leetcode is a good idea.

https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/

And frankly, given your lack of background in this area, it would do you a world of good to get more time to prepare. Try to push the interview back a bit. Even one extra week would be an improvement.

A hefty portion of the population hates, fears, or scorns the government. They think putting healthcare (even more) in the hands of the state will either lead to worse results or give the state even more leverage to push them around.

Also, a big and influential portion of the citizenry is served just fine by the current arrangement. If you don't have any long-term medical conditions and you have a job good enough that your employer provides medical insurance, you're doing just fine, thank you.

Finally, there are large and influential groups that are making a lot of money under the current system, and expect they would make less under a more socialized system. Among these are doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies.

All these factors add up to a formidable bulwark against large-scale change.

It varies, but students are typically required to do anything from half a year to one year of breadth courses outside their major, which would mean arts and humanities courses for those headed into technical disciplines. But many students take what are called AP courses in high school which count as college credits, and quite a few students are able to satisfy breadth requirements that way. And some narrow programs, such as engineering degrees, require next to no work outside the main field of study.

On the other hand, at some institutions one can satisfy the major minimally without a whole lot of courses, leaving plenty of time for non-technical courses.

So to summarize, there is a lot of variability. A US graduate in a technical discipline may have taken anywhere from zero to two years of arts and humanities courses.

If life were fair, Harlan Ellison would have been one of the best-paid writers in the United States, and an utter social outcast.

Bring back the original Jeeps?

The case where it might help is the bright kid from a working class background; you know, the kind who works part-time and therefore doesn't have time for extracurricular activities.

> (#2 in class, 1500/1600, 66 college credits)

That doesn't sounds like an average student to me. You were entering college as a junior, effectively.

Thanks for the info, though.

The more I read about the contortions US colleges go through in the name of social justice, the better scores-only admission looks to me.

Multi-gate protocols do that too. The investment just gets more complicated.

Factory-made homes do exist, but they acquired a bad reputation somewhere along the line, and tend to get used only in limited applications, such as summer cottages.

What is gaining ground, apparently, is prefabricating components of houses, which are then assembled on site rather than doing everything on site from plain lumber. Stairs, for example, are often made from kits.

How the heck is Yahoo still in the top 10?

Any idea how honestly China reports these statistics?

I've never understood why the management consultants get so much money for so little. They are, in the end, selling the labor of clever and well-credentialed but woefully inexperienced people at really eye-popping rates. You'd think any well-run company could get the same sort of insight from its own people. It's really a masterpiece of packaging and brand-building, as far as I can tell.

Let's be clear; I'm not talking here about specialist consultants with deep industry experience and consequent insight. Those make sense to me.

I'm talking about generalist corporate-strategy/management consultants who are peddling what sure looks like a suite of industrial command+control or planning+strategy techniques. How could they possibly be providing enough value to be worth hiring?

I would compose a witty reply, were I not too busy drinking and brooding.

Best English translation: grit

I'm originally from Finland, and this article doesn't make me any happier than I was before.

I wonder how often consultant-driven revampings like this actually succeed. I seem to remember that the show "Kitchen Nightmares" generally fails to turn around the restaurants they work with.

There simply are no large native top-tier tech companies like Amazon or Google in Canada that need large amounts of top-tier talent. The local players are much smaller and are competing for local talent with banks and insurance companies. Less competition means lower wages. Because of permissive immigration laws, there has also been a lot of immigration of software developers from Asia and eastern Europe, which is great for the employers, but exacerbates the problem for local talent.

Cool and awesome does not pay. The top companies may be using cool stuff to accomplish things, but the things being done are ultimately pedestrian. Google sells ads, Amazon runs an online marketplace, Apple makes personal communicators and Facebook is a place for chatting with friends. None of them are doing anything like "searching for the origins of the universe."

I guess the question is whether the companies can allow the drivers enough freedom to make them contractors, while still retaining enough control to maintain service standards. Letting the drivers set their own prices, perhaps through some sort of bidding system, might go a long way.

Serious? Does anyone other than astronomers care about light pollution?

I don't want to scrap it all, just the parts that require hefty subsidies to serve places that have realistic alternatives. US households usually have cars and for those that don't, intercity buses tend to serve even very tiny burgs. So most people most do have realistic alternatives.

Trains are the right solution in some cases. Commuter rail often makes sense. And in some densely populated regions, intercity trains make sense too. But in most of the US, because of the distances between cities, cars and planes work better.

The pay in Seattle for software developers is 100% more than in Toronto. Even second-tier US cities pay 50% more. If you're working in Toronto when you could be working in a US tech centre, I hope you have a good reason.

Market Average Annual Tech Wage Software Engineer (USD)

  Vancouver, BC — $60,107
  Toronto, ON — $62,365
  Atlanta, GA — $92,380
  Boston, MA — $103,979
  Washington, DC — $108,330
  New York, NY — $108,878
  Seattle, WA — $113,906

Source: http://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...

Good, good. The sooner Amtrak alienates its remaining customer base, the sooner it can be scrapped. There are only a few parts of the country that are settled densely enough -- and broadly enough -- for passenger trains to make sense. Any moves toward consolidation of service to only those areas should be welcomed.

English is phonetic enough that if you know either the written or spoken form of a word you can take a pretty good guess at the other one, and will almost certainly recognize it if it is presented to you. It's just harder than it needs to be.

Yes, but virtually all of Amazon's white-collar employees have college degrees, and it's a good bet they expect their children to get them too.

More problematic for Toronto: Canadians don't usually take the SAT unless they are aiming at US colleges. Most don't.

Yay for large numbers of first-generation Chinese immigrants!

Why would social media, of all things, be to blame for any of the rise in killings?