3,157 karma · joined March 15, 2012
Most of that tree mass becomes lumber, which keeps a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. Once cleared, new trees take their place and suck up more carbon. Lumber is a rare win-win for climate change and the economy.
As opposed to natural modes of tree death like fires or simply rotting, in which all stored carbon is released...
Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a better place precisely because these people got in to these colleges. Maybe the lower number for men indicates more risk-takers that Caltech will eventually get huge checks from.
Likewise, someone using similar logic might argue that a young woman who decides her junior year she wants to get married, pregnant, and be a stay-at-home mom is overeducated and her slot should have been taken by someone else. Is that career path just as meritorious as others?
For numbers, we could consider the number of Nobel laureates who had gained Caltech BS degrees since 1970: 1 total. Eric Betzig, Chemistry, class of 1983. No doubt there are more to come, but there were 10 prior to 1970. Whatever Caltech was juicing the tank with I would posit has run out, and the institution's best days are behind it. The reason may have nothing to do with this whole gender issue.
I'd like to close this tangent's discussion with the following: Women and men should be judged by their academic prowess alone. If you're going to prefer women, own it, and don't pretend you don't. I bet at least one male future Nobel laureate scratched Caltech off his list because they're biased in this way. Also at least one future male check writer.
The real figure of merit in this discussion is simply the thickness of both piles.
With regard to the rest, I interpreted what you wrote differently than how you meant it, I appreciate the explanation, and I apologize for the confusion.
I think we would agree about most aspects of college admissions being flawed.
Your second guess is correct.
I recognize the hurry to get a comment in, but an appeal to ignorance instead of googling it and using what you find to shape your opinion really sells yourself short, and diminishes the discussion to follow.
Schools are not communities, they have communities within them, but they are more than just communities.
Your high school homecoming court also has a shared identity and a set of experiences that people outside the court don’t have. How is either important?
A lot of people paid $75 to become one of those data points, and the majority of them didn’t pick Caltech because of the social opportunities (because Caltech is not anywhere near the top of that list unless you’re talking social opportunities strictly for people north of 180 I.Q.).
In Caltech we have an exclusive and highly desirable learning institution with a finite and insufficient number of seats. Rigor or optics, you can’t have both. If you’re choosing optics, own it and don’t be ashamed of it.
Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric.
Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying.
You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.
I don’t have a problem with the Caltech admissions organization doing what they do as long as everyone isn’t afraid to acknowledge every aspect of what’s going on and are content with it. Caltech is a private college, and if they want it to be a private women’s college, or a women’s-first college, that’s fine if they want to admit to it.
I abhor cognitive dissonance, particularly when weaponized, and the linked article smells like that to me.
Let’s start with the assumption that the most qualified women applied to Caltech instead of pursuing educations in law, medicine, or other top-tier professions. I posit a number of top-tier women who tick all the boxes would simply have no interest in Caltech as a school. Men too, but less of them wouldn’t be interested. It’s not a matter of women having less merit, quite the contrary: they consider the legal or medical professions more worthy of their merit and thus for them applying to Caltech would be suboptimal for their career aspirations.
No, the fact is more men applied because men have fewer attractive alternatives, and unless you believe men are inferior writ large, more women are getting in than men in spite of fewer applying, not because the women are more talented, but because the admissions organization prefers having more women than men, application numbers be damned.
While I could accept that the bottom 16 of males and bottom 0 of females are joke applications, these each included a substantial application fee ($75).
Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.
I endured 75+% male and didn’t particularly enjoy it, but that’s not why I attended my similarly-sized engineering college. I went for the education and rigor.
Caltech is and has always been about hardcore study. It’s not a cotillion. At least it didn’t used to be.
I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.
This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus (the top 100 of say 20000 is going to be more qualified than the top 100 of say 7000). In pursuing equality, the admissions group has achieved the greatest inequality in school history from a different perspective.
I submit this also is unfair to women. Imagine yourself with a case of impostor syndrome and having the mathematical understanding to back it up. I’d want to know I earned it and deserve to be there just as much as anybody else there. Some do and have, and there’s no way to know who those some are.
Is it worth sacrificing merit for optics? Maybe it is, but we ignore this double-edged sword (even and especially one of its edges) at our peril.
Until equal numbers of men and women apply, deviating from the application gender percentages will disadvantage everybody.
Open seating (the way WN does it) involves boarding families with children between the A and B groups. They're not getting front row, but they mathematically can sit together no matter how many of them there are. That is, unless the family only has C boarding passes and waits for their C rows to be called.
On a different airline, I've witnessed, firsthand, families all booked on noncontiguous middle seats in the back of the plane. Once one of them tried to sit in my aisle seat, and I got to choose between an uncompensated downgrade to their middle seat, or narc'ing them out to the flight attendant, for whom I have zero trust that they'll not make things worse for everybody.
Having met multiple prison corrections officers and flight attendants in my lifetime, my order of trust to help me with my interpersonal issues goes Southwest, CO, non-Southwest.
The CEO’s “research” appears shambolic and dumbs down what engenders such loyalty to Southwest. Next thing you’ll know they’ll add 777’s, ERJ’s, and A320’s to the bestiary, because it’s also what the other airlines do. Southwest became the leader because they led and went their own way instead of followed.
At the end of the day, 90% of Southwest fliers choose Southwest because of price and availability. Embiggening the boarding process with boarding zones won’t sell more seats, particularly middle seats.
The 10% of business travelers who choose Southwest crave its no-fuss “Greyhound of the skies” approach, and these will be the most turned off.
CEO pay is like telling your driver to redline the engine all he wants. He’ll outperform the competition (with significant personal upside) until he blows the engine (and gets replaced a few years later, having earned billions).
Every day was one day closer to release, to being able to see and spend time with the people I cared most about. I saw dates on the calendar approach and looked forward to them. I never had much opportunity to be bored, and there were plenty of activities I could engage in, even during 24 hour lockdowns. I was forced and encouraged to eat fewer calories (at first at least) and lost a lot of weight, making me much healthier. I had goals I was very eager to work toward, but artificially put off because I couldn't do them while locked up.
This sounds like a mid-life crisis. Your SHBG levels rise with age and your free testosterone levels are likely low. Getting looked over for TRT can potentially help.
Having a middling career isn't enough for a lot of people. Why aren't you in the 1% killing it? A lot of them have problems, but having more money than you know how to spend is a source of contentment for a lot of wealthier people.
Wrapping it up with a quote: "I never worked a day in my life. It was all fun."
Some kind of “failure bond” where the company puts up a security in case of failure might be an option.
Most cryobanks don’t seem like they’d have this problem, but when you move into the decades timescale, things like catastrophic dewar failure can drain the coolant from your samples in minutes, and if it’s not staffed 24/7 with staff trained in contingencies like this (how do you safely remove samples from the dewar fast enough and how do you even know the failure occurred fast enough?) then damage can set in. There may even not be any records made or kept of the failure.
Something to think about if you want to move forward. However, if all you want is epi-DNA, I imagine corpses a few centuries old may qualify as enough. Eggs and sperm need to stay alive and viable, which is a far higher bar.
Can't get any more British than something with British in its name. Not to mention it's very widely used in practice, though it's up there with pounds, gallons, and miles.
It’s well known the reason Amtrak sucks is because freight trains run on the same tracks and their sidings are too short, relative to the length of the trains, to prevent freight-caused delays on most Amtrak lines. Avg. passenger rail speeds in the US peaked in the 1880’s iirc.
If you simply can’t use a siding because your train is too long, I can see a derailment becoming more likely.
There may also be loading fatigue contributions, similar to higher speeds and harder tires making semi trucks responsible for 90+% of US highway wear. The longest trains no doubt run on a minority of busiest routes, so there is less risk of derailment with shorter trains on the plurality of routes. In essence, it’s not that the derailed train is too long, it’s that the previous train is too long, causing the track to wear out too fast.
The game you’re thinking of is roulette. Blackjack doesn’t have colors to bet on.
Putting it all on black is only theft if you lose. FedEx’s founder famously bet half his employee payroll on black and won.
FTX eventually lost.
If you neglected the labor costs of installation, along with the inverters, racking, permitting, etc., they'd pay for themselves in _under a year_ in PG&E territory, which lists a 43c/kWh rate on their website. And that's before any tax or feed-in tariff incentives.
"Better" (efficiency) is completely irrelevant to this math problem.
The private market would have provided a bounty of suitors for Sprint if it couldn't recover from bankruptcy. It may have emerged in a far weaker fourth place, but it would still be around.
Fresh start is likely not an option. You forget about the IP and assets of the company. Can’t take those with you in a fresh start and OP and his investor has a lot of sunk cost here.
OP currently suffers from oppression by minority shareholder, and needs a solution. I gave one.
A new entity should only run you a few hundred dollars through Clerky or similar. Your investor ought to be willing to cough that up, or you can probably put together a pitch deck (freshly inked licensing deal in hand) to attract a new investor in the new entity.
Your terms of licensure would not be strictly monetary, either. Make them $1 plus X percent of new company revenues over the next three years. Even if that X is substantial it's mostly going in and out of the same pocket.
I suppose if you wanted to fold the old entity up now, you could, but murky ownership of IP and assets could be a millstone around a new company's neck in the form of legal exposure from the CTO ("they cheated me out of my equity!"). Better the old entity goes out with a whimper, rather than a bang.