vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.
That was back when an elite degree meant that you had valuable social connections and not that you spent $80k a year watching ungraded lecture videos in your parents’ basement.
I don’t see how the college bubble continues as-is after this. What we had before was basically a common knowledge problem. Everyone knows college is a ripoff and, aside from a small number of degrees, the students are mostly just getting subsidized by taxpayers to drink and smoke pot for four years while the rest of us work and pay taxes. But, we didn’t all know that everyone knows that. There was also a coordination problem in that even if everyone is skeptical of the value provided by the experience, the pool of college graduates was still some combination of smarter and more conscientious than the pool of non-college graduates, so there was a signaling effect to going to college. But now a lot of smart, conscientious young people have an excuse to bail out of the system at the same time. I think many of those young people will end up doing something with this time that sounds better to employers than “I spent $80k a year living in my parents’ basement watching ungraded online lecture videos that were inferior to ones I could watch for free on YouTube.”
The recession after the 2008 financial crisis was the worst economic downturn in nearly 80 years. We are unlikely to see an event of similar magnitude for several decades.
I believe the main reason Apple wanted to drop support for 32-bit apps is so they no longer have to support the Objective-C 1.0 runtime, which must’ve been requiring more work to maintain than they wanted to invest.
Whose healthcare did the Republicans decimate? People get worked up any time the system changes (e.g. Obamacare caused some people to lose their health insurance plans and in-network doctors); many Democrats were voted out of office after the passage of the ACA. The Republicans realized that and (narrowly) chose not to repeal Obamacare.
I cited a government website showing that the population is off by over 200,000 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in New York, but it’s full of world-class bullshitters, so much of what you hear about New York is bullshit. Bill de Blasio claimed there were 2 million people standing in Times Square for New Year’s. How in the world could that possibly be true?
Google’s currently helping to perpetuate the myth that New York is a growing city and its population is at an all-time high of 8.623 million. In reality, it’s a dying city, and the current best estimate is 8,398,748; every bureau except Staten Island is losing population. People are fleeing New York (both the city and upstate) due to high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, bad weather, and a generally poor standard of living.
The network exists for non-pooled rides as well. Riders don't have to wait as long if there are more drivers, and drivers don't have to drive as far to pick up a ride if there are more passengers. The increased efficiencies allow prices to be lower as well.
The technology only seems "not that innovative" because they've been around for a decade. The whole concept wouldn't be possible without widespread smartphone adoption which occurred in that time. The real problem with the business is the economics don't work. Riders use Uber because it's cheap and driver use it because they get paid enough to make it worth their while (or at least they believe that to be the case). These two things are only the case because they're blowing billions of dollars on subsidies.
Uber's business model has the same problem as Groupon's, which is that they don't really have economies of scale. Every market requires a new team of people to run promotions to attract drivers and customers and match supply with demand.
Nearly all of the subway lines were built many decades ago when construction costs were much cheaper. It’s basically impossible for San Francisco to ever build such a comprehensive system at this point. Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station that doesn’t have any train tracks serving it and was only open for six weeks before it was closed because it was found to be structurally unsound. If they do ever build the train tracks (estimated to take ten years and cost $6 billion), they didn’t build enough platforms for the number of trains they want to run.
Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
Why does “math anxiety” get such special attention? What about “foreign language class anxiety” or “essay-writing anxiety” or “being forced to read old books I don’t care about” anxiety? Is it because journalists tend to like those activities and be scared of math?
You can either implement the functions accurately or inaccurately. Implementing them inaccurately is a slippery slope. Intel botched the hardware implementations in their processors not only for large inputs but also for inputs nearish to multiples of pi:
You need more digits than that to accurately compute double-precision trigonometric functions (if the input is close to pi, you need enough accurate digits left after performing range reduction).
That’s not really true. Tariffs are clearly a form of tax. Both taxes and fines are used to discourage undesirable behavior. One difference is businesses typically assess on their own how much they owe in taxes, whereas the government tells them how much they owe in fines.
Most of the tax breaks Amazon was going to get are, in fact, offered to all businesses. The reporting on this has been absolutely awful (as most journalism is).
States already compete on the basis of tax rates. That’s a very good thing. If you don’t like paying taxes out your butthole in California or New York, you can move to Texas or Nevada. It would be awful if the federal govenement told every state they had to have the same taxes as California. California can get away with abusing its residents because it has beaches and nice weather, but not every state can do that.
Ok, but those people were wrong, since Amazon ended up pulling out of New York. New Yorkers have an extremely inflated sense of self-important and think Amazon just has to be in New York, when that’s clearly not the case.
I think the effects of loss of biodiversity are often overstated. Humans mostly depend on a small set of domesticated animals; as far as I’m aware, no one is seriously suggesting that cows, pigs, sheep, or chickens are going to go extinct, or that farmers will be unable to feed them.