> Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.
Seems like the introduction of the law got people to think about cyclists because lunatics will fly through stop signs and ignore yields. Now that they can do it legally, you have to be more mindful, leading to less accidents.
These laws are asinine. Cyclists are such a problem where I live. They believe they are entitled to the road like a 3000 pound car, they slow traffic down, they create jams at intersections, they don't pay attention and fly through cross walks, etc.
You should need to be licensed to use a bicycle. There are far too many stupid people. My favorite example of this from recent history was pulling out to take a right turn, stopping, and right as I'm rolling out to commence the turn a bicyclist FLIES past me such that 1" in any direction would've probably killed him.
This is such a terrible and uninformed comment. Your complaint against people on bikes is that they think they're entitled to use the road at all? Holy smokes, yeah people on bikes are so entitled by insisting on existing in any shape or form? What a selfish and arrogant attitude, shame on you. Cyclists are not the problem with the North American transportation system, cars are.
Stay mad imo. Bicyclists should be licensed and insured just like cars. They pose a danger to everyone around them just like cars, and should have to be able to make anyone they harm whole. Anti-car rhetoric is absolute top tier nonsense. It's harder to get access to a 2000 pound vehicle than it is to get access to a projectile on two wheels that can easily flatten someone.
Yeah you're right. The greatest danger to pedestrians in North America is all those millions of "projectile cyclists" flattening them. That's what the statistics show. Today alone, about 21 people walking in the United States will be killed by motor vehicles. But we should focus on the approximately 8 pedestrians killed per year in collisions with bicycles.
It's revealing of your true priorities that you only care about the massive amount of death and devastation cars inflict on pedestrians and cyclists insofar as it inhibits you from marginalizing people riding bikes.
> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.
I was basically told I would not graduate my PhD program if I didn't do my dissertation in a machine learning application of my field of interest.
The intersection existed but after a year of trying to motivate myself I could not. I ended up quitting. It's more politics than it's worth and I was in competition with students from other countries who had infinitely more funding, infinitely more time, and infinitely more energy than me. I was doing night classes and spending every other waking hour I wasn't working pushing my research.
You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.
You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.
The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.
> You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.
Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.
One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.
I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.
You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.
Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.
Similarly, the delusion of the "house poor" hoping for another 2008 is frankly hilarious.
The difference is, if you picked up a house at 2.7% you will be winning for a long time. There are fewer ARMs, which means a small more protracted "collapse". Housing supply is still non-existent and will be into the near future. Wages will need to keep pace with housing costs in order to provide anyone a chance to succeed. Even after a so-called "recession" in housing they'll still be too expensive. For example, if my house dropped 50% in value, it'd still be way over what I bought it for.
The only deluded people are the ones not holding property. Make no mistake, if you didn't buy/refinance in 2020 you lost out on a literal once in a lifetime opportunity to lock a massive short against the fed.
> you lost out on a literal once in a lifetime opportunity
I don't think anyone can make claims like this, lots of people made the right decision by not buying into an inflated market with job instability around the corner.
I think the correction is needed, any people who didn't overextend will be fine if they intend to stay put for 5-15 years.
Yeah this the thing - somehow those of us who chose not to over-extend in times of exuberance are the ones who lost out? I've been renting for a long time, but my market still doesn't let me buy a home that I could live in with my family for an amount that won't make me lose sleep when rates go up (like everywhere outside the US, most mortgages are ARMs here). Like many of this board, I'm in the upper-echelon of earners in my location, but I refuse to over-extend on a housing loan like many folks in my location.
The only difference is that recently I've resigned myself to the fact that maybe I'll never own in my current location - which even though may be emotionally sad, at least I don't have a crazy monthly payment for a shoebox apartment.
The parent comment is making a really good point (in a roundabout way):
It is just another variation of "timing the stock market". Even if you're correct you can end up losing so much money on the upside that long-term you lose compared to people who buy into a bull market.
Depending on the exact circumstances of when you bought, your mortgage rate, how much prices fall, how long you can hold, and how much prices recover you can still end up losing by not having bought during the run-up.
Here's a made up bay area example:
A house sells for $2m in 2014. Due to rising prices over 8-10 years you end up buying for $3m at 2.5% interest in 2021. The market then tanks by 30%. That puts the house back at $2.1m. Over the following 5 years the market recovers somewhat and the house is worth $2.8m in 2026.
A naive view says "see! it was correct not to buy in 2021! waiting was the correct choice."
But that's not the whole story.
Buying in 2021 means you did not pay $5k/mo rent from 2021-2026. That's $270k. Not all of that will go to principle but some will. And you're 5 years ahead of the mortgage payoff schedule compared to not buying.
Speaking of time value of money... buying in 2021 means you got 2.5-3% interest on your 30 year mortgage. Depending on how things play out buying in 2026 might end up with 4-6% on the same mortgage:
2021 Purchase @2.5%: total interest paid $1.26m
2026 Purchase @4%: total interest paid $2.15m
2026 Purchase @6%: total interest paid $3.47m
In this scenario buying in 2021 ends up with the bank paying _you_ to take the mortgage since inflation is up. If you assume inflation says around 2-2.5% after that you more or less borrow the money for free.
Buying in 2026 costs you around $1m-$2.2m over the life of the loan.
In this example even accounting for the market dropping 30% _and_ not fully recovering it still made more sense to buy in 2021. Remember this is just one example with a lot of assumptions. I'm not saying this is what will happen. I'm merely pointing out that you can predict prices are inflated, wait for them to fall, and end up losing compared to a "sucker" who bought at the peak.
> How do the people putting up the seizure notice not know who they work for? Does the US government contract this out?
Because they US Gov. troglodytes. These are people chasing after some nobodies harming the extortative textbook business instead of going after drug dealers or something. Assuming they even possess two fully functioning brain cells to rub together, the USG never sends it's best.
The government doesnt seem to be doing anything about the textbook business and their questionable practices like:
- Moving a few words/chapters around and calling it a new release
- Selling "activation codes" with the text to kill off the resale book market.
When i went to school (long ago) there was a very active/healthy used book market, not anymore.
My kids were being gouged for books, often written by their prof's and you cant use last years book because the textbook integrates with the testing and you need your code?
The worst offender when I was in school was a physics textbook for a 2 semester introductory physics series. The textbook was about 400-500 pages with an online code. The total cost was $380, and even in graduate school this physics textbook remained the most expensive textbook I was forced to purchase.
Of course, the other worst offender is schools that get their own copy and sell you a printed version (so you can't resell it after).
Entire business is corrupt all the way down. Piracy would be unnecessary if a single semester didn't require almost $1000 in books. Textbook trading was commonplace when I was in school. To the point the CS lab was a veritable copy-factory because one kid would get a textbook and the rest of us would use our monthly credits (something like 2000 pages/semester) to copy it.
At least this somewhat makes sense with satellite.
I have a 1gbps down connection and 1 TB cap because my ISP has a monopoly. I pay an arm and leg for this connection. The nearest competitor is basically a town over.
Don't worry, I can pay an extra $150/mo for unlimited data on top of my already $300 connection. I'm not convinced networks should be public utilities but certainly ISPs should be pursued for de facto monopolies. These jerks even tanked my connection during COVID because of all the Netflix consuming the bandwidth at the trunk. Customers paying for 1 gbps down (< 1% of their customer base I'd imagine) should have priority access in times of increased usage. I shouldn't have to compete with a 20 mbps home connection for usage at the astronomical cost I pay for the privilege.
$300! Wow. I pay about 80 from Comcast for the same service, actually unsure if it has a soft cap. We average about 600gb per month usage. Comcast is also our one and only choice so I am at their mercy with price changes.
10 Euros for a ~gigabit? That's crazy! In 20 years that's only 200 Euros. Even ignoring the cost of procuring the gear and maintaining it and the business for 20 years I'm not even sure how that covers the transit costs for the data during that time.
We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem. I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it. This points to terrible product management, which points to terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up), and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck if you notice the speeding freight train too late.
> If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem.
No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an executive to even allow employees to work that much.
> Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.
Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice shouldn't legally be available.
> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".
I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places.
Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running.
Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want.
The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.
Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
>Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy.
On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not alone in that.
Investment banks also face the problem of employees holding disproportionate power but they have a somewhat different solution than tech companies - keep the harsh working conditions and pay top performers huge bonuses.
If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers."
It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with other ways to entice staff.
> The totality of the circumstances around the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 ought to give authorities probable cause to obtain additional information. While a laboratory accident is not malicious, accidents that result in the loss of human life may still be considered manslaughter. Manslaughter is a crime. There is probable cause to suspect a crime may have occurred in a laboratory accident leading to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, an accident that proceeded to kill 1 million Americans and over 18 million people worldwide in the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional injury exists in the persistent symptoms of “Long COVID” and the political, economic, educational, and other harms resulting from the pandemic.
This exemplifies the problem I've had with this whole thing. Followed by the deification of science, which is really the antithesis of science anyway.
There is an abundance of circumstances that point directly at a lab leak. During COVID the detractors of the zoonotic theory were canceled quickly and shamed publicly. Fast forward to today and we now have many researchers making the claim again. Yet, this time there is much less noise from the detractors. Recently, a new strain was synthesized here in the states which provides further evidence the technology is there and it can be done. An accident seems to be the most probable cause. Shit happens, the problem is this was a big, stinky one.
It is, at the very least, worth investigating. A lab leak is huge when it happens. A lab leak that leads to a global pandemic is possibly the worst case. We should close the lab if this the case and be very suspect of any "gain of function" research going forward. This article was well written I think.
However, my opinion is that this inquiry will never happen because of the consequences. If we were to prove, for example, that the Wuhan lab accidentally leaked the virus it would cause global economic chaos. In this case, perhaps it better people don't know. From a geopolitical standpoint that knowledge could very realistically start a war.
Even if we could prove it, and I believe with a high credence that it was the Wuhan lab, nothing would happen. Because it's China.
The argument about "manslaughter" is laughable because that's a legal classification in US laws. It doesn't apply... because it's China.
Gain of function research has been considered too dangerous in most developed countries, and funding it could be considered a crime. We have the evidence that Fauci directed funds to the Wuhan lab for this purpose. But nothing will be done, because he's a darling of Democrats for standing up to Trump.
There's a reason Xi Jinping's government replaced the head administrator of the Wuhan virology lab back in March of 2020 with a military officer. It was not so the research would stop, it's so that it would be more tightly controlled. This was actually announced, though the rest of the world was too busy freaking out at the time.
RH was a joke from the start. To invoke a no true scotsman, I know literally zero actual traders using the platform. Value investors like Schwab for it's customer service. Sometimes they prefer other firms (Fidelity). Day traders, etc almost universally use Interactive Brokers. Having done some profitable trading in my day I can tell you that IB's platform is arguably the best if your capitalization is less than 500,000 (at these capitalizations you can often find more bespoke brokers with even better access than IB, especially in futures). Their "pro" tier allows direct exchange access, and their API is complete (though antiquated). I'm not sure if they still do it but I distinctly remember them offering a FIX API if you wanted as well. IB's pro features do take some money. You have to pay for exchange access, and you pay per leg. But, as the saying goes, if you aren't paying you are the product (pfof).
RH made it's money through pfof and capturing COVID relief checks.Their brilliant corner in the market was a frontend app so easy to use that you wouldn't even think about the money you're losing. Since RH's release, most brokers offer similar (if not equal) platform usability and RH's lunch has been completely eaten. I would be surprised if it survived a few more years before either going under or being cannibalized by actual brokers.
RH (and presumably other commission-free brokers) sometimes beat the competition on transaction costs, particularly with low-priced contracts, or where you stand to benefit from blending in with other naive option traders. I maintained cash with them just for that purpose, for a while.
As that's no longer applicable for me, I find more and more reason to move all my accounts to Interactive Brokers. The entire history of their nickel-and-diming fees was easily paid for by letting me enter a single position one day in 4AM-7AM pre-market trading hours, which those other basic brokers (including IBKR Lite) don't support.
RH's health is fine. They are still getting positive net deposits, and they're still adding features. It's a great business to be in. They have insanely high margins and their customers' default behavior is to put more money into them. Once they have IRAs, there won't be a good reason for normal investors who just bag-hold stocks to switch away. They have $6 billion of cash, which gives them a ton of runway.
Seems like the introduction of the law got people to think about cyclists because lunatics will fly through stop signs and ignore yields. Now that they can do it legally, you have to be more mindful, leading to less accidents.
These laws are asinine. Cyclists are such a problem where I live. They believe they are entitled to the road like a 3000 pound car, they slow traffic down, they create jams at intersections, they don't pay attention and fly through cross walks, etc.
You should need to be licensed to use a bicycle. There are far too many stupid people. My favorite example of this from recent history was pulling out to take a right turn, stopping, and right as I'm rolling out to commence the turn a bicyclist FLIES past me such that 1" in any direction would've probably killed him.