cantankerous

Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.

I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.

The value of your labor is how much the company is able to leverage it for a return. It has next to nothing to do with where you live. It's on the company to answer this question, not you or some third party to the negotiation between you and your employer.

Structural impediments keep people poor. Not internal monologues.

I'd posit that adding a bunch of parking to a city center is also "meddling" in the lives of people who live in the city center.

Loading zones.

China is where the west hides its dirty manufacturing.

Might be the training data?

Let's be realistic, while you can see denialism of science across the spectrum, there's only one side of it that denies it in the face of extinction-level events. Scientists can't hope to transcend politics (an unrealistic and meaningless goal anyway) when the Right is so given to removing them from the discourse. They need to enter politics and lean in with everybody else.

China's population is concentrated in one part of the country. That makes it easier to serve them more efficiently with mass transit. This isn't true for the United States. The population resides on the coasts, which you can serve with high-speed rail, but connecting the two coasts with the inland population centers via rail is a much, much bigger project.

The shortcoming with that line of reasoning is that it's still not wholly satisfying. Falsifiability is probably necessary but not sufficient for what most people consider to be science. The problem of induction still stands and falsifiability doesn't have much to say about it. Focusing on falsifiability seems incomplete as a philosophy of science.

The image aesthetic is emulating the appearance of a dot-matrix printer. It's just a low-tech motif to go with the publication.

Calling farmers professionals as it relates to the conscious application of dangerous pesticides is a serious stretch. We're approving new pesticides at an unreal rate. These guys have no idea how this stuff works or its impact on the greater environment. They need to use it because plants and insects are becoming resistant to the old stuff and farms are in the business to make money. Externalities be damned.

Suburban lawn care has been going on for decades, using largely the same approach it always has. Mainly fertilizers applied once or twice a year if you bother to care. Broadleaf weed killers, maybe grub killer. The primary way to getting a nice lawn, though, is to overseed so often you choke out weeds. On the other side of the coin, agriculture is engaging in a broad spectrum application of herbacides, pesticides, etc with new formulas coming all the time. At an insane scale.

There is no comparison to yards. It's agriculture.

FWIW nobody's been a native Latin speaker for a thousand-plus years. You're in the same boat as everybody else! ;-)

I've lived in Portland OR, Mid MO, and the Kansas City area. In mid-Missouri, the brown recluse is the standard house spider. Pretty much every spider in my house there was a brown recluse. I had a weird bruise-y/necrotic bite on my hip that I assumed came from one that got in bed with me. It healed up fine without any medical intervention even though it lingered for awhile. I suspect a lot of people get bitten over the span of their lives but the bites aren't really noticeable. Spiders get in your bed or get into your clothes sometimes. It takes a bit of work/luck to get a recluse bite. They're not aggressive and they're not looking for trouble.

The West Coast, in my experience, has very little on the Midwest when it comes to spiders and bugs. In Oregon I was blown away by the lack of bugs. I could leave my doors and windows open at night and nothing seemed to come in. Unreal! The only major thing Portland seemed to have on the middle states is slugs. Waking up in the morning to find slug trails in my kitchen and in the dog bowl was a weird experience. Live and learn!

If you're going to put the time into a research MS degree, you shouldn't be paying for it. Period.

He's right about one thing. You will die of boredom in Lincoln. There are plenty of other nearby Midwestern cities with character and interesting stuff to do (and people to see). Omaha and Kansas City are a couple. I'd probably pick Des Moines over Lincoln, too. It really is as described: sprawling new developments on old farmland in a (sort of) Big 10 college town.

A lot of folks in the Valley who are the hardest hit by these economic changes grew up in California. It's ironic to me that somebody from the Midwest move there and then criticize the residents for not moving to where they moved away from.

If you wear clothes and/or aren't near the equator it's not gonna make a big enough of a difference. Also you're gonna have to balance that with negative sun exposure. Salmon is probably a top vitamin d source, but supplements are probably the cheapest way to pack it in.

If by "the left" you also mean every prominent suburban area in America, then yes!

It's right to bring up the military and the trades as viable options, but let's not oversell that stuff. The trades aren't just a shoo-in easy crack at six figures like folks spout off. You gotta work for that master-tradesman slot. It'd probably take you 10+ years to get there if you're good enough. The trades are designed to limit the number of people entering them...it's part of why they make so much money. It's also incredibly hard work and tears up your body as you age.

I think the drawbacks to joining the military are pretty obvious and go without saying.

FWIW: It's probably easier to become a software engineer than it is to become a master plumber.

I never experienced the "only option" talk, either. My high school put forth alternative vocational tracks pretty often. Also the military, among other things. This was in the early 2000's. I'm skeptical that educators force this as the "only way" as much as it's a culturally ingrained thing now. People hear it, even if it goes unspoken.

Sweden's population is also a lot older than it was in the 1980's. Drives up costs substantially.

Yes but in this case the government's own estimation on doing the work itself sets a bar. Also sufficiently bidding out work drives prices down by competition if the contractors aren't conspiring against the public. Big if.

You aren't going to get R1 research done when you have a 3/3 teaching load with no graduate support, that's just life.

Amen.

Should also add that the R1 school I did my graduate work at put funded research in front of didactics every time (thanks to state funding cuts, primarily). The students (and their paying families) really had no idea that these priorities even existed. Everybody gunning for tenure (and with tenure) put teaching in the backseat because, like you said, you have to if you want to succeed in research these days. Where I was at, graduate students ended up carrying most of the teaching load...to the detriment of just about everybody else.

Would add that Haskell DSL's can be formed from functionality derived from different kinds of monads and other categorical structures[1]. That sounds highfalutin, but different types of monads and other structures (functors, applicatives, etc) give you insane amounts of power to define your DSL in a very precise way. It even gives you a formal basis to reason about your DSL should you want to go that far with it.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia#Introduction

Have you been back to the library as an adult and looked around at what people are doing there? As a child I only ever noticed ragged looking folks at the library, but that's because I was a child. Nowadays I notice all the people on computers. Shoulder surfing them (yeah, yeah) and it looks like a lot of them are taking care of business online that I would normally do at home on my own computer. Finding information, job applications, some gaming, etc. Also the library helps people file their taxes and learn how to interact with local government and vote. This is all on top of the more traditional functions you'd expect at a stereotypical library. I never noticed any of this as a kid, but I definitely notice it as an adult.

You're going to see more homeless people in a library that is located in an area with a lot of homeless people. They can congregate in the library where it's climate controlled and there are bathrooms as well as something to do (books to read). That's pretty common in larger cities.

Some libraries I've frequented also have spaces for hosting public events and also maker spaces for folks who can't afford access to such things on their own. It's really a great thing to see.

The problem you're describing is an effect of today's global capitalism. Workers seeking a dignified income are not able to find that through collective bargaining because free movement of capital allows management to relocate to cheaper markets relatively quickly.

One wonders if the system is worth keeping around in its current form if so many people get screwed by it. What do we have an economic system for, anyway?

Realistically, it takes 4 years to attempt to get your foot in the door at a medical school unless you have pre-admittance or you're looking at a special case like UMKC's 6-year program. Getting into an MD or a DO program isn't a guaranteed thing. It's a substantial downside risk.

Also, you can have a STEM-based undergraduate education as your pre-med, even math and computer science can count if you take the right additional electives. The two aren't mutually exclusive. It's a good fallback if you bomb out of getting into med school (or decide 3 years into ugrad that you don't want to apply).

Doesn't regular soda fall into these categories, too?

I wonder if somebody with a bone to pick with a soda tax works in a bureau that has access to this weaponized malware. Seems like the most plausible case to me.