lawtguy

Scott Manley has a good video on the Stratolaunch (it's a little bit old though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw84qJIGZeo

The flight of the Roc launch plane is very impressive, but they have a real problem with the rocket. The Pegasus XL is not cost effective and they've dropped the plans for making a custom air-launched rocket. With Paul Allen gone, it seems like they're trouble unless they can find another backer with deep pockets.

According to this blog entry (https://minimumwage.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/30/new-minimum-wage-...), the lower minimum wage is for youths is to prevent youth unemployment. This was based on some data the government has (not specified in the blog) that indicates that that younger workers were being passed over in favor of older workers. That implies that youth workers are less valuable (or perceived as less valuable) and thus not worth paying a greater wage.

As an American, I find this pretty strange as most minimum wage jobs are low skill. Since the skill threshold is low, there's not much to be gained by experience, so an older worker isn't much more valuable. I'd expect this lower minimum wage to tilt the market in favor of hiring youths since you get roughly the same work for less. I'm curious to see what the governement's data actually is that justifies the lower youth minimum wage.

3-5 million would put Kaepernick in the same category as Chase Daniel, Matt Schaub, Mike Glennon, Chad Henne, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Drew Stanton and Colt McCoy. That doesn't sound like crazy money given the company he'd be in.

Part of the problem with drawing conclusions about 'Oumuamua is that it's the first interstellar object we've detected in our solar system. Because of that, we don't really know if 'Oumuamua is a regular kind of interstellar object or a strange one. Presumably in the near future we'll be detecting more interstellar objects. If a lot of them look like 'Oumuamua, we can probably assume this type of object forms naturally. On the other hand, if we don't see any more that act like 'Oumuamua, then maybe it's worth looking at more unlikely possibilities (like it being an alien solar sail).

There's been no legislative change, but the the Trump administration appears to be enforcing the rules as strictly as possible. Per this article from Marketplace (https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/05/business/recent-immig...), they've ended expedited processing of H-1Bs, they're questioning more H-1B applications and they're denying more H-1B applications. They are definitely making it as hard as possible for H-1Bs within the current rules.

It looks like the NYT article is taking from this CBO report: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=2018-06/53919-2018ltbo.... You'll notice that in the article and in the report, it's shown as "Net interest" which is defined by the CBO as the amount the US government pays out in interest payments minus what it takes in interest payments (CBO glossary: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...). So the interest payments on the ~40% of the debt the goverment owes to itself would cancel out.

California is actually below average for per pupil spending. In 2015, it was ranked 31st out of the 50 states + DC. See page 23 here: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Becoming a teacher takes a whole lot of education. You have to get a 4 year degree plus 1 year of graduate work to get your teaching credential. For all that education you get:

In 2016, for instance, the average teacher’s starting salary was $38,617—20% lower than that of other professions requiring a college degree.

Which not surprisingly leads to:

Between 2008 and 2016, the number of new educators completing preparatory programs fell by 23%

And on top of that:

at least 17% leave the profession within the first five years, a 2015 study found.

It's a crap job for crap pay. It's not surprising that not many people want to become a teacher. If we want more teachers and better teachers, we're going to have to pay them more and improve the working conditions.

The FAQ on Boom's web page has some answers on how they think their airplanes will make money: https://boomsupersonic.com/contact#faq-section

It looks like they are hoping to make money by having a more efficient, slightly faster and smaller aircraft than Concorde. It also has more range which they hope will open up transpacific routes which Concorde could not do. Their goal is to make it profitable for airlines to charge about the same as they do for a business class ticket.

They also suggest that their aircraft will make a much smaller sonic boom. Possibly quiet enough to be tolerable over land routes. That would obviously be a huge game changer.

Their still building their technology demonstrator, so I'd take all their claims with a big grain of salt. They want to fly their XB-1 in 2019, so hopefully we'll have a much better idea of how well this work next year.

1976 is the only time since the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that a Democrat has won a majority of the south. !976 was definitely not a regular election. The Democratic candidate was white evangelical southerner. The Republican candidate was a northerner who had been Nixon's vice president and had pardoned Nixon. It took pretty extreme circumstances for the south to vote for a Democrat after 1964.

Here's Mr. Kholsa's take on it: https://medium.com/@vkhosla/martins-beach-a-matter-of-princi... And here's the Surfrider Foundations timeline of events: https://www.surfrider.org/pages/6950

It looks like the courts didn't find any right of public access to Martin's beach, but it did find that there was an existing permit for rules for accessing the beach. The court additionally found that if Mr. Kholsa wants to change those rules, he has to file a new permit. Mr. Kholsa argues that the previous owners changed the rules without filing for a new permit, so he shouldn't have to either.

Mr. Kholsa's argument strikes me as wrong on two counts: #1 just because the previous owners made changes without a permit, that doesn't mean it was legal or that he's now allowed to make changes without a permit. #2 there's quite a difference between the previous owners changing fees and hours and Mr. Kholsa ending all public access.

Mr Kholsa was informed before he bough the property that there was an existing public access to the beach and that San Mateo county expected that public access would continue. In that light, he looks a lot like someone who buys a house next to the airport and then complains about the noise from takeoffs and landings. Regardless of what principle he thinks he's fighting for, he's being a jerk.

Take a look at the City of Philadelphia's Department of Revenue annual report (https://www.phila.gov/media/20161122003302/2016-Annual-Repor...). Page 18 is the revenue from liquor tax since FY08. You'll see it's been rising steadily over that time. The Department of Revenue attributes this rise to better enforcement of tax collection (they say the same in their FY16 report as well). It certainly possible that some consumers are switching from buy soda to buying alcohol, but I don't think you can attribute all of the change in liquor tax revenue to the soda tax.

Java and C# have the `finally` block which is essentially the `goto fail`. Typically it is used like:

  try {
    doSomething();
  }
  catch (Exception e) {
    handleException();
  }
  finally {
    cleanUpResources();
  }

Main issue would be car seats. Uber offers the option to request a car seat in a few metros, but besides those you'll have to bring your own. I imagine most Uber drivers wouldn't be all that happy waiting for your to install and uninstall car seat(s). Additionally, you'll have to be going to somewhere you can store your car seat when you get there.

Once you get out of car seats and into booster seats, I could see it as pretty workable. Booster seats aren't all that big and are simple to install. But in CA kids need to be at least 8 years old and over 40 pounds before you can use a booster seat.

In the US, the combination of globalization, automation and lack of support for private sector unions means workers outside of the creative class have very little bargaining power. I'm sure workers will get raises, but I don't see much hope for them getting much above the inflation rate. The only political solution that seems to be getting any traction at all is raising the minimum wage. Some states are doing that, but I don't see the Federal minimum wage getting raised any time soon.

The statement about rising IQ is the Flynn Effect[1]. The fact that IQ has risen over the past 80 years or so is well accepted. Exactly why this is happening is open to debate.

The fourmilab link you mentioned seem to be based on the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"[2]. They explicitly normalized all IQ data to have Briton as 100. The author then assumes that IQ hasn't changed any in the past 50 years. The author mentions the Flynn effect and then ignores it. Once you do that, you really can't say anything about how IQ is changing over time. Instead he basically ends up measuring the relative growth rates of countries.

The Daily Mail link has a whole bunch of things, the graph they have of lowering world IQ looks pretty much like the one in the fourmilab article, so I suspect it's based on the same data.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

The 13% you mentioned I'm assuming is the percentage of the US population that is foreign born. That is not the highest in US history. Take a look at page 3 of this: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/cspan_fb_slides.pdf (sorry for the PDF). You'll see that 13-14% foreign born was pretty much the norm from 1860-1920. The US society seemed to survive that just fine.

To your point though, I suspect a lot of older voters grew up with much lower immigration (due to the Immigration Act of 1924) and so this level feels really high to them even though it was common for a large part of US history.

I also live in California and I also send my child to a private school which costs upwards of 30k.

California currently spends about 10k per student for public education. That makes 30k sound crazy, but in 1970 California spent 5500 which is about 35k in 2017 dollars. California (and most of the US) is woefully underfunding it's schools.

Your chart is gun deaths per 100,000 but the other chart posted was total gun deaths in Australia, so that's not a fair comparison. Here's the gun deaths per 100,000 for Australia: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_al.... You can see from the chart that both the US and Australia show a significant drop in the 1990s. The US levels off by 2000, but Australia keeps dropping through about 2005. It's entirely possible that the further drop could be due to Australia's 1996 gun law.

Some additional data taken from the National Center for Education Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_318.30.a...)

Bachelor's degrees by sex from 2013-2014:

Mathematics, general: 43.9% earned by women (7,420 out of 16,914) Chemistry, general: 47.7% earned by women (6,556 out of 13,730) Physics, general: 18.7% earned by women (1,124 out of 6,002) Computer Science: 14.5% earned by women (1,914 out of 13,220)

It seems like all of the gender differences pointed out about women in the diversity memo would apply equally to Physics and Computer Science as they do to Mathematics and Chemistry, but they gender ratio of Mathematics and Chemistry degrees is much closer to 50/50. So why the big difference?

The MMO City of Heroes did something similar to this. They called it the streak breaker: http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics#The_Stre...

Basically, the higher your chance to hit with an attack was, the the sooner it would break a streak of misses and force a hit. This is definitely not random, but seems to be more satisfying to the player. Plus it no doubt cuts down on the number of complaints on the forums about "unfair" RNG.

Steam doesn't require DRM. It certainly supports Valve's DRM and third-party DRM but it doesn't require it: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

If you consider being required to login into Steam once to download the game and run it the first time in Steam to be DRM, then yes I suppose Steam will always have DRM. That's not much in the way of DRM though.

You're not allowed to print fake money that looks like too much like real money. See https://www.marketplace.org/2015/03/10/business/tricky-busin....

From the article: "Essentially what this law says is that bills must be either 75% smaller than or 150% larger than the size of a real bill and one color, one side."

So printing fake money could be a crime even if you don't attempt to pass it as real.

In addition to this, they all pay employees, which contribute even more tax money to the system (which is never discussed in articles like this).

Generally, the taxes other people pay on your expenditures doesn't count towards your taxes. I can't claim the taxes Walmart pays on the money I spent on groceries. Similarly, business owners can't claim the taxes their employees pay on their salaries.

If you are suggesting that we tax rich people less so they can spend more money, this is supply side economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics). The US been experimenting with this for the last 30+ years and it largely doesn't result in more taxes paid or better GDP growth.

Good article. I thought it was well written and definitely on target about to disagree effectively.

Maybe in a follow up article you could provide some examples (either real or made-up) of ineffective and effective disagreement? Personally I learn best from examples.

I have three thoughts:

1) Regardless of what Martians want, they'll be heavily economically dependent on Earth. Complex materials, chemicals, drugs, microprocessors, etc. simply won't be manifacturable on Mars for a long time. As long as Martians need these things from Earth, Earthlings will be able to influence their politics by controlling (or threating to control) the flow of goods to Mars. However..

2) Martians will be mostly politically independent in their own affairs. They are simply too far away from Earth to be micromanaged. Additional, Mars has nothing of value to Earth (at least so far), so...

3) Martians will mostly be ignored. There will be a lot of hype and interest at first, but it will quickly fade once the novelty has worn off. Unless and until Martians have something of value for Earth, most Earthling will pay no attention.

Since No Child Left Behind was passed, there has been heavy focus on testing. Because of this schools have been slowing removing everything from the curriculum that doesn't appear on the standardized testing. That includes things like recess and P.E. even though the research suggests that physical activity helps kids learn better (http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/recess-makes-kids...).

I suspect that school superintendents would agree that play and exercise is important, but they are under tremendous pressure to squeeze in more learning in an attempt to raise test scores. The result of that is a slow nibbling away at recess and P.E. even though it's most likely counterproductive.

This world view is a very 19th century clockwork universe one: if we know all the initial conditions in sufficient detail, we can predict the outcome. There are two problems with this: at a fundamental level, quantum mechanics says you can't know the initial conditions with infinite precision[0]. Second, even at a classical physics level non-linear systems with very similar starting points can have very different final states. As a practical matter that means even if the rules are deterministic, you cannot predict with 100% accuracy what the outcome will be.

So we have a complex non-linear system (your genes) and a very very complex non-linear system (the environment) that make a very complex non-linear system (your brain). Because we have all of these complex non-linear system interacting together, we cannot determine what will happen in any practical sense. We can probably make some observations that will generally hold about some decisions a human brain will make (e.g. it's been a few hours, it will be hungry and decide to eat), but these are more probabilistic rather than 100% concrete deterministic rules.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

In my experience it's typically more like this:

"Well, there's probably nothing wrong, but there are some test we can run to be sure."

The patient agrees to the tests because it gives them peace of mind and they mostly don't pay for them, their insurance does.

The doctor orders the test because if they don't and there is some sort of rare problem that was actually present, they can be sued for malpractice. GPs in the US generally aren't making any money from these tests, but they do have a strong incentive to avoid a malpractice lawsuit as those are costly and time consuming.

But yes, this is part of why US healthcare is so expensive.

ESR's general observation that the ancients often saw homosexual as being about dominance is probably correct. However, the framing makes it sound like this is specific to homosexual relationships. In fact ancient cultures often saw ALL male sexual relationships as being about dominance. Of course they didn't really need to spend a lot of time discussing who was being dominated in a heterosexual relationship: it was always the woman in pretty much all pre-modern civilizations.

This makes his second point about a supposed biological predisposition towards domination sex really apply to all men. If gay men are struggling with this "biological headwind" then so are straight men.