wtdo

Which three? Cause Tesla wasn't founded by him, neither was Twitter.

I'm not sure, but it may be referencing the old Germanic weregild.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild

I'll second your recommendation to not buy these glasses. However, you don't need a miracle or replacement eyeballs. Gene therapy has already been shown to work to cure color blindness. Dr. William Hauswirth at the University of Washington did that in monkeys back in 2009, and currently has a grant to trial a gene therapy to cure achromatopsia in humans, though I have no idea how that is going. I'd guess color blindness will be curable in my lifetime.

No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.

Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.

I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.

There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college? Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant?

That can be fixed by making sunset clauses automatically require a few things:

1. Must be voted on alone. That is, no sneaking it into another bill, or into the budget votes.

2. Each renewal requires a higher percentage of yes votes than the last time until 100% is required. To my recollection, there's never been a time when the Patriot Act received 100% approval.

I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.

In 2015 I was writing a brand new web frontend for IE 5.5 on a mobile device with something like 240x360 screen dimensions (I forget the details now) for one of the most valuable companies in the world. We had complete control over the devices the users used (the company gave the users those devices). Admittedly, plans were in place to upgrade those devices, but it was still a fair bit out. I left before that happened.

The swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.

That is not what that study says. Yes, cloth masks are not as effective as medical masks. But the study does not compare cloth masks with no masks. The three groups in the study are:

medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing).

Yes, the cloth mask group had more infections than the medical mask group and the control group. But the control group included wearing masks as usual. It does NOT say cloth masks are less effective than nothing. "No mask" was not studied. Cloth masks might be less effective than wearing no mask (I personally doubt that), but this study didn't say anything about that hypothesis.

That's true so long as everyone is dependent on each other. If, everyone is dependent on one country, that doesn't hold

China has a near monopoly on a lot of production. Countries that depend on them certainly won't go to war with them, but that doesn't hinder China from starting a war with those countries, and even gives them an advantage. And it doesn't stop dependent countries from warring with each other and that could even be beneficial to China.

N.B. I use China as an example only. Replace China with any country that might have a near monopoly on production of some kind. The point I'm trying to make isn't "ahhh China scary", it's that interconnectedness may only prevent war if it's actually interconnected, and not a monopoly.

Maybe. But it also seriously helps to avoid being distracted. I live in Seattle and drive to my parents house in Vegas, almost always driving I-90 -> I-82 -> I-84 -> I-15. Washington is great. Hardly any billboards. Oregon and Idaho are about the same. Driving through Utah is awful. Billboards everywhere some of them are brightly lit and flashing. I feel much more distracted by them.

And bumped wages means higher costs which are passed on to customers. The higher prices means having to raise UBI, and the only way to afford that is by increasing taxes, and so effective take home pay from those bumped wages isn't as high as everyone thought and now we're back to square one.

I can't find any relevant data, but I wonder what effects previous quarantines (eg during Spanish flu) had on other infectious agents (eg common cold, norovirus, etc). Nobody was being quarantined for those other diseases, but I'd think a general quarantine would have had an effect on them as well. Maybe there ought to be a monthly quarantine every year, kinda like the Jewish year of jubilee.

I'd imagine on the whole it's wasted. Half the year they aren't just generating wasted heat, they're increasing cooling costs. The half of year that the heat is wanted, it's usually above you, and I imagine that heat is being generated less efficiently than a purpose-built device.

I'm mostly in agreement with you, but the part that gives me concern is precisely how precisely the lasers will be aimed at the retina. I doubt anyone ever really looks at a screen in the exact same place (even if you are staring at a specific character) due to eye jitter. After a year or twenty of use are we going to start having burn-in on our retina's similar to plasma screens used as kiosks?

I have a number in Google voice that I ported from a regular old T-Mobile SIM years ago. I haven't seen many that won't send me an SMS message, but when I do, they are usually banks. I don't think it much matters where the phone number originates.

I just tried it on every platform I have access to; Android, Linux, Macos, Windows and Chromebook. I was able to take a screenshot of a show playing on Netflix on every one.

As an American, how does that work in practice? I know I can go to Vietnam and be treated for a small amount (I was in a Vietnamese hospital for a couple of days due to a really bad strep infection and dehydration as I was unable/unwilling to swallow, and in a separate incident, also had a round of rabies shots after being bitten by a dog there). I figured it was cheap because everything is cheap there and no one there could afford it otherwise, not because of government insurance. But if I go to Australia, Canada, UK, or any other country, how do I get access to this cheap healthcare without becoming a citizen or paying taxes? Do I qualify just by nature of being there with a valid visa?

I just left Osaka yesterday. I didn't use every machine, but I never found one that didn't support English.

What else do you expect people to do there?

Most people are fully aware that what happened there is a tragedy. Most people also have an instant-no-thought habit to smile when having a picture taken. Is it really any better for them to take a picture and be solemn? Is that enough or do they need to express deep sadness for these pictures? Would others claim these sad emotions are just for show anyway? And if so, should we expect people to just not take pictures at all at the WTC memorial? And if so, at what point in time can we start taking pictures at a place with our normal happy faces?

People are there. They are happy they are there, even though 'there' (where ever 'there' is) may be a place that causes them to have emotions on the sad part of the emotional spectrum.

Think of funerals. It's a sad place to be (perhaps sadder since the person who died is someone well known as opposed to a lot of unknown people, but I won't judge either way). Family and friends are together, which usually makes people happy. It's a mixed bag of emotions. If someone happens to smile in a picture there it's probably more to do with habit of smiling for pictures or happiness to be with family and friends (perhaps first time in a while) than it is for being happy the deceased is deceased or for social status boosts.

Search is, by definition, biased. A completely unbiased search engine is completely useless to everyone. Some result is going to take that coveted first spot, and several results are going to fill up the coveted first page. In order to narrow down all the results and be useful some bias is going to show up. I don't go to Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or etc) because I want an unbiased search. Precisely the opposite. I go because I think their bias gives the best results.

If Google were unbiased in its search results you would search for tigers and get random results having nothing to do with tigers because maybe that's really the page you wanted and you don't want bias in your search results. Even allowing that every search result has to have the word tiger in it, there's a vast difference between getting the Wikipedia article on tigers vs some random MC Hammer fan-fic that mentions one time that his pants had tiger stripes.

An example to drive the point home: Where are my keys? A biased search would look first in the places I think they are most likely to be, and those places will be biased by me according to what I normally do with my keys, where I normally go, where I normally use them, etc. My keys are more likely to be in my pants pocket than, my wife's, and certainly more likely than some stranger's (though there is non-zero percent chance it could be in any of those). But an unbiased search for my keys would say that any place is equally likely. Even reducing it to all places that a human could have traveled to in the time since I last saw them biases the search by supposing that advanced life-forms with faster-than-light travel took my keys to Alpha Centauri overnight. Plenty of people believe this could possibly be the case, and a search for my keys that doesn't take that into account is biased against these people and their beliefs.

I agree with your last statement, though. Rightly or wrongly, this may cause Google to change which direction they are biased in. It could also just be an opportunity for others to try different search engines to see which bias they prefer, whereas previously they had never considered it.

I agree. I probably should have stressed that more in the initial disclaimer. It is possible (though, again, unlikely) that it might not be as bad as it initially sounds simply due to fewer bad patents being submitted if the submitter knows the patent application would go through such an extensive process. There'd be a lot fewer vague patent applications and a lot fewer applications for stuff that's obvious.

I generally feel that the cost of patents isn't worth the value they've created. Once one factors in the costs of lawsuits over stupid/obvious patents, patent trolls, the cost of patent attorneys, the increased cost of goods due to patents, etc, etc, the value of patents generally shrinks considerably. Being sure only good patents get through could go some way to increasing the value of patents to society, and thus might be worth the extra cost.

Then again, I'd rather patents just be dumped unceremoniously.

Not that this would be an efficient use of anyone's time but...

Assuming the purpose of patents is 1) to eliminate trade secrets, 2) that patents must be novel, and 3) that patents must be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art, then perhaps a solution would be: take a handful of people skilled in the art, tell half of them to implement the patent and tell the other half only the end goal and see if any of them come up with the same process.

The first group would help to see if the patent is written well enough. If they can't implement it then your patent is automatically rejected.

If anyone from the second group comes up with the same process, then that's an automatic patent rejection. Even if they don't, it's still helpful information for the patent examiner. For example, if they can solve the problem, just not in the same way as the patent application proposes, perhaps the patent examiner will see that the patent isn't necessary. Go ahead and have your trade secret, the public can obviously solve that problem with or without that knowledge.

As a native English speaker, this is also helpful with learning Vietnamese, which also uses the Latin alphabet.

University of Washington [1]

Washington State University [2]

In both cases, professors aren't the highest paid, but they do show up in the top 5. Not that this is exhaustive or necessarily representative, but it shows that for at least these two schools, it's not terrible. The gap between the highest paid and the highest paid professor is substantial though.

What's more disconcerting, is looking at the highest paid in public schools vs the highest paid teachers. Again, this data is only for Washington state [3]. Sorting by highest total compensation, the highest paid teacher shows up at 234th highest paid. Next highest paid teachers are at 1,804, then 2,235, 2,294 and sporadically thereafter.

Given the average salary data [4], it's pretty clear that Washington state public schools are overrun by administrators. I suspect that exchanging most administration for teachers that have the same existing teacher pay would go a long way to bringing the student/teacher ratio to more appropriate levels, reducing teacher stress and increasing student outcomes. Or maybe we could get more teachers and raise their pay.

I believe reducing the student/teacher ratio will allow teachers to handle a lot of the stuff administration already does, which, if true, would demonstrate how administrator's aren't just not needed, but are actively detrimental to a good school.

[1] http://data.spokesman.com/salaries/state/2015/306-university...

[2] http://data.spokesman.com/salaries/state/2015/307-washington...

[3] http://data.spokesman.com/salaries/schools/2016/all-employee...

[4] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/pay-vari...