I really do like this story, but there is also a part of me that reacts by thinking "Easy for world-famous novelists Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut to chuckle about they have talent, notoriety, and respect that no amount of money could buy and couldn't have been achieved by chasing wealth. For the rest of us toiling away in the rat race, hedge fund billions sound pretty great!"
People talk most about CO2 because it has the most total effect as a driver of climate change. CH4 for example has a greater effect per kilogram, but we emit a lot less of it and it doesn't last nearly as long.
H2O technically affects the temperature even more than CO2 but it's not a driver, because the total H2O in the atmosphere depends on overall temperature. Emitting more H2O, from hydrogen cars or something, would just mean you get more rain somewhere.
Maybe most sensible approach: use SRM to reduce temperature directly and head off nasty positive feedbacks like melting permafrost, but treat that as buying time to get CO2 down to a safe level.
"I wonder if it's because some of those at the mid-to-level making these decisions are under the same market pressures as the rest of us to show they've actually 'done sometime'"
Definitely true. Also don't discount the influence of good old fashioned corruption - cash kickbacks, job promises, gifts, etc., I've seen IT contracting decisions so dumb that graft is far and away the most logical explanation.
My low-code exposure is mostly limited to Microsoft SSIS, but my experience is that the only people skilled enough to build reliable and maintainable packages were already good coders.
QA took a hit because developers saw how unmaintainable the test code was. Operations writes code that’s almost as bad as what QA writes. Non coders writing code always makes a bigger mess for the actual coders.
I disagree, yes zoning changes could be needed, but the presence of more daytime workers at home in suburban areas creates new opportunities for restaurants, coffee shops, and other conveniences that cater to those workers.
I mean yes and. There's an entire industry of restaurants that cater to providing food to workers in business districts. They move to where the people are. I don't think suburban neighborhoods having hyperlocal businesses would ever be considered a bad thing.
The restaurants are there and successful because of the density, though. The falafel shop around the corner from three multi-storey office buildings can't afford to have a location in every suburb that formerly sent workers to the business district.
There's existing evidence for this: how many restaurants do you see in standalone office parks? A few perhaps, but nothing like what's downtown.
If you have a parking lot you don't have to have a location in every suburb. People will just drive over from neighboring suburbs when they want falafel.
This is also why you don't see restaurants by office parks - if you want to serve the business lunch crowd, it's better to be by something like a Costco with a big parking lot that's mostly empty on weekdays instead of an office park that's all parked-up at lunchtime. Even absent parking-lot efficiencies, it's probably just optimal to be equidistant from all the office parks instead of next to one.
That's the challenge you face, really - out in the suburbs most people would rather drive 12 minutes than walk 7. I think people just see walking as a way to be cold and struggle to carry heavy things, so fuck it.
So more small businesses by people living in the area would be encouraged (think small mom-and-pop shops) rather than multinational chain restaurants. It’s a good thing.
Modern "mixed use" visions are sterile garbage born out of a well to do upper middle class filter bubble. The kind of hubris it takes to make these people think they can have just the parts of the economy they like would make a soviet central planner blush. It's like thinking steak "just shows up" in a supermarket but for macroeconomics.
You will need all of those "unsightly" B2B businesses to underpin the restaurants, consumer retail, etc, etc, that you do want. And unless we invent teleportation the cost of distance is going to put a cap on how far the B2B businesses are from the customers they serve so they are going to need to be somewhat local too.
I'll go a step further and defend "busywork". Unfortunately we don't live in a perfectly efficient society so being able to learn and execute a formulaic task that might not seem valuable is a necessary skill for most adults. Especially since individual actors may not have all the necessary information to fully assess the value of a task within a larger framework.
I think this is a fair criticism. It seems very plausible that Davidson's reputation has fallen among students and more importantly parents in the last twenty years. As the parent of a 9th grader, I would much prefer her attend our state flagship (UIUC) than somewhere like Davidson. My parents on the other hand were much more impressed with those types of smaller private schools and encouraged me to attend one. Anecdotal, but I think this attitude is fairly representative of the mindset of older millennial parents I talk to.
This one blows my mind. I wasn't the brightest student in college but knew enough to show up everyday. I still remember walking into Calc II on 9/11/2001. The professor (a Jesuit priest) was leading the class in prayer. At least 80% of the kids in that class showed up.
I think you are greatly over-estimating how often students are seeking help asynchronously. If the professor was actually flooded with texts and emails from engaged students who just have different communication expectations, I think that would have been mentioned in the article especially in the list of possible ways to improve. It seems more likely that the students are not attempting to engage at all.
Not really comparable as long as the corporations are still subject to market influence. Corporations that become so powerful they can ignore the wishes of their customers exhibit many of the same flaws as totalitarian governments.
