"Buy Local to Go Green" is one of those silly ideas that somehow a lot of people believe.

It takes less CO2 to deliver sheep from Australia to London by boat than from Scotland to London by bus.

The distance has very little to do with anything.

>I don't know how good their analysis was, but that's the question you want to ask.

It is. There's not enough information in the two articles linked to say if it is encouraging people to turn in books late by eliminating fines, and more importantly, they are still charging people for books lost after 60 days, so there's not really much of a difference other than eliminating fines in the 30-60 day window.

>Excluding laptops, my computers have all been Ships of Theseus.

Ditto. This machine is still the same machine that I first installed Windows 95 on. Never reformatted. Running Windows 11 now. Upgraded every component in it many many times over the years, with the clutch tool being Acronis to clone the boot drive from one drive to another when expanding it without reformatting.

> We starve our schools for funds, yet require specific performance from students with penalties for teachers who do not deliver.

The state ADA average is $17,020 per pupil per year. That's more money going to K-12 education - for every student - than non-resident tuition at a UC ($14,318 per year). And that's not counting local supplementary property taxes which here is twice the state budget. Or federal grants, which are pretty substantial ($170M/year here in San Diego).

I would very happily run a class of 20 students and take them from Kindergarten to 12th grade if they paid me $170,000 per year to do so. They'd get a better and more individualized education than what they're getting now, and I'd only charge half what they were currently costing the state.

Money is not the issue. There's plenty of money. The system is awash in money. But the education still sucks. Only 1 in 3 high school students even hits the proficiency level on standardized tests.

They are independent contractors. They bring their own tools (cars), they set their own hours, they can accept or deny jobs.

California is a very liberal state, but voted for this bill with an 18 point margin. This wasn't the result of advertising or people being misinformed. AB5 (the bill that Prop 22 partly overturned) has been disastrous for part time workers in the state, effectively gutting the entire freelance journalist profession in the state. My only real issue with Prop 22 was that it was clearly a sweetheart deal for rideshare companies and didn't just overturn AB5 and return to the status quo ante bellum, so to speak.

>But that won't happen in a society predicated on greed, selfishness and short-term outlook.

The tuition costs are high exactly because of that thinking. We want to be "generous" and not "selfish" so we write a blank check (that is a combination of grants and loans) to colleges, so colleges just raise their rates every year and hire non-instructional staff to justify the expenses. Only a small fraction of the employees of Harvard are actually instructional staff, and that includes adjunct faculty:

https://www.univstats.com/staf...

2,455 instructional staff x $193k/faculty = $474M for instructional staff

19,178 non-instructional staff = x $91,111/staff = $1,747M for non-instructional staff

31,345 students (undergrad + grad). Cost of instruction per student - 474M/31k = $15,290 per student in tuition if they are only paying for instruction. Yes, that's a bit unrealistic given the cost of faculties and the need for deans and so forth, but it's a good baseline estimate for how much it should actually cost. **Non-instructional staff adds another $56k/year in costs per student**. This is absolutely ridiculous.

You could fire 90% of the non-instructional staff and not notice any difference to the quality of education, and charge $20k a year instead of $65k a year. Or you could just, you know, spend $20k/year to hire your own personal adjunct faculty to teach you everything you actually need to know. Because that's what Harvard pays adjuncts who teach 6 classes a year.

My former ISP (AT&T) would spy on my connections and send me nastygrams if they didn't approve of me doing things they didn't like, and threatened me with disconnection. So I used a VPN for a while so they couldn't spy on me. That's certainly a valid use case.

I eventually cancelled them, since I also wanted to send a message I don't approve of ISPs spying on their customers.

VPNs are annoying to use on a daily basis, though, with a lot of major web sites just failing to load if you connect from an exit node on a VPN.

Just pure virtue signalling from an abhorrent company.

I haven't bought an Apple product in decades, and have no plans to ever again.

I was in Vancouver last year and our AirBNB was a converted office building. Worked just fine.