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Submission + - Rising Temperatures and Heat Shocks Prompt Job Relocations, Study Finds (techtarget.com)

dcblogs writes: A recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that companies are quietly adapting to rising temperatures by shifting operations from hotter to cooler locations.

The researchers analyzed data from 50,000 companies between 2009 and 2020. To illustrate the economic impact, the researchers found that when a company with equal employment across two counties experiences a heat shock in one county, there is a subsequent 0.7% increase in employment growth in the unaffected county over a three-year horizon. The finding is significant, given that the mean employment growth for the sample of businesses in the study is 2.4%.

Heat shocks are characterized by their severe impact on health, energy grids, and increased fire risks, are influencing companies with multiple locations to reconsider their geographical distribution of operations.

Despite this trend, states like Arizona and Nevada, which have some of the highest heat-related death tolls, continue to experience rapid business expansion. Experts believe that factors such as labor pool, taxes, and regulations still outweigh environmental climate risks when it comes to business site selection. But heat associated deaths are on the rise. In the Phoenix area alone, it experienced 425 heat related deaths in 2022 and a similar number in 2023, record highs for this region.

The study suggests that the implications of climate change on business operations are becoming more apparent. Companies are beginning to evaluate climate risks as part of their regular risk assessment process.

Submission + - Open Documentation Academy offers on-ramp to OSS

tykev writes: Documentation authors at Canonical have launched the Open Documentation Academy to offer an easy way to get started contributing to open-source projects:

Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this “getting involved” step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done?

We all very much want to help people become open source contributors by building an on-ramp process. It may take some time, and we will need to adapt, but this is exactly why we’ve started our Open Documentation Academy.

Comment Re:Amazing lack of context here (Score 1) 282

I doubt that there's anything interesting that happened, and I certainly don't believe your take on it, but as a general rule there's nothing at all wrong with the government offering advice or asking people to do things and for people to agree or to voluntarily do those things.

For example: If the government puts out an Amber Alert, you don't have to read it, you don't have to watch for the child who has apparently been kidnapped, and you don't have to report sightings. You can ignore the whole thing and go about your day. You can even deliberately notice the kid and the kidnappers and not lift a finger. That's not illegal. You're committing no crime by letting kidnappings happen where you lack a duty to stop them.

But it's nice to help rescue children, so why not do what the government is asking you to volunteer to do?

Apparently the reason why is that you are opposed to anti-kidnapping, pro-saving-children government conspiracies of that sort.

Comment Re:"Can't have it both ways" is the core argument (Score 1) 282

They're almost always the same. If there are any that aren't, I'd be shocked. He occupies the same sort of 'designated target of hate' that the Rothschilds did. In fact, that's really where it all starts -- a couple of political consultants working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian dictator, decided that a useful political tactic would be to have an enemy to demonize, so they rather arbitrarily decided it would be Soros. Read all about it.

And so we wound up with Hungary being thoroughly fucked up, Hungary impairing the functioning of the EU and NATO, increases in anti-semitism and fascism, probably daily death threats against a guy who did nothing wrong, and all to score some cheap political points.

It's disgusting.

Comment Re:"Can't have it both ways" is the core argument (Score 1) 282

Good thing that wasn't the argument, then. In fact, your summary of it doesn't even make sense -- middlemen don't get in trouble for taking things down, they get in trouble for not taking things down.

What actually happened was that just before the Internet got big, two cases came down concerning different online services. CompuServe got sued for user-posted content, but was found not to be liable because they had not moderated anything and were just a middleman. Prodigy got sued for user-posted content and was found to be liable because they moderated their boards (for things like bad language; they wanted to be family friendly) but had failed to moderate every post perfectly. By letting one bad thing through, they were liable for it -- and by extension, anything else they had failed to catch.

Since Congress wanted sites to moderate user content -- they were really concerned about porn -- they passed a law that encouraged sites to do moderation but did not hold them responsible for failing to moderate every single little thing perfectly in every respect. Further, sites got to choose what they were moderating for -- could be porn, but could just as easily be off-topic posts, like talking about carrots when everyone else is talking about money.

In practice, sites don't like to moderate much -- it takes effort, it may lose engaged users, it costs money, it can't please everyone -- but they certainly can, and there's nothing wrong with it. Get rid of the protection of the CDA and sites won't be able to do mandatory moderation sufficiently, so they'll fall back on none. This is apparently okay with scum who get kicked off of boards left and right, but should not be okay with people who have standards and don't want to put up with that crap.

Submission + - Can you picture things in your mind? (theguardian.com)

whoever57 writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on aphantasia, which is the inability to picture objects in your mind. People with this condition tend to go into STEM fields and remember different aspects of objects and people. Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images.

Try the red apple test.

Comment Re:It's got nothing to do with that (Score 1) 97

It depends on where you live. US education is heavily decentralized, in rural kentucky it was still possible until the early 1980s to have 1-12 (kindergarten would have been a pipe dream) in the nearest town. Most districts consolidated first the high schools (9/10-12) and then middle schools (6/7-8/9), but I'm 45 now, I attended a half-day K-8 in my local town. Our local population supported about 1.5 classes (~40-50 students) per grade, so we had a bunch of splits
half day Kindergarten
regular 1st
High 1st/Low 2nd graders
regular 2nd
regular 3rd
high 3rd/low 4th
regular 4th
regular 5th

at 6th grade, a close by k-5 elementary joined with our population
high 5th/low 6th
2 rooms of regular 6th
3 rooms of 7th
2 rooms of regular 8th
1 room of the highest math aptitude ones, we got pre-algebra in 8th grade instead of their general math and our reading was generally higher so we might have read 1 or 2 extra books over the year in our english class
The 4 K-8 schools went to a common 9-12 high school, so that would lead to a 9th grade math breakdown like:
2-3 sections of honors algebra 1, we would net out 1 class of 12th grade AP calculus AB from this
2-3 algebra 1 these kids would end in trigonometry and geometry in grade 12
2-3 pre-algebra these kids would end in algebra 2 and basic geometry in grade 12
2-3 general math these kids would end in algebra 1 and basic geometry in grade 12
The district I grew up in has changed since then, they've got a common 7th-8th building now and the 9th graders attend an isolated building of their own (7-12 is on the same giant physical campus in the middle of our county)

Larger urban districts like the one my kids attend now have opportunities to slot and track high math aptitude earlier, there are some 6th graders that take pre-algebra so their end target would be trig as sophomores and AP Calculus BC as seniors

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