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Comment Re: If there really is too much solar during the d (Score 1) 316

> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

Comment Re:Well, that's just spiffy (Score 1) 72

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.

Comment Re:It's called work (Score 1) 222

It depends.

If the workers were fired for having opinions outside of work on their own time (e.g., on social media that they were using from home while not on the clock), then they have a valid grievance. That's, at least arguably, a form of discrimination.

On the other hand, if they were busy protesting all shift instead of working, while being paid to work, that's entirely a different thing altogether and falls under "refusal to perform job duties", which is a valid firing offense in any jurisdiction.

Comment Re:Well, there's one logical consequence (Score 1) 147

Pharmaceutical research (i.e., the search for new medications) is also (and has been for decades) disproportionately funded by America. Europe and a few other countries (e.g., Japna, South Korea) do also contribute, but their contributions are consistently a much, much smaller portion of their GDP.

Comment Re:Well, there's one logical consequence (Score 1) 147

I don't know if that's going to work, given that the youth unemployment rate has gotten so high they've stopped publishing numbers for it, because either they'd be too high to publish under Chinese law, or else no one would believe them. Granted, that's not tech-sector-specific, but a *lot* of those unemployed young people are college educated, and STEM fields are quite popular over there. Employers may in fact be in a stronger negotiating position than the prospective employees.

Comment Re:To some extent (Score 1) 154

The last Lee Child book I bought was written by his brother, although Lee gave him the plot outline. It was an "airport exclusive", so maybe he still writes his own books for more general distribution.

Comment Re: That's just tech (Score 3, Insightful) 147

Legit greybeard here.

People hunted me down to help scale up AI networks. I was ready to retire.

There is no shortage of work because thereâ(TM)s no shortage of mistakes. Ageism is a thing for meat grinder roles, absolutely. When $ matters youâ(TM)d be surprised how fast the grey hair turns into an asset, not a liability.

Comment Re:Lead By Example (Score 1) 146

This is nonsense. Cryptography and secret codes have been around for as long as communication. One-time pads were first used on the telegraph in 1882.

I didn't say possible. I said practical. Strong crypto is hard. Secure key exchange is hard.

Governments have been breaking codes for as long as we have had codes.

LK

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