The numbers I cited are backtested portfolio numbers with dividends reinvested or not. Again, it makes the difference between having $11,000 from your original $10,000 investment or $7,000. No, you didn't quite make money adjusted for inflation over that 10-year period, but you didn't lose in nominal terms if you don't ignore the dividends.

All of the beeping and alarms can make life a living hell for patients in the hospital. Any that aren't in a coma are going to be severely sleep deprived from the constant din (in addition to being woken up several times a night for rounds).

Seems like there has to be a better solution that just making the alarms more noticeable.

That 1.5% compounds over 10 years though. If you are going to compare 10 year returns, you need to include total return, not just look at the index. If you invested 10,000 in January 2010 in VFINX (S&P 500 index fund) and reinvested dividends, you would have had $11,000 in December of 2010. Ignoring dividends, you would have ~$7,000. So you actually would not have lost money over that 10 year period.

I don't think it's veiled at all. It's a pretty explicit attack on the network.

Just looking at the point value of the index ignores the dividends paid over that period.

This is like someone who makes $150,000 a year making a mistake that costs them $9.

It's true that STEM classes are easier to fail than humanities classes, but that is true no matter what school you attend. A STEM class could be rote memorization, but a good one requires not just memorizing things but actually being able to solve problems.

A school that kicks people out could be more rigorous, or it could be that it simply admits more people who are unqualified and unable to do the work. Except a few athletes and children of the rich and famous, just about anybody at Dartmouth is already an excellent student. Other schools may see a bunch of students who aren't actually ready for college, and those students need to be eliminated if the school doesn't want a reputation for graduating incompetents.

"Merit" is a very subjective thing. The SAT measures one's ability to perform a very specific set of cognitive tasks. Training can often boost one's ability by providing a memorized set of algorithms for performing those tasks, but not all individuals take to training equally. Some folks can score near-perfect cold and others will never get a high score even if they trained for the rest of their lives.

Also, successful training does not require a paid class. The materials presented in most prep classes can be obtained at minimal costs in various books, and the practice can be performed individually. Of course that requires a great deal of intrinsic motivation.

I think a great deal of the reason why SAT scores are so correlated to parental income as that high-income parents also make sure the kids are getting the best educational opportunities at every step of their academic life (starting even before Pre-K). Simply putting a low-income kid in a prep class or some additional study usually can't make up for 15+ years of lower-quality education.

A university looking for "Merit" has a normative choice to make. Do you want the motivated poor kid who got good grades at their underperforming school but got middling SAT scores, or do you want the rich kid with mediocre grades but had good SAT scores. The poor kid may have a rocky start and then catch up over 4 years, but may also be a higher dropout risk (especially given they likely face many non-academic obstacles during college). The rich kid may have lower potential, but be a safer bet from the standpoint of the university.

I don't know what you mean by "feel good work", but I'm talking about writing substantive papers and exams that require solving problems/analysis rather than simply spitting back memorized facts. That may indeed require a certain memorized baseline knowledge, but a good school will require more from you than simply spitting that knowledge back out when it comes time for exams. You need to use that knowledge to do something.

I also call B.S. on "much higher academic standards than Dartmouth." No school has meaningfully higher academic standards across the board at the undergraduate level. Some schools like Princeton and MIT may be slightly more difficult to get into, and may be more rigorous in some specific programs, but the difference in academic credentials of matriculating students and what is expected of them will be extremely small.

I doubt that is the case at most schools at the Dartmouth level. I went to a small liberal arts school that was a step down from Dartmouth in terms of admissions competitiveness, but I can't think of a single grade I received in my undergraduate education that was primarily determined by rote memorization.

You need a certain number of facts and figures in your working memory, but an education primarily focused on that is not very helpful.

Memorizing the times tables is not nearly as valuable to understanding high-level math as understanding the fundamental math concepts behind multiplication. Being able to spit out "10 x 10 = 100" is not nearly as good as understanding place value and the base 10 number system. If you understand multiplication conceptually and have memorized the multiplication algorithms, you can do any mathematics requiring multiplication. It might take you somewhat longer than someone who has memorized the full table, but not materially so (especially once you progress into higher level math that is less focused on arithmetic).

Likewise, you do need a general sense of dates to understand historical dates. For example, it's helpful to understand the relative timeline of the American Revolution to the French revolution to understand how the events may have influenced eachother. But it's not really necessary to understand that the Bastille was stormed on exactly July 14, 1789 to understand the French revolution. In some educational systems, someone might just memorize that date with no understanding of why it was important or how it may have influenced other events.

Something similar to the Rivian R1S but with Hummer styling would have been great.

One big problem is GM has done a terrible job rolling out EVs.

It had an OK start. The Bolt was a decent first effort. But they cancelled (then uncancelled) the volt with an uncertain ETA on its successor. They managed to get the Bolt's price pretty competitive, but it is now rather dated (especially with charging speed).

After the Bolt, they were supposed to roll out a huge number of models to replace their mainstream lineup. There was the Blazer, the Equinox, the new Hummer, the Silverado, the Lyriq. So far, the Blazer is the subject of a stop sale as it has had seriously reliability problems (on top of pricing coming in way above the initial promise). The Equinox still is MIA, the new Hummer was an overengineered overpriced monstrosity, the Silverado still isn't available (also missed initial pricing targets). Only the Lyriq seems to be "ok", but only just that.

GM needs to understand that just making an EV isn't enough. It needs to be a good car at an attractive price for people to buy it. Plug in hybrids are a useful niche, but they won't sell any of those either if they can't make good ones.

Even with a full forensic analysis, you are making a judgment call about what the true "cause" was. If all cars were limited to 10mph there would be almost no traffic deaths. So you could say nearly 100% of traffic deaths are speed related.

There's no way to actually quantify whether speed is the "main factor" unless you do a full forensic analysis of every single accident. Unless Norway does that, then it's more likely they are just basing them off checkboxes in a police report.

Even if there was perfect information available, there's a measure of judgment over what the "main" cause was. Most accidents have multiple contributing causes. If a drunk driver kills someone after speeding through a neighborhood at 100mph, is the "main" cause the speed, or is it the drunk driving? They probably would not have been speeding but for the intoxication, but the accident might not have happened if they had merely been drunk.