Per the article, the government is spending $913,000,000 for schools to acquire 2,463 busses, "95% of which will be electric." (Side note, I'd love to know why 5% of buses purchased under this plan won't be electric.) That's $370,000 per bus. Enough money to buy a whole electric bus, so I assume that's what they're doing. This is typical moronic "the government is Santa Claus" spending. Those very few districts - 389 - get this massive windfall of completely free (to them) new busses. Everybody else gets nothing. Mountains of school districts across the country are replacing mountains of busses every year already, and most of those replacements are going to be gas. If they'd spent their same $913M on incentive vouchers for schools to buy electric bussesâ"ie, whatever level subsidy it would take to spur adoptionâ"they'd have made the program both more equitable (way more recipients of the funding) and had a much larger impact (way more electric busses purchased for the same amount of program money spent). That is, vouchers for say $92,000 per electric bus per school probably would have still had applicants use all the money, but 4x as many schools would benefit, and 4x as many electric busses would end up on the roads. Some economist could have surveyed schools and estimated the best voucher amount for them to optimize their objective.

I agree. So many posters think it's absolutely clear that we're better off without DST... here's a comment of mine on the topic from several years ago https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11840443&cid=56242171/ which I'll repost: I agree the shifts are a disaster. We're not really saving energy anymore with DST, and it's killing people, causing depression and economic losses, etc. But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with. WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM. OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to? Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight. So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter. A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.

Two addendums: 1. greytree's comment that papers using more technical terms may tend to be in more specialized subjects and thus receive less citations is a good third hypothesis to add to the two I listed. 2. I'm not suggesting that unnecessary jargon is fine, I'm actually highly opposed to it and think papers should be as clear and jargon-free as possible. I suspect the observed effect is due to a combination of at least all three hypothesis, and that appropriately rating their respective contributions would be exceedingly difficult.

It's not a controlled study, it's a correlation.

The correlation supports at least two hypotheses:
1. People are turned away by papers that are more jargon-filled and are less likely to cite them.

2. The kind of people who unnecessarily fill their papers with jargon are the same kind of people who aren't doing very good research, so readability aside, these papers aren't worth citing.

They don't acknowledge this in their actual paper.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2581

They conclude that their analysis "clearly emphasizes the negative effect of jargon on the success of a paper." But I suspect a correlation between jargon and paper quality, so the lack of citations may be dependent on the "quality" variable, with "jargon" just hitching a correlative ride on quality.

Of course, this would be very difficult to decorrelate because you'd need some measure of the quality of the science in the paper... and the only measure typically used for that on a large scale is citations...
But their findings do not necessarily imply that if the same poorly cited papers had less jargon that they would have performed equally to the other papers.

A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.

Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.

If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.

I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.

You obviously haven't driven in really big cities - New York, DC, LA, Chicago...

I completely agree with you that that's how everyone should drive. That's how I drive whenever I'm anywhere where it's possible to do so (moderate sized cities, small towns, rural areas, roads without multiple lanes).

But in the really big cities, if you leave a safe gap such that you could stop in time if there were an accident in front of you, then another car changes lanes to get in that gap. Slow down to make another gap, another car instantly fills it to where you're tailgating them. Keep doing that, and you slow down and down to where you're going an unsafe speed and everyone is swerving around you like a stopped car - and as they swerve around you, they're still cutting over in front of you so fast that you're overdriving your stopping distance. The only speed at which you're not overdriving your stopping distance is under about 10 MPH, which is both illegal on most major arteries and insanely unsafe.

The only thing to do if you have to drive in these places is leaves the biggest gap you can that will usually stop another car from darting in front of you, which still means you are not guaranteed safe stopping distance. Or just don't drive there. There is no way to drive there and avoid tailgating, because someone else will change lanes to make it so you're tailgating regardless of your speed. There is no way to drive safely.

I think it's bursting now. As an honors graduate of a top 10-university, I feel confident in saying: most college graduates would acquire skills more useful to employers spending 4 years working than 4 years in college. Plus they financial difference for the prospective students of spending 4 years making money rather than 4 years hemorrhaging money is enormous. Aside from certain professional fields that truly require a lot of very specific knowledge it takes years to learn (doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc), schooling is a signaling function, not an actual value-add proposition. Bran Caplan's Take on Education But it's value as a signaling function falls apart when supply outstrips demand for a significant category of degree recipients - which is middle-quality school liberal arts majors now, and that's pulling back the veil on the myth of education adding employer-relevant value to students.

If the occupants have reasonable assessments, then the only way for the offers to have any effect on the occupants is for the evil actors to offer everybody twice the market value of their house. And it's easy to buy up whole neighborhoods right now by offering everybody twice the value of their house.

Right now, the evil actors don't want to actually cough up as much money as people want in exchange for moving. They try to buy up homes by offering 10% above market value. When the people refuse, they just bribe government to use eminent domain to kick the people out and let them buy the land at below market value.

If my proposal could somehow help change the evil company's strategy to instead offer everybody 200% of the value of their house, that would be great. But unfortunately, I think the evil people would still rather use eminent domain than actually pay the money. Houses are expensive - it's cheaper to bribe government than pay what it takes to make people move voluntarily.

If it was a real offer to buy, then the "ludicrous tax bill" is just what you should have paid already, that you've been dodging by lying about the value of your property.

That's right. This kind of rule, in effect, would force everyone to grossly overstate the value of everything and pay ludicrous taxes to avoid unnecessary risk of a sudden forced move. However, there may still be a better way to handle this that preserves the idea. For example, if someone makes an offer to buy at twice your valuation or more, you must either sell, or change your valuation to the new offer and pay a few years of back taxes at the new valuation. This would make forced moves always avoidable, but would still provide a reality check between claimed value and market value. In this case, if the real value of a building is $1B and Apple's claiming $200, someone would surely make an offer at $700M or so and then Apple would have to either sell or change the evaluation to $700M and pay several years of back taxes at the $700M price.

That's right. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in pharmacology.

Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:

1. Publish or perish.

2. Nobody reports negative results

3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.

So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.

Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field. Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.

Hence got your bad project."

Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.

Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.

Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.

"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."

A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.

Thank you.

This "news story" reads like one of the Dilbert comics where someone with no understanding of the meaning of the words mashes a bunch of buzzwords together.

"They're betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language."

None of these companies are looking at biology as a computing platform.

While they aren't trying to use biology to perform computation, there are a number of ways computers are good parallels for biology. But even then, they get that wrong. DNA is a storage medium - it's like a hard drive, not software code. The DNA stores the software code. Genes are like code. CRISPR is nothing remotely like a programming language - it's like the combination of firmware and physical write mechanisms in a drive that allow the drive to actually go write values to the right places.

I agree the shifts are a disaster. We're not really saving energy anymore with DST, and it's killing people, causing depression and economic losses, etc.

But... I'm near the eastern end of EST. Near the summer solstice, with DST in effect, it's light out from about 4:30 AM to 9 pm. Honestly, I'd be better off if there were a 2-hr DST shift - I don't get up before 5:30 AM, 5:30 to 10 pm would be much better, which is what they get at the western end of EST and what I grew up with.

WIthout DST, we're looking at it being light out from 3:30 AM to 8 PM. To me, a 3:30 AM sunrise with the modern fixed work/school/daycare schedule is just inhumane. And what a waste having all that daylight waaay before time to get up, and then get dark at 8 PM.

OK, so getting rid of DST makes summer suck. So we could just do DST all year like Florida wants to?

Well, Russia tried permanent DST, and depression and morning traffic accidents is winter went up. Near the western edge of EST, winter solstice sunrise is already 8:20 AM. Permanent DST would make the sun come up at 9:20 AM - about two and a half hours after most people get up for work/school. That is depressing. I remember waiting for the school bus on frozen, dark snowy days well before civil twilight even began, but with permanent DST, we'd be talking about getting to school and classes starting way before civil twilight. So people get depressed and have accidents now for a week on either side of the time change... but if we get rid of it, I'm not sure we aren't just trading it for another set of problems - insomnia in summer, less summer sports and exercise, and trading two weeks of depression and accidents in the spring/fall for three months of depression and accidents in winter.

A single world time zone doesn't help with any of this. It's not like everyone will just run a nocturnal schedule in the part of the earth that gets midnight at what's now noon and vice/versa. If you have to call someone around the world, the question would just shift in semantics from "what time is it there" to "what time do people get up there?" And having a single time zone with no DST doesn't help with it being light too early in summer or too late in winter. Companies, schools, etc could be free to shift the time on their own, but for anyone with complicated schedules, having different organizations make different decisions about whether to shift or not just makes everything worse.

USB was developed by a joint team from a bunch of tech companies, but it was primarily an Intel technology that came "for free" with their chipsets and that nobody used for anything - support was "in" every PC for years, but the PC's had no USB ports. Then Apple was looking for a more modern connector when Jobs got back, and he found out Intel already had one, so he picked USB and debuted it on the original iMac.

Nobody from PC-land new what a USB port was when the iMac came out, and I remember everyone referring to it as "this stupid weird new Apple connector" and saying Apple should have gone with PS/2 and DB-25 Parallel Ports for compatibility with PC peripherals. But surprisingly, once Apple used USB, the rest of the industry actually followed suit.

PCI also isn't a Microsoft technology, it's Intel again. It was on PC's, first, but it isn't exactly a triumph of innovation. At first Macs used NuBUS and PC's used ISA, and NuBUS was much better. Macs also got SCSI, which could run internal components as well as chain up to 14 fast devices like external Hard Drives, optical drives, scanners, etc, where PC's had no fast external port. PCI didn't make significant inroads in PC's replacing ISA until 1994, and Apple started using it to replace NuBUS in mid 1995. It's really not an example of MS innovating and Apple following.

Note to fanboys, I'm not making any comment here in general about how much Apple and Microsoft have respectively copied each other over the years, just that neither PCI nor USB are good examples of Apple copying Microsoft. PCI is neither - it's an Intel technology adopted by both Apple and PC manufacturers to replace their aging busses, and USB is closer to the opposite - a technology not invented by either of them, but that nobody was getting around to using until Apple finally did, then use exploded.

Although Hilary is one of the least popular presidential candidates ever, she has vicious defenders even among those who don't like her, given the alternative.

This [disclaimer, they're selling t-shirts here] sums up how I feel about it.