If the best available evidence indicates X, but you believe Y based on gut feel, then later solid evidence of Y is developed, were you right? Further, should this experience convince you to trust your gut over the best available evidence in the future?

> There's no indication of the circumstances of their birth

Table C1, page 45.

This is also the Cornell University Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, where the median family income for students is over $150K, so certainly none of them are poor.
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They set up an experiment with "workers" who get compensated based on either luck or performance, so some workers get more than others but not necessarily because they did a better job. The students actually being studied are then asked to redistribute the earnings if they want, in either direction (e.g. give workers they feel worked harder more, or give workers they feel were exceptionally lucky less)

One of the variables the the experiment is how much it costs to redistribute the earnings. For example, you can take $1 form worker A and give it to worker B, but if the efficiency cost is 50% then worker B only gets $0.50 and the other $0.50 is lost. This lost value is the efficiency cost.

Basically they're saying that the likelihood and amount of redistribution is strongly dependent on how much it costs to implement it. The more expensive it is to transfer wealth, the more disparity there is between the haves and have-nots.

Overall the paper seems to show that people born with a silver spoon up their ass not only see inequality as less of a problem, but are severely less inclined to do anything about it at all if the solution isn't literal magic. Quelle surprise.
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Yep. Google, at least, started this transition during Trump1.

The company has long had engineering sites in various other countries, but until Trump1, the primary focus was always on cities where Google thought the global talent would want to live. Low cost was clearly not the driving factor in the selection of London, Zurich, Munich, Tokyo and Sydney, to name a few of the ones I visited. US sites were similarly not located in low-rent areas. The workforce was definitely global, because Google wanted to hire the smartest people and while the US does have its share of brilliant minds, the US has only 4% of the world's population, so most teams -- even in the US -- ended up being minority American.

During COVID, Trump leveraged the health crisis to essentially halt H-1B approvals and renewals. This caused significant problems for Google. My own team lost a few people because they couldn't get their visas renewed and had to go back home. Some chose to move to other Google sites overseas where Google could get them a work visa, others simply went back to their home countries. One trans woman on my team was in a particularly tough spot because her home country (India) refused to renew her passport because it didn't recognize her new gender. She couldn't get her visa renewed, couldn't go home to India, and also couldn't move to any other country with an expired passport. Luckily, she had a lot of nVidia and Google stock she'd been saving up to buy a house, and by cashing that out had enough free cash to get an EB-5 "investor" visa. It's good to be rich, of course.

Anyway, Google saw what was going on and, anticipating future troubles of the sort, refocused its overseas office plans on building up teams and infrastructure, especially in India which provided so much of Google's engineering talent anyway, with the intention of shifting whole projects and workstreams there. The company had long required a significant percentage of all staffing growth to be in the US (and especially in the bay area), but that policy was scrapped and replaced by its opposite: A certain percentage of all new roles must be based overseas.

It's still the case that the center-of-mass of Google is in the bay area, but the company is actively working to change that, to build up overseas capacity, and not just groups of junior engineers under a manager whose role is to pass them detailed requirements for implementation, but instead full teams with highly-skilled and experienced senior engineers and managers able to take full ownership of major product areas and move them forward.

Trump's latest moves will just accelerate this transition. The result will eventually be a hollowing out of the company's US capacity, and therefore a reduction in the need to hire American engineers. Lucky for me, I'm leaving Google for a startup and anyway am not far from retirement. Between this stuff and AI being poised to replace junior engineering staff it's a good time to be getting out.

Also, I think it will soon be time to start shifting investments out of the US.

Public schools don't fail int he same way that private ones do. They can't, because they aren't businesses.

It's really sad to have to explain, over and over, that operating public services as for-profit businesses - or worse, replacing public services with for-profit businesses - is literally the whole reason shit is falling apart. The peak of American civilization also had the highest tax rates for the wealthy and the most extensive and functional public services. That was not a coincidence.
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Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

He unintentionally used Signal? How drunk was he?

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

> I can tell that you have no idea what you're talking about because the vast majority of public K-12 school funding is through local taxes, not federal funding.

About 13% of public schools are funded federally. You say "the vast majority" as if to handwave 13% of their funding as unsubstantial. Most importantly, this funding goes to schools that do not have the local tax revenue to fully support them.

> The federal government has almost no control over it so they can't cut funding

The federal Dept. of Education plays a key role in ensuring equitable access to education. You know how they exert control over local schools? By creating and enforcing (or NOT enforcing) policies, because their job is ultimately to implement and enforce laws created by Congress that apply to public education.

> There are also many states that have charter schools that perform better for less money than the public schools, so it's not a money problem.

Charter schools have an abysmal reputation; approximately 1 in 4 charter schools end up out of business within 5 years, leaving their students in the lurch and those who paid for it with empty wallets.

It's just a scam to funnel public money into private hands and push indoctrination. Look at all the enshittification that's happened and is currently happening in the name of chasing profits - we cannot afford that in education, financially or culturally.
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Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

> HOW ABOUT we use a lifting body like an airship instead? ...says the person completely ignorant of the history of airships. There's a reason they aren't used for anything.

It's not immediately clear that a larger airplane would need a larger airport. The size of the runway needed really depends on the minimum speed needed to take off and stay aloft, and how quickly it can reach that speed from a standstill. A huge plane with large, efficient wings and powerful engines that can take off in 5000 feet of runway with a 100+ ton load can still use just about any existing airport.

Meanwhile you can't even get an airship out of its hangar if it's a bit windy, and it's not like a construction site for wind turbines would have any strong wind, right?
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Not only has it been done before, we now have drone technology that make it even easier to synchronize multiple aircraft.

A dozen extra large drones, some slings, and a chase helicopter with the operator. Seems very doable.
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