Any large organization imaginable has practices that depart from theoretically most efficient.

In the case of the government, it's often bound by legacy issues worse than any for-profit company coupled with legal issues that no for-profit company is subject. For example, the IRS is behind on tech in large part because its code base dates back to the 1970s (and contrary to Dodge, you can't just feed COBOL into AI and magically bring it up to date), and also because many of the notice requirements that require paper mailing are required by Congress. Many of the fixes you'd want to do in a private organization require an act of Congress, which may be impossible to get support to.

But the problem is that there is no free lunch with government budgets. Saving the REAL money involves tough political choices. For example, the federal budget is dominated by the military and entitlements (social security, Medicare). Much of the military budget is benefits for servicepeople and veterans. But what politician is going to campaign on cutting VA benefits? What politician wants to announce Medicare cuts? None of them. So they go after silly stuff like USAID that's a rounding error on the overall budget.

It's keyed to revenue targets, so they don't get to choose when it hits.

I guess you didn't learn about "silent e" in first grade like my kids did from their public school teachers.

I'm not a supporter of Sanders' plan, but it's a one-time tax, so government ownership wouldn't become 100% under it.

I wasn't saying or implying that Harvard is the norm or really talking about Harvard specifically. I was just presenting extremes of the college experience. Those extreme's make the averages meaningless. It's like comparing my wealth to that of Elon Musk, the local car dealership owner who is worth $20 million, and saying that on average we have over $300 billion. Doesn't give you much meaningful information.

Your small private college wasn't really the norm either. Most college matriculants numerically are going to community college, local state schools, and for-profits. Non-profit privates (both elite and non-elite) are the minority.

I don't think TFA is saying that kids couldn't read a sentence out loud. They can "decode" words. The accusation is more about attention span and reading comprehension. It's a stretch to attribute that to lack of phonics instruction.

The use of averages to obscures huge differences within higher education. Harvard isn't going to bend over backwards to accommodate a horse because they don't have to (unless they think the parent is going to donate a full equestrian center). They don't have trouble filling their classes with full-pay students. By contrast, your local CC or directional state school isn't getting remotely like 40k for a student in revenue (let alone profit). It's students at the latter that disproportionally make up freshmen dropouts. At highly selective schools, graduation rates typically exceed 80%.

The unions are very regional and also aggressively gatekeep. A few years ago I had an interesting conversation with a plumber in NYC. He had been shut out of the union and barely met ends meet. Outside of the East Coast, most plumbers aren't unionized. What often happens around here is you have one licensed plumber and a bunch of low-wage assistants (usually barely above minimum wage) who do most of the worth. Similar issues with a lot of trades.

I think you've been sold a story by people with a political agenda (i.e. attacking teacher's unions and anything they think is "woke"- i.e. anything they disagree with). Public teacher's unions and schools aren't responsible for curriculum selection. That's done at the state and district level. And any teacher I've met would laugh in your face if you said they thought correct answers to math problems are "white supremacy."

There are good engineering reasons to avoid replaceable batteries. The strategy has been used with some limited success in China, but charging advances are limiting the utility. They are rolling out EVs that can accept charges at 1MW, which means full charges in under 10 minutes. It does require building out those chargers (which use a large battery to discharge rather than attempting to generate that sort of power directly from the grid), but it's less intensive a lift than battery swap stations. The problem with swap stations is they are by necessity make and model specific, while chargers can be universal.

Setting aside all that, EVs are likely to go down in weight relative to ICE as battery densities and motor designs improve. There is no inherent reason why an EV would create more tire particulates than an ICEV. People who are up in arms about EV weights often don't realize that ICEV weights have also increased quite a bit due to safety and NVH demands.

"You know what I don't like about Texas? It's fucking desolate. Very, very desolate. Which is the main reason I don't want to move there, but I may anyway."

What part of Texas are you referring to? Texas West of San Antonio or North of DFW is pretty desolate, but most of the population of Texas actually lives in the "Texas triangle" which is nothing like West Texas. The natural environment of Houston is actually more of a coastal swamp. It's nowhere near as nice as California on average, but even West Texas is less desolate than Death Valley.

Nobody is calling it the Jetsons. But technology does allow them to staff leaner when acting in a defensive capacity. The Russians have to attack to achieve their core objectives. The Ukrainians don't. Neither side is suffering sustainable losses. Nobody really knows which side will crack first, but historically an attacker whose advances have stalled on the battlefield is unlikely to be able to resume significant advances.

Two other issues: The Russians are not still advancing. Over the last 4 mounts, there have not been net increases in the Russian control. They've stalled entirely. A big reason is the medium range drone program has prevented resupply at the front. Now, they can't even get fuel into Crimea- a situation which seems to be worsening every day.

The other issue, which I've mentioned before, is that there is no real deal to be had with the Russians. If the Ukrainians built another Maginot line at the border of the Donbas and said "fine, have the Donbas", the Russians would simply increase the demands. The Russians aren't demanding the Donbas because they really want the Donbas and are willing to walk away in exchange for it. They are demanding the Donbas because it's a poison pill and they know it. If Ukraine swallows the poison pill, Russia will simply offer another.

Bottom line: there is no peace deal to be had no matter what concessions Ukraine might offer because Russia does not want peace. Russia would only accept peace at the price of total Ukrainian capitulation.

Nobody is doubting that Ukraine needs soldiers (and that need has indeed become critical at times), but Ukraine and Russia have very different staffing needs. Ukraine can (and has) automated more and more of their front-line staffing, but Russia fundamentally cannot automate the need of warm bodies to advance and establish control of new territory. Russia's "meat assault" and infiltration tactics combined with large grey zones making evacuation nearly impossible mean their attrition rate has gone way past the traditional disadvantage attackers have. While ground robots can theoretically take and hold territory (Ukraine has even experimented with this), Russia has not yet even attempted holding ground with robots. In fact, they've been found sending drone and artillery operators into assaults out of desperation for more men.

Ukraine has now gotten Russia's attrition rate past its recruitment rate- a state of affairs that cannot persist indefinitely. Russia can dig deeper by ordering a general mobilization, but it has carefully avoided that due to political problems with doing so. It's one thing to send members of minority ethnicities from far off Siberia or prisoners on suicide assaults, it's quite another to send young ethnic Russians from Moscow. There are a lot of signs that popular support for the war has continued to ebb (not that public polling in Russia could be relied upon). We've seen one coup attempt already since the war began. The next one could very well be successful.

Besides, more important than physical attrition is economic attrition. Ukraine has now been given an effective blank check by the EU because it is now existential to Europe that they not fall. Russia is running ever increasing deficits. China has acted as a patron, but only just enough to keep them in the war (i.e. supplying drones and machines used to retain manufacturing capacity). They don't want a Russian collapse (and lose a buffer between them and the EU), but they are more than happy for Russia to slowly bleed to the point they become a client state. Fundamentally, China doesn't care if Russia succeeds in Ukraine or not as long as the state survives in something like its current form.

This analysis is simply wrong because Ukraine is not using humans as a resource as Russia is. Ukraine can send fewer and fewer soldiers to the front lines as long as they can prevent Russians from getting there in the first place. This is no longer a front like WWI with a large number of soldiers sitting in a manned trench looking out against a "no-man's land." Instead, we have a very wide grey zone of ~20km (and growing in many places) where drones hunt anything that moves. Only a small number of soldiers from either side actually sit at or even near the point of contact. Russia's only ability to advance has been sending large numbers of soldiers into the grey zone and hoping enough survive to consolidate control. If drones can mop up all of them, then the advance goes nowhere. If they can't get large numbers to the front, they can't advance at all. That's exactly what the current supply line denial campaign is about. It doesn't take many Ukrainian soldiers to do it.

The problem with "just cut a deal" is that the deal Russia has insisted on requires Ukraine giving up the most fortified areas of the front, which would leave the entire country exposed if Russia breached it. If they could be 100% sure that giving up the Donbas would result in a lasting peace with Russia letting them be, then I bet they would take it. But there is no way to do that.

Another mistake that many Western observers make is thinking that Russia will seek an exit if they can just "save face." Puttin doesn't care about "face" because this is existential for him. The economy will collapse if the war is shut down. War spending is now into double digits of the GDP. He's in his 70s. This war is his last chance to realize his life dream of reuniting the USSR and becoming "Vlad the Great." He can't just accept a fig leaf agreement and let it go because that's the end of that dream and likely his rule. Even the offer of "just give up the Donbas" probably isn't real. If Ukraine said "yes", they'd ask for more because they can't actually accept a real peace.