The sudden hostility and ad hominem attacks are quite puzzling. I don't think my comment remotely justified that response. Sorry if you had a bad day.

Nowhere was the argument raised that healthcare providers taking precautions are immune to transmission. But this is an odds game, and the odds are dramatically higher than in places where friends and relatives must take care of the infected and diseased with no PPE. The experts are rightfully concerned, but they are not calling this latest Ebola outbreak the next COVID.

I think to the extent in presents systemic risk, it's similar to the risks posed by other high flying AI-boom companies like Nvidia. I'm not saying it's good, but SpaceX isn't a unique exposure.

Just citing NASDAQ exaggerates things quite a bit. On IPO, Space X is going to have a market cap of around 1.5% of the S&P 500, but its public float is going to be way smaller than that (less than .25%). The market goes up and down 1% on a day to day basis without it being major news. Even a 2% day can happen without anything earthshattering. So SpaceX alone isn't jeopardizing the market if it goes bust.

"Functioning" in this case is in comparison to a place like the DRC and other places in Central Africa. You won't see large numbers of people dying from Ebola who have never been cared for by a medical professional and you won't see large numbers of dead buried in the backyard or a field outside of town. It's the non-professional care and undertakers that causes people to be exposed to infected fluids.

The biggest reason Ebola is not presently a COVID-level concern is that it spreads through bodily fluids. In countries with functioning public health symptoms, victims are cared for by medical professionals who can avoid coming in contact with fluids. People in the developed world also have more personal space and public sanitation which further limits the risk of bodily fluid exchange outside of immediate family members. Infected individuals can be identified and quarantined much more effectively in a bodily-fluid spread disease compared to an airborne one like COVID.

The biggest risk is that Ebola manages to mutate in a way that allows it to spread via airborne transmission. If that were to happen, it could make the COVID outbreak look mild. That's why it's essential that the outbreak be contained in Africa so it has fewer opportunities to spread/mutate. Sure would be nice if USAID were still around to fund those efforts...

A "masters" is a weird in-between degree that can mean so many different things depending on the school, subject matter, and profession. It doesn't make sense to talk about the general job market for masters degrees when you are really talking about completely different markets. Various types include:

1) A consolation prize for Phd dropouts
2) Professional degrees (i.e. masters in accountancy)
3) Medical field specialists (i.e. speech pathology, physical therapy, specialized nursing)
4) "Find yourself" types (i.e. creative writing)
5) Prep for other grad school (i.e. pre-med programs for people who didn't get the pre-med requirements in undergrad)
6) MBAs (huge difference between M7 and degree mill programs)
7) Specialized post-grad school education (such as an LLM in law for already licensed lawyers)

Putting all of those different programs into a single pot for analysis is pointless. Cost can be anything from they pay you (i.e. Phd programs) to $100k/yr (MBA programs).

I don't think the statement was necessarily wrong. Computers were really expensive in 1993 relative to today, and a lot of people were playing Doom at the time with hardware way below the state of the art. I remember playing it on a then 5-year-old 386 machine that ran it at sub 10fps. A composer would have needed to consider how the music would sound on less advanced hardware.

I'm not suggesting we feel sorry for the students. What I'm saying is that rational actors in the marketplace will not choose Harvard over the alternative if the alternative offers them a better deal.

For better or worse, the people who go to Harvard want to do better than "just fine".

I'm talking about what Harvard has actually proposed: putting a cap on As. You do not know how many B grades would have been As but for the cap. This is especially true in subject that have heavy qualitative components to grading.

Again, I'm talking about the types of jobs that people go to Harvard for. Top-end consulting, investment banking, private equity, etc. type jobs do look at grades. The problem with saying that it's only about your "first job" is that your resume from your first job is what leads to your second. If your first job is at Goldman Sachs, that tends to lead to a very different career trajectory than if your first job is a "management trainee" at a rental car company. You get access to a completely different set of experiences early in your career coming from a top-end employer than you do from a middling one.

Do people leap the career latter or fall off it regardless? Of course. Many people flame out at Goldman and people fly up from the bottom even from mediocre first positions. But the main reason someone pays the big bucks for Harvard over State U. is jobs like Goldman are far more open to you from Harvard. The type of person who gets into Harvard in the first place has already gotten there in-part through careful grade and credential optimization. There's no reason to think that process will suddenly stop.

That only works if there is a mathematical change to grading. If it's something like a cap on the number of As given out, you can't compute it both ways because it's impossible to know for a given course whether a student who received an B+ would have gotten the A but for the cap.

Generally, employers may not scrutinize GPAs much but they play an outsize role in the types of jobs that many Harvard graduates are gunning for. If you want to work for Goldman of McKinsey, you best not come with a 3.0 GPA. In law schools, some firms will outright publish GPA cutoffs. In an area as specialized as law, firms may know the nuances for grading in each school (Harvard in fact does not use letter grades but uses High Honors/Honors/Pass/Fail as the only grades), but even then not every Judge and not every firm a Harvard graduate might want to work for knows exactly what the curve looks like at a given school. Generally, the higher ranked the school the more it can get away with grade inflation and grading systems that obfuscate the relative performance of the students. Lower ranked law schools are the only ones to curve to a C, and that's because they must fail out the bottom of their class to avoid low bar passage rates and accreditation threats.

Most schools with forced curved practice some form of blind grading. Exams/papers are numbered rather than named. Professors may be able to figure out who wrote an exam/paper based on style, but for the most part they are unable to do what you assume they will do.

The problem is we now have a grading prisoner's dilemma. If every school reverted to a C as the average simultaneously, then there would be no problem.

But if one school does it, they put every student at a disadvantage with respect to future opportunities. Even Harvard can't always expect that grad schools and employers will take note of a change to the system and evaluate students appropriately (especially when there is some cutoff year). If next year Harvard started curving to a C, it would look to many employers like a current Sophomore suddenly started slacking off Junior and Senior year because nearly all students would show a GPA dropoff. A subset of employers/grad schools may be aware, but not all of them. So it almost certainly disadvantages their students to lower the average GPA.

Schools also exist in a competitive market for the top students. If Harvard becomes known as the place with punishing GPAs, students will choose peer schools like Princeton over it and Harvard will face declining quality. The reverse of this process is what has fed grade inflation in the first place. I note that the "good old days" of the "Gentleman's C" were days when admission to the likes of Harvard were mostly based on pedigree rather than academic merit. You got in because you were from the "right" family and were associated with the "right" institutions. Most students in this environment didn't care about grades because their future opportunities weren't dependent on them. Today's environment is less like that for most students. There are some students who are billionaire scions who don't care about grades, but for most grades can determine their futures, and they therefore guard their GPAs closely.

At lower levels of education, you can indeed define answers on an exam as "correct" or "incorrect", but as you advance it's likely that there is a gradient rather than a binary. For example, both students may have solved a math problem but one comes up with a much more comprehensive and elegant solution than the other.

Additionally, as you advance exams tend to have more open-ended questions. You do not simply regurgitate facts. You explain and analyze an answer. Inevitably, some students have a more comprehensive analysis than others. I have a law degree. In law school exams, the grade stack might look like this:

C: Mostly correct, but a few errors (misidentifying the applicable law, or a flawed analysis)
B-: All answers basically correct, with maybe a minor error in phrasing or slightly misapplied analysis
B: All answers correct, but somewhat shallow or rote analysis
B+: All answers correct, with some deeper analysis that might miss some fine points
A-: All answers correct with insightful analysis
A: All answers correct with deep analysis that shows true mastery of the material

At my law school, the grades were on a forced curve, but grades below a "B-" were discretionary. Keep in mind that getting in to the school in a first place meant you were an A student in undergrad, so many students felt a shock to the system when their fully-correct exams started rolling in with "B" results.

They wouldn't have the same criteria with Harvard as Podunk U, but they might for Princeton. Part of what created grade inflation is this sort of market. If Harvard becomes known as the place where GPAs are low, prospective students may avoid Harvard.

Employers and grad schools can't always track every nuance of every peer school, and the net result is that students who go to schools that deflate grades are at a disadvantage.

He knew full well this offer had 0% chance of being accepted. It was like walking into a car dealership and ask if they'd take IOUs written on a napkin as payment.