That's my belief. Do you know of any data comparing all the various influences? Money, parental involvement, charter vs. traditional public, teaching methods?

The problem is, every generation of educators seem to get a bee in their bonnet to come up with new teaching methods and we go through it all again. We seem sadly incapable of learning from past experiments. There's always some new fad method. What I find annoying is we also seem incapable of trying controlled experiments and patiently waiting to see how well it works. If new math is so great, try it with 1,000 schools for a few years, then objectively study the outcome before rolling it out to the masses.

At the same time, the educational establishment is stubbornly opposed to accepting data when it tells them something they don't want to hear, e.g. charter schools work pretty well and closing schools during COVID did not. Upton Sinclair got this one right: ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Swift is also 22 years into it's two year lifetime. It's lasted 11 times longer than planned. I'm kind of astounded that it still works and hasn't had problems with things like gyros failing.

I'm all for trying to dock and boost it. It's a great opportunity to try it out and if it fails, well, the mission was due to end anyway. Satellite telescopes don't last forever. You just would have thought people would have been looking into this for years so it wasn't a rush job.

Does it? I'd hope so, and that they're comparing the same varieties of crops. I couldn't follow the paper well enough to tell if they filtered studies based on how well they controlled for those confounding factors.

It is and it isn't. They had a hypothesis, "increased CO2 affects nutritional value" and they set out to answer it. If they had a different question, "why are plants less nutritious than in 1970?" or "are people's diets less nutritious than in 1970?", they would need different research. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, it's fine science.

We, the readers, should understand they asked a specific question, got a specific answer, and we cannot conclude based on that answer, that increased CO2 will cause nutritional problems in the future. It may be, it may not, this paper doesn't tell us that.

The fine headline is leaping to quite a conclusion.

I was able to try reading the actual paper this time. It's a bit dense for me but whatever. It's a meta-analysis. The authors didn't actually grow any plants but consolidated results from many other papers. So far, so good. This is a normal research process.

From the quoted summary, it finds a 3.2% decrease in minerals in major crop plants. That seems a small effect to me, likely overwhelmed by other factors. For example, if you were living on 1500 calories a day 30 years ago and now get 2000, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're likely to be healthier even if each individual bean is less nutritious.

There's also a lot of other things going on. I couldn't follow their methodology well enough but I wonder about confounding factors. For example, were they comparing the same strains of crops? Seed companies come out with new varieties all the time and it wouldn't surprise me if that has a much larger effect on nutrition than CO2.

In summary: interesting research. I'll take their word they found a real effect. I'm not at all alarmed because I expect there are much larger changes at play.

It's certainly a plausible hypothesis. I'd have to read the original article to see whether they considered this.

I'm pretty sure part of commercial farming was selectively breeding crops to make them sweeter because that sells better. The last 60 years have also seen tremendous increases in crop intensity so it's entirely plausible there are fewer minerals left in the soil. Or that plans bred to grow more food per acre just have less energy available to incorporate minerals.

These all seem plausible to me and ought to be testable. Well, the soil composition bit may be hard, you'd need soil samples from 50 or 100 years ago.

Feel free to not ride in one. We're going to ignore your preferences.

I strongly suspect Joby surveyed potential customers and discovered they don't need a snack or to pee in the five minute flight from Manhattan to JFK, even if they're old white guys.

No doubt. I was being flippant.

Thing is, HSR is a solution looking for a problem. I can drive SF to LA in 5-6 hours and then I've got my car with me so I can get around LA. If I take the train, it will take something like 3 hours, on someone else's schedule, and I don't have my wheels when I get there.

Alternatively, I can fly it in about the same amount of time so unless it's much cheaper, the money would be better spent improving airports.

If the distance is any longer than SF->LA, flying wins. If it's any shorter, driving wins. The range of trips where a train wins is as narrow as the track itself.

Apparently that's the plan. Phase 1, the Merced to Bakersfield connection has spent something like $13 billion and is expected to be anywhere from 10-20x that by the time it's done.

We should absolutely stop this madness today. $30 billion was supposed to get us from LA to SF, two places people actually want to travel between. They don't even have a plan to actually deliver what was promised.

I wonder how many busses you could buy and operate for $230 billion.

Heck, just pay Waymo/Cruise/Zoox/Nuro to deploy self-driving cars everywhere. Or hire Joby to fly people around. That'd be a ton cheaper and they're all California companies.

To be fair, I think that's the expected total price tag. They haven't spent that much yet. But none is the answer. Not a single mile of track is ready. I think they've built a bunch of overpasses and track beds, that's about it.

I keep wondering just how long we'll ignore the clear language of the proposition which authorized this money pit. It was very clear: LA to SF, in under two hours, with no more than $10 billion of state funding.

California may have some bright people in government but they sure don't get the headlines. It seems to mostly be staffed by opportunists, idealogues, and useful idiots.

I've lived in California for close to 40 years. I've had one representative I was impressed by (Tom Campbell). The rest have been fools I'm glad I don't have to spend any quality time with.

I take that back a little. Chuck Reed was a good San Jose mayor. Pat Dando was a good city council member. So that's three.

This is being driven by SEIU-UHW, not politicians. Most politicians in the state are vocally against this. It's amazing, the union found a tax even union-funded Californian politicians think is too much. That's quite an achievement.

It's also blatantly self-serving. Tax billionaires to fund a health care program which will hire...well how 'bout that, the union which sponsored it!

TBH, I haven't really followed the proposal. Are they suggesting creating a new health care system? That seems wasteful, we have plenty of existing programs. And we don't typically use the endowment approach, where a program has an investment fund which provides ongoing income. Well, except state pension funds, which are massively underwater right now so that's not a great model to follow.

Anyway, the numbers don't work. The proponents say the tax will raise $100 billion. Invested wisely, that's $5 to $10 billion in income a year. The state budget is something like $350 billion so this is a drop in the bucket. It's not a compelling argument.