covidacct

Don't rally around anti-corruption. Rally around accountability, oversight, openness, and balances of power.

Doing things right is harder than calling out others for doing things wrong, and plenty of horrible corrupt people are all too happy to call out wrong-doers. Support people who do things right, not people who complain about others doing things wrong.

The substantive conjecture behind his tautology is about the economics and business model of SDC-as-ridesharing. Seems like a moot point to me. A working SDC will be enormously profitable regardless of whether the company that builds it gets to own the platform. Plus, the big auto cos might be able to afford to not win the SDC race, but they certainly can't afford to not even play the game. A lot of the money spent on SDCs is seen as hedging, not as serious plays.

Is the instructor an ad junct? Those are cheap and replaceable. They make maybe ~1/10th of what your average FAANG engineer makes because the labor supply is extraordinarily over-saturated. Enough complaints will probably get them fired, if that's what you're looking for, but realize you're probably putting someone with no prospects and no savings out on the street and they will almost certainly be replaced with someone who gives about as many shits as you can expect from someone with a PhD who makes 30k a year. That tuition you're paying isn't flowing to the people teaching the courses.

If the instructor is an actual professor, then probably there's nothing you can do.

BTW, let your kid at least try their hand at navigating this on their own, even if you provide oversight. Barely competent people doing a poor job is not unique to pandemic times and is definitely not unique to higher ed. Knowing how to use a bureaucracy to route around an incompetent person not doing their job well is a valuable life skill. Plus, everyone involved is going to be more sympathetic to an articulate student than to a "helicopter parent".

This is only true at the very beginning of a smoker's habit.

I know a lot of smokers. Exactly zero of them are "willing" to trade the cost for the benefit, for any meaningful definition of "willing".

Addiction is hard. Many addicts rationalize, but few truly "choose".

That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.

If oil consumption enters extreme secular decline and SA doesn't transition to solar, then SA will be a horrendously poor country powered by oil.

If oil consumption enters extreme secular decline and SA does transition to solar, then SA will be a horrendously poor country powered by solar.

That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.

Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets

What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.

For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.

Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.

One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.

Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.

None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.