ghein

No controls for any other industry - if you want an H1b, bid.

So anyone who desperately needs someone on a visa can get them. Low-end body shops go away and a bunch of industries that are being cheap don't get their visas. This is called a good thing.

There are many sectors where hiring managers want degrees and other certifications and pay minimum wage or damn close. Then they complain about worker shortages.

This is all solved by higher pay and better conditions, but people want to bring in indentured servants as it's easier. As someone who has run businesses and bootstrapped, that's utter BS.

I'm appalled at the lack of ethics in civil and mechanical engineering!

Automotive engineers willfully destroyed opportunity for stablehands, whip manufacturers, and train conductors out of hundreds of other occupations annihilated.

Civil engineers with their oriented strand board trusses, reinforced concrete, and dimensional lumber stole the livelihoods of masons, carpenters, foresters and so many more.

Engineers have centuries of unethical practice to atone for. They need to stop their work because everything that they do is harmful and unethical!

Sometimes you catch a spy, fire them, and have them arrested.

Sometimes you identify, feed them false information, and watch who they talk to...

Sometimes you screw up.

There can be good reasons for GE/FBI/CIA to let a spy keep their job.

The reward function was horrible!

You need good sightlines for the kids, room for desks, and need to ensure kids aren't isolated in a corner. Plus light (not just to a small courtyard), ability to escape in case of fire or other emergency!!!!!!! and for minimal noise intrusion from other classrooms.

Minimal space and building material are just not the right constraints and speak to absolute ignorance of the actual problem on the part of the designer.

It all comes down to how explicitly preferences are originally understood and then if the reward function can incorporate implicit analysis.

There have been recent studies about AI powered shirt design - the original input uses existing designs in terms of color and shape rather than the basic naive description of requirements that an engineer would give. Then the designs can be assessed by a review board or put up on a site and not produced until some n quantity of purchases.

You wouldn't try to detect cats in images without labelled data why would you try something MUCH harder without labelled data?!?!?!?!?!

The proposal was fine and jail for repeat offences, now it's been kicked to "review".

Like Seattle's job tax once you get serious attention on something, not to mention the teeming hordes of trial lawyers drooling at the opportunity to sue Santa Barbara Council for ADA violations, the idea is going to die a quick death.

They would have gotten away with it without all those people blowing it out of proportion...

Many pensions have ambitious assumptions of 7 or 8% annual returns.

S&P went from 1565 Oct 07 2007 to 735.09 Feb 27 2009.

We're now up to 2818 but if we had delivered 8% since october 07 we'd be at 3649 by this Oct 5. So we're 28% short!

If you use S&P peak in 2000 it's 1552 and to deliver 8% since then we'd need to be at 6209!!!

Catching back up to steady state growth, especially after a 50% loss, is unfathomably hard!

What makes it worse is that the present value of obligations skyrocketed as interest rates went to 0. In 07 the Fed Funds rate was 4.5% and it's currently 2%. This rate was 0.25% until the end of 2015. For a payout of $50k per year for 10 years, ten years in the future, the present value is $481,031 at 0.25%, $368,442 at 2%, and $254,761 at 4.5%.

So the current obligation is 44% higher than it was in 07 and the amount of money is 28% lower than expected. And this is AFTER the S&P has had an incredible run from 735 to 2818!

Well said!

Too many critics focus on pure dollar optimizing rather than value optimizing. We all have different value maximization functions - if you understand that dollars are just one type of value so called irrational behaviour is coldly rational. Dynamic time preferences for money are accepted but dynamic preference functions for other things (status, sense of self, stress level..) are ignored.

The second part of your analogy is off.

It's not billiard physics to general relativity, it's billiard physics to fluid dynamics and predicting the exact route of a stick through a set of rapids.

In economics our biggest complaints are around failure to determine that we're near a singularity and failure to predict behaviour through singularities (in a signal processing sense). It's understandable, as we all strongly care about the path of the stick, yet still unreasonable.

Macro is a decent enough tool most of the time, as are traditional fluid mechanics approaches. What we don't have are ultra precise CFD tools but in our arguments we act like we should/do. Sometimes traders think that they do have a great CFD solution and that's how we get LTCM crashes!

This is exactly why people have been screaming about this problem for a couple of decades.

It is going to be HUGE and do incredible damage. Retirees will be hurt catastrophically, costs of government borrowing will skyrocket, programs will be cut massively, workers will abandon government.

The issue is that the costs of meeting the prior obligations will be completely impossible. States, cities, and school districts will go bankrupt, massive numbers of people will be fired, and taxes will go up while service goes down.

Unfortunately the politics prevent a fix today and prevented a fix 10 or 20 years ago when it would have been much cheaper. The fix will happen in 10 to 20 years and it's going to be horrific.

A major problem is that this is a case of I'll be gone, you'll be gone.

The union leaders and the politicians - typically in their 50 to 70s - who made the promises will be dead by the time the 25 year old new hires try to collect their pensions at 55 or 65. The incentives are all sorts of screwed up and it's very difficult to create a healthy set of constraints for this kind of bargaining.

The guarantees - constitutional in some states - are what will cause the problem to be bigger.

When you can't resolve unsustainable debt without bankruptcy, then you will go bankrupt and credit rating be damned.

Detroit, Chicago, Illinois are just warm ups for the big battles over the next few decades.

There are political choices behind the decline in infrastructure.

It costs NYC $2.1B per mile to build the Second Ave subway while in Europe it costs $200-500M per mile. There's California High Speed Rail, and then there's just the cost to build a condo in San Francisco (see the "historic" laundromat in The Mission).

You have interlocking legislation, many reasons and opportunities to sue, esoteric work rules. Regardless of the validity of each element the structure as a whole is patently absurd and abhorrent.

Then you have government spending. A university does not need much beyond some blackboards and some professors to teach most everything from Philosophy to French to Advanced Data Structures to Topology. Certain PhDs need more equipment but essentially all the expensive equipment should be paid for by research grants or contracts.

Over the past decades more and more classes are taught by adjuncts at Starbucks level wages. Meanwhile the percentage of staff and spending on administrative functions has climbed dramatically. Adjusting for inflation, from 1947 to 1995, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent. Instructional spending, by contrast, increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase.

Obama promised to invest in "shovel ready jobs". There was a backlash because so much money was being spent on construction and thus, due to the current makeup of construction workers, the vast majority of money would go to men. Spending was adjusted to include other projects so that the gender balance of spending would be more palatable.

So to get $1 in new infrastructure spending you need an additional $1 in net new other government services. Or possibly much more than $1, depending on the various worker populations. This in an environment where you're getting only 25% to 10% of your initial money's worth.

So $1 in net new infrastructure costs $20 or more.

When you're designing or building some things you are just GOING to kill people.

The right decision in designing a car (centre of gravity, stopping distance, thickness of gas tank) WILL kill many people.

Incompetence killing people is one thing (bad spec for o-rings, Therac 25 programming leading to massive radiation dose) but in some programming domains you just are going to make decisions that end badly. If you make the right decisions you'll kill fewer people than the alternative but still some are going to die.