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I can confirm. The most relevant other contributors are dead but even then Francis is the most deserving.

The biggest challenge is finding ice without dust layers from historical volcanic activity, and the South Pole is particularly clean because of it's remoteness as well as the prevailing wind directions. There is, however, one big dust layer that causes signal distortion.

Even the scaled score is not that informative (and perhaps crosses the line on age discrimination) because for older workers the population of people taking the SAT was much smaller as a percentage of high school grads (and presumably weighted towards higher IQs). It's also why there were so many fewer perfect SAT scores -- smaller population in the bell curve.

In some states (California being one) the original mortgage on a house purchase is non-recourse. This means that the bank cannot come after your personal assets in the event of default. Yes your credit gets dinged but the leverage of a home loan is fundamentally different than a margin loan in the stock market.

Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).

Phish gives people a code that lets them access the show they attend on livephish.com without a subscription. You can subscribe and get access to all of the shows. I think livephish.com is run by and/or shares the same platform as nugs.net but it's a different subscription.

We rarely discuss the primary source of health care cost differences in the United States -- US doctors get paid a lot more than elsewhere. I haven't seen a credible proposal to address that. Most of the salary difference can be blamed on deliberately created shortages of doctors in many specialities. Not enough medical school slots (horror stories among my kid's friends of not getting accepted) and then also shortages of residencies that allow foreign trained doctors to work in the US. The only change in recent memory is replacing some primary care physician services with nurse practitioners.

One of the issues the article doesn't mention is that these houses are effectively cheaper to purchase for corporate owners. Generally they can borrow money at a lower rate, but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant. Effectively they are redirecting money that would be paid in taxes into the payments on the new purchase.

It does. I have a Ford CMax from 2014. For years, when the SiriusXM radio software update would happen it would get stuck downloading. The geniuses at Ford decided the update should continue trying to complete even if the car was turned off. So once the download got stuck, it would completely drain my battery every single time. I'd rather have a car that moves that the latest SiriusXM update in my radio. The only fix was to pull the fuse if you noticed that it was happening.

There is a half cent sales tax in BART counties, 75% of which goes to BART.

If I am reading this correctly, Google is now required to syndicate their search text ads to "Qualified Competitors." This is important as it will allow companies to monetize AI answers and other search replacements without needing to completely build a corresponding search ad marketplace. The search ad marketplace is a somewhat natural monopoly where the revenue per auction actually grows with the number of auctions so a second search ad marketplace could never develop on its own.

It's already almost happened with Plenty of Fish. Mostly a one person company, acquired for over $500M.

Estate tax valuations of assets should be made public, particularly the taxed value of professional sports franchises. We know that NFL teams are worth $6+ billion dollars, and seeing the billionaire owner families pay tax on 1/10th of that might infuriate voters enough to demand reform.