mike_n

Similar situation. I ended up paying a few bucks for an extension/guest access pass at the local university. I just started auditing lectures in any and all departments, 20+ hrs/week for a few semesters. Eventually I found myself getting really interested in one subject, took all the classes available, and that's what I decided to do for career 2.0

Wouldn't it be prudent for them to ask for 11 fabs in 11 states, and get 11x more politicians lobbying for them?

Is there a set of standard open-source textbooks for k-12 levels? If not, can we make it happen?

Boudin is junk, no local would eat there. there are so many better local bakeries. Gharardelli, Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf, and Union Square are touristy. There's nothing you can't buy there that you can't find online.

Do bring a jacket so you don't end up surprised by the weather.

Alcatraz and Chinatown and Golden Gate Park are interesting/pretty enough.

Better ideas... Eat some dim sum or a burrito. Rent a car and go to Muir Woods. or kayak and oysters in Pt Reyes. Or wander around Stanford/Cal campus. or drive to Yosemite or Tahoe. or go wine tasting and inner tubing in Guerneville. Or find a concert (jambase, songkick...) or baseball game. or take the ferry to sausalito or angel island. or Exploratorium or MoMA or other museum. or aquarium in Monterey and beach in Carmel. or go to the exploratorium. or try the Church of John Coltrane. or the Church of 8 Wheels. go sailing. lots of world-class dinner options. find random happenings on funcheapsf. etc.

Just don't go to those touristy places, yuk.

Source - am local yokel.

it does seem very plausible that undetected cases are several times higher than confirmed/symptomatic cases. and/or, perhaps when things start to spike locally people begin to take it seriously and change their behavior a bit -- distancing/masks were not very common in the Dakotas before the post-Sturgis wave.

I worked for a solar co in the US for a while, 10yrs ago or so. It was a very interesting time, the hardware (solar panels, inverters) part of our Cost of Goods Sold fell considerably over the course of a few years. I'll suggest a few reasons, as I saw them: 1) Larger-scale, fully-automated manufacturing facilities were coming online. Some mfrs were reputable and high-quality, some not so much. But the abundance of supply caused these vendors to compete for business on price/warranty/etc terms, which drove down our cost to build systems. 2) Lots of developers were also bidding for projects, and utilities forced solar/wind developers to compete to offer lower prices for their power. 3) Government/utility subsidies helped get manufacturing facilities up and running, and made marginal projects more affordable to build/buy. Some incentive programs were well-designed, some were not. The markets that offered the best total return to investors got done first -- the lowest-hanging fruit for solar was in areas with relatively good sun, expensive grid power, and perhaps some extra tax/etc subsidies. Same idea for wind (or any infrastructure or real estate investment, really). 4) Attractive project margins encouraged lots of developers to enter the market, which increased competition and resulted in innovation in business models and processes. 5) Manufacturers scaled up further to satisfy increased demand, resulting in lower hardware costs. 6) Larger investors started angling for a slice of the action. VCs were looking for unicorns, MBA students were looking for jobs. Bankers wanted to make loans and do IPO/M+A work. Big renewable projects/portfolios of >$100M are pretty much the minimum interesting size deal for big project financiers, small deals don't move the needle for them. In fact, if you can put $1B+ to work in a responsible manner, that's even better. Banks are risk averse and renewables were a new/unproven (and thus risky) asset class, and in the early days it was hard to get any sort of financing, at any rate. As more projects demonstrated good ROI, more banks did the work to understand the (hardware/warranty/operational/etc) risks and became willing to lend in this sector. The IRS issued clear guidance on some tax issues which further reduced uncertainty (=risk) for would-be investors. As more financiers entered the market, they competed for deals and the cost of capital for high-quality developers/borrowers fell by several %. 7) Over time, the subsidy programs faded away, but (as intended) during that time hardware costs fell considerably. As developers got more experience, they also got better at reducing ancillary costs (sales, development, legal, etc).

And so it goes, a nice virtuous cycle of competition, some subsidies to help a nascent industry, decent deal economics for investors and early adopters, and manufacturing scale-up.

I'm sure they have plenty of other data points to help them get a pretty good idea of who the phone belongs to

I'm sure the data is still there on a server somewhere for legal/marketing reasons, but now the show_history_to_user field is just set to FALSE.

One reads stories of pork/etc carcasses that aren't being processed right now, perhaps we could ship those onto barges and into the ocean and dump them overboard to seed new pockets of offshore life on the sea floor.

Perhaps they can retool and crank out ventilator/etc parts

Do human doctors have a better rate? And at what cost/throughput?

And with the other hand... unzips

Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, and churn them out by the billion.

I'd wager a large percentage have ;)

it can be mind-bending for sure, it's hard to describe. You might have profound ideas, or not, it's hard to predict; and not all of these will seem so profound when sober the next day. It does seem to increase one's senses of curiosity and wonder and open-mindedness. You might also get new focus/energy/direction/ideas about your passions and life trajectory generally. art/music/nature are enhanced as well.

it almost certainly won't make you an overnight savant (speaking a new language, factoring 4096-bit numbers in your head). but if you're already good at something (musical instrument, painting, engineering/programming, etc) and you are able to spend a bit of your trip thinking hard about a problem you are trying to solve in that domain, you might indeed have some new perspective on the matter. Visualizing abstract CS/math-y things (data structures, networks, algorithms, linear algebra, etc) is great fun. Good luck!

Smile, relax, and remember that you are great.