Readit NewsJust seems very hard to believe a project as massive as a whole new airplane is the best solution to this problem.
The town in question (Salisbury, MA) is built on a narrow strip of land between a marsh and the ocean. Mostly between 2 and 5 houses wide. Doesn't seem like you need a geology PhD to determine you're going to have some erosion problems here.
As best I could determine, the beach replenishment in question was from access points 5 - 11, which covers 1.6 miles and about 150 homes. If I'm right on that, they put down enough sand to extend the beach 3-7 feet[0]. So the first thing to note is that this was a very small beach replenishment project. The senator is probably right that they should go bigger next time.
The cost per home for that would have come out to about $3333.33. Honestly, even if you triple it and do it every year, I don't find that to be an unreasonable expense to impose on owners of $1-5 million houses built on a sand dune. These guys need to quit whining and raise their _local_ taxes the relatively modest amount necessary to preserve their town. Something like $5k/year for beachfront and $1k/year for the rest would get the job done.
[0] This is assuming a constant slope to the beach. The low end is extending at 3 feet above sea level, the high end is extending at 6 feet above sea level.
So in essence the implied cause and effect here for most people reading this headline (intermittent fasting causes cardiovascular death) is actually backwards: (people who are unhealthy are more likely to initiate an IF diet).
Reminds me of the story around diet soda. Some initial association studies found that there was an association between diet soda and several negative health outcomes but upon further investigation the evidence seems to be that it does not cause them.
"Factors that may also play a role in health, outside of daily duration of eating and cause of death, were not included in the analysis."
They set their own hours; overtime pay would odd, but perhaps too many hours should be banned on safety grounds. They bring their own equipment. They owe no particular allegiance to an “employer” like Uber or Lyft (and can work for more than one of them at once!). Even family leave would be somewhat odd, at least in the way that family leave works in the US.
But, in the US, this results is a problem: they are low-paid contractors, and contractors don’t get certain critical employment benefits (automatically tax-deductible health care at group rates is the big one), and the result is extremely problematic.
Perhaps a much better solution would be to let drivers be contractors but to fix the benefit situation. Insurance should not be tied to employment! I, as as independent contractor, should be able (or required) to purchase (or have provided to me by the state) insurance under identical terms to those that employees benefit from. In fact, changing jobs or taking a break from work should have no effect on my insurance plan or the taxation thereof! Contractors should be eligible for Medicare and Social Security just like employees. And perhaps family leave should even be a state benefit: after all, the presence of children benefits society and the state (future labor and tax revenue, not to mention that children are nice to have around), and this benefit does not depend on whether the parents are employees, college students, low-paid contractors or high-paid contractors.
With all of that fixed, allowing people to put miles on their car to provide a useful service for not-amazing contractor pay doesn’t actually seem so bad to me.
The health insurance situation is not great, but it's available through Obamacare. In my experience the actual cost is not much worse than employer provided, but the true cost is often subsidized, so employees don't always realize how much salary they are giving up for health insurance.
No eligibility for unemployment or workers comp though.
They're wanting to spend $20 million on installing plus another $10 million 'earmarked'. Not much in the grand scheme of things but someone somewhere has convinced people it'll be worth the cost.
If they could invent a fast food menu display that stays still and doesn't really break down so I can see what the menu actually is when I'm waiting to order that would be great. Oh, wait...
'enhance customer and crew experience' - Neither customers nor crew like it when the restaurant is busy enough that the line gets long. By making it more expensive to eat at peak times and less expensive to eat at off peak times, they think they can smooth out the demand schedule. Of course whether that's a net positive to any given consumer depends on their relative preferences on meal time, wait time, and meal cost. But the potential is there at least. On the crew side, a smoother demand schedule means they can either schedule fewer people on longer shifts, or if they keep schedules the same reduce the amount of "crunch time" during each shift.
I don't see how "it would take to much work updating today's programs". Most domain specific models call out to Gurobi, CPLEX, or FICO solvers for large problems, and open source ones like SCIP for the small ones. There is a standard MPS format where you can run exchange models between all of these solvers, and the formulation of the problem shouldn't change, just the solving approach inside the solver.
Can someone enlighten me? I could see if they are arguing, this will require a new implementation, and if so, there is a ton of benefit the world would see from doing so.
From some of your other replies it looks to me like you're confusing that with an improved bound on the value of the solution itself.
It's a little unclear to me whether this is even a new solution algorithm, or just a better bound on the run time of an existing algorithm.
I will say I agree with you that I don't buy the reason given for the lack of practical impact. If there was a breakthrough in practical solver performance people would migrate to a new solver over time. There's either no practical impact of this work, or the follow on work to turn the mathematical insights here into a working solver just haven't been done yet.
AFAIK, discontinuous first derivative per se may act as a seed to an oscillation due to its high frequency content that are not captured by any finite resolution algorithm (n.b. Gibbs phenomenon). But it is Crank-Nicolson that characteristically creates these oscillatory problems -- in other words, there are algorithms that can gracefully handle the discontinuity without creating oscillation.
Given the exercise boundary, the American Option Price can be written exactly as a one-dimensional integral. That is the key insight to this superior method.
There are two numerically painful parts of the problem: the advection term and the oscillation inducing terminal condition (because it has a discontiuous derivative). I like to deal with advection by transforming the equation to an advection free equation. I'm under NDA on the best solution to the oscillatory terminal condition so I can't give that one away unfortunately.