No, Musk has not just been lucky. He founded three companies which came to be valued over a billion dollars, each in a different industry; this is more than luck.
Which three? Cause Tesla wasn't founded by him, neither was Twitter.
Readit Newswtdo commented on Toxic Origins, Toxic Decisions: Biases in CEO Selection papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pape... · Posted by u/marojejian
wtdo commented on How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate le.ac.uk/hi/polyptyques/c... · Posted by u/hnmullany
and in addition let him be punished by whipping according to the law, except in the case of murder or arson, for which a fine may be exacted.
Punishment for killing someone was only a fine? Dark Ages indeed.
I'm not sure, but it may be referencing the old Germanic weregild.
wtdo commented on Special filters in glasses can help the color blind see colors better phys.org/news/2020-07-spe... · Posted by u/pseudolus
>This makes me wonder if some new colorblindness glasses manufacturer is planting "viral" content.
This is it. Last couple of rounds of these "magic glasses" have also followed the same pattern, trying to prey on colourblind people's loved ones to buy them these expensive glasses. Everything I've read from people who've actually tried this says they're underwhelming, they work by blocking some of the spectrum around where you have issues (for instance I'm Red/Green so I have issues around those colours but especially browns and purple) so you can distinguish differences more clearly.
They do NOT let you see more colours magically, just distiguish the now reduced colour set better.
I'd love nothing more than some magical solution to cure my colourblindness, when I was a kid up till I was 15 (I got diagnosed really late) my top three careers were Astronaut, Military Pilot and Commerical pilot, if anyone remembers that one scene in Little Miss Sunshine that was very close to my reality. Unforutnatly until we start replacing eyeballs somehow it just doesn't exist.
tl;dr don't buy these, they're trying to use your impulse to do something nice for someone against you.
I'll second your recommendation to not buy these glasses. However, you don't need a miracle or replacement eyeballs. Gene therapy has already been shown to work to cure color blindness. Dr. William Hauswirth at the University of Washington did that in monkeys back in 2009, and currently has a grant to trial a gene therapy to cure achromatopsia in humans, though I have no idea how that is going. I'd guess color blindness will be curable in my lifetime.
wtdo commented on Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures npr.org/2020/05/29/863804... · Posted by u/hhs
I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate.
And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.
Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.
Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).
Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.
No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.
Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.
I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.
There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.
wtdo commented on Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures npr.org/2020/05/29/863804... · Posted by u/hhs
While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the College? Or administrators that manage grants? Or administrators of admissions, or athletics, title IX, or school of medicine?
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
Same as when people say "government should stop spending on useless things, government should be smaller and trim the fat / pork barrel spending". Yeah of course when you put it that way, who wouldn't agree with that. But when you get specific, "government should reduce veteran's benefits, national parks, border security, obesity research, food stamps, etc." well that's when it's not so easy.
This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college? Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant?
wtdo commented on How the coronavirus is driving new surveillance programs globally onezero.medium.com/the-pa... · Posted by u/walterbell
> I wonder if it’s worth governments’ time trying to come up with automatically expiring bills for “emergency” uses such as these.
The Patriot Act has a sunset clause, but has been repeatedly extended, which no obvious sign of it ever not being extended.
The ability to change laws makes it easier for government's to sell these sorts of changes to their constituents ("it's only temporary") whilst knowing that it probably won't turn out to actually be temporary, because they can change something that is temporary into effectively permanent.
That can be fixed by making sunset clauses automatically require a few things:
1. Must be voted on alone. That is, no sneaking it into another bill, or into the budget votes.
2. Each renewal requires a higher percentage of yes votes than the last time until 100% is required. To my recollection, there's never been a time when the Patriot Act received 100% approval.
wtdo commented on Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study blogs.ei.columbia.edu/202... · Posted by u/signa11
I recently posted a link to Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture”, which is available to borrow digitally on the archive.org [1]
One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It’s usually one of the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city — even a whole region.
The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.
This is because too much water can cause it’s own set of problems, and the flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.
What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non-destructive way, through “swales” (winding excavations that slow the water as it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges, sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.
There’s lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of what we’re given every year.
1: https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up
I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.
wtdo commented on Bootstrap v5: drop Internet Explorer support github.com/twbs/bootstrap... · Posted by u/zaiste
I had to support IE6 until 2012 because a certain company didn't upgrade their workstations...
In 2015 I was writing a brand new web frontend for IE 5.5 on a mobile device with something like 240x360 screen dimensions (I forget the details now) for one of the most valuable companies in the world. We had complete control over the devices the users used (the company gave the users those devices). Admittedly, plans were in place to upgrade those devices, but it was still a fair bit out. I left before that happened.
> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.
It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
The swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.
wtdo commented on How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down npr.org/sections/goatsand... · Posted by u/mmhsieh
Cloth masks may be counter productive
That is not what that study says. Yes, cloth masks are not as effective as medical masks. But the study does not compare cloth masks with no masks. The three groups in the study are:
> medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing).
Yes, the cloth mask group had more infections than the medical mask group and the control group. But the control group included wearing masks as usual. It does NOT say cloth masks are less effective than nothing. "No mask" was not studied. Cloth masks might be less effective than wearing no mask (I personally doubt that), but this study didn't say anything about that hypothesis.