100% agreed. The moment I saw the “revised” syntax I had a real “what were they thinking” moment. You’re supposed to take the good parts of a good thing and add it to a bad thing, not the other way around!
Really, OCaml’s syntax is beautiful, unless you’re one of those people who loves to show off how adept they are at typing matching braces, parentheses, commas, and semicolons. Writing a little lambda in C++ is an impressive display of manual dexterity… [&](…,…){… return …; }; Who would rather write that than let f x y = … in?
The only way I’d improve OCaml syntax would be to add something like python style list comprehension.
This 100%. McMaster quietly perfected e-commerce at some point, and because we’re live in a fallen world, nobody decided to follow their lead. If only we could convince McMaster to sell toilet paper and cereal…
I don’t see how tariffs magically create wealth for foreign exporters that translates into higher wages. Let’s say I can buy a $10 shirt from Lesotho with zero tariff. Now a 50% tariff gets imposed. I can either eat the tariff and pay $15, in which case Lesotho still gets their $10, or Lesotho can eat the tariff to keep their exports competitive, in which case Lesotho now makes $5.
The part about giving a competitive advantage to local producers is true, though…
for countries that pay a worker $10 a day, put a tariff on the goods produced by that worker to total $10
for countries that pay a worker $15 dollars a day put a tariff on the goods produced by that work to total $4
therefore someone importing goods produced by one worker in one day from the lower wage country would spend $20 for the goods from the lower wage country but only $19 for the goods for the higher wage country giving a competitive advantage for higher wages
obviously that is a simplistic example but that's what i mean using tariffs to incentivize better behavior and level the playing field so the most exploitation doesn't make the most money
If the shirt costs $10 in labor, and the pre-tariff wholesale price is also $10, how does the manufacturer make a profit? Surely the wholesale price would at least include some markup for profit? So like $10 labor + $3 markup (per employee-day) + $10 tariff ($23) contrasted with $15 labor + $3 markup + $4 tariff ($22), in your scenario.
But now you see that the low wage manufacturer has a third option, $10 labor + $1 markup + 10 tariff ($21), which would maintain their competitive advantage and in this scenario only cut their daily per employee profit by $2, as opposed to the $5 hit they would suffer by raising their employee wages to $15 day from $10.
What I'm saying is set a minimum wage on imports. Set a global minimum wage. Anyone importing something from somewhere that doesn't meet that minimum wage would have to pay a tariff greater than the amount saved with low wages.
The goal is to increase competition and improve fairness between locations. You wouldn't want to do it all at once at first, rather a gradual increase. You wouldn't want to distort the local economy too much so don't insist somewhere pay 10x the median local wage. Lots of things you would do which are more complex with an eye for fairness and competitiveness and definitely not trying to raise everyone by force to American levels of wages, but always measured amounts of
pressure.
That’s a nice idea, but I’m skeptical—where is the new wealth coming from that will allow Lesotho to pay its workers more? It’s not an issue of strong-arming some bad guys in Lesotho to pay their workers more using tariffs as a negotiation tool.
I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.
It's coming from the people who buy the exported goods.
This would mean, of course, that the people who happen to work for an export-oriented factory become much more wealthy than most people in Lesotho. So you might reasonably wonder whether it's better to make twice as many workers half as wealthy. Labor advocates believe the answer is no: paying some people genuinely good wages both creates and encourages further development, while paying a larger number of people "good enough" wages encourages poor countries to race to the bottom competing for the lowest standard of "good enough".
It's clearly not protectionism, because you wouldn't put tariffs on everything - including all the raw materials and parts you need to import, if you wanted your local industries to succeed. And you'd have a coherent industrial policy to go along with it.
Protectionism is France and England putting tariffs on each others cheese. America putting tariffs on Canadian lumber.
Putting tariffs on places that have a 20x factor difference in wages is something else.
And protectionism isn't necessarily a dirty word. It's often valuable to save your local industries from being wiped out and to not have a foreign country have complete control of a necessity.
Such a tarrif on low wage countries would prevent the exploitation of low wage countries. Because any county could easily 'defeat' the tarrif by setting a minimum wage.
It doesn't help raise the people being exploited out of poverty. But it does prevent countries from getting stuck in a cycle of depending on low wage labor.
Whether that works out better for the exploited is uncertain. But the alternative argument is effectively "these poor countries should be happy to let themselves be exploited" it is their only way out of poverty. And that really doesn't sit right with me.
This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.
The problem is that if the law is arguably unethical or arbitrary, you're going to catch more "good" people in it. My comment was not so much a defense of Ross as it was an accusation against unjust drug law.
Imagine a hypothetical law which arrests anyone who trades in red shirts. Someone comes along and doesn't see what the big deal is and decides to trade in these shirts on the black market. Lives are saved because it is impossible to get shot at while paying for red shirts over the Internet instead of in person. Then the dude who ran the red shirt marketplace and seems like an opportunistic idealist gets locked up with the key thrown away.
Anyway, it is arguable that the Silk Road saved lives, given that black markets are persistent regardless of legality.
Seriously, that was pretty blatant "he was one of the good guys like me and so the law shouldn't really punish him, not like one of those other people with different value that should be punished to the full extent."
I mean there's a legal concept of motivation. A murder is sentenced very differently if it's premeditated, or not.
The idea of looking at someone's motivations to determine their sentencing is critical to our legal system - otherwise important defences like the "Battered Wife Defence" wouldn't work.
I think most of us can also see a difference between a poor person stealing some gloves to stay warm in the winter and a rich person stealing those same gloves for the thrill. The only difference here is you don't like the fact that Ulbricht's motivations were more high minded than your average crack pusher (cough CIA cough) - the judge didn't either - in fact he sentenced him harder for it to make an example of him.
Exercise can supposedly help outcomes for some types of cancer—-I wonder whether the mechanism is similar to that of fasting. The supposed mechanism AIUI is that exercise makes less glucose available to the tumor. Podcast with more info here: https://overcast.fm/+6j6rLbfGM
My first reaction to this news was, “fine, sounds like a silly requirement.” However, being a PhD graduate from a minority background, I really have to thank my advisor for the undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a PhD and a great research career. I don’t know what motivated him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, if professors know that performing such duties helps them get promoted, perhaps it’s not a bad policy, as long as inequities exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.
I think this is a good point. I wonder how useful diversity statements are for accomplishing this task. It just seems like cheap talk to me. More useful would be to reward people in tenure review for outreach to minorities.
I’m from a minority, just not one that is recognized as such in the convoluted system that is racial politics in the US (I am of Iraqi descent). But if I were in the shoes of someone who should be benefiting from DEI policies, I’d be pissed off with how it’s shaken out. Seems like a whole lot of empty, performative symbolism with negligible actual change. Things like DEI statements read like box ticking to me, allowing administrators to say they’ve “tried” without doing anything. Same goes for sensitivity trainings, and flashy renaming of, for example, master to main. The singular focus on symbolism has not done anyone any favors apart from a few semiotics professors, although I wonder if they’ve been chastened by how little their favored policies have accomplished.
I once helped my advisor write a grant application and he put in some great outreach stuff in the DEI section of the app. What turns me cynical about DEI statements/sections is that after we won the grant, there was no money for that inclusion programming and nobody ever checked whether we'd really done it.
It’s similar to making everyone sort their recycling, and then just throwing it all in the same landfill when it actually gets to the dump.
Why not actually recycle?
And/or if we’re not going to actually recycle, why make everyone go through such a complicated song and dance and spend so much time on something that ends up not mattering?
Wait, this is a lot more applicable of an analogy than I was expecting.
It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not just professors from historically-underrepresented groups, who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.
This comment does not make sense in reply to this question...where did they say anything about evaluation, the point they made is the difference it made is their advisor doing outreach.
No it's not on an individual basis, outreach work means something more like the professor talked to a group of students about their work and what they can do to join their lab for a phd. There are lots and lots of undergrads who don't know a thing about graduate school.
they very well might have been evaluated based entirely on their abilities alone.
A toxic element of DEI is that now they have to always wonder (as does everyone else) if it was done because of their skin color/gender/race, regardless of what their mentor says. Because it very well may be true as well.
Just like the justice system. People should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. DEI and more broadly CRT are toxic because minorities, like all humans have faults and these ideas promote minorities to assume discrimination instead of faults. Therefore not helping these individuals improve their faults. This also promotes division and hatred in society. Overall net negative.
I happen not to agree with them, but leaving that aside they're often that Ok fine, it's a pipeline problem^, but the solution is to address that at every stage, not just the beginning.
(^meaning for example schoolgirls aren't sufficiently interested and encouraged into STEM so university applications are low, so admissions are low, so graduations are low, so job applications are low, so offers are low, so employer gender ratios are low)
STEM is something you gotta have some substantial internal motivation to do, such as doing it for a hobby. The kind of work I enjoy, you gotta really like it or it isn't going to work out for you.
For example, I was taking machines apart when I was 7 trying to figure out how they worked. I'd break open resistors to see what was inside - just baffling grey dust. Eventually I took bicycles apart, then engines, then whole cars. It was just foregone that I was going to engineering school.
I get very little joy from programming. I never program outside of work - I hike, climb, work on my house, raise my kids. But it pays the bills and I can do it, so I've put in the time to learn enough to be worth paying a salary.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then I wanted to be a smoke jumper. Now I'm a staff engineer.
Not everyone gets to do what they love. Some of us are just following the money.
Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade.
The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.
> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.
Pretty much all the ones I know that are good at it love it. Just like musicians and athletes.
Sure, there are those in it for the money. They're usually the tweeners.
> Nowadays college students are much more practical.
I'm not so sure about that. There's a large number of math avoiders in college, and when they graduate discover their degree is worth a minimum wage job.
Okay but the difference is that being a mediocre athlete or musician means that you're unemployed, whereas you can be a totally mediocre programmer and make well into the 6 figures. My friends who are professional musicians know far more about their craft than even the most motivated engineers I've worked with, and they make less money than the worst paid engineers I've met. I've casually played guitar for almost 20 years and been programming less than half that time ane I can't even think about going pro without a massive dedicated effort.
Ha ha ha. I have a CS PhD and am friends with grad students in many other STEM fields. There are just as many who are "passionate", or whatever geeky losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called, as there are people who are working on their degree for the sake of practicality. I would say the latter are in fact generally more successful.
As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks. It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.
The extra cost is just passed on to the consumer, and you gain predictability and managerial prestige.
As an example, Amazon had twice as many people working just on Alexa as there are employees total at JPL. And JPL designs, engineers, builds and operates dozens of groundbreaking spacecraft, including several space telescopes, Mars rovers, and the Voyager programme. JPL needs people with substantial internal motivation, Amazon et al. do not.
> As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks.
I see no purposeful force "shaping" this.
> It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.
They would hire the one brilliant person if they could. The trouble is finding them.
Also, brilliant is not the same thing as enjoying the work.
Maybe put some value and engage with someone's articulation of their personal experience as opposed to simply dismissing it because it does not comport with your world view.
Not to be flippant but the saying "when you're robbing peter to pay paul, you can always count on the support of paul" comes to mind. Maybe you really are a super qualified researcher that is doing great work, but all I see as the result of this DEI stuff is sinecures and make work jobs and generally lower standards across the board. (e.g. the former harvard president, or the current press secretary)
I dont think anyone would have a problem with DEI if it was about identifying unrecognized talent and making sure it got the proper attention. Thats not what it is right now.
It's not about treating students differently. Rather it's about where you spend your limited resources for outreach.
For example, during my PhD I did outreach in both elementary and middle schools where teachers said there were skills gaps they needed help with. The demographics in some of those schools happened to be such that 80-90% of the students were black and brown.
That's not really DEI. That's just targeting schools with skills gaps, and it might have turned out to be mostly white. To be DEI, they'd have to be chosen because of ethnicity, gender, etc.
DEI is applied broadly, for example here's a list of demographics targeted for DEI from one of Biden's executive orders [1]:
The initiative will advance opportunity for communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including: people of color; women; first-generation professionals and immigrants; individuals with disabilities; LGBTQ+ individuals; Americans who live in rural areas; older Americans who face age discrimination when seeking employment; parents and caregivers who face employment barriers; people of faith who require religious accommodations at work; individuals who were formerly incarcerated; and veterans and military spouses.
Using https://www.mcmaster.com/ makes me wish I were a hardware engineer. Makes every other e-commerce site feel like garbage. If amazon were this fast, I’d be broke within days. Why haven’t other sites figured this out?
As a hobbyist, I cannot justify the cost of McMaster. I will confess that I often use it to find the precise name of a part for purchasing on Amazon/AliExpress.
Maybe a quality service really does cost that much? But the gap in performances and usability is so great, it seems that something else must be at play sometimes.
If you are upset that I posted obv GPT output, then here is a reason why you're failing at your disgruntlement:
I am able to post my prompt in whatever crazy alarmist fashion I would like and massage it into producing an output that I agree with, represents my arguments and doesnt inflame or trigger...
aside from the 12 monkeys anti GPT reponse, because they couldnt imagine that it not a generic GPT-barf, as opposed to the machinations of the OP to get a more salient point without crossing lines....
All they have to do is measure time in bed, which for most people most of the time will correlate closely with total sleep. Insomniacs are outliers so you don’t need to worry about measuring them and most are taught to just get up when they awaken anyway.
Agreed—the article is sort of silly in that it debunks a bunch of bogus claims about dark mode, but then completely overlooks the main legitimate use, which is to limit exposure to artificial light at night. You basically want to get as much light during the day as is safely possible to stay focused and alert (note that this can be counterindicated for people with certain health conditions, like glaucoma), and then limit light exposure as much as possible at night in order to be able to fall asleep and keep your circadian rhythms healthy. More information here, e.g. https://hubermanlab.com/dr-samer-hattar-timing-light-food-ex...
> You basically want to get as much light during the day as is safely possible to stay focused and alert (note that this can be counterindicated for people with certain health conditions, like glaucoma)
Incidentally, for most people, this means that - unless they're spending most of their time outdoors - they're not getting enough light.
The CPU complex on the M1 series doesn't have anything close to the full bandwidth to memory that the SoC has (like, half). The only thing that can drive the full bandwidth is the GPU.
Really, OCaml’s syntax is beautiful, unless you’re one of those people who loves to show off how adept they are at typing matching braces, parentheses, commas, and semicolons. Writing a little lambda in C++ is an impressive display of manual dexterity… [&](…,…){… return …; }; Who would rather write that than let f x y = … in?
The only way I’d improve OCaml syntax would be to add something like python style list comprehension.