I remember I returned from my parents where I had stayed over the weekend and it was okay - to a city that was still glowing from the heat at 11 pm at night. I say that as someone who spent a summer vacation in the Emirates (that place has cooled swimming pools right at the beaches, and for good reason the Gulf water is not warm but unbearably hot!).
In general, if/when global warming picks up we have to make some major changes to all our cities. As they are now they are giant furnaces and heat batteries with all the exposed concrete and asphalt.
> Today I read The Washington Post and Fox News every day, to compare what they're saying.
I (a German) do the exact same thing! I don't even find Fox News stories particularly egregious, it's more in what stories they choose, but it's not any worse than WP or German news, only different. The discussion forums are much harder to bear though, but there is at least one major German newspaper (FAZ) that has very normal articles but a Fox News like crowd in the forums too (but they express themselves much better). WP seems to be a single-issue website these days, it's Trump, Trump, Trump drowning out every other topic. The other articles they still have left are just a side-show. It's waaayyyyy too extreme for my taste.
I think GP is saying that it's precisely because grades are limited to a handful of values that you get grade compression instead of grade inflation, and that if prices were limited to some upper value you would get price compression which would be bad.
Especially the 2nd course is pretty big, on of the largest online courses there is in terms of videos to watch and things to learn. But while it is a lot it is much easier than the quantum mechanics course(s) half the size on edX. You don't have to think much, just listen and learn.
Aft hat you have a very solid foundation, now check out more such courses on the same platform.
> the government is funneling an ever-greater percentage of revenue from productive pursuits to pensions
That is too simplistic for me. Income for one also is income for somebody else down the line.
All those "economic" considerations I read about - not just on this topic - remind me of my extremely lousy chess play: Never think more than a single step ahead.
But the economy is a circle. All those views are form the PoV of an individual entity - income and expenses, and where it comes from and where it goes "does not matter".
But to look at the economy is completely different! Here you have to look at the entire circle, not at just a single piece of the chain.
For example, giving old people money, directly or indirectly, leads to an increased flow of money through systems of the economy that are utilized by old people. That would be the health sector most of all, not a lot of change in housing or food (they already had a roof to live under before they retired and they won't eat more food than before). Maybe tourism benefits too.
What happens if they get less money? What sector(s) benefit(s), who loses?
The purely financial considerations don't make sense to me on the greater economic level. Is the economy suddenly unable to maintain the housing and produce sufficient food because some numbers in some balance sheets are off? That happened a lot in history. My own grand parents lived with at least five different currencies within their lifetime without moving (Germany). We found that "finance" can easily be reset provided people are willing to do so (that's the important part) - what matters is factories, knowledge, culture, trade, etc.
There certainly are a lot of problems of high pensions (compared to non-pensioners), for example if the old people end up with a larger share of the available housing, which includes not just housing they themselves use but also housing they control (investments) because that funnels even more of the money flow through the economy through the control of (some relatively few) old people. that may no lead to a housing shortage, after all who owns housing does not seem so important as long as there is enough, but a consequence is that young(er) people feel insecure in their outlook and are more reluctant to have a family. Also, the kinds of housing being built is probably different when done purely as an investment.
As for the health sector, I'm not sure how bad it is to have it deal (even more) with old people's problems. After all, aging is everybody's problem at some point and if that leads to progress, be it symptom control or some day even more direct control of aging I don't see why getting more of the economy's money flow to go through that sector would be bad. After all if "cost control" was the overwhelming argument then collective suicide would be the best solution. Since we are alive and like it that way we may as well "waste" our resources on just that.
We have that wonderful tool "money" and "finance", but I think too many people have forgotten that it is a tool and treat it like a natural law and the be-all and end-all. We actually have much greater control - and much more arbitrary control than a lot of people think - over how we use the tool. Unfortunately only severe crisis opens the minds of people enough to wield the power we actually have over our own creation.
Is it? Since Adobe switched to the subscription model and the "Adobe Creative Cloud" I'd say they would be quite happy if that infrastructure would be good enough to run their very big application suite(s). Not to mention the savings of not having to support two major platforms (and several OS versions for each) - even realizing them only partially would be big. Of course, given the size of their product I'd say there is little use in talking about this at this point, the web platform would have to mature a lot more first.
Obviously the example code is inside another function - `await` can only be used inside a function marked with `async`, which always returns a promise.
That means error handling may not be necessary inside that function. Errors are caught automatically and returned to the caller as rejected promise! You need error handling at the top level but not necessarily inside each function.
You make sure the material is "boring" so that you can concentrate on what the talk is really about: The people in front of you. They change every time, sometimes radically (composition of the audience and context). You want to waste as little conscious thought as possible when it comes to the material you are presenting so that you are free to dedicate yourself to the audience.
How boring does it get for a painter to use the same kinds of brushes for all their paintings? Or for a musician to use the exact same instrument? It doesn't, because they are not what you focus on.
It may get boring to minimally refactor the same code twenty times -- the code is the focus of the action. When giving a talk about the code the focus is what you want to achieve with people, not with code.
If you are there and really only care about the thing you want to present instead of the people in front of you then sure, they will probably notice.
Disclaimer:
This goes along with the other sub-thread here about the value of recording talks. What I say above is more about talks that are about convincing and motivating people. I don't mean that as in "motivational speeches" at all, but an Apple keynote about their new products is in that category. You want to give people a "look behind the scenes", at the person, because technology fails if the people and/or organization(s) fail no matter the quality of the technology. If the talk is about the latest internal optimizations of the V8 Javascript runtime giving the talk once and then point to the recording, or even just a lengthy blog post may actually be better and the main reason there is a talk is "the conference is there anyway and why not". But that's the kind of talk I would put only minimal effort into and it still works, because I don't need to convince and engage people, only to inform them.
Yes, we truly live in the age of useless bullshit. 99/100 talks I've watched from YouTube make me skip through the bullshit and see if there's even a single slide with some interesting content in it.
I prefer the (open source) videospeed Chrome extension [0]. It gives me a much wider range (thus far I used up to 5 x speed; audio is blanked above 3 x speedup), 0.1 increments - and keyboard control. The latter is essential to me, I can watch sections of online lectures at high speed and quickly slow down without fumbling for the mouse to watch the few sections that demand more attention at lower speed.
Right, but at 2x you can actually watch the whole thing in half the time. If it's not too technical you can come away with 100% of the information. The more technical or unfamiliar accents the more backups you will need.
Without knowing anything about the CIA specifically but about big organizations incl. government ones:
I suspect 99% of the employees have jobs comparable to what you see in the daily Dilbert cartoons, and they sit in aging offices with outdated equipment (unless it's just after a rare new-stuff purchase wave), and they spend 90% of their time fighting the bureaucracy, creating, filing and reading reports, and "internal politics" on all levels. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's not like they have a razor-sharp focus for each and every employee (just like any other large organization) and most of live for anybody is just to muddle through somehow.
I once participated in a big project for the foreign ministry of a big European country. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to place the icons everybody should see by default so that they didn't cover essential parts of the country's symbols shown as default background image... when I suggested to an employee with half-inch thick glasses who placed his eyes like three inches from the monitor that I could decrease the resolution of his desktop so that everything would get bigger he refused because he thought he had to cope with whatever he was told, and if the higher ups declared default screen resolution to be X * Y it was not his place to select a different one...
Anyway, I liked everybody, it was great fun. It's just a bunch of humans after all ;-)
I remember I returned from my parents where I had stayed over the weekend and it was okay - to a city that was still glowing from the heat at 11 pm at night. I say that as someone who spent a summer vacation in the Emirates (that place has cooled swimming pools right at the beaches, and for good reason the Gulf water is not warm but unbearably hot!).
In general, if/when global warming picks up we have to make some major changes to all our cities. As they are now they are giant furnaces and heat batteries with all the exposed concrete and asphalt.