One of the comments on the original article plays aerodynamics off as unimportant, saying only up to 0.4 miles per gallon difference. Even if that number was true, this is an industry that gives drivers patches on their shirt or hat for averaging above 7 miles per gallon of fuel for the year. An extra 0.4 miles out of every gallon is insignificant at all.
Keyboardio is run by a programmer who developed debilitating RSI and his wife. He tried a bunch of keyboards, then designed his own. Lots of people asked where to get one, so they refined it into a product and started the company. That was the Model 01, and I have two of those.
Having the function button located for the base of the thumb is really comfortable and useful. The swappable bases (flat linked, tented, and the separate stands) are nice to have. The link between the two halves of the models 01 and 100 uses an Ethernet cable. The stands use a standard camera tripod threaded connector, so building your own mount for a chair or armature is simple enough.
I had a warranty issue with one of my Model 01 boards. One keyswitch didn’t work reliably. Instead of sending the whole thing back, Jesse sent me four or five spare switches, some stickers, a personal note, and a page explaining I could desolder and solder the switch without voiding the warranty (as long as I didn’t damage anything in the process of course). The Model 100 is socketed.
The hardware design and the firmware are open source.
I buy a lot of books for an individual. I have a dedicated library room in my home, and that’s not the only place there are bookcases.
I shop by ISBN often because I want specifically a particular edition in a particular cover. So it’s not just title and author. It’s not even title, author, publisher, edition, and cover honestly. Sometimes there’s an Indian subcontinent English printing of a book that’s laid out differently and on different paper from the US/Canada market version.
One small drawback is sometimes I’ll order a book by ISBN, and the bookseller will locate it by ISBN, and it will be a completely different item on a different topic by a different author. Sometimes if a book is a small printing or is a very old title the publisher will recycle the ISBN.
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.
I tend to think "good teachers" is a thing that doesn't really matter outside of niche 1-1 breakthrough moments. I know there are exceptions. Teachers who go way above and beyond, but that's not a scalable solution. A great teacher can make a difference in a handful of children. But they can't fix a fundamentally broken system. I tend to agree with you that it's not teachers that make a school good. It's the reputation and the parents who will move to areas based on said reputation. It's already selecting for parents who have the means and willingness to decide where they live to achieve better results for their child's education. They are invested in other ways as well.
Thus bad schools don't necessarily have bad teachers. They have a concentration of complacent or actively bad parents who drag the entire experience down for everyone. Throw in the bulk of special needs kids who fall on the public school system that is not in any way equipped to actually handle them and it's no wonder very few kids are learning effectively.
I do think the impact good teachers have is relatively minor, except for the part where a good teacher isn't a bad teacher, and the damage a bad teacher can do is enormous. A young inexperienced teacher is almost certainly getting into the career because they want to help kids. They may become a bad teacher, the bitter sort of teacher, after many years of seeing little but negative outcomes. At that point, they become part of the problem and realistically the only way to correct this is to wait until they quit. Incidentally, high wages are more likely to keep bad bitter teachers in jobs they hate longer, while young optimistic teachers require less fiscal motivation.
Perpetually low pay sees fewer truly competent people going into education. It also means that mid-career people who are trying to raise families often leave for better pay and hours.
But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?
Take a look at the careers of Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, James Gosling, Kirk McCusick, Allen Holub, Al Aho, Marvin Minsky, Daniel Friedman, Gerald Sussman, Lance Leventhal, John Carmack, John Romero, Paul Graham, Guy Steele, Christopher Date, Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, Douglas Comer, Andrew Tanenbaum, David Patterson, Jeffrey Ullman, Fred Brooks, or Jim Keller.
Of course Compaq was Houston rather than DFW. The case design for the first portable was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat at the House of Pies diner on Westheimer.
They still could have had Donna working at TI, which has a presence there.
It depends on what part of the car is crumpled, dented, scratched, or misaligned and what your deductible is. It doesn’t take much body work to hit $250, $500, or even $2000.
reply