Similar situation. I ended up paying a few bucks for an extension/guest access pass at the local university. I just started auditing lectures in any and all departments, 20+ hrs/week for a few semesters. Eventually I found myself getting really interested in one subject, took all the classes available, and that's what I decided to do for career 2.0
I seriously doubt any student would care, honestly. When I was a freshman there was an older guy in our courses who was transitioning careers. He was a smoker like half of our group at the time, so we spent a lot of time just shooting the shit with the guy between classes.
Also, if the guy paid for an extension pass and was auditing courses "officially", he's well within his rights.
Maybe they like the laws in Texas more, alot companies have been moving to Texas for that reason. Although that is conjecture. Also having them geographically close has perks for logistics.
Next to the $B that is a modern fab, running an electrical generation station is a minor investment. I also wouldn't be surprised it Samsung has a division which builds power plants, given that in SK they build apartment buildings and air conditioners.
Boudin is junk, no local would eat there. there are so many better local bakeries. Gharardelli, Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf, and Union Square are touristy. There's nothing you can't buy there that you can't find online.
Do bring a jacket so you don't end up surprised by the weather.
Alcatraz and Chinatown and Golden Gate Park are interesting/pretty enough.
Better ideas... Eat some dim sum or a burrito. Rent a car and go to Muir Woods. or kayak and oysters in Pt Reyes. Or wander around Stanford/Cal campus. or drive to Yosemite or Tahoe. or go wine tasting and inner tubing in Guerneville. Or find a concert (jambase, songkick...) or baseball game. or take the ferry to sausalito or angel island. or Exploratorium or MoMA or other museum. or aquarium in Monterey and beach in Carmel. or go to the exploratorium. or try the Church of John Coltrane. or the Church of 8 Wheels. go sailing. lots of world-class dinner options. find random happenings on funcheapsf. etc.
it does seem very plausible that undetected cases are several times higher than confirmed/symptomatic cases. and/or, perhaps when things start to spike locally people begin to take it seriously and change their behavior a bit -- distancing/masks were not very common in the Dakotas before the post-Sturgis wave.
I worked for a solar co in the US for a while, 10yrs ago or so. It was a very interesting time, the hardware (solar panels, inverters) part of our Cost of Goods Sold fell considerably over the course of a few years. I'll suggest a few reasons, as I saw them:
1) Larger-scale, fully-automated manufacturing facilities were coming online. Some mfrs were reputable and high-quality, some not so much. But the abundance of supply caused these vendors to compete for business on price/warranty/etc terms, which drove down our cost to build systems.
2) Lots of developers were also bidding for projects, and utilities forced solar/wind developers to compete to offer lower prices for their power.
3) Government/utility subsidies helped get manufacturing facilities up and running, and made marginal projects more affordable to build/buy. Some incentive programs were well-designed, some were not. The markets that offered the best total return to investors got done first -- the lowest-hanging fruit for solar was in areas with relatively good sun, expensive grid power, and perhaps some extra tax/etc subsidies. Same idea for wind (or any infrastructure or real estate investment, really).
4) Attractive project margins encouraged lots of developers to enter the market, which increased competition and resulted in innovation in business models and processes.
5) Manufacturers scaled up further to satisfy increased demand, resulting in lower hardware costs.
6) Larger investors started angling for a slice of the action. VCs were looking for unicorns, MBA students were looking for jobs. Bankers wanted to make loans and do IPO/M+A work. Big renewable projects/portfolios of >$100M are pretty much the minimum interesting size deal for big project financiers, small deals don't move the needle for them. In fact, if you can put $1B+ to work in a responsible manner, that's even better. Banks are risk averse and renewables were a new/unproven (and thus risky) asset class, and in the early days it was hard to get any sort of financing, at any rate. As more projects demonstrated good ROI, more banks did the work to understand the (hardware/warranty/operational/etc) risks and became willing to lend in this sector. The IRS issued clear guidance on some tax issues which further reduced uncertainty (=risk) for would-be investors. As more financiers entered the market, they competed for deals and the cost of capital for high-quality developers/borrowers fell by several %.
7) Over time, the subsidy programs faded away, but (as intended) during that time hardware costs fell considerably. As developers got more experience, they also got better at reducing ancillary costs (sales, development, legal, etc).
And so it goes, a nice virtuous cycle of competition, some subsidies to help a nascent industry, decent deal economics for investors and early adopters, and manufacturing scale-up.
I don't think they have the balls to pull something like that.
If a manager suggest this in a meeting, the legal folks will eat him alive. If it comes from higher upps, then someone will leak this and that will be the end of Google.
More likely it will get annonomised and feed into since ML. But it would be super illegal to do what you're describing and with as many employees as Google has someone would notice and leak that.
I think so, too. I imagine it's the same with opting-out of "Location History" - you opt-out of seeing the log, not out of locations actually being logged.
It would be cool if there were a way for Google to prove (maybe cryptographically?) the absence of some data on their servers, so that I could verify that my location data has actually been deleted.
One reads stories of pork/etc carcasses that aren't being processed right now, perhaps we could ship those onto barges and into the ocean and dump them overboard to seed new pockets of offshore life on the sea floor.
From what I've been able to gather, scuttling ships to provide artificial reefs works: it increases the surface area of part of the ocean, which in turn leads to an increase in bio-density and species variety.
Note that this is a vague impression of a topic I know next to nothing about; I could easily be wrong here.
That's somewhat fatalistic and cynical, but there's a kernel of truth in your sentiment. We have of course done good and meaningful work when it comes to environmental protections and preservation - sure, we could argue that perhaps we haven't done enough and should do more, but the effort is there.
I'm not sure if our primary goal in "improving nature" is to help "nature" or simply keep nature sustainable for humans and future humans.
