More precisely, the market value of those tech companies increased relative to the value of the dollar. Does that mean the value of those companies went up or does it mean that the value of a dollar went down? How would the analysis change if the value of those companies was measured in ounces of gold or pounds of rice or soybeans instead of dollars? How has the value of those tech companies changed relative to the price of a median US home?
Survey: Raise your hand if you believe that the official US government inflation figures are a true and accurate measurement of the change in the value of a dollar.
In a his recent book Live Not By Lies, Ron Dreher argues that totalitarianism, fascism, and the politicization of everything are all roughly the same thing (and that they are contrary to human flourishing). Dreher cites Benito Mussollini's definition of totalitarianism/fascism: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." It's a lengthy argument - see the book for details.
If your objective is to graduate and issue diplomas to as many people as possible, then you should definitely not issue grades during the covid-19 disruptions. Instead you should make accommodations. Relax requirements. Emphasize asynchronous learning. Reduce your standards. Anything less than this will compromise your gradation rate.
On the other hand, if your goal is to actually educate students and to teach them problem-solving, analytical reasoning, and creative thinking, and to equip students to cope with the contingencies that they will inevitably encounter in life and to thrive in the face of adversity, then grades become a measure of how well you have taught and how well the students have learned. In that case, grading should continue as normal. No accommodation. No reduction in standards.
So whether or not you issue grades during covid-19 depends on whether your goal is to graduate students or to educate students.
It is said that a person's character is best revealed when they are under stress. Universities are now under stress. What will this show us about their true motives and character?
In order to understand how chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are believed to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we first need to review how the virus itself works.
When a coronavirus binds to a cell, it transfers is single strand of RNA inside the cell. Then ribosomes read the RNA and use it to make proteins. The first protein made by the coronavirus RNA is call RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP). The RdRP protein catalyses RNA replication. In other words, RdRP takes one strand of RNA and makes a (complementary) copy of it. It does this over and over, and in that way generates lots of new coronavirus RNA, which after being packaged in other proteins made by the viral RNA, forms new virus particles that go on to infect other cells.
The proposed mechanism of action of chloroquine is that it (indirectly) inhibits the action of RdRP. This makes it harder for the virus to replicate and spread, and thus making it harder for the virus to get ahead of the victims immune system.
Chloroquine inhibits RdRP by increasing the concentration of zinc inside cells. Inside the cells, zinc forms (among other things) zinc triposphate. It appears that when RdRP is replicating an RNA strand, if it needs an adenosine triposphate as the next link on the RNA strand, but a zinc triposphate is drifting by at the right moment, the RdRP will stick in the zinc triposphate where the adenosine ought to be. This gums up the mechanism and causes the RNA replication to stop. Or, at least, that is the latest theory.
RdRP is not a part of normal cell metabolism, so inhibiting it does not cause other problems. There are other (sometimes severe) side effects to chloroquine, however, so it should not be taken except under knowledgeable and expert guidance.
There is another drug, favipiravir, that also shows promise against coronavirus in early trials. Favipiravir works similarly to chloroquine in that it inhibits or impedes the activity of RdRP, though exactly how it does this is less clear.
I submit that it's better to make everyone more free than it is to make some people very free and other people mainly subject to them.
Yes, this is exactly my point. In every implementation of communism to date, there have been a few heads-of-state who were very powerful and very free and countless ordinary citizens that were subject to them. That's the situation that Josephus refers to as "tyranny". That is the situation that you and I ought to be opposing.
And Open Source does oppose this. Gone are the days when programmers had to subject themselves to IBM/AT&T/Honeywell in order to get access to the software they needed. Only the elites could afford software then. These days, anybody can download a copy of Debian, for free. Open Source is a great equalizer. Open Source does not solve every problem, but it is a force for good.
There still exist concentrations of power, which are worth opposing. But transferring all power to the state, which is what communism does, creates a new and even greater concentration of power, which ends up making the problem worse. Better is to move power downward, toward regions, communities, civic and religious organizations, families, and individuals. Distributed is better than centralized. That's why we have checks-and-balances, three branches of government that (by design) are constantly in opposition to each other, frequent elections, laws against monopoly control, unions, a bill-of-rights, and so forth. The whole point is to prevent concentrations of power, since, as you observe, concentrations of power tend toward evil.
Communism is about concentrating power in the hands of the state. Open Source is about distributing power to smaller groups and individuals. The two are in opposition to one another.
No, Bruce. Capitalism arises spontaneously whenever you give people a few basic freedoms. The only way to make communism/socialism work is to take those freedoms away. So the only way that you can argue that communism is not inherently evil is to say that it is not evil to take away such things as the right to detemine for yourself what you will do for a living and the right control the products of your own hands (which is the right to own property), the right to enter into mutually beneficial contracts, the right to buy and sell as you see fit, and basically the right to determine for yourself how to live your own life. Take away those rights and what you are left with is usually called "totalitarianism" or "tyranny" or some such. But whatever you call it, it is inherent to communism.
The other day I was reminded of a quote from Flavius Josephus, the 1st century Roman historian. Writing in about an ancient ruler in Babylonian ruler, he says:
He gradually changed their government to tyranny, finding no other way to break their fear of God than to make the people dependent on him for all of their daily needs.
The really interesting thing about this quote (I think) is Josephus's definition of "tyranny", which is basically any form of government that makes the citizens dependent upon the government. By that definition, Open Source is the antithesis of tyranny, since the whole point of Open Source is that the users are in control and are not dependent outside powers. The whole point of Open Source, at least as I see it, is that individual people are free to control their own destiny.
Bruce, I really admire all that you've done for Open Source. Can we now agree to work together to fight tyranny? Part of that is recognizing that you cannot have communism without taking from people the right to control their own destiny.
$(problems-you-solve) > $(problems-you-create)
It really is that simple. Just solve more problems than you create, and you will never have trouble getting or keeping a job. Technological innovation, government policies, cultural conventions, and the opinions of the director of workplace studies at Cornell have nothing to do with it.
There are two ways of making this formula work. You can minimize the term on the right, or you can maximize the term on the left. Let's consider both cases.
The principal problem you will create as an employee (or business owner) is that you will expect to be paid. Your employer/customer does not want to do this. It will be a problem for them. This is an unavoidable problem. There are other factors on the right-hand side that are avoidable, however. You can minimize the problems you create by being a nice person. Don't be a prima donna or a jerk. There is an entire self-help industry devoted with minimizing the right-hand side of the formula, so I'll say no more about it here.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side. So the best approach for getting and keeping a job is to maximize the number of problems you solve. Note that the better of a problem solver you become, the more income you can command without unbalancing the formula. So if you want to achieve "employment security", probably your best approach is just to learn to be a better problem solver.
So how do you learn to solve problems? Practice solving problems!
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed. My theory is this has not so much to do with the subject matter of STEM as it does with the way STEM is taught. In your STEM classes, the homework and the tests and most of what you do is solve problems. You get lots and lots of practice solving problems. And that ends up making the students better problem solvers. Courses in which you write long papers tracing the development of gender stereotypes in 17th century New England farming communities do not provide nearly as much practice at problem solving, which results in graduates who are not as good at solving problems, and who therefore have more difficulty making the aforementioned formula work.
The problems you solve need not be technical problems. Problem solving tends to be an easily transferable skill. You might develop problem solving skills in math class, or playing chess, or working puzzles, but then end up applying your problem-solving prowess to management or administrative or marketing problems.
The key is to practice solving problems. Practice constantly. Make it your lifestyle to solve problems. Make problem solving part of who you are. Do you see some litter on the ground? Pick it up and you have solved a problem. Are there dirty dishes in the sink? Wash them and put them away - another problem solved. Do you see a shopping cart that some prior patron has left in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store? Push that cart to the cart corral, or back into the store. (Do not be tempted to say "that is somebody else's problem". Your goal should be to solve problems, not assign blame for them.)
If you dare: end each day be reviewing what you have done and detailing the problems you have created and the problems you have solved, and resolve to do better the next day. If you are very brave, you can ask your spouse/significant-other to help you with that task, as they will often be able to point out countless problems that you created or problem-solving opportunities that you omitted because you where oblivious to them, but be cautious of this latter approach as it can lead to unnecessary conflict.
Remember the formula:
$(problems-you-solve) > $(problems-you-create)
Do this, and be skeptical of academic studies, and you will live a happy and successful life.
Maybe Intel is an evil company that likes to cast off older workers, just to make them suffer.
Or, maybe Intel was merely closing down some older and no-longer-profitable business units from the 1980s that happen to have been staffed with workers that hired on in the 80s.
Or, maybe Intel was merely flattening their management structure, laying off managers and keeping the engineers, thus disproportionally impacting manager who also happen to be older, on average.
Or, maybe there was some combination of the above.
The fact is, we don't have any information on the issue. That the EEOC does not like Intel tells us nothing, unfortunately. In a better world, the EEOC would be an unbiased and objective adjudicator of these matters and a source of reliable information, but any rational observer knows that it not the case, at least not lately.
Perhaps by "CS" they mean something other than programming. Topics might include:
There is a lot more of the above. This is stuff
((lambda (foo) (bar foo)) (baz))
