Britannica has been around for over two hundred years. I sold a LOT of sets i my day. Unfortunately, there are huge numbers of people who can't or don't read. In my old age, I find myself tutoring/coaching people on how to think and how to study. This last year, I have been coaching 4 people, WITH MULTIPLE DEGREES, who read only about 150 words-per-minute and can't remember what they read. (In my generation , boomer, the average reading speed was 200-250 wpm w/70% comprehension.) A report by abtaba (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abtaba.com%2Fblog%2F59-reading-statistics) says that 42% of college graduates never read a book after college. Judging from what I see in this forum, I suspect that a lot of them haunt /.

This is a waste of resources! If a person reading 250 wpm reads for an hour a day they could easily read a 100,000 word book each week. If they did that every week that would be over 50 books in a year. If only half those books were on a subject they were interested in, they would have acquired the knowledge/book requirement for a BA/BS degree about every two years. (Assuming they learned how to think somewhere along the way.)

However, letting AI set the standards for learning come with compliance, not thinking. Encyclopaedia Britannica is a proper name. (Notice how I spelled it EncyclopAEdia?) However much a writer tries to include the ligature "ash" (ae) in his text, Ignorant spell-checker, ignorant editors, and ignorant AI will insist on changing it to a simple "e".

Britannica jumped the gun: AI is not ready to improve on an encyclopedia designed to accumulate facts for reader's consumption.

It is true that the rich got richer. The question is: "Did they get richer by creating more wealth for others and shaving a portion for themselves? or did they get richer by plundering the resources of other people?"

It is not like the very, very rich keep their money in a huge money vault like Scrooge McDuck. You can only do two things with money: Either spend it or invest it. If you spend it, you are creating jobs and making things better for the people who make those products and services you spend money on, whether it is the lower-paid worker who has a job or the higher paid executive and investor that puts the process together. If you invest it, you are providing the resources that enable others to produce goods and services, which provides jobs and income for other people to who can circulate the money through the economy by buying the goods and services they need or want. Being rich does not automatically make you guilty of exploitation, and stealing someone's wealth by government intervention of force should be reserved for those who are guilty of exploitation or theft.

So some smarty is going to say, "Well, what if the person DID keep it in a vault instead of spending it? What if he kept it under his mattress? What if he burned it? From an Economic point of view, those are simply bad investments....

The cost of ALL electricity is going to go up in Texas when new measures are required to provide backup for wind and solar power generation.

This is simple Economics: The current level of reliability is not adequate for the more extreme conditions, and statistical judgements made in the past are apparently outdated. Higher reliability = higher costs, and those costs get passed on to consumers.

Consumers of wind- and solar-generated electricity have been getting a free ride due to subsidies, so the suppliers have been acquiring as much of their energy as they can from the "cheaper" sources, and the delivered cost to the consumer has been lower than actual costs. Those companies that get most of their power from these alternative sources will, in fact, have to pay some of the costs for providing the backup, and this will drive up their prices out-of-proportion to the prices of conventional energy. But, overall, the costs will spread out over the grid. Those who get the subsidies will still be able to market their energy at lower rates than those who don't get the subsidies.

The Author is too ignorant to use analogies. He can't even understand That the name of the company is "Encyclopaedia Britannica". He must have been educated on Wikipedia. I'm sure Britannica know how to spell its own name...

There were multiple conditions that seem to have caused the outages. (I say "seem" because not all the data is in yet. A definitive explanation might be weeks away.)

But here is the gist of it: When wind and solar power failed, it took parts of the grid below its "baseload" level, and that started bringing down parts of the grid. Period.

Wind and solar only work about 20-30% of the time. When they aren't working, there needs to be back up. Energy on the grid MUST meet the demand, or the grid goes down. In this case, the backup systems couldn't be brought online adequately due to poor maintenance, poor planning, and poor policy. Bingo! The grid started failing.

The backup necessary to keep the grid up for say, 30 days, if wind and solar went down, would cost about 1/3 of what it would cost for the wind and solar installations they were designed to back up. Consumers have been reaping the benefits of wind and solar only because these have been massively subsidized. The actual cost of wind and solar is expected to level out to much higher rates than from other sources if subsidies ever end.

I believe that wind and solar have a place, especially for niche markets like home and ranch energy independence, but the massive investment in Texas was a mistake. Politicians bought the solution without examining the Science.

Yes, Steffansson lived at a New York hospital and lived on a "meat only diet" for over a year, and was in better health after that year than before he went in. The maintenance of life for people with ciliac disease was a "meat only" diet up until about the last 60 years or so.

AFAIK. there has never been a study that substantiated the need for carbohydrates in the diet. (After a certain amount of protein is digested, the liver supposedly makes a base carbohydrate compound through a process called, "carbolysis" from the excess protein.) The main use of carbohydrates is for providing energy, which can also be derived from fats, and burns ketones instead of sugars. However, if you don't take in enough fats and/or carbohydrates to supply the energy needed for daily living, you could starve on protein-only diets. This is why diabetics and people on a very low-carb diet should make sure to eat larger amounts of healthy fats. Diabetics do have to worry about "keto acidosis", which is something that occurs when the ketones and sugar levels in the blood both rise beyond the capacity of the available insulin to handle it. This makes the blood acidic, and can be very dangerous. (This is a highly-simplified explanation, so consult a good Physiology or Microbiology book if you want to know more.)

What Comcast is doing is reducing their services. They are suspending some TV services and reducing broadband speeds from around 300mps to 50mps, and adding a $15 charge to each subsequent month's bills for their "Assistance Plan".

...Prices will get so low that Exxon-Mobile will have to lay off some of those Democratic Congressmen...

Basically, I'm outraged by the biased, ignorant, and stupid reports like this. This is a national emergency and small-minded ideologues are spreading FUD and hate when we should all be pulling together.

Early estimates of potential damage due to COVID-19 infections calculated 2-3.5% fatality rates. In the USA (about 140 million people) that would have been somewhere around 3 MILLION deaths under runaway epidemic conditions. (Closer to 2 Million if only 70% of those exposed contracted an illness.) The estimates are far lower now, but we still need to mobilize for medical equipment along with flattening the curve so we can save more of the seriously ill people.

Just yesterday (Sunday the 29th) I had to go to the emergency room at the Houston VA Hospital. (Non-COVID-19 emergency) The PA who examined me and got me my medicines told me he had been using the same N95 mask for 5 days because they had none at the hospital. (Apparently thousands of masks disappeared from inventory and no one knows why.) They have no coronavirus testing kits and don't expect any for a couple of weeks. The VA has expanded their triage system to accommodate hundreds of potential patients, but they need time to acquire resources (and over 80% of ALL medical supplies are made in China).

If we only see 100,000 deaths it will be a very good thing. In fact, it will be a miracle. We are all going to get exposed to it sooner or later. As I understand it, about 70% of the people who get exposed actually get infected, and about 15-20% of those show serious symptoms. They are saying the mortality rate could go as low as 1% if we can get out ahead with medical equipment and vaccines. Look up the definitions of the words "epidemic" and "pandemic". Do the math, and quit promoting sh*theel propaganda. Think like a Scientist instead of an intellectual lamer.

I read a book back in 1973, "Survival of the Wisest" by Jonas Salk (You remember who he was, don't you?). https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSurviva...

This article totally depresses me. Dr. Salk was claiming in his book that the plastics we were using were going to hang around and kill us someday. If I remember correctly he focused mainly on Styrofoam, but I seem to recall that Teflon was also specifically named for breaking down into microparticles and circulating into the body.

Crap! We could could have started mitigating the evil effects 'way back when. And since then we have a proliferation of similar plastics plus thousands of other plastics that are going to do tremendous damage until we either find a way to clean them up or mutate into something that thrives on them... Too late for me, though.

I can see that the right-leaning citizens needed to create their own forms of news media in self -defense; The majority of the news is dominated by left-wing propagandists. However, the content is not necessarily news, and thinking citizens need to create their own self-defense methods.

First, when people ask me what I think of the news, I point out that I only really pay attention to articles that have Political AND Economic AND Social implications. Those conditions mean that the shelf life of the events being reported is long enough that people can see consequences and effects. "Man rides deer?" In 10 years nobody will care. "Kim K's boob fell out of her dress?" Next week nobody except Kim will care, and she's only concerned that someone will find a picture of it. "Yankees win the World series?" 100 years from now only really dedicated baseball fans will be interested in such trivia. Otherwise, "Who Cares?" "President indicted by House in Impeachment vote?" OK, that has consequences and getting the FACTS might be worth the effort.

Which brings me to my Second filter: Get the FACTS first. All the editorials in the world are useless if you don't know what really happened. (Judging the veracity and precision of the report is too technical to address here.) After you get the facts, it may be entertaining and worthwhile to dip into some of the editorial content, but only if you are reasonably adept at separating opinion from fact, and evaluating for rhetorical fallacies and other logic violations. This last skill is in short supply, especially among those who went to public school. (Did you catch the rhetorical fallacies there?)

For those who are truly interested in semi-objective reality, let me recommend a book called, "The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMyth-Ra... It has a broad picture of the differences between good Economic Thinking and Political Thinking.

The article is such a mess I hardly know where to start.

CAPITALISM DOES NOT EXIST (as a proper noun). It is a label. Socialism and Communism are also labels and don't actually exist in the real world. There is nothing wrong with labels; Philosophers have been arguing the fine points of different labels for thousands of years. The point is, labels must be defined and agreed upon before they can be compared on their merits.

What is "capital" in our modern definition? Well, in medieval times "capital" mostly referred to livestock. (The word capital came to us from the Latin word for "head" and we still refer to "head of cattle", we still wear caps on our heads, the city where heads of government meet is called the Capital, and many other examples exist.) If you didn't eat all your cattle they would reproduce and the herd would grow, and you would be wealthier. There is now a consensus among Economists that Capital is the existence of unconsumed assets that are used to create more assets. So for the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that a "Capitalist" society is one that allows Capital and property rights to exist, and that "Capitalism" exists when the society primarily creates wealth through the use of Capital. OK?

So what's wrong with that? Well, before the existence of "property rights" and the spread of "Democracy" and "Republicanism", everything was owned by the most powerful in society. Those who could conquer other lands and people did so, and effectively "owned" those conquests until a more powerful person or group defeated them in turn. We are still suffering from the vestiges of this mindset. In those days, if someone worked for you they were a "servant" and you had more or less total control of their livelihood. This attitude is still prevalent in many (most) big companies and corporations today. When I was a kid, finding employment with a company that would keep you on for your whole working life and let you retire with a pension was considered a good thing. (But God help you if you lived in a mining town or mill town in company housing. The company had 'way too much control over your life.)

So what I'm getting from this article is that the "master-servant" relationships between Governments, Industries, Companies, and individuals are breaking down, diffusing, and diversifying. If we see more "ad hoc" enterprises; if the companies become more like communities where people voluntarily get together to provide goods and services for the masses; then "Capitalism" still exists or can still exist, but the flavor will be quite different. I suspect that this is the point under discussion.

One final thing: This type of society has been proposed before. Pope Leo XIII proposed this in 1893, and it was widely discussed by G. K. Chesterton under the name "Distributism" to distinguish it from "Capitalism" (because "Capitalism" created a different, exploitative, perception of Economic life).

I had a friend who worked with Brad Meyers on the Amulet Project at CMU in the mid-eighties. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.cmu.edu%2Fafs%2Fcs%2F... I specifically remember him telling me that, after extensive testing and comparison, the CMU crew concluded that they could find no significant advantage by Object-Oriented Programming over "Structured Programming" as a methodology.

I have had mixed results: Using structured languages such as Modula and Pascal, and design systems like Warnier-Orr diagrams, I have been able to create many complex systems in much less time than using OO tools on similarly complex projects. (W-O is also a handy tool when writing in C or Assembly; design is a powerful skill!)

Using Smalltalk I have been able to design and build some incredible systems, but trying to do the same type of OO development in C++ or Java is a hassle and a lot less satisfactory. Most of the programmers I see using Java and C++ skip the design phase and don't use the tools that would leverage their efforts such as UML or MDD. Bad design is a trap waiting to explode applications unexpectedly.

Back in '75 I was convinced to abandon my investment in LISP and Prolog for Pascal. It took me a while to grasp the underlying concepts, but I would certainly choose Pascal over Fortran today.

I don't play with different languages as much as I used to, and today I do most of my programming in LISP, Scheme, Racket, Haskell, or Python. However, I still believe that design should come before code.

Cognizant and TCS (and any firm subcontracting from them) has a high probability of qualifying as an "electronic sweatshop". People I know who have worked for them have suffered the following indignities:

More than one contractor specializing in IBM Maximo, SAP, Oracle, or DB2 has been hired as a project manager based on their excellence and competency, and then had that competency and excellence ignored. The tasks they should have been doing were simply diverted to India and assigned to people who didn't know what they were doing. It was common for these guys to be at work at 7:00AM, go home at 2:00PM, then have to get up and coach overseas workers between 10:00PM and 3:00AM.

Typically these guys were given "manager" or "supervisor" titles that implied great responsibility for the outcome of the project. If the overseas workers screwed it up, the client would be pissed off at the so-called "supervisor". This has a negative effect on the contratactor's reputation.

Hiring bonuses and relocation expenses were NEVER paid on time. Payroll problems were very common.

Fast transfer from one piece of the project to another piece of the project was common; The contractor would suddenly be relocated to someplace else where there was an emergency.

I'm basing these statements on the experiences of 6 friends who wasted over 3 years apiece in Cognizant/TCS hell. This is obviously a very limited sample, but I have NEVER met anyone who had a really positive experience with these companies as a contractor. Not one of those projects finished within budget or on time, and the contractors involved had difficulties getting back on a reliable contracting career after working for these companies. This all happened between 2009 and 2012, so things may have changed, but it is important to find out how working for these companies affected people who recently worked for them.

Sorry for not responding to this faster, but I had to order the book and read it thoroughly. At the time of my previous response I had only read excerpts.

You seem to think that I'm against the 5-paragraph essay. I'm not. The 5-paragraph essay has its uses and teaching concise communication seems appropriate to me. I'm against the 5-paragraph essay as a writing PRODUCT. The end result of writing (IMO) should be communication; not 5 paragraphs, not 7 sentences, not a concluding paragraph that says, "in conclusion...", but an actual transmission of thought.

There are over 460,000 words in the English language. My opinion about teaching using only the Ogden Basic English comes from my desire to see people master the skills of communication. And that is what writing is; a skill. If you are learning to golf, you start out with only 3 clubs in your bag. After you learn the basics you expand your quantity of tools. The same is true of learning martial arts (limited basics called kihon), tennis, watercolor painting, and many other skills.

I like the idea of using E-Prime later on, because it forms communication with direct descriptions for the relationships between subject and verb. Once a person can clearly distinguish those relationships, they can move on to creating artful communication. The process of learning a skill is the experience of going from "awkward, awkward, awkward" to "mechanical, mechanical, mechanical", and on to "elegant, elegant, elegant".

So I'm not saying that appropriate experiences should be overlooked. I'm saying that the desired goal is creative and artful output by the doer. Musicians must learn scales and proper body control before they can produce artful music, and writers must learn those equivalent and analogous skills to produce artful writing.