This is what +/- and its variants are for. Especially useful for sports like hockey where scoring is rare. Of course, in a work environment this is even harder to try and measure, if for no other reason than that people are almost never 'off the court' and if they are there are many confounding factors.
Yeah, there's a bunch of advanced stats that more accurately model this in sports. My point is twofold:
(a) despite the existence of better stats, a lot of people still care about goals/assists, because they're much easier to understand.
(b) the difficulty of measuring these stats in low-scoring sports (soccer, hockey) is greatly magnified in business; instead of scoring O(1) points per hour, a small software team may "score a point" every couple weeks or quarter or year. Additionally, the number of people contributing is often greater, and we see fewer "identical lineup, but with player A swapped out for player B" situations (and ~never for long enough to get meaningful stats about "points scored").
If a new investment firm took this long to have securities show up in your account, they'd be shut down faster than you can say SEC. Coinbase isn't exactly a new t-shirt company working out issues with their silk screener, they're an allegedly $20B (alleged) currency exchange. They have a higher standard to meet.
I can see how Silicon Valley standards have to rise up to Wall Street standards and they're not there yet. Tech like Auto/Finance/Space are new to SV and they're all full of scaling woes. Traditionally "SV style" has been to be scrappy and accept a healthy amount of breakage, and never say no to incoming demand, even if it's crippling your platform.
You have a point that SV needs to get into the mindsets of the industries they are trying to disrupt and rise to those higher standards.
To add another point, Coinbase is in unchartered territory. I want to see a new cryptocurrency investment firm show up on the market and function without a hitch. Companies like Coinbase are the only datapoints so far in this space.
The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. So that could also contribute to giving deer more cover/habitat. Also we killed all the wolves east of the Mississippi 50 years, and coyotes have yet to fill their niche.
> The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization.
Source? It would surprise me to see that many people voluntarily give up their farmland rather than, say, selling it to industrial farmers or real estate developers.
If you are driving thru New England and pull over to any forest you can start walking and eventually you will find a short stone wall. These stone walls used to mark the borders of farm land but now they are in the middle of the forest. They are everywhere! Really gives you an idea of how much farming used to go on there.
In my area, once you get passed a point south of me, those walls are fewer and fewer. There are areas where it was never farmed and old growth trees still exist.
What is great is you can walk out to places and stand there and be reasonably certain that you're the first human to have ever stood in that spot.
I'm way up outside Rangeley, Maine. I even have true old growth and there weren't many natives in the area. So, there are some places where it's a good guess. They aren't easy to get to, of course.
It's because it was never really good farm land to begin with. With the advent of the Erie canal, railroads, and industrial farming techniques the competition from the really excellent farm lands of the Midwest made farming NE rocky terrain impractical.
I grew up in Vermont and the woods are full of old stone walls put up by farmers and cellar holes where their buildings used to be. Not just on the edge of the woods, but deep within them too. I'm not a student of farming but I don't think that New England is a particularly good place to do it. Lots of hills and mountains and rocky soil. As for real estate developers, there's a lot more money to be made in heavily populated areas of the country. Taking VT as an example, the state contains fewer residents than the Boise, ID metropolitan area does, and the largest city has fewer than 45K people.
edit: removed link to an article that has been posted several times.
Real estate developers pale in comparison to the sheer amount of land in the US. Hell, even just on the "wrong side of the tracks" in many very expensive cities there's often completely abandoned/disused land that's worth a tiny fraction of the land a half mile a way.
Once you get somewhere more rural/remote, the land is going to have even less value.
The landscape was largely unsuitable for large scale farming (tiny fields with thin soils among rough terrain), and most farming areas aren't near cities.
Lot's of people gave up on farming hardscrabble New England in the early part of the 20th century which resulted in reforestation. Farming is making a comeback in niche products, but nothing at the previous scales. This article (sorry for the paywall) gives a good summary: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/11/21/how-new-england-....
Just find some photos of places in the countryside of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Massachusetts from 1900 and compare to the same places today.
Or go walking through the forest, and count how many stone walls you have to clamber over. Every one used to mark the edges of a field or a pasture that was hacked out of the forest, and then was allowed to grow back up when farming the cold, rocky soil of New England was no longer cost-effective.
You're right - farmers generally didn't just let the fields lie fallow and become forested. Piece by piece, farmers sold their most marginal lands to housing developers, commercial ventures, etc.
The wages will never be high. Thats just the nature of the job. But unions can fight for things like working conditions for TAs and helping students deal with abusive advisers. Students are strongly incentive not to bring complaints against professors since they hold all the power over potential career advancement. Unions could help here too.
Really more than students unionizing its adjunct faculty that are being severely exploited. Whereas PhDs at least get a degree for their troubles, adjuncts just get straight up robbed, and too many of them are living on public assistance and non-guaranteed contracts.
"...and helping students deal with abusive advisers."
This is one thing I hope the unionization movement will genuinely change. There's not much room to move the needle on pay, but having students have a means of addressing abuse besides "Throw myself on the mercy of the department and hope they don't shred my career" would be a huge step.
Interestingly, one of the grad student union's arguments in a place I was at was, essentially, "You're flooding the university with cheap adjuncts, and it's devaluing our career path", which I thought was, at the very least, an interesting take.
There's actually a lot of room to move the needle on pay even. I know a CS department that is giving it's grad student a >$5000 yearly raise from $25K because it's grad student union (unofficial) found out that CS students are getting much worse pay compared to the other engineering grad students. 5000 is a lot of money for grad students.
The president can’t spend money without authorization from congress (see Authorization for Use of Military Force congress keeps renewing) It doesn’t matter where the money comes from. Congress doesn’t just control how tax receipts can be spent, they also control how much can be borrowed and when, and directs the president in how to use it. And neither the president nor congress control monetary policy.
counterpoint: nuclear-armed USSR, and since then nuclear armed former Soviet Republics with poor nuclear security, definitely including Russia in this.
second-counterpoint: global warming is also bad, actually damaging the earth instead of potentially damaging it.
This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of money in politics. It only goes so far, whereas siloing opposing voters can be at least as effective, and more permanent.
Actually, it is an act of Congress that mandates single-member geographical districts (1967 Single-Member District Mandate). Several states over the years have had at-large districts, and it has been a debate since at least the 1842 Apportionment Act. The debate has gone from one focused on federalism (states should decide how to elect reps) to equal protection (black people should get not get drowned out by racist southern states. flip side, gerrymandering is easy to do, hard to prevent). Nothing in the US Constitution prevents at-large House reps.
Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Single-Member Districting Mandate (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) was passed to mandate geographically based single-member districts. One reason it was passed was because of fears that southern states would use at-large districts to dilute the black vote. The other is that at the time, Indiana was under court-order to elect all 11 of its representatives at-large unless it could come up with a satisifactory districting plan. This was an attempt by Congress to claw back some power from the judiciary after the 1962 Baker case declaring the one-person/one-vote principle that districts must be of roughly equal population. I think that it is an interesting debate and definitely doesn't get talked about enough (or at all!) in school.
This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)
This is because an at-large system isn't the same as a proportional representation system. In an at-large system, 51 percent of voters can still control 100 percent of the seats. This is because each voter gets one vote per seat. For example, if a hypothetical state had 5 Representatives elected on at at-large basis, and 51% of the state favored one party, they could win 51% of the vote for each seat, and win every seat.
It may be true that no state had a Black majority in the 1960s, but several states did have a Black majority until the 20th century. From Wikipedia:
Three Southern states had populations that were majority black: Louisiana (until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s) and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s).
Interesting. I had always thought that moving to a proportional system would require a Constitutional amendment, which seems like a virtually impossible bar to clear, but if that law is constitutional, would Congress also be able to mandate that all states elect their representatives at-large using proportional representation?
