!opinion@lemmy.ml
!opinion
@lemmy.mlhttps://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/opinion-does-graduating-with-honors-matter/
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-23/supreme-court-states-lawsuits-federal-policy-us-vs-texas
In a ruling Friday, the high court brought Texas and fellow states in line after a deluge of Republican lawsuits over immigration and other presidential policies, setting limits on the ability to sue.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-22/gas-stove-bills-house-republicans
House Republicans, and some Democrats, are using their power to pass legislation that would preempt nonexistent bans on gas stoves. It's really just a bad-faith attempt at anti-climate virtue-signaling.
Birds have feathers. And birds fly. But the feathers are not to aid flight. And I'll prove it.
Dinosaurs evolved from reptiles. And birds evolved from dinosaurs (theropods). After all that evolution, much is still similar. Birds still have beaks and make nests and lay eggs in them. But birds and theropods have a new body shape (their legs that go straight down from their bodies), feathers, skin, and they lay hard eggs.
Compare photos of a chicken and a veliciraptor. Then compare their skeletons. There is not much difference at all. It is like comparing prehistoric and modern crocodiles.
The flying animals in dinosaur times did not even have feathers, but the flightless therapods did. And most modern flying animals do not have feathers.
Some birds have evolved feathers with special aerodynamic properties. But then bats have evolved skin, and insects have evolved wing-tissue with the similar properties.
Birds also evolved special bone structure to aid flight. Saying feathers are for flight is like saying bones are for flight.
Theropods evolved feathers, but they did that millions of years before they started flying. Many of them never evolved to fly at all, including many extinct dinosaurs and many living birds. The ability to fly is distinct from the bearing of feathers. There is no connection at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/12/remote-working-problems-company-culture
The office expenses I’ve saved on since 2005 have come at the expense of my company’s culture
Somebody today coined the term "hygiene poverty" which means not having enough money for things like toothpaste or perfume. It sounds exactly like normal poverty, like we don't need a new term for that.
But it could be useful to categorise it. We already have food-poverty, bed-poverty, and housing-poverty. They are specific problems people have. People suffering one type of poverty are not necessarily suffering any of the others. So it is useful to be specific instead of lumping everyone together as if they are all face a more-or-less similar problem.
We should use, extend, and formalise this concept.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/career-ambition-advice-data/671374/
Five pieces of career advice, shaped by economics, psychology, and a little bit of existential math
Grade inflation is a problem. I think most people are already convinced of that, so I'll skip to the solution.
It's simple. Percentiles. People no longer receive scores based directly on how many answers they got right. These scores are converted into percentiles. Percentiles are the number "what percentage of people did you score better than". So the subjects are divided equally into 100 groups.
It is a simple and old thing, but it does solve the major problems with exams which are intractable under normal systems, and are today costing examining bodies years of effort to try to deal with.
This is just a simple solution to one age old problem - stopping the party with most power (usually the seller) from using deposits as a way to gain leverage the weaker one. It removes the unfairness and flaws the the way deposits normally work.
Deposits are usually asymmetrical. They are charged by one party to give it leverage over the other, in the event that something falls through. For example if a hotel guest cancels a booking he loses the deposit, but if the hotel cancels it it pays nothing. So there is an asymmetry of power. It's unfair.
In well-regulated areas, deposits are held by a trust. For example in the UK a deposit paid by a tenant does not go to the landlord. It goes to a "deposit protection scheme". This helps resolve all sorts of disputes. An uninterested party will judge whether the tenant has forfeited his deposit.
Combining these two ideas yields the solution to the problem. The best way to deal with deposits is this: Both parties pay the same amount to a trust as a deposit. If either party breaks the agreement, he receives the other party's deposit plus his own.
There is one additional benefits, made possible by this innovation: The deposit amount should be set not by one of the parties, but by regulation. For example it could be 10% of the transaction price. When entering the scheme, both parties can state if they prefer a different amount. The final deposit amount will be the median of the three amounts (the buyer's preference, the seller's preference, and the regulated amount).
This plan is indeed radical. It punishes suppliers would can produce energy cheaply and efficiently by taking away their profits. It rewards suppliers using Russian gas by letting them sell for higher prices than everyone else.
All excess revenues above the cost of production would be taken by the state.
It incentivises renewable energy suppliers to turn off their generators, which will worsen the problem. If a wind turbine (for example) is broken or is due maintenance, it will be cheaper to turn it off than to repair it. Building new turbines will be financially suicidal.
What would make sense? Taxing profits or taxing income. This is not radical but it works well.
They also want to reduce consumption during peak hours using some crazy voucher scheme. Instead, they need to charge different rates to consumers at different times of the day. This is so simple and un-radical it is already common in many places.
They want to use the tax income to renumerate energy consumers (ie everybody). There is one simple and known way to do this, called UBI. The tax is re-distributed equally as a subsidy every resident.
In fact, the most effective solution is to raise a tax on all electricity energy and gas consumption, per kJ used. (Ideally prices are also set depending on time of day.) This further inflates the price and drives unessential consumption sharply down. This tax revenue is redistributed as a UBI. So people who use very little electricity make a good income. But every extra unit you use is very expensive.
You also need a way for consumers to measure the cost. For example website showing the price of boiling a kettle and of other common activities, in euros.
The solution is exactly the same for businesses.
The big advantage of the existing plan? Governments can choose the criteria for receiving grants and vouchers. So it can be selective, choosing (to some extent) who gets money. This power is the life-blood of politicians. It allows them to trade favours with businessmen. For example,
measuring the growth in energy costs as a proportion of revenues to trigger quailification for supports.
So the ROI government is planning to subsidise only the thirstiest energy consumers, the same ones they already have a strong political relationship with.
This is why the subsidies/vouchers/grants system is appealing to them. It allows them to look like they are solving the problem, while really setting up a scheme to trade influences with their political allies, and worsening the problem.