Multiply anything by a billion people and it’s going to be a big number - food waste, plastic grocery bags, paper napkins. It can be a way to encourage people to think about their own contribution to environmental problems, but it often ends up distracting people into making a big deal of, and demanding personal lifestyle changes over, something that’s actually a small contributor to the real problem.
NPR/USDA estimate that adults eat about 2000 pounds of food per year, so 94kg/2000 pounds = 10%. 73 kg/2000 pounds = 8%. Not bad, honestly, considering, for example, a banana peel is 12% of the banana.
My grocery started a campaign where the “guarantee your milk has at least 10 days,” so they’re discarding or diverting milk not just on the ‘best by’ date, but 10 days before that. All I can hope is that it’s getting diverted to lower-cost stores or food banks and not actually getting thrown out, because that’s ridiculous.
Dog races are worse than horse races, mostly because the dogs are trained to be more-or-less psychotic. Horses, you can see as understanding the competition they’re in and being (at least mostly) willing participants.
University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.
Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.
Only looking at northeast Ohio, the population and income maps you show are high along the Cleveland-Akron-Canton corridor, where the voter purge is west of there - Wooster & Mansfield.
- What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.
I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.
I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.
All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.
Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.
My guess is just the US, because of the low birth rate on 4th of July.
I got a PIN assigned by my bank back in the 1980s, and it is in that range. I always assumed it was random, because how easy is it to generate a 4-digit random number? But maybe they gave out PINs more like safe combinations. I don’t think you could change them back then, either.
If you’re going to have any non-linux clients, samba will be an order of magnitude easier. MacOS handles nfs pretty well, but Windows just wants SMB
“We tried this and got nothing,” is not really knowledge that can be built on. It might be helpful if you say it to a colleague at a conference, but there’s no way for a reader to know if you’re an inept experimenter, got a bad batch of reagents or specimens, had a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, inadequate statistical design, or neglected to control for some secondary phenomenon. You have to do extra work and spend extra money to prove out those possibilities to give the future researcher grounds for thinking up that thing you didn’t try, and you’ve probably already convinced yourself that it’s not going to be a productive line of work.
It might be close if the discussion section of those “This project didn’t really work, but we spent a year on it and have to publish something” papers would include their negative speculation that the original hypothesis won’t work, or the admission that they started on hypothesis H0, got nowhere, and diverted to H1 to salvage the effort, but that takes a level of humility that’s uncommon in faculty. And sometimes you don’t make the decision not to pursue the work until the new grad student can’t repeat any of the results of that first paper. That happens with some regularity and might be worth noting, if only as a footnote or comment attached to the original paper. Or for journals to do a 5-10 year follow-up on each paper just asking whether the authors are still working on the topic and why. “Student graduated and no one else was interested” is a very different reason than “marginal effect size so switched models.”
I can’t tell you how many times I had some exciting idea, dug around in the literature, found someone 10, 20, even 30 years ago who’d published promising work along exactly the line I was thinking, only to completely abandon the project after one or two publications. I’ve come to see that pattern as “this didn’t actually work, and the first paper was probably bullremoved.”
It’s really hard to write an interesting paper based on “this didn’t work,” unless you can follow up to the point where you can make a positive statement of why it didn’t work, and at that point, you’re going to write a paper based on the positive conclusion and demote the negative finding to some kind of control data. You have to have the luxury of time, resources, and interest to go after that positive statement, and that’s usually incompatible with professional development.
And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.