The meals are pricey, no doubt, but the app is where the real value is.
In NYC, I’ve scored insanely cheap deals—last week I got 10 chicken nuggets for $1. Right now, I’ve got a 50¢ double cheeseburger offer staring me down. I’d redeem it daily if it weren’t for health reasons (it says once a week, but for me, it’s somehow available every day).
And don’t sleep on the $6 meal deal: a McDouble, 4-piece chicken nuggets, small fries, and a small drink. For six bucks, that’s tough to beat!
Given that the app exists and will save you money it's hard to discourage its use but it seems pretty clear their goal is to obsolete in-store menus to obscure the real costs of their meals. Customers get deals in the short term to encourage conversion but in the long term it will be used for price gouging.
Though long pre-app I remember McDonald coupons in at least school newspapers and the like.
I remember one pretty silly case where a coupon gave you cheeseburgers for less than hamburgers. The local McDonalds wouldn't let you order a hamburger at the cheeseburger price so you ordered a cheeseburger "hold the cheese."
I can see hundreds of wind turbines from where I live (all the red lights flash in sync on the horizon, it's kinda creepy). There's definitely more wind during the day than at night here.
If everybody knows it’s the deal, which is apparently the case in NY finance, it’s a non issue.
In fact not having a gardening leave might be more suspicious, as it means you’re so useless and out of the loop your previous employer doesn’t think there’s anything you could be carrying over.
It's not usually a deal breaker because of how common it is, but it does matter. You are going to be disadvantaged against someone who can start sooner. I fully support this legislation. Non-competes are anti-competitive, period.
This doesn't seem like as big of an issue as you make it sound from my anecdotal experience. The finance guys I know in NYC don't have this issue? It's such a common part of the work that hiring people this far out in advance is quite common...
Garden leave and notice periods are, to some degree, a coordination issue. "You have to give us and we have to give you three months notification of termination of employment" works (mostly) fine when everyone does it and they know it's just the way things are. It's harder when you're that problem candidate who can't start for three months when that isn't the norm.
That is completely normal. College hires are either returning interns from the previous summer or else mostly recruited in the fall to start after they graduate in the summer, so almost all new grad hiring takes place 6-12 months out anyway.
Will you be factoring in the cost of an accident (you can adjust the rarity of the accident to get your expected value) destroying the entire economic engine of the state?
A lot of nuclear closures make no sense. Germany's indiscriminate shutting down of all the nuclear power plants in the country without waiting for renewable alternatives to be online was a bad idea.
However, specific shutdowns do make sense. A nuclear plant situation upstream of the biggest city in the US, right by the entire city's water supply is very high up in the list of existing nuclear shutdowns that make sense.
Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into the externalities of climate change.)
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I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM. Basically, no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest forms of energy we have, behind only solar, wind, and hydropower. Admittedly, deaths ≠ costs, but I imagine the numbers would be similar.
nuclear is also incredibly hard to build an accurate model for because the concern tends to revolve around the risk of human stupidity causing major issues.
on top of that, i feel like there is a lot of hand waving involved with the waste. if we really industrialized nuclear fuel worldwide - we would be creating a lot of nuclear waste. theoretically, this isnt a problem.
what id like to see, and may do one day if i run out of projects, is at what risk factor does nuclear equal fossil fuels. not, look how much better it is, but "this is about how dumb we would need to be in our handling of nuclear plants to cause about the same damage as our current system does"
making it apples to apples like that would make it much clearer.. % risk of this or that is tough to internalize for a lot of people. but is active sabotage of 1 out of every 10 plants necessary to be as bad as current energy? or is just 1 plant failing enough to make nuclear worse and we are just saying the likelihood of just 1 plant failing is astronomically small
Fossil fuels have enormous global risk, so that's not bad for nuclear.
The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway. The usual arguments, intermittency of renewables and land use, don't work well when examined closely, at least when justifying new nuclear power plants.
First of all, we’re currently closing nuclear plants that would could otherwise have a lot of life left, so this isn’t merely about whether to build new plants. But putting that aside for a moment:
> The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway.
Is it, though?
From where I’m standing—wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy. I mean, look at the top link. Solar doesn’t even get its own category. So we fall back on fossil fuels.
Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs. Build a few more nuclear plants, and boom, New York’s electricity could be CO2 free, in a few years!
> wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy
"They are not producing enough energy, therefore they can't produce enough energy." This is an obviously wrong argument, since there is nothing preventing vast expansion of renewable capacity. The world is constantly hit by 100,000 terawatts of sunlight; total world primary energy consumption is 18 TW.
> Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs.
i am equally interested in seeing it compared it to alternative fuels in the same manner. the point is more about putting nuclear into perspective with human error. and what kinds of human error are necessary to make nuclear dangerous.
I feel there is an assumption that there will always be enough people at every plant who are fully competent, which i do not think is the reality we would see if we replace most energy needs with nuclear
Also the Japanese government is projecting a total of somewhere between $200 billion and $600 billion to clean up the mess left behind -- amortizing that on the $/MWh produced by the power plant would probably lead to slightly more expensive power...
The proper way to make the accounting is to sum the cleanup for Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and then divide by the 120-180 operating nuclear plants and further divide by the 25-35 years of continuous operation:
∑ accidents
---------------------------
∑ fleet x years operated
Just curious, has anyone ever had a candidate actually fail FizzBuzz in front of them? I think the original statement was something like 90% of candidates can't do it. In my experience, every single candidate I have ever given that question succeeds. When I am asked FizzBuzz on an interview, I am actually insulted.
Not FizzBuzz, and not me personally, but from someone I worked with and I have 0 reason to believe is lying:
After a few disappointing responses to better questions, interviewer decides to give a "freebie" and asks for a function that determines whether an integer is odd or even.
Candidate produces something that loops from 0 to the provided integer, incrementing two separate counters, then comparing them at the end.
Interviewer manages to stammer out something like "are you sure there isn't a more efficient way to solve this?"
Guy furrows his brow for a few minutes more, then a light bulb of sorts goes on, and he declares "Of course! ..."
I would be amazed to meet someone who, if asked whether 3042041 was odd or even, would follow this exponential-time procedure manually. Unless the candidate was such a person, it's a failure of programming.
Yeah, but "doesn't know about the % operator" is a lot less damning than "can only think of an exponential-time algorithm to determine if a number is even". Like, this is terrible, but it's linear time:
char s[32];
sprintf(s, "%d", n);
char c = s[strlen(s) - 1];
return c == '0' || c == '2' || c == '4' || c == '6' || c == '8';
Not fizzbuzz, but at one of my past companies we did a similar low complexity problem (use any language you fancy, google if you need to, you get a list of things, filter them by some attribute and group it by another, print out the list per group) during a phone screen, and people did fail it. Typically doesn't happen in later interviews, unless people have a complete mental breakdown due to stress.
If you can't pay a mortgage or feed a family, summers off and pension aren't useful. Teachers don't have equity like many other industries. They pretty much universally don't get bonuses. The mindset that teachers have something that offsets the embarrassingly low salaries that we offer them is the result of decades of politicians trying to justify cutting money from education.
What is the money being spent on? It's hard to get actual data on this down to the granular level of pens and paper. I've read tons of statements that it mostly goes to administrator salaries, various "initiatives" (but how does an initiative cost separate money? never answered) and infrastructure costs. I believe that's likely, but I also haven't seen raw data.
Next question to me is: what actually needs funding? Teacher salaries, sure, easy argument. But then what? What supplies? Books, laptops, projectors, software licenses, crayons, play-doh, stencils, rulers, graph paper, craft paper, what? And how often?
Comparing my elementary school experience 80's to my children's (now); Technology and Curriculum materials are much more prevalent.
I find the use of so many single use materials surprising. Most of the subjects won't have a textbook in the traditional sense, they've a 'math program' that includes a workbook, any number of handouts, worksheets, and often an application or website. Most of my textbooks were from the 60's, we made brown grocery bag bookcovers for them and were expected to return them with minimal wear. While this generates increased reoccurring revenue for the publisher, I'm unconvinced it's an improvement.
What are the lifetime cost differences on chalkboards vs. smartboards or overhead projectors vs digital projectors.
It's not like my kids don't have all the technology at home, chromebooks, tablets, etc. I don't think they need it school too, especially when often all they do with it is the app from the subscription they have in place of a textbook.
The huge increase in infrastructure costs are seriously under-appreciated.
This is an article from 2002 about new schools being built in Baltimore. One for $14M and one for $13M. The article laments how much school construction costs are rising.
That data doesn't look to be adjusted for inflation, no? 1990 dollars are worth essentially half of today's dollars, so those charts don't say very much, even if they only go to 2005.
Edit: it's also the case that the population has grown by 50 million people since 1990, which would bring an expected increase of 15-20% in expenditure. Accounting for both, I'm surprised we don't spend more.
Considering the average pay was about $65k, I'd say that most states seem to have decent pay. That's slightly higher than the average pay in the US, and significantly higher than the median.
My state has good teacher pay. I know someone working as a secondary ed biology teacher making a little more than I do as a dev (about $90k; both of us have masters).
Average isn't a useful metric here because you'd be hard pressed to find an "average" school. Teacher salaries generally don't do a good job of tracking the cost of living. $65k might be a good salary for some parts of America, but if a bigger chunk of those teachers are in dense urban areas with high costs of living (see: the bay area) it's not good at all. It's also not useful if you lump public school teachers in with private school teachers.
If it's not a useful metric, then it seems the article has no support for it's argument about teacher pay. If you also look in the article, it mentions that many of the states with higher costs of living also have significantly higher average pay, while states with lower cost of living have lower pay. It seems to generally track.
Now there could be localized areas that have pay problems, like the bay area. But are these widespread? Or is this a symptom of some underlying problem like locale specific policies or preferences (property taxes, housing prices/zoning/preferences, and the largest income inequality in the country)? Using other anecdotes, like in my area, there doesn't seem to be a problem.
So basically, if we can't use averages, what quantitative evidence is there that teacher pay being low is a widespread problem? Or is it possible that the audience on this forum is used to pay which falls in the top 5-10%, and thus skews the perception of what is "good" pay?
"Teacher salaries generally don't do a good job of tracking the cost of living."
You make this claim, but is there evidence to back that up? Because I don't see it in the article nor the comments.
>$65k might be a good salary for some parts of America, but if a bigger chunk of those teachers are in dense urban areas with high costs of living
Seems like the location of teachers would match the location of workers and children. It seems reasonable to compare the average worker salary to the average teacher's (or public teacher if that is your main interest)
Public school teachers belong to unions and have lifetime pensions. Many of them have their educational loans forgiven after a certain number of years of service.
Not in all states. In my state (North Carolina), teachers participate in the public employees retirement/pension fund. However, public employees are prohibited by law from joining/forming a union.
Yes, the get "summers off", but there are also mandatory continuing education requirements that must be completed, so they're still working (unpaid) during those two months.
Teachers also cannot request a vacation day. If you need to call in sick, you're responsible for securing a substitute (school provides the list of approved people, better start calling them frantically).
Neither of those benefits, if they exist in a state, negate the hardships of a low salary. Thinking of paying off the loan which got you the job as some sort of luxury is wild. We could also just pay them more so loans didn't need to be forgiven.
But this and the previous comment is true for all jobs. How can you compare a job where it takes years and years of dedicated study and very special set of skills and aptitude to match the remuneration of a job that is less valuable and only requires certification?
Can we expect school teachers to be paid as much as a project manager or surgeon? It is not an easy job or an unskilled one, but it is not at par with the more you well paid jobs as well.
Cities want to have a mixed housing and diversity and all kinds of income earning citizens. But then the low wage earning populace start complaining that pay isn’t good enough and wages need to be increased. You can’t have the cake and eat it too. We can create subsidized affordable homes in expensive Ca zip codes but we can’t bring down cost of living…because it’s the high cost of living that supports the rest of the pyramid by way of high cost of goods and services. And taxes. From gas to utilities to restaurants, everything costs more. So those on the lower wages who are subsidized will always have a lag in cost of living no matter what.
It’s all relative. The govt should make infrastructure and basic support systems equal to ALL cities with diverse cost of living index. That’s all we can do in terms of equality.
Completely random google search and this about rural schools : https://hechingerreport.org/rural-schools-have-a-teacher-sho.... [..] “People arrive here, and they can’t deal,” said Kohl of the many teachers who come for a few years but don’t stay. “Yeah, the mountains are beautiful, but they’re nine hours away. If you want to fly anywhere, you drive 325 miles to Billings.”[..] For many reasons, including low pay, isolation and scarcity of housing, hanging on to local talent is an especially acute problem in Montana.[…] you can’t fix isolation and lack of housing with higher pay. This is a govt failing.
How much does tutoring cost? It costs 10-12k per student per annum according to most schools budgets. And most school districts have 10-15k students.
Schools are for social reasons as well as educational. So children can learn from their peers..but consider what is happening in schools. There is violence, guns, bullying and drugs in school. They are becoming political and it’s like rounding up all the impressionables for any kind of indoctrination. Education has become secondary to politics in American schools.
Union negotiated working conditions are worse but pay is higher. Something is utterly rotten with American public education and it’s been this way for the past two decades. It has gotten worse in the last ten years. It might be beyond repair at this point and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt.
> Teachers don't have equity like many other industries.
What "many"? Are there any industries besides software and finance that offer equity compensation?
I had real jobs in a couple fields before I became a coder, and never once did they give me free stocks. I think one company you could use part of your pay check automatically _buy_ their stock at nearly market prices, which would have been a silly thing to do.
Sounds nice as long as things like the pension are actually funded. Not so great if you worked for years of lower pay only to find out that your pension is being cut because your employer didn't put aside as much money as they were supposed to.
If the childhood mortality risk associated with Covid is comparable to the flu (which seems to be the case) why weren't we masking every child before Covid?
The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. It's not about protecting the individual children (at least not primarily, because they are so low risk). Whether or not this is still a useful approach probably depends on the locale. It seems like places where the Omicron wave is rapidly ending, having children wear masks is entirely pointless.
>The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff.
People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity? "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children to possibly impact hospital capacity elsewhere" is not something that makes sense to me. If this was just another bottleneck in some system and not related to the pandemic you'd address the real problem, right?
> People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?
You mean like calling in the national guard to help alleviate the problem or busing in nurses from all over the country, or creating temporary wards, or fighting to get more ventilators and medications? All of those things and more have been happening.
> "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children
Not only are you minimizing the benefits here, but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones. That is not something that makes sense to me. I want to make my choices based on our best understanding of the evidence we have right now, not based on things that may or may not ever happen in the future.
Right now, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when community spread is high in your area are proven to do a lot of good to help prevent very real harms. That's enough for me.
Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year. I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently, and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case. I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
>Not only are you minimizing the benefits here
CDC's own studies did this, not me.
>but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones.
Yes exactly. We know that kids have an infinitesimally small risk from covid, we know that teachers have a similar risk profile if they're vaccinated. The "potential" outcomes are catastrophic to development, and we won't know for years what detrimental effects forcing small children to wear masks all the time will have.
Sorry, still doesn't make sense to me. We have one set of known knowns, and one of unknown-ish unknowns, and we're still doing this because people (not you, necessarily) seem to think the goal is to "never get covid".
> Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year
I'm surprised more haven't been. Nurses are being outright abused, but that doesn't change the fact that nurses are being asked to travel great distances to help with staffing issues. The whole situation in nursing is a huge mess right now for a lot of reasons.
> I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently
you should be paying more attention to the news, or possibility looking critically at where you're getting your news from since it's not serving you very well. I don't know which one you heard about but your list should include Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Oregon, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire. New Mexico has also called in the national guard because of omicron, but they want troops acting as substitute teachers.
> and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case
> I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
Yes I have. Most hospitals don't want to add entire new wings full of beds because covid isn't going to be like this forever, but in just the last few months here are some examples of hospitals doing wherever they can to add capacity:
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-nursing-homes-covid-...
This is on top of all the beds and overflow centers hospitals have been adding over the last two years. It's not that every hospital is waiting until they have people dying outside their doors to start adding beds either. One of the best US hospitals for heart surgeries is just outside of Chicago and they've renovated parts of their old partially demolished hospital building to keep on standby so they can handle covid cases in case they get overwhelmed like so many others have. It's a pretty smart way to gain some extra ICU space while keeping costs down.
Your facts are just very wrong or very incomplete. I recommend looking into this stuff a bit more using new sources.
"why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?"
Maybe we should, but we are talking about an astounding cost, with ongoing upkeep, for once-every-hundred-year events. And that's just for new facilities - we already have nursing shortages.
Instead, we (and just about every other country) have used mitigation efforts to reduce the transmission rate when hospital capacity is threatened. It's a lot cheaper and can be done quickly, unlike building new ICU capacity and training new doctors and nurses (many of whom would be out of the job once the pandemic is over).
You say this is expensive and hard, but so what? Isn’t that what you do when a pandemic occurs?
You also point out we have a nursing shortage currently (we did before the pandemic as well). Isn’t that a reason why we should do this? Kill two birds with one stone … solve the prior nursing shortage with a training and hiring blitz.
Expanding hospitals, building new hospitals and training scores of new highly-skilled staff all takes many years. In addition to being extraordinarily expensive.
And then what? The pandemic ends and we have incredibly expensive facilities sitting empty (but still incurring maintenance costs forever) and a surplus of highly-trained staff who cannot find jobs because 98% of the time, we simply don't need any more capacity than we had in 2019.
Training staff does take time but new hospitals can be built quickly. The Chinese built an entire new hospital in 10 days. It probably isn't as good as a modern US hospital, but it's better than nothing.
The mitigation efforts have cost trillions of dollars in relief spending to make up for the economic damage they caused. Could we not have expanded capacity with one or two of the trillions we spent?
Makes you kinda wonder what kind of emergency this is? I mean they tried setting up fully staffed field hospitals in the beginning but they were closed—most without seeing a single patient.
Whatever the hell society is doing right now, it ain’t to protect hospital capacity. If hospitals were truly falling apart we’d have done something to fix them.
Because the Covid mortality risk for children is already with masks, compared to without masks for the flu.
Also, there are considerations other than specifically a child's death that are relevant here, like who that child can spread it to and what negative longterm effects surviving COVID-19 carry, neither of which are as pronounced or unknown as with the flu.
Children can spread the virus to adults, but adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months now. And since everyone will be exposed anyway it hardly matters who does the exposing.
How many children are there in the US? I'll let you pick the number you'd like to multiply by 0.00002, to get the number of children you're okay with killing.
It's easy to act morally superior and make cheap emotional arguments for when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions. All lives have value, but no life has infinite value. You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.
And in the long run it won't make any difference anyway. Everyone will be exposed regardless of whether or not schoolchildren are subjected to mask mandates. So what's the point of continuing the charade?
I absolutely can expect the majority to endure a minor inconvenience, if that minority they're protecting is a thousand innocent children in a given year (you didn't pick a number, so I will, 78 million children).
And the point is to lower the curve, not avoid exposure.
But, again, you know all of this, you just don't care. Shameful.
Children actually have around a ten times higher chance of drowning than dying of COVID, so should we close all the pools and lakes? No we don't do that because we realize as humans that life is not without risk, in fact risk is what makes life worth living. I have children and worry every day something bad might happen to them but I let them take risk and live life because I know that's the only way that they will grow and be happy.
We do close all the pools and lakes to children who can't swim, or who swim unsupervised. We literally do not let children swim freely in random bodies of water. It's a huge deal; we hire lifeguards, teach them methods of operating safely in bodies of water, there's all kinds of equipment a child can wear while in the water to prevent drowning...
This isn't a great analogy for you, because it pretty thoroughly proves my point that masking is a very reasonable thing to do, compared to the litany of structure we put around children swimming in pools.
I was a lifeguard at a summer camp for christsake, what a terrible analogy. I literally worked to implement the many systems we use to keep kids safe in bodies of water.
I'm sure if a politician spouted such things they would just get tons of votes from parents. Honestly its kinda interesting to hear you say such a thing out loud because some of the more extreme voices on the anti-mask side have claimed that control is exactly whats going on which makes me wonder if you are not just trolling at this point (or maybe they were right all along).
> You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.
Who is saying the mandates and restrictions are perpetual?
> Because the Covid mortality risk for children is already with masks, compared to without masks for the flu
This is false, which we know because we can measure the fatality rates for children in unmasked locales, and they do not differ from those in masked locales.
