That seems too broad of an age range since you end up comparing 34 year old high school graduates to people with undergraduate degrees a decade earlier in their careers.
Only looking at the first few years of a career for undergraduates has another problem I mentioned in a different comment. Not all professions have high starting salaries even if your lifetime earning potential is significantly improved. As far as I can tell this methodology, if applied to graduate degrees, would conclude medical school isn't worth it as an example.
A significant difference in lifetime earnings doesn't necessarily imply a large jump in early career earnings. For example the difference in lifetime earnings could come entirely from significantly higher income later in a career that more than makes up for a lower starting salary.
Some professional careers work exactly like this, for example pilot or doctor. Lifetime earnings would be a much better comparison than just looking at the first few years of a career to asses if the educational investment was worth it or not.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, that calculation sounds fundamentally wrong if it's comparing median college graduate earnings after 4 years against high school graduate earnings in general.
After 4 years the median college graduate is still early in their career and likely hasn't hit their maximum income potential, but they're being compared against high school graduates at every stage of their careers, including those who have maxed out their potential income in whatever field they're working in. Or is the high school comparison similarly limited to early career?
Given that the most universally agreed to counter examples are diplomats and invading armies, I'd say a reasonable non-lawyer interpretation is that "subject to the jurisdiction" excludes people who are in some way under the authority or control of a foreign government even while in the US. They may be physically here, but they're presence is on behalf of a foreign government that has jurisdiction over them even while in the US. US law might apply to them in varying ways depending on their status, but there is still a distinction that does not exist for other visitors. Maybe less about the question of whether US law applies at all and more about if US law applies equally beyond the 14th amendment and if any other government can lay claim to authority.
You could potentially apply this to temporary tourists as well, but the linkage between them and the government of the country they are coming from is much weaker since their presence typically doesn't have them acting on behalf of the foreign government or with any special legal distinction.
I'd also pose the same question back to you, what's a reasonable definition of "subject to the jurisdiction" that excludes everyone except US citizens, as many conservatives want, or at least only extends to legal permanent residents?
Government regulation around conditions of employment has a very long history, because "the market" has a long history of producing things like Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire when it's allowed to.
While in theory the market punishes bad employers by making people not want to work for them, the reality is that for all but the most in-demand individuals, the power asymmetry between an individual and their employer is such that some level of government regulation is probably needed to maintain reasonable working conditions. You could certainly argue whether regulating this particular thing is a good idea or not of course.
But in a case where either treatment choice could be reasonable, doesn't it seem like a better answer for the insurance company to defer to your doctor rather than their own assessment? Whoever is making that determination at the insurance company doesn't know you, hasn't treated you, may or may not have more expertise on the specific illness than your doctor, and as you pointed out the insurance company doctor is ultimately motivated by keeping costs low more than they are motivated by keeping you healthy.
Obviously I can see why the insurance company would prefer to be making decisions about your treatment, but it's not obvious why any of the rest of us should view that as an optimal or even acceptable way of running healthcare. It's essentially the car insurance model but with vastly higher consequences, and it's not great even when it comes to car insurance.
What do you mean it's not a supply problem? Suburbs and the housing within them aren't naturally occurring features with limited supply. They're not oil deposits. You can just build more of them.
Same thing with places like NYC or Paris or London. The point isn't that they need more development, it's that other places need more development so people who want the NYC experience in the US don't have exactly one city to choose from. You don't make NYC cheaper with more building in NYC, you make NYC cheaper by making more NYC like cities.
Edit: Per a comment below, this does not seem like a regular feature of the game, just an oddity of today. It would still be worth figuring out a way to eliminate the tie issue or at least ensure it's less of a factor in future games, but the game is much more fun on average overall than today's game suggests
Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.
Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.
A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.
The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.
Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.
It's mostly, but not entirely, a combination of biases working in a feedback loop. Because of the 737 MAX crashes, which were legitimately at least partially Boeing's fault, stories about incidents involving Boeing planes are more likely to get covered in the media and become popular on social media, essentially selection bias. Confirmation bias means both the media and readers are more likely to view it the new story as Boeing's fault whether or not that's accurate, and this first impression becomes solidified in peoples' minds, anchoring bias.
This is very important because aircraft accident investigations take time and few aviation incidents generate enough attention that there is much if any follow up once the full cause is known. This first impression is what people remember the next time there is a Boeing story, further strengthening the confirmation bias. It's a self reinforcing feedback loop.
Which is not to say that Boeing doesn't deserve some bad press. The MAX story, the door plug blowout, and some others are legitimate evidence of issues at Boeing. But the bias feedback loop ensures that every Boeing story is treated that way, significantly distorting the reality of the issue.
I like to think I'm generally more optimistic than average that AI growth will be a a net benefit to the economy, standard of living, and employment, but "AI creates jobs building AI data centers" is a terrible argument in favor of that optimistic idea.
Ignoring the fact that the number of data center construction jobs a given data center produces is probably vastly lower than the labor displacement possible with the compute power said data center will hold, the idea of losing your job due to AI only to get another job building data centers for more AI is some genuinely dystopian stuff.
I feel like AI would be a lot more popular if the proponents of building AI hadn't seem to have all gone to the Darth Vader school of PR. AI is a valuable tool because it allows skilled labor to be vastly more productive, not because it displaces skilled labor into jobs where they build they build the infrastructure for the robotic overlords that replaced them.
That might be a valid solution on the individual level, but it seems problematic if we want the kinds of things only a large organization can realistically produce. In addition to small organizations that can act as a source of employment for people who absolutely can't stand a corporate hierarchy, we also need large corporations that don't suck, or at least suck the minimum necessary amount to attract people less averse to having a boss. At least if we want things like airliners and what not.
I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.
No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.
I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.
> You can't compare batteries to actual power plants.
Sure you can. It makes as much sense as comparing EVs to gasoline powered cars. Which is to say that it's perfectly fine if the question you're trying to answer is whether one can replace the other, which is in fact the question here. As long as the lights come on when it's dark out and your car goes when you hit the accelerator, does it really matter to you as a user whether the power to do those things was created right that second or created hours ago and stored until you needed it? An EV doesn't produce its own energy either, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether it can replace your gas powered car and that's why people directly compare them.
I have generally moved from bearish to bullish on the future of current AI technology, but the continued inaccuracy with basic facts all while the models significantly improve continues to give me significant pause.
As an example, creating recipes with Claude Opus based on flavor profiles and preferences feels magical, right up until the point at which it can't accurately convert between tablespoons and teaspoons. It's like the point in the movie where a character is acting nearly right but something is a bit off and then it turns out they're a zombie and going to try to eat your brain. This note taking example feels similar. It nearly works in some pretty impressive ways and then fails at the important details in a way that something able to do the things AI can allegedly do really shouldn't.
It's these failures that make me more and more convinced that while current generation AI can do some pretty cool things if you manage it right, we're not actually on the right track to achieve real intelligence. The persistence of these incredibly basic failure modes even as models advance makes it fairly obvious that continued advancement isn't going to actually address those problems.
> Uncle Sam should sunset SSI and allow citizens to select from and move freely between a number of accredited funds.
But how does the government actually do that? This feels like one of those ideas that sounds OK right up until the point where you try to map out an actual plan with more detail beyond the word "sunset".
If current Social Security taxes fund current payouts, how do you redirect those taxes anywhere without cutting off current Social Security recipients who spent their entire lives paying into the system? Even those still working have spent some portion of their career paying Social Security tax. Do they get a lump sum payout they can invest (from where?), a limited annuity in retirement (paid for by who?), or is that just money down the drain?
I'm not even necessarily opposed to the idea of changing Social Security into something else, but I'd love for any proposal for doing so to come with something that looks even remotely like an actual plan.
I think the right analogy here is that I'm a renter and the person who built my house (builder) is different from the person who paid for the house (landlord). The builder said the roof needed trusses but the landlord decided they weren't "structurally necessary" and refused to pay for them. The roof collapses on me...does the landlord escape liability?
Maybe an even better analogy is that I live in a rented home and after I report some weird respiratory issues, an inspector finds black mold all over the place. The landlord refuses to fix the issue because "black mold is totally fine, bro" and I get really sick. I could maybe have moved out, but I kinda feel like the landlord is going to have a bad time here.
Sorry, but this feels like a lot of weasel lawyer doublespeak nonsense. Denying insurance coverage for a specific procedure for a specific patient based on whether you think that procedure is necessary is absolutely making a specific medical decision that will impact the treatment of that patient. The idea that this does not constitute practicing medicine is absurd and the fact that the patient can potentially still obtain treatment seems immaterial. A doctor who flat out told a patient a certain procedure wasn't medically necessary could be legally liable if that wasn't accurate, so how is the same not true of an insurance company who has far more impact on the ability of the patient to obtain treatment?
The reality is that this is the insurance companies trying to have their cake and eat it too. They actually want to be making a medical decision in denying coverage since it gives them a legitimate reason to do so, but want to avoid any liability if that decision was wrong.
Words do in fact have meaning, which is why if you want your decision to be viewed as an insurance one rather than a medical one, you probably should avoid using phrases like "medically necessary" as justification for your decision to approve or deny insurance coverage. Using that phrase strongly suggests that while the ultimate decision was about providing or denying insurance coverage, what informed that decision was a medical determination about the actual necessity of the procedure. If you want to keep the decision firmly in the insurance realm, better considerations to mention might be expected lifetime payouts, shareholder value, and "because fuck you that's why".
I suspect many people during the Industrial Revolution weren't seeing those end products either, only a total upending of their way of life and means of earning a living. And to be fair, many of them probably didn't experience enough of the upside in their lives to make up for the shock of the transition. Ideally this time around we can make that shock less painful, but I'm skeptical.
Only looking at the first few years of a career for undergraduates has another problem I mentioned in a different comment. Not all professions have high starting salaries even if your lifetime earning potential is significantly improved. As far as I can tell this methodology, if applied to graduate degrees, would conclude medical school isn't worth it as an example.