The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.
Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.
So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).
I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.
As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.
Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.
"...defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise." and "human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats."
For anyone believing he might be a sane person after reading this, consider this part:
>He even named a suspect: Greta Thunberg.
It's insane how much hatred industrialists and boomers in general seem to focus on a kid who's fed up with their bullshit and tried to rally up other kids. I guess subconsciously they believe this mindset threatens their wealth so much that they can literally compare it to the antichrist.
Greta Thunberg is a force to be reconed with, she has an exceptionaly articulate way of stateing exsactly what the establishment does not want to hear, stands up and does that and does not flinch.
Speaking to the british parliment, 12min speach, bieng mocked with false clapping and laughter, 2019, she was 16.
I know you're just willfully dumb, but other people reading might think you actually have a point.
No army in the world including the US could stop a civilian uprising of even a million people who have just rifles and the will to fight. They don't need nukes, tanks, or airplanes. If a large enough percentage of people, say 2% of the population, decided to fight a civil war, the US army/gov would fall in a few months if the rebels knew what they were doing.
It would be a guerilla war. And all of the critical infrastructure in the US could be destroyed in a month. No gas. No electricity. Smaller uprisings would be easily squashed.
Now, would this ever happen? Unlikely. Americans can barely get their fat asses out of bed much less do military operations for weeks at a time. Things would have to get incredibly bad and a leader would have to organize it. But it is possible.
My problem with this thought is that a civil war = government forces vs cilivilan militias.
I imagine it more a weakened government (but still with a functioning military) supported by civilian militias backing the government, versus various large and small insurgencies possibly with foreign backing.
Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!
That's a fact that sounds like a good thing, but could just as well be a bad thing. Why does it take less of it, and does that impact the environment downstream less?
It requires less because it’s a broad spectrum herbicide but the crops tolerate it. You don’t need much so not very much runs off. Needing to do multiple applications of multiple types of herbicide is definitely going to cause more runoff and more downstream effects.
I'm not a big fan of Roundup (I say send kids through the field cutting weeds with a bean hook like I did growing up; it builds character), but they have a legit argument that spraying post-emergence causes less runoff than tilling weeds under before planting, so you retain more soil and have less chemicals running into waterways.
> to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc.
Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.
The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.
Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.
While it's true that most people don't drive that far daily, it's also true that most people want their cars to be multipurpose.
Most EVs can only be time-efficiently charged to 80% while DC fast charging because the charge curve drops a lot.
And nobody want the pucker factor of getting much below 10% while road tripping.
So, you're really only working with 70% of the max range. At 'normal' freeway speeds of 70mph+, most EV max ranges are less than 300 miles, and 70% of that is 210 usable miles.
You can make it work, but it feels like you're always managing and thinking about charge level vs a car which usually has 400+ miles of range on the freeway.
IMO the base range for EVs needs to be 500 miles, to get 350 miles of usable range, plus 350kW+ charging so charge stops are 10 minutes ish. And the Chinese EV companies have 400kW+ charging cars already, with announcements for 600kW charging!
So battery energy density is critical to getting the range that people want without making the cars even heavier.
Sorry but what you are after likely has less than 1% utility. Niche cars will always exist for cases like yours, but everyone will depend on charge network.
If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.
Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance.
The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can.
So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics.
Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.
> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants
What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.
There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.
> There are only so many black people in the country.
The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.
If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.
> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.
It doesn't mean that at all.
Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.
Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality. This doesn’t mean that the FAA should mess with its hiring process in an ill-conceived and very likely illegal attempt to make it look like the problem doesn’t exist.
But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!
Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.
There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?
As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?
We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?
You're telling me they had this diversity mandate 10 years ago and in the last 10 years all they could think to do was to disqualify white people from hiring and there were absolutely no opportunities to go and encourage people to be air traffic controllers?
Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)
Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.
Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.
The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).
Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.
There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.
Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)
What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.
Having been on the (explicit) receiving side of this - you just don’t fill the other positions until you find the right candidates (where right is whatever criteria you can’t say out loud - though has been said out load often in the last few years).
Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.
Advertising your jobs to more people (including black ones) might help you find more candidates. If you're not finding enough candidates AND you're only finding white candidates, something is wrong, innit? There are all those people who aren't white who might be candidates who for some reason you're ignoring.
How long do you go before you call it quits, and how many white candidates do you need to pass over before you find ‘enough’ black candidates? What consequences need to happen with all those unfilled roles before it is ‘enough’?
Especially since the market of people willing to work the job AND take the pay AND work in the area is not infinite.
We’re talking about a group which went out of its way (apparently) already to recruit folks with the specific colors they wanted + these other criteria.
Don’t forget, everyone else in the country has been having similar constraints and has been trying to do the same thing near as I can tell.
Why do you think they were sharing test answers (it seems), and still only got x candidates in?
And also, doesn’t this entire thing seem actively unfair and racist (albeit to everyone except the chosen minority) instead of what at worst was perhaps a passively unfair and racist situation before? (Albeit to everyone except the majority)
How is that actually any better, except that it pisses off the majority instead of the minority?
Seems like a good way to lose elections, frankly. Or have a majority of the population angry at every minority out there.
Because if your hiring numbers (and workforce composition) don’t line up with what the gov’t expects (applies even more to the gov’t itself) then as a hiring manager you’re in deep shit.
Straight from the president up until Trump (for many administrations), affirmative action is required.
And what the gov’t expects is that your workforce composition aligns with the population as a whole, percentage wise.
There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above.
If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect.
So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.
Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates.
But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.
According to the article they actually tested the first assumption and it was true.
The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.
Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic". My experience has been that beyond a certain threshold on a given test, job performance is essentially uncorrelated with test performance.
As for the article, it's not given me particular solid vibes, a feeling not helped by some of the comments here (both pro and con).
Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".
Also, if you had a better test then you'd use it, but at some point you have 10 candidates and 5 slots and have to use something to choose, so you use the closest approximation available until you can come up with a better one.
> Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".
Sorry, but I just don't agree. There are "qualifying tests" for jobs that I've done that just do not have any sort of monotonic relationship with job performance. I'm a firefighter (volunteer) - to become operational you need to be certified as either FF I or FF II, but neither of those provide anything more than a "yes, this person can learn the basic stuff required to do this". The question of how good a firefighter someone will be is almost orthogonal to their performance on the certification exams. Someone who gets 95% on their IFSAC FF II exam is in no way predicted to be a better firefighter than someone who got 78%.
He talks about some of the extras he did in the post. Assembly, testing and pre-purchase inspections. I assume some of the markup will be removed when others enter the niche.
You can also find some deals on branded equipment on gov auction sites. People are buying lots there, refurbishing when required and reselling for similar markups.
All of the options require a bit of legwork and elbow grease.
Having the combination of capital to buy an entire shipping container of these and also put in the months of work to sell them for a $60k profit seems like an uncommon combination. Like I’d personally find it super cool but I don’t have $100k in cash to gamble on this
Because all the BS rent seeking parties you have to deal with as part of international shipping will make that $6k excavator 12-15k. A lot of costs are fixed per shipment hence buying container fulls and reselling.
And the Alibaba importer is going to care a lot more about satisfying a potentially repeat $100k importer over a one time $5k buyer, and when you purchase large orders like this you can set quality standards for your products and the seller is on the hook if the products do not match the listed requirements.
Basically, you're paying more but they're taking all of the hassle and worry and a large part of the risk out of the operation for their cut and you're not paying much more than you otherwise would for the service.
They're reading our freaking brains!