> I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.
The accent bit happens in the US too, to an extent. Depending on the accent you grew up with, you get different responses from people in professional or professional-adjacent settings if you forget to switch the knob back to the more homogenized vaguely Iowa-sounding GenAm accent. This covers a gamut of other accents - regional or not (NE, aave, southern, val, etc).
But it's not nearly as bad as RP in England from what I gather - for one, a pretty decent chunk of the population would normally grow up with a GenAm accent with no forcing, unlike in England where it's a pretty hyper local <5% of the native population.
The real problem imo is that below 0% is really bad, and has the potential to spiral. So the fed does not target anything close to 0%, but instead targets some buffer above it.
So it's not that "2% is good", but more that "2% is the best buffer we've decided above the <0% super scary threshold"
Yes of course below 0% is especially bad, but I dont think thats the whole story. If central banks were able to set inflation with 100% certainty I still think targeting a number close to 0% is a bad idea. Nominal interest rates have a floor due to defaults, servicing costs. As inflation approaches 0 that floor is hit and monetary policy loses its ability to control real interest rates. Keeping nominal rates above their floor is key to ensuring small business can obtain liquidity, as the floor is approached it makes less sense for lenders to write small loans.
There are many other reasons a positive inflation rate is better than substantially near 0. One common complaint about inflation is that erodes real wages because nominal wages are sticky, but this is actually a good thing. It gives businesses room to breathe during downturns without cutting nominal wages or having to cut staff. Positive inflation also forces cash into productive uses which helps monetary policy because it keeps the actaul money supply more stable.
I don't think that OP meant to say their wage income was low.
I think OP means that once their investment returns starts exceeding their wage income, their motivation for continuing to work drops.
Which, I kinda get. If you don't really like what you're doing, it's harder to stay motivated at continuing to work when your bag of money makes more money than you do.
It sounds like OP is already planning on some amount of return to work, which may be necessary because that exact point (investment returns > wage income) isn't necessarily a safe point to retire. But it might be, depending on how much you spend, and what your not-employer-funded healthcare costs are.
Y"eah, the same reason we're going to have a trillionaire soon is why even if someones making a great salary, their 401k is inflating faster than they need to earn a living in a low cost of living area.
Absolutely absurd, but if you got the upswing between 2010-2020, you might be in an upper class while still living in lower class, meaning your 401k is all you need to survive on while the billionaires continue to pump the market as a defacto monetary instrument and leave the dollar for the poors.
Think of it like bitcoin, but instead of owning electronic worthless hashes, you own LLCs that own stocks and take out loans on behalf ot he LLC against those stocks.
Then you just trade those LLCs around as tokens of wealth.
It's just yet another wealth transfer between classes. They can happen frequently and unpredictably, and usually but not always from workers to owners. If you happen to be in the class that benefits, you take the windfall.
I mean, it depends on where you take your driving test. In a lot of places in the US (especially in some rural areas), you may still pass. In some cases you might not even drive near a stoplight during the test.
If you "know a guy" you can even pass a driving test without ever getting behind the wheel of a car. Road licensing is in complete shambles in the last 10 years. A lot of "workarounds" and corruption.
> Section 4 says to prioritize prosecuting cyber crimes. Not sure why they wouldn't already be prosecuted.
Not a whole lot of federal prosecutors. They're very selective about what gets pursued or not.
If they can't reliably build cases with a >90% success rate, it doesn't get prioritized. There's like <500 (federal) convictions per year on this whole area.
We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.
Not to mention quitting in droves because very many don't want to take these cases or otherwise to stand in court and explain why current admin is not bound by existing laws, court orders, the US constitution in general, or internationally recognized human rights etc.
If a federal prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute federal crimes, it's probably best for both themselves and their country if they find themselves a new job.
Out of curiosity, did you willfully choose to not understand the circumstances that prosecutors are being forced to carry hundreds of cases, too many to even read before they are in court, and then they are forced to stand in front of judges and face contempt while they are asked to explain why the government, who the prosecutor has no real control over, is violating yet another judicial order?
It isn’t just a matter of prosecutors picking and choosing…it’s underfunding, DOGE, and then those that are left are treated as adversarial the moment they complain about conditions or case loads. (Just like your comment does.)
It is only when judgement is rendered that it becomes a federal crime. Until then it is only alleged. And guess what: this administration is alleging a lot of things that fail.
Ah hahah yea. Not too much need about hackers being prosecuted going around. Lot more news about hackers breaching companies though. Closure rate of law enforcement & prosecutors vs hackers has gotta be way under 1% lol.
Florida, at least for local Florida stuff, like what GP is talking about, has had R governor, senate, and house for 25+ years. With a supermajority R for most of that I think.
> As a loose comparison, hardware bit errors happen probabilistically, yet they’re so rare that we can effectively ignore them in day-to-day use assuming no specialized application (e.g. defense, space, critical infrastructure)
The better comparison on bit errors would be e.g. rowhammer, an adversarial bit error. Which you absolutely can't ignore.
It's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately, people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to teach something rather than nothing.
Sounds like people are paying for these courses is part of the actual problem, then? Students should not have any kind of entitlement whatsoever to pass classes other than merit.
Framing it as a transaction is part of the problem IMHO. We have a collective interest that the majority of the population gets the best education possible. Turning universities into credential stores leads to all the negative side effects we're dealing with - pay to play schemes, dubious credential mills, rich families bribing universities, and so on.
That's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.
Under the circumstance that the primary and secondary education levels have failed to adequately prepare a student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be unfair.
The university teaches what it teaches; it exists as a place of higher learning. If the student is unprepared for that, they are unprepared to attend. It's not university's job to fix shitty high schools' teachings and redo lower learning. Go get a highschool tutor if you need that.
If you were never taught math, that sucks, but you shouldn't be admitted to a university. That's just not what needs to be happening. Go catch up on math at your own and reapply when ready.
It's difficult to assess which students have a chance of success without standardized testing.
"In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0".
Math 2 is the remedial elementary and middle school math course at UC SD. Lack of standardized testing plus grade inflation contributes to this outcome.
The accent bit happens in the US too, to an extent. Depending on the accent you grew up with, you get different responses from people in professional or professional-adjacent settings if you forget to switch the knob back to the more homogenized vaguely Iowa-sounding GenAm accent. This covers a gamut of other accents - regional or not (NE, aave, southern, val, etc).
But it's not nearly as bad as RP in England from what I gather - for one, a pretty decent chunk of the population would normally grow up with a GenAm accent with no forcing, unlike in England where it's a pretty hyper local <5% of the native population.
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