Not technically required, but required for many workplaces. I do applaud an end to mandates even though I support vaccination and am vaccinated and boosted. And therein lies the problem.
I think the broader point for the HN crowd is this is a great example of why you want to be part of a profit center instead of a cost center in a business. If it's easy for management to try a direct line from incoming revenue to the work you do (like a sales person or, in this case, a football coach), you are in a great negotiating position. If you are in a cost center, management will do everything possible to reduce your salary, even if it the grand scheme of things that cost center is critical to running the business.
The irony is that the people who do the central work for the business, academics at the University, engineers designing the next products, even factory workers often are often cost centres. This leads to the somewhat perverse insentive to remove more and more of your central workers to hire managers and administrators.
One can also try to work for companies that properly appreciate the value of all necessary components of the business, even if one can't directly tally their contribution. Most important factors to success are not easily measurable.
Too much - universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors.
> universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors
Professors can't do what he does: bring in big-ticket spending, sponsorships and donations.
This is true - but professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them. This is a problem with how hard to market the value professors provide is - a lot of admissions care more about a good sports team than a good set of professors even though the later factor will be much more important to them two years in.
Basically, people don't act rationally so the market is irrational.
> professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them
I wouldn't so quickly ignore the additional tuition revenue athletics departments bring in at non-Tier 1 schools.
University athletics are a weird thing. But if the pay bothers you, think of it as a commission. Going cheap on that will likely cost more than it saves.
...or the Athletic Director. Unfortunately that can usually cost the state long after they are gone as the retirement system is usually setup based on final salaries. In the case of the State of Oregon the 3rd highest paid PERS recipient is Mike Belotti who was the head football coach for 13 years and then AD for 2 years. He gets almost $50K/month in retirement. The only two higher recipients are doctors that worked for the state more than twice as long as Belotti.
I am confused as to why "repair the thing before it catastrophically fails" is not the best of the available options. Decommissioning a facility like this is a loss for science globally, even if there are alternatives available. Telescope time is precious.
You would have to dig into who is providing funding and how the funds are being spent by UCF, Universidad Ana G. Méndez, and Yang Enterprises Inc (the loose consortium tasked with O&M of the facility).
See the latest update on https://www.ucf.edu/news/update-on-arecibo-observatory-facil.... Just a month ago, cable sag surveys and safety assessments were done, and a structural monitoring instrumentation system was installed. I'd be curious what those reports show, and if this most recent failure was anticipated. If it wasn't expected, what was the value of the work last month?
I'm not saying that he should, everyone can spend their money as they wish, but just as a fun thought exercise, could a private, extremely wealthy entity do it? Say, could Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk just say "yep, I'll pay for all the repairs from my own pocket"?
Absolutely, but then they should assume control of operations to ensure a tight ship is run. If efficient use of funds is demonstrated, further funding (whether private, public, or crowdsourced) should follow. You don't want to encourage mismanagement of limited funds.
Edit: Upon further thought, I think it's an exceptional idea that SpaceX submit itself as an O&M vendor for NSF (and perhaps even NASA) RF/observatory facilities. Between launches and StarLink, they have demonstrated lean execution.
@ISL: Your point is noted, but SpaceX has a $50-100 billion valuation, access to capital markets, and StarLink is likely to be very profitable. I don't think it's fair to paint them to be in financial peril as they were during their earlier years. UCF's entire budget is $2 billion, and they can't scrap together a few millions dollars to properly care for Arecibo. UCF and SpaceX have each demonstrated their level of capability.
SpaceX has been so lean that they have been one launch away from bankruptcy. That isn't the right model for a scientific user-facility with a half-century expected lifetime.
Are you talking about back in 2008 when the third launch of the Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit? That was a long time ago. They are not near that situation now. The main goal of SpaceX is creating a human civilization on Mars. Seems to me like they do have the right combination of getting things done and the long view.
In theory you could do interferometry with a lot of orbiting radio telescopes. I'm no radio astronomy expert, but I can see a lot of practical problems with this idea.
For one thing, if you want the same signal-collecting power as the Arecibo observatory, you need dishes with the same total area. Since Arecibo is 1000 feet in diameter, if you put dishes on every one of the 12,000 satellites in the initial Starlink constellation, they would each have to be over 9 feet. That's about the same size as the chassis of the satellite itself.
In order to do anything useful with the collected data, the receivers need to have very precisely synchronized clocks, and their relative positions need to be known to within a small fraction of the wavelengths you're interested (which for Arecibo can be on the order of centimeters). I'm not sure whether GPS receivers alone would be enough to meet these requirements -- you might need to add atomic clocks to every satellite as well.
Now you have to think about how to aim the antennas. Presumably you can't just reorient the entire satellite, because its main job is to keep its ground-facing antennas aimed at the ground and its solar panels aimed at the sun. So you need to add a separate antenna pointing mechanism, with a fairly wide range of very accurate movement along multiple axes, so that all of the radio antennas can observe the same region of the sky simultaneously.
Presumably the Arecibo telescope itself is connected to fairly sensitive, low-noise, specialized signal processing equipment. You would have to take all of this equipment, design a space-rated version that can fit on a satellite, and then manufacture 12,000 of them. You also need to add enough solar panels to power it.
All of this would add a huge amount of mass to every satellite, which would make them way more expensive to launch. Note that this applies to to both the monetary cost and the opportunity cost of SpaceX's annual launch capacity.
Finally, the Starlink satellites have a roughly 5-year design lifetime, so it's not enough to build this colossally expensive telescope array once; you have to keep building and launching half a dozen replacements per day for as long as you want to continue using it. There's no way it would ever be cost-competitive with a ground-based observatory.
It's serious question, from the future.. (but no answer and downvoting - what's wrong ? I know Arecibo is very important)
..about radio telescope arrays, computer power and feasibility. Astronomers complain that they lost the sight of the stars because of Starlink. Could it be somehow compensated by an array of moving, smaller radio telescopes in orbit?
Britannica: 'The world’s most powerful radio telescope, in its combination of sensitivity, resolution, and versatility, is the Very Large Array (VLA) located on the plains of San Agustin near Socorro, in central New Mexico, U.S. The VLA consists of 27 parabolic antennas, each measuring 25 metres (82 feet) in diameter. The total collecting area is equivalent to a single 130-metre (430-foot) antenna.'
Spend time with your neighbors and local businesses. That goes a long way. Learn more about what works well in the city, and what doesn't. Consider serving in a volunteer capacity with various organizations like local neighborhood councils or schools. Most importantly, if you can devote time, money, or both to local schools, you will make the biggest impact there.
Have kids? Send your kids to the local public school. That is an enormous difference maker. Don't push for dumb things (e.g. Latin), but be an effective advocate for students whose parents might be unable to get involved, and contribute time and energy to improving resources across the board.
There are many issues. Perhaps the most obvious is that parents cannot teach their children and work simultaneously, while children accustomed to the classroom setting are unable to focus on a task independently at home. Either the attempts at schooling or the attempts at working are dropped - dropping the schooling seems like the better choice for families that need a paycheck.
I don't think the implication is that "fully/100% remote" is inherently good, but that it is an important quality to a population. For example, I only seek fully remote work, so knowing that a position is 100% remote is critical to my search when looking at jobs.
There's more to it than that. You don't want to be "the remote guy" on the team. You want the whole team to be remote. Otherwise, you are going to have a far less pleasant experience and no chance at career growth.
I don't think you even need everyone to be remote. I've noticed that its enough to just have two separate offices with teams that have a mix of employees between those two offices.
Once you have that, adding people that are fully remote becomes almost trivial, since you are already accounting for most cases where people aren't always in a single space.
We use a baby monitor in conjunction with specifically patterned clothing. The monitor observes the pattern and assesses whether the baby is breathing - if not, it will alarm on both the phone and the crib monitor unit.
Is it strictly necessary? No. But it helps me sleep, and that means the baby sleeps better because he's not being visited and monitored by a human.
We've had one false positive in 6 months. That's an acceptable tradeoff, in my mind.
This is the Nanit monitor with the Breathing Wear band. The cost is significant - $300 for the monitor, $20+ for the band, and an annual fee after the first year. With that said, an IP-enabled monitor lets you do things like spend time outside the range of a non-IP camera (e.g. on vacation, go to the hotel pool while the baby naps), things I find extremely valuable. Naturally, there is a privacy impact that should be carefully considered.
Those in a position of relative power (e.g. airline employees) are not allowed to ask "what disease do you have that merits this animal?" but they are allowed to ask "what services does this animal provide?" There is a clear and obvious distinction between those questions, and the answer to the second question will clearly identify those who require exceedingly well-trained and expensive service animals. People who want to carry their dogs onboard without paying a fee are less likely to have an answer.
Because as it turns out, the way public housing was being built concentrated all the poverty in the city into a tiny area, which drew the predators out of the woodwork, drove away investment, and made the housing development nigh-unlivable. Additionally, the architecture has often been hostile to the residents, and the city neglected maintenance.
The best way to build public housing would be to make it a part of the gentrification process. Build where the revenue from property taxes is increasing, and in proportion to the development for more affluent housing.
Some municipalities get a lame approximation to this by requiring that developers build housing for poor people in exchange for regulatory variances, but it just isn't the same.
But the short explanation is that the US is overwhelmingly run by rich people, and the rich people in the US hate to see poor people get something at or below cost without them sweating on it first, because they believe that welfare dollars are overwhelmingly coming out of their pockets, and they earned them by their hard work. They may be delusional, but they still get elected to fill the public offices.
Rich property owners (or those looking to become rich from high-value property) would counter with concerns about their property value being destroyed, but personally I am satisfied with this as it is an indirect means of progressive taxation.
Wrenching the general populace above bottom-barrel poverty was done on the back of twentieth-century prosperity (ie: progressive taxation) but there is no such progressive taxation scheme for property tax (ie: property taxes are exceedingly complicated and many deductions are available). It is only prudent that other (new and exotic) means of wealth redistribution are attempted.
I understand that it's difficult to do correctly, but it has been done correctly in the past, on a few occasions (e.g. the scattered-site developments in Yonkers, NY).
It just seems like we've completely given up, and I'm not sure if that's something that has been politically ordained or if we just aren't interested in trying again.
You can demand an end to "mandates" and public health emergencies, but you must then applaud when those things end.