Nuclear companies generally aren't prepared to assume full liability for nuclear accidents [1]. This makes me pretty skeptical that nuclear power is really that safe.
Roads are non-rivalrous (to an extent). Meaning during off-peak times a private toll road would likely be under utilized if it were not regulated/subsidized. Another reason is that if a road happens to be the shortest path between a populous area and an in-demand destination it would likely be something close to a natural monopoly. This could potentially lead to high prices, too many billboards, etc.
> Roads are non-rivalrous (to an extent). Meaning during off-peak times a private toll road would likely be under utilized if it were not regulated/subsidized.
Arterial roads may be non-rivalrous in the same sense as the internet backbone, but the last mile to your home is definitely a natural monopoly for both roads and ISPs. How would you feel about ubiquitous toll roads that start at the end of your driveway?
Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy?
Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted).
Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr
Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr.
Average "union" pay is: $25/hr
So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
I'm not sure what companies you've worked for, but salary is almost never based on a 'meritocracy,' it's based on the minimum amount an employer thinks they can get away with. That value has nothing to do with an employee's output, and everything to do with minimizing costs.
Well, speak for yourself and the companies you've worked for, but that hasn't been my experience at all.
At both of the companies I've worked at we got a yearly "merit-based" increase depending on how your manager ranks you vs. your peers. The increase is anywhere from 0-5%, and the manager can only recommend their top employees for the high (5%) merit-based increases. This is on top of other increases (such as promotion-based increases), btw. I've gotten several pretty high merit-based increases back-to-back, and those +5% really start to compound with other forms of increase (promotions, bonuses, etc) after a few years.
That isn't paying by merit, it is a leadership style with financial incentives. An obnoxious one in my opinion, but some people like it. Very common in sales.
If you were paid by "merit", you would be paid by your contribution to the revenue of the company. That is mostly restricted to owners.
I disagree. Unions tend to favor seniority-based promotion over merit-based promotion[0] for obvious reasons (unions can't tell how much merit an employee has without deferring judgment to company managers/execs, but unions can tell how long someone has been working without deferring judgment to anyone).
Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the change in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:
> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.
The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?
I'm not sure "richer than their parents" alone, is a fair metric for social mobility. If you're born in the top 20% and stay in the top 20% (not advancing higher), is that really a social concern? I mean, Bill Gates kids are unlikely to do better than their parents, but that's ok.
From what I've read, most social mobility metrics are from low quintiles to higher quintiles.
So if in 1984, 50% of children do better than their parents, and that 50% is mostly the bottom half (I have no idea if it is), then you're doing pretty good in terms of social mobility, no? People making below the median are doing better.
And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
> And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
They address that in the paper:
> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.
> We seek to do this as far as the law allows us to do, and other companies do that as well. We operate within the rules placed on us by the legislatures of this country and its states.
Sure, but this is an antitrust hearing and trusts aren't really legal in the US.
The cost of that is prohibitive except for very particular cases. On the other hand, even tiny devices have powerful computers nowadays. We don't need 3rd party cloud.
Considering the close relationship with Google and Wikimedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia and the considerable money Google gives them, how can one not see this project as "crowdsourcing better training data-sets for Google?"
I dont think the relationship is that close - all it says is google donated a chunk of money in 2010 and in 2019, it was a large chunk of money(~3% of donations) but not like so much to make a dependency.
> Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar?
Pretty unlikely tbh. I dont know if anything is decided for licensing, but if it is to be a "copyleft" license it would be cc-by-sa (like wikipedia) since this is not a program.
Keep in mind that in the united states, an abstract list of facts cannot be copyrighted afaik (i dont think this qualifies as that, wikidata might though)
How so? Wikimedia-provided data can be used by anyone. Google could have kept using and building on their Freebase dataset had they wanted to - other actors in the industry don't have it nearly as easy.
Denny seems to be leaving Google and joining Wikimedia Foundation to lead the project this month, so probably you do not need to worry too much about Denny's affiliation with Google.
Off the top of my head the risk of identity theft and black mail are probably biggest reasons why privacy is important. This is especially concerning when you realize how "secure" data often leaks and becomes public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...