Richard Sherman, one of the top NFL players and also a Stanford grad, is very outspoken about this, and agrees with you: https://www.si.com/2013/10/23/richard-sherman-seahawks-concu.... His argument is that at this point, everyone playing the game knows the risks, and is taking that into account when making their decision to play.
To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.
I am unable to locate a source, but I recall a quote by an NFL official that all it would take is for 10% of the parents to believe football is dangerous to kill the sport. Moving to flag football would confirm this notion, setting aside the idea that flag football will probably not have the spectator draw that the current football has.
In flag football, you generally don't have linemen in the traditional sense; there's no blocking allowed, and the quarterback is protected by a count instead of his blockers.
The American Flag Football League is one of the organizations trying to take over this space (they recently played a game in Levi's Stadium with Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, among others). Here are the full rules if you're interested! https://www.americanflag.football/official-rules/.
Completely agree with this; not only are you more likely to share a common origin or destination, but it also becomes an opportunity to meet someone new within your network.
According to [0], it seems that "whoever" would be correct here.
> Rule 1. The presence of whoever or whomever indicates a dependent clause. Use whoever or whomever to agree with the verb in that dependent clause, regardless of the rest of the sentence.
> Examples:
> Give it to whoever/whomever asks for it first.
> He asks for it first. Therefore, whoever is correct.
The Week (http://theweek.com/) does a fantastic job of this. They summarize the main issues of the week from the viewpoint of a variety of politically-diverse sources, and there's a lot of non-US news in there as well. I believe they've covered all the examples you mentioned in recent weeks. Well worth a try if you haven't heard of it yet.
> they're particularly well-tailored to picking up candidates who are hard to find by resume alone
Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?
Yes, certainly - I think the thing I mean doesn't conflict with the thing you mean.
Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great.
Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades.
But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.)
So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.
I'm sorry I can't find a link to the study right now (I'll add a link if I find it), but one of the most fascinating lectures in my college linguistics class was about swear words, and this exact question. The lecturer claimed that hearing or seeing a swear word has a physiological effect on most people, not unlike being slapped in the face. However, when you replace the text with asterisks or beep it out, the effect is diminished, even if the audience knows exactly what's being replaced.
In that context, it makes sense to avoid using swear words in more professional settings if you want to avoid giving the audience the associated emotional reaction; it's distracting at best and offensive at worst, and it's easier just to find another way to communicate which word was meant.
There's a lot of other issues here - it's unfair to say he got "fired" because of what he did last year. He's been very bad lately - huge dropoff since he went to the SuperBowl.
Demand response [0] is an interesting solution to the electrical grid problem; utilities will pay customers (usually large commercial customers) to use less energy during periods of peak demand (which allows the utility to build fewer plants, so everybody wins).
> it isn't as if driving has been anything close to free
Driving isn't free, but the costs you mention are all part of the cost to the person choosing to drive. That person has presumably incorporated these into their decision of whether or not to drive.
A congestion tax (or dynamic toll) is an attempt to internalize the external costs that a driver imposes on others; when I get in the car and drive, I slow everyone else on the road down, but without a toll (or an expectation of altruism toward random strangers), that won't affect my decision making at all. The goal of a toll is to make the cost of choosing to drive equal to the sum of the costs it imposes on everyone, not just the driver.
To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.