While some will cry this is racism against Chinese students, it is not. The reality is that Chinese students are here only with permission of the Chinese government and are beholden in many ways to the ruling Chinese communist party:
The PRC exerts great pressure on Chinese immigrants even after they become U.S. citizens. One need only to look at the case of the head of R&D at Coca-Cola who was convicted of stealing trade secrets for China:
So yes, China is an economic rival and they go to great lengths to steal U.S. trade secrets. So why should we help educate the students of an economic and military rival?
Bookies determine the odds and typically refuse to take bets from skilled bettors.
A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all participants. In established betting markets such as for stocks, pros dedicate their careers and their organizations to improving the public estimates emerging from the market (though not for the sake of that improvement).
General prediction markets might turn out bad, but the above isn't an argument why, it's namecalling.
Disagree here. That's the stated goal and the point for some folks, but the subset I explained above also exists and their point is to benefit from a false sense of security.
>>At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and players gamble.
Oh c'mon now. This is completely impossible to police. Players and referees are not under constant supervision. They have families, friends, partners. Some of them got caught but you can be certain most weren't because it's just very difficult to catch.
There are always multiple people who know about key players' injuries, illness, other factors. The game is negative sum and additionally insiders take a a chunk for themselves. It's worse then roulette which at least doesn't pretend to be fair.
It isn't impossible to police. Players and referees are under supervision...I am not sure why you think this isn't the case. Regulated gambling companies i.e. not Polymarket, maintain lists of people who are connected to sports inc. through family. And they maintain systems that monitor unusual betting activity that is shared across the industry, it is quite easy to detect this activity because most of the flow that bookmakers see is uninformed. So if you see a customer that doesn't bet regularly put down $10k, line moves in their favour...that is obviously extremely suspicious because that won't happen with 95% of the volume you take.
As an example, there was a football player in England who had a friend that bet on a transfer market (a market that is extremely prone to inside information). It was detected immediately (despite being a relatively small bet of $10k, I have heard anecdotally that insiders have been detected in this market down to $500 bets), the player was banned, fined $500k, etc.
Btw, the reason these systems exist is because there are certain sports that are too lucrative not to make a market in but the economics/nature of the game mean that matches are easily fixed: 99.99% of this activity is low-ranked professional tennis, and surveillance has been very effective (all of this is funded, not by professional tennis, but by gambling companies). Generally, this isn't as prevalent with US sports because none of those preconditions exist for the major sports.
One really appreciates the “pocket” label of this format if one wears suits, sport coats, or blazer jackets, or almost any of several styles of coat that fall under the category of “overcoat”: these books really were pocket size! For those pockets, that is. The thicker ones are pushing it, but the ones closer to 250 pages fit neatly in a blazer pocket. Thicker ones are fine in the cavernous pockets of many overcoats (though, hell, so are trade-size books)
(Phones work better in a jacket, too—I think we made a mistake running away from that clothing style, they’re like wearable purses that also make you look nicer. Sure suits are kinda wasteful with the way the jackets get downgraded if the pants are destroyed, but odd jackets we should have held on to!)
They also fit nicely in the back pocket of jeans, and leveled-out sitting on your wallet. I pretty much always had a book there from middle school until sometime after I was married.
Yeah suits are kinda ass. Again, the need to have trousers so closely matched they can pretty much only come from the same batch as the cloth in the jacket. Sucks. Looks nice, but man that blows.
Jackets are dope, though. Get some summer-weight ones and even in that season you don’t have to use trouser/jeans pockets. So nice.
Yeah, a matter of preference I’m sure. I prefer not having to scrunch a little at the waist to reach e.g. “cargo” pockets, and there’s nothing like interior breast pockets on jackets, for pants (various sorts of hidden pants pocket exist, yes, but they’re hard to get at). No extra weight pulling pants downward, requiring a tighter belt (or suspenders—which, that part I’m on board with as long as the pants have actual suspender buttons!). Can take the jacket off and remove all burden, put it back on and be ready to go again. No sitting on things, having things pinch or poke your leg or hip when you sit.
It’s basically a looser way of wearing your stuff on you, than pants pockets. Less welded-to you. At some point I realized I disliked summer starting because coats and front-pocket/pouch hoodies went away and I had to start carrying things in my pants again. Later, I came to like the standard pocket systems on blazers & friends way more than hoodies and (modern casual) coats, and discovered that with the right fabric and (lack of) lining choices I could wear them in almost any weather if I wanted to (I don’t, every day, but weather’s no longer a major reason not to)
(I am not saying I’m right, just explaining what I get out of it over extra pants pockets)
What's confusing to me is that even most of the the print-on-demand services I've seen for self-published writers don't go below trade paperback trim sizes (5x8 inches).
There's a huge amount of indie fiction that really wants to be in pocket-size mass-market print format (for those buyers who prefer paper to ereaders), for ergonomics and some of the pulp aesthetic, but it's forced to trade paperback trim.
What? This is terrible news. I've always loved the mass market paperback format, it's perfect for reading. Trade paperbacks are annoying to shelve, annoying to carry, and less comfortable to read.
How serious is this comment? As a thought experiment, this intrigues me. Imagine Steve Wozniak suddenly pops in as CEO. What might happen to the company in the following years?
I doubt Woz would want the job. He's an engineer, not a corporate strategist, and he seems happy that way.
The ideal CEO would be a business strategist, innovator and thought-leader, and world-class marketer, but with enough of an engineering background to chase hard problems.
There aren't many of those around.
Jobs did okay at all four, mostly. Cook gets the first, mostly, and has adequate delegation skills for engineering and marketing. This works superbly when the engineering is world-leading (the M chips) and badly when the engineering is mediocre (the software.) The marketing has drifted towards attempts at luxury-consumer branding, which is an off-the-shelf pitch. It hasn't been a failure. But it has lost some of its distinctiveness, and it's a little incoherent at times.
Cook's still been hugely more successful than Sculley or Amelio. Sculley was a bland corporatist, and Amelio was very, very smart, but too much of an engineer to be good at the rest. He did really well elsewhere, but Apple just wasn't a good fit.
The job is a poisoned chalice. It's going to be extremely difficult for the new CEO to assert their authority over the established fiefdoms, keep the plates spinning, deal with a weird political and economic environment, and still create Apple-styled innovation.
The problem of running a $4 Trillion consumer hardware company, with incredibly optimized supply chain operations, is that it heavily constrains the directions a new CEO would take the company, and by extension, the set of plausible people who could take the helm. I think even if the next CEO has a new or different product vision, they'd need deep knowledge on the hardware side of the house just to steer in any different direction.
I don't know if OP is serious, but more than once, his name has come up on this topic in discussions in the past that I've had with people in my social circle who work at Apple. He obviously gets much respect and is considered an engineer's engineer.
I don't think anyone would be against Woz stepping into to revitalize Apple. The real question is whether Woz would do it.
Everybody loves Woz, for good reasons, but (a) he’s not a manager (b) he’s not executive material (c) he’s notoriously unmotivated (d) he hasn’t engineered anything significant since what, the mid-1980’s?
Valve is privately-owned with its BDFL owning over half of it. It has never gone through a leadership transition. It could relatively quickly go entirely bad after Gabe Newell is gone.
Shit, I'd take it. Sideloading, custom OSes, less-wimpy legal chops against hackers... Valve could turn Apple around.
A 5 year release cadence would incentivize the iPhone to change something more significant than just the price tag. And Proton would give me my first justification for a owning a powerful phone.
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.
Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).
This article references how grade inflation has boomed since 2013 (when the authors were in school). Here's an article from 2013 bemoaning grade inflation:
Folks, this is an annual grouching point among folks who care about or work in academia. Nothing to see here.
--
Edited to add that I am a community college English professor. Most people pass my class because the college has set the final drop date one month before the end of the semester, so students have plenty of time to avoid a bad final grade.
Tom Junod is a natural treasure. And for those who are complaining about the writing style; this is journalistic long-form non-fiction, not a technical article where you want the TL;DR executive summary up front. You read this stuff for the journey, not for the "I need to use this information now" approach. If you don't like the style, fine, but don't denigrate it. Much long-form non-fiction is written this way. He's weaving together three different strands of biography here - the two football players and his own connection to one of them -- with a meditative discussion on the acceptance of the risk of fatal injury in youth sports. And yes, you can have that many strands -- that's what braided essays do.
The author is a native French speaker (see his "About" page) and I think he is writing in English, which he clearly is not fluent in, to make a point: you can understand his argument, written in broken English, even though he could have run it through AI to clean it up and make it more palatable to a native English speaker.
