Most deathbed advice I've encountered resolves around wishing they had accomplished less and focused more on friends/family. For me at least, it is a good reminder. YMMV.
He left the Senate in 2009 when he became vice president. He left the VP office in 2016 after Obama's second term ended. He was private citizen when this was happening. Powerful person? Sure. An agent of the government? No.
The reason people find the 'zero inflation' headlines misleading are mainly for three reasons:
1) Aggregate month-to-month inflation metrics were flat/low due to gas prices falling, but many important categories were still quickly inflating. Notably rent, but also food.
2) The reason people normally reference 12 month inflation windows is because many things, like energy prices, are very volatile month to month. It is going to take time to really see the trends.
3) For things that skyrocketed like food, people are hoping to actually see the prices come back down.
So, yeah, you are correct on your numbers, clearly. But as an non-expert, I'm not really sure the current trends are positive. I think they are still pretty troubling.
I don't think the stimulus being one of the drivers of inflation is an 'extremist fringe theory' at all. I thought the consensus was it was one of many factors, and the exact contribution of the different factors (stimulus, supply issues, etc) was up for debate.
US inflation is higher than other wealthy nations and the US also did a larger stimulus. So there is evidence that the additional stimulus may have created greater inflation in the US. Scope this paper here: [0]
As far as the consensus for the cause of inflation being unclear among experts, scope this article in left leaning VOX: [1].
> The UK government has borrowed vast sums of money to fund over £400 billion ($558 billion) in stimulus during the crisis. Total government debt has soared to £2 trillion ($2.8 trillion), or close to 100% of GDP, a level not seen since the 1960s, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Almost no one claims that IQ tests are invalid, they really do estimate g, very strongly correlated with IQ. What is often being questioned is the strength of correlation between scores and life outcomes. And of course there’s the incendiary nature vs nurture debate.
It shows that in the USA "net worth relative to nominal GDP" is actually pretty stable. The US has the lowest multiple of all the countries under analysis. Indeed the graph shows the US being almost exactly at the historical average.
I'm not sure what this means, but I certainly found it surprising.
This is what I find interesting. No one seems to complain about house prices more than people in the US - and yet on average - housing relative to rents & wages is much more affordable in the US than almost every other country in the world.
Could that because of of the USA's slums dragging down the average?
Say that your income is at the 0.75 quantile, nationally: you're just barely in the top quarter.
Now arrange the housing from least desirable to most and look at the 0.75 quantile of that: how affordable is the entry to the 25% most desirable places to live?
How close are those places to where you earn your 0.75 quantile living?
its not about slums. the US has abundant land and houses are cheap in most of the country. It's just big (especially coastal) cities where the prices are insane. Alot of americans do in fact live in "fly over country" where prices are 300k or sometimes less. In addition, we are lucky that we have a lot of cities, not just one major one.
Contrast this to a tiny country like britain or japan with only one major city london/tokyo where everyone wants to live. Where land actually is a limiting factor.
The human mind requires practice to retain skill and proficiency. Period. People who were solid engineers and later become executives, 20 years down the line many say they no longer can code. I've seen this many times.
Where are you getting this concept that humans never forget skills? That's completely false.
Come to think of it, the basics of playing chess is of insufficient complexity to be compared to an algorithm interview. More like being able to mount basic strategies and chess moves. Not sure how the average player would be able to recall those if they haven't played chess in a long time, because they were instead playing games derived from basic chess moves but with very different game mechanics.
If you demand more complexity then you need to take people with more skills. Do you think that Magnus Carlsen would forget how to mount a basic defence if he didn't touch chess for 20 years? He wouldn't be as good, sure, but he wouldn't forget how to play, he would still beat most people.
My rule of thumb is that people remember things one or two layers lower than their max. If you learned calculus then you wont forget basic algebra. If you took a grad course on electromagnetism then you wont forget basic calculus. The same goes for algorithms, if you learned them once and then never had a course where you built upon those to make more advanced algorithms you will forget them. But once you start to see them as basic building blocks for other things then you wont forget.
So from this rule, if you just learned the rules for chess you would forget them. But if you started trying to win chess games and viewed the rules as building blocks for strategies, then you will remember the rules for chess. Then you start to compose strategies etc.
The problem, then, would seem that the majority of software work is no longer building things, as it is jury-rigging together APIs and frameworks, thus leading to the loss of use of remembering the building blocks. And leads to the replacement of such vital components as building blocks with other components like design patterns or commonly used SDKs and libraries.
> Where are you getting this concept that humans never forget skills? That's completely false.
I never said humans never forget skills, I said humans never forget skills they master. Most people never master much at all, maybe 90-99% of software engineers would be in the never master bucket. Which is why I get downvoted, most people never get good and get angry when you tell them that they can work to improve.
That is true, that most people don't master anything. The question is if software engineers should be expected to master the material in interviews other than for interviews, if it truly makes them better engineers who build better software. And if so, they we arrive at my original question: why is current computer science education and training failing to convey that vital information? And how can this situation be remedied?
In terms of working to improve, given the excellent filtering capabilities of algorithmic interviews, surely if people were taught right and knew how to master it not to mention what they should master in the field, then it would not be so difficult to improve (though this would render the filter ineffective)? Because then more engineers would have known from day one what they should focus on (not that they don't at present, because these interviews are now broadly known to the public), and thus having mastered the material, be passing the interviews easily.
I really think that college could be structured better, yes. I think that algorithmic fluency helps in many areas both in science and in the industry, and the way college is taught isn't good for reaching that stage. If nothing else it provides you with a good framework for how to think about and structure computation.
