The general consensus about the forthcoming "On or before June 29" report is that the most likely natural explanationt may be some incredibly improbable, but still remotely possible, simultaneous combination of sensor error and eye witness mis-identification that somehow corroborates each other.
Just come out and say what you mean instead of slimy implications. It's obvious you believe in the false narrative that conservatives are somehow being "persecuted" in academia. This is a disengenous lie spread by right wing propaganda networks like fox news from a few cherry-picked examples. And even if it were true, people disagreeing with your position and calling you out on it is not "persecution."
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Nothing new will come of it, therefore nothing interesting, therefore nothing on-topic for HN.
It's not a lie. Liberals own academia. 39% of colleges have no Republican professors. In many majors, the ratio is between 15 and 20 to one Democrats per Republican.
There is no world where ratios like that exist and discrimination doesn't occur.
Power corrupts. No one is immune, no matter how high the ideals the wielders of power would hew to. Since professors are those anointed to speak their mind about difficult issues, it's especially telling when they start to be persecuted. It doesn't matter from what political direction it comes from.
Just a quick fact-check, it would be more accurate to label Andy Ngo as a fascist propagandist and agitator than "independent journalist" and a having a milk shake thrown at you is not "almost losing your life".
Occam's Razor: postulate as few as possible new entities to explain an event. Aliens causing UFOs not only postulates that aliens exist, but that they're intelligent, and have visited Earth. That's a lot of new entities we have to consider. On the other hand we know foreign governments exist. We know foreign governments test new aircraft. So the only entity we have to assume here is that an aircraft with these properties exists.
That said I think there are other alternatives that are even more likely: that these sightings are sensor malfunctions or natural phenomena that have been blown out of proportion by popular myth and deliberate disinformation -- (which is certainly the case with all other UFO sightings).
If I didn't read the report, I would have thought malfunctioning is the most likely explanation. But an active duty warship's SPY-1 radar, and 6 super hornet's IR sensor pods all malfunctioning at the same time? Unless it's a very sophisticated cyber or electronic attack or really some physical (not just optical illusion) natural phenomenon, that is very, very unlikely to happen. This sophisticated attack or natural phenomenon that let observation on Unidentified Swimming Object and UFO is also unlikely. So, by Occam's Razor, which I still insist is not appropriate assuming the reports are true, that the reports are false, hoax, or disinformation.
This is how I took notes in college as well. TeX people may scoff but word is way better for taking math notes quickly. Just learn the key combos and you can do almost anything rapidly. The only thing I found tedious was matrix/vector stuff.
Most people seriously interested in this topic should already be familiar with the "insulin index" paper (was reposted to HN within the last couple weeks).
> When workers can’t afford to live within biking distance of work, then it’s not a viable solution.
This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.
Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem.
Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable).
However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them.
It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.
Counter-anecdotes: in Chicago (e.g., UP-N), Boston (e.g., Fitchburg), and much of Europe (e.g., many major cities in Germany), the commuter rail systems do take you out into very affordable areas.
I used to commute into SF from Redwood City with the Caltrain. If I couldn't have taken a bike with me on the train, it would have been impossible because the last mile at both ends was completely undoable with local buses.
I can easily see that it would improve my quality of life a lot if there were a bunch of customer-facing businesses interspersed with housing in a dense city block. I would love to be able to take a quick five minute walk to grab that random tool I need or that last ingredient I need for a recipe; my life could be so much more spontaneous!
I have more trouble seeing where the 500 seat office for a global enterprise should go on my city block. it seems like that sort of space would lead to a dead feeling at night when everyone goes home and the space sits empty.
Look at big cities around the world and you'll find buildings with retail at the bottom and office space further up. I don't think it would be an issue, unless you stroll around the sky at night.
Come to Berlin or any other major European metropolis to see how that works out. Plenty of bigger office buildings in the middle of the city where lots of people commute to them with bicycles, public transport and even walking. Right next to apartment buildings with small businesses and restaurants and cafes.
Turns out when you don't need to allocate space for 500 cars around a building, you can build it in a single city block and coexist with other types of buildings. And you even get a rooftop with a view as a bonus.
In areas where cities are dense enough for public transportaiton to make sense, adding a new line does indeed lead to induced demand. For cities that are spread out and unwalkable (read: almost all US cities), public transit isn't efficient enough to move enough people from point A to B, due to A and B being very far away -- never mind the fact that once you get to B, you can't even walk to many destinations due to the city being designed in such a sprawly, pedestrian hostile way.
For public transportation to work, we first need to make our cities denser. The best way of doing this is by outlawing use-based zoning and moving to form-based zoning. That means getting rid of the concept of a "single family zone" and a "commercial zone", etc. and just specifying stuff about the materials and shapes of buildings. It also means outlawing parking minimums. Many cities around the world (and even a few in the US, re: Philadelphia, NYC) have this kind of zoning which allows for much denser development.
The Boring Company's "solution" is a [sad joke](https://slate.com/business/2018/12/elon-musks-los-angeles-tu...) that belies Musk's utter disconnect with reality. The fact that the man openly mocks public transportation while crying about LA traffic only makes the matter worse.
It's a problem because it's a positive feedback loop. More highways = more traffic, which leads people to want to build more highways to supposedly ease congestion, and this continues ad infinitum. Our cities grow more spread out, less walkable, and less sustainable. Overall it makes our cities worse both for the people who live there and the environment.
If we didn't subsidise highways so much, demand for them would be reduced, and it would make more sense to build denser housing and provide public transportation.
[citation needed]