Missoula is not really the rural part of America that the parent comment is talking about. While Missoula’s population “feels” small at 75k, it’s the second largest metropolitan area (110k-ish) in the state, which has a population of a million.
I’ve been following news of this sort closely during COVID as a personal curiosity. Most of the affected towns are either (1) within 1-2 hour drive of a major metro center (e.g. northwestern CT) (2) already a major vacation destination prior to COVID (Jackson Hole, WY and friends) (3) a top-3 metro area in the state. If you check more than one box, the situation is more dramatic.
Many of these places were already changing prior to COVID, but, as in other domains, COVID has accelerated an already latent process.
Basically, Missoula’s example does not contradict their claim.
But yes, remote workers are more likely to move to a place like Missoula than a place like Philipsburg, MT.
I’ve seen that engineering manager / pm split work like magic before. Usually there’s also an amazing tech lead in there making it work. It’s rocket fuel for the product (assuming market fit, big assumption) and the career growth for the team.
It doesn’t happen often because most companies don’t want to grow their people that much. Consider the frequent HN comment about finding it easier to get a promotion/raise by finding a new job.
That outcome usually comes from some carefully crafted policies at the company level. Stack ranking is an example, though it is more popular recently to talk about in terms of bell curves (of 4-7 people, hah). Caps on raises, onerous documentation processes, and explicit and implicit limits on the number of promotions a manager can request at a time are all popular. There’s a lot of creativity going into crafting policies that limit career growth without saying they are limiting career growth.
Managers that care about people eventually figure this game out, realize how career limiting it is to push too hard on it, and either leave management or switch to caring about org/product stuff more. This has been consistent in my unscientific study of a dozen friends.
That said, I agree with you. I’d like to see that experiment done with a lot of intentionality and care.
If you'd like to not be downvoted into oblivion you'd do well to provide an alternate theory. What's your prediction for the upcoming election? Why? What's your methodology? Or is your point that forecasting is futile? I can't tell. There's too much emotion directed at 538/etc. for me to suss out what your point is besides disliking 538/the media/etc, which just isn't particularly helpful for the discussion.
I wish it were that simple. HN just seems to have gone the way of reddit, where downvoting is disagreement. And of course, 3 minutes after I post this comment, it's downvoted.
I don't have a methodology, because I'm not a pollster with dozens of people at my disposal. I am just bemused and annoyed that things like 538 continue to be taken seriously when they continue to ignore sociological, historical, and cultural factors in favor of an overly-complex quantitative model.
Re: the upcoming election. I don't think we can be sure, yet. Certainly it will be close, and the Biden at 90% to win estimations make no sense to me. Biden is a much weaker candidate than Hillary and he continues to make blunders (i.e. I guarantee that his comments on fracking in the last debate just lost him Pennsylvania.) Trump seems to be finding a lot of allies in strange places, e.g. African-American celebrities. That may be an isolated incident, or it may signal some big unexpected changes.
At this point my estimation is Trump-Biden 55-45, for the simple reason that people tend to vote for economic issues and Trump has a better "perception" on this issue. "It's the economy, stupid." as James Carville put it.
> HN just seems to have gone the way of reddit, where downvoting is disagreement.
Alternatively it might be because you're objecting to the results of a well-documented statistical process, and then when being questioned saying things like "I don't have a methodology".
You'll notice that the comment you replied to (saying it was similar to your point) is not downvoted into oblivion.
> Biden is a much weaker candidate than Hillary and he continues to make blunders
That’s your view; however, he is polling much better than Clinton, which would indicate that voters don’t necessarily agree with you (or else just that peoples’ opinions of Trump are lower than last time round, or a combination. But really it hardly matters).
> (i.e. I guarantee that his comments on fracking in the last debate just lost him Pennsylvania.)
Looks like 20-50,000 people employed in fracking plus industries supported by it in Pennsylvania. And presumably most of those would be voting for Trump anyway; it’s not like Biden’s views on fracking were a total black box til now. So it only really matters if it’s very close anyway.
I agree that there are factors that so much of current reporting is missing. The black (and Latino) swing toward Trump, for example, is apparent in every single poll I've seen. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion Nate Silver's discussed it, but little else other than the odd article like https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/trump-macho-a... (which basically attributes male Latino support for Trump to the same machismo that ruined their ancestors' countries). Same with the increase in black Trump support from 2016%'s 8%, even though it's pretty clear from history that no Democrat can win the White House without at least 85% of the black vote.
>At this point my estimation is Trump-Biden 55-45, for the simple reason that people tend to vote for economic issues and Trump has a better "perception" on this issue. "It's the economy, stupid." as James Carville put it.
My model is simpler. If Trump wins every other state he won in 2016, he only has to win one of MI, PA, WI, MN, or NH/NV. The first three he won in 2016 (and, as you say, Biden's views on fracking may very well cost him the state); MN Trump lost by 1.5%, so the state is only sightly behind the rest of the Midwest bar IL, and half of Minneapolis being torched this summer probably pushed the state over.
What you’re suggesting is possible technically but nobody does it because the idea of having to turn your entire plane towards a missile threat to neutralize it virtually guarantees your destruction if two missiles are fired at you in rapid succession. This is not a rare occurrence. At all. Yes, from multiple directions. That’s exactly how surface-to-air systems are set up.
It becomes slightly more reasonable if you turret the gun, until you factor in the weight of the necessary ammunition to neutralize multiple threats, the turret itself, and the independent radar used for target acquisition and tracking. A B-52 could pull it off, a fighter couldn’t yet. Not without massively compromising their payload and aerodynamics.
Chaff, flares, stealth and jamming are used because they actually work in practice. Jamming is a big one that people don’t hear about much. Wonder how the B-52 is still in service? Jamming. Wonder how wild weasels do their job? Jamming.
When you see a turret like that on a bomber then you can get excited for self-guided bullets shooting down dozens of multiple incoming missiles. But tbh at the rate we’re going it’ll just be a laser instead.
Thanks have a much more robust complement of armor compared to an aircraft. They defeat the mechanism of armor penetration in munitions before impacting the armor. They still take a significant beating after the munition is "defeated". Airplanes don't have armor in the same way a tank has. Even small arms fire can take out an aircraft, generally speaking.
The automatic ballistic defense systems a tank uses would obliterate an aircraft. They are basically shaped charges that explode outwards to deflect a munition. It only works because tanks have thick armor in a dense, heavy, package.
That is an old system, mainly used by the USSR, and mainly intended to act against long piercing projectiles of depleted uranium.
It is more common to have active electronic systems. For example, one such system fires grenade-like projectiles upward that then explode in a downward direction. The timing is accurate enough that the incoming attack is hit by the shrapnel. Another system is more like a shotgun.
The more reasonable comparison is ship-based defense systems. The USA uses the Phalanx CIWS, which fires simple dumb projectiles of the same diameter as those of a typical fighter plane gun. About 100 are fired to destroy an incoming missile.
Adding an AI to a modern fighter makes it an awful lot like a flying Phalanx CIWS. You have a nearly identical gun with a nearly identical radar.
Modern ATGMs are usually subsonic; none of the protective systems on tanks are designed to counter supersonic missiles or projectiles. There's a world of difference in countering a Mach 3 missile and a TOW or Hellfire.
Incoming speed doesn't help the attacker unless it beats the sensors, which operate at the speed of light. Mach 3 missiles impact Mach 0.1 shrapnel at about Mach 3.
That helps the defender. The faster the missile goes, the harder it gets hit by defensive shrapnel.
Speed makes the engagement cycle short; instead of having maybe 2 shots at an incoming missile, you get one. And if your system is too slow, it has no chance of reacting in time. Most systems are designed to defend against missiles, but are ineffective against cannon rounds (APFDS).
1% eponymous class
9% professional elite
90% working class
That's actually more skewed than the society described in 1984[1]:
2% inner party
13% outer party
85% proletariat
Note that the 2% keeps the 13% toeing the party line (they don't have to amongst themselves, and proles are explicitly said to be free) to avoid any sort of Manor Farm pigs[2] getting funny ideas. IngSoc only had one party, but if one allows two outer parties, nominally opposed to each other, one may discover they each spontaneously self-police their own thought criminals.
[1] I've always thought of 1984 as being a very anglophone sort of dystopia, but now I believe Orwell was writing therapeutically, cathartically imagining a world in which the social constructs of his second-rate english boarding school applied to the whole of society.
Basically Amazon is a symptom of global wealth inequality. He’s making the point that no company the size of Amazon, and no person as rich as Bezos, should exist.
The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”
Ultimately if you can't be bothered to read a short book on the subject, you can just live with your confusion on the subject. The world can't be boiled down to sophomoric sequences of logic that ignore the complexities of reality and human behavior.
