It only takes about 30 seconds to show that the BH site is anything but dogmatic. For example, check out the Hedgefundie thread on risk parity investing using leveraged ETFs (now at 9000 posts):
The bread and butter for BH is the unsophisticated investor who is paying their Edward Jones advisor 1-2% for an overly complicated, underperforming portfolio. These folks are better served by a simple plan (like the three fund portfolio) that they administer themselves. Their success in investing is mostly driven by advice to save and maintain long term exposure to the market. Saving that 1-2% makes a meaningful difference in their retirement lifestyle. Ordinary people can come with their portfolios and get free, unbiased financial advice that saves them thousands of dollars a year.
Investing discussions are the tip of the iceberg, though. Anything related to personal finance is germane. Discussions of tax planning, estate planning, withdrawal strategies, with participants who are experts in the field, are invaluable. For example, this long running thread with monthly posts that tracks a forward test of a mechanistic Variable Percentage Withdrawal strategy (as an alternative to the 4% rule):
Personal Consumer Issues section is golden for advice on purchases.
It's real secret, though, is the heavy moderation. It is very strongly curated around its subject matter, and in particular its "no politics" and "posts must be actionable" policies work to ensure that it has a very high signal-to-noise ratio.
Might be true for the university as a whole, but many of the colleges at Minnesota are quite selective. The College of Science and Engineering is one example, accepting 1177 out of 14,000 applications for 2017.
1. Aircraft use 100% power in situations other than takeoff, so it's hard to see how you could lower peak power/use smaller engines just by eliminating takeoff.
2. Typical aircraft takeoff roll is under 30 seconds, and most aircraft have 3hours+ endurance, so you'd be extending the range of the aircraft by < 1/360th.
I ended up with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen 2 -- it has a five row physical keyboard, with the top row as a virtual keyboard.
It was constantly registering touches on the top row when I didn't want them. With a laptop, I commonly rest my hand on the keyboard and touch -- but don't depress -- keys.
Today it's only used in a desktop configuration with an external keyboard.
I'm not the only one who felt this way -- see, for example, this Ars review of the gen 3, which said of the gen 2 keyboard:
"...the keyboard shed its top row of function keys, replacing them with a software-controlled touchable strip, and used a peculiar arrangement for buttons including home, insert, backspace, and delete. The result wasn't better; it was awkward."
"this is about local, city-maintained streets. Unless you live directly on a state or federal highway, those gas taxes, state sales taxes, and income taxes do not go towards the street you live one."
This statement in the article is untruthful. The Ames budget he references explicitly lists gas tax money as going to local street maintenance.
If you're curious about your city, key question to ask is whether they have a pavement condition database. If they don't, they have no idea what the right amount of maintenance is. If they do, they should be able to predict whether they are spending at the right rate, and predict the same for the next several years.
City policies on this vary so much that it's impossible to generalize. That said, newer cities often end up forgetting that they need to pay for street reconstruction. The original cost of the street is usually included in the initial price of the house.
Sophisticated cities maintain a model (commonly called a pavement management program) that lets them predict future maintenance cost across the city.
He misses the fact that Ames does get tax money for street maintenance [1] and reconstruction [2]. His estimate for a properly maintained street is quite low -- other Midwestern US cities are able to get 60-70 years from their streets.
He also misses out on special assessments as a source of revenue -- which is very common for residential street projects.
I ran my own email server for probably 20 years, starting with UUCP over USR Couriers. It got more and more difficult to keep things running, and I had better things to do with my time.