You can even donate money today: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/
From memory, Mozilla's spent years trying to get donations through asking people nicely and in relatively unobtrusive ways in-browser for years. You can even give monthly - a subscription, if you will.
Not only have they tried both donations and subscriptions, but their efforts have been resoundingly ignored. To the point where you are far from the first person to fault them for supposedly choosing to not do what they demonstrably do.
Perhaps people suggest that donations and subscriptions don't work well or reliably because there's history showing that.
I suspect you will find that in many cases, people whose brains have been hijacked by chemical dependency may experience some difficulty in behaving as a stakeholder in society. It will often not stack up favorably against feeding that dependency, no matter how much they might favor it in the abstract.
Individual capacity enables community resilience. If you have resources that can be shared, they can be shared with your neighbors.
Otherwise, we're either asking local government to invest in resilience or reinventing local government to ask this new body to invest in resilience. In either capacity, we are not investing in individual capacity, we're just trusting that the resources we need will be made available in time of need and sufficient to the needs of all.
That works to the extent that a polity is willing and able to seize, care for, and sell off parcels. At scale, this is not guaranteed to be as easy as it sounds. Case in point: Detroit.
I agree. There's no moral or ethical difference in any way.
Unfortunately for us, the law routinely does see a substantial difference and treats them as such. Due to that, the SCOTUS sees them as different and judges that a law on one is not automatically a law on the other.
In other words, to ban a thing you actually need to specifically ban a thing and not just something that feels ethically like the thing you want to ban.
This article readily conflates niceness and kindness. It would be very easy to read this and take away the understanding that critical feedback that leaves a person feeling in any way negative is not kindness.
There's a great deal of nuance to how kindness is defined. It's very easy for one set of actions to be either very kind or very unkind, depending on definitions.
Listening, being respectful, and being empathetic may drive one person to bite their tongue and silence feedback that someone is performing poorly out of fear of hurting them or the morale of the team. Another may be driven by the very same things into giving candid feedback.
This article does not do a good job of exploring the difference. It just asserts "Being nice is the new punk".
We're building this because the ability to make narrow, specific predictions can be narrowly and specifically useful. This works if you have a good understanding of both the tools and the domain you're looking to make predictions in.
Unfortunately, from an outsider perspective, this looks like being widely and generically useful. If you don't understand your tools, you're going to misuse them, and this hype cycle is the result.
San Francisco is an instructive example. Prior to Uber, calling a taxi in SF gave you a 50% chance of one showing up in some functionally unknowable amount of time. 50% is not an exaggeration, it was sometimes below that, and you would have no idea if you should expect your cab in five minutes or fifty. Then you would be charged some amount of money you could in theory anticipate but in practice could not. Should the driver misbehave in some manner, there was theoretical but in practice missing accountability.
The drivers were then exploited ruthlessly by medallion-owners.
Uber became very popular very quickly because it addressed a number of those consumer pain points up front. You could know for sure if a car was going to come, have a quite good idea of how long it would be, and get a price in advance. Sure, your complaints would likely be ignored, but nothing new there.
I think you will find that for the vast, vast majority of scientific papers there is significant negative expected value to even attempting to have layperson reviewers. Bear in mind that we're talking about papers written by experts in a specific field aimed at highly technical communication with other people who are experts in the same field. As a result, the only people who can usefully review the materials are drawn from those who are also experts in the same field.
For an instructive example, look up the seminal paper on the structure of DNA: https://www.mskcc.org/teaser/1953-nature-papers-watson-crick... Ask yourself how useful comments from someone who did not know what an X-ray is, never mind anything about organic chemistry, would be in improving the quality of research or quality of communication between experts in both fields.
Search systems aren't real people or real businesses either. Never mind details like how you define and enforce "real" in a decentralized way across N legal systems with wildly varying ideas of what it means to be a "legitimate" business. There is no system or ledger you can query to find out if a given person is real or a business is legitimate. This is exceptionally unlikely to change on a useful timescale.
The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.
Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.
> I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps even in lieu of teachers unions.
In a very real sense, public schools are already customer-owned cooperatives governed by a set of trustees elected by the customer-owners.
That said, once you have a school owned by the teachers it's no longer a public school. Public schools are funded by and governed by the public. A cooperative school owned by worker-owners is by definition not a public school.
If you look at sibling comments, you'll find a whole discussion where users talk about the major significance to many people of a different numerical estimate. With that in mind, I think that for many people the issue is indeed greater employee income instead of avoiding pennypinching over basic employee wellbeing.
OK. Let's assume that the rest of the C-suite combines to give that number a solid 5x multiplier. How accurate that is is left as an exercise to the reader, but be aware that the CEO is almost always the highest-paid member of a C-suite.
That would turn $116 into $580 per year. Spread out, that would be approximately $22.30 per paycheck if biweekly, or $24.16 if twice a month. All before taxes, of course. Real life-changing money for hundreds of thousands of people, right?
The point here is not that spreading the money from the C-suite to the workers is in any way a bad idea. The point is that it doesn't go nearly as far as we might like to think. We might want to adjust our policy preferences and goals to reflect reality instead of dreaming of us all dining endlessly on the the fat of the C-suite.
There was no cost-benefit analysis on offer, you are correct. This is not the same as there being none, though. Weed-out courses are a classic example implemented at the institutional level - they exist to find as early as possible who is likely to be compatible with the educational program to come. Like any system working on messy humans (who like to defy neatly delineated categories), there are marginal cases who just need a little help to flip from one category to the other. The author calculated that they were such a marginal student and invested accordingly. This should not be confused for assuming that every passionate, driven student is a marginal case who just needs a little help.
The author is essentially arguing at length for a greater emphasis on benefit and less on cost. Not just in o-chem, but at every stage of medical training.
The author prefers to believe that it was poor instruction. The implication is that because they were willing to show up for a 7:30am lecture, they were capable of making it.
On the one hand, the author is on to something. Most people learn much better with intensive, one-to-one instruction than with large lectures. The real issue, as with all educational programs, is the cost in time and money to teach. More personalized, intensive training from more specialists in teaching a specialized subject simply costs more to get the to the same goals as bulk lectures. Nobody wants to say "There was a very rational cost-benefit analysis and I lost out". Instead, it's all framed as a need to dedicate more time and money at an already demonstrably drawn-out and expensive process.
On the other hand, a person's ability and willingness to show up at 7:30am are probably irrelevant. No matter how relevant it feels to a person who wants to show their dedication, passion, and drive.
Here you go! Insert credit card here.