The problem is so much bigger than that. Here in Edmonton, we have regular folks who campaign and crowd-source funding to install lights on bridges, buildings, just about anything for the sake of making things look 'nicer'. Which is unfortunate for those of us who want to see the sky.
Anyway, how's the light pollution been on your Africa trip? You must have been through some seriously dark remote areas by now.
Your post hits the nail on the head, but complicates things more than needed.
The whole idea of "middle class" is a fiction that supports the behaviours discussed in the article. In the real world, it doesn't actually exist in any meaningful way. You're either working class or you're not. If you can walk away from your job today and never look back, congrats! You're not working class. But for everyone else, you're stuck and putting a fancy label on things doesn't change much.
I disagree. While the terms "lower middle class" and "upper middle class" are perhaps unnecessary, the term "middle class" itself is an important economic (and socioeconomic) distinction, although its exact definition is highly contentious.
Here are my own definitions (it's important to note that sometimes people don't fit neatly into a single category):
Lower Class (also called the Working Class, or the Working Poor): They live paycheck-to-paycheck, usually at job(s) that have low pay, shifting schedules, no benefits, low job security and no possibility for long-term career-building. They own very few assets, if any, and rent/borrow most things. They are usually one medical emergency away from financial ruin (at least in the USA). They are too worried about tomorrow and the next week to worry about further into the future.
Middle Class: These people have fairly stable jobs that have decent pay and benefits. They often build careers around those jobs and it becomes part of their identity, which can be seen in the way they think of themselves and introduce themselves to others (e.g. "I'm an accountant"). They own or make payments towards owning core assets such as house. They sometimes own small businesses. If they lose their jobs, they can use their skills and connections to find another, but it can take some time. They tend to plan and save for the future, at least passively (e.g. 401k accounts).
Upper Class: The upper class is defined primarily by wealth. Even when upper class folks don't have "fuck you money", their wealth enables them levels of comfort that can only be dreamed of by the Lower Class, and is looked up to by the Middle Class. Work tends to be optional for most, and tends to be about prestige and social class rather than a necessity. When they lose their jobs, it's mostly because of corporate politics or some sort of scandal, and they can trivially find another job using their connections (usually an email or phone call is sufficient).
I'm not sure about that, because there is such a huge range of "need to work" lives.
Taking it for granted that everything but "upper class" means "has to work", it's still worth drawing distinctions amongst the non-upper-classes. Those differences do exist in very meaningful ways, all the way down to life expectancy.
You can't just trivialize away the difference between "college? how the fuck would I afford that?" and "it's 100% expected that I'll go, and my parents can pay the entire thing with zero debt".
> 3. Invented async/await, by far the most ergonomic concurrency primitive yet created.
This feels like a bit of hyperbole. The actor model seems much more intuitive than async/await. Indeed, message passing between actors is how concurrency works in the real world (think about how people interact with each other).
I knew I'd get pushback on that one, it is somewhat hyperbolic; I'm here using "most ergonomic" to mean "closest source-level similarity to the synchronous equivalent." Which is perhaps not the "best" way to model concurrency, but has the advantage of being very easy to learn.
What you describe sounds like a consequence of Erlang's dynamic type system, rather than its concurrency model. Besides, don't most languages have "opt-in" error handling? For example, I work mostly in C# and if you don't catch an exception, your program will crash. How is that different? At least in Erlang, my program might restart itself. Sadly that doesn't happen on most other platforms.
The quantitative easing FUD on HN is getting pretty tiresome. It gets blamed for everything from VC subsidies to house prices and just about everything in between.
All three rounds of QE in the USA focused on mortgage-backed securities and Treasury securities. Are you suggesting there were a bunch of VCs who were neck deep in the MBS or CDS/CDO rackets in the mid 00's?
Don't forget another important point here: most lecturers at the post-secondary level are not teachers. That is, most of them have little to no formal training in how to educate others. It still kind of blows my mind that, to my knowledge, not one of my university instructors/professors, despite being subject matter experts, is credentialed to teach children - at any grade level - in a public school.
Not only that, but it is likely that they will have received no teaching training at all. When I was hired as lecturer I was just told these are the classes you need to teach and then left on my own to figure it out.
Teaching credentials do not effect teacher quality. Whether at primary or secondary level the best predictor is years of teaching experience, with measures of subject matter expertise (a Master's degree in the subject they're teaching, not education) and measures of general intelligence (IQ tests or close enough like GRE or SAT) also having large positive effects. The additional effects of more experience end at around six years experience.
Teaching qualifications have an effect on teacher performance that is not reliably distinguishable from zero.
The reason is that Oprah operates in what's called a "winner take all market". There are thousands of baristas, servers, and (probably) garbage collectors with failed dreams of stardom in Hollywood, etc. But you don't hear about them.
Garbage collecting is not winner take all. No single garbage collector can corner the market because the role doesn't require unique talent in the same way that being a famous talk show host does. Oprah's value is her unique personality, brand, style, mannerisms, business savvy, etc rather than any sort of utility (like removing up your rotting trash) that she may or may not provide.
> China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill.
That's.... not how it works. USA consumers purchase lots of imports from China, which causes massive flows of capital from the USA to China. China uses these capital flows to purchase treasuries from the USA which (in part) funds the federal deficit.
At no point is China just "creating debt-free money".
The exact same thing happens in other countries with large trade surpluses. Part of the reason for the Greek crisis was that Germany exports a lot of goods to Greece. This capital flow drives down the price of money (the interest rate) in Frankfurt and drives up the price of money in Athens. The Germans, seeing that they could get 1% at home or 7% in Greece (in the early 00's) then used the capital flows to purchase securities in Greece, such as bonds, CDOs and CDSs.
Anyway, how's the light pollution been on your Africa trip? You must have been through some seriously dark remote areas by now.