That experience is ridiculous, I'm sorry you had to go through that. My cousin is a teacher and is trying to support one of her students who is very food insecure. She's currently putting a box of food into the kids backpack every day, so the kid doesn't feel different/shame bringing a bag of food home. The one consistent meal the kid gets per day is the school lunch.
It wasn't that child's choice to be born. Some of the biggest lifetime ROI's out there are ensuring a childhood isn't filled with trauma, involves enough nutrition to help their bodies and brains develop, etc.
I have no time for people who make an argument about "the government shouldn't be providing food because it creates a dependency or expectation they'll want for life". Their lifetime earnings and contributions to society will be vastly larger if they aren't hungry during the school day.
It's tough to focus and learn when you're only eating a few hundred calories per day.
After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.
It's great to see an automated method for this, even if it still needs to be reviewed by an expert. Back on the 2011-2014 era I was on a team which helped make materials available for a chemistry grad student. I wasn't aware of the standards book, but followed more or less the same process outlined in the paper, using GIMP to simplify images, paste into Word, and add textboxes with braille font to the images, and then embossed. It was probably 5-10 minutes of effort for a basic graph, and we were doing the work for entire math and chemistry books. This would have saved so much time for us!
We also had to figure out how to represent electron clouds. Some could be done as 2-D representations, but eventually 3-D was required. We created a plugin for Blender which would import a MacMolPlt save file, generate the structure for the molecule (coordinates for each atom, bond types connecting the atoms), and a point cloud for the electron cloud. Each column of the periodic table was a different shape, each row was a different scale. It worked pretty well, and generating STL files was automated.
The program is somewhere on my hard drive not available publicly and probably technically owned by Iowa State or the federal government, whether they know it or not. I'm curious how much it'd take to get out running on a current version of Blender.
If the refund is paid in less than 45 days after the tax filing deadline or the day you file your taxes, they will pay you interest. See here: https://www.irs.gov/payments/interest#pay
Within the last few years I got a couple hundred bonus bucks back from the IRS as interest. Might've been a year where they were overhelmed and took significantly longer to cut the check that usual
I've seen Saturday for payroll week start. It naturally makes sense to align other business calendars accordingly.
It does get funky with overtime. If weather cancels a Monday-Friday shift, you might schedule a makeup shift on Saturday. What would typically be straight time in the same pay period is now going to cause overtime in the following week.
6-week December threw off a bunch of reporting last year for my company. The reporting group was not aware of the 6-week fiscal month, and the date dimension table didn't reflect it.
A coworker used to work in a meatpacking plant. There were two people who had the exact same name, first middle and last. They worked in the same department and in fact on the same machine.
They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B.
Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.
In my AP Statistics class, we had a few weeks after the test before school was out. We had to do a statistics project, and the teacher didn't particularly care what it was.
We were checking which candy was most popular from a giant bowl, and went classroom to classroom just asking a randomly selected student to pick a piece of candy.
We got 100% on the report, which included "We didn't inform the participants of and potential harm from participating in the study. We're heartless bastards, oh well."
Then I went to college and helped in quite a few study designs with a Professor who had worked with over 30 IRB's across his career. Ours was by far the most strict. We were primarily doing software usability studies, and every single question we would ask a participant needed to be verbatim. Your data anonymization, destruction, and analysis plans had to be fully defined, including storing the participant name to UID key separately from the data.
Deviation or asking follow-up questions based on a prior response was either not allowed or a whole additional huge layer of SCRUTINY (I'm not sure). I'm genuinely curious how any sort of therapy focused study could have occurred with that IRB.
Maybe the professor was training you and didn't care about the value of your undergraduate study, which was almost certainly not worth the professor's time otherwise.
Late reply, but that experience was actually in grad school. I was involved with research as an undergrad as well, but it was definitely confusing from how I stated things.
I was funded through a DARPA grant. It was definitely not a training exercise.
Yes, doubling your income and maintaining your lifestyle would make a huge difference. In many cases such an extreme bump isn't reasonably available.
I believe GP was more referring to the rough rule of thumb is to have 25x your annual expenses by the time you retire. +5k income versus -5k expenses, you're better off cutting your expenses. By cutting expenses, the target drops by 25xExpensesCut, and you're throwing an extra ExpensesCut towards savings, helping on both sides of the equation. Going from spending 95% of savings to 90% makes a huge difference on the timeline, but 50% to 45% is much more modest since the timeline for compounding growth is so much shorter.
Using 70k income, 50k expenses, and a 5% return, this would take about 30 years. [0]
75k income, 50k expenses goes to 25.2 years [1]
70k income, 45k expenses goes to 24 years [2]
150k income, 50k expenses goes to 10.6 years [3]
Another detail often forgotten about, salary is stated before taxes, spending is almost always after taxes.
That further increases the power of decreasing expenses.
All good points. The original article has a few things that are oversimplified I think, which is why I criticize it a bit. For example, if you go from a country in the EU to San Francisco, you're going to earn way more but spend way more too. But if you plan on going back to the EU when you retire, this won't matter much because your living expenses will drop.
I don't know how hard is doubling your income in general, but I don't know if it's always harder than dividing by two your expenses. The thing is that by focusing on earning more, you will end up with more money, and at that point you can always cut back expenses. While if you focus on cutting back expenses, you will end up with less money.
It wasn't that child's choice to be born. Some of the biggest lifetime ROI's out there are ensuring a childhood isn't filled with trauma, involves enough nutrition to help their bodies and brains develop, etc.
I have no time for people who make an argument about "the government shouldn't be providing food because it creates a dependency or expectation they'll want for life". Their lifetime earnings and contributions to society will be vastly larger if they aren't hungry during the school day.
It's tough to focus and learn when you're only eating a few hundred calories per day.