Berkeley Blogs

>making it possible to actually download the PDF The journal they published in, Physical Review X, is a newer open-access journal from APS (along the same lines as PLOS ONE or Nature Scientific Reports). I think it's great but not everyone agrees. To read more on the debate around the open-access phenomenon look at http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/ and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

> We may be splitting hairs about signed agreements and assurances. None exist, unlike the assurance that Russia would never invade Ukraine. > Yes there are no signed agreements. Of course there aren't cause it never happened, and was never promised. > One interview with the dead Gorbachev is a source, but assurances were given by Western leaders to other people in Russia as well which are documented. There were never any real agreements, to anyone in any way shape or form that constituted and actual agreement that was meant to be enforced, the leader of the country himself has said that already. > That aside, what is important is Russia was under the understanding that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet bloc countries right up to its border and create a security threat which we are seeing now play out. No they weren't their leader literally said he knew that wasn't the guarantee, this is more Putin invented fiction to just his imperialistic war of conquest. > If you find something that Sachs got wrong, I would love to hear it. Here's an article that refutes everything he wrote. > https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1661857051725709314.html Here's another > https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2023/03/20/open-letter-to-jeffrey-sachs-on-… By the way, I looked up Jeffery Sachs cause you seem to love him as a source, so I googled him, turns out he's appeared on Russian propaganda shows hosted by Vladimir Solovyov. Now why would Sachs go on a…

> Obviously stereotypes about assuming any individual is a drug dealer is racist. But I think it’s reductionist to say that’s really the only place opposition to immigration is coming from. Nowhere have I argued for any particular immigration policy. Immigration law is complicated and I get that. I have only taken a stance against nationalism. We can have a rational discussion about immigration without resorting to nationalist stereotypes and rhetoric. > Italian immigrants brought the Mafia with them—the turn of the 20th century was a peak in the country’s foreign born population and also its homicide rate. https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-dec… https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-pop… Not the stats I'm finding. Foreign-born population as a percentage is pretty constant from 1870 to 1910, while murder peaks between 1920 and 1930, after the foreign-born population has already started to decline a bit. Murder then begins a dramatic increase in the 1970s, a decade in which the foreign-born population is at an all time low. Between 1990 and 2020 the murder rate has dropped dramatically even as the foreign-born population has grown to levels not seen since 1920. This is exactly the kind of nationalistic rhetoric I object to. People spout "facts" that they heard from other people that would at best amount to a correlation if the numbers were true—and the numbers rarely are…

Interesting. Do you have any sources of information to back that up? It contradicts my perception of things, and I would like to know if I've been operating under a faulty understanding. Example: according to this [1] article : per-capita murder rates were something on the order of 30/100000 in colonial times, 15/100000 in the "wild west" period compared to 6/100000 today. [1] https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-dec…

You can bing :) that phrase and see other resources, e.g. https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/why-dont-refugees-fly/

Agricultural use of water is heavily subsidized. The amount of water you would have to pay $2000 for, Big Ag gets for around $40. Source: https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2018/01/26/the-cost-of-irrigation-water-and…

If the only reason we sentence people to death were because it is more humane than putting them in prison for life, then it would be given as an option to the prisoner. I don't know of any case of someone sentenced to life in prison who argued they would rather be put to death. Edit: I've now done some research and found some death-row-inmates do express a preference for a death sentence: https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/09/25/why-death-row-inmates-oppose-lif… https://www.quora.com/Is-prison-crueller-than-the-death-penalty?share=… http://www.bu.edu/pilj/files/2015/09/17-2SmithArticle.pdf

The author's experience is interesting to read about, but their dwelling is not typical of ADUs. 240 sq. ft is on the extreme low end of ADU sizes. Googling yields a variety of different figures, but one blog[1] cites an average ADU size of 640 ft. As someone who currently lives in a <700 sq. ft apartment with another person and a dog, I can say that 640 ft would be very livable for one person. Tiny homes sound terrible, but tiny home != ADU. There are a lot of more reasonably sized ADUs being built, and most of them should be much more pleasant to live in than this one. https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/05/23/jumpstarting-the-market-for-acce…

I like this argument which only looks at very long term statistics. Violent crime has been decreasing since colonial times if not earlier and globally. In this sense, a particular decrease in violent crime doesn't explanation as such (though the long term trend does. Perhaps lead exposure has been decreasing for a long time, perhaps not). Increases in crime, long term, are correlated roughly with veterans returning from war. See this link for the argument. http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-decl… Edit: also the original lead argument pretty hinges on a single moment of crime increase. I don't see how more detailed studies of the correlation could be more revealing since reality only provides one instance of a potential to leaded gasoline and reality is going to be noisy.

"American households use less electricity than they did five years ago." http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/05/08/evidence-of-a-decline-in-electric… Will there be a rebound effect? It is too soon to tell, but it is not a given that household consumption always increases.

You didn't back up anything you were saying. It looks to me like women crossed the majority in 1960. http://blogs.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/gender-college_go…

In the early 60s and crime kept increasing every year until it peaked in the early 90s. Its been on a steep decline ever since. There's some interesting graphs here - http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-decl… Murder rates are plotted with lead exposure here - http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/us-murder-rate-track-be-…

Evidently this is being blown way out of proportion, and other researchers have been studying this region for some time (to say nothing of the actual people living there, who have known about these "lost cities" all along): http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2015/03/03/theres-a-real-archaeological-surp…

Given the broad geographic footprint of the HN community, I'm curious what folks here think about how much of a role that a tolerance of failure plays in Silicon Valley's track record of supporting commercial innovation. I don't know if others agree (and it's no doubt an over-generalization), but my intuition is that commercial failure lacks the stigma in Silicon Valley that it does in most other places. Much ink has been spilled on the topic and some have even suggested that Silicon Valley has a "Failure Fetish".[1] It seems popular to trace the roots of this and other cultural features of Northern California (e.g., 60s counterculture) to the Gold Rush of 1849. But perhaps it simply another artifact of startup density that Sam suggests is so critical? [1] A sampling from various…

Your post reminds me of some statistical data I saw a while back that says that Americans have a very poor view on the actual economic status of those around them and the rest of the country. link: http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/09/30/wealth-and-an-american-paradox/

I have a feeling these graphs do more to explain the problems that Berkeley professor wrote about (http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students/) than the explanations he proposed.

And this is again the essence of whataboutism and demonstration of its uselessness and harm. See, I tried to explain how it is reasonable to handle the question about Ukraine, but you, instead of interacting with the issue, flooded the medium with complete unrelated nonsense. You just flooded the medium with noise mostly. I think Ukrainians made a very correct observation about Chomsky https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-… "While you admittedly call the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “war crime,” it appears to us that you cannot do so without naming in the same breath all of the past atrocities committed by the U.S. abroad (e.g., in Iraq or Afghanistan) and, ultimately, spending most of your time discussing the latter." See also the example I made here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31602479 Worse, the two issues you like to stress here constantly (Yemen, Ethiopia) are completely different in nature and have very different solutions as was explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31603138 based on Yemen example. In fact, there is (for now) clear and straightforward solution to end the war in Ukraine but Yemen and Ethiopia are lacking such solution, so these 2 are even completely irrelevant to the problem at hand.

A while ago, the Stanford dean wrote an open letter about the decreasing amount of funding for the UC system. In this letter, the dean mentioned the value the UC system provides to Stanford, the research community in general, and the state of California. However, the Stanford Dean also said something interesting, he said that Stanford can't provide an education on the scale that the UC system does. While I agree Stanford can't match the entire UC system on scale, I have to ask, why not on a scale similar to a UC Campus? UC Berkeley, for example, has over 27,000 undergraduates, with a vastly higher percentage of low income students than Stanford or any Ivy. At Stanford and Harvard, total undergrad enrollment is below 8,000. As a result, Berkeley educates more low income students than the entire ivy leave combined. This is true of a number of UC campuses. It's clear that the elite privates have decided to keep their undergraduate populations very small. Even if they do improve the percentage of low income students, the scale is so minuscule that they can't really be large scale agents of social mobility. So, why aren't Stanford and Harvard enrolling 25,000 undergraduates? If UCB and UCLA can do this, why can't they? These institutions do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students, the big gap is in undergrads. http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2014/10/13/why-elite-private-universities-ge… Because these universities get a huge amount…

> "when I say "traditional education", I'm referring to the liberal arts college model" Yes. My response concerns the 'this is intended to be different' on the first slide, which grates because it's a blanket statement. Had it added 'different from a liberal arts education' or 'different from what most think of college' then I would not react as strongly. > 66% of high school graduates enroll in college within a year Not all of those enter a liberal arts school. That 66% is those 'who enroll in 2- or 4-year colleges in the fall immediately after completing high school'. 23.8% are in 2-year colleges and 42.1 are in 4-year colleges. (See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_302.10.asp ). Concerning the 2-year colleges, and quoting from http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-03-10/features/os-florida-ass… . > A.S. programs are different in that they require students to immediately specialize in a limited number of high-demand fields. They train in areas such as nursing, law-enforcement administration, media design and fire-science technology. Certainly some of them are using a 2 year program as a stepping stone for a 4 year program. But college also includes religious colleges, culinary college, .. and looking around, it also includes the Aerosim Flight Academy in Florida. Which is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, which is for schools that…