As someone in an adjacent field who tried to keep up with the state of the art until the late 2010s, I really relate to this article. I'm reminded of another interesting personal story about AI-induced academic depression https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.01870. I think it's valuable to record things like these.
I completely agree with most of your points. I have a spot in my garden where I want to plant a large native tree, probably an oak. I would love to plant all natives, except that they quickly get eaten by deer in my neighborhood. Even many "deer resistant" varieties like coneflower and beebalm. Of course, this make no sense, since deer and native plants should have evolved to survive beside one another. I think this contradiction is because the local deer population is just much much higher than the historical levels, since they have no natural predators here. My neighbors say they weren't a problem until recent decades. I was somewhat skeptical, except that I see many plant varieties thriving in the 2012 Google streetview shots that would not be feasible to grow today.
We have deer as well that keep eating certain plants. I am drawing a blank on which ones, but they kept growing back rather quickly. We are going to take into consideration this year and perhaps plant them in less convenient spots, more quantity, or something else when it comes to mind, like some sort of deer sprinkler project that targets them. Haha. Although it is quite annoying as they were eating two of my favorite plants I got last year, I'm not too bothered by it. I'm going to buy more and try what I mentioned above and see if it helps at all. They leave the milkweeds alone, probably for obvious reasons, and the milkweeds are the happening place for basically all the insects. It is crazy how popular they are. There are other plants they also leave alone. I think it's going to just be trial and error since they don't seem to like all the native plants, just some of them.
Yes you can. I did it last year after transplanting a 4' to 5' tree that needed time and space to grow. I see deer "evidence" all around outside the fence. But they can't get close enough to munch.
Are you sure? In some cities it is allowed. The city might say it is not allowed, but the state has different rules that overrule whatever the city says.
Of course you do still need to be safe in your hunting, and that can be tricky.
Not really. Ionizing radiation can knock electrons out of atoms. This sounds like knocking atoms out of molecules. But the wavelength these radio waves is several cm, so it's dubious that they would affect individual atoms, or even individual cells.
It was a real shock when I moved to the U.S. and the posted price on items didn't match with what I actually had to pay.
In Australia, the posted price is the price, and must "include any tax, duty, fee, levy or other additional charges"
That's mostly because local sales tax makes it very hard to advertise a price - each small locality might have a different tax level, and a different final price.
So if you are trying to send a mailer or run a tv ad, what price do you do?
That's different from fees that don't vary by location, like in this article.
I mean it's just a tax the business has to pay to the government, calculated based on products sold. Any business could conceivably do something similar with any tax if they wanted, e.g. add a "XYZ fee" that's added at the register to compensate for XYZ tax. (And in fact many businesses in the US do exactly this, listing each tax as an excuse to tack on arbitrary extra hidden fees at check-out!)
I think this also doubles as a political statement. Basically a subtle way to shift "blame" and make consumers feel upset about a tax, and more likely to put pressure on governments to reduce said taxes. Ultimately it's all anti-consumer.
Its not shifting the blame. Its placing the blame squarely on where it belongs. If you're in New Hampshire and buy something listed as $1, then you only have to pay $1. Why? Because New Hampshire does not charge any sales tax. But if you were to cross the border into Massachusetts, then suddenly everything has an extra 6.25% tacked on at checkout solely because the Massachusetts state government decided to tax each transaction at 6.25%.
>I mean it's just a tax the business has to pay to the government, calculated based on products sold
No, its explicitly a tax on each transaction to be paid by the buyer. You're probably thinking of corporate tax, which the company also has to pay, but is completely separate from sales tax.
From their site:
>The buyer pays the sales tax, as an addition to the purchase price, to the vendor at the time of purchase. The vendor then sends the tax to Massachusetts. For motor vehicle and trailer sales, however, the buyer pays the sales tax directly to Massachusetts.
It's not the stickers on the shelves, though it would be mildly annoying to retag the entire store, it's the ads in the newspaper. Low margin businesses like groceries can't advertise an all-in price for their stores in the metro area when every tiny municipality in a metro has a slightly different tax rate.
Growing up in suburban Kansas City, we had both city, county and state sales taxes which could vary based on a short drive. And then there's certain entities which are allowed tax exemptions, like teachers making qualified purchases for some things.
> Low margin businesses like groceries can't advertise an all-in price for their stores in the metro area when every tiny municipality in a metro has a slightly different tax rate.
Yes they can. Just have a constant price in that advertising region for the premium items you're advertising, eat the cost in locations with high sales tax rates (or rent, or wages, or shipping costs, or any other of the ten thousand other factors that they already deal with without issue), and make up for it in the areas where costs are lower than average.
Almost every single large business in the United States already does this, and it would be incredibly trivial for them to do it for sales tax as well.
Pretty sure this is a factor in how we ended up with food deserts: municipalities that couldn't rely on property taxes to cover their budget raised sales taxes, and chains closed their underperformers. Which of course means the municipality loses more tax base as their citizens shop in another city.
Almost every large grocery store business does this, and a brief google street view tour of North St Louis will show multiple places where grocery stores have vanished and been replaced, if at all, by dollar stores.
now i'm curious; has anyone been to a store that doesn't have a computer at the till / register, and the person ringing up your goods had to calculate the subtotal + sales tax = total by hand?
the few times i remember handing over a specific sum of cash at thrift/vintage stores, indie shops, etc smaller stores here or there, they would always seem to include the tax in the displayed price if there was no computer to calculate the final tax, and the receipt (if any) was whole numbers throughout
No, not since I was a teenage employee at McDonalds, and doing the arithmetic with a pencil. The next summer I saw my first computerized cash registers. But then I was a stockboy and had nothing to do with the point of sale. (Summers of 1972 and 1973.)
Not to criticize anything, but India too have similar structure like US, Federal Tax is Central Tax, State Tax is State Tax, City tax is known as Octrai Tax. Even then, anything & everything has MRP sticker or print, Maximum Retail Price, which includes everything. Shops at places with lower tax sells at lower rate, or not, but everything which gets uts price advertised is advertised at MRP.
Maybe for TV advertising but definitely not the reason for price labels on shelves to omit tax. Retail chains are perfectly capable of printing custom price labels for each branch. Supermarkets in my country have individual pricing per branch.
I worked in a grocery store in a state that taxes food. Sometimes bottlers would have a giveaways with prizes revealed under the cap. A free soda being the most common. These were redeemed as a 100% off coupon but we still had to collect a penny in tax.
Exactly. We just bought in the greater DC area and our mortgage payment is is only $500 more than our previous rent for a house that is much bigger/better. Given that $900 of our mortgage payment contributes to equity, we are throwing less money in the trash than before. Also, I have essentially frozen the amount I have to pay for shelter for the rest of my life (except for property tax and insurance increases). Even if our house never appreciates, it still made more sense to buy than rent.
The above only applies if you are very sure you want to stay in the same house for the long term, otherwise the high cost of real estate transactions will kill any advantage.
> we are throwing less money in the trash than before.
This phrasing needs to die. You weren't throwing your money in the trash, you were exchanging it for a place to live. There's a big difference between throwing money away and using it to not be homeless.
The thing is you still "throw money away" in owning a home through maintenance, see the 5% rule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwl3-jBNEd4. There are large, unrecoverable costs in upkeep of a home. You will have to replace the roof in 15-20 years, just to have it not go to crap. That's $20k with no actual improvement to the home. Plumbing, outdoor siding, and so on. These would normally be covered by rent.
Property tax is bundled into our mortgage payment, so even after considering the 1 % maintenance, our large house and yard worked out cheaper per month than our small rental condo and balcony. Unfortunately, we just had to replace our roof in Sept, but it only cost $6k (despite multiple quotes in the $15k range).
I will acknowledge that owning a house is sometimes like having an extra part time job. I'm forever fixing little things or gardening or changing things about the house. I consider this to be a new hobby, but if you consider it work then that's something else to consider.
edit: I put our loan details into the NYT calculator and it said "If you can rent a similar home for less than... $1,618 PER MONTH... then renting is better." That might get you a 1 bedroom condo around here, instead of a 4 bedroom house with a yard like we got.
> I will acknowledge that owning a house is sometimes like having an extra part time job. I'm forever fixing little things or gardening or changing things about the house. I consider this to be a new hobby, but if you consider it work then that's something else to consider.
This is good to know and confirms what I've noticed about homeowners. I hate maintaining stuff, whether it's my car or my furniture or whatever, and I only do it if the time/money tradeoff is worth it. Some homeowners seem delighted by it though, crafting their own castle and the like. Do you have time for other hobbies that are "big" with these tasks?
Exactly. Researchers have been doing tomography with energy-dispersive detectors for decades, especially at synchrotrons. They often represent that data in 3D with false color indicating material properties. If there is something particularly novel about this work, it's not clear from the article, which reads like a rehash of a University PR piece.
I found it enjoyable and understandable, but I guess I was already slightly familiar with matrix factorization for recommendation/characterization problems.
