Scientific discovery is not driven by economics 101.
Your dismissal of "excess supply" based on "margins" eliminates breakthrough contributions by profs that work for 20-30 years producing marginal research until one day they make the connection that transforms the world.
It's true that most professors never come up with breakthroughs. You cannot predict in advance which ones will. The best we can do is put many of them to work on research, connect them with their peers, and wait.
Take the K&R C book. It describes the language itself only - not the standard library. The Kotlin docs describe the language _plus_ parts of the Kotlin standard library which is why it appears to have lots of features. You'd have to read through half the standard C library documentation & pthreads docs in addition to K&R C to get the equivalent experience.
I get the sense that the only development environment the OP knows at all is Python. With that perspective I understand why they might think that error is cryptic.
People keeps forgetting that pretty much everything is C-based and only a few language ecosystems have abstracted it away enough. And even then, if you want to program in slightly esoteric environment, you have to confront that fact. Just understanding how C/C++ projects are used (libraries, header file, linking,...) can get you really far if you have to stray from the happy path.
The shortage of PCPs is a money problem, not a symptom of a broken model.
People smart enough to go to med school are (generally) also smart enough to do an ROI analysis. If I can make $500k/yr as an oncologist and pay off my student loans in 10 years vs. getting paid $150k/yr as a PCP and pay off my student loans in 30 years, which route am I going to choose? People that want to be PCPs are making the choice to go into higher-paying specialties just because it is expensive to become a doctor in the first place.
Obviously it is possible to change the economic incentives to increase the supply of PCPs. One simple way would be to just create full-ride scholarships for those that want to be PCPs to dramatically increase the ROI for being a PCP.
I don't believe its entirely a money problem. Certainly there is a factor but that oncologist is also spending a few more years in Residency typically. The trade-off is that as a PCP you are working predictable hours in generally a low stress environment.
So I agree money is a factor but I also think the current insurance model makes its incredible difficult to run a PC office. You have to bring on significant overhead which you then need to cover my making strict quotas on seeing patients. I don't believe this aligns with what PCP enjoy doing.
Take C++ vs. Rust, for instance. If I look at this from a business perspective:
- Rust compiler can likely help confirm reference correctness, so this is a plus.
- Rust language exchanges the cognitive load of memory allocation for tracking reference ownership, so this is a neutral. (In C++ anything that has access to the pointer can technically "own" it so there is no need to track function call traces for ownership, but lifetimes do need to be analyzed against the semantics of the program. Potato, po-tah-to.)
- The pool of Rust developers available to work on a project is much smaller.
If I'm writing software where memory safety is of high importance and I can afford to take the risk with a smaller developer pool, Rust makes sense. If I'm writing a game? It's going to make far more business sense to hire a bunch of C++ developers that can work with Unreal or C# developers to work with Unity or Python developers to work with Godot or whatever.
And for real mission-critical software memory allocation isn't used so in those cases Rust has zero advantages. (Real mission-critical software lays out a static memory map up front to avoid exactly the problems Rust is trying to avoid but to also ensure real-time & predictable response times.)
So we're left with niche software like OpenSSL or similar that can benefit from Rust. But it's more likely that we want a language that supports proofs of correctness (think Coq or seL4) in those cases and Rust can't even support that.
Let me educate you on what Wisconsin actually looks like since I grew up there.
50% of the population lives in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, and Eau Claire. Those cities, respectively, are in the southeast, northeast, south-central, and north-central parts of the state. You could generously include Hudson and La Crosse in that list in the west and southwest parts of the state, respectively, if you wanted to add a couple of smaller-sized municipalities to tie the state together.
One more point of reference: Minneapolis/St. Paul in Minnesota lies ~40 miles west of Hudson and Rochester, Minnesota lies ~90 miles west of La Crosse.
I-94 connects Minneapolis/St. Paul, Hudson/Eau Claire then turns south through Madison and Milwaukee, then to Chicago. I-90 connects Rochester (Minnesota) through La Crosse then on through Madison and Milwaukee. Another interstate (I forget which) travels north/south and connects Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
There is enough traffic along I-94 to justify a rail connection from Minneapolis/St. Paul/Hudson/Eau Claire/Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There is also probably enough traffic to justify a rail connection from Green Bay to Milwaukee as well.
Remember when I mentioned that 50% of the population lives in those cities? The other 50% of the population lives in rural areas and is generally involved in agriculture, forestry, or tourism, or support for those industries, and there are 2000+ small towns of 1000 population or less geographically distributed across the rest of Wisconsin, each typically 10-50 miles apart from each other. The towns did not arise like this by coincidence! This spacing actually creates an optimal geographic spanning tree across the state for the purpose of efficiently transporting food and forest products from rural areas to urban areas.
Now, something has to actually connect the farms/forests to the towns and the towns to bigger towns and the bigger towns to the urban centers in order to transport the food and forest products (and tourists). Traffic along the very rural links is extremely low; it is not uncommon to travel one of those links for 40-50 miles and not see anyone else on the link. So let's assume for a minute that it would be reasonable to build rail links, and let's assume (generously) that there are no hills in Wisconsin and that we can lay it out in a grid across the 250 miles x 250 miles to cover the southern 2/3rds of Wisconsin, with parallel rails separated by 10 miles:
* We need to build 12,500 miles of rail. Cost to build 1 mile of railroad track is $100,000, so the total cost is $1.25 billion dollars. Ok, not the end of the world.
* We need to build and operate the trains over these rails. Call it 100 trains. Data on the cost to operate a train is sparse, but call it $100/mile to operate a train. These trains would need to travel back and forth (conservatively) 4 times per day; 4 * 100 * 250 * 100 = $10,000,000 per day to operate, so the total cost per year just to operate the trains (disregarding maintenance) is another $3.65 billion dollars per year. _You can safely assume that the train operator - likely the state of Wisconsin - would lose $3 billion per year operating these trains_. Why? Remember when I mentioned just how lightly loaded the rural transportation links are? There would be some days those trains would operate with a grand total of 3 people on board. And oh, by the way, we still need roads covering the county in order to transport people and goods to the rail stations so we haven't eliminated the need for roads or vehicles, unless we're planning on increasing the rail grid by a factor of 10 each direction and now we've increased costs by 100x for both build-out and maintenance.
Also conservatively, we can estimate that the people in rural areas drive ~20,000,000 total miles per week across the whole rural population. (Farmers don't generally drive back and forth to town every day; maybe once or twice per week on a "busy" week.) Call it a $1/mile to operate a vehicle, that's $20,000,000 per week or about $1 billion per year to operate the vehicles that the rural people require anyway. Even if we built a 10-mile grid of trains the rural people would still need to drive that ~20,000,000 total miles per week to get back and forth to town, so this expense does not disappear.
Now, consider the fact that as soon as you travel more than 100-150 miles inland from the east or west coast the entire country generally falls into the situation that I described above, and repeat the exercise across ~2500 miles east/west and ~100 miles north/south to see how impractical it would be to blanked the country in rail.
Would it be feasible to replace highways with rail lines connecting SD/LA/SF/Sacramento? Absolutely. Amtrak should be operating rail along those routes and should be making a fortune doing so. Is it feasible to replace highways with rail lines across the US? There's just no way that can ever be economically feasible even if you factor in carbon externalities.
> it's currently 13°F in Dallas right now, so not really sure the point of calling out specific cities. it's winter. it gets cold in winter. things have problems working correctly in that cold of winter.
Only in Texas do things have trouble working correctly when it gets down to 13F. Auto-spec parts are rated for -40C to +105C.
Generally in Minnesota the primary problem with (older) ICE vehicles where the battery is located toward the headlights instead of back toward the firewall is that a battery with low charge will have a cell or two freeze when it's kept outside on a -10F - 30F night facing into the northwest wind, then the engine doesn't start the following morning and the battery needs to be replaced. Very few vehicles have trouble in 13F weather, except maybe in Buffalo, NY when so much lake-effect snow falls that the vehicle can't even drive through it.
> ...from a non-snowbelt area ... We've got a 2005 CR-V with 235K miles on it that will need to be retired due to rust in the next few years. Mechanically, it's still dead nuts reliable.
I had a 2004 Honda Pilot that was still mechanically good at 240k miles, but the salt melt that gets put on the roads in Minnesota ate through the rear suspension mount points to the frame. My auto repair shop wouldn't even quote me a repair on that, which I assume would have basically been to replace the frame and rebuild the body for $20-30k.
Your dismissal of "excess supply" based on "margins" eliminates breakthrough contributions by profs that work for 20-30 years producing marginal research until one day they make the connection that transforms the world.
It's true that most professors never come up with breakthroughs. You cannot predict in advance which ones will. The best we can do is put many of them to work on research, connect them with their peers, and wait.