This doesn't address all of your comment but specifically with patient confidentiality – Israel agreed to share more data with vaccine manufacturers in order to get quicker access to the vaccines. There are obviously problems with bilateral dealmaking and Israeli distribution (the article below points them out), but Israel almost certainly saved lives by weakening confidentiality. I think that was the right call.
In some ways the argument against Excel is like the argument against Electron: if you're comparing it to an elegant, purpose-built and well-tested application, yes... it falls woefully short.
But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.
You're being downvoted, but I think this sentiment is right and if you take it seriously, it's an argument for the SAT. Pretty much _everything_ in the USA is pay to win, not just the SAT, and the more subjective factors like essays, extracurriculars, and even grades, are more biased.
Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.
Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.
You could just as easily have an enthusiast who finds a few new indie albums per month and listens to them all the way through, or someone who leaves a top-40 playlist on in the background.
From the article:
82 per cent of respondents earned less than £200 from streaming in 2019, including some with “millions” of streams.
This just could not happen with what I’m suggesting.
Example: The band above, which earned < £200 must have at least 2 million streams a year = 166,666 a month
For simplicity let’s assume each of those 166,666 streams is a unique user. Each also listens to 1999 other songs that month (about 5 hours a day of music seems average?)
So each owes the artist 1/2000 of their £10 subscription = $0.005
166,666 streamers * $0.005 = £833.33 a month = £10,000 a year.
(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment.
(2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true.
(3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs.
Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the CS route, but most aren't. You need to do basic programming to do physics, but not industry-grade software engineering.
It's not a hard set of skills for physics grad students to pick up, but it's a bit more than a boot camp. Most of the deep stuff is there. There's a lot of shallow stuff at this point, though.
Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).
There are definitely unpleasant quant shops. But there are pleasant ones, too. Interviewing with shops is like asking people to dance. If you stop after the first rejection, you're doing it wrong.
It isn't thrown away, though. If your district picks a third party, you send a third party representative to Congress. You'll have different choices in district-specific and state-wide races but you could also have a third party senate candidate and no realistic third party house candidates (for example Maine in 2018, though they had ranked choice voting). I don't see how having multiple levels of elections changes things beyond larger populations making it harder to coordinate outside the parties.
But all the prior blocks are static, that's the point. If you can break the cipher used at some time t, anything that people had "stored securely" by encrypting it and putting it on the blockchain before time t is vulnerable. As our technology and understanding gets better, t might get later and later. Obviously it depends on your use case, but it's a good argument for not putting sensitive things out in public on a blockchain at all.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/israel-trades-pfizer-va...