I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.
There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.
Citation needed. Everything I have seen shows that suburbs are a net drain in contrast to dense urban areas. Infrastructure has very high fixed costs that require more people to net even.
Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
Well in my state generally the wealthiest people live in suburbs and pay all the taxes. The poorest areas are in cities and get the subsidies. So the suburbs are subsidising the cities. And that was before everyone started WFH so downtowns are now really empty.
What subsidies? What about businesses and their taxes? Wealthier people don’t always pay more in taxes, even at a localized level, and businesses tend to be based out of the cities.
When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.
Tuition is waived in 98%+ of cases,
when it is not the assistantship is being paid by a research grant and for many of those the stipend is already higher than USCs. There may be some act of it tuition fees from one internal account to another in the case of a waiver though.
I don't understand people making very good salaries who don't just provide their own (cheap in the scheme of things) tools where practical if they don't like the ones they've been given.
In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly).
This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.
The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.
Utilities are huge financial organzations that have to provide secure generation and transportation over decades. Just because solar is cheaper now doesn't mean you can replace everything in just a few years. Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much.
> Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much
If you think that solar doesn't work fantastically in Nebraska, then I think you need to reevaluate the data, and start holding your utility to account.
Solar works great in Minnesota, with lower solar resources than Nebraska. The key difference is whether the utility will allow a financially beneficial decision to made, not the fundamental economics of the technology.
Contrast the planned 2023 solar additions in yellow dots on this map:
So while you are right that utilities are slow, which was the main thrust of my original comment, we must also acknowledge the financial incentives of utilities to distort a setup that can not even result be called a market.
Electricity decisions are made based on what the utility perceives will give it the greatest profit, with all their biases, and without regard to what will deliver the best overall cost-optimal solution for reliable power.
The main point is people in Northern lattitudes needs most of their energy in the Winter, especially winter nights. Its a very different problem to Southern states where peak energy use is hot sunny days.
As for distortions the biggest problem with retail users is that panels have changed the market but people still expect to use the old rules. Eg be self sufficient 320 days a year but expect eletricity on demand at the same low rates on the few days they need the grid. That isn't scalable and home solar people are getting an unfair advantage from the system, which is why utilities (rightfully) dont like it.
Seriously, check out where solar is getting installed on that map.
Cold wonders are not a reason to avoid solar. Look at where they are getting installed around the north east and the Great Lakes. They will laugh at your Nebraska winters.
We tried it once and the semi-tech SMEs had no desire to write cucumber code so it ended up being the developers who hated writing in a second language. No real benefit.
The ideas behind BDD are sound, but I've never seen it work out in the real world.
In reality we as programmers need to turn what the stakeholders want into code. They will talk in meetings: we better take notes. They will write things down [in English or whatever language they speak], but it won't be code. There will be conflicting requirements, and we as programmers need to understand the topic well enough to make reasonable decisions on the easy stuff, while going back on the harder stuff - easy and hard is as the decision makes see things not as a programmer sees them: better know that too.
Once you figure out what stakeholders want turn it into code. It is useful to have integration tests for scenarios that they care about (some of them are stupid - the last version of an embedded product I worked in had a 5 length array, and it turns out some customers needed 7, and later analysis proved that 7 was the mathematical max anyone would ever want. The current version is C++ using a vector so the potential length is unlimited (limited by free memory), but we still have a test proving 7 works because the mistake in the past burned enough people)
I've done it plenty, just never in the context of cucumber (I find it gets in the way).
E.g. When a front end team says "we need an API to do X" to backend I dash off a couple of draft example API calls and responses and organize a 10 minute meeting where I show the draft to the front end team and back end team (stakeholders).
That discussion we have in the meeting where we 1) talk about what needs to go in the request and response while looking at it and 2) edit the example scenario and 3) finally lock down a version everybody agrees upon is, essentially, BDD in its purest form.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people do this type of thing without even realizing that it's BDD.
(A lot of people also dont do it and the mismatch in expectations only gets realized and negotiated around once there is code ready to deploy. This is an awful waste of time and effort.)
This doesn't sound like a stupid test at all: it safeguards against a regression by preventing anyone from changing the vector code. In an ideal world every bug would be caught by a human once and only once, and thereafter be tested.
Yes it's included in the prices. Technically it's supposed to go to waiters, but I don't think it really happens. They just get a "livable" flat wage. Back in the days it was customary to just leave the change when paying for your meal in cash, but it was rarely the equivalent of more than a dollar or two.
I can see this argument, although I don't agree. It's only marginally acceptable if it's either 1. VERY up front, or 2. Doesn't exist and is incorporated directly into the price.
The biggest issue is it is mandatory and its impersonal. If it's mandatory and impersonal, it's /not/ a tip, and it shouldn't be percentage based. If the business wants to raise prices, raise prices. Tacking on additional costs that are not correctly and appropriately represented in the price is basically fraud, and it's doubly uncouth because my understanding is that most businesses don't give this service charge to the workers, it's just treated as revenue.
How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.