- PIX (Brazilian Payment method) as unfair to master/visa duopoly
- Last couple years the Brazilian Supreme Court has been involved in certain battles with X and other US companies (Elon Musk has been particularly involved)
Energy:
- Brazil tariffs US ethanol imports in 18% (while US does not)
Last week Flávio Bolsonaro (presidential incumbent for the end of year elections) visited Trump so it is certainly some interesting timing. His brother Eduardo has been living and lobbying in the US for more than a year now.
I'm actually surprised that sentiments like this still exist. We work in technology, we've had enough contact with enough people to know that there is a difference between motivation to learn a hard technical field and the aptitude to actually do that field. "Anybody can learn basic addition" is mostly true. "Anybody can learn linear algebra" is not.
You could say that not every adult, 2 deviations from the IQ median for the sake of rigor (we lose 2.5% of the population under), capable of reading might be able to follow it, and I would accept the argument. At the same time almost every adult was also indoctrinated in such a way they "hate maths", even though their only experience is dealing with numbers, operations and memorizing formulas that might eventually be useful.
I'm not sure this translates well, but the best allegory I could make to illustrate my point is "the fish does not think about the water".
Great, I'll get on the phone to the local special school and let them know their non-verbal autistic students with IQs in the 50 to 60 range are to be enrolled in manifold theory next semester, and if they can't do it then badosu says it's all their fault because anybody can learn maths.
You are being disingenuous. Of course people with disabilities or severely deficient in cognition have innate difficulties that might hamper or completely preclude the development of mathematical skills.
The main point is that the educational environment most people have to deal with: public school in most countries, focused on rote memorization of formulas for passing tests, is the main factor on the incredibly inefficient and adversarial perception of most students and adults.
If you are able to understand something as "basic" as higher order effects in economics and societies, accrued from an understanding of rates of change from calculus, you are of course extremely privileged. On the other hand you are not some gifted unicorn with a special brain, you are just lucky (exceptions exist, but even they have to be somewhat lucky).
I'll defer to the research[0], but I believe mathematical attainment is correlated primarily with IQ and mostly only correlated with maths anxiety, wealth, etc. to the extent that those things are proxies for IQ.
It's cruel to tell students that everyone can learn maths. Neither "everyone" nor "maths" is strictly true, you know it's not true, and most of the students also know it's not true. If you just told them "everyone in the class can improve" then it would be correct and uplifting!
Terrence Tao is a gifted unicorn with a special brain and this makes him lucky, as does his excellent education. Everything is luck when you look at it from enough of a distance.
I am fine with the research results, it's important to note that it does not control for pedagogical variance. [Edit: I'd like refer to the last 2 paragraphs on the Discussion section to point out other issues in the paper the author acknowledges]
One speculation I'd be fine to make would be that high IQ could be associated with survival bias, e.g. someone who is already quite adept at identifying patterns might be able to derive meaning from structures without requiring the motivation that compounds over time for others "less gifted". But I am happy to accept it's just a very convenient speculation.
Sure, Terence Tao might be a gifted unicorn with a special brain, he had of course the circumstance and means to have his potential thoroughly leveraged. Maybe someone "gifted" that is forced to memorize the quadratic formula to pass a test gets bored (but not gifted or motivated enough to complete the square on their own).
Edit: I agree with the rigor on "everyone" and "maths" (not everyone, not all maths), I hoped we had shared context on this basic assumption (which I expected to be a frivolous pedantism, I stand corrected nevertheless). I also appreciate the point about cruelty (which, in the schooling context, I believe goes beyond just our specific topic) but this textbox is too small to contain my wonderful argument.
This it total gibberish. No one cares about this sort of academic correction for observed outcomes. "Hmm some kids are continuously scoring better on math exams. Our pedagogy must be wrong! We must teach better." In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
I mean, we have good evidence that "New Math" pedagogical approach in the 70s was very ineffective compared to traditional learning by example, memorizing multiplication tables at younger ages. Would you say that is "gibberish" as well?
> In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
It's hard to take your argument seriously when your own sentence corroborates what I'm trying to convey.
That's interesting, but it seems to be focused on aggregate usage due to power generation. Does it account for data centers shifting to the use of evaporative cooling? Because (AFAIK) they aren't air cooling gigawatt class data centers.
That's also (again AFAIK) what causes the most concern among local residents in many locations. Separate from concerns about how a new neighbor might impact their electric bill in the future is the concern that drawing enough for a small city from the water table each day could prove detrimental in the long term.
Salt Lake City area is not particularly cold. It definitely gets hot in the summer, and snow in the valley melts within a day or so.
Looks like the cedar rapids site is also closed loop, with the full buildout being a hair over 1 gigawatt. Compared to salt lake city, colder in the winter, and a bit cooler in the summer but with very high humidity comparatively.
Free and open trade (creating the peace on the oceans that allows for flags of convenience), and the space and expectation for countries to resolve differences through dialogue and membership in international institutions.
Sometimes you just have a bad interviewer who is looking for something specific from you but isn't telling you. If you're experienced in these interviews, you catch the signs and adapt by asking questions to suss out which direction the interviewer wants to take it.
Sometimes your answer is plausible but the interviewer wants to see you justify it. Sometimes your answer is wrong but the interviewer wants to see if you can reason your way through it, and maybe come up with an alternative.
If you're junior/inexperienced, it's often hard to tell and it'll feel arbitrary/unfair, and unfortunately that's just how it goes. As a more senior/experienced candidate, you can often figure out which situation you're in by asking questions to feel out the interviewer and then try to pivot during the interview, though it still takes valuable minutes out of the interview that you could have otherwise spent showing your competence.
Tech related:
- PIX (Brazilian Payment method) as unfair to master/visa duopoly
- Last couple years the Brazilian Supreme Court has been involved in certain battles with X and other US companies (Elon Musk has been particularly involved)
Energy:
- Brazil tariffs US ethanol imports in 18% (while US does not)
Last week Flávio Bolsonaro (presidential incumbent for the end of year elections) visited Trump so it is certainly some interesting timing. His brother Eduardo has been living and lobbying in the US for more than a year now.
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