> If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.
Isn't this how a lot of machine shops operate, or how things operate internally in larger manufacturing factories? Customer/person-from-different-team comes in and explains what they want to do. Maybe they have some sketches or pictures of similar parts. Then there is back and forth with the CAD guy to build the thing.
One critical difference is that the CAD guy is usually smart and you have to explain to them things at a more high level, along with some written down hard numbers that need to be obeyed.
> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world
For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.
I would like to use finance tracking products like GNUCash. But I don't have the patience to download the csv for half a dozen accounts every month (Products like plaid are a no go from a basic security perspective). I am in Canada, and there seems to be no hope that I will have API access to my bank accounts anytime soon.
Also, did I mention how much it annoys me that the transaction description differs between the CSV and the PDF statement for pretty much all banks I use.
Well, there is legislation before Committee to mandate open APIs that any accredited institution can use. As a consumer you will not be eligible, but you will be allowed to pay some third-party to pull your data from your bank and save it in their database, after which maybe they might allow you to download it in their proprietary format should they choose.
Me, I use plain-text accounting (hledger) that automatically imports the CSVs from my bank and categorizes transactions automatically, and I wrote some quick scripts using Python to import the PDFs from my brokerages and paystubs. It's not automated pulls but I only have a handful of accounts so it's really not a pain to manually pull statements once a month and run the import scripts. It takes me longer to reconcile everything to the penny then it does to do the imports, and it's a whale of a lot faster than manually entering through GNUCash. Plus, it's plain text so all you need is vim, git, and the command line.
The openbanking thing has been going on for 4-5 years now, with no end in sight. The banks simply do not want to enable a system which allows third party apps to step into the space, and they are too large and lobby a lot. I don't expect anything to happen for a while still.
Import-only is the lazy way. :) If you want, GnuCash also has features to support manually entering each transaction as it occurs.
Then GnuCash has features to match up financial institutions data exports against your transaction splits, see the discrepancies, and then reconcile against their PDF statements.
It's a way of life, but you always know what money you have, where. Although that sounds like something for wealthy people, I'd say it's actually more important the less money you have.
When I was a poor student, I carried around a small notepad in my pocket and a pencil and wrote down every transaction. Only way I ensured discipline to not waste money and then go hungry later.
But now I am ruined by smartphones, which are way too slow to type in every transaction manually.
There needs to be a lot of investment in training and safe defaults though. Most people are not ready to automate even a little of their banking like that.
I would even prefer banks had the option to push data to trusted feeds than having open APIs you could call on your own.
Yup or restrict API usage to trusted providers. In Brazil, we have a system called Open Finance [1] which allows you to connect bank account, so you can see investments, money spent, credit card spending and limit, etc. from your other bank accounts. Some local personal finance systems integrate into Open Finance to pull all of this data for you.
I'm using self-hosted Sure.am and also using SimpleFin to connect to Canadian banks. It works, but barely, since it effectively scrapes with no real API access. I have to login daily to update 2-FA on various accounts, and have suffered account lockouts a couple of times, due to "suspicious activity".
But it still beats downloading multiple exports from the bank and importing it manually...
Forget children. I regularly coerce adults - junior members of my team - to learn properly things they don't care to learn too much. Both for the benefit of the organization (society in the case of children) and for their own benefit.
I will bet that the number of adults who ever engage in coloring or painting as adults is extremely small. Probably less than the number of full time scientists, engineers, finance professionals etc. Yet no one complains that we are forcing students to do art in school, even when many students don't particularly like doing art. Why? Because we recognize that developing general artistic ability in humans is important, so we need art classes.
The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.
Math is a tool for solving problems, and people will do work to create value that they will share with you for helping them solve a problem which will ultimately create even more value.
In short, math is a powerhouse tool for carrying society forward.
Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
In short, starving artists.
There is also the whole thing where art is an abstract concept with a subjective definition, and a solar cell sporting new tech with 33% efficiency objectively being better than one with 24% efficiency.
I cannot support such thinking. Art is foundational to human experience. People crave that their free time is filled with good food, good music, good books, good movies and shows in beautiful houses with beautiful gardens. All of these are various forms of art.
There were humans for tens of thousands of years before there was high technology. But there were hardly any humans around before there was art.
> Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
Idk, the soviets didn't invest in socialist realism propaganda for nothing.
Less sarcastically, art has had an outsized influence on society and culture. Take any social movement you want, and there was probably some novel or work of art that galvanized it.
Firstly, measuring art in $ terms ignores the benefits that extend way beyond $ terms. Most fine art produced has a value approaching 0. My wife and I buy art from time to time, but we've never spent more than about $100 or so, yet get disproportionate pleasure from it.
As a first order approximation the "price" of art (as distinct from its value) is a function of branding not asthetics.
Secondly most artists get paid, not from doing fine art, but from adjacent careers that require good color, balance, composition, and so on. Industrial designers (think Jonny Ive), interior design, food presentation, magazine layout, web design, architecture and so on. Art skills are all around us. In the same way engineering is around us.
Put another way, engineers build ugly (think beige PC boxes). It took an artist to give us the iMac. And it was a marketing genius (yet another important skillset) to bring the artist and engineer together.
Teaching math goes far beyond creating mathematicians. Teaching art goes far beyond teaching artists. Societies that drop art because it is unproductive get ugliness permeating everywhere.
I'm not sure i agree witb the ratio. I think its much more lopsided. E.g. 100,000 artists in, one trillion dollar work of art out. (I'm counting indirect value. e.g. All the people who read Dune or a silent spring and become environmentalists as a result should have their value attributed to that work of art)
Also i'd point out the selection bias of not counting people who fail out of engineering school but still counting every unsuccessful artist.
I have this inner model of something i call "the rock star economics": many people want to do music but only one becomes a rock star and makes serious money. But he gets so much attention that many more people want to become rock stars.
Applies to art, fashion, media.
Most practical (including engineering) successes are much less externally attractive but do make decent money for everybody involved.
I know this is going to seem reductive, but especially with young children we teach art due to the value it gives them as individuals developing. Not for the GDP or individual fiscal benefit.
Further, judging the value of art to society by how much it costs is ridiculous and an asinine comparison.
Art class as part of public education is not completely uncontrovertial.
It grew out of a time where basic artistic skills were expensive to learn, and could be a real class differentiator (and had some employment benefits).
That's now a fair bit less true; but still continues to prevent these things becoming the sole domain of private schools.
There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.
A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.
Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.
The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.
The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.
Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.
I haven't read up on all the assumptions made for those projections. If something unassumed pops up that makes things substantially worse then the population peak would come earlier I guess. But that's a gamble.
For a more down to earth example, my graduate school student union also only negotiated the floor of pay and benefits. The compensation for graduate students varied easily by 50% over this floor, even students in the same department.
?? add relevant wifi/port to connect to a projector/projection glasses / laser projector[0]
3 old micro ibm hard drives combined into rgb color space / diy laser image projector[1] might be able provide a bigger picture without exceeding DIY credit card size. kinda depends on laser size.
Ummm... a smartphone internal projector module more compact than diy stack of ibm microdrives / laser.[2]
As I understand it, these cards work basically the same way as transit card systems in other countries, like the SF Bay Area's "Clipper" cards.
The overall model is similar to tap-to-pay debit cards. They're only used for consumer-to-business payments. When you tap the card, the card sends over an account number / signature / etc, which the merchant sends to a central clearinghouse to finalize the transactions.
The main difference is that the card itself keeps a running balance of how much money the customer has available to spend. In many cases, this gives the merchant enough confidence to e.g. let you through the train turnstile without actually waiting for the central clearinghouse to confirm the transaction. (I think in practice they usually send all the transactions in batches, daily or weekly or something.)
The readers do some trusted-computing/secure-enclave type stuff but are not especially hard to obtain; I think there have even been cases where companies like Nintendo have built them into consumer products, so that you could e.g. tap your card to your Nintendo 3DS to buy a video game.
I imagine there's a bit more security on the machines that let you load money on the cards, but it's probably not completely impossible to make a fake card. But the low value limit (usually a couple hundred dollars, depending on the card provider), the inability to get cash out of the system (often you can't even buy things like postage stamps), and the fact that you'll get caught relatively quickly (once the central clearinghouse notices the transactions don't match up) make it unattractive to do it in practice.
Isn't this how a lot of machine shops operate, or how things operate internally in larger manufacturing factories? Customer/person-from-different-team comes in and explains what they want to do. Maybe they have some sketches or pictures of similar parts. Then there is back and forth with the CAD guy to build the thing.
One critical difference is that the CAD guy is usually smart and you have to explain to them things at a more high level, along with some written down hard numbers that need to be obeyed.
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