Speed limits are originally designed to reduce risk, not "compensate" for it. You can tell this is true because the victims of crashes caused by speeders do not receive proceeds from speeding ticket fines.
And this is sensible. How do you compensate a family for a dead body? You can't. So the purpose of the law should be to prevent the need for that compensation in the first place.
Depending on how you count, between 10% and 40% of the US is employed by the govt either directly or by proxy.
I understand your sentiment, but the reality of just shedding a large fraction of those jobs is hard to even imagine. Unemployment in 2008-2009 peaked at around 10%.
Between income taxes, corporate taxes, sales tax etc. most people with jobs give up half the money they make to the government anyway, so that makes sense.
Counter counter point: SQL injections and buffer overflows now require nearly intentional effort to introduce into a codebase, whereas they used to be the default.
The question is: when we find a common class of vulnerability, what's the best way to deal with it?
We find SQLI regularly. We don't find buffer overflows very often! That bug class has been mitigated. It's better to eliminate bug classes, and memory safety is a good idea. But it's a good idea we've had in mainstream software engineering for coming up on 2 decades, and your default assumption about any piece of software should still be that it harbors grave vulnerabilities.
Harvard is optimizing for a different objective than retail investors or even smaller endowments. It can afford to take less risk and get less return.
Lots of small colleges with 100MM endowments using a passive strategy will fail to survive the next deep recession. They need those returns to survive, so they have no choice but to accept the associated risk. But one deep down market without an associated counter cyclical uptick in enrollment numbers and they are dead. Ask any small private college CFO and they'll agree.
On the other hand, the public markets could lose all their value and Harvard would still be able to cover its operating expenses.
Harvard's goal is to survive for centuries. The goal of a college with a 100MM endowment is to make payroll during the next few school years.
SWE isn't a BLS tracked occupation, it's a title which loosely corresponds to a higher paid segment within the Software Developer occupation; the median salary for Software Developers is $105,590, with a Bachelor's degree identified as BLS as the entry-level education.
There is no healthcare profession with the same or higher median salary that doesn't have at least as Master's degree as the entry-level education, and all healthcare occupations except Physician Assistants and Nurse Anesthetists/Midwives/Practitioners with the same or higher median salary actually have a doctoral or professional degree as the entry-level education.
There are no occupations in Business & Finance with equivalent or higher median pay. (Personal Financial Advisors, at $88,890, are the highest in that area.)
There are some engineering occupation with higher median pay, but only Aerospace, Computer Hardware, and Petroleum Engineers (Chemical gets close, at $104,910.)
So, no, there aren't lots of occupations in those three areas paid, on average, better than SWEs (or Software Developers).
There are a bunch of management occupations with higher pay, though, ironically enough, “Top Executives” is just a bit below Software Developers.
Properly designing incentive systems in a realm of pervasive externalities and nonobvious costs and benefits is difficult.
I'm not saying the market/cost approach is necessarily the best or appropriate. But it's an interesting thought experiment to work through it.
Sometimes imposing arbitrary requirements (e.g., "have an agenda") is a cheaper way of effecting the same ends. Though Goodhart's Law is another pitfall.
You can have multiple JVMs or JDKs installed, and therefore the need to change environment variables depending on your use cases, but I was referring to Java being part of the operating system in the same way that Python is part of some operating systems, for example several Linux distributions (Fedora, RHEL, and practically all derivatives).
Isn't it still just a package on Red Hat distros? A base system package, granted, because some system tools are written in Python.
But in any case, it just becomes one more version of Python to consider. If you're already dealing with multiple versions, what difference does it make?
It is "just a package" in the sense that there are RPMs for Python, but many system management tools are Python scripts that assume you have Python and specific Python libraries installed so that everything will run correctly.
There's no issue with using the system Python, but any Python packages should be installed via yum or similar Red Hat / Fedora tools and not pip.
Note that the newer versions of RHEL have created developer-specific tool packages to separate the system packages from developer packages. This allows the developer packages to get upgraded quickly so developers have nee, shiny tools without breaking the compatibility that the base system needs to keep running.
