> Make someone declare the value of their property. Then the government has the choice of taxing them at the scheduled rate, or buying the property from them, for that cost.
Isn't that what got Guatemala invaded back in the 1950s?
I had a similar memory of hearing this scheme in the context of a Latin American country. Industries were nationalized, and foreign corporate owners were compensated based on the tax assessed value of their businesses.
Sure, those are some good counterexamples: both sons of professional athletes. And there are plenty of others.
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself!
So my view is that people of both rich and poor upbringings have a good chance in the sports world these days, at least for those sports where the necessary gear is relatively cheap.
Perhaps I should have instead said "is that still happening at meaningful rates".
LeBron James is an interesting example. Per wiki:
> Realizing that her son would be better off in a more stable family environment, Gloria allowed him to move in with the family of Frank Walker, a local youth football coach who introduced James to basketball when he was nine years old.
and then later he went to a fancy private high school (whose wikipedia page has many notable alumni, all athletes).
So while "from poverty" may be technically accurate, I don't know if I'd count it given all his opportunities later in childhood.
Times have changed. Due to the rise of expensive youth travel club sports leagues I suspect we will see fewer poor children turn professional. There will always be a few outliers but if you don't have access to top coaching and extra competitive playing time prior to college then you're really at a disadvantage.
> "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.
When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT requirement at the time.
The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.
This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is not a new phenomenon.
Looking at Table 2 I wonder why Chinese and Korean are similar enough to go in one huge bucket (1.5M) but Japanese is distinct enough to get it's own tiny bucket (33K).
- land meats were all but banned in Japan for centuries prior to Perry's ultimatum, encouraging the development of alternatives in flavor and nutrition like natto and katsuobushi
- geographically, Japan had less access to land crops (even wheat was not common!) and more access to fish and seaweed than Korea
> "pumpkin"--that is "squash", so there are some localisation improvements which could be made to improve British and American English use
That's a much bigger issue than just wording differences. As an American, there's several different squashes in common use of which pumpkin is only one. (acorn, butternut, and spaghetti are the ones I'm thinking of; zucchini if you want to be pedantic).
Agreed. My comment was to highlight that if a recipe for a soup just says "1kg squash", that could mean anything from "Cucurbita maxima subsp. maxima var. Jarrahdale"[1] through to "Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo var. recticollis"[2], with vastly different outcomes for the soup.
The model under the hood should probably have ingredients as parts of a taxon, then have common names mapped (many:many) to these parts of taxons. Then it's necessary to have abstract classifications such as "pumpkin seed" which could be defined as the seed of multiple different taxons, which for some recipes, may not matter which one of 5 Cucurbita subspecies is used. That way if someone types "squash" or "pumpkin seed" they get asked to clarify what they mean, which will change quite a bit depending on locality of the person being asked.
It might sound like a waste, but at least they weren't finding ways to cram more ads into everything.
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