"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill
> In 1992, Ellison shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. After receiving treatment at University of California, Davis, Ellison donated $5 million to seed the Lawrence J. Ellison Musculo-Skeletal Research Center.
> In 1998, the Lawrence J. Ellison Ambulatory Care Center opened on the Sacramento campus of the UC Davis Medical Center
> In 2007, Ellison pledged $500,000 to fortify a community centre in Sderot, Israel, against rocket attacks
> In 2014, he donated $10 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
> In 2017, he donated $16.6 million donation to support the construction of well-being facilities on a new campus for co-ed conscripts
> In May 2016, Ellison donated $200 million to the University of Southern California to establish a cancer research center: the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC
> Between 2021 and 2023, Ellison invested $130 million in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and has pledged a further $218 million since then
Note that I made that claim in 2011. I had tried to research this a bit for the brief period of time that I was at Oracle, and really couldn't find anything (other than the Ellison Medical Foundation). That said, I think my essential assertion stands: given his wealth, Ellison's philanthropic work is de minimis.
Nobody claimed otherwise. The claim was that he gave money to nothing except his own life extension fund. And you agree that he's given money to other things.
Would you consider a “charity” for Nazis or for an org that has killed and maimed tens upon tens of thousands of children to be a good thing or even charity?
The listed criteria for what they evaluate is not what the issue is. Did you check Charity Navigator? An org that focuses on abusing kittens will be evaluated as good by them as long as its governance is by the books.
Wikipedia regardless is not something that should be cited directly when it comes to anything remotely political.
It is always enlightening when people criticizing "virtue signaling" accidentally reveal that the problem they have is not the signaling, it's the having virtue.
There was a time when one of the virtues was not to brag about how virtuous you were. I think that's why a lot of folks have a problem with virtue signalling. In their minds if you're signalling by doing something publicly it karmically negates what you're doing and almost alchemically turns it into something resembling vice.
I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.
This comment feels like it was made outside the context of the existing conversation. The comment I replied to was calling all charity virtue signaling and not just vocal giving.
But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.
Society providing incentives for rich people to give money to charitable causes is good actually. An evil person doing good things for selfish reasons is still doing good things.
The real problem comes when you look up what charity actually does with the money.
It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.
It's not virtue signally if you're tangible helping people. Like if I give away food, maybe I have the intent of signalling something, but I'm also giving away food. That actually happened.
The world would be a much better place if rich people virtue signalled much more and thereby donated more.
I concur. This was my main experience with WSL1 vs. WSL2.
If I'm running Windows, it means that the files and projects that I care about are on the Windows file system. And they need to be there, because my IDE and other GUI apps needs files to be on a real file system to work optimally. (A network share to a WSL2 file system would not let the IDE watch for changes, for instance.)
WSL1 was a great way to get a UNIX-style command line, with git, bash, latex etc., for the Windows file system. WSL2 was just too slow for this purpose; commands like "git status" would take multiple seconds on a large codebase.
Now I switched back to MacOS, and the proper UNIX terminal is a great advantage.
I suspect the non-standard JSON license was in part a strategy to encourage third-party implementations, so that the format would become a standard.
(W3C standards, for example, require "multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path". https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ )
This is slowly happening for various types of plastic. We have discovered some PLA-eating bacteria in Asian forests (PLA is "biodegradable", but usually not meaningfully at room temperature), PET-eating bacteria in the ocean, and apparently some bacteria that can degrade polystyrene and polyethylene
But each of them only works in certain environments. Just like wood is very biodegradable, but if you keep it dry you can build wooden structures that last centuries
Keep it dry or keep it wet. It's the alternating condition that makes wood desintegrate because then bacteria have both food, themselves and water to work with.
The wooden posts under buildings in Amsterdam famously stood for centuries, until the water table was changed a few times in a row and then rot set in.
Indeed, if it is just saturated in an oxygen poor environment it will last for a very long time. As soon as you expose it to air it starts to rot, and pretty quickly too. This effect is compounded by the mechanical effects of repeatedly shrinking due to drying out and then re-absorbing water again until the wood is saturated.
More than you probably ever wanted to know about this subject:
Lots of houses and other historical buildings in Amsterdam are having their foundation supporting piles replaced. This is a very challenging operation and highly specialized gear has been built to do the job, and with a minimum of vibration to reduce the chance of damage to the structure. They're called 'schroefinjectiepalen' in dutch (too many letters for Scrabble).
The essential piece of kit is a tiny pile driver that gets lifted into the basement of a building and that then pushes hollow steel shells into the soil until resistance. Each shell is threaded, much like drilling rig piles from oil drilling, only much shorter, typically 1 to 2 meters in length. When the required resistance is met the shells are filled with grout, so you end up with an inside-out reinforced concrete post that once it has cured can be load bearing. There are also versions where the grout escapes the post and forms a shell around it and there are versions where there is more armoring inserted into the steel tube.
Edit: finally found a good English language article:
> They're called 'schroefinjectiepalen' in dutch (too many letters for Scrabble).
I was about to comment that you could form it in multiple steps, but turns out, I forgot about the size limitation of the scrabble board/how many of each letter.
Either way, that's some neat tech. Specialized machines for such "obscure" usages are pretty interesting. Partially because you just never even think about those existing until you hear of em.
It's a very interesting subject. At first the judgement was 'it can't be done' and then some enterprising company came up with a very creative solution.
And for me, I hadn't even thought of that being a problem, or wood being used for foundations, or... and so on.
Just, so many chains of logic I probably will never even think about that lead to such neat tech which would be interesting to me. Makes one wonder what else there is.
> One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic.
The problem is that day may be millions of years away. It allegedly took nature several million years to evolve bacteria that can digest lignin and cellulose, allowing old fallen wood to decompose in the forest. Coal deposits are from an era when such bacteria were not present.
Even if we had such bacteria, they would only be able to digest plastic under certain conditions. Overall, plastic pollution is here to stay for a very long time.
Humans have indirectly accelerated the rate of evolution (or natural selection if you will), so I doubt it'd take millions of years. Entire ecosystems have changed more in the millennium of modern human activity than many millions of years before that. What makes evolution slow isn't so much evolution itself but the pressures of the environment; drastic, sudden environmental changes spur rapid evolution.
Non sequitur and false. The US constitution only guarantees that the government won't ban your speech. Non-government entities are allowed to ban speech.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
Afterwards, they ship the entire engine, with turkey giblets and all, to a lab where the resulting damage is analyzed. Smells awful, according to the engineer I sat next to at a Thanksgiving dinner once...
In Norway, the card terminals usually go into an "accept with signature" mode if they are temporarily offline. So they print a receipt that the customer has to sign. (This is for BankAxept debit cards, which are standard in Norway.)
In a grocery store line once, I remember a distraught customer whose card was declined due to insufficient funds. The store manager came over, yanked the ethernet cable from the payment terminal, and told the customer to try again. "Accepted with signature."
(Or at least AI-assisted to the point where the author feels like they should mention it.)