Brilliant curation of talks. Sampriti's point about waterways as the forgotten infrastructure hits hard becuase most coastal cities are paying billions for highway expansions while ignoring water corridors thatalready exist. I lived in a city where ferry routes got canceled for "low demand" but the adjacent highway added lanes that were instantly congested. The convergence of hydrofoils and autonomy could genuinely flip how we think about proximity to opportunity.
Thanks for using the term immigrant instead of using migrant.
FYI: I worked at Honeywell with a Russian immigrant who spoke good if slightly accented English. Every year he got a couple of patent checks at the engineering banquet. Admirable guy. I had a couple of Russians with terrible English in one of my C programming class. I asked the admirable guy what I could do to help them and his advice was "Don't do anything". He told me he worked as a mechanic when he first came to the US because that was a job he could do with poor English skills. After a couple of years, he spoke acceptable English and then went looking for an Engineering job. He didn't think there was a way around learning English before learning C. I've talked about making passing ESL level 3 or 4 a requirement to become an immigrant. If noting else, it would eliminate the problem of smart Chinese teaching assistants who can't communicate with their students.
Good one.
Brilliant curation of talks. Sampriti's point about waterways as the forgotten infrastructure hits hard becuase most coastal cities are paying billions for highway expansions while ignoring water corridors thatalready exist. I lived in a city where ferry routes got canceled for "low demand" but the adjacent highway added lanes that were instantly congested. The convergence of hydrofoils and autonomy could genuinely flip how we think about proximity to opportunity.
Nice work, Ben! Looking forward to reading more about these projects.
Thanks for using the term immigrant instead of using migrant.
FYI: I worked at Honeywell with a Russian immigrant who spoke good if slightly accented English. Every year he got a couple of patent checks at the engineering banquet. Admirable guy. I had a couple of Russians with terrible English in one of my C programming class. I asked the admirable guy what I could do to help them and his advice was "Don't do anything". He told me he worked as a mechanic when he first came to the US because that was a job he could do with poor English skills. After a couple of years, he spoke acceptable English and then went looking for an Engineering job. He didn't think there was a way around learning English before learning C. I've talked about making passing ESL level 3 or 4 a requirement to become an immigrant. If noting else, it would eliminate the problem of smart Chinese teaching assistants who can't communicate with their students.