InefficientRed

Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.

If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it.

BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?

sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.

More helplessness.

My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well.

It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value.

BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds.

> Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.

Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world.

BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program?

You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.

I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.

So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.

Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.

Criminal harassment isn't a "don't like" thing. It's just a misdemeanor crime. Harassment people isn't "just free speech" even if it is speech. Graffiti isn't "just art" even if it's art. There has never been a time in the USA where you could systematically harass someone without committing a crime.

But okay. Suppose there were a cyber attack sufficient to trigger full scale nuclear war and which also didn't fully disable Russian's nuclear armament.

Do you really think that Russia would not launch nukes just because the US didn't publicly declare responsibility for the attack even though Russia knows the US is responsible? Because, to be clear, that was OP's assertion:

>> And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given. The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.

I judge middle school debate and this still has to be the most wildly insane geopolitical take I've heard in a long time.

You must be hot boxing some strong stuff... might be time to roll down the windows of that information bubble and get some fresh air ;)

Because by hiring masters degree interns you're not exactly scraping the cream off the top...

Masters degrees in Computer Science -- unless used as an immigration thing -- make no sense.

The make no sense for the research route -- in CS in the USA, you go straight to a (zero tuition + living wage stipend) PhD from undergraduate. No reason to pay for a master's degree.

The make no sense for the SWE route either.

Masters students are mostly in it for either a domestic degree or because they couldn't find a (good enough) job out of undergraduate.

Most departments know this and treat their MS program as a total cash cow.

LOL Jira has nothing on billing in 15 minute increments.

IME bullying -- actual bullying, not power contests or nasty office politics -- isn't even remotely normal in office settings.

> The true solution to getting bullied is to...

...ignore it if isn't serious or tell an adult if it is serious.

> fight back ferociously

Anything physical is de facto serious and should be dealt with via adults and not between children; at least in my bubble, physical violence between school-aged children is rare and taken very seriously. A bully physically harming other children would receive a serious punishment, the parents would be in the loop, and the school counselor would be heavily involved with that child for the remainder of the school year.

Anything systemic and sustained, or targeting immutable attributes, is also de facto serious.

It's possible that things are different in your social environments, but "bullying" as I understood it as a kid is no longer even remotely socially acceptable.

You see similar things in other crime-adjacent communities. E.g., I've known many taggers who support stiffer penalties for people who tag in national parks, deface uncontroversial monuments, etc but are afraid that those stiffer penalties might result in a crackdown on their own plainly criminal art installations.

Similar with petty theft. Lots of people will say stuff like "I love boosters they are taking care of the common man" while simultaneously going into fits of rage when their own property is stolen.

"I spend enough time around people who commit this crime that I can see how much damage this type of behavior can cause, but I also think my particular flavor of it is harmless."

> Personally I feel this is law is a great step forward to stop hate speech and other forms of severe harassment

I can't speak to Japan, but harassment is already a crime in all US states. Using a telecommunications device to harass often carries even stiffer penalties than just harassment.

All US states also have laws specifically about cyberbullying [1]. Although there have been successful challenges (e.g., in Colorado) most of these laws are almost certainly constitutional.

It's hard to form an opinion on this particular law without more details (about both the law and Japan's legal system), but the way it's described in the article is worrying. Publicly insulting someone can be a component of harassment, but on its own is clearly not harassment. There is a distinct difference between insulting someone in the course of a conversation and a sustained campaign against that person.

> but the thought that if you happen to “rage” on someone mid game and receive jail time for that scares me.

"Trolling" in gaming is like "tagging" in certain tagging-adjacent communities. In both cases the crimes (vandalism, criminal harassment) have become so normalized that membes of the community reframe plainly criminal behavior as positives -- "free speech" and "art" respectively.

Criminal behavior has become completely normalized among certain pockets of heavy internet users, most of which are heavily adjacent to gaming.

I'm not talking about being rude or divisive on a forum. I'm talking about things like death threats, doxxing, brigading non-public-figures, messaging people on all social media channels from dozens of obvious sock puppet accounts and continuing for months after being asked to stop (happened to a local teacher after appearing on a 3 minute news segment), etc.

A lot of what passes for "just trolling" among heavily online individuals -- gaming-adjacent communities in particular -- is in fact textbook criminal behavior. A lot of the behavior during Gamergate, for example, should've resulted in restraining orders, fines, and jail time.

[1] https://www.stopbullying.gov/resources/laws

> To be honest, I’ve always felt like our CS course was inferior.

Let me put your mind at ease.

The difference in rigor of CS programs is fairly insane, even just in the USA. Flagship state universities and elite private universities all have rigorous curricula. Beyond that, caveat emptor. Small colleges and branch campuses of state universities are the worst in terms of variability -- some excellent, some truly terrible.

I mostly blame the fact that industry pays well and universities pay horribly. This is, again, worst at small colleges where they want to pay all faculty the same. $80K will buy you world-class philosophers/theologians/psychologists, but you simply cannot get good CS PhDs for less than $90K/year. This was true even before the current run of inflation. The floor for a half-decent CS hire these days is probably closer to $100K.

The good news is that graduates of lower-quality programs go on to have successful careers and make good money. If you are content not being in the top decile of earners in your field, the education provided by most of these schools will serve you fine.

The bad news is that those graduates really do have serious deficits that are obvious upon cursory evaluation, so breaking into the most interesting and highest paying positions can be difficult.

The good news about the bad news is that, if you know that you have big CS gaps relative to the top decile of your competition, you can adjust your strategy and still come out ahead.

My advice, if you are from one of these lower-quality institutions, is to choose one of two paths. One path is to go deep in a particular technical area through either self study or graduate school. The other path is to differentiate yourself by developing valuable non-technical skills -- communication, understanding the business, building relationships, etc.

(And before anyone accuses me of elitism: I attended a low-quality CS program.)

The eF150 gives you a couple days. The Prius is a better solution if you really need backup power.

Toyota explained that the system supports supplying power from hybrid electric vehicles

Presumably, this means you have a short, medium, and long option for emergency power:

- short: the battery

- medium: the battery + your car's battery

- long: use your ($25K) Prius as a gas generator to power your home for as long as necessary.

This seems like a more versatile setup than the e F150 at least for my use cases (rural WV -- power might be out for long periods but I can always get gas). It'll be interesting to see the price range of course, but this could be a good "mostly battery + gas if needed" backup option to compete with the diesel generator situation now. And of course the eF150 isn't really a good backup power (or transportation!) option in my case.

The eF150 generator use case always seemed like suburban prepper fantasy bullshit. The actual use case is for running power tools on site.

Prices were also high. Time will tell.

80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas [1] and the average school commute distance for high schoolers is (or, was, can't find a recent number) 6 miles [2].

FWIW, I lived a little under 5 miles from school in a non-bike-friendly suburb and managed to transport myself to and from school just fine without a car. We had 100 degree days in the summer, but we also had... summer break. Maybe one hot week in August, but nothing I would call dangerous.

The "20 miles down a county road" scenario is an outlier. If that is representative of your community, then the school policies of your community (including start time) should reflect that reality. The 80+% rest of us are having a different conversation about a different place. No reason to get angry about it.

> city dwellers

Far more Americans live in metro areas than in nonmetro rural areas.

> childless

The vast majority of American children do not live in rural areas. Rural areas are, on average, old and managing to get older.

> think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.

The California law requires a start time no earlier than 8:30am, which is already several hours later than 10:30.

When I was in high school our start time was 7am or something like that, but there were "negative hours" so you could show up as early as 6am. There was cold breakfast in the cafeteria with a staff member present, or you could go to some classrooms for tutoring (I think one per core subject). Hazy on the exacty details -- it was a long time ago -- but I do remember the doors were unlocked 1 hour before classes started and you could either hang out or get tutoring.

Starting -1 hour at 7:30am gives a parent 1.5 hours to commute from school to their job by 9am.

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[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...

[2] https://nhts.ornl.gov/briefs/Travel%20To%20School.pdf

Assuming you can get a gross offer that matches net, having the money in post-tax accounts is better because the tax rate on the 401K at withdrawal will likely be higher than the 15% capital gains rate.

I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.

> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.

Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.

Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.