Having more experience as a businessman with very little gaming depth, I find it even more absurd.
3,337 karma · joined May 2, 2016
>What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Good questions, I don't have many answers since I'm only one of the above, certainly not an Ivy League PhD :)
So I'll respond with a short response to your prompt, using only the natural intelligence this senior citizen has remaining .
>graduated summa cum laude from Rice University and enrolled at Princeton for his Ph.D. in 2018. His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024.
>he aimed to work in science roles at pharmaceutical companies.
This shows a certain kind of kind of ambition and brilliant capabilities. I would think if he had stayed in Houston in 2018 and went straight to work at an oil company or chemical company he would done a lot better by now. Then with a company helping pay for the advanced degree, they will already be more invested in your progress after that.
I almost took this route myself when I was right out of school, my first employer was fairly ideal as a research company that had some money-making chemicals (including a pharmaceutical I didn't know about until I got the job), however it was the only chemical place at all in the college town, founded by one of my professors 20 years earlier. That's just about the opposite of how it is in a truly industrial location.
>The response to numerous applications was mostly silence, with a few rejections.
For me it was from applying at non-chemical outfits so I could potentially survive the Nixon recession and remain in the college town to regroup and see about further degree pursuit.
I'm not up-to-date but I would think that staying in Salt Lake would also limit the job possibilities for pharmaceuticals compared to places like New Jersey. All things being equal a local candidate can often be preferred precisely because the screening process takes so long, by the time they get close to selecting the winner, the need to get to work immediately rules out any further delays. Job goes to the one that can start the next Monday without involving any personal "logistics", and who can put the nose to the grindstone uninterrupted immediately without distractions, making up for time lost when the position was unfilled.
>Weis studied chemical principles and molecular interactions,
I did that, it was a very worthwhile stepping stone, no doubt about it, I also accepted a destiny to thrive or not based on my own technology. I'm a chemist, not an engineer though.
When an opening came up at my local target chemical employer, the competition was so overwhelming in number I didn't stand a chance. This felt about the same point in the recession as it is now. I began to realize I needed to start looking in another state, so that was going to be after my fiancee graduated if we could survive that long.
No such thing as on-line screening yet, and phone screening had become out-of-the-question, with hundreds of applicants, employers never had any more time for that, especially for jobs where the application form is what you need, not so much a resume. Fax machines were not even out yet.
So you applied in person and it was personal screening from that point forward. During normal times an open position would draw a few applicants a week, and it could always take a long time for a candidate to get hired whether the employer was seeking some uncommon previous experience or not.
The problem was, there were now hundreds of applicants per day for jobs of any kind, and it was getting worse.
The real break came when I was applying for miscellaneous local jobs (hope was still declining across the country), one time at a lumber company. I didn't think my chances were too good after I talked to some of the other applicants, a number who had at least a few years somewhat related experience when I had not much.
But I was already wearing a tie so I stopped by the old chemical plant when there wasn't an opening and the Personnel lady[0] liked me and pulled my original application to review. I toured the plant and labs with the actual hiring PhD, and within a week they made me a part-time job 4 days a week Tue-Fri. I tried my hardest to kick butt in a visible way and within 6 months some of the other workers started to say "to themselves", "why doesn't he have to work on Monday?". So that's how I got the first full-time job in my field :)
Things were still not ideal concerning pay and (chemical) toxicity, and after I became a more experienced candidate I went for "greener" pastures, some of which were uniquely toxic in their own ways :\
There was a real big difference once I got to an actual major industrial environment. There are more diverse opportunities, but more normal in the sense that the majors have money-making chemicals first & foremost usually based on natural resources more so than technology, then their research is also massive in scale afterward, when they simply need it more and can afford it better. Realistically, though the number of opportunities are far more abundant, I would still say the biggies fund far less experimentation than the amount they could actually afford. Which turned out to be where I found my niche and eventually started my own research company, with somewhat deeper theoretical background for the most part after more than a decade of more intense experimentation, and leaning much more on ambition to make up for the lack of advanced degree. By now it's been a few more decades of further advances.
>Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics.
I know a little but sure don't think I could pull my weight doing that compared to a decent engineer. However I still feel confident I could turn him into a money-making lab worker right quick, no engineering required. Just like I did the last time the employer I had hired a ChemE PhD for me to train.
For this person in particular having circuit boards on the bench without being under an employer's direction, that is one thing most ChemE's don't do. I think a good one-word piece of advice might be "electrochemistry", and would consider focusing on networking with as many of those in every level and position in the battery technology landscape. I would play the odds that there's more employers who don't have "any" open positions (compared to those that do where odds are in your favor) and focus on the former (after already experiencing so much of the latter) so that when something does come up you might have a better chance.
[0] The "HR" designation for the established Personnel Office at corporations was still in the coining process. With the unprecedented amount of meat they now had to draw from, it could then be recognized as more of a "resource" to be exploited, and huge compared to the personnel they still had working after the widespread cutbacks. A great deal of rebalancing took place between the effect these external untapped resources have versus the internal human resources, especially with regard to pay & benefits. Once it got underway it did kind of snowball in a lot of areas. For instance you could start a salt mine based on a natural resource, but eventually once you had thousands of employees and for some reason growth has stalled, quarterly figures can still be goosed toward increase by extracting more from human resources along with the same old salt. It's all just salt of the Earth to some people when you think about it ;)
And cops do sometimes want a higher performance police cruiser than average in case a runaway speeder needs to be apprehended.
Probably going to eventually need an autonomous one of these for some police departments:
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2026/09/california-highway-patr...
No driver needed but you still need to have a Robocop inside to get out and write the citation :)
In the old days this kind of thing was often referred to as a "police interceptor".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8-1SYvDTI
If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)
After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.
And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0
But the company itself should be given a citation for the majority of ordinary traffic violations, and should be the one fined.
Also the further back you go into the 19th century, the more likely it is that the potentiating invention would be completely unrelated to nuclear chemistry.
Regardless, that same potentiating invention (whatever it is) is surely responsible by now for a whole lot more things other than nuclear science.
Not very close to that yet really, it has nothing more to do with Medical School than the College of Law does.
If I'm not mistaken, every dental school might not have been on board as long as others, but it was well into the 20th century that dental associations did not yet accept the "theory" that germs can be a cause of tooth problems.
OTOH once in the hands of some private equity funds, they can pretty much do that to one of their properties whenever they feel like it, or even decide to take the whole PE group public if they get a wild hair.
All it takes is a little paperwork for them (the kind they are much more self-interested in compared to most decent medical professionals) perhaps including some bank notes.
I had one that was staying horizontal, not emerging, and that might have been the only one that was pushing my other teeth closer together to where it was getting difficult to floss.
I don't have such a wide jaw either and it was a godsend that the oral surgeon was a highly dedicated South Asian having narrow palms and longer fingers than so many others, because the horizontal tooth had to be removed surgically.
Me too, had to wait until the 1960's.
The marketing push was really effective, even on black & white TV.
The originals were so powerful that it would rarely leave anything more than floss would leave behind.
I can only imagine the water jet on new units over the decades got so much weaker maybe because somebody did some accidental eye damage or something.
What I like to do once a week is to use it with hot water, not too hot but about like hot coffee or tea which I do not drink.
I believe there are many types of germs that are highly adapted to thrive at your normal body temperature, and do not survive at temperatures too many degrees away from that.
This seems really good for the gums too not just between the teeth, and the modern offerings basically massage the gums when you pound them with the water jet, the old units would have been too painful for that.
Also on a deep minor toothache just getting started, which feels like it is way down between the root & bone, I have sprayed the tooth directly long enough to heat up the whole tooth which seems to work
If all recommended treatments have been tried with no success, the real solution will have to be something that is not recommended.
With all other things held constant, in such a case the non-recommended approach would have best been the first and only treatment deployed.
That's part of the problem. By the time the fully analog original equipment needed replacement, the only commercial replacements available already had been built for network access for quite a number of years while none of the purchasing people were keeping up-to-date with it.
Even the less-massive models are so expensive that the vendors can't fail to include the latest technology whether anybody is using it yet or not, because future. These things don't fly off the shelf very often either and lots of analog leaders "just" used temporary consultants to bolt on some networking without ever gaining any unwanted digital headaches and accompanying expertise.
Along with the routers of the 1990's, inexperienced users were supposed to be able to just connect it and have it work.
Lots of them never connected it to the web or any other network, or maybe years later when there should have been orders of magnitude more security considerations they finally plugged in a long enough ethernet cable and it just worked as they always expected it to once the future got here.
It hasn't been that many decades, conventional (lack of) wisdom is it certainly shouldn't take more effort to install than an analog unit would have required.
That was expensive enough.
Whatever degree AI is adopted by their company or not.
You could substitute a laptop computer for a copy machine, as an example of another electronic hardware/software purpose-built assembly, and lots of the same things will naturally apply, even if the nominal use of the laptop never includes any need to open it up for routine electronic service for the lifetime of the device.
IOW even if the only thing anybody "services" is the software.
Lots of people would also agree that the ideal in either case would be no routine service needed at all, not even the software. For the lifetime of the device, of course.
It doesn't take that much additional abstraction to relate how so many companies should really reckon with the possibility that people having great experience on the front line also often have just plain natural leadership ability. Even if it has been untapped it could still amount to more sound decision-making, compared to executives in the same company having less of both.
Even if there is not some star performer on the front line who would make any executive seem dumb by comparison, the combined experience and leadership abilities of all those front-line people are still sometimes going to put the combined executives to shame if given the chance.
Hence why they are not usually given the chance.
Among those however there are quite a few that specifically address situations where the machine laughs, or at least smiles, whether at the humans or with them, either intentionally or unexpectedly. Sometimes to themselves ;)
This covers a lot of ground, and maybe it's no coincidence but watching some old sci-fi movies these days it comes up a lot more than I expected and is quite nuanced. With so many different people of the past framing it within their own diverse perspectives at the time. Or beyond their perspectives as the case may be. You could look at one of these every day for a year and it would really give you something to think about.
Even if it was the second time around.
There was a comic book I remember as a child which didn't come out very often where every robot had a number but the real problem machine was H-8:
https://valiant.fandom.com/wiki/H8_(Gold_Key)
This is so bad I probably shouldn't give people ideas but here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus%2C_Robot_Fighter
They didn't call them bots, they were "robs" and they were everywhere, especially the "pol-robs" who were the mechanical police. Decades later to be somewhat resurrected solo as Robocop in the movies.
I guess it all makes sense after you think about it for enough decades, the bots lurk within the digital realm, and the robs carry out the physical deeds.
Not without digging into the changelog where it does looks like there are positive signs.
Still wouldn't know how to download a Windows version using a Linux PC, or if the Windows platform is actually available yet or not.
Don't think I'll ever be able to get even as far as the image of a globe without reducing browser security & privacy.
IOW the website acts like it's just another complete dud.
While radio.garden works just fine at the same exact browser settings.
But actually my washer does respond to to load levels that it senses, then fills with different amounts of water accordingly.
And then like an unruly robot, it sometimes becomes unbalanced and "ambles" across the floor unexpectedly when it's supposed to be a completely stationary automaton.
You don't really know if you're going to wake up from it, but I seem to remember visions of what the offterlife holds, and it is heavenly with that deep sense of salvation so many people have been longing for more than ever.
Still can't quite figure out where I was at the end of the tunnel but it was like a fleeting glimpse of paradise.
It all seemed so real.
It's all like a dream now and I don't make a big deal about it, people wouldn't believe it anyway, but I no longer have the same fear of the end times that still haunts so many :)
That's actually too predatory for a free country right there, without going any further. Which is Flock's problem, independent cameras have been around for decades, and often in public, without the general public resisting their ubiquity.
Everything else rolls downhill from there. Who knows what different parties would do with the data? That's a whole 'nother can of worms.
So the cameras themselves are not the most un-American component, it's the network and the way it's handled that makes so many people feel like preserving what remaining privacy there is means more to them than tracking every single person's movements all the time everywhere.
All kinds of people have instinctively recognized that a total surveillance system is like a lot of other things, the system itself needs to be more predatory by nature than the "less-organized" scofflaws and actual criminal predators who are the targets, in order gain overwhelming odds on capturing them all. Like the old saying goes it takes a thief to catch a thief.
IOW when you treat everybody as guilty until proven innocent, you get a lot more criminals that way.
But that's just not the American way, so patriotic Americans balk.
Piece of cake really, compared to getting lucky trying to lower taxes.
not my downvote btw
For one thing, in the 1970's lots of true "baby boomers" were still too young to vote.
Maybe what you mean is old folks in general, they were the ones in California who were desperate enough to support the proposition which might be able to save their homes.
They should know, lots of them had been through The Great Depression, and were so much older than boomers they could be their grandparents, well they actually were if you do the math.
And they did the math, getting by just by the skin of their teeth while those just a little bit older who had been on a fixed income earlier had already been taxed out beyond recovery before the proposition.
They already ate the pain, I guess it's difficult to remember how up-front it was if you never spent that many years among Depression survivors.
Nobody ever wanted a depression again, and losing your home through no fault of your own was one of the most visible outcomes that ordinary people could do something about before it got out of hand.
This was supposed to be big, and it is bigger than ever, this is by design.
The problem comes from trying to work against it when the entire economic system surrounding "real estate" was supposed to evolve by now to where nobody pays more tax by now than the most proposition-protected properties.
The idea was for it not to end up making any difference as the years went by, nothing could be more fair than that.
The pearl-clutching comes from the failure of following generations to evolve away from taxing properties or wealth, with all levies eventually falling exclusively onto commerce instead so that only those who are actively making big transactions at the time are logically expected to be able to afford anything at all at the time.
Otherwise things are going to stay as medieval as they can, and the torture will continue until the attitude improves.