gtmitchell

Good to hear, it seems UTOPIA has really turned a corner after a rough start. They expanded to my city recently and I have had no regrets about switching. No wonder Comcast / CenturyLink / etc are fighting so hard.

This isn’t particularly surprising to me. I’m a scientist, and in my field, women have outnumbered men in my undergraduate and graduate programs, and also in every lab I’ve worked in as a professional.

The hard sciences haven’t had the gender imbalance currently seen in engineering and tech jobs for decades now.

Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, since you typically have news sources that are either owned directly by the government or are published by political parties.

The vast majority of organizations in the US already use the metric system in places where the metric system makes sense. Basically everyone who wants to use it is already using it.

For everything else, what's the point in the government mandating it? There's no political desire for it because society in general doesn't care, and society doesn't care because the costs outweigh the benefits. There's no practical advantage to the average person to learn their height in meters instead of inches and feet, or to have to start shopping for hectograms of food when ounces work just fine.

Just more proof that bread and circus remains an effective strategy for politicians to win favor with the masses.

House prices in my area have quintupled since I moved here 13 years ago. A 20% drop would move house prices back to where they were perhaps 4 years ago. And now that interest rates are double what they were, housing affordability is as bad as its ever been.

As someone who has spent the last decade watching home ownership get farther and farther out of reach, it's really depressing. It really will never get any better than it was, and I'm fairly confident I've missed my chance at home ownership.

As a bright-eyed science undergraduate, I went to my first conference thinking how amazing it would be to have all these accomplished and intelligent people in my field all coming together to share their knowledge and make the world a better place.

And my expectations were exceeded by the first speaker. I couldn't wait for 3 full days of this! Then the second speaker got up, and spent his entire presentation telling why the first person was an idiot and totally wrong and his research was garbage because his was better. That's how I found out my field of study was broken into two warring factions, who spent the rest of the conference arguing with each other.

I left the conference somewhat disillusioned, having learned the important life lesson that just because you're a scientist doesn't mean you aren't also a human, with all the lovely human characteristics that entails. And compared to this fellow, the amount of money and fame at stake in my tiny field was miniscule. I can only imagine the kinds of egos you see at play among the scientists in this article.

Also, remember the survivorship bias inherent in surveys like this. They rarely capture the very large portion of graduate students who leave their program without a degree.

I was one of those, and it’s really difficult for me to look back and see anything positive in the experience. I’m sure if the opinions of dropouts were included, you’d get an even bleaker view of the value of going to graduate school.

Trying to get a PhD. I wasn’t a good student and I didn’t choose a good advisor. I spent the better pet of a decade trying to finish and failed. I ended up unemployed and divorced in large part because of that decision, and while my life is OK now, I can’t help but regret that little decision that lead to so much personal pain and suffering.

Wow, someone pulled off that synthesis? I'm impressed!

For those who are wondering if this has any practical applications, the answer is almost certainly no. At best, someone might look at the synthetic pathways used to produce perfluorocubane to attempt to make something similar. It has really unusual spectroscopic and physical properties, which is pretty cool, but mostly in the sense of being a curiosity rather than being something you can do something with.

Imagine this as being the chemistry version of someone managing to get Doom to run on an electric toothbrush or something. It's interesting and amusing to know it's possible, but you're never actually going to start using your Sonicare for gaming.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel anything but hopelessly depressed by the housing market.

My neighborhood consists of approximately 10% corporately owned rental homes purchased after the housing crash using money borrowed by said corporation for next to nothing.

These houses are now full of people such as myself who can’t afford to purchase homes, paying ever-increasing rents and never able to scrape together enough capital to buy anything of their own.

Sure looks to me like we’re reinventing feudalism, with serfs paying tribute to their investor lords.

Off the top of my head:

-Academic researchers are already overworked, underpaid, and undertrained. Asking them to spend even more of their time to meticulously upload all their notes and data to an electronic notebook is going to be an uphill battle.

-Academic scientists live or die by their ability to publish. Open data, especially if you're sharing in real time, makes you vulnerable to being scooped by competing researchers. Even disclosures of data after the fact make it easier for others to benefit from work you did with no benefit to the ones who collected the data. Given how cut-throat academics is, you're also not going to get many researchers on board with this idea.

-Interoperability of most laboratory software is poor. People have been trying to get laboratory instrument manufacturers to support open data standards for years with little success. They don't have any financial incentive to allow competitors to have easy access to their data.

Chemist here. Every few years, someone has the novel idea that we should have open data for all chemistry laboratories, so then we can do Better Science. And like every other proposal I've seen, this one will get approximately zero traction because it doesn't address any of the core issues behind why laboratory data is currently closed.

I try not to be too pessimistic about it, because it really would be great if there were more open chemical data. I just really doubt anything could accomplish that without remaking the US university research system from top to bottom.

6% core inflation with wage growth flat. And that doesn't even include housing prices, which went up 25% last year alone where I live.

Am I the only one feeling entirely hopeless about the prospects for my financial future? How does everyone else deal with this?

I made an upward lateral move at the same company because it gave me a 25% pay bump, plus the ability to work remotely. I was hoping that would allow me to finally be able to afford a house, but it still doesn’t seem like enough.

In 1987, I was typing BASIC programs I read from a book into a TI-99/4A attached to a television in my bedroom, and desperately wishing I had a cassette recorder peripheral so I could actually save anything. Having to retype in a game every time I wanted to play it was so tedious.

This article hits close to home. I was a very late-term dropout from a doctoral program in a hard science. I had neither the good sense to quit early on, nor the mental fortitude to complete my dissertation and ended up wasting years of my life in the process.

Among my many regrets, I wish there had been a professor who could have been honest with me about my ability to succeed as well as the consequences of failure. Unfortunately, by the very fact that they were professors, they had never experienced anything like the misery that I did.

I did miraculously salvage my science career, but any time I get the chance, I strongly discourage anyone from pursuing a graduate degree in my field.

I think at least part of it is desperation.

Home ownership has been one of the very few reliable ways for the middle class to build wealth, and with housing prices skyrocketing and the future looking even worse, I suspect many people are trying to get whatever they can before any chance they have of owning is gone forever.

This is my reality. I've lived here since right after the real estate crash and have seen house prices triple in a decade. I don't work in tech, and I don't have the flexibility to move because of family commitments. My rent keeps going up and I've watched my dreams of home ownership evaporate before my eyes.

I can't say for sure whether this boom has been good or bad on the whole, but I can say there are lots of people like myself who are excluded and are left wondering where we went wrong or what we could have done differently.

As a PhD dropout myself, I understand entirely the decision of these students to distance themselves from what were obviously negative experiences for them.

Unlike those listed in this article, I actually ended up staying in my field of study for work, but psychologically it has been very difficult. When I'm confronted with situations that reminded of what could have been if I had finished my degree, I sincerely wish I could find a new career like these people, so different from my current one that I could finally leave behind those feelings of failure and inadequacy that grad school left me with.

I regret deciding to major in a hard science instead of programming, as well as spending far too long in a PhD program before dropping out.

The personal and professional toll of these choices has been painful on the best days, soul-crushing on the worst.