throwawayjava

Of all the women I've dated, only 1 said she noticed me (either way) before first developing a reasonably close friendship.

For the big middle, personality has a huge effect on perception. See e.g. https://psychcentral.com/news/2007/11/30/personality-influen...

> why won't you care about your physical appearance? Why leave something that important on the table?

Well, certainly don't be a slob. And not just because of dating! Dressing poorly and appearing unkept effects other parts of life too (e.g. career). Also, exercise is important for all sorts of reasons aside from attractiveness.

But other than being generally healthy and well-kept, I don't focus on my appearance because grooming is boring. Why spend your time grooming beyond a level of general acceptability when you could learn to play an instrument, learn a new language, read a book, or go for a hike?

If all you focus on is appearances, don't be surprised when the only people who find you even remotely interesting are other people who focus a lot on appearances.

TFA mentions the low sample size of the original study, and augments it with Twitter polls. But TFA author's Twitter follows aren't exactly a representative sample of the population...

Furthermore, monogamy and sexual activity remains strong for people in their 30s, and I expect this will continue to be true in the future. Women are having children later, but there's still a strong preference for monogamy among people who choose to have children.

This article does a good job at summarizing the problems with the narrativein OP's post: https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-no...

> It remains to be seen what the end result will be this time around.

More men will learn how to make themselves attractive people, so that women who aren't ready to have children yet are none-the-less invested in forming a strong and lasting relationship that includes a sexual component.

Some men won't accept this and they will be celibate for a good chunk of their 20s.

Oh well.

What should not happen is a regression to the sexual and gender role "morals" of the past. Quantitatively, there are at least as many women as men in the world. Qualitatively, "celibacy during your 20s" is not even remotely similar to the level of harm experienced by the bottom third of women for most of human history.

I also think that will not happen, and fears about social stability are enormously overblown. It's exceptionally unlikely that a small subgroup of men who already refuse to adapt is large enough and motivated enough to hold the rest of society at gunpoint.

There is so much emphasis on physical appearance and status in this thread.

If this is a common mindset among young men, it's no wonder they are lonely. Who wants to spend time with someone who reduces deeply human relationships to status and sex appeal?

Attractiveness is a complicated and extremely individual thing. Appearance and status are much less important than forming an intimate emotional connection through shared experiences and values.

Now, markets aren't always zero-sum. But they are often competitive.

> When I write better code today than I did yesterday, you, my teammate, will be happier, not sadder.

That's also true in football...

This is a huge problem for Windows and Mac.

This strikes me as the main problem with the mindset around HSR. Consider e.g., Madison, Wisconsin.

Milwaukee would have a much more vibrant and dynamic ecosystem if undergrads/PhD students/professors could get to/from meetings with investors in MLK/CHI and be back for afternoon classes. Or continue internships/meetings during the school year.

There are enormous inefficiencies (and corresponding brain drain) caused by the fact that the region's center of innovation is 1+ hours by car away from the region's center of finance.

An MLK <-> CHI <-> Madison rail line would change the dynamics of the entire state's economy. Simply counting cars on the roads between those cities in the present ignores how HSR changes the entire dynamic in a very qualitative way.

...sure. But also, once you build a 5+ million person metro area you're pretty committed to it...

I can't think of a single case where there would be an "obvious" replacement for that person -- not just in the US, but anywhere in the world. In fact, most of those H1Bs I've worked with eventually end up switching to the O1 anyways (for reference, very few SWEs -- even at FAANGs -- would quality for the O1).

Electrified rail is a viable alternative to suburb <-> urban center commutes. Similar/better travel times are possible.

And in both cases rail is much more pleasant. E.g., ICE trains are way nicer airplanes -- anyone who thinks otherwise has never been on an ICE train or really enjoys being punished.

I also prefer DB trains to being a passenger in a car on an interstate. Trains, when well-done, are much quieter, a much smoother ride, have much more comfortable seats, and offer the option to stand up and stretch if you feel like it.

Cycling is never a replacement for either of those two use cases.

Huh?

kaycebasques does not give any opinion on the landlord either way. Unless their comment was substantially edited, you're making a lot of assumptions about kaycebasques' views.

Even for frequent fliers, the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government. I fly almost every week, but in the past 12 months I have probably spent a lot more time at city hall on a stupid residential parking permit than I did in (non-customs) airport security lines.

In addition to personality, a lot of people project much larger political ideologies onto the TSA. You see a lot of that even in this comment section.

First, the graphs for "manufacturing less computers" out form a more-or-less flat line. However, employment in "manufacturing less computers" declined precipitously. Even if we zero out the effect of computers and chips on manufacturing output, we still see constant output with precipitous decline in employment. Note that we see this even in countries that don't manufacture microchips.

Automation clearly is effecting manufacturing employment in manufacturing outside of chip fabs. That's patently obvious even from the graphs purportedly used to prove the opposite.

Second, the IT revolution is/was real. Most of America's largest companies are built on the back of silicon and the chips powering those market cpas were manufactured in highly automated factories. So, even setting aside (1), it's still clear that automation caused a decline in manufacturing employment. If chip fabs had required as many human workers as car plants, US manufacturing job growth would've been robust.

So not only is old manufacturing automated, but growth sectors in manufacturing are also automated. So that "new industries" don't offset automation in "old industries".

(Finally, as an aside, the rhetoric about this hidden fact that everyone ignored is IMO mostly bullshit storytelling. US economic growth in the last 30 years (and especially the last 10 years) was powered by semiconductors and information technology. Also, semiconductors have powered growth in the manufacturing sector. I don't think there is a single economist alive who doesn't know both of these facts, and many of the studies critiqued by the "semiconductors explain everything" crowd explicitly address these two facts...)

We would need another decade of record growth just to offset the losses from 2009. Let alone offset 2008 and all of the loss from 2008-2010 and return to even minuscule net growth over a 2 decade period.

One might think "okay, great, so deliver another decade of growth without a period of recession". Which sounds reasonable until you dig into the reason behind the recent job growth numbers. As the article that you cite points out:

> Baumohl said companies have come to the conclusion that the likely 3% growth the U.S. enjoyed last year was a “sugar high.” With reduced expectations for growth — even with the new incentives to write off depreciation in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — CEOs have concluded it’s better to meet the additional growth opportunities with new workers than pricier machines. “Workers are viewed more like inventory,” he says. “If you need them, you can hire them, and if the economy really turns south, you can let them go. CEO have taken a very realistic approach,” he said.

I.e., if you don't produce sustained growth, employees will be laid off. But if you do produce sustained growth, then incentives shift and capital investments in automation are easier to justified. Either way, and regardless of trade policy, don't expect manufacturing employment growth over the next decade to even offset the 2008-2011 losses, let alone return us to net growth over a 20 year window.

Europe is a lot of countries, the US-Europe alliance is old enough that there have been at least three or four distinct time periods where the answer to this question fluctuates (cold war, post cold war, post-9/11, post Syria)

Furthermore, defense is not some sort of measurable good; especially for countries in the EU who are surrounded by non-enemies, how much they choose to spend on defense is in large part a political question.

It's really hard to say e.g., whether Germans would have chosen to spend more on defense if the US decreased its defense spending in Europe. And the answer would probably be different in the different time periods I mentioned above. E.g., given the German attitude toward US military presence in Europe over the past 20 years [1], I suspect the answer for that period is "no".

But ultimately the answer to this question will be different from country to country and from decade to decade, and a truly nonpartisan answer would be "there's really no way to give a definitive answer for all of Europe across that time period.".

> do we americans overestimate our contribution to the defensive posture of the west?

Americans underestimate (or often simply don't even know about) their contribution to many of Europe's most pressing security and welfare expenditures. The 15 year war in the middle east is now taking an enormous economic and political toll on Europe.

It's not too far-fetched to say that Europe might have been both safer and richer today had the US spent substantially less money on its military over the past 15 years (read: not waged wars in the middle east).

[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20180711/almost-half-of-germans-want...

Some people who research white nationalism don't make specific accounts for research purposes [1]. In general, and based on my own usage patterns, I think it's probably dangerous and definitely scary to assume that googling for "X" on your primary account implies that you support "X"

[1] Source: Currently sitting next to someone who is literally a full time white supremacy researcher.

"Best" schools (<1%) will have what the article is describing (strong student mathematical problem solving communities lead by teachers with strong mathematical training). Typically very expensive, either directly through tuition or indirectly because they are public schools but only serve students in very high net worth zip codes.

"Very Good" schools (<10%) will include some of the epsilon-delta formalism but might have some curricular problems and a "gifted just means moving through the terrible not-real-math curriculum faster" problem that the article talks about.

"Decent" schools will teach how to compute derivative/integrals by rote and maybe talk a bit about the physical intuitions in a very hand-wavy way. Calculus is very much a continuation of Algebra or Trig where you learn some rules and how to pattern match and don't ask too many questions about why.

The other half of USA high schools? They don't even offer a Calculus course of any kind [1]. Which... if you don't teach it at all, you can't teach it wrong...

As an aside, AP CS has the same problem as the problem identified with AP Calc. AP CS is the epitome of a "Java School" course.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/where-...

But you're not going to build the first self-driving car without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to develop a new pharmaceutical without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to get the sort of branding that being the first to beat the best humans at Go/Chess/Poker can get you without an army including lots of PhDs. And so on.

You're absolutely right that PhDs aren't required for the sort of sys admin and coding work that's accessible to bright high schoolers. But there are very few competent CS PhDs who would even bother applying for those jobs.

Also, your comment isn't germane to the article because the article isn't talking about sys admin and coding jobs. I've literally never seen a job posting for a sys admin job that asks for a PhD. Have you?

"McDonald's isn't Amazon" seems like a good enough reason.

Amazon can "just hire a few PhDs/seasoned engineers", plug them into the right places in the company, and expect good things to happen.

McDonald's would need to hire a new team from the leadership down and would be working up-wind in a hot seller's labor market at every level.

> They have 100 (?) menu items, not 1,000,000 products.

McDonald's is a huge company with lots of opportunities to apply ML. Store operation, hiring, supply chain optimization, menu/product design, lots of resource scheduling problems, marketing, etc.

I can easily see McDonald's making back hundreds of millions very quickly just by decreasing the friction and amount of time required to make improvements in these and other areas.

> Is McDonald's the right owner for a high-tech customer intelligence product? It just feels like such a bizarre cultural and core-competency fit.

Automated ordering is becoming a core part of McDonald's customer experience. Automated and augmented decision making is becoming a core part of McDonald's franchise management. Outsourcing those things would mean putting the fate of the company's future in someone else's hands.

Plus, there's huge upside to owning that IP. McDonald's is taking leadership on automating away the sales clerk and decreasing reliance on skilled/knowledgeable franchise owners and managers.

Graduating into GFC was terrifying.

I'm sure some were sheltered from it or blissfully unaware, but many were very aware.

I don't think this argument is being made in good faith.

More importantly, it's kind of absurd on face. Science pays horribly. See: literally any thread on HN about PhD programs. See also: levels.fyi vs. the starting salary for asst. profs at your local state university branch campus.

Whenever someone makes this argument, I show them a picture of the apartment I lived in during grad school and then point out that even the "winners" of the rat race who get professorships can leave academia and double their income over night.

But then, us tech folks forget the dot com bubble when things are good too.

Also, there's a qualitative difference between a job and a part time gig. my part time jobs in early college were trivial and required no mental, no emotional effort, and no outside of work skills development. My part time jobs in late college were mostly tutoring, which was doubly good becayse I reviewed material and also I could do less of it because it paid well.

In any case, at the very least the combo of part time and no mental/emotional/professional devlopment effort makes a huge difference. At least IME.