Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H₂O -> 2H₂ + O ₂

Obviously the biggest problem is making sure you have an even number of water molecules.

Hint: It’s not because this idea never occurred to any of the scientists and engineers involved in hydrogen power.

This the order in which you should try to access papers:

1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

Sorry - I should have realized others would point that out as well. I didn’t mean to pile on.

“Right to work” means employees can work in a union shop and receive the benefits of such without having to join the union or pay dues. It’s a set of laws that have successfully destroyed unions.

You’re thinking of “at will” employment laws, which means an employer can fire an employee for any reason or for no reason, but not for an illegal reason (which varies depending on state but includes the right to organize and rights against discrimination and retaliation).

This article presented no analysis or insight whatsoever. It just is a few paragraphs presenting raw results of survey data and a pull quote from a finance guy essentially saying “YMMV.”

It would be helpful for people to have something about retirement expense rates, lifestyles at different income levels, the burn down rates of people retiring today and projected future costs, and so on.

I mean, I’m American, so it wouldn’t apply directly to me anyway, but it’s something I think about more and more as I get closer. I’d retire today, if I could. I do have a fair amount of savings, and if I was willing to retire someplace inexpensive I might be able to pull it off today, or in a couple more years at most. So I’ve been doing my own research there (including looking at golden visa programs in case US politics continues on its current path), but I like to hear how others are thinking about it as well.

I think it’s more likely that we will see smaller scale attacks by domestic terrorists, ranging from mass shootings to something on the scale of a Timothy McVeigh. I can also see a probability of a return to a 1960s/1970s level of political violence and assassinations.

I think those are more likely than a large scale attack from foreign terrorists.

TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.

That was exactly my thought. I’m in the tech industry, and so we work with a high percentage of people on visas and such. A lot of people want to come to the US because of the advantages in salary and exchange rates, but will then move back home after making their nest egg. I’m told you could retire in comfort in India with $1M USD. Combine that with returning to family and culture, and I think that even if this statistic applies only to people with what were long term immigration plans, it seems an entirely reasonable number.

TFW when your country can’t even act as a bad example others can learn from.

TiVo has entered the chat.

Yup, that was it. Thanks!

I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.

I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.

The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”

I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.

Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!

Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.

Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks. There’s the whomping willow, which they can’t just cast a force field against. There were the spiders and the centaurs in the forest. The big three headed dog. That devil’s something plant. And if I recall, Voldemort didn’t realize the caretaker had come into the house until he was in the hallway and Nagini saw him. Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I read those.

Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.

And for what it’s worth, I think a sniper could take out a Jedi, too.

I don’t know. I’ve always thought a sniper could have taken out Voldemort. Far away, camouflaged, and the bullet gets there faster than the sound. It’s a reaction time thing.

The reason it’s framed as “child poverty” specifically is because growing up in poverty has very specific and lifelong consequences ranging from lowered IQs to behavior and mental illness issues. It’s really highly correlated, to the point of being deterministic.

I agree that poverty needs to be fixed for everyone, but for children in particular it can have long lasting effects for an entire generation and more because of what it does to brain development.

I worked very, very briefly as CTO for one of the biggest companies in that space. I’m talking like about a month or two. The scam was getting users to register and click through affiliate links which could be monetized to offset the costs of the free iPod.

Shortly after I left, the company was literally sued out of existence for false marketing around their prizes. I was just happy the checks cleared. I ended up making about $30k for a total of a few hours of work, and dodged a massive karmic hit.

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