At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
A possible line of reasoning is that drugs should be legal, but the property and violent crimes committed around them shouldn't be, in the same way that adults are legally permitted to drink alcohol, but they're not legally permitted to drive drunk. The "ruining cities" is about the crimes, not the drugs themselves.
That's the logically consistent line of thought, yes. Which is one I don't particularly disagree with, because of the harm the war on drugs has caused.
But the inconsistency comes from people advocating for a black market drug site and bending towards the far right. The same people who in the same breath also further criminalize drugs, reduce access to things that help addicts while arguing that drug dealers should be deported and our streets swept.
The logical inconsistency is that 'their' drug dealers are conducted by people of virtue therefore they did nothing to break the law. And not being willing to deal with the actual fallout of said illegal drug empire.
Political coalitions are not personifiable, contiguous entities. There are disparate groups of individuals aligned on certain issues and at each other's throats elsewhere. That said, political hypocrisy isn't uncommon, but in this case you may be over-generalizing.
Pat and cynical oversimplifications are bad for discourse, because they suggest that a default angry response is correct and, coincidentally, frees you from having to think harder about anything.
We can debate the merits of various drug pricing schemes but at the end of the day, prices are set by a small group of interested actors who want the prices to be as high as they possibly can without causing a violet revolt. So call it what you will but let's not pretend there's some deeper, more important meaning to be sussed out here.
My fairly generic PhD advice, as somebody who did one, graduated a bit early, and is happy about the process and where it's taken me:
* Choose your advisor with care. This is not very easy as an applicant looking at professors' websites, but if you are admitted, any good school will probably have an in-person or virtual admitted students day where you can talk to current students out of faculty earshot. Take advantage of these times to ask about your potential advisor. A truly bad advisor will probably produce at least one person who will warn you about them. If you can't do this in person, try to get a quick phone/video chat -- something off-record where they can be honest. I was always happy to do these for my advisor, because I liked him and wanted him to get more good students. Conversely, I know people who were warned off specific advisors during these events, for good reasons. A bit of subjectivity: a good advisor at a decent school is usually better than a bad advisor at a good school.
* The financial niceness of doing a PhD in field X seems to correlate pretty well with the current job market value of a masters in field X, at least partially for reasons of leverage -- if you can leave and transition into a cushier job, advisors have to provide a bit more value. Computer science scores highly on this metric.
* There is a ton of negativity about PhDs in places like HN. This isn't unjustified: doing a PhD with a bad advisor can be a very bad experience. At the same time, I think "person who had a bad PhD experience" is also "person who writes comments on the internet" with higher probability than "person who had a good PhD experience".
Homelessness increases --> any place where you can just hang out without paying attracts more homeless people --> there are too many homeless people hanging out for hanging out to remain good for business --> cheap hangouts close --> expensive hangouts like co-working spaces become viable.
Add increased labor costs and your profit margin for late night coffee drops significantly. Add a safety factor, and it becomes a more cost effective option to reduce hours.
We've been seeing that here in my Northern California city for the past few years.
Where are poor people supposed to go ? Where is a person making minimum wage supposed to live.
>First of all, they found, for families and children, one of the largest increases in homelessness, families, a 39 percent spike in 2024 from 2023. And on that January night that they surveyed, they found 150,000 children experiencing in — homelessness.
It makes me uneasy whenever someone suggests forcing an undesirable class of people to become concentrated in institutions (or, perhaps, camps). Historically it hasn't worked out so well. But maybe this time it will be different?
Having not been born during his presidency, whenever I think of Jimmy Carter, I think of his appearance in Travels in Georgia [1], a John McPhee essay that's mostly about following a couple of workers for the Georgia Natural Areas council as they travel through and collect information about Natural Areas in the early 1970s. Jimmy Carter, then-governor, pops up at the end to be taken in a canoe down a river that the couple of workers want protected. Having basically nobody around to impress, Carter is nonetheless affable, open, curious, and generally good-hearted. The piece ends at the governor's mansion, like this:
A ball sat on the pavement. Before going in, we shot baskets for a while. "The river is just great," the Governor said, laying one in. "And it ought to be kept the way it is. It's almost heartbreaking to feel that the river is in danger of destruction. I guess I'll write a letter to all the landowners and say, 'If you'll use some self-restraint, it'll decrease the amount of legal restraint put on you in the future.' I don't think people want to incur the permanent wrath of the governor or the legislature."
"I've tried to talk to property owners," Carol said. "To get them to register their land with the Natural Areas Council. But they wouldn't even talk to me."
The Governor said, "To be blunt about it, Carol, why would they?"
The Governor had the ball and was dribbling in place, as if contemplating a property owner in front of him, one-on-one. He went to the basket, shot, and missed. Carol got the rebound and fed the ball to Sam. He shot. He missed, too.
This is in the category of "things I believe I read from a reputable source, but which I can no longer definitively attribute", but my understanding is that one contributor to Tokyo's lovely and specific density is that its zoning laws are pretty relaxed, and on top of that they are not very strictly enforced. This is maybe less workable in a society with higher variability in people's judgment of what is ok.
And the sheer amount of people. It is very fun to have so many people who are at least semi-proud of the city they live in. Embracing both the chaos and the calmness of 6am on weekeneds.
A return to less centralized web publishing would also be bad for the many creators who lack the technical expertise or interest to jump through all the hoops required for building and hosting your own website. Maybe this seems like a pretty small friction to the median HN user, but I don't think it's true for creators in general, as evidenced by the enormous increase in both the number and sophistication of online creators over the past couple of decades.
Is that increase worth traumatizing moderators? I have no idea. But I frequently see this sentiment on HN about the old internet being better, framed as criticism of big internet companies, when it really seems to be at least in part criticism of how the median internet user has changed -- and the solution, coincidentally, would at least partially reverse that change.
Introducing a free unlimited hosting service where you could only upload pictures, text or video. There’s a public page to see that content among adds and links to you friends free hosting service pages. TOS is a give-give: you give them the right to extract all the aggregated stat they want and display the adds, they give you the service for free so you own you content (and are legally responsible of it)
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