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Trump has said he might take Greenland "by force". That doesn't sound "anti-war" to me.

I think the Ukraine stuff is more complicated than you're making it out.


I think that might be a myth? If I tried buying a $0.50 candy bar with a hundred-dollar bill, I think that the cashier might refuse it and I don't think they'd get in trouble for doing so.

I thought the "legal tender" argument only worked in regards to debts to the government, though IANAL.


No, it's worse now.

Back in 2017, I could still read public profiles, their tweets, and look at the replies, all without logging in.

Now I can't even look at an account page without logging in.


Postdocs always seemed like a scam to me.

Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].

And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."

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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.

Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).

I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.

I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.

[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.

[2] depending on the dollar->pound exchange rate.


> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry

Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.

Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:

In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.

Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).


It’s not exactly overqualification, more misqualification. If all you have to say for yourself is “I have completed 23rd grade, look at all these papers I wrote,” your skills and experience, no matter how deep, have diverged from the needs of almost any conceivable employer. I strongly encourage anybody thinking of doing a PhD to get a job in industry first, even if just for a year.

I've found STEM research to be different than that. Lots of opportunities to build and design whilst growing understandimg. Work with diverse teams and students of multiple levels. Communicate, work with, and network with industry individuals.

That depends entirely on the company. Where I am, what you say is mostly nonsense. Postdocs usually end up being the people leading (head down focused design or management) new projects that are directly or indirectly related to their research.

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.


Stanford School of Medicine has a FOOD BANK for Postdocs because they literally can't afford groceries lol

I mean, in regards to iron specifically, I get bloodwork done in my yearly checkup and it will tell me my iron levels.

Historically mine have always been low but in September of 2023 I started a diet and started taking iron supplements, and when I got my bloodwork I was in the happy "green" range.

ETA:

I should point out that I'm a pretty tall dude (~6'5"), which might make it easier for me to avoid getting too much iron, but if I were getting too much iron I assume it would probably show up in my blood tests?


> sauces you make yourself? I often mix some different oils, mustard, seeds, miso, bit of leamon juice and spices… but weighting and logging everything will take 3x the time to do the sauce itself

I can't speak for anyone else, and I actually do try and weigh everything, but if I forget to weigh or the portions are too small to measure with my cheap kitchen scale: I weigh out my serving of the finished product, and Google either the restaurant or premade-grocery-version of what I made and look at their nutrition labels.

Obviously it's not going to be perfect, but I figure that my homemade pizza sauce will have roughly the same ingredients as the Ragu pizza sauce at the grocery store and thus roughly the same calories and nutrition at a per-ounce level. I always assume that my homemade stuff is 20% higher in calories more just to compensate for uncertainty, but doing this I did manage to lose about 60lbs.


It can still be useful just to get rough estimates of what you're making at home, especially for portions and products that are roughly comparable.

If I make an egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich in the morning, and forget to weigh out or count how much of something I used, it can still be useful for back-of-napkin estimates if I Google the McDonalds Sausage McMuffin with Egg.

Obviously it's not going to be exactly equivalent, but I usually assume my homemade thing is 20% more than the restaurant to compensate.

It's of course better if you just weigh everything out first, you can get much more accurate measurements and calorie estimates then, but this can work in a pinch.


I'm currently dieting again, and the only way that I've been able to properly portion calories is to weigh nearly everything I eat and then add the numbers together in Google Sheets.

Eyeballing a portion of a lot of food can be nearly impossible to determine how much food you actually got, but weight is fairly straightforward and objective (at least to an ounce or so of granularity for most kitchen scales, which is good enough for dieting).


No, I don't really think you're right about this.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That's a right I wouldn't take away form them even if I could.

They are not entitled to me being nice to them. Fuck that; if they advocate for something that I think is harmful, then I'm not going to be "respectful" to them.

My grandmother in no uncertain terms said that my wife should be deported. She doesn't have any power deport my wife, so she wouldn't fall into the "bad actor" in your definition, but she's made her opinion clear on that.

I could swallow my pride, roll my eyes, and ignore the horrible racist shit she says, but why exactly? The whole point of free speech is the ability to criticize bad ideas, and sometimes that's going to involve hurting a Republican's feelings.


Hi Peter,

My wife has a green card, and has since October of 2021. We have filed the paperwork for her to get citizenship in November of last year, but of course these things take time to process.

Due to the anti-immigration rhetoric of the incoming Trump administration (particularly against Mexico), I am extremely worried that this might end up with delays or even a halting of the citizenship process.

Are my fears founded?


I don't think so. She's already an LPR and during his last time in office, other than some processing delays, in my experience, applications that were supposed to get approved got approved.

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