I strongly think that parents who elect to not vaccinate their children (absent a documented medical condition preventing safe vaccination) should be liable for child endangerment. This is reckless behavior that is reasonably likely to result in bodily harm to another human being. This is a public safety issue with a clear and benign and effective solution. Those who opt out should be liable for the consequences of their actions.
Grandma (and the physically disabled, young women, etc) has a chance against a young, fit, male attacker if she has a gun.
Only if she has it out, loaded, safety off, is capable of pointing it in the right direction before the attack occurs and is aware of where the attack is coming from. It's an absurd hypothetical strawman that NEVER actually happens in the real world. Do you really want granny carrying a sidearm at all times given the extremely remote chance of her actually getting attacked outside of your imagination? Personally that's not a society I care to live in. Firearms have their time and place and I'm not remotely arguing against the 2nd amendment but they aren't what keeps crime in check. Guns are used FAR more often to facilitate crime than to prevent it. Real security comes from a properly structured civil society. Guns play a role but it should be a very minor one.
As one cop told me in a moment of frankness; "I ain't dodging gunfire for no $70k a year and a pension!"
The number of cops that EVER discharge their weapon intentionally in the line of duty is miniscule. It's significantly less than one percent. If your story is true then it shouldn't be surprising at all - almost all cops never have to "dodge gunfire" or shoot at a live person. However if he really wanted a safe job and a pension then he should have picked another line of work. There are easier and safer ways to make a decent living.
Police in the US have no legal obligation to protect citizens.
Police have a legal obligation to enforce the laws and guess what? The laws (usually) protect the citizens. (unless you are a minority - then you are apparently on your own judging by police response times) Countries with far stricter gun control laws somehow miraculously manage to have even better crime statistics than the US and FAR fewer deaths by firearm. Having a civil society isn't merely a result of everyone packing guns and having a Mexican standoff.
Police handle the paperwork. Citizens are the true "first responders".
What a bunch of delusional macho BS. When was the last time you actually saw someone grab a gun and go be a "first responder" to a crime? You haven't. The notion that you are going to protect society with a firearm isn't justified by the evidence. The evidence shows that the odds are FAR higher that the gun will be used in a suicide or result in an accident. I don't have a problem with people owning guns but let's not pretend that the citizenry are marching out to fight crime. If we get to that point I'm moving to someplace civilized.
The problem with weakening encryption is that weaknesses do not care who uses them and once discovered they cannot be corrected. And weaknesses WILL be discovered sooner or later. Probably sooner. There is no way to only let the "good guys" in while keeping the "bad guys" out. You cannot weaken encryption without making it completely useless in the process.
The USB 3.0 cable in front of me is thinner (including outer insulation) than a single wire on a 4-pin molex connector in my desktop.
Those so called "molex connectors" are actually made by several companies. Molex is a company, not a type of connector though Molex is one of the companies that makes the ones you are referencing. TE Connectivity for example sells an effectively identical connector in their Mate-N-Lok line. People know what you mean but I actually run a company that makes wire harnesses and if you came to me and said "molex connector", I would stare blankly at you until you clarified which of the thousands of different types of connectors made by Molex you were referring to.
Those connectors housings can accommodate terminals that will use everything from 14AWG wire all the way to 30AWG. They also cost less than a quarter and the terminals are a few cents each. FAR cheaper than any USB cable and easier to work with as well.
In the meantime focus on the tools and the generally (after 20 years time) still ridiculous state-of-affairs in terms of usability.
I'm not optimistic that the problem is solvable. I honestly do not see any way to make encryption both easy to use and secure/trustworthy. Any solution that makes it easy to use necessarily for most people involves trusting a third party that they do not know. Do you REALLY trust the company that wrote/compiled the encryption software you are using? I'm not a coder and even if I was I don't have the time or expertise to review the code. The whole point of encryption is that you don't want to trust third parties. So you can either make it really complicated to use or you can make it secure but I don't see a credible way to make it be both at the same time.
Furthermore, unless it is REALLY easy to use (near transparent) most people aren't going to use it. Not even enough to get a decent installed base will use it. Hell, I *love* the idea of encryption my data and communications and even I don't see myself using it because it's too much of a pain in the arse.
Actually for a while it was the other way around. AMD pioneered x86-64 and Intel was the one playing compatible catch-up when they tried to bank on IA-64 and it tanked badly./quote.
That situation lasted for all of about 1-2 years and even then AMD never really were able to capitalize on it because Intel was better capitalized, and had cost advantages and 64 bit didn't matter enough at the time. While it was a misstep by Intel it wasn't one they couldn't recover from. Intel putting a 64 bit version of the x86 wasn't exactly a huge technical challenge for them. Intel has made a number of mistakes over the years but AMD simply has never been smart enough or well funded enough to make Intel pay for them.
What stop FB from making a client that encrypts local but sends the private key to the NSA?
Nothing but you can use a different client. The key doesn't care what client you created it in. Frankly I have no idea why anyone would regard FB as a trusted party. FB should never ever see the private key. If they do then you may as well presume your encryption is broken.
My point is that Facebook should not be trusted with anything related to encryption.
I think the entire point of (properly done) encryption is that you don't have to trust Facebook. At all. And frankly based on their behavior and that of certain three letter agencies you really shouldn't trust them. I certainly don't but my answer to that is to not use Facebook.
The problem with good encryption is really more in the usability of it than the technology. The technological problems are well understood. The problem is that no one has come up with a way to make encryption both easy to use and simultaneously secure. Making a key pair, storing the private key securely, encrypting your message, ensuring the software has no backdoor, etc all require significant technical chops. Even if you do that the person you are communicating with has to have all those same technical chops AND the motivation to use them.
So why is AMD constantly on the verge of bankruptcy?
Because AMD has historically made their business model making a product that is compatible with another company's product and that other company (Intel) has a cost advantage in making the product and generally controls the architecture. Intel is actually quite the manufacturing juggernaut in microprocessors whereas AMD has basically no manufacturing of their own. Intel also has a lead in die size as well so AMD is typically playing catch up. Intel basically can make a smaller, faster processor cheaper and sell it for less any time they want to. Hard to compete effectively with that. AMD has to be smarter than Intel and they haven't shown themselves to be capable of doing that on a consistent basis. Even when their designs have been better, Intel has been able to leverage their die size advantage to overcome design deficiencies. Furthermore they've made some pretty bad tactical business errors (the acquisition of ATI hasn't been the smoothest) and Intel has been known to engage in some arguably shady business dealings with their customers.
Basically probably the only reason AMD is still with us is that Intel doesn't want the anti-trust scrutiny that would come with killing them off. Having AMD around gives Intel a "credible" competitor, albeit one that hasn't shown any meaningful ability to compete consistently. AMD has been trying to diversify away from just PC microprocessors for a while now with mixed success.
First it raises awareness about PGP which might cause more people to use PGP to encrypt and sign their emails.
No it won't. The only people that will do it are crypto-geeks. It will not result in widespread adoption. Most people A) don't give a shit, B) don't understand public key encryption, C) can't be bothered even if they do understand it, and D) the people they communicate with think A, B and C as well. The value of it is not commensurate with the difficulty of using it to most people most of the time.
I wish more companies would support this. Even if it's just random status updates and reminders for services I use, I prefer absolutely everything to be encrypted.
In principle I agree with you. Unfortunately precisely none of the people I interact with on a daily basis have even the slightest interest in bothering with encrypting their communications. Worse, only a handful of them have the technical chops to do it properly. The rest wouldn't even begin to comprehend the need to jump through all the extra hoops. If they need to tell me something privately they simply do it in person where no one can listen. Using a tool like PGP securely is NOT simple and this will ensure it is never used except by a handful of crypto-geeks.
There currently is absolutely no way I am aware of to make public key encryption simultaneously simple AND secure. You can have one or the other but not both. It fails the "explain it to your grandmother test" badly. Until some clever soul can find a way to make it nearly transparent to use and still secure, end-to-end encryption will remain a play toy for paranoid geeks and the occasional clever n'er-do-well.
I've never heard of this happening (to programmers).
I hire people all the time and I've had to say no to great candidates who wanted more money than we could pay. I've also turned away applicants who thought they were worth more than they were. Most companies have a budget and they aren't going to exceed it. They know what local market rates are (unless they are idiots) and are unlikely to pay you more than that. If you live where I do you probably aren't going to get a six figure salary as a programmer but the cost of living is a LOT lower than in Silicon Valley so the net result is often better.
I've messed up negotiations pretty bad, too (by telling them that I was going to give my current company a chance to counter-offer....it ended with the hiring manager yelling at me for a while), but they'll still come back.
That is VERY unusual. Most employment negotiations do not go anything like that. I'm not a programmer but I do have two masters degrees, an accounting certification, and a lot of experience as an engineer and I've had times when it has been REALLY hard to find work better than flipping burgers. If you are luck enough that getting work hasn't been a problem, congratulations. Unfortunately that doesn't describe most of the working population.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
Spoken like someone who has never been in a big financial or social hole or had a severe medical condition. Sometimes hard work and talent and making good decisions isn't enough. If you grow up in a depressed area with a poor family there is a non-trivial chance that opportunities are going to be hard to come by. Sometimes people have severe medical conditions that put them in a financial hole or make it difficult to work. Get sick and you might find yourself in a deep financial hole through no fault of your own. Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation because someone ripped you off.
It's easy to say luck has nothing to do with it but that simply isn't true. It is a LOT easier to get opportunities if you are in a good financial position to start with. It's a lot easier to make money when you already have money. That isn't to say you can't make it if you don't have a silver spoon but it is a lot harder and that is a matter of luck. Being healthy is largely a matter of luck. My mother suffers from ALS and cannot work and that is NOT her fault. Your romantic notion that all that matter is hard work and fiscal discipline is a nice story but a false one.
Everything you will ever achieve in your career will depend on other people. Learn to work well with others. If you have ambitions to achieve something noteworthy you are going to have to get a lot of people moving in the right direction. This is not easy but it is critical.
While you should comply with company policies, you can always archive the emails in a variety of formats.
Doing this may invite the wrath of the company legal department if discovered. This creates a VERY real source of potential legal problems for a company should they get sued. In most companies this would be grounds for immediate termination with cause if the actions taken conflicted with their email retention policies.
Most people are terrible at salary negotiation. Based on various studies with some degree of variance, overall they suggest about 55% of men do not negotiate their wages, and about 70% of women do not negotiate their wages. That is NO NEGOTIATION AT ALL.
Bear in mind that a lot of people are pretty desperate to get a paycheck. You can pretty easily take yourself out of the running for a lot of jobs by trying to negotiate salary (or by doing so clumsily) particularly when there are multiple qualified candidates for the job. Not saying that more folks shouldn't negotiate their salary but many times they are not negotiating from a position of strength. It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky. I've been in both circumstances myself at different times so I understand how hard it can be to negotiate when not getting the job at all is a worse outcome than getting paid a sub-optimal amount.
That said I agree completely with what you said. Negotiation is a very valuable life skill. The sooner you get good at it the better.
It's still true.. only in this case "free time" is unemployment.
Curiously unemployment remains consistent with historical norms and there is no indication automation is having a meaningful impact on employment rates overall. How do you propose to reconcile your assertion that automation is increasing unemployment when all the data indicates that it is if anything having a positive or neutral effect of employment?
It was naive to say that automation would make all of our lives better. Mostly it just makes corporate profits go up, and everybody else gets screwed.
Really? Automation is responsible for dropping the percent of people working in agriculture from over half to somewhere around 2% in the US. Do you think your life was not improved by that? Automation has made tasks like washing your clothes, cooking your food and getting clean drinking water basically afterthoughts. Do you think your life wasn't improved by that? Automation has eliminated countless tedious and wasteful and repetitive tasks for clerical, agricultural, and manufacturing workers. Do you think their lives were not improved by that?
The US is among the most highly automated countries in the world and also has among the highest per capita GDP. Those facts are not coincidences. The same is true of the EU and Japan. This meme that automation is going to take away all our jobs and turn us into unemployed paupers is ludicrous and tiresome and false. People have been making the same dystopian claims about automation for ages and it's just nonsense.
What radiologists do today is not what radiologists will do in 20 years.
That is a VERY different statement than saying radiologists will be going bye-bye.
Yes. My wife is a hospital internist and she says that 80% of her job could be done by someone with less education or automated
You could say that about pretty much everyone's job. That doesn't mean it is economic to do it. I'm an accountant and an engineer myself. Most individual tasks I do could be done adequately by someone else with less education given a modest amount of training. But I don't have endless money to hire other people or purchase automation to do those tasks. Furthermore I actually create some of the automation to make me more effective myself but it doesn't reduce the amount of work. Even if I automate 80% of what I do I will still have 80% of the other tasks that I need to do that would be doable by someone else. The work expands to fit the time allowed. I have effectively an endless to-do list. I just only actually get to the stuff I can actually do in the time allowed.
DeepBlue/Watson is going to replace a large amount of what specialists do because it'll do it better and more accurately.
Not until a LOT of problems get solved that currently we are in no danger of solving. For something like Watson to be useful you have to be able to feed it accurate and useful data in an efficient manner. Medical records are currently in an almost comical state of disarray and are riddled with missing and bad information. Furthermore few medical records systems can talk to each other and there is no indication that will change in the near future. Furthermore what specialists do isn't simply being a differential diagnosis engine. If that were all they did we would have automated it with expert systems years ago. My wife is a pathologist and I can assure that Watson isn't going to replace her before she retires. Supplement maybe but certainly not replace most of what she does.
But these days it's all about "Show me the money". There's plenty of blame to go around for this kind of thing modern ethics and integrity being what it is.
I'm curious how you think that "modern ethics and integrity" is any different than it ever was. People have been greedy for money as long as there has been money. This is nothing new and I don't expect it to ever change. There never was a good-old-days in regards to ethics and integrity.
It's better they're in private industry. They might actually accomplish something that benefits society (hence their higher value and higher pay).
You think basic research doesn't benefit society? The value of something to society isn't necessarily reflected in the salary to do it. Nobody (sane) would argue that a professional baseball player is more valuable to society than a school teacher or police officer but we pay them far more.
It really harkens back to the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
What does that have to do with research? These people weren't hired because they are great teachers. They were hired because they were great researchers.
The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines.
Not in your lifetime they couldn't. If you think otherwise you don't actually understand what they do. Doctors aren't just differential diagnosis engines. And even if they were a differential diagnosis (which is all a diagnostic computer can give you) will just give you a set of choices and probabilities. It won't give you a definitive answer because frequently there isn't one. The human body is far more complicated than any program we have access to and you need someone who can think through problems and more importantly deal with people. Computers can help but medicine isn't just about technology.
We tend to worship the ground they walk on in the United States but at the end of the day medicine is just a trade, no different than plumbers or electricians, and nurses do the bulk of the work in your typical medical practice.
Nurses do the routine work. You don't pay a doctor to do or diagnose the routine stuff though they certainly can do that. You pay them because they will catch the unusual stuff that a nurse would miss. Doctors are specialists of a sort. If you want to take your trade analogy you could hire a general handyman to work on your plumbing but if it is anything difficult or complicated you probably want someone looking at it who is better educated on the problem at hand. You don't pay a surgeon big $ to do a routine procedure. You pay a surgeon big $ to be there in case something unusual happens. When you code on the operating table the value of their time skyrockets. My wife is a pathologist specializing in skin. Dermatologists are allowed to read their own biopsies but most send the excisions to her or someone like her for a diagnosis because she will catch things they will almost certainly miss. Melanoma for example can mimic a variety of common benign problems which a nurse or even a general practitioner doctor might easily miss. Nurses can do a lot of the things doctors can do but when they run into something subtle or unusual then THAT is when you need a doctor.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly think that parents who elect to not vaccinate their children (absent a documented medical condition preventing safe vaccination) should be liable for child endangerment. This is reckless behavior that is reasonably likely to result in bodily harm to another human being. This is a public safety issue with a clear and benign and effective solution. Those who opt out should be liable for the consequences of their actions.
For all your "It never happens!" crap there are daily documented cases.
Show me the evidence. Cite me these "daily documented cases" of grandmothers and disabled people defending themselves with guns. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Grandma (and the physically disabled, young women, etc) has a chance against a young, fit, male attacker if she has a gun.
Only if she has it out, loaded, safety off, is capable of pointing it in the right direction before the attack occurs and is aware of where the attack is coming from. It's an absurd hypothetical strawman that NEVER actually happens in the real world. Do you really want granny carrying a sidearm at all times given the extremely remote chance of her actually getting attacked outside of your imagination? Personally that's not a society I care to live in. Firearms have their time and place and I'm not remotely arguing against the 2nd amendment but they aren't what keeps crime in check. Guns are used FAR more often to facilitate crime than to prevent it. Real security comes from a properly structured civil society. Guns play a role but it should be a very minor one.
As one cop told me in a moment of frankness; "I ain't dodging gunfire for no $70k a year and a pension!"
The number of cops that EVER discharge their weapon intentionally in the line of duty is miniscule. It's significantly less than one percent. If your story is true then it shouldn't be surprising at all - almost all cops never have to "dodge gunfire" or shoot at a live person. However if he really wanted a safe job and a pension then he should have picked another line of work. There are easier and safer ways to make a decent living.
Police in the US have no legal obligation to protect citizens.
Police have a legal obligation to enforce the laws and guess what? The laws (usually) protect the citizens. (unless you are a minority - then you are apparently on your own judging by police response times) Countries with far stricter gun control laws somehow miraculously manage to have even better crime statistics than the US and FAR fewer deaths by firearm. Having a civil society isn't merely a result of everyone packing guns and having a Mexican standoff.
Police handle the paperwork. Citizens are the true "first responders".
What a bunch of delusional macho BS. When was the last time you actually saw someone grab a gun and go be a "first responder" to a crime? You haven't. The notion that you are going to protect society with a firearm isn't justified by the evidence. The evidence shows that the odds are FAR higher that the gun will be used in a suicide or result in an accident. I don't have a problem with people owning guns but let's not pretend that the citizenry are marching out to fight crime. If we get to that point I'm moving to someplace civilized.
The problem with weakening encryption is that weaknesses do not care who uses them and once discovered they cannot be corrected. And weaknesses WILL be discovered sooner or later. Probably sooner. There is no way to only let the "good guys" in while keeping the "bad guys" out. You cannot weaken encryption without making it completely useless in the process.
Every time I hear the name of the store Hot Topic, Jim Gaffigan comedy routines start running through my head.
The USB 3.0 cable in front of me is thinner (including outer insulation) than a single wire on a 4-pin molex connector in my desktop.
Those so called "molex connectors" are actually made by several companies. Molex is a company, not a type of connector though Molex is one of the companies that makes the ones you are referencing. TE Connectivity for example sells an effectively identical connector in their Mate-N-Lok line. People know what you mean but I actually run a company that makes wire harnesses and if you came to me and said "molex connector", I would stare blankly at you until you clarified which of the thousands of different types of connectors made by Molex you were referring to.
Those connectors housings can accommodate terminals that will use everything from 14AWG wire all the way to 30AWG. They also cost less than a quarter and the terminals are a few cents each. FAR cheaper than any USB cable and easier to work with as well.
In the meantime focus on the tools and the generally (after 20 years time) still ridiculous state-of-affairs in terms of usability.
I'm not optimistic that the problem is solvable. I honestly do not see any way to make encryption both easy to use and secure/trustworthy. Any solution that makes it easy to use necessarily for most people involves trusting a third party that they do not know. Do you REALLY trust the company that wrote/compiled the encryption software you are using? I'm not a coder and even if I was I don't have the time or expertise to review the code. The whole point of encryption is that you don't want to trust third parties. So you can either make it really complicated to use or you can make it secure but I don't see a credible way to make it be both at the same time.
Furthermore, unless it is REALLY easy to use (near transparent) most people aren't going to use it. Not even enough to get a decent installed base will use it. Hell, I *love* the idea of encryption my data and communications and even I don't see myself using it because it's too much of a pain in the arse.
Actually for a while it was the other way around. AMD pioneered x86-64 and Intel was the one playing compatible catch-up when they tried to bank on IA-64 and it tanked badly./quote.
That situation lasted for all of about 1-2 years and even then AMD never really were able to capitalize on it because Intel was better capitalized, and had cost advantages and 64 bit didn't matter enough at the time. While it was a misstep by Intel it wasn't one they couldn't recover from. Intel putting a 64 bit version of the x86 wasn't exactly a huge technical challenge for them. Intel has made a number of mistakes over the years but AMD simply has never been smart enough or well funded enough to make Intel pay for them.
What stop FB from making a client that encrypts local but sends the private key to the NSA?
Nothing but you can use a different client. The key doesn't care what client you created it in. Frankly I have no idea why anyone would regard FB as a trusted party. FB should never ever see the private key. If they do then you may as well presume your encryption is broken.
My point is that Facebook should not be trusted with anything related to encryption.
I think the entire point of (properly done) encryption is that you don't have to trust Facebook. At all. And frankly based on their behavior and that of certain three letter agencies you really shouldn't trust them. I certainly don't but my answer to that is to not use Facebook.
The problem with good encryption is really more in the usability of it than the technology. The technological problems are well understood. The problem is that no one has come up with a way to make encryption both easy to use and simultaneously secure. Making a key pair, storing the private key securely, encrypting your message, ensuring the software has no backdoor, etc all require significant technical chops. Even if you do that the person you are communicating with has to have all those same technical chops AND the motivation to use them.
So why is AMD constantly on the verge of bankruptcy?
Because AMD has historically made their business model making a product that is compatible with another company's product and that other company (Intel) has a cost advantage in making the product and generally controls the architecture. Intel is actually quite the manufacturing juggernaut in microprocessors whereas AMD has basically no manufacturing of their own. Intel also has a lead in die size as well so AMD is typically playing catch up. Intel basically can make a smaller, faster processor cheaper and sell it for less any time they want to. Hard to compete effectively with that. AMD has to be smarter than Intel and they haven't shown themselves to be capable of doing that on a consistent basis. Even when their designs have been better, Intel has been able to leverage their die size advantage to overcome design deficiencies. Furthermore they've made some pretty bad tactical business errors (the acquisition of ATI hasn't been the smoothest) and Intel has been known to engage in some arguably shady business dealings with their customers.
Basically probably the only reason AMD is still with us is that Intel doesn't want the anti-trust scrutiny that would come with killing them off. Having AMD around gives Intel a "credible" competitor, albeit one that hasn't shown any meaningful ability to compete consistently. AMD has been trying to diversify away from just PC microprocessors for a while now with mixed success.
First it raises awareness about PGP which might cause more people to use PGP to encrypt and sign their emails.
No it won't. The only people that will do it are crypto-geeks. It will not result in widespread adoption. Most people A) don't give a shit, B) don't understand public key encryption, C) can't be bothered even if they do understand it, and D) the people they communicate with think A, B and C as well. The value of it is not commensurate with the difficulty of using it to most people most of the time.
I wish more companies would support this. Even if it's just random status updates and reminders for services I use, I prefer absolutely everything to be encrypted.
In principle I agree with you. Unfortunately precisely none of the people I interact with on a daily basis have even the slightest interest in bothering with encrypting their communications. Worse, only a handful of them have the technical chops to do it properly. The rest wouldn't even begin to comprehend the need to jump through all the extra hoops. If they need to tell me something privately they simply do it in person where no one can listen. Using a tool like PGP securely is NOT simple and this will ensure it is never used except by a handful of crypto-geeks.
There currently is absolutely no way I am aware of to make public key encryption simultaneously simple AND secure. You can have one or the other but not both. It fails the "explain it to your grandmother test" badly. Until some clever soul can find a way to make it nearly transparent to use and still secure, end-to-end encryption will remain a play toy for paranoid geeks and the occasional clever n'er-do-well.
I've never heard of this happening (to programmers).
I hire people all the time and I've had to say no to great candidates who wanted more money than we could pay. I've also turned away applicants who thought they were worth more than they were. Most companies have a budget and they aren't going to exceed it. They know what local market rates are (unless they are idiots) and are unlikely to pay you more than that. If you live where I do you probably aren't going to get a six figure salary as a programmer but the cost of living is a LOT lower than in Silicon Valley so the net result is often better.
I've messed up negotiations pretty bad, too (by telling them that I was going to give my current company a chance to counter-offer....it ended with the hiring manager yelling at me for a while), but they'll still come back.
That is VERY unusual. Most employment negotiations do not go anything like that. I'm not a programmer but I do have two masters degrees, an accounting certification, and a lot of experience as an engineer and I've had times when it has been REALLY hard to find work better than flipping burgers. If you are luck enough that getting work hasn't been a problem, congratulations. Unfortunately that doesn't describe most of the working population.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
Spoken like someone who has never been in a big financial or social hole or had a severe medical condition. Sometimes hard work and talent and making good decisions isn't enough. If you grow up in a depressed area with a poor family there is a non-trivial chance that opportunities are going to be hard to come by. Sometimes people have severe medical conditions that put them in a financial hole or make it difficult to work. Get sick and you might find yourself in a deep financial hole through no fault of your own. Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation because someone ripped you off.
It's easy to say luck has nothing to do with it but that simply isn't true. It is a LOT easier to get opportunities if you are in a good financial position to start with. It's a lot easier to make money when you already have money. That isn't to say you can't make it if you don't have a silver spoon but it is a lot harder and that is a matter of luck. Being healthy is largely a matter of luck. My mother suffers from ALS and cannot work and that is NOT her fault. Your romantic notion that all that matter is hard work and fiscal discipline is a nice story but a false one.
My advice to a newbie is to never be a position where you can't say _NO_.
Great advice but not always possible. Sometimes life just isn't very kind to some people. Worst thing is it's pretty easy to get trapped
Everything you will ever achieve in your career will depend on other people. Learn to work well with others. If you have ambitions to achieve something noteworthy you are going to have to get a lot of people moving in the right direction. This is not easy but it is critical.
While you should comply with company policies, you can always archive the emails in a variety of formats.
Doing this may invite the wrath of the company legal department if discovered. This creates a VERY real source of potential legal problems for a company should they get sued. In most companies this would be grounds for immediate termination with cause if the actions taken conflicted with their email retention policies.
The obvious response to which is, "Sure, but in exchange, I'll need copies of the pay stubs for those working for you in comparable positions."
To which the company will likely say "thank you for your time and we'll show you to the door".
To be clear, I agree with you but being right carries a non-trivial risk of not getting the job. That may or may not be a good thing.
Most people are terrible at salary negotiation. Based on various studies with some degree of variance, overall they suggest about 55% of men do not negotiate their wages, and about 70% of women do not negotiate their wages. That is NO NEGOTIATION AT ALL.
Bear in mind that a lot of people are pretty desperate to get a paycheck. You can pretty easily take yourself out of the running for a lot of jobs by trying to negotiate salary (or by doing so clumsily) particularly when there are multiple qualified candidates for the job. Not saying that more folks shouldn't negotiate their salary but many times they are not negotiating from a position of strength. It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky. I've been in both circumstances myself at different times so I understand how hard it can be to negotiate when not getting the job at all is a worse outcome than getting paid a sub-optimal amount.
That said I agree completely with what you said. Negotiation is a very valuable life skill. The sooner you get good at it the better.
It's still true .. only in this case "free time" is unemployment.
Curiously unemployment remains consistent with historical norms and there is no indication automation is having a meaningful impact on employment rates overall. How do you propose to reconcile your assertion that automation is increasing unemployment when all the data indicates that it is if anything having a positive or neutral effect of employment?
It was naive to say that automation would make all of our lives better. Mostly it just makes corporate profits go up, and everybody else gets screwed.
Really? Automation is responsible for dropping the percent of people working in agriculture from over half to somewhere around 2% in the US. Do you think your life was not improved by that? Automation has made tasks like washing your clothes, cooking your food and getting clean drinking water basically afterthoughts. Do you think your life wasn't improved by that? Automation has eliminated countless tedious and wasteful and repetitive tasks for clerical, agricultural, and manufacturing workers. Do you think their lives were not improved by that?
The US is among the most highly automated countries in the world and also has among the highest per capita GDP. Those facts are not coincidences. The same is true of the EU and Japan. This meme that automation is going to take away all our jobs and turn us into unemployed paupers is ludicrous and tiresome and false. People have been making the same dystopian claims about automation for ages and it's just nonsense.
What radiologists do today is not what radiologists will do in 20 years.
That is a VERY different statement than saying radiologists will be going bye-bye.
Yes. My wife is a hospital internist and she says that 80% of her job could be done by someone with less education or automated
You could say that about pretty much everyone's job. That doesn't mean it is economic to do it. I'm an accountant and an engineer myself. Most individual tasks I do could be done adequately by someone else with less education given a modest amount of training. But I don't have endless money to hire other people or purchase automation to do those tasks. Furthermore I actually create some of the automation to make me more effective myself but it doesn't reduce the amount of work. Even if I automate 80% of what I do I will still have 80% of the other tasks that I need to do that would be doable by someone else. The work expands to fit the time allowed. I have effectively an endless to-do list. I just only actually get to the stuff I can actually do in the time allowed.
DeepBlue/Watson is going to replace a large amount of what specialists do because it'll do it better and more accurately.
Not until a LOT of problems get solved that currently we are in no danger of solving. For something like Watson to be useful you have to be able to feed it accurate and useful data in an efficient manner. Medical records are currently in an almost comical state of disarray and are riddled with missing and bad information. Furthermore few medical records systems can talk to each other and there is no indication that will change in the near future. Furthermore what specialists do isn't simply being a differential diagnosis engine. If that were all they did we would have automated it with expert systems years ago. My wife is a pathologist and I can assure that Watson isn't going to replace her before she retires. Supplement maybe but certainly not replace most of what she does.
But these days it's all about "Show me the money". There's plenty of blame to go around for this kind of thing modern ethics and integrity being what it is.
I'm curious how you think that "modern ethics and integrity" is any different than it ever was. People have been greedy for money as long as there has been money. This is nothing new and I don't expect it to ever change. There never was a good-old-days in regards to ethics and integrity.
It's better they're in private industry. They might actually accomplish something that benefits society (hence their higher value and higher pay).
You think basic research doesn't benefit society? The value of something to society isn't necessarily reflected in the salary to do it. Nobody (sane) would argue that a professional baseball player is more valuable to society than a school teacher or police officer but we pay them far more.
It really harkens back to the old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
What does that have to do with research? These people weren't hired because they are great teachers. They were hired because they were great researchers.
The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines.
Not in your lifetime they couldn't. If you think otherwise you don't actually understand what they do. Doctors aren't just differential diagnosis engines. And even if they were a differential diagnosis (which is all a diagnostic computer can give you) will just give you a set of choices and probabilities. It won't give you a definitive answer because frequently there isn't one. The human body is far more complicated than any program we have access to and you need someone who can think through problems and more importantly deal with people. Computers can help but medicine isn't just about technology.
We tend to worship the ground they walk on in the United States but at the end of the day medicine is just a trade, no different than plumbers or electricians, and nurses do the bulk of the work in your typical medical practice.
Nurses do the routine work. You don't pay a doctor to do or diagnose the routine stuff though they certainly can do that. You pay them because they will catch the unusual stuff that a nurse would miss. Doctors are specialists of a sort. If you want to take your trade analogy you could hire a general handyman to work on your plumbing but if it is anything difficult or complicated you probably want someone looking at it who is better educated on the problem at hand. You don't pay a surgeon big $ to do a routine procedure. You pay a surgeon big $ to be there in case something unusual happens. When you code on the operating table the value of their time skyrockets. My wife is a pathologist specializing in skin. Dermatologists are allowed to read their own biopsies but most send the excisions to her or someone like her for a diagnosis because she will catch things they will almost certainly miss. Melanoma for example can mimic a variety of common benign problems which a nurse or even a general practitioner doctor might easily miss. Nurses can do a lot of the things doctors can do but when they run into something subtle or unusual then THAT is when you need a doctor.