Given medical corporations raise drug prices on old drugs 10X, maybe you are gullible.
Yeah yeah drug companies are greedy, news at 11... You really think lung transplants are the same thing? Here's a clue - drugs have big capital costs to develop but cost very little to replicate. There is no way a lab grown lung is going to be cheap to manufacture or easily sold multiple times since it involves major surgery. Nobody is going to be able to afford this treatment without insurance and insurance sure as hell isn't going to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a lung that doesn't last. You're basically arguing that insurance companies aren't profit motivated.
Nobody seems to have a sense of humor, and some of the responses seem outright delusional.
Or maybe you just weren't being as funny as you think you were. Happens to all of us sometimes especially online where tone is hard to convey... Admittedly joking about people mortgaging their homes to buy a lung is tough to pull off successfully unless you are standing on a stage in a comedy club.
How long before we have to beg for lungs and mortgage our homes just to breathe?
Just until the US gets a conscience and starts treating health care as a fundamental human right and providing care to all their citizens without them risking bankruptcy. Seriously, if you have a single payer health care system like most of the civilized world this isn't a problem.
Is that like the "military-grade aluminum" Ford has been advertising as making their trucks out of now?
In that context it probably means material that is mil-spec. Just means it has certain characteristics specified by and conforming to a standard set by the military. Doesn't mean it's necessarily anything special. Milspec parts often meet other standards too though milspec parts are typically more rigorous than many other standards available.
Companies like to use this to do some promotional puffery that makes their product sound more impressive than it might otherwise but what they are saying isn't a lie and it does have some meaning.
Volume of Earth: 260,000,000,000 cubic miles. Length of Earth's orbit: 584,000,000 miles. Dividing, that results in a cross sectional area of 445 square miles for a ring around the sun, using only the materials of planet Earth. Allowing a thickness of 528 feet, that gives a ring width of 4,450 miles.
A little back of the envelope geometry doesn't equal thinking this through. You are effectively arguing the following: 1) That we could and should turn the entirety of Earth into a ring (seriously?) 2) That all the materials Earth is composed of are actually useful and adequate for such a purpose (spoiler: they aren't) 3) That a thickness and width you calculate (if true since I can't be bothered to check your math) is actually sufficient to be useful 4) That you have a means to provide adequate gravity or simulated gravity 5) You have a means to shield inhabitants from solar radiation and create an inhabitable and sustainable atmosphere 6) How any of this is economically justifiable given the almost unimaginably high cost of such a project 7) How you expect to recreate an entire ecosystem basically from scratch that is well suited to existing in such an artificial construct
Basically even if you stripped every ounce of useful material from our solar system you really would still come up short. And how you would economically justify such a project you haven't even begun to address. Seriously, it's a cool idea in the same sense that a lightsaber is cool but that doesn't make it possible to actually do.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
A dyson sphere (which you brought up) is a fictional technology. We have NO existing technology that would allow us to visit other star systems therefore everything in your argument is de-facto made up technology even by your own description. We have little more than a few thought experiments about how to visit other star systems and we can barely get into low Earth orbit economically. When we actually have a significant manned presence and sustainable economy in space then we can start talking about way out there ideas like visiting other star systems. Your claim that there is "no fundamental physics barrier" is an argument from ignorance by claiming that because something hasn't been proven definitively impossible that it must be possible.
I'm not sure what your point is here. The point that "If X exists, we should see Y. We don't see Y. So this reduces our credence in X" should be straightforward.
We have barely searched a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the universe for life. It is WAY too early to start drawing serious conclusions about what we should see based on what we've already seen since we've barely seen anything. Your argument is kind of similar to saying "we've looked at the other 7 planets in our solar system and haven't seen anything so we should conclude that life in the rest of the trillions of other galaxies is unlikely". I understand what you are saying but I think you are making a hasty generalization.
We shouldn't necessarily see them. But if any sort of megastructures are doable,the incentive for an advanced civilization to try and make them will be high.
You could make the same argument about an FTL drive but that doesn't mean it's possible under the actual laws of physics of our universe. Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's feasible to accomplish. Lightsabers are cool but good luck actually making one. And even if something is technically possible it isn't always economically realistic. We can and have sent men to the moon but we haven't figured out a way to do so that is economically sustainable so we don't do it anymore. Being an advanced civilization doesn't require the building of structures that are in all likelihood impossible to build.
Moreover, the swarm variants of Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't require intrinsically advanced materials, and don't require that much material.
I get that you really like the idea of Dyson spheres and I'll agree it's a really cool idea. But there is no evidence that any version of them is feasible outside of a science fiction book. It is a thought experiment and in all likelihood nothing more. Lots of really bright people have given the notion a lot of thought and there is no evidence that it is actually possible in the real world. And yes it would require a lot of advanced materials, even for the less resource intensive versions like the swarm. Do you have ANY idea how large even a modest sized star like our Sun is? The circumference of our Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly a billion kilometers. Where do you expect to get enough materials for even the most modest of habitable rings to exist on that sort of scale? Forget what it would need to be made of, first you have to even find that much raw material. Good luck with that.
You made the argument, so you need to provide links that support your argument. Is that hard to understand?
If you have time to argue you have time to search. Took you more time to act petulant about it than it would have to actually do the research yourself.
It is data, but it is wholly irrelevant to the question. We can detect planets, but can't tell if they support life or not from here.
That's not true actually. We can by looking at chemistry of exoplanets which we definitely can measure today. There are markers of life that can be seen from Earth. If we see certain organic molecules then we have strong evidence that life exists there. If we see life on an exoplanet that is likely how we will see it first.
Determining if we are looking at life that has formed what we would consider an industrialized society is a bit more challenging but still feasible. And if there is life then there is always the potential for "intelligent" life.
What's so terrifying about humanity being alone in the universe?
To answer that question look to what religious zealots do when they actually believe that hypothesis to be true. A lot of bad human behavior arises from us thinking we are more special than is justifiable.
Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
Only to those already predisposed to confirmation bias thinking humans are somehow special. Objectively the only thing we can actually say is that we have not yet found any evidence of life anywhere but Earth. Any further conclusions are unjustified at this time. Thinking we are "special god creatures" is an unjustifiable stroking of one's own ego that is unsupported by any verifiable evidence.
As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us. The only question is, how far away are they?
That is a reasonable theory but so far it is unsupported by evidence either for or against. I agree that it seems improbable that there isn't life elsewhere in the unimaginably vast universe but we also must acknowledge that the universe is under no obligation to conform to what we find logical.
First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones.
Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology.
Second, many stars are relatively close together.
That statement is true in a sense but misleading. The fastest spacecraft we have ever launched will take tens of thousands of years to travel even the 4.3 light years to our nearest star. "Close" when you are talking about distances between stars is in reality still an almost unimaginably vast distance so close isn't really very close.
We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations
That seems like circular reasoning. You are saying we don't have evidence of other civilizations because we don't have evidence of them trying to communicate with each other. But since such evidence would constitute proof of their existence your reasoning seems to circle back on itself unless I misunderstand where you are going with this argument.
We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres.
Why should we? We have no evidence or credible physics theory that such a structure is actually physically possible in real life. Heck, where would one get enough material to create such a structure? You could strip every planet in our solar system of every useful molecule and you still wouldn't have enough material to surround our star with a ring much less a sphere. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible in the universe we actually live in.
The Fermi Paradox is an utterly useless test. It takes variables you have no data on and then says to compute their probability.
We do have data. Quite a lot of it actually. So far all the data we have has not given any indication of life anywhere but on Earth but it is data all the same. Now the universe is a big place and we've only looked at a tiny bit of it so far but to say we have no data is simply not true.
The courts are good at individual cases that have nuance and the technicalities of jurisprudence. That is not the place to drive social agenda to solve societal problems.
As a general proposition I agree but sometimes there is no other choice. The rest of the government doesn't always act in a manner that makes social change feasible.
People exhale CO2. When the EPA or courts expands the authority of the government to regulate CO2 as a pollutant they can effectively regulate your breathing.
That's one of the more ridiculous arguments I've read in a while. No amount of breathing by humans makes CO2 a pollutant. Massive release of sequestered CO2 from burning coal and oil does make CO2 a pollutant. Anything can be a pollutant if there is enough of it to screw up the ecosystem. Do you really not understand the difference between regulating industry emissions of a chemical versus respiration? Exactly how do you think an EPA regulation will deny you access to breathing?
It is very nice to be independently wealthy and not have to worry about getting a paycheck, but for the rest of us we have to do it for a paycheck or face homelessness and possibly starvation.
You don't have to be independently wealthy to make a living doing something that you don't enjoy. If you hate IT work then go find something else to do. It's a big world with lots of opportunity.
If all available work is under such conditions, is that really a choice?
Are you seriously claiming that someone who is bright enough to find work in the tech sector will find it impossible to do something else if they put their mind to it? Possibly even something they actually enjoy doing with reasonable hours and adequate pay. Point is very few people are forced to work in IT. Arguing that they don't have a choice is really just nonsense in almost all cases.
Do I really have to explain that some people don't really give a shit about what they are doing? Sure everyone works to get paid but some people actually try to enjoy what they are doing along the way so that the job is more than just a means to get money.
I would posit that humans in fact need someone to be worse off than them as a coping mechanism for their own suffering/misfortune/whatever.
Only the more pathetic and narcissistic among us. Sadly that seems to be a rather large percent of the population. I fear people don't need that but quite a number seem to enjoy it. If we do actually need to feel better than others then that is a very sad commentary on us as a species.
Yes, you should be grateful, but you are an ungrateful self centered little shit. Common malady.
Grow up. You post some of the most ridiculous drivel on this site and then have the stones to start calling names when someone points it out. If you don't actually have a rebuttal more eloquent than calling someone names then shut up and move on to your next troll.
Yes, but the stress that tech people experience is completely fake. It REALLY doesn't matter if your work is done on time.
It does if you want to remain employed with your current company. If that doesn't matter to you then you probably aren't stressed to begin with. If anyone who worked for me expressed that attitude they would be "succeeding elsewhere" in short order.
No one is going to die if your software or network doesn't work.
I'd like to introduce you to some folks who work in medical IT who will disagree with you rather strongly. Same thing with software that controls/drives cars or airplanes or manned rockets or traffic signals or ocean navigation or food safety or electrical grids or nuclear reactor controls or.... The list is very long for things that actually do matter. Yeah, nobody probably cares if your word processor crashes but more than a few of us do things that have serious consequences.
Amazingly humans survived for thousands of years without IT or computers.
Ok we're done here. Claiming people shouldn't have stress because computers didn't exist 200 years ago is irrelevant and stupid.
Try working construction for minimum wage and not knowing where your next job will come from. Then have your blood pressure tested.
Ahh the "staving people in Africa" argument your mother made to get you to eat your vegetables. Great example of the fallacy of relative privation. Just because other people have it worse doesn't mean you should be grateful for a possibly better but still bad situation.
Tech work culture is seriously broken when 80 hour weeks and never going on vacation for any reason is encouraged and celebrated.
If you work under such conditions by choice then it is on your shoulders alone. Some people like to work those sort of hours and that's fine. Anyone who doesn't like that sort of lifestyle and chooses it anyway for more than a brief period is just doing it for a paycheck and I lack much in the way of sympathy.
As the saying goes, you can get busy building your dreams or your will help someone else build theirs.
It remains to be seen who will bear the brunt of it.
You and I will. That much is self evident. Tariffs pretty much always benefit a few at the expense of the many. Trump is doing nothing more than pandering to a political base and costing all of us in the process. If he really wanted to solve trade issues he's going about it entirely backwards.
That's practical for tenure and promotion but for every annual evaluation?
If you've asked once it's not like a lot will have changed in the last 12 months publication-wise. The work to check recent performance should be fairly minimal by comparison. And if that is too much work for an evaluation then the manager is either lazy or incompetent.
You'd suggest getting an external referee (since colleagues in the department may be biased one way or the other) for evaluations?
If you don't know what you are evaluating then absolutely yes. If you and I are both physicists then there is a good chance I know enough to properly evaluate your work. If we are in different fields then chances are you will need to ask others for their opinions. I do this all the time when evaluating my employees. If I want to know how someone is doing in a specific job that I don't know the details about, I ask their manager or someone who works with them about their work (obliquely if necessary) and how good they are.
As for getting it wrong how can you be any more certain that this external referee is likely to do a better job than those selected by a reputable journal?
The journals do not evaluate the body of work of someone. They just evaluate one document. That can provide some information but it's not remotely enough to evaluate the quality of someone's work. Likewise having lots of publications does provide any indication of quality of work. It's "easy" to get a lot of shit work published. Just looking at publication numbers and which journal without checking deeper is just being criminally lazy. It's the equivalent of a journalist watching twitter feeds and reporting that as investigative journalism.
True, but your suggested method has one peer decide.
Who said anything about one? If you want to know someone's reputation in a field you will have to get a sample size greater than one.
Slashdot Mirror
Given medical corporations raise drug prices on old drugs 10X, maybe you are gullible.
Yeah yeah drug companies are greedy, news at 11... You really think lung transplants are the same thing? Here's a clue - drugs have big capital costs to develop but cost very little to replicate. There is no way a lab grown lung is going to be cheap to manufacture or easily sold multiple times since it involves major surgery. Nobody is going to be able to afford this treatment without insurance and insurance sure as hell isn't going to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a lung that doesn't last. You're basically arguing that insurance companies aren't profit motivated.
Nobody seems to have a sense of humor, and some of the responses seem outright delusional.
Or maybe you just weren't being as funny as you think you were. Happens to all of us sometimes especially online where tone is hard to convey... Admittedly joking about people mortgaging their homes to buy a lung is tough to pull off successfully unless you are standing on a stage in a comedy club.
You're preaching to the choir. Most of us anyway. It's the republicans you have to convince.
FTFY. Though sometimes I wonder if there is much of a difference...
figuring out how to make the replacement lungs only last 1 year, so the patients have to pay over and over.
Wow, cynical much?
How long before we have to beg for lungs and mortgage our homes just to breathe?
Just until the US gets a conscience and starts treating health care as a fundamental human right and providing care to all their citizens without them risking bankruptcy. Seriously, if you have a single payer health care system like most of the civilized world this isn't a problem.
Is that like the "military-grade aluminum" Ford has been advertising as making their trucks out of now?
In that context it probably means material that is mil-spec. Just means it has certain characteristics specified by and conforming to a standard set by the military. Doesn't mean it's necessarily anything special. Milspec parts often meet other standards too though milspec parts are typically more rigorous than many other standards available.
Companies like to use this to do some promotional puffery that makes their product sound more impressive than it might otherwise but what they are saying isn't a lie and it does have some meaning.
Volume of Earth: 260,000,000,000 cubic miles.
Length of Earth's orbit: 584,000,000 miles.
Dividing, that results in a cross sectional area of 445 square miles for a ring around the sun, using only the materials of planet Earth. Allowing a thickness of 528 feet, that gives a ring width of 4,450 miles.
A little back of the envelope geometry doesn't equal thinking this through. You are effectively arguing the following:
1) That we could and should turn the entirety of Earth into a ring (seriously?)
2) That all the materials Earth is composed of are actually useful and adequate for such a purpose (spoiler: they aren't)
3) That a thickness and width you calculate (if true since I can't be bothered to check your math) is actually sufficient to be useful
4) That you have a means to provide adequate gravity or simulated gravity
5) You have a means to shield inhabitants from solar radiation and create an inhabitable and sustainable atmosphere
6) How any of this is economically justifiable given the almost unimaginably high cost of such a project
7) How you expect to recreate an entire ecosystem basically from scratch that is well suited to existing in such an artificial construct
Basically even if you stripped every ounce of useful material from our solar system you really would still come up short. And how you would economically justify such a project you haven't even begun to address. Seriously, it's a cool idea in the same sense that a lightsaber is cool but that doesn't make it possible to actually do.
No it isn't. The point is that this is something where things like nuclear propulsion should work; there's no fundamental physics barrier (unlike say with an FTL system or any other made-up technology).
A dyson sphere (which you brought up) is a fictional technology. We have NO existing technology that would allow us to visit other star systems therefore everything in your argument is de-facto made up technology even by your own description. We have little more than a few thought experiments about how to visit other star systems and we can barely get into low Earth orbit economically. When we actually have a significant manned presence and sustainable economy in space then we can start talking about way out there ideas like visiting other star systems. Your claim that there is "no fundamental physics barrier" is an argument from ignorance by claiming that because something hasn't been proven definitively impossible that it must be possible.
I'm not sure what your point is here. The point that "If X exists, we should see Y. We don't see Y. So this reduces our credence in X" should be straightforward.
We have barely searched a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the universe for life. It is WAY too early to start drawing serious conclusions about what we should see based on what we've already seen since we've barely seen anything. Your argument is kind of similar to saying "we've looked at the other 7 planets in our solar system and haven't seen anything so we should conclude that life in the rest of the trillions of other galaxies is unlikely". I understand what you are saying but I think you are making a hasty generalization.
We shouldn't necessarily see them. But if any sort of megastructures are doable,the incentive for an advanced civilization to try and make them will be high.
You could make the same argument about an FTL drive but that doesn't mean it's possible under the actual laws of physics of our universe. Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's feasible to accomplish. Lightsabers are cool but good luck actually making one. And even if something is technically possible it isn't always economically realistic. We can and have sent men to the moon but we haven't figured out a way to do so that is economically sustainable so we don't do it anymore. Being an advanced civilization doesn't require the building of structures that are in all likelihood impossible to build.
Moreover, the swarm variants of Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't require intrinsically advanced materials, and don't require that much material.
I get that you really like the idea of Dyson spheres and I'll agree it's a really cool idea. But there is no evidence that any version of them is feasible outside of a science fiction book. It is a thought experiment and in all likelihood nothing more. Lots of really bright people have given the notion a lot of thought and there is no evidence that it is actually possible in the real world. And yes it would require a lot of advanced materials, even for the less resource intensive versions like the swarm. Do you have ANY idea how large even a modest sized star like our Sun is? The circumference of our Earth's orbit around the Sun is nearly a billion kilometers. Where do you expect to get enough materials for even the most modest of habitable rings to exist on that sort of scale? Forget what it would need to be made of, first you have to even find that much raw material. Good luck with that.
You made the argument, so you need to provide links that support your argument. Is that hard to understand?
If you have time to argue you have time to search. Took you more time to act petulant about it than it would have to actually do the research yourself.
Twenty seconds on google will find you all the articles you want on exoplanet atmospheric measurements.
It is data, but it is wholly irrelevant to the question. We can detect planets, but can't tell if they support life or not from here.
That's not true actually. We can by looking at chemistry of exoplanets which we definitely can measure today. There are markers of life that can be seen from Earth. If we see certain organic molecules then we have strong evidence that life exists there. If we see life on an exoplanet that is likely how we will see it first.
Determining if we are looking at life that has formed what we would consider an industrialized society is a bit more challenging but still feasible. And if there is life then there is always the potential for "intelligent" life.
What's so terrifying about humanity being alone in the universe?
To answer that question look to what religious zealots do when they actually believe that hypothesis to be true. A lot of bad human behavior arises from us thinking we are more special than is justifiable.
Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
Only to those already predisposed to confirmation bias thinking humans are somehow special. Objectively the only thing we can actually say is that we have not yet found any evidence of life anywhere but Earth. Any further conclusions are unjustified at this time. Thinking we are "special god creatures" is an unjustifiable stroking of one's own ego that is unsupported by any verifiable evidence.
As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us. The only question is, how far away are they?
That is a reasonable theory but so far it is unsupported by evidence either for or against. I agree that it seems improbable that there isn't life elsewhere in the unimaginably vast universe but we also must acknowledge that the universe is under no obligation to conform to what we find logical.
First, there are no physics barriers to visiting other stars, purely engineering ones.
Engineering is applied physics so that statement is something of a tautology.
Second, many stars are relatively close together.
That statement is true in a sense but misleading. The fastest spacecraft we have ever launched will take tens of thousands of years to travel even the 4.3 light years to our nearest star. "Close" when you are talking about distances between stars is in reality still an almost unimaginably vast distance so close isn't really very close.
We see no attempts by anyone to apparently communicate with other civilizations
That seems like circular reasoning. You are saying we don't have evidence of other civilizations because we don't have evidence of them trying to communicate with each other. But since such evidence would constitute proof of their existence your reasoning seems to circle back on itself unless I misunderstand where you are going with this argument.
We also see no signs of any sort of megastructures like Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres.
Why should we? We have no evidence or credible physics theory that such a structure is actually physically possible in real life. Heck, where would one get enough material to create such a structure? You could strip every planet in our solar system of every useful molecule and you still wouldn't have enough material to surround our star with a ring much less a sphere. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible in the universe we actually live in.
The Fermi Paradox is an utterly useless test. It takes variables you have no data on and then says to compute their probability.
We do have data. Quite a lot of it actually. So far all the data we have has not given any indication of life anywhere but on Earth but it is data all the same. Now the universe is a big place and we've only looked at a tiny bit of it so far but to say we have no data is simply not true.
The courts are good at individual cases that have nuance and the technicalities of jurisprudence. That is not the place to drive social agenda to solve societal problems.
As a general proposition I agree but sometimes there is no other choice. The rest of the government doesn't always act in a manner that makes social change feasible.
People exhale CO2. When the EPA or courts expands the authority of the government to regulate CO2 as a pollutant they can effectively regulate your breathing.
That's one of the more ridiculous arguments I've read in a while. No amount of breathing by humans makes CO2 a pollutant. Massive release of sequestered CO2 from burning coal and oil does make CO2 a pollutant. Anything can be a pollutant if there is enough of it to screw up the ecosystem. Do you really not understand the difference between regulating industry emissions of a chemical versus respiration? Exactly how do you think an EPA regulation will deny you access to breathing?
It is very nice to be independently wealthy and not have to worry about getting a paycheck, but for the rest of us we have to do it for a paycheck or face homelessness and possibly starvation.
You don't have to be independently wealthy to make a living doing something that you don't enjoy. If you hate IT work then go find something else to do. It's a big world with lots of opportunity.
If all available work is under such conditions, is that really a choice?
Are you seriously claiming that someone who is bright enough to find work in the tech sector will find it impossible to do something else if they put their mind to it? Possibly even something they actually enjoy doing with reasonable hours and adequate pay. Point is very few people are forced to work in IT. Arguing that they don't have a choice is really just nonsense in almost all cases.
Who ISNT working for a paycheck?
Do I really have to explain that some people don't really give a shit about what they are doing? Sure everyone works to get paid but some people actually try to enjoy what they are doing along the way so that the job is more than just a means to get money.
I would posit that humans in fact need someone to be worse off than them as a coping mechanism for their own suffering/misfortune/whatever.
Only the more pathetic and narcissistic among us. Sadly that seems to be a rather large percent of the population. I fear people don't need that but quite a number seem to enjoy it. If we do actually need to feel better than others then that is a very sad commentary on us as a species.
Yes, you should be grateful, but you are an ungrateful self centered little shit. Common malady.
Grow up. You post some of the most ridiculous drivel on this site and then have the stones to start calling names when someone points it out. If you don't actually have a rebuttal more eloquent than calling someone names then shut up and move on to your next troll.
Yes, but the stress that tech people experience is completely fake. It REALLY doesn't matter if your work is done on time.
It does if you want to remain employed with your current company. If that doesn't matter to you then you probably aren't stressed to begin with. If anyone who worked for me expressed that attitude they would be "succeeding elsewhere" in short order.
No one is going to die if your software or network doesn't work.
I'd like to introduce you to some folks who work in medical IT who will disagree with you rather strongly. Same thing with software that controls/drives cars or airplanes or manned rockets or traffic signals or ocean navigation or food safety or electrical grids or nuclear reactor controls or.... The list is very long for things that actually do matter. Yeah, nobody probably cares if your word processor crashes but more than a few of us do things that have serious consequences.
Amazingly humans survived for thousands of years without IT or computers.
Ok we're done here. Claiming people shouldn't have stress because computers didn't exist 200 years ago is irrelevant and stupid.
Try working construction for minimum wage and not knowing where your next job will come from. Then have your blood pressure tested.
Ahh the "staving people in Africa" argument your mother made to get you to eat your vegetables. Great example of the fallacy of relative privation. Just because other people have it worse doesn't mean you should be grateful for a possibly better but still bad situation.
Tech work culture is seriously broken when 80 hour weeks and never going on vacation for any reason is encouraged and celebrated.
If you work under such conditions by choice then it is on your shoulders alone. Some people like to work those sort of hours and that's fine. Anyone who doesn't like that sort of lifestyle and chooses it anyway for more than a brief period is just doing it for a paycheck and I lack much in the way of sympathy.
As the saying goes, you can get busy building your dreams or your will help someone else build theirs.
It remains to be seen who will bear the brunt of it.
You and I will. That much is self evident. Tariffs pretty much always benefit a few at the expense of the many. Trump is doing nothing more than pandering to a political base and costing all of us in the process. If he really wanted to solve trade issues he's going about it entirely backwards.
That's practical for tenure and promotion but for every annual evaluation?
If you've asked once it's not like a lot will have changed in the last 12 months publication-wise. The work to check recent performance should be fairly minimal by comparison. And if that is too much work for an evaluation then the manager is either lazy or incompetent.
You'd suggest getting an external referee (since colleagues in the department may be biased one way or the other) for evaluations?
If you don't know what you are evaluating then absolutely yes. If you and I are both physicists then there is a good chance I know enough to properly evaluate your work. If we are in different fields then chances are you will need to ask others for their opinions. I do this all the time when evaluating my employees. If I want to know how someone is doing in a specific job that I don't know the details about, I ask their manager or someone who works with them about their work (obliquely if necessary) and how good they are.
As for getting it wrong how can you be any more certain that this external referee is likely to do a better job than those selected by a reputable journal?
The journals do not evaluate the body of work of someone. They just evaluate one document. That can provide some information but it's not remotely enough to evaluate the quality of someone's work. Likewise having lots of publications does provide any indication of quality of work. It's "easy" to get a lot of shit work published. Just looking at publication numbers and which journal without checking deeper is just being criminally lazy. It's the equivalent of a journalist watching twitter feeds and reporting that as investigative journalism.
True, but your suggested method has one peer decide.
Who said anything about one? If you want to know someone's reputation in a field you will have to get a sample size greater than one.