ebg13 (u/ebg13) - Readit News

ebg13 commented on Build your own bamboo bike kit bamboobicycleclub.org/... · Posted by u/Lio

Shared404 · 5 years ago

> That instrument had better be a steel triangle.

Played percussion in high school band. I have a feeling taking care of a triangle is much more intense than you think it is.

ebg13 · 5 years ago

You're probably right. I don't know what would be a sane instrument to compare to bicycle care though. Is it possible to play music with a giant rock? It's weird seeing this kind of language about a classic utilitarian device that has stood the test of time exactly because it requires very little care or maintenance.

ebg13 commented on Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sasvari

sudosteph · 5 years ago

I'm glad to hear you did get out and did well for yourself. Thanks for explaining it from your perspective. As much as you were personally influenced by the people surrounding you - it was probably the exact same dynamic, but opposite (the people around me taught me was that academia was a debt-trap or a luxury for elites who didn't want to be demeaned by real jobs) and that is likely the source of my bewilderment and even low-grade bias against the field as a whole. I can see how if you are someone who respects academics, and listened to respected academics (who necessarily experienced success) - how that would lead you down a totally different path. Seems similar to what I hear about people who try to get into acting in Hollywood - they always listen to the people who make it.

Feel you about unionizing though. I'm in the southern US, and we don't see a lot success here. Still, I'm an IWW member, and my local hospital just successfully unionized a few months back - so it's something I do truly believe is worth continuing to fight for.

ebg13 · 5 years ago

Thanks. It's hard to express how literally almost everyone who enters a PhD program is coming right out of undergrad and is still in many ways a child. There are no good decisions because making good decisions depends on having good insight and information and guidance, and the only people who can give good insight to the next set of children are either in therapy or quit, but the only people who get asked for guidance are the small fraction who made it.

And the entire system depends on funneling more children into the meat grinder so they have the most perverse incentive to just keep lying about everything. Graduate students are used and abused for a huge amount of lecturing, guiding, and grading so that schools don't have to pay for professors, so that they can have more millionaire administrators and football coaches and replace the flowers in the quad every week and other weirdly expensive stupid shit instead of providing basic healthcare or a decent wage for their lecturers. And then people are surprised to hear that the same schools that have grad students doing a ton of the work for peanuts don't have professor positions available at the end.

ebg13 commented on Build your own bamboo bike kit bamboobicycleclub.org/... · Posted by u/Lio

ebg13 · 5 years ago

This seems like a fun, slightly expensive craft project but not a serious bicycle. Or maybe the problem is that it's a little _too_ serious of a bicycle.

$400 for just some tubes, glue, and dropouts, plus another $800-$2500 for the other parts needed to turn the frame into an actual bicycle, plus however much you value several days of labor, and then from their FAQ...

> How long will a bamboo bike frame last? It’s difficult to say. If you care for your bike as you would for a musical instrument...

Care for your bike like a musical instrument?! They can't be serious. That instrument had better be a steel triangle.

> Are Bamboo Bicycles strong enough? Absolutely! Over the hundreds of bamboo bikes built, they have travelled thousands of miles

Is that 10 miles each? That's not very reassuring.

> If you crash, won’t you get splinters? Likely, yes

Oh fun.

ebg13 commented on Show HN: Find the safest well lit walking route between two locations github.com/mfbx9da4/brigh... · Posted by u/mfbx9da4

ebg13 · 5 years ago

Nice idea and implementation!

In case you plan to move this from hackathon experiment to real product, to me the second letter in the logo splash (first image in the readme) looks like an "l" instead of the "r" that it's supposed to be. So I first read it as "BlightPath" which is probably not desired.

ebg13 commented on Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sasvari

NalNezumi · 5 years ago

I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)

I met one person at my Master's degree lab who went on to PhD, he said his childhood dream was to be a professor (and his father was a professor). I also have a father that is a professor (and have been very curious about PhD - although that window is getting narrower as I'm getting closer to 30:s) but he have multiple times told me that "it's not worth it", "it's a waste of time, the opportunity cost lost is too high", yet in my field I often see job post that requires a PhD, so I get mixed signals.

ebg13 · 5 years ago

> I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)

Bluntly, if your goal is to become a professor, don't. With 99.99% certainty, you will not become a professor and the opportunity cost is extremely high.

Almost nobody with a PhD who dreams of being a professor ever actually gets to be. Most quit or only ever become adjuncts, and, in the US at least, adjuncts earn less than minimum wage and get zero respect from anyone. Most likely you will be abused by institution after institution who will keep telling you how important your dream is while stringing you along and paying you next to nothing. Or you will quit. Or you will have a mental breakdown.

If you can see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, do literally anything else. If you can't see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, spend some more time thinking about it.

If you're independently wealthy and don't really need to succeed at the goal to live a happy life of luxury, then definitely go for it.

ebg13 commented on Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sasvari

quickthrower2 · 5 years ago

> I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.

Early startups?

ebg13 · 5 years ago

Startups tend to at least pay you for your time and effort, I think? But I wouldn't call startup culture healthy either.

ebg13 commented on Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sasvari

sudosteph · 5 years ago

On a personal level, I feel empathy for you and your struggling peers. You should not hate your life that severely, no matter what your line of work is. And it's not right to be lied to by people who should be looking for out for you.

But to be honest - as someone who was born and raised working class and has a perspective colored by that - I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself. Why don't you quit and learn a skill that's actually in demand? Is it just sunk-cost fallacy? Or do you feel that hard work and some degree of intelligence entitles you to a career that's meaningful, respectable, ethical, and well-paid - regardless of it's value and demand as determined by the rest of the world?

It's hard to say, but either your position is more valuable than you're getting paid for - which means you all need to unionize, or it's not actually that valuable and you need to quit. Or maybe it's worth exactly what you're getting paid, because so many others will line up right behind you, and take those terrible odds because they like the environment / self-pride / respectability they get from working in academia.

ebg13 · 5 years ago

> Why don't you quit

I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles.

> Is it just sunk-cost fallacy?

Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-lifetime shot is normal and common. But it isn't. It isn't normal. What's normal is failing to make it after giving 7 years of your life for less than minimum wage because there are 1000 applicants for every hyper-specialized position and almost all of them have more experience than freshly-defended-and-posted you, even if you're coming out of Harvard or Yale. But most people at the bottom never see this until it's too late, because nobody at the top talks about this ever. Worse, people at the top constantly lie about it or dismiss how bad everything is because _they_ made it and don't see what's so bad from where they are. They're all stuck in pre-2009 mindsets before available job postings completely fell off a cliff and never recovered.

To pervert a common expression, psychological warfare is a hell of a drug.

> which means you all need to unionize

This does happen, but, I don't know where you live, culture in the US is extremely hostile to unionization. Hell, the NLRB only decided that graduate students qualified as employees and were thus _allowed_ to unionize in 2016 after more than a decade of saying otherwise.

ebg13 commented on Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/sasvari

ebg13 · 5 years ago

Postgraduate student depression and suicidality is at horrifying proportions. The universities don't care. No one cares. Academia is super fucked and super fucked up, and it just keeps marching onward with blindfold on and fingers in ears, yelling "LA LA LA LA" as loud as possible.

Academic positions are basically gone. Whatever didn't vanish completely after the 2009 recession is definitely gone now. Universities continue to purge full professorship as a possibility and continue to shovel more work for less pay onto adjuncts and graduate students making less than minimum wage. And then they put on a big smile for the kids and say "One day you will be a college professor. Look how nice it is. You should join us." A huge lie. A huge malicious pyramid scheme of a scam. Every program churns out PhDs by the dozens every year. Which academic positions are they going to fill? Which of their advisors are retiring? There aren't any positions. Nobody is retiring.

And if you think that _science_ is bad, try a non-science field. There's lots of machines being built out there in the world. There's not a lot of people these days giving enough shits to pay historians.

I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.

ebg13 commented on MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, says she gave $4.2B to charity cbsnews.com/news/mackenzi... · Posted by u/neom

ve55 · 5 years ago

That's true, but a charity doesn't (usually) actually use the stock - they would sell it to spend it when they needed the money, and I think (perhaps I'm not correct here since I don't have data) they generally sell equities instantly post-donation, with the main purpose of donating stock instead of cash being for personal tax purposes.

ebg13 · 5 years ago

Many charities keep their resources in investment structures. These are often called endowments.

> a charity doesn't (usually) actually use the stock - they would sell it to spend it when they needed the money

It sounds like that means that withholding the money in order to make it grow better wouldn't actually help them then because then they wouldn't be able to spend it when needed.

ebg13 commented on MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, says she gave $4.2B to charity cbsnews.com/news/mackenzi... · Posted by u/neom

ve55 · 5 years ago

One thing that I wish was considered more often when looking at effective philanthropy is the opportunity cost of the money in terms of amount donated over time.

For example, assume someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos had donated all of their money (liquidating their shares however possible) the moment their companies went public. It's tough to say that this would have been a better result, since the amount donated would have been a small fraction in comparison to what could have been; their donations would have been a drop in the bucket.

Given certain people (and/or corporations) have historically allocated capital very effectively (and, for example, that the annual returns of AMZN/MSFT/others have been very good for decades and obviously far surpass inflation+charity efficiency scaling), is it not more effective altruism for those like Bezos and Scott to keep their wealth compounding as effectively as possible, and then donate it much later on, perhaps in a few decades?

I understand that the idea of this may sound unappealing for many reasons, but I rarely hear good counter-arguments for why it shouldn't be done. I apply this to myself personally, and rather than donate large amounts of my income now, I'd like to be able to donate 100x the amount (or whatever it may be) in 30-70 years.

(edit: After reading some great responses, I do think the best counter-argument is perhaps that of "sure you can compound wealth and donate later, or you can donate to something so effective that it compounds (e.g. enables more people to live and accomplish things, which could compound at a higher growth rate). I think this is the best point to mention in response to what I wrote, but I don't know of any analysis that backs it up with hard numbers - do we have charities that we can demonstrate actually cause compounding to happen this well? It's difficult since we'd need to accurately model future compounding returns from them to get the types of answers that we'd want.)

ebg13 · 5 years ago

> is it not more effective altruism for those like Bezos and Scott to keep their wealth compounding as effectively as possible, and then donate it much later on, perhaps in a few decades?

You can donate stock. Or, if desired, the charity can convert your cash back into stock. Or you can transfer the stock into a trust that the charity controls.