To be clear: you like money, but you will not earn money.
Poor and middle-income people earn money. Rich people just take it from the people who earn it.
30 years ago when I started heading down the computer science path, nothing about it seemed evil.
Honestly at this point in my software career (~10 years), it’s not evil per se, but I don’t feel great about essentially existing to help rich people (VCs, PE, etc.) get richer. But I suppose that’s a problem that isn’t limited to IT.
Certainly not limited to IT. One of my professors from many years was an aerospace engineer1. He recounts to us the time that he busted his ass on some design for a long time and managed to make some huge cost savings. And then after it was done he realized that all he really did with his extra hard work was help some executives and stockholders get a bit richer. Not long after that he switched to education.
1Not in the defense industry
I’ve had this thought for a while and I definitely agree that a lot of software I’ve built is a net negative to society as a whole and the only reason why I get paid as well as I do is because I’m helping rich assholes suck value out of society more efficiently.
For instance, I’ve worked on CMSs that automated 90% of the processes for medium-large insurance companies. Sure, it may result in a marginal price reduction for insureds (lol), but it almost certainly has led to fewer staff being hired to the benefit of the overlords. If more and more middle-class white-collar jobs gets replaced by software, that helps put downward pressure on wages. At the end of it all, are the marginally lower prices worth it to society, when everyone has a lower wage or no well paying job forcing them to participate in the gig economy and such?
It’s a depressing thought, and I’ve been trying to break into research engineering roles or something of the sort to get away from my current role but it’s been an uphill task.
I feel like I mostly got away with it without being evil thus far. I ended up working for a foundation and the team I’m in builds internet access (and layer 2 transport) for institutions of higher education. But maybe network engineering isn’t really the typical outcome, most of my friends became developers.
Did you try any of these and not like it? Yes -> geology
Should be a subbranch of “ambivalent towards safety” - How do you like to endanger yourself -> Blowing things up = Chem Eng or Hit things with hammers = Geology
accurate, and for the record, EPA, you can take my DCM wash bottle out of my DEAD DEGREASED HANDS
Like, so what if we store our tBuLi with other low-flash point flammables? And pyrophoric oxidizers? In the same bin? That’s stuck in a block of ice in the 30-year-old freezer because it hasn’t ever been de-iced?
What if the power goes out for a long period of time and the tBuLi goes for a swim? Or we say you have to de-ice the freezer?
Haha sounds crazy. And, I wouldn’t have to do the shitty quench before disposal. Or work on that project anymore.
Because you’re injured or because PI fires you?
Haha, yeah :)
:|
:)
:|
Oh, while you’re here, does this still smell like DCM? I can’t tell if I rotavapped it all off and the NMR tubes all need aqua regia (sorry my b).
Aqua regia isn’t even that scary. Try pipetting pure bromine while it shoots itself out from constantly evaporating
Aqua regia ain’t no piranha, and also ain’t the most concerning thing in my post lol.
Ah bromine. Super dense, low MW, and low bp, all making dosing accurate amounts a heroic feat. If you store your bromine cold, you can precool the pipette by sucking up and spitting out a few times before transfering, which helps cut down the vapor.
Like, so what if we store our tBuLi with other low-flash point flammables? And pyrophoric oxidizers? In the same bin? That’s stuck in a block of ice because in the 30-year-old freezer because it hasn’t ever been de-iced?
That’s just bad management and you shouldn’t store tBuLi that long anyway because it’ll decompose. You shouldn’t put it in freezer either
Oh, while you’re here, does this still smell like DCM? I can’t tell if I rotavapped it all off and the NMR tubes all need aqua regia (sorry my b).
just put it on high vacuum
What are you working with that requires aqua regia to clean NMR tubes? I’ve only had to use piranha once in a decade, while cleaning things that acetone, DCM, and basic ethanol won’t touch, and this was just after moving to another lab
That’s just bad management / just put it on high vacuum
Yes. The whole thing is satirizing the “Safety -> Against” bit. Each piece, though exaggerated for effect, has a basis in something I’ve seen over the years.
Regarding NMR tubes though, the answer in my old group was precious metal complexes, which have a tendency to mirror out once they’ve done their bit. Or just existed for too long; a lot of them were touchy. The mirror tends to resist solvents and scrubbing. Nitric acid alone sometimes was enough to remove it depending on the metal, but often not. At some point the cost, effort, and danger are all supposed to outweigh just binning the lot and buying new tubes, but my PI was allergic to buying new things.
Look, I’m all for green chemistry, and I’ll switch to using safer, more environmentally friendly reagents and solvents the second they are close to the efficacy of the real deal.
Until then, leave my acetone and heavy-metal catalysts alone!
Acetone is rather green (7 in GSK solvent guide), but I for one haven’t used heavy metal catalysts in a year, and more if you don’t count palladium
Depends what is meant by green. Acetone is decent for health and safety (flammability notwithstanding) but is produced from petrochemicals and tied to the production of phenol (petroleum -> benzene and propane (or natural gas -> propane), propane -> propylene, benzene + propylene -> cumene, cumene + O2 -> phenol + acetone). Not much chlorophyll involved. Also has somewhere between a moderate to obscene CO2 burden depending on how you draw that box in and around the oil industry, but so do most commodity chemicals.
I for one haven’t used heavy metal catalysts in a year
Maybe not directly, but a lot of commodity chemicals rely on some truly vile metal mixtures for catalysis :)
When I find a solvent on pubchem that has the taste characterized by some mad lad from the 1800s, it makes me want to try it.
You say THF is spicy water? Now I’m curious. We must confirm this claim.
I hear ether smells good. We must confirm this claim.
These fancy new box cutters are safe and cannot cut your hand. We must confirm this claim.
Economics is STEM???
Economics is science but with resources.
Economics is like ecology for the financial / resource world.
Yeah, part of ecology looks at relationships between groups of organisms, and economics looks at relationships between economic agents. Those relationships require understanding of behaviours and motivations of those groups.
Well, whilst it’s basically Astrology, it does decorate itself heavily with Mathematics.
(A more serious answer is: it depends on which part within Economics one is talking about. For example Behavioural Economics does use the Scientific Method).
Econometrics, data science, behavioural economics, game theory, micro and macroeconomics, public policy, all of it uses the scientific method and is empirical.
Could you clarify which part of economics you believe is not scientific?
First, Game Theory is from Mathematics, not Economics.
Next, Policy Making is Politics, not Economics. Sure, many Economists end up working in it, but I wouldn’t actually blame Economics for all the Conclusion-Driven Model Crafting that goes on in there - that abuse of Mathematics and modelling to overwhelm and swindle “people who aren’t good at maths” is a perversion of even Economics.
As for the rest, the lack of reliability of central bank forecasts of thing such as GDP Growth and Inflation would indicate that whatever they used to base their forecasts on isn’t reliable enough for publishing.
As the saying goes, Economists have predicted 8 of the last 2 Recessions.
Back in the day when I worked in Finance and followed those things, it was quite extraordinary just how much of that was flipped around and re-explained when the final numbers came out and things turned out to be very different from earlier forecasts.
More in general a lot, if not most, of Macroeconomics does not seem to be Falsifiable: whenever the mathematical models created based on the various theories in Macroeconomics fail to predict what happens (often by a huge distance) it’s invariably blamed on “unexpected factors” - if “unexpected factors” are making your models fail by a huge distance you don’t really have a theory that explains reality and are really just practicing what’s at best semi-guided guessing, same as how in the old days people predicted the weather for the next day by the color of the sunset and how much the bones of old sailors were hurting.
