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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.
Passive Income has been outpacing earned income for decades. The best job to have is a giant pile of money in a stock account. You barely even have to trade it. Blue Chip stocks are generating double digit returns. All off other people’s labor.
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 kiss ass so I can get rich while my boss gets richer off me. Perhaps I’ll work harder with a gun in my back for a bowl of rice a day.
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.
In a sane world, automating away tedious work would be an unqualified good. Too bad we live in a capitalist clown world where rich assholes are able to capture 120% of the benefits of automation, leaving regular people to make up the difference.
Computer science is no more evil than most of the industries on the chart; they all offer ethical jobs as well, they just tend not to pay as well as the evil ones
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
Geologists do sometimes blow stuff up
Then when you go to grad school you realize you have to like all of them.
“Do you collect locks?” is also a good one.
I never heard of LockPickingGeologist
He’s on YouTube
Came here to say I felt under represented lol
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 :)
:|
:)
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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 :)
Almost all of solvents are made from petrochemicals, so it’s a distinction without difference. Few exceptions (bioethanol, MeTHF, DMSO maybe) also require obscene amounts of energy to prepare
What makes acetone tick as a solvent is the fact that most of phenol is used up immediately for bisphenol A, and this leaves 1eq of acetone from cumene process unused (or cyclohexanone, and this leaves all acetone unused). In some way, acetone is a waste product and that’s why PMMA or isophorone diamine is a thing
Just it’s low toxicity, the fact it’s non-chlorinated and sane boiling point makes acetone a pretty green solvent by comparison
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.
I’m under the impression that it’s half math half psychology of groups.
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.
That’s a great way to put it. The ecology of money goods and services.
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.
You could literally apply this nonsensical logic to any other field that uses maths and say “it’s mathematics, not X”. This is a non-argument.
“Policy Making is Politics”, politicians implement policies, but the ones behind the scenes who actually do the math to optimise these policies and advise politicians are economists.
“Conclusion-Driven” this is just plain false. There is an overwhelming amount of empiricism in the economics field.
“Economists have predicted 8 of the last 2 Recessions” … and have learned from these mistakes. These were described and studied in detail in my course, and you then go on to say that macroeconomics do not seem to be falsifiable. Yes there are no ways to ethically have experiments in economics, but there are plenty of workarounds to not being able to experiment. Natural experiments are rare but they do exist, as well as a myriad of other data science methods to derive conclusions from real life scenarios.
Finally, “when I worked in Finance”. Finance is a single field of economics, it does not encompass all there is to learn from economics. There is also a conflation from those who study finance courses that what is taught in economics courses is similar. It isn’t. Economics is a STEM field, while finance is a business field.
None of that makes sense.
You’re literally not using Logic (for example “we are improving” does not logically follow from “we make mistakes”), arguing against the very opposite of what I said, constructing straw-men from things I did not say so that you tear them down and trying to support your claims on one thing by making unsupported claims on a different thing.
That shit is political speech, not analysis.
Learning from mistakes is an improvement. That you’re mad about it doesn’t make it any less true. And clearly you don’t know what straw-men are given I’ve quoted you in my reply.
The claim “they learned from their mistakes” does not follow from “they made mistakes” and hence is not supported by it - for example, it’s quite common for people to make a mistake and then derive the wrong conclusion for why, hence not learning from it. You’re literally ignoring the part I disputed in your original statement (that making mistakes does not always lead to learning from them) and instead addressing something I did not dispute at all (that learning is an improvement) - absolutely, learning is an improvement, shame that “learning from one’s mistakes” is a stated desire on how things should be from Pop Culture (i.e. “you should learn from your mistakes”), rather than an observed and confirmed causal relation that’s always true.
Again, shit that isn’t Logic. You adding a claim of madness for my personality really just drives down the point on that.
As for the straw-man, selective picking of what somebody else wrote (with or without the inclusion of selective quoting) “enriched” by affirmations of your own that go beyond what the other person wrote and are not supported or even implied by it, is literally the most common way to build straw-men.
Yes. In the heirarchy of science, it ranks just below literature.
Having done a degree, yes. It’s entirely empirical.
It falls into both Science and Math
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Not only that, but it apparently doesn’t even involve math anymore!
Hey, if biology qualifies, why not that?
“Frickin’ beautiful.”
Moment of silence for those who thought environmental science doesn’t have maths. (No money is true though.)
Economics is not real bro
Yeah but what if we imagine it’s real and convince everyone to believe it too. Surely nothing will go wrong!
I’m kind of joking, if you want legit economics check out Mike Hudson and other MMT authors or preferably become a communist. Mainstream economists live to justify rent seeking by the ruling class. They don’t distinguish between production and rents and debts etc
I would recommend checking out David Ellerman. He shows that workers get 0% the property rights to what they produce positive and negative violating the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match @sciencememes
Economics just means studying how we distribute limited goods. It breaks down when goods aren’t limited (or rather, we have more of it than we can reasonably use), but we’re not quite at that level of post-scarcity for most things. Though we might be close enough to cover the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Economics as a practical discipline tends to assume capitalism. Economics can still be valid without assuming capitalism. There are tons of non-capitalist modes of distributing limited goods.
The assumption of capitalist-like structures is for a good reason. Because there is literally zero practical evidence that scarcity can exist without them in scalable economies. If you require scalability in the presence of scarcity, you will have markets, you will have currency, you will have competition, you will have investment, and so forth. At best these things can be mediated by centrally planned state capitalism. But pretending like this is not just another brand of harm reduction capitalism is rhetorically counterproductive.
The overwhelming consensus of the past century regarding Marxist economic theory is that it is incomplete at best because it takes a very naive view of scarcity. Where Marx requires revolution and then a bunch of hand waving, modern revisionism requires harm reduction and the gradual whittling down of scarcity over time. Historical materialism is certainly a pretty useful economic lens, but Marx really goes off the rails in the prescriptive conclusions he draws from that analytical framework.
Marx ≠ anti-capitalism
There are other modern anti-capitalist argument derived from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.
Markets ≠ capitalism
In postcapitalism, we can use markets where appropriate. We have practical examples of non-capitalist firms with worker coops and 100% ESOPs.
There are theoretical mechanisms for collective ownership that can be shown to be efficient like COST.
There are theoretical non-market democratic public goods funding mechanisms
Yes of course there are syndicalist models as well but these things are still fundamentally different approaches to harm reduction. Capitalism is a boogie man bad word for a number of different economic forces which are inevitable in the face of scarcity. Don’t get caught up in linguistic pigeonholes. The point is that we seek to meditate and mitigate these forces, not that we worship some particular dogma which pretends they can be eliminated.
Marx is incomplete. That doesn’t mean non-capitalist economics stopped with Marx.
Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying, but this is what MLs tend to believe.
I mean mainstream economics is a farce. MMT at least approaches sanity. Yeah you need Marxism-Leninism but there aren’t many of those economists in Western academia.
You’re confusing the study of economics with specific economic ideologies. Clearly you’ve never studied the subject and are very much biased.
I’ve studied economics as a discipline too much not to acknowledge its institutional biases. The statement “economics isn’t real bro” is a joke, but it’s a joke about how bad the state of the academy is in promoting neoliberal economics.
If that weren’t true it wouldn’t be powerful enough to turn Argentina into a fourth world nation. Milei is a product of these academic institutions.
If you actually went to or taught at a university that eludes these biases like the Braudel fans at Binghampton, you wouldn’t be scolding me for making a joke about how stupid most economics degrees render people.
This is what you claim to have done: “a joke about how bad the state of the academy is in promoting neoliberal economics”
And this is what you actually said: “Economics is not real bro”
I shouldn’t need to spell it out any further than that.
Economics departments are not real bro
The ideology is often implicit in how the model is explained. For example, 2 simple facts that go unmentioned.
- Only persons can be responsible for anything. Things, no matter how causally efficacious, can’t be responsible for what is done with them
- The employer receives 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs. The workers qua employees get 0% legal claim on that. This fact is obfuscated using the pie metaphor
Sure, in theory, that is what it should be about. In practice, many economists bias the theories they develop to make sure the conclude in favor of their own ideological biases. Often, metaphors are treated as deep truths while simple facts are treated as superficial and ignored or even obfuscated due to their ideological implications if they were plainly stated @science_memes
Of course a hexbear tankie would think that. Sincerely hope you’re joking, but maybe I shouldn’t hope to not get severely disappointed.
That’s cool dude, except you worship it like a religion. Did you know your GDP numbers count rents and debts the same as production?
Did you know that’s just one possible economic model in the field of economics?
If you follow the flowchart and dive into most economics departments you will encounter what I’m talking about.
What are you talking about Keynesian liberals or something? I do like to read Adam Tooze to see him close in on an interesting point only to veer wildly. Foreign Policy in general has some interesting writers if you want to mine the most advanced liberal cope.
The model of economics I’m describing is the one which has been most heavily promoted by the west, neoliberalism, it has been used to dissolve the social welfare state which was set up to compete with the socialist bloc since defeating its chief rival and counterbalance in the USSR. It’s an ideological persuasion that works along with coercion and subterfuge to eliminate capital controls and suppress the masses with starvation and crackdowns, especially in peripheral countries which are starting to establish socialistic policies or nationalize natural resources. Look at Chile for a perfect example of liberal economics in practice.
I am aware of plenty of different non-Marxist models of economics and none of them are great because they treat various sectors of production wrong. China and Vietnam have their shit all figured out that’s why finance capital and food aid can’t decimate their agricultural production and then extort them into unfavorable IMF deals.
I think you are conflating performance of economic models with the study of economic systems. Economics is literally just the study of a real phenomenon that occurs in the world. It’s a valid study to try and understand why it operates the way it does.
Most economics degrees expose people to the toxic neoliberalism I’m joking about in the intial reply though. It’s been weaponized against the third world to horrible effect.
Like 90% of economics is completely divorced from real phenomenons.
Have you actually been to rural China by any chance?
Which is why it’s explained in economic courses beyond your baseless ideas that there are better models to calculate standards of living than GDP. But you’d never know that. Because you know nothing of economics.
Dude you are not going to get better results by looking at further cherry-picked statistics from first world countries. The standard of living in the first world is collapsing because of finance capital and economics as a science there exists to cope about it.
It’s almost like that’s one way of measuring economic output and not the only way.
GDP is meant to drive down variance by being a relatively simple thing to measure, and therefore provide a consistent means of tracking long term trends.
I’m no fan of Hexies but economics - at least as understood by neoliberals - is not real.
Economics gathers and interprets data like any other STEM field, don’t know what else to tell you. The stuff I learned in my degree is very much real.
Economics treats metaphors as deep truths while treating simple facts as superficial. An example of this is in presentations of MP theory where the pie metaphor is emphasized while the actual structure of property rights and liabilities is ignored and obfuscated @science_memes
After indirect
Do you want to feel like you are in a secret society? Yes -> actuarial sciences
There could be one more to differentiate engineers from architects. Do you like to solve problems (engineer) or create them (architect)? Fun flowchart!
That is literally the path I took to become an Env. Scientist
Ah, a fellow poor with no hope. How goes it!?
😭
Same for computer science
It got me
You know it’s a complete and proper list because it excludes that pseudo-science Geology.
Geology is just a specialized field of chemistry. Biology too for that matter.
Well and chemistry is just applied electron physics
We could just skip a few steps down the list and agree it all just comes down to maths.
Nope. The most important difference: You cannot prove anything in physics. Only in maths, you have 100% certain proofs.
Exactly!
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Geologists all end up pulling oil out of the ground.
Not this one. Environmental scientists end up cleaning up after them.
