Caltech glassblower's retirement has scientists sighing (2016)
beta.latimes.com
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Mediocrity: it takes a lot less time and most people won’t notice the difference until it’s too late.
We see this scarcity in other industries that require traditional master/journeyman/apprentice systems, like master machinists, masons, or plasterers. That there is are no baseline jobs, like light bulb manufacturing in glassblowing, that allow a sufficient pool of talent to acrue so that the very best, the "10x" artisans, can be found. That pool also gives a fallback so that people who are trained but do not possess the talent or dedication to become masters can still be gainfully employed.
It's funny how people are willing to bet against the lottery on their whole career.
Then again... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
And we as humans control "the market". It's not some abstract impossible-to-reason-with force. The better that we understand this, the better our economies will work.
I'd say instead "that's how the market DOESN'T work" since clearly there are a lot of market failures - master glass blowers being just an example.
So if you spread the contract out over ~30 years or so, the numbers look far different.
[1]: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/15126571/study-mlb-averag... [2]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070709131254.h...
If it was known 10+ years ago that Caltechs glassblower made 300-500k a year, you can bet they wouldn't be in this situation now.
The million dollar salaries for baseball players entice entire generations of kids and teens to at least "try" the sport. It keeps the good ones motivated and the few elite athletes a payout for a lifetime of work.
We could argue whether this is all worth it for entertainment, but you can't argue with the compensation model, it flat out works. It attracts and retains the absolute best people in the world at that specific job.
1) It's a career with extremely limited options for progression, and you might work in the same place your entire life, or perhaps have a small handful of jobs (an increasingly alien concept in today's job market, and one that might make you feel imprisoned if you're not that ambitious).
2) (I suspect) The compensation is not likely to be terribly impressive, particularly early on, as compared with other viable options. Differences in compensation tend to compound over the years, so you'll always feel like you're behind the curve.
Factor in cost of living in California and I imagine it starts to look incredibly unappealing.
One is what you say: Lottery style. Provide huuuuuugae outcomes for some lucky people.
The other one is reduce the risk for everyone.
The universe does not care which one you choose, so I cannot argue using reason for one or the other, it's a choice. Still, I very much prefer society would adopt the second option. I think we made life choices way riskier than they need to be. Perceived risk still is as high as if we lived in scarcity of long ago times.
Okay, contrary to what I just said that I cannot argue with reason because it's the same outcomes, I actually question that the outcomes of the "luck based" system are as good as one where riskiness of some life choices is lowered. I'm not sure though, it can't be an all-or-nothing approach, if it means a lot more people doing ever more useless things that would be something I don't want to see either, on the other hand, we already have plenty of that (see Dilbert or recently discussion of "The rise of the bullshit job").
I think the guidance of resources of the current system leaves something to be desired, too many undesirable outcomes that are then rationalized using the very tool that created them (i.e. explaining them using the existing system while pretending that this system is the (same as the) goal).
Can universities order custom glassworks from commercial companies? Ship them from China, where labour is much cheaper? 3d print them? Make do without them?
A large part of his job is constructing custom equipment for specific tasks. A big part of this is figuring out what the user really needs or is trying to do. The glassblower has more experience than most of the people asking for equipment to be made. He'll often work with them to improve their initial design. You wouldn't get this if you were just sending off an order to a company to have custom glass made.
Another important part of his job is repairing equipment when it breaks. If you break an important piece of equipment in your lab are you willing to wait for it to be packed, shipped to China, fixed, and shipped back? Broken equipment may have been used to hold hazardous chemicals and there is often chemical residue on the glass. Most people in a lab wouldn't be able to clean the glass well enough to make it shippable without the equipment in the glassblower's office.
I don't think anyone has done any work on 3d printing glass. Even if you could 3d print glass that doesn't address the problems with poor design and repairing broken equipment.
It's possible to do without a glassblower but not a good idea for a top tier research university. If you can't get custom glass made then you can't do certain experiments. Not being able to do those experiments could lead to problems recruiting faculty and students that want to do them.
My situation was similar, I spent six months trying to transfer half a lifetime of domain and software development expertise to a very keen and competent young engineer, but of course this had to be done in between all his other nearly full time responsibilities.
This is what happens when organizations don't believe in the long term future, just next year's balance sheet.
There will be no problem finding people with glass skill and a desire to do flameworked glass. It is the other skills mentioned in the article, such as familiarity with chemistry, higher math and lab work, plus the desire to have a 9-to-5 job with an institution that is difficult to come by. Many people who choose to become artistic glassblowers do not have any sort of higher technical education, or would not mesh well with a university job in some other way, such as, being enthusiastic about tattoos and vaping cannabis extracts all day.
Besides that, many glassblowers can imagine the benefits of a regular job that involves glassblowing, especially as they get older and the healthcare benefits grow more useful. The volatility of the artistic/functional glass market plays a role, too. Currently it's experiencing a downturn, despite the cannabis market booming, and many people are seeking other incomes. It would be interesting to hear whether Salem has seen an increase in applications or inquiries.
What I didn't see an article is a mention of one reason this is happening. Mass production, primarily in China, and outsourcing, primarily to India, has removed the need to have an in-house glassblower and made it not a good choice financially, because a lot of the items they used to make can now be replaced more cheaply then they can be produced by hand.
I have a cousin who worked for a petroleum company for over 40 years as a scientific glassblower. He recently scaled down his business from hundreds of items and now only makes one especially profitable item.
Repair of specialized equipment is a big deal, too. In many cases it takes as much skill as fabricating an apparatus in the first place.
Like the article says, it helps a lot if the glassblower understands the scientific process and works closely with the researcher. I think researchers work around this by finding ways to use or combine standard equipment. A scientist doing truly novel work, though, will benefit from or require customized glassware.
My belief is that this will be solved by 3-D printing or automation in some way.
The most recent 3-D printing with glass I have read about creates a piece of fused silica, which is even harder to fabricate and more useful in lab work. They print it from a silica infused polymer, and then each section is fused with the laser, and the polymer burns away, leaving quartz. Seems quite workable to me. This was covered in an article published recently.
edit: one article that gives a good overview: https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=15114
a more consumery article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/you-can-now-3d-pri...
There are still things best done with tubes, and in some ways tubes are much better than transistors if it comes to reliability, mostly related to the sheer physical size preventing as-trivial cases of ESD/EMP fried LNAs in radios. Or the HF switch selecting between antennas and RX/TX. But this is probably a minor concern in practice.
I am interested in the amount of specialized glasswork required by the institution. I also doubt that the glassware of tomorrow's science is even remotely like the glassware of today's. The next glassworker is more of a materials scientist, with glassware as a skill, probably; in much the same way as a programmer may know both Java and Python.
FDM glass: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2015/08/Glass-Printing_Med... (and sadly this counts as a pretty complex example)
Glassware, not complex at all: http://www.raystoreylighting.com/wpimages/wp71af747e_05_06.j...
Somewhat complex glassware: http://www.adamschittenden.com/laboratoryglasswarecondenser....
You can see the clear differences. Assuming you can get the printer at all, 3d printed glass has layers (and therefore isn't going to contain gases or hold vacuums very well), it's easily 10x heavier, far more expensive, ...
Also there are several alternate methods under development that won't leave a rough surface, like hot glass methods.
Glass can be smoothed by heating to temperatures below that which cause sagging and deformity. If the smoothness is fine, on the order of a frosty surface (>200 grit or so) that would polish it (this is called kiln polishing). Of course, you risk basically melting the piece so this is a delicate operation with anything other than a plate of glass.
If 3d printing doesn't work, we can create robots that do what glassblowers do. I could easily script what I do for the right machinery (a series of computer controlled lathes and torches).
More likely the University will outsource to a local company that in turn handles the communication with an overseas factory.
How ableist! Some people can’t choose whether they smoke cannabis or not. They need it like diabetics need insulin.
In the functional glass industry, we don't discriminate against cannabis usage... somewhat the opposite. If you don't smoke and especially dab, you will have a hard time fitting in, and more limited social and business opportunities. At the same time, many people in the community look down on excessive alcohol usage. Smoking throughout the day is considered perfectly normal, or beneficial, and nobody would consider looking down on it or encouraging less consumption of cannabis.
FWIW, this strikes me as quite distasteful. It sounds like cannabis is helpful to you, and that's great. But other folks should be able to make their own decisions.
The medicinal market is likely to explode though, given how it's not covered by patents and legalization is happening left and right.
Lab work and higher math may be a problem, but I’ve read many times today’s best botanists and agricultural students go into cannabis so the worlds may not be as incompatible as one would think.
:)
Since obviously such behaviour is totally unheard of in universities.
My experience from dating someone at Caltech is that this would not, in any possible way, be an issue.
https://books.google.com/books?id=HKLUF3PWOGYC&pg=PA66&lpg=P...
> Our glass blower, Bob Morley, has retired. He made essential contributions to many of the experiments over the years, and the Department will miss him and his skills.
https://sharepoint.washington.edu/phys/newsletter/Documents/...
Pushed out. And with him a lifetime of hard won skills. They asked for him back after they learned their mistake but he had moved on.
I mention this, because the calibration was an essential aspect. Each result, of itself, was to some degree a one-off. You weren't getting production replication to set high degree of precision; there was variability. You then measured/calibrated how your individual unit performed.
I've seen that a lot, in subsequent life. There may be variability in whatever device or process; if you learn what it is and understand it, you can then use the device or process precisely in light of that knowledge.
But, a lot of people don't know how to do this.
Not just with glassware. With accounting. Tools. Programming. Scientific formulae (simplest example of this: people who could never generalize, but instead tried to memorize all the "plug-and-chug" instances for all the specific test problems they would be presented). Etc.
So, aside from having the resulting glassware, I think making it -- and calibrating it -- is a useful lesson, in itself.
Rick always had something amazing and elaborate under construction when I went and saw him. Definitely not the things that you could find in a chem glassware catalog.
Machinists are somewhat similar. But in academic settings there are many students and postdocs who need to make their own hardware, and there needs to be someone to train them and to manage the workshop.
Walk into the MET machine shop (not the ME machine shop, those guys will be hacks, it's just the nature of the different priorities of the different programs) during any given weekday evening and ask the TA to recommenced someone.
Probably easier with borosilicate than leaded glass.
They never make it happen because most people at a given institution don't really care about furthering the institution as a whole, and are instead focused exclusively on their own lab or personal career.
for example if you are in a lab and need a single cell sequencing but the equipment is too expensive or you lack the expertise, if your university(or another university) has a "single cell sequencing core" with equipment you can use it for a small fee.
example of a core search:
https://search.eagle-i.net/central/#results?q=rnai&t=http://...
[1] I know of one astronomer who's work was threatened by rare/protected birds nesting near his equipment. Sometimes it is good to work in an organization with in-house ornithologists. 'That's not dark matter. It's bats flying by your telescope every night."
The reason these aren't more prevelant is that the universities typically don't pay for them directly; they are frequently funded by a department and stocked with equipment purchased by individual labs. In exchange for donating equipment, the labs get priority access and have supplies and equipment maintenance costs paid for by the department.
IN THEORY cores and other communal resources should be paid for by university overhead (basically a fee assessed on each grant or funding source brought in). In practice, overhead goes to pay for a bunch of bullshit that has nothing to do with research.
It funds things like facilities, administrative support, and then is actually used for things like core facilities or shared equipment expenditures (this is often at the department or college level). It's also often where the source for new faculty startup packages and the like comes from.
Correction: the uni don't reward tenure track people either these days.
Working 6 years for a $55K salary with a nonzero prospect of getting fired from your field forever afterwards isn't exactly a rewarding experience.
I don't know what will happen in another generation.
If you pay for the exact amount of glass blowing you need, you will only have 1 glass blower per institution and there isn't room for apprenticeship.
Seems like an easy fix would be a "Glass Blowers of Southern California" shop, where a few glass blowers could service USC, UCLA, and a couple other schools at the same time.
That way you could still easily meet with the blower locally, but it wouldn't be on campus.
Northern California wouldn't need a shop because Stanford, and Berkeley already have a bevy of glass blowing experts.
Apprentices take care of day-to-day work on their own, have oversight, and universities don't have to afford their own master glassblower.
If most of the glasswork in your lab has to be hand-made, you need dozens of people to do the job, junior personnel can be trained on the easier pieces, and the best of them can grow into experts making unica.
Nowadays, there’s no need for junior glassblowers, so to get an expert, you’ll have to pay a candidate for years, possibly decades, without getting any benefits from it.
Worse, there’s no guarantee that the person you hire will ever become good enough to do the job.
Health and safety also may have made it more expensive. Glassblowing also isn’t the healthiest job. Burns and cuts go with the job, various fumes are toxic, there’s “glassblower’s cataract”, and it is heavy labor (e.g. when lifting a few kilograms of glass at the end of a pipe that’s meters long)
The one problem is they don't seem to need anywhere near the degree of precision.
Mike Gnann is admired within our artistic field and does well with both... https://www.instagram.com/merge_scientific
But if you compare that with someone like https://www.instagram.com/eusheen who is at the top of the artistic pipe niche, I think you can see that there are equal amounts of precision involved.
It matters where you're trying to fit in the market, of course. Someone can buy a torch, get rudimentary lessons and be making some sort of income from pipes within a year. You would be able to make some scientific glass items after six months, but not enough to get hired anywhere, except maybe in India (which is really the key here).
I'll add, including myself for over 17 years. Currently for artists at the top of the field, a nice piece starts at 10k. For production work, you're looking at 10-120k a year.
The total market for cannabis accessories or something like 1 billion a year. Just for a handmade glass, we are talking at least tens of millions domestically (see Aqualab.com for instance) and also a huge amount is imported, though it is technically not legal to do so.
For whatever reason I know a lot of
a) Neon workers who used to do scientific glass blowing. But left because neon paid better.
b) Glass workers that make glass pipes because it pays better than scientific glass blowing or neon work.
Note: Potheads will spend in ordinate amounts of money on paraphernalia.
That's true but most of them spend inordinate amounts of money over a large number of pieces, which doesn't leave enough profit per piece to really support a skilled craftsman. Cannabis is already pretty expensive for a heavy smoker (1/8th of flower or 1g of concentrates a day is easily $30-40/day) and the aesthetic of cheap glass is good enough for the vast majority of people.
Out of the dozens of heavy smokers I know in Washington, I'm the only one with any glass pieces worth over $1,000 and they are all practically indestructible so they get replaced at a rate of once every 4-5 years instead of every other month.
Compare with a scientific glass blower at $15/hr. Then factor in payroll taxes.
I bought 1 1000mL RBF, 1 500mL RBF, a 300mm distillation tube, T, vaccum takeoff adapter, thermometer well and a few other bits and bobs all in 24/40 for like $40 shipped from China.
It's not beautiful, but it works. You need guys like this for the crazy complicated apparatus, or the one-offs, but for everything else, mass production is the way to go.
if a research university doesn't need a full-time glass-blower, they ain't doing enough research!
Paying for a custom rig that works and does exactly what they want is easily worth the added expense, paid for by research grants. Waiting for mediocre products,that only mostly solve your problem, to be shopped internationally just isn’t worth the cost savings.
Sadly, the old Amateur Scientist columns are hard to come by unless you have access to a library with Sci American going back to 1952. (The old Mathematical Games columns by the late Martin Gardner are great too. I first read about public key encryption just a few months after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman wrote the MIT memo on it because it appeared in the August 1977 column by Gardner.)
Heck, even if you aren't doing something new you may need glassware for which there is not a sufficiently large demand to support an industrial production line.
I could not find a scientific glass blower salary in the California public records system. I looked, perhaps they are titled under something else?
> To master scientific glass blowing, proper training and apprenticeships are key. Only one school in the nation, Salem Community College in New Jersey, offers a degree program.
> In addition to the hands-on training, which requires a knack for precision as well as coordination, students must take courses in organic chemistry, math and computer drawing.
> "You need to know enough about everything, about mechanics, about chemistry, about physics, about thermodynamics — whatever a chemist can come up with, you need to know just a little bit to get that chemist through," said Dennis Briening, instructional chair of Salem's two-year program. "And of course, you need to be very skilled, technique-wise. So it really takes a long time to get to a position like Rick's."
Sounds like a job for people who are bright, good with their hands, and like making money. Really, the whole piece is about how few people are going into this trade, and I can't see how people can't be brought into it if the demand's there.
Because you may spend years getting a degree in making lab glassware, only to find yourself put out a job because someone invents a glassblowing machine... Or trains up a few thousand people in China to do it for one tenth your wages.
Not exactly motivating me to drop everything, move to Salem, and spend the next few years becoming a glassblower.
> Fellow chemists are relieved Caltech will keep a glass blower on campus. For them, it's more convenient than ordering from a catalog and preserves the intimacy researchers should have with the experiments they design.
Let me get right ahead on staking my livelyhood on a university's budget indulging the 'intimacy' between its chemistry lab and their resident glassblower. Who do you think will be canned when Caltech will need to scrounge up some cash to build a swanky new dorm? "Sorry, Doctor Weinberg, you're going to have to get your glass on Amazon, like everyone else."
I'd be surprised if, in a decade, you couldn't do the same for glassware.
With glassware, the chemist isn't using AutoCAD to create detailed engineering drawings of what he wants. The glassblower is taking on much of the design role. I suppose you could just get the university to hire a mechanical engineer to do the CAD work, and send CAD drawings to China to manufacture the glassware according to spec, but that's not going to be cheap.
Also, millions of engineer hours have been put into making the software equivalent of a glassblowing machine. No CS department employs an in-house 'Kernel writer' or 'TCP/IP Implementer'.
> "You need a person who has some idea about the scientific process and how to translate what a student wants to do into a piece of apparatus that really works," said Bob Grubbs, a 2005 Nobel laureate in chemistry and professor at Caltech. "How do you get from a couple scratches on a piece of paper, to something you actually go use in a lab that you trust and is not going to blow acid in your face?"
Doesn't mean those who hold the purse strings will pay for it. (Doesn't mean they'll pay for custom software either).
>"How do you get from a couple scratches on a piece of paper, to something you actually go use in a lab that you trust and is not going to blow acid in your face?"
Engineering. That's how. Instead, the academic community seems to want to rely on rockstar glaziers the same way a startup relies on one or two developers to handle everything from design to implementation to release.
Have the student sit down with someone who can draw proper technical drawings and specs. Then hand those proper technical drawings off to a glazier. Then give the finished glass to a QA person who will verify it against the specs.
But even then someone needs to know a lot about chemistry, glass, and glass manufacturing to understand if something is both feasible to build and useful.
Even knowing what is and is not slight modifications of existing products requires a fairly deep understanding when you're dealing with highly toxic substances.
If universities were willing to spend that much money on glassware, they'd just pay glassmakers $750k or so, and wouldn't have any trouble hiring them.
Seems like they've created the issue themselves.
This is different than a production setting, where you can often afford to screw up the first few in order to get the process right. And in addition to making pieces, a scientific glassblower is also repairing them. My trips to the glassblower's shop were usually right after I broke something.
As for reproducibility, no two voltmeters are the same, or yardsticks, etc. Part of good scientific practice is figuring out how to obtain reproducible results despite known variations in materials and tools.
https://www.facebook.com/sccgec/photos/a.323088208072418.107...
"Do you love working with glass? Would you like to take your passion for flameworking to another level? Would you like to pursue a career in scientific glass?
The only program of its kind in the nation, Salem Community College's Scientific Glass Technology combines classroom study and hands-on laboratory techniques, technical drawing and advanced fabrication. Students develop a solid understanding of scientific glassblowing so they are able to fabricate apparatus according to technical specifications.
Scientific glassblowers create glass apparatus for scientific research in laboratories, universities and industry; they play a vital role in diverse avenues of inquiry. Biological research, the pharmaceutical industry, medical industry, chemical engineering, the semi-conductor industry, aerospace, electro-optical systems, physics, earth sciences, food science, and mechanical engineering are just some of the fields served by this unique skill.
Graduates of Salem Community College have earned positions at a variety of employers including Proctor and Gamble, 3M, GE Global Research, Chemglass Life Sciences, Pope Scientific, Cannon Instruments, Meggitt PLC, Phillips Healthcare, L-3 Communications, the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, Cal Tech Institute, Temple University, the University of Botswana, the Australian National University, the Savannah River Nuclear Site, the National Institute of Health, Argonne National Laboratory…among numerous others.
Learn more about our Scientific Glass program, as well as our Glass Art programs, and other opportunities at http://www.salemcc.edu/glass/glass-education-center "
One of the bits to note form the 2017 article:
> Today, she serves four campuses of research faculty and graduate students.
> ...
> Nevertheless, scientific glassblowing is a dying art.
> "It's slowly been dwindling. Like, lately, if people retire, they kind of shut down the shop and start outsourcing. But us glassblowers are trying to change that," said Roeger.
> Roeger is working to reestablish the apprenticeship program in which she learned her skills. "The apprenticeship program is a four-year, full-time, hands-on training with a master glassblower, and it really does take that much to be able to produce glassware that customers can use."
Going back to the 1976 article:
> Joe was successor to Jim Davis who doubled as glassblower for the Physics and Chemistry Departments for many years before retiring for health reasons
UW Madison still maintains its glass shop ( https://www.chem.wisc.edu/content/glass-shop ), a mechanical engineering shop ( http://chem.wisc.edu/content/instrument-shop ) and an electronics shop ( https://www.chem.wisc.edu/content/chemistry-electronics-shop ).
The UW Madison chemistry glass shop page has two videos on it - one from Wisconsin Public Television and another on YouTube ( https://youtu.be/pfeUbkU7IKQ )
(edit: another article about Scientific glass blowing https://asgs-glass.org/history-of-glassblowing-who-was-first... - note the editors note that when that article was written, Joe Wheeler was the oldest practicing glass blower at 90 years old)
Second, have you ever seen 3D printed glass under a microscope? It's full of voids and the surface is awful (at least the last piece I saw). For high temp usage, this will not work. This is also a very specific kind of glass -- borosilicate mostly, with some pure quartz work as well, and it's going to have very different properties than even garden variety soda lime.
In short -- maybe 50 years. But, lacking the demand, I doubt we get there at all.
Totally doable, but not exactly easy.
There is also a very strong bit of "I don't know what the requirements are." A chemist will go to the glass blower and ask for something... they can describe what they're trying to do, but they've got no idea about what they need to actually accomplish it ("I'm trying to create bubbles in a fluid" or "I'm going to be putting a catalyst in an oxygen / hydrogen mixture to examine it while the reaction is taking place"). It is the glass blower that takes those requirements and makes the actual product.
Claiming that in 5 years one will be able to 3d print pyrex glass and glass blowers will go the way of the buggy whip makers is akin to saying that you see a renaissance of visual programming tools and in 5 years programmers won't be needed because you'll be able to have the application automatically generated.
I don't see it.
1) People who don't print, think its a microwave oven, just push a button, right? People who do print see it more as a complicated craft with very slow somewhat expensive learning curve, much like a table saw or ... scientific glass blowing.
2) Very small scale mass production with 3-d printing, once you've expended considerable effort, time, and filament, to dial in the design and the machine and the technique, is almost "push a button" easy, but you can't reach that stage until maybe five prints are done and the whole point of a master glass blower is there is exactly one of this new object on the entire planet and you're in competition with dozens of labs worldwide, some of which will take a day to make a new reaction flask and win the publish or perish race, and some that will take a month to make the same new reaction flask and they'll be the ones who lose the publish or perish race.
3) The other confusion is people thinking its like buying a screwdriver from China instead of from a local machinist, or downloading an app from the app store why reinvent the wheel. But a master glass blower is of the category of work thats more like buying a rocket engine R+D component that has never been made in history much less mass produced, or is more like writing the first app in its category. In that way, having a large team that needs to coordinate between the chemist, the engineer, the CAD guy and the 3d printer operator is the usual management fallacy of nine women making a baby in a month, surely the scientific glass blower can do it alone, cheaper, more reliably, and much faster than the 3d printing team could ever hope to achieve.
4) Its not insightful that if you're doing world class competitive research requiring world class labor to remain competitive, then switching your subject matter expert labor fields isn't going to fix anything. The research that requires a tech with 20 years of experience is going to have just as hard of a time, if not harder, in finding a 3d printer tech with 20+ years of experience as it will finding a replacement for the master glass blower who retired with 40 years of experience.
5) If you know the playing field is leveled for blown glass equipment, then the only thing thats certain about switching to 3d printed glass is it'll take time and money your competitors aren't spending. The issue with #2 is there is no mass production, the specific issue with #5 is you don't get bonus points for doing things the hard way or being intentionally obscure. If in an industry that publishes in English, you publish all your papers in Klingon, thats very impressive but you'll never get tenure with that attitude, everyone will always be ahead in a terrain defined by publishing in English. Until the majority give up on glass blowing custom gear, you'll always be at the back of the research pack.
"The highest earning Glass Blowers in the United States earn $47,720 per year"
I would guess that a master scientific glass blower would earn more and have better conditions, but not an order of magnitude more.
oh ....
*businesses and organizations, if you will.
It's hard to find out whether that process is complete in Iceland because I don't speak Icelandic and the parliament doesn't translate everything they produce, but the EU has already started telling people that GDPR protects everyone in the EEA:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/d... (Page 15, yellow box)
More links on the subject:
https://www.personuvernd.is/ny-personuverndarloggjof-2018/
https://chaucer.com/rights-and-scope-of-gdpr-for-non-eu-resi...
https://planit.legal/blog/en/the-applicability-of-the-gdpr-w...
It was the planit.legal-link that confused me to begin with. Written so short time ago (Feb 18) while stating: "a rapid implementation procedure and the extension of GDPR to the entire EEA is expected". Rapid indeed.
After some reading, I notice a discrepancy of GDPR articles stating that EEA is affected immediately, while from an EEA/EEA state point-of-view seem more concerned with EU-EEA agreements "to be concluded" and laws to be applied, just as you also implied.
I guess the GDPR alarmists has dulled my senses and I was expecting some kind of catch in this case. Cry wolf..
But the article is available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20180605190135/http://www.latimes...
Calling it a cancer suggest you've not actually had to comply with it, you're just parroting all the people who are blowing it out of proportion because they don't understand the law or just don't think privacy is as important as ad revenue.
The fix for what? Being able to access content from the LA Times?
1) Weren't doing a very good job with your political reporting, and didn't know about it.
2) You are storing way too much information about your users for a newspaper to store.
3) You use deprivation of news to a particular group of people to try to influence them, or others to aid in your goals, whatever they might be.
4) You don't have that much money, and can't afford the changes necessary.
In my opinion, of these, only 4 is really acceptable for a newspaper, as news at its core is about trust, integrity and dialogue. Each of which none of the other answers leaves untainted.
... but I believe I don't even need to make the argument, because time and the growing distrust of how companies handle their sometimes very private and sensitive information don't care about arguments, it will simply make the things it cares about happen, given time, and the opportunity to be heard.
Evidently the GDPR, all things considered, is preventing this person from reading the LA Times, in the same way that California's temporary ban on foie gras prevented Californians from enjoying foie gras.
Regulations on the duties of business affect the rights of individuals.
"The EU is basically saying "if you do business here, and you screw this up, we are going to sue you before seeking other remedies""
That has never, EVER been said. Not once. In fact, the vast majority of guidance says that they will seek compliance BEFORE suing people. If you can't get the basics right, no one here can trust you to have an honest conversation.
> - likely infringement – a warning may be issued;
> - infringement: the possibilities include a reprimand, a temporary or definitive ban on processing and a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of the business’s total annual worldwide turnover.
> It is worth noting that in the case of an infringement, the DPA may impose a monetary fine instead of, or in addition to, the reprimand and/or ban on processing.
> The authority must ensure that fines imposed in each individual case are effective, proportionate and dissuasive.
In the official disclosure about enforcement, they state that warnings are optional ("may"), and only apply to "likely infringement", and they have more or less no standards determining what is "effective", "proportionate", or "dissuasive", and to me "proportionate" and "dissuasive" or "effective" are somewhat conflicting constraints. In some cases surely an effective fine is not proportionate, or a dissuasive fine is not effective or proportionate, or an effective fine is not dissuasive (that is, does not dissuade future infringement). I don't know what you consulted to get your information, but I would suspect europa.eu[0] is a decent source.
Heck, you even contradict yourself, first you say:
> That has never, EVER been said. Not once.
But in the next breath, you say:
> In fact, the vast majority of guidance says that they will seek compliance BEFORE suing people.
If you "get the basics right", surely you realize that it can't be simultaneously the case that it has never, "EVER" been said that a suit will be filed before compliance is sought, but also that the complement of the "vast majority", the petty minority, say that they will sue people "BEFORE" seeking compliance, by your own statement.
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...