They Build Spacecraft and Fight Epidemics; Shutdown May Scare Them Away
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It is not possible to gauge intelligence or academic credential by visual inspection, unless someone is wearing an academic gown. Some very accomplished people positively seem to enjoy looking disheveled.
Can confirm. A friend of mine has been consulting now for over 15 years. He's an excellent engineer with some valuable specialization. Met him after work for dinner and he shows up in crappy jeans and sandals. "Why are you dressed like that, didn't you just come from a client site?" "It's part of the uniform." Apparently IDGAF is a signal in more ways than I thought. In this case it shows that you are good enough not to need to conform - and he's right. I do wonder weather dressing better but finding another way to signal value might take him up a notch, but I honestly couldn't say.
And the aforementioned (and appropriately flagged) comment isn't about people looking shabby, it's about people looking Hispanic or South Asian. No one questions whether a white person in casual dress might be an engineer, scientist or something other than a janitor.
Having a strict dress code isn't a sign of status in my book.
When I was in college there was a direct correlation between brilliance and how disheveled one looked.
Do you think standing around holding signs is an effective tactic? Is that what you would do if you were directly impacted by the shutdown?
Note that Gustavo Costa was interviewed "on a cold morning in his quiet living room" and the unnamed scientist spoke "by phone on the way to a job interview." I didn't see the article claiming they spoke to anyone pictured, and yes, those were very well-balanced race/gender/age diversity photos. Even had a couple of grey-haired white guys.
It’s even more discouraging to think how far we have come from the times where, among the favorite lore, was the story of JFK asking someone sweeping the floor at NASA “and what do you do?”, with him replying “I send men to the moon”.
(Edit: you probably need to change your settings if you want to see what we’re reacting to.)
I've noticed this when I travel--all over the world, I see people wearing NASA t-shirts, everywhere I've been: Europe, Asia, South America. It seems like the NASA meatball is globally popular.
Whatever the Americans are paying for NASA, it must be an absolute bargain in terms of the good press and soft power it wins them worldwide. Can you imagine any other foreign government agency that people would be eager to have on their shirt? Was Roscosmos similarly popular during the Space Race?
I for one have never seen anyone in Europe wearing a NASA t-shirt, and that includes American tourists.
Neither I ever saw it in Geneva in Switzerland where I live, which is home to CERN folks, many UN/NGO folks, banker folks, or generally quite international folks. Maybe you keep seeing 2-3 people in your vicinity over and over?
I’m German, and I wouldn’t mind wearing a shirt, although I’m slightly afraid it may be misunderstood as a claim to have worked there.
This is the so-called “soft power” that’s been in the news lately. Do I want my countr to be an ally with the one planting their flag on the moon and llettting it slowly turn white? Hell, yeah!
It’s also a good example of why political decisions matter: it took quite a bit of convincing to keep NASA civilian when it first came about.
Historically, government shutdowns have been a very effective way of swinging popular opinion against the party that is viewed as causing the shutdown.
The key, and what both parties are working really hard at, is to paint the other party as the "guilty" party for causing or not resolving the shutdown.
The 2013 shutdown happened smack in the middle of our post-PhD job hunt. The shutdown itself ‘only’ lasted a few weeks and directly slowed down interviews at federal labs. However, the overall environment of uncertainty affected hiring well before—-and well afterward. It also spread beyond actual federal jobs to those that somehow interact with the government (contractors, companies with federal contracts, labs that get federal grants). Nobody wants to hire a new person just to lay them off a few months later, nor do people (especially those making academic salaries) want to jump into such a precarious situation.
So....I listened pretty carefully when someone from Canada made me an offer. The salary was maybe a touch low by US standards, but it was available right now and likely to stick around. As a result, We have spent the past five years training Canadian students, building up Canadian labs, and so on.
We think about coming home: we miss our friends and families, it does get cold up here, and living abroad can be strange. At the same time though, we do need steady jobs for ourselves and our research.
FWIW, I don’t think we’re particularly special in this regard. Only two people from my PhD cohort are still doing research in the US (1 academic, 1 industry). The rest have gone abroad or left research, in part due to the crazy career uncertainty.
The first part solves the fact that companies prefer immigrants due to the fact that they can pay them a lower wage, setting a minimum wage in law that is internationally competing would drive some businesses out of america, but those businesses are harmful anyway because they are exploitative towards their employees, and therefore they aim to exploit Americans.
The second aspect, fast-tracking immigration status so that immigrants can become legal citizens easier, solves the fact that some employers might abuse the status of immigrants to pay them less. It'd be trivial (and actually it is quite common already) for employers to tell their immigrant employees "Accept this shitty pay or I will report you to ICE". This completely removes that method of extortion from being viable.
Seems to me, if a gangmaster is supplying seasonal workers to a farm, the farmer won't report them, the gangmaster won't report themselves, and the workers won't report their employer. Who's left?
You gather data on the manpower requirements for farmer Joe, look at the payroll taxes paid by farmers with similar operations, and audit the bottom standard deviations for tax compliance.
One of the reasons that conservatives traditionally have such a hard on for the IRS is that it’s the primary agency able to detect these types of frauds. In the years they control the House, they defund IRS enforcement ability.
As I already addressed with point two, fast-tracking of immigration status to legal citizen status, is vitally important to remove this method of extortion.
I can see the point in border controls for goods (laws on what can be sold vary from place to place), and an army to stop someone else taking over, but not for individual people, be they workers, tourists, students, children, pensioners, or refugees.
If your family has been in the US for 100+ years, I assure you that’s exactly how they got started.
If your friends knew people were employing illegal immigrants they should have reported it if it bothers them. Not complain about it.
Also, doing drywall isn't highly skilled, it's job you get anyone to do with a few days of training (hell you could get away with not doing the training)
I never said get good at it within that time but you learn the skills required. Practice is how you get good. Highly skilled jobs take a long period of time just to learn the skills required. Hence drywalling is a low skill job.
So even in a worst case scenario, where all immigrants happen to have one skill only, and overwhelm the market for, say, phone booth cleaning, they are also a market for any other profession of at least equal size.
In practice, the numbers of immigrants should be easily absorbed by the vastly larger population of the US, although it may be beneficial to, for example, spread out the impact among the states and invest in vocational training.
Oh, and the article even starts out that way: "and it keeps him in steady demand as a contractor at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center"... and then immediately commits some slight-of-hand to start talking about the "civil service", i.e. govvies.
Is learning to be purposefully misleading a whole class in journalism school, or does it just come naturally?
However, this argument totally misses the point. Some of these contractors aren’t getting paid either—and I’m not sure if contractors always get back pay. They are also limited in what they can—-and are allowed— to do without their government counterparts. Finally, the bigger picture is that these folks, along with federal employees, are part of a broader R&D ecosystem. Like a real ecosystem, if you keep destabilizing it, it’ll eventually fall apart.
Nobody else (not the Soviets, not the ESA, certainly not SpaceX) has done it even once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterre...