alexgmcm

> It was still a step up from the previous condition of serfdom and subsistence farming.

It's actually debated as to whether it was better at first.[1]

It seems for a for the first 60 years or so the standard of living may actually have fallen until the initial shock was over and working conditions etc. improved.

You are right though that modern industrialising nations may be able to leapfrog some of those difficulties allowing for a much more rapid arrival at decent living standards.

[1]https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandt...

In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger.

Equally, tools like Wordpress has killed off/deskilled the old 'webmaster' role - I mean sure, there are still people making money doing Wordpress sites for businesses but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it was at the start of the dot-com boom era.

To be fair, most STEM PhDs have pretty grim prospects too.

There was a famous post, "Don't Become a Scientist!"[1] about Physics in particular.

It includes the memorable line: "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."

Which I suspect tells us more about Katz's social circle than anything else but nonetheless shows that it certainly isn't a rosy wonderland in STEM.

[1] http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

I remember seeing an analysis about a decade ago when I was deciding on grad school.

And if I recall correctly, Economics was basically the only field where it made financial sense to get a PhD, taking into account opportunity cost etc.

I've read both books and done the Nand2Tetris course.

I think Code by Petzold is decent in that it's a book you can read in bed etc. but it spends a long time discussing mechanical relays as an analogue and later discusses various processors in depth.

I think Nand2Tetris is slightly better in that it focuses on what I'd consider to be the most important stuff, but it's an actual course and requires significantly more effort.

Nand2Tetris is probably the best course I've ever done though, including my university studies in Physics and ML. It's fun and you learn loads.

I studied Physics. I now work in Data Science, I'd strongly recommend studying Computer Science instead of Physics just because there are many, many more jobs in it.

It's not even about pay (as maybe you would be happy being paid less) but just the actual lack of research jobs in Physics (and the ones that exist typically have poor job security with temporary contracts being the norm).

So it's highly likely you would do the degree in Physics and end up having to work in something else anyway. In which case you might as well study something that has better job prospects.

But yeah, that's just my opinion.

It's a bit discouraging that over a century later the same problem still remains.

Spain has a 17.3% high school dropout rate though.[1] So education is an issue. Although yeah, many graduates were also unemployed in the crisis.

I think the crisis was kind of exceptional as everyone was going to be pretty screwed either way. But furthermore, it seems that until you reach a sort of 'critical mass' of educated workers it can be hard for them to find employment as it's hard for the country to attract companies that require an educated workforce.

I think the solution would be to continue investing in education to help reach that critical mass and at the same time make it easier for people to set up new companies, start-ups etc.

Spain is pretty bad for this with the harsh autonomo taxes for people trying to start their own business etc., plus all the bureaucracy which often has to be done in-person and appointments are hard to get etc.

At least it seems like things are improving, although the Coronavirus will be a setback.

[1] https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/11/13/spain-has-highest-...

You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1]

It's pretty sad - young people are living with their parents into their thirties and not having children until their 40's if at all, fuelling a massive decline in the birth rate to one of the lowest in the world at around 1.3 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[2]

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033179/fertility-rate-s...

Also, the engineers are often well aware when something is wrong or dubious.

But there's a difference between knowing that and having the power to do something about it.

Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.

I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market.

But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.

I suspect they don't have children, as finding a suitable and affordable family home in the city is also incredibly hard.

If you are single and can just up sticks from one apartment to another then yeah, it's pretty trivial.

Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as fuel.

The problem is largely a political one.

Meetup.com are clubs though?

It seems at least there you find people with shared interests rather than the random sample at work or church.

I met my friends through language classes and meetups as I emigrated.

But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries. With UK-based devs there wouldn't even be a language barrier.

There is quite a lot of red-tape involved with hiring foreign workers though.

Housing is a huge issue in Europe as well, yeah we have shorter commutes, but that comes at the cost of higher population densities which often means living in high/medium-rise flats.

These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.

Why not both?

Fusion research budgets are a tiny, almost negligible, fraction of GDP as it is.

We aren't so starved for cash we have to choose between fusion or fission - but that might mean less money for wars, the ultra-rich etc.

That's true, the investigator POV stuff was cool.

But all the romance I found really unrealistic and ham-fisted.

They cut that completely out of the show.

I was trying to escape the intro material but legitimately couldn't work out how to navigate the site.

But yeah, robotics is really tough - I tried a course on Coursera once and found it too challenging despite my Physics major background.

I want to learn it though as it'd be a cool hobby to share when I have kids etc.

Is leasehold that common outside of London?

My parents own their property as freehold, and it's only an hour from London by train.

Tbh, I just ended up emigrating as the property market was so bad it felt hopeless.

When I was a student, we bought a big sack of Textured Vegetable Protein that was insanely cheap and tried living off of that.

It was unbearable - we later discovered it's what they use to feed prisoners and some zoo animals.

Honestly, vegetables and legumes aren't much more expensive and vastly superior.

At least in Physics a big issue isn't so much the pay (you won't get rich, but you won't starve..) but rather the instability and uncertainty.

Due to the way Academia is structured there simply aren't enough jobs, and the more senior people can get stuck just writing grant applications instead of doing actual science.

I'd massively expand the number of National Labs and research institutes so it isn't such a pyramid scheme - and allow budget for some sort of "scrum master" figure to deal with the non-science bureaucratic stuff.

Expanding the grants budget would also help make it less desperate so scientists can focus on doing science and not begging for funds.

I like it because it just has stupid memes and jokes, and some cool recipes and stuff - it's easy to browse for 10 minutes on a break and it feels organic.

Instagram and YouTube etc. have all become incredibly corporate with professional production studios etc. dominating the platforms - I imagine the same might happen to TikTok eventually, but at the moment you can just see a funny video someone made of their cat, and the cat isn't sponsored by SquareSpace.

I think fusion is a lot closer than 50 years away.

We should know without a doubt whether it is workable by 2050, perhaps before then.

I strongly recommend the book "The Future of Fusion Energy"[1] as a good summary of the current state of the field. It's written by two fusion researchers and is legit (I have a Master's in Physics myself and almost did a Plasma Physics PhD so I am somewhat familiar with the field).

The book isn't dry either, it's honestly one of the best books I've read in years.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion-Energy-Jason-Parisi/dp/...

Wouldn't it be really difficult to put a 55 inch TV in portrait mode?

Although I think as I live in a city with small apartments, wall-mounting is much less common. I guess with a decent wall mount perhaps it is trivial to rotate it?

I think that isn't defined as a writing system as you can only record numerical data.

Same as how the Inca Quipu[1] isn't generally defined as writing, despite the fact it seems they may have encoded some non-numerical information such as provinces for accounting purposes - like having a province_id in a database.

You can keep track of taxes etc. with a system like Quipu, but you couldn't write down the Iliad with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

I work as a DS as well. I don't think there's such a thing as "should be paid more" - the market shows us that SWE's are more highly valued presumably because there is more demand for those skills.

However, this will lead to people migrating from DS to DE and SWE roles if the compensation is relatively better. Yet we see articles about a 'shortage' in DS when they just aren't paying as much as a similar skill-set can get in a different role.

I think there is just more demand for SWEs. Nearly every company will have software engineers, but not every company has data scientists and even the ones that do will almost certainly have more engineers than data scientists.

After all, you can't use data science to optimise your product or service if you don't have sufficient engineers to build it and maintain it in the first place.

Pay has a lot to do with it because if you can switch to an engineering role (SWE or Data Engineer) and have more focused responsibilities and a higher salary then that's what most of them will do.

Although given the demands made for a DS role are often unicorn-level I don't even think increasing pay would help.

Isn't it a net benefit to everyone if each country pursues its comparative advantage though?

I don't see why becoming some sort of Juche state would help anyone.