delazeur

I was a Nucor engineer in the early 2010s, and all their rolling mills had them by then. Things had changed a lot since the '90s, though. The old guys talked about having to manually replace the electrodes in the arc furnaces, which has been done with a robot arm since the late '90s or early 2000s.

(For those of you who don't know what this is, each electrode is a graphite column one or two feet in diameter and about 20 feet long. Replacing them took two guys, selected for their resemblance to linebackers, and had to be done multiple times each day.)

"Illegal" and "criminal" are not the same thing.

Every American steel mill I've been in or heard about has cages that people have to stay inside if they are near the part of the line where this can happen. (Presumably an OSHA requirement, but I'm not 100% on that.)

Yeah, and that's not even remarkable. 70-90% of employees in a modern manufacturing facility will be in maintenance or support roles.

Overgeneralizing a bit, my experience has been that people tend to be much better at spotting foreign propaganda than domestic propaganda.

> Well if it was written out would it matter?

Yes, if N.W.A had been used as a precedent to support the Slants it would matter whether or not N.W.A. was written out. The more fundamental question of whether slurs should be protected is separate from the precedential question of whether slurs have been protected in the past.

> Blah, blah, informed electorate. Meanwhile most people have little or no grasp of the basics of political philosophy and economics, the history of both, are terrible critical readers, know little about the actual structure and functions of their government, and so on, so if your concern is being able to evaluate policy so you can make better choices in the voting booth start with those things.

This is so true. I am always surprised at how many otherwise intelligent news junkies I encounter who, for example, don't understand the difference between the House and Senate.

> I would rate Chinese people the most independent-minded group of citizens in the world. Chinese people are incredible at recognizing propaganda and superficial arguments that bear limited practicality.

That's a very weird statement to make.

> nobody that i know who has student loans can afford to pay that much per year

I think that's cumulative cost, not annual cost. Hard to say though; it's not a very good figure.

You are never going to be able to negotiate for yourself on an equal footing with a corporation, but unions can achieve a close approximation.

Oh, come on. It has not been that long since we found out that major tech companies were colluding to suppress SWE salaries. Have you already forgotten?

Right. If someone is going to make that argument, they should be expected to at least explain why something won't scale up.

No, trench warfare predated Bismarck, although it didn't peak until after he died. Vicksburg and Petersburg are good examples from the U.S. Civil War.

If that was true, we would expect the American Bible Belt to have some of the cushiest prisons in the developed world.

No. Thinking out loud is not the same as communicating a thought process.

There is an enormous difference between a person taking a minute to collect their thoughts without speaking and a person being unwilling or unable to communicate. I can't be sure, but it sounds like at least some people in this thread are talking about pushing back against the former as well as the latter.

Anecdata: most of my employers have offered good (but not the best) insurance. If you didn't use it, the employer and employee contributions together were probably something like $10k-$15k. If you did use it, the employee contribution would be capped at something like $20k-$30k, but the employer contribution would be uncapped. Somewhat famously, the CEO of AOL (?) talked about spending $1,000,000+ on an employee's neonatal care.

That article doesn't actually back up your claim. ("The waiting lines in the UK for surgeries make it more likely you die before you get it in time if you have anything remotely serious.")

At best, it has a speculative quote or two.

1. Good insurance is unavailable to many, many people in the US.

2. Good insurance is extremely expensive. If your premiums for good insurance are low, that just means your employer is paying a lot. I don't see much substantive difference between paying high premiums and paying high taxes.

Instead of providing a source for your original claim, you just made an additional unsourced claim.

I'm in a similar position to you (I grew up on free lunch and now have a well-paid engineering career). But your or my existence and success doesn't negate the trend; there will always be outliers. I don't think I've ever had a coworker who grew up anywhere near as poor as I did, and all things considered my family wasn't all that poor.

Source? If true, why does the UK have a longer life expectancy than the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Some percentage of kettles were not well made and did not last. All the kettles that did last were well made. It's wrong to look at the population of kettles that lasted, observe that they are all well made, and conclude that all kettles made long ago were therefore well made.

> Before, a single kettle could last generations. I'm personally very disturbed by the idea of more and more people getting many deliveries every single day. That kind of consumption is insanity and just think of the carbon footprint.

I agree that this type of rampant consumerism is an entirely new (and disturbing) thing, but there is an enormous surivorship bias in a statement like "a single kettle could last generations." All the kettles in the world today that someone inherited from their great-grandparents were extremely well made, but it does not follow that all the kettles that generation owned were well made.

If you only consider salaries at major companies in SF/Seattle/NYC/Chicago, or you only look at the salaries of graduates from top programs, then sure. But the average programmer, graduated from an average school and working at an average company, probably makes a salary not too different from anyone else with a STEM degree.

Yup.

Gonzo: of or associated with journalistic writing of an exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalized style. bizarre or crazy.

> we still don't know for sure whether there are no negative consequences

That is a carefully-worded statement that will always be true about everything.

I am a chemical engineer currently working in a consulting niche (air emissions control and regional air quality management). My interviews have very consistently been designed to test my writing and public speaking skills, which are admittedly crucial in my job, rather than specific engineering knowledge. At this point, my resume contains reasonably strong evidence that I possess such knowledge, but that wasn't the case when I was starting out and the interviews weren't really any different. The closest things to technical questions I can remember being asked are of the form: "Imagine a piece of equipment you are responsible for isn't working. What are some steps you would take to identify and solve the problem?"

I have also occasionally interviewed for non-SWE positions at tech companies (usually data scientist or regulatory compliance positions, both of which are closely related to my current field), and I have found the interviews to be similarly light on technical material, but with much less emphasis on speaking and writing skills.

Not having been through any SWE interviews myself, that's about as much as I can say in comparison. My loose impression is that SWE interviews are relatively heavy on logic puzzles and mini coding problems, but that's all I know. I am happy to answer more specific questions about my experience, of course.

> I've seen this statement made routinely for two decades online and have never once seen it supported with anything concrete.

I find that hard to believe. References for this claim are readily available.

> to use an example another commenter made -- an appliance manufacturer contracting with electrical utilities to subsidize the cost of electricity used by their appliances

Is that something you are claiming currently occurs, or something you think should be allowed to occur? IANAL, but I do work in the energy/electricity sector, and that sounds illegal. Utility regulations tend to be fairly strict.