What could transpire within a week _outside of_ weekly work or tasks that could influence your reports' career trajectory or force them to re-evaluate it? To put this in context, I'm attending such meetings but really see them as a noblesse oblige type of ritual that serves to reinforce our rapport (we don't see each other much otherwise), but otherwise a waste of my time from my standpoint.
What fraction of apartment buildings in California have double-pane windows? What fraction of commercial buildings in SF/East Bay have operable windows to take advantage of natural ventilation?
I think the concept of "bullshit job" is intuitively familiar to everyone. It's what you experience when you're just whiling your time away at work or in school. Can easily become the rule (khalyava in Soviet Union[1]), also characteristic in my experience of government/Fortune 500/unskilled labor in the US.
I personally favor thin books that present what really matters after having digested it first. Not that there's no place for thick books on my shelves (CLRS among others). I find HaskellWiki/Hoogle better serve the use case that the Haskell Book seems to target.
I suspect few physics students would agree with you about the didactic value of LL. The audiences for the two types of books couldn't be more different.
Not to start a flame war, but imho this is my definition of a "terrible book". Of the everything and the kitchen sink variety. By contrast, I very much enjoyed LYAH, not least for its self-effacing humor. Hutton was too dry for me. There's a less well-known "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" book by Richard Bird that is concise and targets the mathematically inclined crowd.
As someone who came to the US as a refugee, the differences are far more nuanced than the food you eat or the language you speak. An insular community may legitimately feel threatened by the influx of outsiders. I've witnessed first-hand industries that have been rendered inaccessible to native-born folks through immigration (construction trades). I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to move across continents, but I also think that it's completely natural and rational to keep the door of your home shut to strangers.
A citizen of any country would be well advised to first and foremost guard their self-interest. One might argue that accepting immigrants is against the self-interest of the native born/legal resident majority. Speaking as a refugee from what you consider to be Hell (USSR).
The price you quote is the cost of yearly subscription for just a single program (per station). An architect or engineer will use ~5 such programs on a daily basis for various modeling/analysis tasks.
All valid points. I think there's a more fundamental hurdle though: money as the instrument of coercion, with the state monopoly over defining its legitimacy, distribution channels, taxation. I can't fathom how the incumbents could let go of the monopoly.
Going to college might not be financially rewarding for many, but neither are trades. I worked in the construction trades for about two years before switching to engineering, and later software. In retrospect, switching careers paid off several fold. As a white male, without having served in the military, I could not get into the carpenters union, not without losing a couple years waiting in line. So my only option were small time contractors, remodels and the like. Poor pay, no benefits, underemployment, long daily commute. The worst part for me was the very slow learning rate. There was no training. I had to steal the knowledge, in the fake it till you make it fashion. I wouldn't get to do new tasks otherwise. I found engineering (civil) and software development very much in the spirit of craftsmanship. I still think of myself as a tradesman, just without all the crap surrounding manual trades in the US.
My wife found a bristle in her burrito last year. Luckily, she noticed it before swallowing. The place kindly offered her a free burrito as a consolation :(
It is correct that you don't qualify for federal aid for a second undergraduate degree. You can still receive financial aid as a graduate student. I'd strongly advise you to consider getting an MS. This may require taking on loans, but in the current climate this shouldn't be a concern if you're a good student.
This scenario is clearly not in the interest of the incumbents in the world of currency (US$, Euro). It's conceivable, however, that because of geopolitical wars some other state -- with enough clout and whose income can be ensured by means other than taxation (Russia or China perhaps) -- adopts some cryptocurrency wholesale, with a view to disrupting the financial markets. It's quite implausible that the sponsored choice would be Bitcoin though.
Sincere question: It appears that it's crystal clear to everyone where the distinction between fake and real news lies, or who should be allowed to post (mis)information (serve ads, if you prefer) on the interwebs, or how to identify the culprits exhaustively. I fail to see a way in practice to draw the boundary and identify/persecute the offenders. Imho virtually all ads spread misinformation (push someone's agenda) to my detriment. My only means of resistance is inherent in my duty (civic, but also self-serving -- to keep my sanity) to consciously make the effort to seek/filter through multiple viewpoints.
A structural engineer in the US, at a minimum, requires a Professional Engineer license. The licensing requirements are similar elsewhere in North America, and in Britain. In some states (such as California), to practice structural engineering requires a Structural Engineer license. So anytime I mentioned structural engineering in this thread, it goes without saying...
A construction project is overdetermined to a degree that few other enterprises are. In terms of compensation, an hour of a practicing structural engineer (aside from Calatrava & co.) is worth about as much as a carpenter's (who's paid his dues, so at about the same level of investment as engineer's into his profession). In terms of know-how or sweat equity or risk minimization, it's near impossible to say who, if anyone, contributes disproportinately more than others.
I've personally worked at different times as a carpenter (residential projects) and structural engineer (long-span bridges, tall buildings). I mean it quite literally.
Coming from the profession, I often think that the problem is quite the opposite -- that there're too many engineers with an outsized ego. In almost every way, aside from schooling, the structural engineer's trade is no different than any other construction trade, and has a contribution -- framed in financial terms, or in terms of common good -- on the scale of that of a (qualified) tradesman.
This comment is right on point. In building construction, the structural engineer is typically the architect's client. The challenge is always to seek the compromise that promotes your partner's agenda, without compromising the structural integrity.
Might be worthwhile to add conditional risk to it, to generalize it to the minimum risk classifier. That way you'd also distinguish it from, say the scikit-learn implementation.
In the US (Chicago), the invention of the elevator led to progressively taller buildings. Today, elevator technology is still one of the limiting factors of how tall you can build.
What about continuous data (real numbers, strings)? Your approach has rather limited application. On a different note, merge/sort approach (O(n log n)) is in general less efficient than the heap approach (O(n log a)), and may be impractical or wasteful of space (O(n) vs O(a)) if dealing with realtime data for example.
For perspective, the going wage for a skilled (journey level) carpenter in the SF Bay area is essentially the same today as it was in 2005 (the last time I was part of the labor force). This is from a quick survey of Craigslist ads. If anything, the real wage seems to have decreased.
Your career path (and its determinants) mirror mine to an uncanny degree. Nonetheless, I disagree that there's a long-term shortage of skilled labor in the US in general, or that any short-term shortage has its root cause in underdeveloped supply channels. I saw first hand how easy it was to procure non-union labor, even at the height of construction boom circa 2004 (when I left construction trades) or 2015 (when I left the construction industry as a licensed engineer). Like yourself, I couldn't compete (or refused to put up with) what's essentially become a migrant work force. While it does take about as long to become a skilled carpenter as it takes to become a software developer (and a strikingly similar mindset too), it's infinitely easier to employ migrant skilled workers, the workers are highly mobile, there's a ready supply of them anywhere there's active construction going on, and everyone in the construction business -- from employers to clients -- has de facto acquiesced in the status quo where work permits are not enforced. Union labor is indeed rather inelastic during the periods of boom and bust, but it's also chronically underemployed, historically shrinking and in the big scheme of things a tiny portion of the overall labor.
It's hard to imagine that OCaml's libraries/tooling would be the game changers (drop in the bucket by comparison to the vast JS ecosystem). Would be nice if SMLtoJs compiler got the corporate backing though.