temporaryi3

I did my phd in experimental physics and I have to say my realisation of this large point, that papers are little more than resume padding to lock in an achievement was a significant contributor towards destroying, and I use destroying seriously here, any faith or trust that peer review or publishing has anything at all to do with the scientific method at all.

Your results replicate, or they don't. Your calculations, equations, and models predict experiment. Or they don't.

Writing papers about it and getting the feedback of "peers" is nothing more than an old fashioned circle jerk for padding resumes, CVs, and persuading other people in that academic hierarchy that you deserve funding. It is a game that is divorced from actually learning, researching, understanding, measuring, and predicting the world.

I'M in the UK and I absolutely do not trust the civil service at all.

Politeness > accuracy & honestly is a very common preference, but not mine.

what you want is the internet with only a couple hundred million people connected, only a million or so content creators.

Unless you have some pretty evil supervillain scheme, no moral compass, and succeed.... that world is never coming back.

Yes. Google is noticeably worse year on year for technical queries in particular, but everything else as well.

It's more reasonable to expect them to make 35-45K pre taxes, 20-25k after taxes. With a COL of a working class person around 17.5-20k.

Most people in software, or any tech field, are barely middle class let alone retiring aged 50.

"On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use."

That's simply not true.

What do you do when you don't have that itch?

You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.

Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.

It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.

Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.