Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

Send your squire to fetch the breastplate stretcher!

Fair enough, and after all it’s not your money.

In any case, it should be pretty cheap to have someone set it up for you. I’d throw it out there as somewhere around $30-50/hour with remote work allowed, or a fixed price of $1000-1500. From your description it sounds like something that could be knocked out in a week by someone with a few years experience, and you have the additional security of having someone else on the hook for, well, security. Just make sure they document everything.

First, if people are winging it, your first problem is going to be standardization and sterilization of the data. If everyone is using excel, for example, they should be filling in the same template which enforces data integrity (eg required fields and allowed values). Don’t allow anyone to roll their own. Standardize everything. At that point your job becomes pretty easy with solutions ranging from converting the data to CSVs or just uploading it to a sql database (eg mysql) with some gui.

I would recommend thinking pretty hard about whether there is a business value in limiting access to data that people “don’t need.” While it does make sense for reporting to have simplified views, managing user level access to specific subsets of data is often not justified for the level of effort required. If you’re dealing with actual (eg government) classified information or if there are highly valuable trade secrets that need protecting, that’s another story. But if it’s just “Jeff in NY doesn’t need to see Jane LA’s sales numbers,” it’s probably a waste of effort and will be a time and money sink. I’m saying that as someone who has worked on very highly classified systems.

Anyway, everything you’re talking about is a solved problem That can be solved using excel and maybe an off the shelf database that an intern could set up for you.

You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H₂O -> 2H₂ + O ₂

Obviously the biggest problem is making sure you have an even number of water molecules.

Hint: It’s not because this idea never occurred to any of the scientists and engineers involved in hydrogen power.

Sorry - I should have realized others would point that out as well. I didn’t mean to pile on.

Well, at least their spamming this post reminded me to block their account, so there is that.

Just say no to fascists, kids.

“Right to work” means employees can work in a union shop and receive the benefits of such without having to join the union or pay dues. It’s a set of laws that have successfully destroyed unions.

You’re thinking of “at will” employment laws, which means an employer can fire an employee for any reason or for no reason, but not for an illegal reason (which varies depending on state but includes the right to organize and rights against discrimination and retaliation).

I think it’s more likely that we will see smaller scale attacks by domestic terrorists, ranging from mass shootings to something on the scale of a Timothy McVeigh. I can also see a probability of a return to a 1960s/1970s level of political violence and assassinations.

I think those are more likely than a large scale attack from foreign terrorists.

Yup, that was it. Thanks!

Which is another argument in favor of gun control.

Do you think all countries arm all of their regular police officers with firearms?

bare arms

Those aren’t the type of guns we’re talking about…

It is absolutely infuriating when you see this and put it next to cases filed against people like Trump and Gaetz.

I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.

I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.

The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”

I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.

Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!

Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.

Cops have plenty of discretion in choosing which laws to enforce, and how. They have to - they have limited resources and we have a ridiculous number of laws. I’ve had a cop say that if he wants to pull someone over, he just has to follow them for a while. They’ll drift their lane, fail to signal, speed just a bit - there’s always something. Her doesn’t have to, he just does it if he feels like fucking with someone. They chose to do this. He’ll, I think Seattle was one of the cities where the cops basically went on strike and refused to enforce the law almost at all during some dispute with the mayor.

Harassment at LGBT bars has been historically one of the main ways the LGBT community was systemically oppressed and made to stay in the closet. It happened all the time in the 50s and 60s, and bar owners used to have to bribe the cops to stay open (and sometimes still get raided but with advanced warning). Hell, some of the bars were run by the mafia.

This was exactly the kind of thing that kicked off the LGBT rights movement when their arrest of Stonewall patrons triggered a riot. There were laws on the books then, too, including full on criminalization of homosexuality.

That’s exactly where a significant chunk of this country wants to go. And this is the kind of thing that starts it.

Hopefully, this will force them to change those laws, but that’s just removing the opportunity for these kinds of raids. They should no more be having these raids than Texas should have enforced its antiquated and never-enforced sodomy law, which resulted in the Lawrence ruling (which they also want to overturn).

Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks. There’s the whomping willow, which they can’t just cast a force field against. There were the spiders and the centaurs in the forest. The big three headed dog. That devil’s something plant. And if I recall, Voldemort didn’t realize the caretaker had come into the house until he was in the hallway and Nagini saw him. Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I read those.

Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.

And for what it’s worth, I think a sniper could take out a Jedi, too.

I don’t know. I’ve always thought a sniper could have taken out Voldemort. Far away, camouflaged, and the bullet gets there faster than the sound. It’s a reaction time thing.