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.

I always got “Groundhog Day with Guns,” plus “Waiting for Godot,” plus Game of Thrones.

Too much alliteration?

“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).

Same. I’ve also had peer reviews that pointed out that I spelled Erdős’ name incorrectly as Erdos. I had another that I grew so irate over Reviewer #2’s critique of my lack of explanation that I turned a ten page paper into a 53-pager, which was then accepted. I’ve also seen absolute blatant inattention, and I’ve definitely been subject to being told to add coauthors because of their seniority/role or current lack of pubs.

I’m completely with you on the academic publication industry. I sympathize with the younger researchers now who are in a far more pay to play environment than I ever was. We’d always build public fees into our funding because we felt obligated to open access all of our work (being government funded, but also just morally), but we were a big money institution that had that kind of flexibility. $10k is nothing on a $5M grant. But now, there’s so many journals that exist only to churn out papers for the publish or perish culture, and no one seems to take seriously the fact that they go unread and are just hitting a check mark.

99% of the time I’m sure it doesn’t matter. It’s just flotsam. But there should be a way of gauging a paper’s potential importance, both by journal ranking and maybe by topic. I’m really not going to call out some overseas researcher who is just trying to keep their job for publishing in a backwater journal, but it’s like that old saying that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Or that Ashkenazi story about the rabbi emptying the pillow full of feathers to illustrate how a damaging lie is impossible to recover from.

God damn it. I don’t think that reviewers and publishers are aware as to the potential long term consequences of publishing shit papers that ultimately get retracted. It’s one thing if it’s some physics paper on a new superconductor, it’s another thing if it leads to an antivax movement that’s still going to this day.

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.

Or she could have a Boost supplemental nutrition drink and have it taste like chocolate instead of blood and placenta.

Probably not very much.

1. Unless I’m mistaken this is a Chinese company trading on the Chinese market. Unless someone was specifically looking to be in the Chinese real estate market (which was very hot about a decade ago iirc), they wouldn’t have a lot of exposure. I think the Chinese market has been in the shitter recently, so I’m not sure who’s holding them right now
2. Retirement funds (pension funds and 401k target date funds, which is where most of the money is these days I believe) skew very conservatively. They spread their money across markets (so like 5% tech, 8% utilities, 7% municipal bonds, whatever). They might have a chunk in a bucket of “foreign” markets, but even those would be spread across multiple industries. I’d be surprised if any of those funds had more than a fraction of a percent in a single company like this.
3. Target date funds get their name from the fact that they’re investing with the expectation that you’ll retire at 65, and the closer that date gets, the more conservative the investments become. People who are retiring soon will have even less exposure to this, and people who are retiring in 20 years will never know this happened.

The real question is whether there’s going to be a ripple effect but it’s not looking like that yet.

Uh-oh. They violated the EULA.

This is just the latest change in which an invention changes the nature of warfare. You saw it happen with crossbows, which allowed unskilled troops to shoot people far away, gunpowder weapons, which negated armor and castles, rifles, which removed much of the need for long lines of troops using volley fire, the machine gun, which made an infantry charge much less effective, air power, which changed the nature of naval warfare, and more than I care to list.

The problem is for the very impactful changes, you have two generations of military leadership who have learned tactics and strategy based around technologies that are becoming rapidly outmoded. WWI shocked people with the level of slaughter seen.

It’s easier to adapt to using a new weapons system than it is to figure out how to respond to it, because the uses were defined as the system was being developed and just need the actual applications to be refined and optimized, while the responders have a much larger search space.

I’ll always be the first to come down on the crappiness of the Russian military - I could go on for pages about what they do wrong - but to some extent this is something all armies are vulnerable to. Look how long it took for the US to adapt to IEDs, for example.

Yup, that was it. Thanks!

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.

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.

Did you leave Kahn and his followers out on purpose? They basically got transported. Maybe it’s an edge case, but I would consider being exiled to a planet and not being allowed to leave as a kind of incarnation.

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No, it’s for all Jews.

In Judaism, there’s no proselytizing - they’re not actively seeking converts. A rabbi is supposed to reject a request for conversion three times before beginning the process. There’s a bit involved - you can find it online - but it involves time and effort and depending on your genitalia a bit of pain (basically just a pinprick even if you’re already good to go, as it were, because a medical circumcision isn’t considered to count as a religious one). Orthodox Jews don’t tend to recognize converts unless they’re also orthodox, but that doesn’t affect the Law of Return.

It’s just a lot of work for a “free” vacation. It’d be easier in the end to just travel over there, unless you’re looking for citizenship.

There are of course many Jewish atheists, but they’re definitely going to push back on that point for a convert.

Honestly, for the level of effort and given OP’s atheism, I’d just save up for a trip to Costa Rica and do jungle zip lines and hang out with sloths. The candles and the hats are nice, but there’s easier ways to tour the Middle East - and I’d include joining the Marines in that.

If they have a six hour delay, I probably have some padding in that timeline. They’d hook me up and say “It’s just a panic attack, here’s some O2” and send me on my way. Then I’m either getting back on the plane, rescheduling with the ticket desk, or hitting up a bar and heading home until tomorrow.

What I’m wondering is what they’d do if you told the flight attendant you’re having chest pains and a shooting pain in your left arm. They’re not going to want to hold a person on board who may require emergency medical treatment. You might not make it back on board that particular flight, but with that kind of delay I’d probably just rather rebook anyway.

I’m not sure why deplaning passengers would cost more money. The flight crew and terminal operators are still working throughout the period. The one thing I can see oosssibly causing an issue is going back to the terminal and u loading the luggage, but it literally happens every day. I can’t see it taking more than about 30 minutes based on my experiences.