GalenErso

Why? Why can't scientists from outside the US and Western Europe seek international co-authors, like everyone else?

> Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.

This works in tech but not necessarily in other white collar fields like finance. In finance, there is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire laterally unless they have no other choice. Professionals like investment bankers and CFAs are recruited straight out of university and groomed to assume leadership positions in the long term.

What causes El Niño to happen every few years? What mechanism drives the phenomenon? I was thinking maybe sun spots, but sun spots have 11 year cycles on average, so I don't think it's the cause. Why doesn't El Niño happen every year, like hurricanes?

More expensive cars are better for the environment if people start driving less or stop driving. But it's worse for the environment if people hold on to older cars, because they are less fuel efficient than newer models and release more fine particles in the air.

> Reports of raids or official security visits at prominent consulting firms in the last few months, including American outfits such as the Mintz Group and Bain & Company and most recently Capvision Partners, a consulting company with headquarters in New York and Shanghai, have raised alarm.

Chinese authorities give exactly zero fuck about the "prominence", prestige, or wealth of an organization or individual. The CCP disappeared one of China's richest men, Jack Ma, and forced him to go through a political re-education program because of one time he barely alluded to questioning the government's policies. China has executed CEOs in the past. Meanwhile, the most prominent newspaper in the United States recently published a glowing article about Elizabeth Holmes, recently condemned to 11 years in prison for fraud. You wouldn't see that (the article) in China.

Maybe we could take a page from them.

Why isn't Robinhood available in Canada, anyhow? I wanted to use them but I had to fall back on my bank's (very good) in-house brokerage platform.

Hair and eye color are simple epigenetical traits, and very easily measurable. As for size, I don't know if you've traveled to East Asia recently, but the young generations are just as tall as we Westerners. I follow a number of Asian bodybuilders and they aren't any smaller than your average white bodybuilder. The stereotype is likely the product of a historically poor nutrition, but that has changed, and Asians born in the last 30-40 years are proof.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is far more complex to define, measure and test than eye color or height.

Can't their success be more attributed to a culture that favors learning and education, as well as the relative financial prosperity of Ashkenazi Jews compared to other groups? That the children of successful artists, scientists, or financiers become successful artists, scientists and financiers themselves is least surprising.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come to mind.

I'll cut straight to the chase:

White people are _not_ more intelligent than black people. And it is both factually incorrect and racist to believe so.

- "I never said white people were mo--" Sure, but that is nevertheless the belief held by 99% of the people who think that some ethnicities are inherently more intelligent than others. It's a reasonable assumption that that is what you think.

> (UK) Internet traffic took a significant nosedive, dropping by as much as 18%. The Sunday trends didn't stop there. As night fell and Prince William took to the stage to deliver a speech during the Coronation Concert, there was a clear drop in Internet traffic.

Reposting a comment from Reddit[1]:

Microsoft has been bleeding talent for the last 5-6 years due to low compensation. It's why the SLT authorized a "correction" in pay last year that saw many people get a significant pay bump. Lots of new college hires have even stated that Microsoft's offer was the lowest offer they received. Levels.fyi tells basically the same story as well if you compare Microsoft to many other tech companies.

One thing to note is that the bonus and stock award budget have been reduced from last year where it was inflated. So, it's back to normal. What is frustrating is that it's also likely "back to normal" for the executives when it should be minimal to non-existent. The pessimist in me says that this is nothing more than juicing the quarterly stats so that Satya and his directs hit their targets for their "normal" bonuses.

Honestly, this is the closest I've seen the company to unionization and I'm willing to bet that efforts are going to start soon. Especially if the Q4/annual results exceed expectations.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13dveyv/microso...

> I'll give the country 10 years to implode

I'll take predictions that won't happen for 100, Alex.

Unfortunately for Taiwan, it doesn't have the ability to prevent the U.S. from destroying TSMC's factories with: long range cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, PGMs, or special forces. But that wouldn't be necessary to deny China TSMC.

> Last year we reported on TSMC Chairman Mark Liu, who told interviewers that, “Nobody can control TSMC by force.” He reasoned(opens in new tab) that, “If you take a military force or invasion, you will render TSMC factories inoperable.” But, explosives wouldn’t be needed, according to Liu, as TSMC's fine-tuned operations would simply crumble as its real-time connections with the outside world evaporated. However, we should remember that China’s motives should not be measured against business rationality. Instead, its policies may be colored by a leader seeking glory, destiny, a legacy, and so on.

Doesn't Adobe want people to become familiar with their tools, regardless of legality, so they continue to use them later in the workplace?

I didn't get my first real phone until after high school, while everyone else had one.

I graduated salutatorian. I was able to focus on my homework after school for hours without distractions. I had a computer at home, but it was pretty crappy.

Continents can rise and fall without changes in the quantity of liquid water on the surface. One must also consider the fact that the world was much warmer then, so things like Greenland, the Antarctic ice sheet, and glaciers did not exist. If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world of today were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The answer to your question is that a portion of this water turned into ice. Ice that is now turning back to liquid form thanks to climate change. Another factor is that water is also slowly disappearing into the Earth's crust. When the Russians dug 12 kilometers into the crust, they discovered that rocks at that depth were saturated with water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole?useski...

Quick game: try to guess the countries that would exist in this world (470 million years ago) and their relative geopolitical influence. This large, elongated island in what is now Greenland: would it be a global power like Britain used to be, or a poor backwater like Sri Lanka or Madagascar? Britain owed its position in part to large deposits of easily accessible coal, which supercharged its economic and technological development. 470 million years ago there wouldn't be coal, or oil, but you can assume that this geography exists in our present time. This double island in what is now Western Russia, would it be one country, or two, one controlling the north, the other the south? And the main continent, would it be more like Asia - a fragmentation of empires and sub-cultures - or North America - a monolinguistic entity under a single authority (yeah, I know Canada exists, but Canada is basically a satellite country of America, and fyi I'm Canadian)? America owes its wealth and influence in large part to its geographical isolation from the world island, the Old World of Europe, Asia, and Africa, coupled with its abundance of temperate and resource-rich land. Could some of these lands qualify?

Those three islands off the coast of what is now South Africa would be interesting to study: would they be three separate countries? One country? Or an extension of whichever empire dominated the continent? Would be they friendly or hostile to each other?

- Confusing naming conventions. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Compare to Sony's Playstations 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Names matter enormously. There's a reason why FAANG and FAANG-tier tech firms all have very simple names. While that may be far from the only reason why these companies are so successful, it matters more than one thinks.

- Lack of AAA exclusives. Halo is the main one, but Sony has God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, all the Spider Men, The Last of Us, Forza, and others.

- Price. The PS4 was cheaper than the Xbox One by $100, and this mattered to parents who could afford to gift their children a $400-$500 console, but not a $1,500+ gaming PC. This matters less in the North American market, where people have more disposable income, but East Asian and European markets are safely in Sony's pocket.

- Controllers? There is a meme that Xbox controllers are designed for large, "American" hands. Regardless of the truth, memes and perceptions shape decisions.

- Sony has the Japanese market locked up. Xbox is the dominant console in the US, but its dominance is weak: 53.3% vs. 46.65% for the Playstation.[1] Which begs the question: why hasn't Microsoft crushed the competition in its prime domestic market, but Sony crushed theirs in Japan?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1044948/market-share-of-...

The fact that the minimum wage has remained unchanged for so long has an interesting economic consequence: it has effectively abolished the concept of a minimum wage. Nordic countries like Germany don't have a minimum wage. Rather, labor unions negotiate pay rates for various industries, and businesses are free to set their own rates. Left-wing people in the US think that abolishing the minimum wage would be a disaster, as businesses would be free to pay their workers peanuts. But this is not what's actually happening in other industrialized countries without a mandated minimum wage. Sure, a business could offer $4/hour, but because it would not be a liveable wage, no one would take those jobs, even people who are desperate. Likewise, $7.25/hour, the mandated minimum wage in the US, is now so low compared to the cost of living that no business is paying that anymore, even the penny-pinching ones. So the labor market situation in the US at the moment resembles more that of Nordic European countries.

It may be that the lack of a minimum wage in a situation of labor scarcity empowers workers. When there is a mandated minimum wage, a business can pay that, because it's an easy decision. But when there is no minimum wage, businesses have to work harder to determine an appropriate pay level. They have to conduct market research, hire consultants, study their competitors, and make a decision.

Apple could just squash the unhappy shareholders with its private army. Kill two birds with one stone. My plan is foolproof.

Fear will keep the shareholders in line.