Conversely, if you want people to be susceptible to mustache-twirling villains offer as little money as possible with no job security what so ever. Modern hard

Conversely, if you want people to be susceptible to mustache-twirling villains offer as little money as possible with no job security what so ever. Modern hard sciences academia is a horrible place and the problem is economic: there are too many scientists and too few jobs for them. To quote Stephenson's Cryptonomicon: >Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree,and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of work from him, in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand.