gtmitchell

7 ms·

31.
by gtmitchell 3y ago
Good to hear, it seems UTOPIA has really turned a corner after a rough start. They expanded to my city recently and I have had no regrets about switching. No wonder Comcast / CenturyLink / etc are fighting so hard.
32.
by gtmitchell 4y ago
This isn’t particularly surprising to me. I’m a scientist, and in my field, women have outnumbered men in my undergraduate and graduate programs, and also in every lab I’ve worked in as a professional. The hard sciences haven’t had the gen
33.
by gtmitchell 4y ago
Because, to first approximation, this is true. Every organization, every person has their own biases and agenda. I'm not sure why Americans believe that objectivity in news reporting is even possible. Other countries don't seem
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
The vast majority of organizations in the US already use the metric system in places where the metric system makes sense. Basically everyone who wants to use it is already using it. For everything else, what's the point in the governm
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
Just more proof that bread and circus remains an effective strategy for politicians to win favor with the masses.
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
House prices in my area have quintupled since I moved here 13 years ago. A 20% drop would move house prices back to where they were perhaps 4 years ago. And now that interest rates are double what they were, housing affordability is as ba
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
As a bright-eyed science undergraduate, I went to my first conference thinking how amazing it would be to have all these accomplished and intelligent people in my field all coming together to share their knowledge and make the world a bette
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
Also, remember the survivorship bias inherent in surveys like this. They rarely capture the very large portion of graduate students who leave their program without a degree. I was one of those, and it’s really difficult for me to look back
39.
by gtmitchell 4y ago
Trying to get a PhD. I wasn’t a good student and I didn’t choose a good advisor. I spent the better pet of a decade trying to finish and failed. I ended up unemployed and divorced in large part because of that decision, and while my life
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
Wow, someone pulled off that synthesis? I'm impressed! For those who are wondering if this has any practical applications, the answer is almost certainly no. At best, someone might look at the synthetic pathways used to produce perfl
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel anything but hopelessly depressed by the housing market. My neighborhood consists of approximately 10% corporately owned rental homes purchased after the housing crash using money borrowed by said corpo
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
Off the top of my head: -Academic researchers are already overworked, underpaid, and undertrained. Asking them to spend even more of their time to meticulously upload all their notes and data to an electronic notebook is going to be an uph
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by gtmitchell 4y ago
Chemist here. Every few years, someone has the novel idea that we should have open data for all chemistry laboratories, so then we can do Better Science. And like every other proposal I've seen, this one will get approximately zero t
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by gtmitchell 5y ago
6% core inflation with wage growth flat. And that doesn't even include housing prices, which went up 25% last year alone where I live. Am I the only one feeling entirely hopeless about the prospects for my financial future? How does
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by gtmitchell 5y ago
I made an upward lateral move at the same company because it gave me a 25% pay bump, plus the ability to work remotely. I was hoping that would allow me to finally be able to afford a house, but it still doesn’t seem like enough.
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by gtmitchell 5y ago
In 1987, I was typing BASIC programs I read from a book into a TI-99/4A attached to a television in my bedroom, and desperately wishing I had a cassette recorder peripheral so I could actually save anything. Having to retype in a game
47.
by gtmitchell 5y ago
This article hits close to home. I was a very late-term dropout from a doctoral program in a hard science. I had neither the good sense to quit early on, nor the mental fortitude to complete my dissertation and ended up wasting years of m
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by gtmitchell 5y ago
I think at least part of it is desperation. Home ownership has been one of the very few reliable ways for the middle class to build wealth, and with housing prices skyrocketing and the future looking even worse, I suspect many people are tr
49.
by gtmitchell 5y ago
This is my reality. I've lived here since right after the real estate crash and have seen house prices triple in a decade. I don't work in tech, and I don't have the flexibility to move because of family commitments. My re
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by gtmitchell 8y ago
As a PhD dropout myself, I understand entirely the decision of these students to distance themselves from what were obviously negative experiences for them. Unlike those listed in this article, I actually ended up staying in my field of stu
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by gtmitchell 10y ago
I regret deciding to major in a hard science instead of programming, as well as spending far too long in a PhD program before dropping out. The personal and professional toll of these choices has been painful on the best days, soul-crushing