SoleInvictus

Tl;dr: imagine the success and continuity of not only your career but the careers of your employees had a significant element of random chance involved. Welcome to research.

Now former scientist here. I see the typical "people would do this anyways" comments but I'd wager they don't understand what it's like to work in science and academia. It's publish or perish. In the United States, it's an absolute capitalist meat grinder and it can be brutal.

As a lead researcher, you are dependent on securing grant money not only to keep your job, but to keep the jobs of your co-workers and the very lab itself afloat.

How do you secure grants? By showing you have the experience and ability to complete the research.

How do you show you have the required experience and ability? By your lab's record of publishing the results of successful research.

What is successful research? In an ideal world, it would be what was found at the end of an investigation, regardless of if it disproves the null hypothesis or not. In reality, it's the results of research that have further application, either in industry or that disprove the null hypothesis and act as a step to get you further related grants.

What happens when an investigation flounders? So you didn't disprove the null hypothesis. In an ideal world, you publish a paper explaining what happened and everyone knows what not to do in the future. In reality, it's basically unpublishable as journals want what will make them money. Your lab now has the research equivalent of a gap in your resume. You continue with other research and hope it is publishable. If your lab has a streak of bad luck and multiple projects crap out, now it's harder to secure grants. The downward spiral begins.

Is what this researcher did wrong? Absolutely, but I get it. I 100% get it.

We need serious reform that removes the profit motive. A functional research system would better catch fabricated results before they're published. It would alleviate the pressures that drive good people to do bad things in the pursuit of doing further good. It would actually enhance scientific discovery as ALL results would be published and without parasitic publishers as unnecessary middlemen.

So Google Search, even back in 2000, was an AI?

Seriously. As a biologist, my education was general enough that I learned how little I know about everything, instead giving me an inferiority complex.

You can save $1000 a month? Damn!

It's not. I'm guessing they did a Google search, looked at a few misleading article titles, and then decided they were a scientist.

On average, the hole has been shrinking, but 2023's hole was the 12th biggest on record. The eruption of Hunga-Tonga was thought to be the main factor.

The mass die-off reference likely refers to penguin chicks dying because climate change is causing sea ice to melt earlier than before. The poor little guys are falling into the ocean and drowning. It's not ozone layer related, though

Seriously. If these "media pros" are actually concerned, it appears my personal server adheres to higher standards than their industry.

No no, you really weren't off base. Even if they were owned by Walmart, I doubt they could do worse.

That's great, I'm glad you got some deals!

The thing about them is their low wages and reluctance to train their employees meant high-end goods were often priced very low. Levi's jeans were $10-15 a pair while designer jeans were priced at $5. I recall someone donating a batch of Hermés scarves. None of the pricers knew the brand, so they put them out for $1 each. I bought them all for 50% off (employee discount!) and hit eBay. This kind of thing happened weekly so the employees were always looking for things we could resell. We made less than $20k/year, that's how we scraped by!

I'm not sure how other stores are, but mine was a great example of being a penny wise and a pound foolish.

So, I'm not trying to be the "ackshually" guy.

Value Village isn't owned by Walmart.

Buuuut, you're still right. They're absolutely a shit company. I was an assistant supervisor at Value Village a couple of decades ago. First, they're 100% for profit but advertise in such a way that consumers believe they're a charity. What they do is buy donations from charities by the pound. Any donations accepted at the store on behalf of a charity are paid at a drastically reduced rate, so of course they push HARD for customers to bring donations directly to the store.

The shit cherry on top was the stores lying to charities about the quality of received goods to avoid paying. If clothes, for example, were soiled, they'd refuse to pay for the entire batch. Stores would find a few dirty shirts, claim the entire cart was crap, claw the money back, and sell the rest of the cart.

The company makes a HUGE profit but pays their employees peanuts. Our head cashier had worked for the company for eight years and capped out at $7.25/hour in 2003, about $14 today. One year, they announced no raises, no reason given. My then girlfriend and I discovered the owners had purchased a cabin in Northern California for use by the c-suite douches. The store manager was pulling in $60k a year, plus bonus, in a very low cost of living area. Me? $8.25 per hour.

What else? They incentivize under staffing by making a supervisor's paltry bonuses tied to their staffing budget. Staying at budget meant no bonus. They had to come in under budget for any bonus, and the more "savings" the higher the bonus. I got chewed out when I first started scheduling because I used all the hours allotted in the budget. The store went from a shit hole to being fairly respectable but it would eat into my boss's bonus. Her maximum annual bonus? $2.5k.

So they may not be owned by Walmart, but they're the Walmart of thrift stores. Fuck those guys.

I'm also disabled. We tend to refer to this as the "disability tax". Anything that could potentially be billed to insurance or for which there are no other options is incredibly expensive. If we can't afford it or don't have insurance, we're always welcome to go die under a bridge somewhere. Gotta pay for the owner's yacht.

Same as long as this isn't the only thing they do. I work with a guy that loves to talk about his passions and it's awesome for like thirty minutes. Then it's alright for another 15-20. After that it starts to drag and I begin to feel the weight of my mounting unfinished tasks.

You're right, it's yet another stop-gap measure keeping us from making ideal, long-term solutions. If we were an intelligent species, we'd have been hellbent on implementing renewable energy solutions and putting massive, massive amounts of research into fusion. Instead, we're where we are now. What a time to be alive.