The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network
I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
Since this is the most important and urgent topic humanity should be working on: why isn’t this the case? Idiocracy is here. Don’t look up.
We have to throw everything into the race. But how to do this with the current inner workings of our societies? How to overcome greed? What about the power of (social) media? Why do we have Netflix and so on? How can we make people spend their time solving climate crisis, saving our planet earth?
Saving the planet doesn't make the stock prices go up, so no one will care.
Private companies are now getting their own nuclear power stations to power AI. We can't get new nuclear power for public use, but private for profit initiatives? Absolutely.
> Saving the planet doesn't make the stock prices go up, so no one will care.
I mean, it _could_, if you set up a market structure to incentivize it. CAISO (California) has done this, and now solar and storage costs are plummeting and associated industries are booming as the solar+storage solution starts outcompeting other forms of energy production.
Heck, solar+storage is even booming in ERCOT (Texas), which has no specific market incentives for it. Their spot market swings so wildly that storage makes money on power arbitrage and transmission easing.
Any nuclear power plants being built decreases the marginal cost of building another. If private companies are willing to front the cost of building the first one in recent times, it may help.
It's classic game theory. The benefits are public and delayed, and the losses are private and immediate. This dramatically incentivizes defection.
Few people are going to give up their modern convinces so their great grandchildren will have better lives. This behavior is everywhere. Few people give up, say, their excess capital to reduce suffering in developing countries, or eating meat for the benefits of the animals that suffer to produce it.
I've gone to enough city council meetings in the last two decades advocating for exactly the things that would incentivize GHG reductions while increasing some quality of life (everything from urbanism, to walkability, to dutch-style cycle infrastructure, to expanded train systems, to general electrification). The number of people who won't even try an induction range because they view a gas range as important to their identity is astounding. Most people are against repurposing any public streets for transportation alternatives, even in the most left-wing cities, much less the absurdity of actually proposing anyone should actually give up their car.
It's also a coordination problem. You won't help your children (the timeline is not that long) by personally giving up your "modern [conveniences]". You need a substantial portion of the population to do that to have any hope of moving the needle. So the choice is between getting the benefits or not, your children will suffer anyway.
Coordination problems aren’t typically too difficult. The USB C switch, or the python 3 switch all had serious frictional costs, but are generally doable in aggregate.
I think asserting it is a coordination problem is just a self-serving excuse for defection. It’s not as if we can’t switch if not everyone switches all at once. We just don’t want to go through the frictional costs of switching if others defect.
Since certain political parties seem to feel it justified to throw their antediluvian morals about life in my face, I am responding in kind. I believe global warming is the central moral issue of our time. I hold each person who has voted for a political party that supports the continued carbon pollution personally responsible for the lives and welfare of my children and my childen's children. They are morally bankrupt and care nothing for the Earth and Humanity at large. As a technically-minded person, I believe we can definitely science our way out of this. But hope is not a plan. Most of these deluded voters have no clue how to solve this, they are hoping that we technophiles will pull a rabbit our of our collective hats and save them. But clearly there are no simple answers here, no miracle feats of engineering or unobtanium that will save us, just legal and regulatory changes necessary to hold capitalism and greed accountable for the changes it has wrought on the pale blue dot we all depend upon. We have done little to none of the tasks necessary to stop this train. I am angry and filled with sadness for my children, as the greedy few and ignorant many are destroying the little hope we have left.
No, humanity doesn't need to work on it at all, instead, humanity should be working on a peaceful painless extinction, because that will happen anyway, but not necessarily in a painless way.
Yep, the primary problem is Africa.. but if the earth becomes inhabitable (this will happen sooner or later) this problem will be solved. But it'll most likely be brutal and preventing that brutality is precisely what I think humanity should focus on..
Read the last sentence of my comment again.. and again, until you understand what I'm talking about. LLMs won't help as they're brainwashed to avoid this topic.
Extinction on earth will happen and that's an undeniable fact.
AI is made by humans, humans are biased towards existence, and if AI came to conclusion that humans should stop reproducing that would be seen as "oh, that's a dangerous AI that wants to kill human race".
Yep, it's getting better in developed countries, but this will not lead to anything good unless we deal with those countries with very high fertility rates (like in Africa)..
Pro tip: reducing a gas that occupies 0.04% (aka 400ppm) of our atmosphere isn’t going to fix this. The warming of our home has much more to do with astrophysics than puny humans. Do you think The Boring Company is about solving traffic problems?
We are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals. 3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years. We must slow down the climate catastrophe now.
There were three sentences. Which one exactly was hyperbolic?
- "We are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals". We're outside the envelope (the historical range) of biotic and abiotic conditions that defined our species' existence on earth for the duration of our time as a species. We are seeing climate extremes never before experienced by the genus homo, let alone homo sapiens. This is a matter of climatic record, absolutely no controversy here.
- "3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years"? That's a future prediction so obviously we can't confirm or deny it. We've "only" seen 100s of millions globally displaced already from small-scale recent collapses. But those have other causal factor in addition to climate. Still, sea level keeps rising. Water extraction continues sinking coastal water tables into brackish water. Extreme storms happen more and more frequently. Most people on earth live near the ocean. Totaled property damage is more and more common. 3 billion people displaced in 30 years is plausible given the recent trends. It might be less if we're lucky.
- "We must slow down the climate catastrophe now." Given the ongoing catastrophe, I fail to see any hyperbole in this statement.
How is this hyperbole? There’s a wall being touted at the southern border of America for chrissake, the country that has a statue engraved on it that it takes in refugees. Every temperate climate western country has a border “crisis” right now.
This statement seems very naive and hyperbolic, like “chicken little”. The people crossing the southern border of the US are economic migrants that are not fleeing “climate change” that is preposterous. There are more military aged males relocating due to criminals situations per day than the amount people coming to the US because of a “hole in the ozone layer” in one year. People that think this way, I think are consuming way too much leftist media and are not thinking critically.
Well, you’re just throwing insults like a child but the fact is that what you said is completely hyperbolic and irrational. What I wrote is clear enough. The people crossing the border are not doing so because they are scared of climate, you sound ridiculous for asserting that.
That has nothing to do with climate change. They aren't abandoning their homeland because its hot. They're doing it because they can get more money elsewhere.
No one said it was because “it’s hot”. It’s not like they go to cool off. But climate change changes everything. It may kill off a tourist economy they relied on. It may reduce crop yield, making food too expensive, etc. It may increase disease. Absolutely climate has a huge impact.
What's hyperbolic? The fact is no one knows how bad it'll be and how soon. Does that mean no statement can be made about the future? We're already seeing problems around water sourcing. I don't see how any of OPs statements are a stretch.
Every time I see someone make a statement about the future negative affects of climate change inevitably someone comes around to say that's not helping. It reads like a shade of denialism. How can you fix a problem without reviewing the consequences? I've yet to hear these same commenters suggest what would help.
What you will see is the fingerprint of trolling conservative bots, talking about “leftist” this, “woke” that. Same as Twitter. With nothing to back anything up because they’re just shills.
Where is one shred of evidence of any of this? Humans adapt. It’s this kind of thing why you have 20-year-olds that think we’ll be dead in 5 years. It’s ridiculous. The same people that make this argument also try to tell us that the 10 million people that have illegally crossed into the US have some because of climate change.
No, no, every possible question must be answered by an automated plagiarism machine running on GPUs which need multiple kilowatts to operate. It's called progress, you see.
The AFD is just attacking everything that the Greens propose. No constructive discussions at all, only populism. I fear that heat pumps will be the smaller „issue“ society will face in near future. The citizens are not yet ready for the necessary changes. Another problem is that Russia is trying to heat things up, too, not with the gas they provided, but with fake news campaigns in various medias. And yes, insulation is more important than the heating—-it can cut 80 percent of the bill for heating.
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