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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • I’ve been gambling before and it was fun when I won money. The thing is I know how, with few exceptions with games like poker and blackjack (and only then if you’re skilled), you will ALWAYS lose more money than you win over long enough of a time period.

    I’m a big, walking math machine, though, so I’ve been the person getting a little too tipsy at the roulette table and telling everyone exactly how probability works and that numbers are never “hot”. The roulette dealer was surprisingly amused.



  • Yep, it’s all cumulative. I think the “weight loss is in the kitchen” advice helps those who don’t understand weight loss is a function of net calories, so start exercising and eat more because they think exercise somehow magically makes weight go away. If only I had a nickel for every time I heard “weight lifting converts fat into muscle” over the years…

    My aunt is a great example. She started doing daily walks to lose weight but picked up a “healthy protein smoothie” from a local coffee shop on the way home. She slowly gained weight because they were more like milkshakes and easily had 500+ calories per serving.



  • Given we have the technology, any new construction should be required to be environmentally neutral at a minimum, ideally with ongoing improvement.

    If they need to use millions of gallons of groundwater? Great, go fucking wild, but directly fund managed aquifer recharge projects to replace that groundwater at an equal or greater rate.

    Increases in resource consumption should be covered entirely by the data center plus improvements to benefit the community.

    No longer should big business be used as a means to siphon the value of labor and natural resources and concentrate it for selfish use by the worst of humanity.










  • In the US and that’s absolutely the norm here. I’d know - I went through it.

    Your edit expands the context outside of what we’re discussing - losing 10,000 STEM PhD candidates. People don’t often do part-time PhDs in STEM as they’re not frequently offered. People aren’t keeping their full-time jobs when getting a STEM PhD because that becomes their full-time job.

    Looking at it from a super high level, universities apply for funding to complete research, which is completed b graduate students with assistance from faculty. Their tuition is covered to give the graduate student the necessary skills to complete the research while also furthering their other educational goals as time and funds allow.There are often constraints on how and when this research is performed which can make it incompatible with a part-time schedule. The time requirements can also be massive - between classes, teaching, lab research, field research, and being the de-facto lab manager, I easily put in 70-80 hours a week. I even had to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t seek outside work or I’d lose my funding, which ultimately was comical given I wouldn’t have the time






  • I agree 100%. My friends, peers, and I all wasted huge amounts of time during our undergrad degree,and to varying extents even in post-graduate degrees, fulfilling the university’s “one size fits all” curriculum standards.

    I spent hundreds of hours sitting in lecture over nearly a decade. I DO NOT learn well from oral instruction but still was graded on attendance. I did homework far in excess of that required to learn and practice the material. I wasted so much time that I could have achieved double the number of degrees, even then with less work, if I had been given full autonomy and responsibility to learn the course material.