Victerius

Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

Sorry, but I think it's you who are out of touch here.

Requiring 15-20 years of experience?

Just... no.

Software engineers are so well paid that many of them retire from the job market permanently after 15-20 years. You might as well ask people to be 65 years old until they can occupy the position.

20 years is 25% of a lifespan, and 33% of an adult lifespan.

Why isn't 10 years good enough? Unless it's an executive position for people who are at the end of their careers. You can become a Brigadier General in 20 years in the military, which would be broadly equivalent to a SVP.

Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything

If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.

I don't understand your sentence.

With the news stories about overseas Chinese police stations, I wonder why they didn't go after him directly in Italy. Maybe they lacked his home address. But that could be obtained by a cyber infiltration of the Italian government or through old school espionage.

Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter

I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.

I don't mind having to conform to some norms. I would even go so far as to argue that close-knit communities are impossible to maintain over long time horizons without these gatekeeping attitudes and insider values that outsiders must conform to.

Your comment reminds me of a line by Boromir (Sean Bean) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

"It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing."

Where the little thing here is the transistor.

I wish society in general worked like this: less formality, more informality, more relationships.....

.... I could move to a small town. I've always lived in a large metropolis and, to be frank, I'm tired of it. I can't move to Monaco, or make the global population decrease by 90%, but I could move to a smaller community in my state. I think this is what I need to start building more relationships with other people.

Impressive.

Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.

I didn't know Prof. Wien had a HN account.

Let's have some fun. Here's a basic special relativity problem from John R. Taylor's Classical Mechanics.

A space explorer A sets off at a steady 0.95c to a distant star. After exploring the star for a short time, he returns at the same speed and gets home after a total absence of 80 years (as measured by earth-bound observers.) How long do A's clocks say that he was gone, and by how much has he aged as compared to his twin B who stayed behind on earth? [Note: This is the famous "twin paradox." It is fairly easy to get the right answer by judicious insertion of a factor of γ in the right place, but to understand it, you need to recognize that it involves three inertial frames: the earth-bound frame S, the frame S' of the outbound rocket, and the frame S'' of the returning rocket. Write down the time dilation formula for the two halves of the journey and then add. Notice that the experiment is not symmetrical between the two twins: B stays at rest in the single inertial frame S, but A occupies at least two different frames. This is what allows the result to be unsymmetrical.]

By his logic, an object moving at 0% of the speed of light would arrive instantly.

I want to bring my family with me on a two week summer trip to Hawaii onboard a military C-130.

It's 8.5 billion light years away. It would be like aiming a water hose at Mars from low Earth orbit.

You're right, but my point is more about uniformity. Society seems to have tacitly agreed that there's only 3 beautiful looks for everything. You can be beautiful - and by "you", I also mean buildings and inanimate objects -, but only if you fit this narrow criteria.

Give me diversity. Give me creativity.

It's come to the point where I find some conventionally attractive individuals not particularly interesting. For example, men who look like this: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ8c7xV...

There are so many men who look like this now, on Instagram and TikTok. It's boring. They all look the same. When everything is beautiful, nothing is.

The C-130 Hercules platform says "Hello there!"

Don't fool yourself; we're not overpopulating ourselves to global economic and environmental meltdown;

Yes we are. Yes. We. Are.

Let it happen. I'll start panicking if the human population is still decreasing at 100 million. But for now, we are still growing.

I respectfully disagree. In the 12 months following a nuclear war, Americans would still need to file their taxes before the April 15 deadline, the federal and state governments would still have to pass annual budgets, software vendors like Microsoft and Apple would still need to push updates to their products, homeowners would still need to pay their annual property tax bill, people would still need to refill their drug prescriptions.... life could recover and go on. I'm not convinced that a nuclear war would be so destructive that civilization wouldn't survive. Most nuclear attacks would probably target missile silos in rural North Dakota and airbases anyway, not cities.

But, as I outlined in my comment, there are situations other than nuclear war where the US might want to restart nuke production.

This raises a tricky question: Should the United States open or reopen a production line for nuclear weapons in order to avoid losing their manufacturing know-how, the way we do with M1A2 Abrams tanks? The United States once produced thousands of tanks per year. Today, there is only one tank plant left open in the nation, the Lima Army Tank Plant. For years, US Army leaders have asked Congress to stop purchasing new tanks because they didn't need them, but Congress kept ordering the Department of Defense to buy tanks anyway. They did this for two reasons. First, because the tank plant is a source of jobs in Ohio. Second, because tanks, especially modern, 21st century tanks, are specialized tools, and we wouldn't want to forget how to build them. An argument is made than it is cheaper to keep producing tanks that are not needed than it would be to restart a tank production line if one didn't exist. The argument is sensible and most likely true. After the US Air Force ordered an early end to the production of the F-22 Raptor in the early 2010s, the production line was dismantled. A report in the last few years estimated the cost to restart the production line in the billions, if not the low tens of billions.

So, back to nuclear weapons. The United States manufactured tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Most of these weapons have been decommissioned and the production lines have been shut down. The United States no longer manufactures nuclear weapons. Now, the incoming Ground Based Strategic Deterrent will be built by Northrop Grumman in the next few years to start replacing the aging Minuteman III ICBMs, but the warheads and the nuclear cores will be recycled from existing ICBMs.

Which raises a question: How would the United States replenish its nuclear weapons if the need arose? For example, after a nuclear war, where the US lost or expended 80% of its arsenal? The question of what to do after a nuclear war may sound absurd to some, but it's a worthwhile and interesting one. More on point, what if the nuclear cores degrade to a point where they may no longer work? This is essentially what the Department of Energy's Nuclear Stewardship Program is for. It's a program that costs billions of dollars a year and uses supercomputers to model the slow degradation of the nuclear cores in the stockpile.

But here's where it gets trickier. The New START treaty will expire in 2026. If it is not extended or replaced by a new treaty, there will be nothing stopping Russia from expanding its nuclear arsenal. China is also expanding its nuclear arsenal as we speak. Last week's report by the Department of Defense claims that China will have 1,500 nuclear weapons within a decade or so. China is building new nuclear weapons. The United States is not. And China is not bound by any arms control treaty.

Now, the US also happens to have about 1,400-1,500 nuclear weapons deployed, plus a few thousand more in storage, disassembled.

But what if China decides at some point to push past 1,500? To 2,000? 5,000?

A country with 5,000 nuclear weapons could conduct a first strike against a country with 1,500 nuclear weapons, on a 2:1 ratio, and still have 2,000 nukes in reserve for further strikes. This is why the nuclear arms race happened between the US and the Soviet Union in the first place. Any disparity in the deployed arsenals gives the side with more the advantage. So if China ever decides to expand beyond 1,500, the strategically sound move for the US would be to start building more, to match the Chinese production. It would be tragic, but it's not impossible.

But the US no longer manufactures nukes, so the old production lines would need to be reopened.

After a month at a Zen silent-meditation retreat, Heller went back to his job at Goldman Sachs as a commodities trader in oil and gas.

That sounds pretty successful to me.

"And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one."

Plato, The Republic

That's me. I log into my brokerage every few weeks to have a quick peak and make any necessary tweaks. And then I log out and don't think of it. I don't keep an app on my phone because I know it would distract me.

How do we get the Chinese needle snakes under control once they're done with the rats though?

Arizona is actually a good choice. It is geologically stable, doesn't suffer from natural disasters, is somewhat close to Silicon Valley, and has a large enough talent pool to staff TSMC's facilities.

I had several thoughts while reading this article.

Cambodia is contaminated with millions of unexploded ordnances dropped as cluster bombs by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In addition, millions of land mines were buried throughout the country during a series of civil wars from the 1970s–1990s.

Millions. I can't process numbers that large. I know what a million is, but I struggle to imagine what a million land mines would look like. What happened to Southeast Asia during the 20th century was so sad and tragic.

Rats have been so successful that the rodents are now seen as competition for the more traditionally used military dogs for mine clearance.

I didn't know dogs were used to clear mines. I would have thought they would be too heavy to walk on mines, considering that mines can kill children, and military working dogs have a weight comparable to children.

Lastly, I wondered whether it would be both possible, economical, and militarily sensible to create mines that expire after a certain time, due to an engineered deterioration process for the detonator or for the explosive charge. A form of planned obsolescence. Few conflicts last more than a few years. Is a five year old mine really that useful militarily? Fresh mines can be dropped from aircraft now if a sudden need arised. The Korean Demilitarized Zone is the most obvious example I can think of where old mines might still serve a future purpose.

the private property owner retains title even as the land’s assessed value plummets to zero.

I was told by my accountant friends that land couldn't be depreciated.

One could write a good story on the premise of an alien race who comes to Earth after the loss of their home planet. The aliens then attempt to reactivate dormant submarine volcanoes to create a new continent for themselves in the Pacific Ocean.

Magma City / Ta-Koro