Oh screw me they are definitely paid way more than the postdocs. I’m fairly certain that for biomedical scientists with PhDs, postdocs are the lowest paid profession with this level of qualification…

Like seriously. I think the number that was thrown around for post-PhD scientists in pharma was like $100-150k/yr to begin with. Granted those jobs have their own shortcomings, but still…

So I have a bit of a unique case… I’m a researcher, and academia is kind-of known for hiring people across the world & are very willing to sponsor visas as long as someone has a PhD. I genuinely wouldn’t have been able to find a regular job in EU, and that is not even considering the language barriers… I’d love to know this topic better as well.

Biomedical postdoc in the US. Pay is exactly $61,008/yr. Postdoc means a PhD is required, and I work in Chicago, mind you

There’s actually a bit of a fun fact in this… Postdocs have historically been chronically underpaid. The NIH actually worked with a consultant a year or so back, who suggested NIH to gradually increase postdoc pay to $70k/yr (80k in urban areas). NIH didn’t agree to that, but chose to gradually increase salary over several years

NIH has a recommended minimum salary (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipends) based on years of experience. In theory institutions can pay more… In practice, a lot of them just stick to the bare minimum, some places even low-ball. This is why my salary is exactly $61,008. Last year it would have been $56.5k so… At least it is an improvement

A carpet cleaner. I had to prepare a previous apartment for showing (it’s a long story) & there was quite a bit of dust on the carpet

Could just be I’m stupid, but I was not prepared for how involved such a machine is… to be fair it is meant for professional use, so I was probably just not properly trained for it

Thanks! You put this better than I could. I was thinking that this has to be something philosophers have figured out or at least seriously investigated… I will look into these concepts

IMO this is the asklemmy community and I came here asking for opinions so… I think your opinion is quite valid

Carbon monoxide poisoning when I was like 8 or 9… Just chilling out at a relative’s house, then I just blacked out, next thing I knew there was cold air blowing at my face and I was outdoors. I’ve experienced other terrible things but this is probably the closest “near death” experience I have so…

I don’t think this is good advice by any means, but I dropped my previous car at a car dealership for $500. They only were able to give me $500 because 1) it was an ex-police car and they apparently couldn’t sell it under normal circumstances, and 2) the car was pretty beaten up and probably have to be scrapped for parts.

This information is 2-3 years old so maybe things have changed… but back then I believe car dealerships would be willing to take a car for at least $500, since they can probably make a profit by auctioning the car or scrapping it for parts that way. So if I really just want to get rid of something, it’s not a bad option. However, most second-hand cars are worth way more than that, especially if I’m willing to put in a bit of effort, so… take this information as you will. I agree with the other comments that a used car can go for much higher if I’m willing to try.

The thing that annoys me is… even if they genuinely want to save money (and that’s a big if), this is barely even “saving” much money. NIH has historically been a very good return on investment for the US government despite running on a shoestring budget, and that is probably not even accounting for the various downstream applications (like all the pharma industry) that relies on NIH-funded research.

Part of the issue with indirect costs are due to the NIH never getting much of a budget raise and the ballooning bureaucracy… Yes, there are people wanting change for the better, but the current administration decided to wake up to violence by dealing with this in the worst way possible

Considering how powerful the US has in terms of geographical advantage and military prowess, I’d be horrified if any entity is capable of staging a coup in the US… Maaaybe if a few countries somehow convince Canada/Mexico to all work together. But all-things considered it certainly seems like a self-coup is much more likely for the US

I was somewhat scared of driving after dark because it always felt like there’s a ghost watching me from the backseats…

(Used to live at a place where you have to drive to even get groceries)

I… kinda fit the bill. Most proud moment was getting the highest grade in my class for Organic Chemistry (believe it was 107/100 or something… we had extra credits since the course was too damn hard) while barely studying, because the chemical structures/concepts made natural sense to me and I kinda liked the class

Used to think I’m really smart. Later on I realize I probably have hyperlexia from my ASD diagnosis so… I still studied, just that it seemed to have taken much less time for me than most others

• What led to the Haymarket Massacre, which might have been the main catalyst behind the 8-hour workday… So I cannot hate it out of principle
• Seems reasonable but I don’t know how to actually implement it
• For some reason is more associated with Anarcho-Capitalism rather than the other variants, which I thought was… Interesting

This is more related to why there’s no legal pathways rather than “why deport”, but I could think of a few reasons that make it difficult to improve legal immigration:

• Bureaucracy in some countries (notable example being the US) makes it slow/difficult to pass new laws
• Since immigrants (legal or not) can’t vote, laws regarding improving immigration pathways aren’t usually popular among the voter base
• There isn’t a country in the world that has figured out how to “solve” the immigration problem, so there isn’t even a good reference point
• There is a global rise in right-wing and sometimes far-right sentiment, which are often targeted at reducing immigration, which makes improving immigration pathways even less politically appealing

I guess if legal immigration isn’t really an option then deporting someone might just seem like the “natural”, lawfully correct thing to do. I don’t exactly agree with this but I think that might be what’s happening

Disclaimer: not a professional investor, trader, or finance researcher. I literally just have a mix of US and international index funds and bonds.

These are just my personal opinions and I probably don’t know more than OP… My view of the stock market, especially with short-term changes is… I don’t assume anything to make rational sense, or that the market could really be quite stupid.

Maybe my view was influenced by A Random Walk Down Wall Street… but my main consideration was below:

• So-called “meme stocks” and hype cycles have existed for hundreds of years, much longer before the current LLM hype and the previous crypto hype
• There is a somewhat “successful” strategy of buying a stock to sell it to the next sucker, which would be very prone to the entire thing collapsing

Especially considering that LLM is the current hype (and the hype cycle might be ending), I… imagine just about anything could happen.

More specifically regarding Nvidia though, I mean they’ve already made their fair share of money because their technology was used for both crypto and LLMs so… They already won anyway, so who’s really hurt from their stock dropping a bit?

Yes, I already did, even before this particular news broke out…

I tried to individually tell every one I know IRL (which is not too many ppl sadly), basically told every single one of them to consider back-up career options… There are a couple of 1-year exchange students from Europe in my floor and I have not-subtly hinted at them to make contingency plans for PhD training back home. I’ve been following the news very carefully recently so I can share relevant items as soon as possible… The people need to know. I’ve even considered making know-your-rights printouts before they claimed they’re doing an ICE raid in Chicago, but realized how little resources I have for that… I absolutely will do something. Not sure what it is but I can’t see society go this way.

I just feel bad that as a non-US citizen there is only so little I can do… I don’t even know if I could join a protest without being considered for deportation at this rate. Am planning my leave as well so there’s that.

Funny incident, I blurted out to my family 2-months ago that Trump will probably build a concentration camp and was told to shut the F up… Murphy’s law I suppose

Conventional AI/ML: I… don’t think so, unless they are models specially designed for playing games (with extreme examples being the likes of AlphaZero for chess/shogi/go). Actually I guess you could say that whatever DeepMind was doing was technically training/improving their models using video games? Case in point, their innovation on AlphaZero led to AlphaFold (which literally got a Nobel Prize) and the recent weather prediction tool

Generative AI: The field seems to have a major existential crisis due to running out of high-quality training data. So maybe there would be a way to use games to augment training data? I’m not an expert in Generative AI/LLM training so I’m not sure of the details

AGI: I’m certain an AGI model can be improved using video games but I don’t think researchers even remotely have a concept of how to build an AGI model yet

Sadly nothing yet, maybe just a couple of T-shirts… Mainly because I had to move/relocate every 1-2 years for my entire adult life until now & had to sell/give/throw away anything I couldn’t bring with me every time I move

I currently work as a postdoc in biomedical research, so my line of work was directly in the line of fire of recent Trump administration nonsense… Not great.

Beyond this though, I’m just impressed at how almost delusional my boss and some of my lab members has been. Lab PI/group leaders are responsible for bringing in grants, yet they don’t seem to even care about the fact that almost all grant reviews are paused (and some of their grants are due early Feb!)… Not to mention they seem almost happy about RFK and Bhattacharya; I do not approve of such behavior as a researcher… Especially since another student in the lab is fucking suffering from long COVID-induced chronic fatigue. I don’t understand how could some other ppl in the lab be so insensitive

To be fair, I’ve been essentially “fired” from the lab anyway. Not actually fired, but was on an 1-year contract and PI refused to renew (and it’s more difficult to fire someone than not renewing contract in Illinois law anyway). Pretty shitty behavior but I guess I should have expected a newer PI to not know how to properly lead a lab… Partly due to that, I’ve started applying for jobs in Europe two months ago and have just recently started getting interviews. All of them are scheduled early morning for me, I’m not a morning person, and at least one or two have been somewhat disrespectful so… At least I’m hoping to get at least one offer I hope?

Also am worried about selling some large possessions (furniture, hobbyist items) since I’m probably leaving the US soon. So a bit stressed recently between work and personal matters

All in all, I’m… surprisingly calm for the amount of bullshit I need to deal with. No ideal why. Maybe it’s just the power of video games lol

Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)…

My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I’d be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn’t require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so… This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming

I guess if I am nit-picking, it’s very hard for a statistician to claim anything as having a zero possibility… of course a statement like that helps no one. These are my actual thoughts:

non-zero possibility

It is technically possible that Musk’s gesture was not a Nazi salute but rather something that looks similar. Fun fact, this is something that happened with S. Korea’s Megalian hand gesture issue (for example see this case: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo), where ppl found the gesture in a lot of unexpected places. However, the Megalian gesture is a pretty common hand movement, whereas the Nazi salute… I mean I guess it could happen due to a really bad out-of-context dance choreography?? But that clearly wasn’t Musk’s case

“But I am just wondering if everyone else sees this that way with no room for it being a result of autism and definitely that.”

… I mean maybe?? I have weird Autistic intrusive thoughts sometimes but even then this is a bit… Honestly though, I don’t know if I should put any respect to someone who willingly know what a Nazi salute is, and then choose to do it in front of one of the most important political events in the world, twice in a row nontheless. I find it hard to believe such an act to be a faux pass and non-intentional. Heck even if it is completely unintentional, this would be ground for job termination and put on a blacklist for life for most job positions I know

“Is this where we are? I feel more scared to be in America now.”

Yeah I know… I seriously wonder why I am still in the US as well.