Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?

The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.

Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.

Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.

According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.

I would blame the monopolization of the economy. A few corporations purchasing big chunks of the industry control the job market create a bottleneck where supply of jobs is controlled by a few corporations. Once all jobs are controlled by a few decision makers the precarious work conditions, diminished salaries, abuses, etc. come naturally.

> Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate.

Even if everybody had high education, companies would still compete for the best employees. There is no competition for employees because large corporations have agreed to not do so.

Apple, Google, Intel... discussed no-poach as a way to keep salaries low. Has anything changed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.

This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.

Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't. And we still don't know exactly why. The current leading theory is it's something to do with the balance of fast vs slow switch fibers that make up the muscle, but we don't know without more derivative and incremental research.

Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.

Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.

Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.

Science is and always was incremental. The breakthroughs come from truly unforeseeable places. It takes seemingly niche and unprofitable and incremental research like studying bacteria living in volcano vents, for us to have PCR.

VCs expect a sliver of their companies to become Unicorns, we understand it to be a numbers game. That grace is given to entrepreneurs but scientists need to grovel for cash and endlessly show that their research is "translatable" or sufficiently impactful.

Sorry, I've heard this one too many times before. Thanks for your contribution to our world's knowledge, I hope you value it as much as I do.

In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing

It's not ironic when you understand that libertarianism is really about maximizing personal liberty for an individual, and that often means constraining the liberty of others who would stand in their way.

It's the most libertarian thing for millions of people to have very constrained lives under the rule of some wealthy person who gets to do whatever he wants.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people today using computers without understanding how transistors work or which register they're writing to at any given moment. Many of these people also drive cars without understanding how gears can shift or how the radial motion of the main drive shaft gets transferred in the transverse direction to the drive axle. I suppose a few of them wear clothes without having ever sheared a sheep and without knowledge of the best way to felt wool.