Is it possible to earn enough in the unacceptable careers?
Engineering, medicine, business covers most choices that pay well, and there is demand. Business in particular is a catch-all which will let you get into any industry that pays well.
Of course there are niches outside of them that need a few smart educated people, but they are niches that can only take support a few people and get saturated easily. We have "starving artist" as an expression in English for a reason: there are a lot of great artists that will never really earn enough for more than the cheapest food and shelter with nothing else left over. (there is nothing wrong with such a lifestyle if you are not in my family - if you are in my family we want better for you, and in particular the grandchildren which your life will not support)
All government communications are subject to inspection and should be disclosed as soon as possible.
Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?
Because diplomats. The Vienna convention[0] means that they are exempt from interference by foreign governments an d their agencies. Of course, the assumption is that diplomats are not acting 'nefariously' but if it turns out they are, the host country has recourse to various options, including expulsion...
Is that all that's being transported? Communication? Those bags seem to be holding more than just text.
I'm not sure the government is actually authorized to spy, per the US Constitution. It seems that it (spying) would only be authorized as part of a military operation.
The us constitution explicitly states the powers the federal government are granted. The bill of rights guarentees that all powers not given to the federal government are guaranteed to the states and people (9th and 10th amendments)
Under Article I, Section 8, Congress has the power to declare war, raise and support Armies, provide and maintain a Navy, and organize, arm, discipline, and call forth a militia.
Using spies (human intelligence) is as basic to warfare and defense as any other weapon.
Spying on citizens is where things get murky.
And as much as many readers here may dislike the intelligence agencies, distinguishing between domestic and foreign targets in the internet age is not an easy problem to solve.
Especially considering they're damned when they go too far (e.g. Prism) and damned when they don't (9/11).
Spying and other intelligence gathering was, at the time, seen as a "necessary and proper" part of running a military. And the Constitution explicitly authorizes providing for "the common defense", explicitly authorizes the existence of military forces, and grants the power to make laws "necessary and proper" to carrying out these authorizations.
Spying and intelligence are still, in the present day, seen as a matter of national defense. NSA is explicitly under the Department of Defense, for example. CIA is civilian, but is still framed as serving a defense/national security purpose (thus Constitutionally justifiable) and scoped to be foreign-facing (domestic intelligence is primarily the FBI's province, "necessary and proper" for enforcing federal law).
Paragraph 2.1 states "2.1 Need. Accurate and timely information about the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers, organizations, or persons and their agents is essential to informed decisionmaking in the areas of national defense and foreign relations. Collection of such information is a priority objective and will be pursued in a vigorous, innovative and responsible manner that is consistent with the Constitution and applicable law and respectful of the principles upon which the United States was founded."
All country's diplomatic services have a similar exempt mail/pouch system; it's a service we all extend to each other. Others leave ours alone, and we leave foreign government's alone in turn (at ports or elsewhere).
Governments are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other; this is a way to do it out in the open.
Governments are a function of their laws. I'm not sure what you mean by, 'are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other'.
I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.
Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security.
The SECRET stuff can actually be sent by the USPS. It just has to be packaged correctly, properly labeled, and you have to select the appropriate options for sending it.
I did the courier job briefly when I was working for what was then the Defense Communications Agency, and we were transmitting SECRET documents. I had the hand-carried copy, and they sent a second copy via USPS.
I even had a nifty courier badge, which was created by using a typewriter to fill out a small government form that was printed on orange card stock, and then the whole thing was laminated together. No pictures, no fingerprints, no signatures. The security agents at Washington Regional Airport sure took notice....
I think this is a symptom of a drive towards "messaging", "narratives", and "stories" over logical analysis of verifiable facts in (allegedly) persuasive writing.
I wouldn't doubt that some behavioral modification experiments "found" that such "tactics" work to change peoples' beliefs and actions, but I think many have taken up the effort to try to optimize such experiments, despite unethical implementations (c.f. Facebook attempting to create negative emotions by manipulating timelines) and harmful ends (c.f. White House "science office" targeting specific individuals with behavioral modification emails soliciting them into taking on interest liability on a loan.
Unfortunately "narratives" and "messaging" and "stories" took on memetic qualities for quite awhile in a portion of the culture, so we may still have to deal with the consequences for a while yet.
>I think this is a symptom of a drive towards "messaging", "narratives", and "stories" over logical analysis of verifiable facts in (allegedly) persuasive writing.
Could this be a byproduct of the tools we use to communicate now? Social media is ideal for propagating bite sized, meme-like ideas and incentivizes a herd mentality. Older forms of communication may have been a better medium for long form articles and thought provoking discussion.
Narratives, messaging, and stories have always played a big part but has social media effectively squeezed out the substance and all we're getting is the fluff?
Maybe the "smartphone" format is played out for now. New innovation may need to come from a new or emerging industry.
Following price and size trends, the next industry would be making a device ~1/50th the size of a "smartphone". Something like the size of a large SD card, probably.
When physicists say "estimate" in this context, they mean "take into account this fourth-order tiny effect by using an approximate theory of said effect with accuracy of a few percent, and then use 1.2 meters when it's really 1.0 so you overestimate by 10%".
It's like when you take a caliper and measure the width of an object, you typically neglect the error due to thermal expansion of the caliper since it's hotter/colder than when it was marked with gradations. If you're really anal about uncertainty (like these guys), you'd estimate the effect of this expansion and say "a conservative estimate says this contributes an uncertainty of 0.0003 mm".
>But in reality the current system doesn't work and needs constant massive bailouts and public funding R&D to just barely operate for the minority..
Says an HN comment..
Maybe try to rework this sentence, because it doesn't appear to be true. While things may not be excellent for everyone, clearly the "system" works to some extent.
>The entire point of the current economic system is to motivate the masses to enrich the few.
Do you have a source on this? What do you consider to be the current system? The Federal Reserve System?
>If the motivation goes away then maybe people will work to enrich their own lives.
Do you seriously not think that people work to enrich their own lives right now? I can tell you that I'm posting this to enrich mine.
The current state of our market system requires massive bailouts and massive funding into research and development, massive subsidies (e.g. arms), and an overworked and underpaid workforce to limp along and pay out a healthy dividend to the richest(few) investors.
>source on this?
Just look at any multi billion dollar company; whats the difference between shareholder payout and worker payout? How else would you define this system where a company can declare hundred million dollar profits while paying minimum wage?
>Do you seriously not think that people work to enrich their own lives right now?
We try. for the last 8 hours i worked to make money that would enrich my life, but my work made someone else a hundred times this amount so 1% of my last 8 hours was for me.
If somebody else is making 100x off of just your work you need to quit yesterday and find somebody to pay you 2x what you are currently making. They will be more than happy to do so as they will still be making a 50x profit on you.
Either that or you have absolutely no clue as to how much value you actually create for your company. Nobody generates 100x profit, not even slaves.
I thought your point was that somebody else is actually making 99-100 dollars for every dollar that you make. I would like to know how you came to that number.
i worked out those numbers roughly for myself. My point though, was; most of, or at least the majority of my working life is to enrich someone who is richer that could can ever be. This is the nature of the relationship between the shareholder and the common worker.
>Offering the chance to shill for part of your shift, and offering this only to an elite who're able to do it effectively, is a really clever social exploit. Will it continue to be allowed? Maybe. It's very much the kind of thing that's bending 'the rules' for their benefit, and to do it properly you kind of have to be Amazon.
That strategy or similar has been going on for a long time, Amazon isn't doing something unseen before and they are probably just copying it from what they've seen. I've seen a local utility run an ad featuring claimed employees talking about their employer/company in a positive on television.
I've also seen similar ads from an oil industry company, and others.
What magical language are you opposed to? The term "ritual" is pretty well defined: "Rituals are series of steps we take while attaching some kind of symbolic meaning."
In the article, they link to multiple papers they've written on the topic of rituals, as well as quantify their results in the experiment they performed:
"About 58% of the participants in our ritual condition chose the carrot over the chocolate, as compared to only about 35% of those in the control condition and 46% of those in the random-gestures condition."
As the article is in the magazine's "Behavior & Society" section the science in the article seems cogent.
'Ritual' can be used in religious or magical contexts, but is not inherently magical and is routinely used in other contexts. I don't actually know of any magical connotations for 'vexing', except that it sounds somewhat like 'hexing'.
From the article: "Many of our most vexing problems, from overeating to not saving enough for retirement to not working out enough have something in common: lack of self-control."
The definition of the word: "make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, especially with trivial matters"
Still not seeing the magical connotation; seems pretty well grounded in human behavior, which is topical for Scientific American.
"vexing" is defined as "annoying, worrying, or causing problems" [1]. I have encountered the word hundreds of times, but until your comment I wasn't aware that it was used in a magical context too.
If you look up a linguistics corpus like the Corpus of Contemporary American English [2] or the British National Corpus [3] -- visit those sites, search for "vexing", and click on "VEXING" again -- you'll see a representative set of usages of the word "in the wild", and none of them appear to have anything to do with magic. There's also something in C++ called the "most vexing parse" [4], which too doesn't seem to have anything to do with magic. (By the way, you may like to try this exercise with "ritual" too, to see how the word is used in practice.)
If you search the Authorized King James Version of the Bible you will find this[0] passage:
>And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
"Ritual" is a word with a variety of connotations. Note that a marriage ceremony is a ritual. That's an everyday use of the word that I don't think you would have objected to or called magical.
Then there's the academic definition, covered elsewhere in this thread.
