eks-reigh

It's a very grim book, but it's also fundamentally about the goodness of people. The setting and the plot are bleak, but its outlook is, in a way, hopeful.

At least that's my takeaway. If someone else found it purely depressing I would understand, but I feel differently.

Same! There were a few other art cars parked by the locks, so I would guess it was some kind of meetup.

You may well know this, but I get the sense that it isn’t necessarily common knowledge, so I want to spell it out anyway:

In a lot of cases, the salary for a grad student or tech is small potatoes next to the cost of the consumables they use in their work.

For example,I work for a lab that does a lot of sequencing, and if we’re busy one tech can use 10k worth of reagents in a week.

I have no earthly idea, really, but I don't think we would have seen this on hacker news of they were suspending studies of pill bugs, or food packaging, or something boring like that.

I spent the summer of 2017 as an intern in the department of the interior. At the time, the white house was proposing to cut the DoI's budget by an order of magnitude. I went to a fascinating talk about how they strategize when faced with budget cuts. They don't just cut things from least to most important, they start by cutting things that have champions. For example, the first things on the chopping block at the time were Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay restoration, because those programs have champions in Congress who would fight to get them funded again. More obscure programs don't have that advantage, so if they get cut they're just gone.