throwawayarnty

Do people have to sign waivers so phone checkers aren’t liable if and when robbers come and take the whole basket of phones ?

Having lived in many European countries, Netherlands was by far the most openly racist of them all. Especially during coronavirus.

Just browse a Facebook apartment rental group in Netherlands. Most would say “No internationals!”.

Imagine a society where such blatant discrimination exists, and you will see why such scandals targeting foreigners is no surprise.

As another anecdote. It is common for apartment ads in Netherlands to explicitly say “no foreigners!” in their ads. Which was a shock to me when first seeing them on Facebook by 18-22 year old Dutch university students offering rooms.

Extremely offensive if this ad would show up in usa or other new world countries.

I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent.

Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.

My only objection is the food/fruit/vegetable argument. The best fruits and veggies come from gardens, most from Japan.

Random fruits and veggies from the wild mostly taste overly sour, bitter, or under or over ripe.

I can’t feel sorry for people who take a line of credit and use it to put it in cryptocurrency.

Maybe its schadenfreude, but I feel they all got what they deserved. Trying to make 7 percent returns risk free is asking for hidden risks.

You’re right that France is also bad (also spain) but it’s better to sample around phd salaries in different countries. Roughly in euros per month:

Netherlands: 3000

Sweden: 3000

Switzerland: 4000

France: 1500

Italy: 1000-1500

Spain: 1000-1500

Germany: 2000-3000

USA: 2000-3000

Uk: 1300-1600

Note in many countries you get benefits like insurance, pension, unemployment insurance (basically free money after your PhD).

In summary, there are different tiers, and UK is at the bottom tier comparable to France, Spain, and Italy.

As a non Brit but had a permanent position in Oxbridge, my advice was to look beyond the UK.

Even within Europe, there are many institutes that are strictly better than oxbridge. If you’re a scientist, there is no point in being too narrow and confining yourself to UK.

I would agree though that at the undergraduate level oxbridge is excellent. Postgraduate what matters actually is the advisor and grant money.

PhD in the UK is a different level of poverty compared with PhDs in any other “Western” country.

Can you imagine graduating at the top of your class and you living in London or near London on less than 20k pounds a year? You can double or triple that income in other phd programs.

The only advice if one really wants to do a PhD is to sample broadly across different countries and PhD programs and choose one that unlocks future options and also pays living wages.

The thing that is so foreign to me in the UK is their academic culture.

There are people who literally think there are only two universities worth being at: Cambridge and Oxford. They are shocked when they find candidates from abroad turning down offers for permanent positions there or leaving their positions for somewhere else.

Do everything yourself to show them how things should be done.

The desire to live in NYC is mostly for the hype and story you can tell yourself.

The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily life matters much more than the few weeks of the year that you can take your visitors around the city.

The fuel that drives people to live in NYC is propaganda from TV, films, and books.

It might be fun to live for a few years, but imagine raising a family with multiple kids in a tiny apartment. There are better ways to live than that.

Even if FSD doesn’t work out Andrej still has an impressive achievement for 5 years.

I’m not sure if many people 5 years out of their PhD can say they did anything close to what Andrej did.

University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking.

The only criterion that matters for a student that wants to select a university is the fraction of graduates that go on to do impressive things.

The interesting thing is that knowing these facts has no correlation with whether you are a good biologist.

Real biology involves designing clever wet lab experiments, analysing data to predict new phenomenon, then following up with more experiments.

Nothing in real life biology relies on knowing a huge amount of facts. You just look it up on google.

What makes biology hard to teach is that there are no principles. So teacher can just point to experimental results and ask students to memorise those results. Real biology is about saying the textbooks are all wrong and here is how it really works.