Sometimes this can be useful. One of my parents had a massive stroke that completely disabled them, but because they had written all of their passwords on a notepad, I was able to immediately start to pay their bills and manage their communications. Obviously, it is risky in a lot of scenarios to let someone else, family or not, have that kind of access, but it saved me a huge headache, and I will be preparing something similar for my own family.

Since we are mostly talking about office and tech jobs, you are not making an apples to apples comparison. Some relevant differences are:

1) Some risks are necessary to perform certain jobs
2) The risks you mention are generally known prior to accepting offers for those jobs

For 1), it's been demonstrated empirically over the course of the past two years that it is not essential to work in an office -- or other dangerous environment -- to complete most office jobs. The same cannot be said for linesmen, bricklayers, etc.

For 2), most people accepted their office jobs and then the risk profile changed substantially. It's reasonable to try and maintain the same level of safety you agreed upon when you began working.

It's silly to suggest that office workers should be subjected (unnecessarily) to the same hazards as other occupations when we simply don't need to. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the same specious line of reasoning that upper management is using at my company.

"At 89-years-old Manfred Steiner is finally what he always wanted to be: a physicist."

You don't magically become a physicist or scientist when you earn your PhD. That notion is just gatekeeping nonsense. There are numerous people working as physicists, chemists, biologists, etc without a doctorate. You just need to be working in the domain and practicing the scientific method.

If you can do one, you can do two (or three). Most people don't because there's no return on investment. I sometimes joke if I can't find a job, I'll just go back for another degree. Who would be more qualified than someone who has already been through the process and had publications and a dissertation?

If you were more familiar with evolutionary biology, you would not be as surprised by Popp's ideas. Since Darwin, the idea of genetic "fitness" as it relates to the individual's [genes'] survival has been ingrained the field. Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene from a similar perspective.

Evolutionary biologists study survival as a genetic concept. Your lineage is erased from the gene pool when you don't procreate. Similarly, "helping others for the sake of society" is almost negative fitness in a sense, as you expend resources to propagate someone else's genes. That's why many animals devise strategies to trick competitors into raising their young, reducing the effectiveness of their sperm, or any number of games to increase the number of successful offspring they produce for minimal cost.

Popp's ideas are an extension of this school of thought, albeit a bit ludicrous. The individual can always decide what they think is best for their personal life, society, etc.

Whoever said this did not grow up in a culture where being offended can get someone "canceled." Nowadays, to be offended is to have power.

> If you can't master at least Python by the age of 12 (median age: 10), you need to be moved to a school for the mentally disabled. (Ditto for the artsy, social, financial, linguistic, nutritional, etc equivalents.)

How many 12 year olds have mastered a foreign language? How about any other subject for that matter? The tech world seems plagued by people who think something is simple because it is *in hindsight*..

My degree is in the natural sciences. The number of software developers who can't accurately answer "why is the sky blue?", "why does ice expand in my freezer?", or "why does medicine have side effects?" is enormous even though these are natural phenomena staring them in the face every day. I don't presume to tell them that this stuff is "easy" and that they are somehow mentally disabled for not knowing how the world works.

I was 28 when I learned my first programming language (Python), and it took some diligence just like anything else, mostly because it's a man-made system complete with abstractions and syntax that need to be absorbed. Dismissively stating that it's easy to pick up only frustrates people when they find how nontrivial it really is.

As a molecular biologist, this is 100% the correct answer. The reason isn't that scientific discovery is inherently surprising, or that journalists are sensationalist (both statements are true to an extent) -- it's that you NEED to publish something that is framed as novel/surprising to keep your job. So the "surprise" starts at the source, when the scientists communicate their findings to the journals.

What I've done is whitelist people on my contacts. I've told them not to call unless they really need to get my attention. That way, if I hear my ringer go off, I know I *really* need to answer. It solves the spam issue, but if someone is stranded and using a phone number I haven't listed, that will be an issue.

As a scientist myself:

There are entire fields dedicated to studying the psychological and neurophysiological differences between men and women. Denying that there may be biological differences with regard to behavior between the two sexes because it's not politically correct in the current climate is ignorant and unscientific.

However, I think Damore pinned too much emphasis on the nature argument; it didn't help that the media went berserk on that point because it makes for a more controversial headline.

Beyond the controversy, there are many competing hypotheses that could explain why women aren't represented in tech beyond oppression and discrimination.

The major points in this issue ought to be: why is it necessary to discriminate against certain groups to promote others? Are there alternative explanations as to why there isn't gender parity in tech, when there is in e.g. chemistry, medicine, stats, and some engineering fields? To what extent should a hiring process go to correct real or perceived imbalances in the workplace?

This is very reminiscent of the Ivy League debate going on right now, where Asians are claiming that there is discrimination against them for being too successful.

The article was published in Nature Communications - Nature Publishing Group's open access journal. Nature itself is a journal that has 3-4x the impact factor of Nature Communications. This probably doesn't matter to most people but it is a way to gauge how novel/impactful the research was perceived by the scientific community.

"The categories laid out in his will -- physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace -- have remained the basis of the awards, and a prize for economics was added in 1968. So, what gives? Why only those five original fields?"

The summary/article forgot about the literature category.

You could say the same thing to Apple and its stagnating product lineup

This is an excellent ploy to freely tag compromising images that would otherwise be unidentifiable (i.e. from the neck down). What will Facebook do with their person-matched database of embarrassing pictures? Sell to the highest bidder? Keep in mind, once those pictures are uploaded and flagged by a person, they are going to sit in Facebook's servers until the end of time... to combat revenge porn of course.

My friends all got jobs, relocated across the country/world, and then started having families. My coworkers are now all representative of what my other friends did, and they're all too busy raising young kids. I don't have the local co-op option like I did 15 years ago.