Speaking from my experience in the physical sciences:

Postdocs are not cheap labor, at least by academic standards. Funding schemes vary, but grad students are often free, meaning you only have to dig up money for consumables/materials/etc. Those that aren't free are relatively cheap, again, depending on the system, some can have their salaries (and tuition) paid by being teaching assistants. If you want them to spend more time in the lab, you can pay their (paltry) salaries. They also have scholarships available.

Hiring a postdoc means hiring a "real" employee on a temporary contract. Most universities have fixed pay scales or guidelines, but that is the gross salary for the postdoc. The overhead for a postdoc is comparatively enormous because you have to pay for insurance, pensions, employer tax contributions, etc. In exchange you get someone with a PhD devoting 100% of their effort to your research. They aren't making six figures because their goal is to publish papers, which is best done in an academic lab. Also, the low pay acts as an incentive for them to move on... at least, in theory. Usually, though, if they stay on long enough they become "senior research assistants" or whatever, and move up the pay scale.

Also, it's not like academic pay scales are that great for anyone. Assistant professors make considerably less than their industry counterparts and work considerably more. The traditional ways to make money in academia are to be famous enough that other universities want to poach you and companies will pay you for consulting or to found a spinoff. The rest are stuck with standard pay scales. It's the coaches and administrators that pull down the big bucks. If you're curious, the state of California publishes the salaries of all UC professors.

Keep in mind that most/all of the costs for hiring postdocs are funded from an increasingly small pool of grant money. We're not talking about private companies, we're talking about a professor trying to keep cash flowing into the lab by competing for grants, which means publishing papers, which is best accomplished by postdocs, and so on.

I think--but I'm not at all sure--that the modern postdoc is closer to what we used to call an assistant professor. In the "old" system (which is still in place in much of Europe) assistant professors were literally assistants to a full professor. They would work in a lab for years until the full professor retired, at which point one would be promoted (via associate professor). An assistant professor in that capacity functions just like a modern postdoc. We now use the term assistant professor to mean "tenure-track professor," which is basically a postdoc that has five years to prove themselves capable or be fired (and of course takes on much more responsibility).

BTW I think the entire system is broken, but taking a principled stand will destroy your career. A professor who pays their postdocs 100k a year is at a competitive disadvantage and is likely to miss out on funding as a result. A postdoc who holds out for 100k a year will never be hired. What disturbs/saddens me is the seemingly endless supply of postdocs willing to work wherever, for however long, and for whatever money just to "stay in the game" in the hopes of landing a tenure-track position. There is clearly a supply-demand imbalance there that creates opportunities to abuse hungry postdocs, particularly from countries without robust university systems. I have seen people trying to raise children while moving half-way around the world every two years earning a postdoc salary; no severance, no moving expenses, no permanent contracts.

Tragically that is the result of political decisions ranging from Cold War era corn subsidies to trying to undermine the sugar cane industries in countries that we don't like. At one point there was simply too much corn being grown to consume, so industries started looking for other things to do with it. They have done some amazingly clever things, but also things like HFCS and ethanol. Eventually the food industry basically broke food into its constituent parts: fat, salt, and sugar. Fat from (hydrogenated) vegetable oil and sugar from refined corn. Toss in some texture from modified soy, maybe a bit of wheat, sprinkle salt on it and add some circus grade meat so you can put "beef" on the box--poof, Hot Pockets.

...so in a way, it's the government that made us fat.

Food moves through the intestine at roughly a constant rate. If it takes more time to absorb calories than it does to make it to the colon, then those calories don't make it into your bloodstream. That is why liquid calories are so dangerous; they are very efficiently absorbed and don't contain the fiber, etc. necessary to feel full.

If I might add to your spot-on assertions: There was a documentary on obesity called The Weight of the Nation that quite clearly explains the differences in basal metabolic rates between two people.

Two women of the same size and weight are sitting at a table drinking tea (or whatever). One consumes 2000 calories a day as she always has and has never had a weight problem. The other struggled with weight her whole life and eventually dieted to get down to her current weight. She consumes 1300 calories a day to maintain that weight. The difference is in their base metabolic needs; the naturally thin woman is less calorie efficient than the dieting woman. Thus, if they eat the same amount of food--2000 calories a day--one women will keep her same weight, while the other will start gaining. That is also the core of the "yo-yo diet" problem.

There are all kinds of other examples, such as Native American populations that have lived off of fish and basic agriculture for centuries becoming obese and struggling with diabetes and heart disease because they gained access to McDonald's, while the near-by white populations remained unchanged.

I think that people confuse the fact that a calorie deficit will necessarily lead to weight loss with a linear relationship between food intake and metabolized calories when in reality everyone's ability to metabolize food into calories is different.

Most of what you said is spot-on, but fructose is not really metabolized differently than glucose. Both are six-carbon sugars and fructose is immediately rearranged to glucose enzymatically. But, again, not disagreeing with the rest of what you said--it makes a huge difference how we consume sugars and what they are consumed in combination with.

Sucrose is cleaved into fructose and glucose by enzymes in the saliva, but there is also an odd glitch in our metabolic pathways that tends to divert energy derived from free fructose directly into fat storage instead of converting it all to glucose. One theory is that since fruits ripen during the warm months and fruits often contain an abundance of fructose, that it once served as a trigger to start storing fat for Winter, but who knows. The problem boils down to more calories in than out, but it can make a difference how those calories are consumed.

Solar has reached grid parity in Eurozone countries. The only way nuclear could undercut it now is if the entire continent stopped installing solar and diverted all their resources into nuke plants.

It seems like every person that breaths the same air as me at a conference, stumbles across my website, applies for a job, etc., tries to add me to their LinkedIn network. I get a zillion emails with "Someone you don't know and don't want to know wants to add you to their LinkedIn something something." And people keep setting up these groups for former members/employees of stuff, which just dilutes the pool of useful contacts further. LinkedIn is useful for keeping track of former colleagues (because we all move around a lot), and I do occasionally get non-spam from people finding me on LinkedIn, but the SNR is ridiculous.

As an American living in Europe, I could not agree more with that statement. In fact, one of the bigger unifying forces seems to be disdain for the European Union and making fun of the French. (BTW Israel is also an associated country of the EU and I doubt anyone is thinking of Israelis when they say "European.") The idea that a Brit has more in common with a Finn than a collection of treaties their respective governments signed is just wrong. However, this was a difficult concept for me, as an American, to wrap my head around simply because countries here are so tiny (and have such long histories)... they're the size of states, they all belong to a big "union," therefore EU = US is an easy shorthand. It is really difficult to see things from the other side of the Atlantic until you spend a few years here because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.

I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.

I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.

The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.

Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

I don't think that is entirely true. The magnetic strip in my PIN card failed and it stopped working on other bank's ATMs. It continues to work fine with my bank's ATMs and in chip readers at retailers... But thanks for reminding me that I have to replace it before I go to the US : )

I pay for cable, but just don't watch it--I pirate everything instead and the since the fastest tier comes bundled with phone and TV, I pay for them too.

I just hate commercials so very much. Those jingles and catch phrases, the branding... it pollutes my brain and I resent it. (I will pollute my brain how I want to, thank you very much.) I am bothered by the fact that I remember commercials from my childhood so vividly. I still remember when a Hostess commercial ran twice in a row when I was six... with that dancing humanoid cupcake in the park telling me how delicious it was.

Once I got a VCR, I would record TV shows on VHS and watch them immediately after so that I could fast-forward through the commercials, but someone who likes uploading things to usenet now takes care of that for me.

I'm sure I belong to a tiny fraction of crazy people, but there are plenty of reasons to pirate besides saving money.

Are you a parent? Because once you have kids, decisions can come back to bite you in the ass years later in ways that were not at all obvious at the time. I realize we are talking about the workplace, and understand your point, but being a good person and not an asshole is the first step towards raising kids who are good people and not assholes... sometimes I think children are the origin of parables and generalities about "doing the right thing" and "being a good person" even when you have nothing to gain. All that nonsense about setting a good example can easily follow you home from work.

Several of my organic chemistry courses were taught this way. Since there was no practical way of taking notes digitally at the time (which may still be the case?), we were forced to perfectly transcribe the structures into our notes. I still have most of those notes and can still draw near-perfect benzene rings... and am still picky about pens.

Probably, but I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: "The demise of broadcast TV and push-media in general." Now tell me what I've won!

I had no idea it was airing where I live, but why would I care when the "pirated" version is waiting for me to queue it up at my earliest convenience on myriad devices. (So is the Netflix version, but I use a region-unblocker for Netflix--is that still "piracy?")