If the US government owned all our nuclear plants and subsidized them (as it is in France), we could also be paying less for nuclear-derived electricity but it would be meaningless.

Perhaps you think a planned economy is more efficient than a market-driven one?

I'm work for an organization that provides design services (as opposed to building and selling products). If you are ever, ever , realistic about the time it will take to deliver or what features you can include in a design for a given set of resources, you won't get the job. It's as simple as that.

Why do you think most construction projects go over budget? One big reason is they had to make a crazy bid because if they didn't, someone else would.

The bottom line is: if you say no, you're out of a job.

You're probably right, especially considering neither Berkeley nor San Francisco are in Silicon Valley.

Indeed, context is everything.

We put American citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps (a weasel word like "internment camp" doesn't change what it was).

We put American citizens of German descent in charge of our armed forces (Eisenhower, for example. He was Pennsylvania Dutch, who are of German descent).

DARPA is an organization that provides grants to researchers. It does not do the work.

The work was performed by engineers at Northrup Grumman. This work was funded by DARPA.

I'm a professional in the business and I was really happy to see that they seem to have gotten everything right! I was prepared to roll my eyes when they showed a cross-section of a bipolar transistor (which they didn't) and their treatment of BEOL processing was outstanding.

Bravo!

I'd like a few examples as well so I can check them out. I'm an engineer and I found it to be one of the most plausible books I can remember in science fiction. The one mistake that got me was that the narrator grossly overestimates the number of calories a day a human needs to function, but that is hardly Phantom Menace quality.

I disagree. Rather than "hiding the PhD", I think the poster should be looking for jobs that "require" a PhD. There are plenty of them, they just don't have a large cross-section with standard "coder" positions.

You worked hard for the PhD, poster, use it!

You assert without proof that your research has no practical application. Were your researching how to implement LOGO in VAX assembly language or something?

More to the point, if your research was on the cutting edge of Computer Science I assure you it has practical applications. Use some of the research skills that you gained obtaining your PhD and put them to use identifying companies that have business or research interests in line with your own. Then, using LinkedIn or conference proceedings, identify researchers and engineers with interests similar to your own and contact them. Ask to set up informational interviews. See if they "know anyone" looking for new researchers. Build a network tirelessly until you have a job.

You have a PhD. You're not a programmer anymore. Accept it and don't look for programming jobs. Most organizations that are pushing the state-of-the-art have need for PhD-level people. Find them and find your niche.

Surely your advisor has links to industry? Where does the funding come from? Industrial consortia? Federal sources (NSF / DOE / etc). Can you look at doing a postdoc at a National Lab so you can make some contacts? If you don't, ask your advisor for help. It is the least he or she can do for you.

I don't think resume sites are good places for a newly minted PhD to look for work. You surely did some networking while you were a student. Did you present your research at some conferences? Those are the people you should be talking to about work, not filling out on-line applications. At the PhD level you find work based on a personal network, not web-based applications (although you will need to fill those out for compliance).

Also known as the days when you were most likely a teenager or young adult.

Check out Simon Singh's book on Fermat. He does a cracking job doing just that!

While this is technically true, in practice it is very, very hard to significantly increase your exercise while keeping your caloric intake constant.

This is simply because you get much hungrier when you're exercising. If you increase your exercise volume while keeping your eating constant you'll feel miserable and hungry all the time. Just like dieting, except you'll feel worse for a given calorie deficit.

You can lose weight through diet, exercise, or a combination. For most people a combination works best but you have more leverage on the diet side than on the exercise side.

Indeed. I also find it strange Matt is so adamant that Tesla was shafted by modern memory, when the very unit of magnetic field strength is the Tesla! How many people get units of measurement named after them? Why did Musk name his car company Tesla if nobody had ever heard of him? Why did a heavy metal band name themselves Tesla and use the electricity metaphor in their marketing? There are researchers who probably contributed even more to the development of the modern world such as Steinmetz, Heaviside, and Shannon who are more obscure to the general public than Tesla.

You seem to misunderstand what sunk cost means. You're using the phrase as an argument to keep funding the project because "we can't reverse time and get the money back". In fact, the common definition of the sunk cost is opposite of your use. Generally only future costs should be relevant to an investment decision, otherwise you run into the danger of "throwing good money after bad". There is a lot of evidence that continued funding of the F-35 is in fact throwing good money after bad.

You also present a false dichotomy. One alternative option from spending upwards of a Trillion dollars on the F-35 is to manufacture more smaller, cheaper, proven fighters such as the F-18 or indeed the F-15. Keeping our current squadrons operable is less of an issue if we build more at lower cost.