Nowhere in the Economist article do they use the word "hack" because - again - some dipshit is using the word "hack" to mean approximately whatever the hell they want it to mean.

"Hack" != "use"
"Hack" != "terminate"
"Hack" != "amend"

Either send your editors back to junior high grammar, or maybe exercise some editorial judgement and stop this silliness.

My advice?

Try to get past the idea you're the victim.

You made a stupid choice, one that's had lifelong consequences. Unless you're in an exceedingly rare circumstance, you probably knew what you were doing was wrong (albeit maybe not as serious as you thought) and chose to do it anyway.

And seriously, you tell me what is a more primary function of the HR department than to catch and prevent the hiring of people with a demonstrated disregard for rules and structures that everyone else seems to be able to follow, particularly if that person wasn't perhaps forthcoming and contrite about it?

Instead of bemoaning your fate, I'd hope that you'd be volunteering your time with schools and youth organizations trying to explain to kids that yes, bad choices still do have some consequences. Honestly it sounds like you're too full of self pity to do that, though.

Yeah, it's totally unreasonable for stupid life choices to actually have consequences.

Well, you're in luck. One political party in the US (roughly 55-60% of the electorate) is committed to legislation and policies that mean nobody* ever has to live with the results of their choices.

* well, except for the people that made the right, usually harder choices; those stupid chumps are the suckers we make pay for everyone else's mistakes.

Yes, some science fiction is little more than cowboys & indians "in space", or a detective novel "in space", etc because the primary impetus for science fiction (and its claddistic cousin, fantasy) is rarely only about hewing to some speculative verisimilitude.
Of course a culture set in the far future would be almost incomprehensibly different; it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax? I fail to see how that would be entertaining, for all that it would satisfy some sort of weird "purist" esthetic.

For that matter, part of the wellspring from which science fiction flows is precisely the universality of the human experience. By divorcing the story from current contexts like nationality or gender (for example), an author is free to paint on a whiter canvas, and highlight subtle story elements that might otherwise get lost. By insisting that future cultures be incomprehensible, he's denying science fiction one of its most compelling abilities to tell stories that matter to people today.

Logically, no. But then, one has to understand that every position - no matter how altruistic your motivation - has a consequence. If your local group is protesting anything based on funding from Putin (or the Koch Brothers, or George Soros, etc) understand that as well-intentioned as your protests may be, you are being used as a convenient pawn.

And then understand that because of that consequence (or some associated one), that position means that you may have repugnant allies, who agree with that position for motivations of their own.

And then understand that later, people may excoriate you for those allies, utterly disregarding the context or your motivations. (The picture of Don Rumsfeld infamously shaking hands with Saddam Hussein springs to mind.)

The article is very clear .... on histrionics.

Advancing power storage tech is practically a holy grail of power companies. You don't really think that they enjoy having to have MASSIVE overcapacity (for potential maximum-demand spikes) that sits idle not generating $1 in revenue 60%+ of the time, yet has to be purchased and maintained as if it's used every day?

Seriously, take off the tinfoil hat about "big energy" and try for one second to actually look at it from their point of view. The ability to store more power, for longer, more cheaply removes a HOST of excess-capital investment *and* allows them to forecast steadier margins instead of pricing-in overcapacity and getting grilled by consumers and government for gouging.

If I find out which trains have this, I'm so going to post a youtube of a chipmunk or gopher on the track. He might have accidentally wandered onto a patch of duct tape.

Anyway, yeah in seriousness this sounds like nonsense.

I'm almost certain I read an interview with Jack Cover (one of the early inventors of these systems) in which he explicitly likened the effect to an electric eel, implying that may have been precisely on his mind when he developed the device although the similarity in the process at that point may just have been general.

As much as I like the idea of anything confirming that life in the universe is abundant, this is again little more than an educated guess.

RTFA, he seems to be trying to update the drake equation based on the presence of planets in the goldielocks zones of local stellar populations. Fine as far as that goes, but I strongly suspect that such populations will derive more consistently from where they are on the main sequence, as well as their stellar neighborhoods.

This means that simply extrapolating our local population of such planets is no more reliable than extrapolating the globe's population of insects based on where you're sitting now: whether you are in the arctic or the jungles of Belize is going to give you radically different results, neither of which are representative.

I understand your points, but my succinct answer particularly to the 'nonsensical' bit would be "SHE'S 4."
Tomorrow she might want to be a dinosaur. (My mom said that when I read Johnathan Livingston Seagull as a little kid, I cried for 2 days that I couldn't be a seagull.)

Ironically in 2028 when she's 18, the most secure career choice she could have in the US might be to be a plumber or an electrician.

So my point to Mr Auerbach would be to calm the hell down and let his daughter know only that she can be anything her talents and desire take her. "Dinosaur" might be unlikely, but hell, who knows?

I agree with the bulk of your analysis and commentary.

I would only submit that Dad here is simply reflecting larger social pressures that we don't comfortably talk about much: curiously implicit in much of the pro-woman conversation is still "why can't women be more like men?" - albeit from the opposite direction. Instead of male chauvinists denigrating & trivializing womens' preferences, it's female chauvinists doing the SAME thing because women aren't apparently making their choices in a "male enough" way. Ironic, indeed.

Not to mention too that the discussion always seems to revolve around "not enough women" - maybe it's that an OVERselection of men are choosing that field instead?

People make lots of choices as they grow and mature. I believe women make these choices categorically differently from men. I think they're basically saner and better socially-adapted generally than males - we don't see 50% of felons as female, for example.

In this case, Dad seems to just be parroting the politically-correct position in the conversation today. The fact that (I agree) his position is still very much gender-assumption-loaded reflects that the public discussion remains so as well.

He's talking about 'encouraging' his daughter to be a scientist.
Why?
Because every other fucking slashdot story is about how "we need more women scientists"....a position developed and maintained entirely by meme, unsupported by facts.

Actually some data suggests that programmers, engineers, scientists tend to be a touch OCD about their preferences throughout life, leading them to prioritize these rather "hard" subjects over other things early on, other than, say, social development (thus the stereotype of nerd=science). Girls seem to prefer social development, thus, they tend not to direct to these fields unless highly motivated.

So the social pressure at work here is a father who thinks his daughter "ought" to be anything. Particularly at 4 - that's fucked up.

So "hack" is now a synonym for the simple word "use" whenever it's cool?

"I hacked the door to go outside."

"I hacked the language so I could keep using the word 'hack' as much as possible."

I appreciate the use of the term "fiendish" as artfully coined in this discussion.

It paints the companies trying to avoid taxes as nearly-diabolical agents skulking around in the dark, not to mention adding a delightful soupcon of sinfulness.

Of course, what this seems to conveniently ignore is that national taxation policies are likewise "fiendishly" complicated, sometimes driven by complicated corporate structures, but just as often driven by a quasi-socialist, populist, and (as long as we're painting in Medieval imagery) a quasi-Dulcinian desire to appropriate at least a piece of anything valuable "for the public" meaning actually "for politicians to spend and gain votes without the usual pain of public taxation or debt".

Companies respond to these policies. If the policies are so contrived and convoluted that there remain loopholes that are worth pursuing to evade tax, that's the LAW WRITERS' fault, not the companies' for exploiting it. But it plays so much better in the press to blame companies for being greedy, rather than politicians for being incompetent.

"In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source."

Agreed. But it should also be said that just because it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source doesn't logically mean it's wrong, either.

For some reason, humans seem to naturally adhere to this simplistic "if a is wrong, then b is right" position. It's entirely possible that both 1) 60 Minutes mendaciously presented the situation to conform to certain preconceived biases or for commercial/political motivations outside the story itself, in fact given their history I daresay it's likely, AND 2) the critic here is also lying (or at least spinning facts in ways that most people would feel is dishonest, and, given that he's a pro nuclear advocate, I daresay that's likely too.