the reason for the weirdness is that it doesn’t look like a recession in the labor market. Layoffs have been almost exclusively limited to tech, and within tech pre-profit or highly speculative (cryptoshovels) companies. This is important because in the US economic system labor power drives income drives inflation. (This isn’t true in all countries.)
When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.
I was under impression that unemployment is a lagging indicator. The last thing employers want to do is let people go - they will try to cut here, cut there, stop hiring etc.
Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.
> and not being able to get much stronger with training
Actually, the problem is the opposite. Their muscles get too strong too quickly and then they blow a pulley because their tendons aren't strong enough for the forces that their muscles are easily capable of producing. This happens in adults too, but AFAICT it's more common in kids and adolescents (but perhaps that's because most adults who get into the sport later don't ever climb as hard). Growth plate injuries are less common but devastating.
Avoiding these sorts of injuries is probably the biggest reason why training or a team is worth the $.
Ashima Shiraishi was arguably the strongest female climber in the world when she was 13, Tommy Caldwell won a climbing competition against some world-class talent at 16, and it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds climb hard at gyms with good youth competition programs. Grades that used to be reserved for the best in the world (5.13+) are climbed nightly by kids at any number of gyms throughout the world. At my local gym, where a large number of former full time climbers get their fix, the competition high school kids are very often the strongest climbers in the room.
It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing.
The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.)
In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem).
> I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...
Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees":
Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference.
"let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them.
"Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below.
Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.
no one suggested this happened except you though. It's clear the kid was supervised by the climbing instructor. Clearly top-roping with either auto- or human belay because that's the only kind of situation where you'd have a kid on a 50-foot wall. Kid could get injured sure, but it would be a tooth getting knocked out by slamming into the wall from a bad belay catch, not falling 50 feet to the ground.
This is only kind of true. If you are asked "why is X true?" and you go on critique the epistemological basis for saying that something of type X could be true or not, you may be giving an in-depth and intelligent answer that is responsive to the prompt. But you are also not demonstrating the knowledge that the question was designed to probe; i.e., that you have learned and retained the particular arguments for the truth of X that were covered in class.
These discussions sometimes go off the rail because it's a bunch of STEM folks critiquing the humanities, so I'll share a STEM example that gets the point across. A too-clever friend of mine got marks off in our Analysis course because he presented a constructive proof of a theorem on a test, and that was not the proof technique that the test was designed to interrogate.
Superficially his answer was "correct". But then, as his professor pointed out, on an even deeper level it really was incorrect, because our write-ups of proofs are really high-level descriptions of formal derivations, and the student was describing a proof a different axiomatic system than the one assumed by the question, so, to be totally correct, he would have had to embed the proof that his proof in constructive analysis mapped over into normal analysis. Which would have been quite a bit of work that the student, at the time, was unable to do (and probably no one could do in an exam setting).
But, again, the real point is that this part of the debate is pedantic because what my clever "friend" really didn't understand was WHY the question was being asked. The answer is supposed to demonstrate a certain piece of knowledge in a certain context; it's an exam answer in a closed curriculum, not a Treatise.
Besides, you are ALWAYS writing into a audience and context; if you want to write to a "pure" audience, you may do so, but consider saving it for Sunday morning prayers.
Which, since that friend isn't paid to write analysis proofs these days, were perhaps important lessons ;)
> it is force of law that prevents large scale arbitrage of the form in this article.
This is actually exactly analogous; many people don't realize that the status quo of "multiple denominations" have ancestral ties to bimetallic currencies of the sort covered in this article.
It would have been difficult for Henry III to de facto outlaw smelting of gold coins because the scale of the gold penny's distribution was much smaller (making attribution of a smelting operation much harder), and because the ability to surveil this sort of activity was severely limited by geography.
But melting down US pennies is de jure illegal (nb: only since 2007 [1]) and the number of pennies you'd need to smelt down in order to justify the effort would probably make the sourcing operation noticeable to authorities.
> Why is it that software engineers in a few decades have come to the conclusion that proper variable naming is important and abuse of sigils a bad idea but mathematics don't feel the same way?
If yo read code in standard libraries, you'll see a lot of either single-letter variables or extremely generic variable names.
Most mathematics is dealing with things at least one level of abstraction higher than a standard library.
In most programs outside of things like standard libraries, a variable usually stands for something concrete and specific. A customer. An order. A specific type of element in a UI. Etc.
In theory papers, a variable usually stands in for something generic and general. An arbitrary program. An arbitrary finite set. Etc. Sometimes even an arbitrary program in a programming language that is not defined in particular but only in general (e.g., "any language with parametric polymorphism", "any language with a specific sort of binding structure between things in these two syntactic categories", etc.).
Again, standard libraries already start using more generic variable names, and most theory papers are dealing with an abstraction level higher than standard libraries.
I'll give some examples in the most strong-man way possible: by choosing the standard library of a famously verbose language (Java). Here are a few examples, with increasing levels of abstraction mapping onto increasing use of single-variable names:
1. A byte is pretty damn concrete. The Java byte implementation [1] uses almost exclusively single-letter names (b,s) or names that are so generic that they might as well be single-letter names (e.g., anotherByte instead of b). When more meaningful names are used, it's because they are public type names (String, int), which is, again, pretty damn concrete.
2. The next level of abstraction is Generics. Here, even Java -- a language whose verbosity is a long-standing joke -- starts using single-letter variable names for both types and values [2].
3. Finally, we dive into things that abstract over generics [3] and start seeing weird sigils in addition to single-letter names. (What does Predicate<? super E> mean?!)
And, again, this is a strong-manned example, since Java is famously verbose and I'm choosing some of the most-used and therefore most verbosely documented .java files in the world.
Notice, btw, that natural language documentation increases as the verbosity of names decreases. This is the same in math, where those symbols are small pieces of 20+ page papers full of english prose explaining the meaning of the symbols.
And, again most mathematics is dealing with things at least one level of abstraction higher than anything you find in a standard library. Sometimes several levels of abstraction.
It's not the income share agreement per se. It's the request for his banking info. They weren't asking for a routing and account number, they were asking for enough access to track direct deposits.
There's no way in hell I'm ever giving that sort of banking access to an employer, let alone an educational institution. For starters, I share a bank account with my wife and her earnings are none of their god damn business.
This book's browser supports JavaScript but the book itself skips over it because the browser just uses DuckPy. Which is a reasonable pedagogical choice. Building even a moderately "realistic" JavaScript interpreter would be its own semester-length course.
(This is a really fantastic resource; I'll probably use it as the basis of course once I get around to semi-retiring and taking a teaching job. Thanks, OP!)
When the employment outlook changes, and I expect it will, we will be in a traditional recession.