Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Emily Toth Martin and Marisa Eisenberg point out the obvious value of wearing masks to reduce the likelihood of catching and spreading respiratory illnesses. And Wanzhu Tu et al. find that people build stronger immune defences to COVID-19 by getting vaccinated than by getting infected.
- Angella MacEwen highlights the massive real wage cuts which Canadian workers are being told they have to accept, as well as the need for government action to ensure housing and other necessities of life are available and affordable. And H.G. Watson writes about the need for collective action to ensure workers don't bear the brunt of profit-driven inflation.
- Zak Vescera reports on the disconnect between the Globe and Mail's sponsored top employer list and the track record of worker deaths at Suncor.
- Jessica Corbett discusses the difficulty in trying to undo the consequences of falling short of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Natasha Bulowski reports on the growing recognition that "sustainable" monoculture forests are more a matter of greenwashing than climate change mitigation. And Adam Radwanski and Jeffrey Jones report on new investment standards based on the seemingly obvious principle that fossil fuel projects can't properly be classified as green.- Finally, Stefan Labbe reports on the calls for a fracking moratorium in British Columbia rather than continuing a practice of abandoning residents in "sacrifice zones" to ill health effects. And Rachel Monroe reports on the efforts to salvage something from a rapidly-receding Colorado River watershed.
Re: wage cuts, I see IT as important for the next 6 years and then materials science should take over. $55000 is about what IT brings. Beyond that there are skills for brings high value products or concepts to fruition that come from outside the sector. I'm looking at real space mapping of atoms and maybe nanoparticles and nanostructures. It is mostly used for electron mapping now. Things like machine learning the transition between turbelent gas flow into low quality hermetic devices vs high quality non-turbulent leaks. Equating vacuum pressure to the glue materials strength tests they use now. I'm big on Raman and fluorescent sensors. I imagine using fluorescent nanostructures to demo new analytical techniques. There might be Venus orbit batteries even without good electric engine manufacturing. Space armour will get good. Lasers will get good? Good enough to thread UHV piping through wafers? I'll have to machine learn it. I might make games still. Looking for peripherals which log motions like a cat swipe as my hand and the server or engine software to integrate such data as a game event.
ReplyDeleteAn employer might want to go 1/2-ers or get the IP for software or something. Sapphire is still able to displace other materials even without making products from nanoparticles. It will pay more.