Sorry, but I think it's you who are out of touch here.
Requiring 15-20 years of experience?
Just... no.
Software engineers are so well paid that many of them retire from the job market permanently after 15-20 years. You might as well ask people to be 65 years old until they can occupy the position.
20 years is 25% of a lifespan, and 33% of an adult lifespan.
Why isn't 10 years good enough? Unless it's an executive position for people who are at the end of their careers. You can become a Brigadier General in 20 years in the military, which would be broadly equivalent to a SVP.
> Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything
If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.
With the news stories about overseas Chinese police stations, I wonder why they didn't go after him directly in Italy. Maybe they lacked his home address. But that could be obtained by a cyber infiltration of the Italian government or through old school espionage.
> Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter
I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.
I don't mind having to conform to some norms. I would even go so far as to argue that close-knit communities are impossible to maintain over long time horizons without these gatekeeping attitudes and insider values that outsiders must conform to.
I wish society in general worked like this: less formality, more informality, more relationships.....
.... I could move to a small town. I've always lived in a large metropolis and, to be frank, I'm tired of it. I can't move to Monaco, or make the global population decrease by 90%, but I could move to a smaller community in my state. I think this is what I need to start building more relationships with other people.
Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.
Let's have some fun. Here's a basic special relativity problem from John R. Taylor's Classical Mechanics.
A space explorer A sets off at a steady 0.95c to a distant star. After exploring the star for a short time, he returns at the same speed and gets home after a total absence of 80 years (as measured by earth-bound observers.) How long do A's clocks say that he was gone, and by how much has he aged as compared to his twin B who stayed behind on earth? [Note: This is the famous "twin paradox." It is fairly easy to get the right answer by judicious insertion of a factor of γ in the right place, but to understand it, you need to recognize that it involves three inertial frames: the earth-bound frame S, the frame S' of the outbound rocket, and the frame S'' of the returning rocket. Write down the time dilation formula for the two halves of the journey and then add. Notice that the experiment is not symmetrical between the two twins: B stays at rest in the single inertial frame S, but A occupies at least two different frames. This is what allows the result to be unsymmetrical.]
You're right, but my point is more about uniformity. Society seems to have tacitly agreed that there's only 3 beautiful looks for everything. You can be beautiful - and by "you", I also mean buildings and inanimate objects -, but only if you fit this narrow criteria.
I respectfully disagree. In the 12 months following a nuclear war, Americans would still need to file their taxes before the April 15 deadline, the federal and state governments would still have to pass annual budgets, software vendors like Microsoft and Apple would still need to push updates to their products, homeowners would still need to pay their annual property tax bill, people would still need to refill their drug prescriptions.... life could recover and go on. I'm not convinced that a nuclear war would be so destructive that civilization wouldn't survive. Most nuclear attacks would probably target missile silos in rural North Dakota and airbases anyway, not cities.
But, as I outlined in my comment, there are situations other than nuclear war where the US might want to restart nuke production.
This raises a tricky question: Should the United States open or reopen a production line for nuclear weapons in order to avoid losing their manufacturing know-how, the way we do with M1A2 Abrams tanks? The United States once produced thousands of tanks per year. Today, there is only one tank plant left open in the nation, the Lima Army Tank Plant. For years, US Army leaders have asked Congress to stop purchasing new tanks because they didn't need them, but Congress kept ordering the Department of Defense to buy tanks anyway. They did this for two reasons. First, because the tank plant is a source of jobs in Ohio. Second, because tanks, especially modern, 21st century tanks, are specialized tools, and we wouldn't want to forget how to build them. An argument is made than it is cheaper to keep producing tanks that are not needed than it would be to restart a tank production line if one didn't exist. The argument is sensible and most likely true. After the US Air Force ordered an early end to the production of the F-22 Raptor in the early 2010s, the production line was dismantled. A report in the last few years estimated the cost to restart the production line in the billions, if not the low tens of billions.
So, back to nuclear weapons. The United States manufactured tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Most of these weapons have been decommissioned and the production lines have been shut down. The United States no longer manufactures nuclear weapons. Now, the incoming Ground Based Strategic Deterrent will be built by Northrop Grumman in the next few years to start replacing the aging Minuteman III ICBMs, but the warheads and the nuclear cores will be recycled from existing ICBMs.
Which raises a question: How would the United States replenish its nuclear weapons if the need arose? For example, after a nuclear war, where the US lost or expended 80% of its arsenal? The question of what to do after a nuclear war may sound absurd to some, but it's a worthwhile and interesting one. More on point, what if the nuclear cores degrade to a point where they may no longer work? This is essentially what the Department of Energy's Nuclear Stewardship Program is for. It's a program that costs billions of dollars a year and uses supercomputers to model the slow degradation of the nuclear cores in the stockpile.
But here's where it gets trickier. The New START treaty will expire in 2026. If it is not extended or replaced by a new treaty, there will be nothing stopping Russia from expanding its nuclear arsenal. China is also expanding its nuclear arsenal as we speak. Last week's report by the Department of Defense claims that China will have 1,500 nuclear weapons within a decade or so. China is building new nuclear weapons. The United States is not. And China is not bound by any arms control treaty.
Now, the US also happens to have about 1,400-1,500 nuclear weapons deployed, plus a few thousand more in storage, disassembled.
But what if China decides at some point to push past 1,500? To 2,000? 5,000?
A country with 5,000 nuclear weapons could conduct a first strike against a country with 1,500 nuclear weapons, on a 2:1 ratio, and still have 2,000 nukes in reserve for further strikes. This is why the nuclear arms race happened between the US and the Soviet Union in the first place. Any disparity in the deployed arsenals gives the side with more the advantage. So if China ever decides to expand beyond 1,500, the strategically sound move for the US would be to start building more, to match the Chinese production. It would be tragic, but it's not impossible.
But the US no longer manufactures nukes, so the old production lines would need to be reopened.