In the classical music world, there is a recent example of a composer getting canceled for a complete misinterpretation of an Instagram post. His publisher demanded he apologize, in fact, it provided a pre-written apology for him to just sign. He refused to do so, and his publisher dropped him entirely, which basically ended his career, at least for the time being. So, some people are compelled by employment reasons to apologize, and the apology does work in terms of keeping one’s job.

His employer tried to coerce an apology from him, and then fired him when he refused?

That sounds like a lawsuit in the making, even if he wasn't a formal employee.

The relationship between a composer and his regular publisher is not one of employment. And publishers regularly refuse to work further with authors when said author does or says something that the publisher feels will make it look bad. Lawsuits don’t typically happened unless a contract has already been signed for the creator to provide a new work to the publisher, while if the two parties are currently between contracts, there are no grounds for a lawsuit.

This post focuses on the job market after the PhD, but another reason to avoid a PhD is that it is just too much work. I have an MA but remain very involved in my field, I publish a paper or two each year and present at conferences. But after seeing my colleagues' workload unrelated to their actual research, I don't want to do a PhD: the students in PhD programmes are expected to help out in the exhausting process of grant application writing, editing the department's publications, teach courses, etc. This is true of all the universities with a department dedicated to my specific field. Even a fully externally funded position doesn't allow you to escape such obligations and focus solely on dissertation writing.

My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.

If you publish a paper or Two every year in your field... what more do you need to do to actually get the degree?

If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)

When you choose to compile a dissertation from peer-reviewed articles, only those articles count which are written after you start the PhD program, discussed in seminar, and published. For me to write sufficient material for a dissertation and see it published would take about three years. So, that is three years I would be expected to do various administrative drudgery within the department.

I feel like I should mention that the GP was asking something of me, and little of what you write here is relevant to my own situation. (Maybe it is relevant to people in other fields.)

Do you have a regular day job and publish on the side? How do you manage it?

I work as a freelancer with some specialized skills that command a high rate, and I live in a country with low cost of living. That means that I typically only work 2–4 hours per day (and not even every weekday), and the rest of time can be dedicated to research. Over the years I have managed to scan virtually every publication relevant to my field, so I don’t even need to make the expensive trek to an academic library very often.

OSMAnd doesn’t always have routing limited to a few hundred kilometers. If one is cycle-touring, then the Brouter engine plugin for OSMAnd can be installed and that generates pretty quickly very long-distance routes.

But with regard to planning long car journeys, there is always the option of generating the route using one of the several OSM-based routing engines on the web, then downloading a GPX file, opening it in OSMAnd, and telling OSMAnd that is the route you want to follow.

I just add intermediary way-points for long routes. Works well enough.

Without getting into how official a product OSMAnd can be considered, I think it’s worth pointing out that Carto has limitations that OSMAnd improves on. Due to OSMAnd’s configurable vector drawing, it is possible to make the map show road surfaces or whether roads are lit. These are features missing from official OSM.org, which of course serves as little more than a tech demo.

If you can't find certain business information or addresses in OSMAnd, that means it is missing from the OpenStreetMap database, so it isn't going to be in Organic Maps either.

West Africa has a long history of border closures when one head of state doesn’t much like another. Trade doesn’t really tempt nations to open to their neighbours, because so much of the international trade on which the coastal countries of the region depend is through container shipping from China or other far-flung places, not from the people next door.

The US may be litigious but judges and lawyers aren’t stupid. The key issue is that it would generally be pretty hard to find someone sufficiently culpable.

Many cities plant lots of male dioecious trees (ie some individuals of the species only have staminate (“male”) flowers and others individuals only have pistillate (“female”) flowers, the city plants only the trees that produce staminate flowers) which produce twice as much pollen as they would if trees were selected more randomly. This is because they drop less litter. But it is bad for people with allergies. I don’t think any such people have had success suing their cities for this practice.

> which produce twice as much pollen as they would if trees were selected more randomly.

My understanding is that it's even worse than twice, because the female flowers of some species actually filter the pollen out of the air.

I know I'm not arguing the merits of this specific case, but a world with no bees is a world where basically everyone is dead. Living can be hazardous, but some (very slight) dangers are necessary in a world that makes living possible.

There are also other insects beside bees. A world only with bees is also a dead world.

It wasn't meant to be an either/or.

No need for that correction. The issue is that while MapsMe got sold to a dodgy company and now has some respectable FOSS forks, the Notes layer on OSM is still full of notes that were created from Maps.me over the last several years and clearly state that.

There is a sixty-year tradition now of pieces for instrumentalists + tape or live electronics, where it is the synthesized material that is spatialized through loudspeakers around the audience.

Completely different context than using a synth in a digital realm. I'm not saying you can't spatialize synths, but that the waveforms are unlike sounds we encounter in the natural world so it takes adding a bit of "naturalness" to them to help our ears understand where they are in the space around us. That's something that's harder to do in a digital environment like a spatial audio engine, but is easy enough to work around. Just an ancedote on spatialized audio in software, which again is different than what you're talking about.

> I wonder how much making being depressed part of your identity prevents you from getting better.

I had the same thought recently when Bikepacking.com posted a short video documentary about two obese women doing long-distance cycling. The women claimed that their goal was to end fat-shaming. Yet maintaining such a heavy weight while engaging in such physically demanding activity is difficult indeed. I therefore got the impression that they had so made being overweight a part of their identities that it was no longer a condition they just happened to be stuck with, rather they were deliberately maintaining it at some half-conscious level.

I think that's probably the case in many scenarios. IMO people are often more resistant to change than they are drawn to improvement. That's why I think it's important to be careful what you base your identity on.