> While there's a lot of plastic in the ocean it's relatively thinly distributed. It's not like there's a bunch of bottles floating in one place. It's a bunch of plastic dust in the water column.
But it's distributed over a very large area, and affects sea-life. Guess what that means for people who consume fish?
I don't know how it affects sea-life. Other than the occasional scare-tactic picture of a turtle with a plastic web stuck to it, what is the systemic effect? Sure there's lots of plastic in the ocean; there's lots of sand too. What's really at issue?
The United Nations Ocean Conference estimated that the oceans might contain more weight in plastics than fish by the year 2050.[33] Some long-lasting plastics end up in the stomachs of marine animals, mature and immature.[6][34][35] The food chain is affected as the plastic attracts seabirds and fish. When marine life consumes plastic allowing it to enter the food chain, this can lead to greater problems when species that have consumed plastic are being eaten by other predators.
Besides the particles' danger to wildlife, on the microscopic level the floating debris can absorb organic pollutants from seawater, including PCBs, DDT, and PAHs.[40] Aside from toxic effects,[41] when ingested, some of these are mistaken by the endocrine system as estradiol, causing hormone disruption in the affected animal.[38] These toxin-containing plastic pieces are also eaten by jellyfish, which are then eaten by fish. Many of these fish are then consumed by humans, resulting in their ingestion of toxic chemicals.[42] While eating their normal sources of food, plastic ingestion can be unavoidable or the animal may mistake the plastic as a food source.[43][44][45][46][47]
Marine plastics also facilitate the spread of invasive species that attach to floating plastic in one region and drift long distances to colonize other ecosystems.[15] Research has shown that this plastic marine debris affects at least 267 species worldwide.[48]
Plastic fails to degrade - fish eats, breathes or otherwise absorbs plastic - plastic is now in fish - plastic fails to degrade - fish is caught - plastic fails to degrade - fish, along with thousands of other fish, is caught - plastic continues to fail to degrade - fish are processed into ready meals... can you guess where the plastic (which is still failing to degrade, by the by) is going to end up?
Again with the loaded words. And what is the actual health issue? Do we imagine that fish are exposed to more plastic than the average human? Not likely. We already accept plastic into our lives continuously.
My Honda CR-V will periodically beep with "NO KEY" lighting on up on the dashboard(say I give my wife the key to get inside our home on a crappy day while I go park the car elsewhere), but doesn't make impose any restrictions on using the car while it's on, regardless of your current speed or gear. Once you shut the car off though, that's it.
2). Sticking it out in CS undergrad when I was having a hard time with the material instead of dropping out
3). Leaving shitty jobs(though I could've left sooner at each instance) for greener pastures
4). Instead of resorting to drugs or alcohol to deal with bad times and loneliness in my life, turning to running instead and running the Marathon des Sables(and unrelatedly but subsequently finishing my pilot's license) which made me believe in myself
> America is so stuck in legacy tech. Nobody checks signatures.
The USPS sadly still forces credit card users to have signatures on the back. They don't check signatures against the PIN pad / signed receipts, but the clerk will either yell at you or refuse the transaction if you have "Ask For Drivers License" on the back of the card. This has happened to me on more than one occasion.
So that's what I should've done while I was there so we could've gotten a legit database to handle our yield curves processing! We were expected to do everything in Excel, and if we were lucky, MS Access :|
Got any tips on how to get going on a site like Upwork? I'm not sure I tried that one before, but I had a horrible experience on Freelancer.com and I've sorta shied away from those since then. I have enough on my plate with grad school and a full-time job at the moment, but if I ever find myself in dire straits I'd like to have options.
Toptal as a freelancer for full or part-time I find better, even if it comes with all sorts of other issues like their opaque refund policy. There's other freelancer sites around too that are similar, usually posting on remote job boards like remoteok, weworkremotely, jobspresso ect. Surprisingly making a post on your local Craigslist you want contract, P/T work pans out too if some local company decides to contract you but I wouldn't work for individuals there since you'll likely not get paid. There's also here, the monthly freelancer for hire post.
Charge bellow market rate in order to build reputation than brace for the day some dick will complain about some bullshit and they pull the rug under your feet.
I'd ask a different question, of why do you need to measure it in the first place? I learn more about our codebase, my productivity goes up -- I deliver more updates, with less bugs, faster as I learn. Do I need to measure the details of how much I learned? Or is it sufficient to just know that I'm grokking more each day, and that is reflected in my work?
Isn't that the mantra of BI? Be careful what you measure, because that is what you will improve.
> Isn't that the mantra of BI? Be careful what you measure, because that is what you will improve.
The corollary is that you don't improve what you don't measure.
> Or is it sufficient to just know that I'm grokking more each day, and that is reflected in my work?
OP's point is, I believe, that you don't know that you're really grokking much of anything and how much it's actually reflected in your work, because you're not measuring it. This can work if you have good feedback mechanism at work, though.
> The corollary is that you don't improve what you don't measure.
I mean, this is a nice saying, but it is pretty clearly not true. Lots of things that aren't measured are improved; we have not measured my two year olds vocabulary at all, but it is certainly improving.
So measuring learning is a good thing, because it means you will likely be more deliberate in actually getting better at it, as opposed to just leaving it up to chance
But it's distributed over a very large area, and affects sea-life. Guess what that means for people who consume fish?