Well duh there’s no profit in curing children’s cancer.
We used to be a fucking country, man.
The world has Wifi because of the blue-sky research done at the CSIRO. This resource extraction colony is run by short-sighted deadshits.
The world has Wifi because of the blue-sky research done at the CSIRO.
Ehh, they like to claim that, but they weren’t actually involved in the development of wifi, they were working on another networking radio tech that never went anywhere.
They do hold a bunch of patents and like to sue for royalties over them though.
In many ways - that’s the point! They had the funding to develop things which would then become the building blocks for other technologies. Blue sky research is research done without a commercial outcome - but enables future projects with immediate application.
It’s the only way we progress.
This is why I left academia after doing my honours. At the time I was planning to start a family and needed something that paid at least minimum wage.
especially doing the whole PHD is abhorrent, since the pay is very little, and only ever well off students can afford to succeed in the phd in general. disadvantaged students are often unable to compete with students with no financial worries. they did this with columbia ? the med school was free for that class, and the college decided to only choose well of students instead. this doesnt mean disadvantaged cant do grad school , its just they are working 2-3 times as harder to earn it than someone that can afford to spent 24/7 studying.
PHD students in essence provides cheap low cost labor for research, without having to deal with a tenured professor.
The pay is one thing, the next filter for Australian PhD students though is that if you want a job in academia you probably have to go overseas, at least for a few years as a postdoc. You may also get paid shit all as a postdoc depending on where you go, and then your position will probably only be for 2 years then you have to find somewhere else.
Will you be able to come home eventually? No uni has any money to hire permanent staff so good luck!
Your value in society is determined by how much value you bring to billionaires.
The worst part about that? We all agree.
Maxim is getting paid to get a PhD. Boo hoo.
You’re getting the big downvote but the pay difference is between Maxim, who is a postgraduate new to the field and relatively inexperienced, and a research scientist with the PhD who earns about 110k a year - 45 to 55 an hour on average. That is the payoff for the miserable pay rate now.
If you go blue-collar, you’ll discover that apprentices also start at that kind of pay rate, which slowly increases as they get more experience, which is they key part that’s missing from this conversation.
The “but they’re working on curing children’s cancer!!!1!” is just an emotional hook to generate moral outrage. There are plenty of PhDs getting 18 an hour researching weapons systems, but they don’t make the news.
PhD students are already years past being “apprentices”. You have to already done at least 4 years of study (3 year undergraduate + honours year at minimum) to start a PhD, and most will have done 5 or more (undergraduate + 2 year research masters)
But they’ve generally had zero real world experience. They’re usually just career students up until that point.
I can’t help it if it is a long and arduous path to the career that they have chosen. But the fact is, they’re still in the education system and learning/ gaining experience at this point, just like apprentices.
I don’t disagree that the pay is shit and that it could go up a bit if it is actively discouraging people to do their PhD. Being used as cheap labour is a problem for both apprentices and PhD students alike, it seems.
The “but they’re working on curing children’s cancer!!!1!” is just an emotional hook to generate moral outrage. There are plenty of PhDs getting 18 an hour researching weapons systems, but they don’t make the news.
The first of those jobs is constructive and beneficial to both Australia and to humankind as a whole. The second is destructive and literally helps kill people. It’s invalid to trivialise that difference down to “moral outrage” - in fact morality need not be involved at all - health research is a vital job I’d like to see rewarded better.
I respond with a hearty “bollocks” to all your statements. The Guardian is using the children’s cancer statement as a hook to get you in to read their article, nothing more, nothing less.
Having said that, people on their way to PhDs should probably be paid more to entice them to do one if we are starting to get a shortage of PhDs around the place.
I respond with a hearty “bollocks” to all your statements.
I am enthusiastically curious about why you claim that the curing of children’s cancer being beneficial is “bollocks”.
Working on curing childhood cancer is emotional because it’s something that we as a society value collectively but clearly aren’t compensating the work enough. Why should we pay a pittance to people who have 5+ years of training under their belt? Is it simply because they’ll make more in the future? That sounds like a pretty exploitative system to me.
sounds like a pretty exploitative system to me
It mostly is and not only when it comes to PhD students. We are in a society in decay.
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