u/Beautiful-Bonus2279

In many countries especially USA UK China, your big “end goal” in life is to buy a house/get on the property ladder. In China, it is because that used to be the default way to secure your assets value against inflation until recently. It is completely normal for your whole family to chip in to help you buy an apartment, sometimes that’s the whole reason they’ve been saving money this whole time. In the UK, the goal is to get on the “property ladder” and become a landlord (at least in the past). The sign that you made it would be if you bought a house, saved up for down payment for a bigger one, move into that one and rent out your old one and repeat. I dunno how it works in the USA but probably similar to the UK. In all of the above, the premise is that the house price will continue to increase.

I’ve heard that’s not true in Japan due to the earthquakes, houses there are built to be temporary and they depreciate over time, and are quite cheap compared to the rest of the world.

So what exactly does the Japanese citizen work for then?

When they encounter a situation where the rules set by other people are nonsensical/unjust/unfair, an INTP would rebel by either not following the rules at all or straight up not playing the game. Getting to their end goal is optional, but they will not comply with the rules.

An INTJ on the other hand will ruthlessly pursue the goal no matter what. If the rules are dirty they’ll just play dirtier. They don’t care about the fairness of the process or that complying with ungrounded rules constitutes corruption of their integrity and dignity by the authority, as long as in the end they achieve their goal, their actions are validated.

For example, if they are a widely persecuted ethnic minority in society and they’re participating in let’s say some kind of highly prestigious competition, and the rules are openly unfair to them and they face harassment, gatekeeping etc from the majority who don’t want to see them win. An INTP will just refuse to play. An INTJ will be Machiavellian and pretend to comply for the time being, and play with the odds and the rules against the INTJ, because the INTJ knows that as long as they still win in the end, everything will be validated and they will have their voice heard.

By my current timeline, the soonest I can start my startup dream is at age 34. I know that in China there’s a 35 deadline to get your career going and if you lose your job afterwards you are considered too old.

I want to know if the same is true for entrepreneurship. Do the VCs question your stamina the way they would for a new employee?

What if the founder is 40/50?

By culture wars I mean in the general sense: Gender wars, Race wars, Culture wars, Religion wars etc

Even in liberal discourse, most people think the root cause is the disproportionate assignment of power over others to people of one type/demographic instead of an even distribution at all levels of the power hierarchy. “Oh X type people have too much power over us, what have they done to deserve that level of status?? We need more Y type Z type people up there”.

Nobody stops to ask why we even have a power hierarchy in the first place.

The root cause in question, as I see it, is this: We incorrectly believe “power over others” to be a legitimate form of reward.

Person A is so good at baseball! A is such a star! Let’s all defer to A over everyone else in this other social situation that has nothing to do with baseball! B is not happy that A has power over B without B’s consent? Sucks! Maybe B should try harder and get good at baseball so everyone likes B!

To me, the only time A has legitimate power over B, is if B is in A’s baseball team by B’s own choice, and A in charge is in the best interest of the whole team. This also means A is accountable to B and the rest of the team. But this accountability is simply not there if the status was given as a reward instead of a responsibility.

Look around you, even if we have a perfect meritocracy where only the most awesome people are at the top independent of their demographic, is their field of competence relevant to and in the interests of the people they have power over?

Is that badass girl boss or trailblazing ethnic minority in that position of power because they’re good for you? Or those above them?

The only legitimate leader is one that is there due to the best interests of everyone they have power over, but that rarely happens in real life. Leaders nowadays tends to punch down. It’s a competition of who gets to bully others instead of who’s the best for everyone’s interests.

I suspect, if this issue is solved, even if there are some uneven distribution of demographics on each level of the hierarchy, the “culture wars (general)” wouldn’t be nearly as intense as it is today.

Social hierarchies… power hierarchies… dominance hierarchies… status hierarchies…

I don’t want to participate in any of that. But even in politically liberal discourse, they almost never attack the hierarchy itself. All they seem to do is say: “It is wrong that those at the top are mostly people of this demographic and those at the bottom are mostly other demographics, we should make it such that the distribution of demographics is even along the hierarchy” instead of “why do we even have the hierarchy in the first place”.

Even in a perfect meritocracy, why should the winner have any legitimate authority to control the losers?

Sometimes the criteria used in the “meritocracy” makes no sense! Oh A is better at baseball than B, therefore B must defer to A in this social situation that has nothing to do with baseball. If A attacks B and B as much as even try to defend themselves, how dare you? Don’t you know you suck at baseball?

In a hierarchy free world, the value of everyone’s voice is tied to their logical consistency and evidential groundedness, and nothing to do with the person. The same thing said by A and B should not be valued differently because A and B are on different levels of some hierarchy.

The only exception would be in an emergency where everyone is in danger and it is in everyone’s best interests that the most qualified person for that particular scenario be put in charge. And in this scenario that person should be reluctant to accept the position because they are also accountable to everyone “below”. The higher status of a person should not be seen as a reward, if that happens, there’s a fundamental asymmetry of accountability going on.

像鹤岗，惠州大亚湾这种盖太多了房价砍一半的情况是不是以后会经常发生？

还是大概率多余的房子会拆了？ 或者改成商业用房？

I’m at a crossroads in my life where I’m going to have one last Hail Mary shot to do something ambitious with my career. But it is more likely than not that I will still fail at the end. I ask this question pertaining to my back up plan 7 years in the future.

I am a Hong Kong resident with a home return permit. I already have sufficient passive income from abroad to support a decent lifestyle in a place with low cost of living like Qinghai.

Assume for a moment that I will have sufficient startup capital. What kinds of equipment would have decent demand in Qinghai?

My current idea is something with wheels: E-bikes/Scooters/trailers etc. Or something to rent to tourists like drones, hiking kit, camping kit, temporary storage, accommodation.

I don’t need it to make huge amounts of money. Just enough to support a chill, low maintenance business.

The “moat” I envision is simply deploying assets in the right location. I don’t need to market my skills or qualifications or experience (because I won’t have any in the future). I just need to market the availability of the right asset at the right place.

Is there anything I’ve missed here? How might this fail (other than lack of startup capital)? Does anyone even rent any of these things (especially drone and scooters) in China? Is it very difficult to get storage space/storefront there?

Last year I dropped out of a PhD in the UK. I had applied to an advertised project, and to my utter surprise I passed the interview despite my mediocre CV and research proposal at the time. It was also a project with an industry partner.

I mistakenly thought I at least partially understood the project so I went there, expecting to figure out the rest as I go and maybe receive some training from them. I also foolishly assumed that they accepted me based on the quality of my research proposal (because I knew my CV was bad), but when I got there, it eventually became clear they didn’t care for that at all (but it was never explicitly declared irrelevant). They instead gave me a new project outline that was different to both the advertised one and my own proposal. To this day I don’t know how they hired me.

When started familiarising with the literature based on the new project outline, I discovered that this “subject” barely existed at all. There were a couple of papers that were tangentially relevant and they never cited each other despite talking about similar ideas, using very different choice of vocabulary to refer to the same concepts. Turns out I didn’t understand anything at all!

So I went to my supervisor, maybe she knows the field better. I asked her about the papers I was reading, she doesn’t seem to (or maybe she acted like she didn’t) have heard of them. I asked her what should I be reading then? She gave me a book from the 90s, which I cited in my now irrelevant research proposal, whose work hasn’t been used or developed often in decades especially in this subject (based on the new outline).

Later someone told me that in the UK, it is completely normal that the supervisor doesn’t know anything, and it’s my job to figure things out.

Based on that I concluded that while on paper I’m still a student, in practice I am expected to function as a low cost R&D employee for the sponsoring company and UKRI. They are paying me this time after all. Which means I can’t just ask for help and show my weakness like a helpless student, I need to take charge and say “I got this” even if I don’t, and figure things out on my own.

So I proceeded with that like an absolute moron, and got more and more distressed and disoriented as time went on because I was expected to report on my progress to the “stakeholders” even though I understood nothing (later I realise this is probably a field where you can only understand things if you worked in a company as part of a team). Every time I showed up at a progress meeting, my supervisor acted like I was doing just fine in terms of direction and understanding, and all I need to do is to just start writing.

I don’t know if this happened to anyone else, but I was so distressed and disoriented that I eventually, without even noticing it, started making shit up from random pieces of literature I could sorta understand. I now look at those progress reports like “what was this guy high on when he wrote this?”, but at the time I genuinely thought it was adequate. Despite this, my supervisor kept giving me the usual smile and nod, only showing dissatisfaction at the fact I didn’t write enough.

I’m diagnosed autistic and I’m not good with unspoken social cues. It now occurs to me that this might have been a sarcastic UK way of saying “you utter idiot, proceed as is and see how you fail”. I did not catch this at the time at all, I genuinely thought I was doing okay after each meeting.

Later on, as it became more and more clear that I had no idea what I was doing, I had a casual chat with my supervisor that pertained to another PhD student. She made the remark “yes! He’s very good! Very coachable!” with a kind of weird sly smile.

Much later on after I dropped out, it now occurs to me that they were hinting that I wasn’t “coachable”. A lot of things I dismissed as too subtle to register were probably very strong signals.

So was I wrong about the independent work? Should I have actually pestered them more about all the inconsistencies and shit I didn’t understand? Should I have acted like a student this whole time? Or is the root cause actually that I just didn’t have the prerequisite competence and knowledge for this project, and that in the adequate circumstance, I should not have needed so much help in the first place?

In the UK, if I suspect some remark is sarcastic because it doesn’t make sense, should I just assume it’s sarcastic until proven otherwise?

Or just alone?

Me personally I’d be perfectly fine not talking to literally anyone for years on end. There’s plenty of world to explore online.

So by my understanding you get a set of requirements, between the requirements and the final product you could do calculations, simulations, design iterations etc and by the end you have a thing that you run tests on and if it passes all, that’s what you deliver right?

So I want to ask: are all the stuff in between also deliverable? Do you have to document officially all the intermediate calculations, design changes etc? If you did the calculations wrong, or even (hypothetically) just kinda screwed around based on vibes without any calculations and by sheer chance of luck, the thing you put together passes all the tests, does that matter at all?

UK Chinese here. Things are changing nowadays, but in the UK it used to be that the moment you turn 18 you and your parents no longer have any obligations towards each other, and it was considered shameful to receive help from parents either financial or otherwise.

I never had this conversation with my parents so they kept acting like it’s not shameful at all while everyone around me were competitively hyper independent. I didn’t even notice the distinction until the past few years.

I do remember my own days in China when relying on your parents was called 啃老, so I thought things were not so different from the UK. But now I realise it seems to be completely normal to compete on the Chinese marriage market using your parent’s assets instead of your own.

So how does it work there? What percentage of the adult population still receive a significant amount of financial support from their parents? At what age nowadays do they switch from receiving support to giving support?

I have a four year gap after my first degree in engineering. The reasons are complex but definitely not good to explain in an interview. My goal is to re-jumpstart my engineering career by any means possible such that this gap doesn’t kill my prospects immediately. Either by getting a job or into a PhD program.

The way I see it, employers/PhD admissions are worried about three things when they see a gap: 1) Is this guy fishy (criminal/sex offender/fired for incompetence etc)? 2) is this guy still any good skill wise? 3) is this guy fundamentally lazy and unmotivated?

1. is easy to prove - I have no criminal record of any kind and have no previous employers. 2) is solvable, I can just do a new masters degree. 3) is extremely hard and is the main reason I’m asking the question.

The truth is, I couldn’t get an engineering career started in the first place because I forgot to do internships, and had nothing to talk about when applying to the first job. Coincidentally, I had a pretty large accident settlement which I then invested such that I had runway to afford a bare minimum living without having to “take any job available”as they say. Instead of wasting my time on a minimum wage job that gives me no real marketable development to wave at employers, I tried to use that time to strategise to figure out the gap problem. After a long period of being unable to get that first job due to the expanding gap itself, I had indeed given up hope because I thought it’s no longer possible.

I have since then un-gave-up because I learned that there might be some PhD programs that don’t care about the gap. If I do a hard, 2 year research masters in an engineering subject now, if I graduate with good results and a good thesis, are they still gonna think I’m 3) lazy and unmotivated? Is a four year gap still gonna kill me?

Can I just tell them the truth that I was unable to get a job + financially sorta didn’t need to + gave up after a while, and then un-gave-up and did a masters degree to prove that 2) my skills are up to date and 3) I’m not lazy and unmotivated?

Or know anyone that has?

How did you/they explain the gap? How long was the gap? Which field? Which country?

I graduated with a first from a global top 10 British university in engineering. I have a gap of four years (long story but definitely not good in an interview) and I’m trying to re-jumpstart my career by doing a PhD in Germany (where I hear they don’t care so much about a gap but plz correct me if I’m wrong).

I plan to do a two year research masters in robotics/controls in the UK, and use the skills, experience, thesis, grades from that and my undergrad degree to try to get into an individual PhD program in Germany (or with some luck, a Fraunhofer Institute). My strategy is to try to use a precise matching of my masters thesis topic and a specific research group’s research to “outweigh” the gap on my CV

Do you think the gap will still kill me?

For context I have an engineering degree and I’m trying to enter robotics/drones/control engineering.

I have a four year unemployment gap on my CV after I graduated. The reasons for that is a long story but doesn’t matter now. I simply don’t have a good explanation for this gap because I did basically nothing productive other than applying to jobs and giving up. I’ve concluded it’s impossible to not end up in minimum wage jobs for the rest of my life with this gap.

I have since un-gave-up so I’ve been exploring the academia angle - a PhD admissions committee would probably care more about my abilities and grades and past thesis work than my work history. Given that I can’t cover this gap now, I can only hope to do something to “outweigh” it.

From this “outweigh” strategy, I concluded that I need to specialise hard, and very accurately, into something that will be highly in-demand when I graduate (assume seven years). The “sniper rifle” strategy. Such that I will end up being one of like 50 or so people in the entire world who knows how to do this exact thing your startup wants to achieve. Surely that would outweigh any gap (Plz correct me if I’m wrong)?

The risk here is that I end up specialising in something that won’t be in demand, and there’s zero companies that cares about whatever I became an expert in. And now I’m overqualified.

I’d say I have about 5% chance that my sniper round hits the target.

The alternative is to generalise and focus on practical skills. Actually build something and iterate during the PhD. I will have 5 years of robotics/controls/drones experience building actual prototypes that doesn’t have a lot of technical innovation. The “shotgun” strategy. This to me sounds safer in theory, but I worry that my four years of gap will still kill me because there are many people with such practical skills and very few with such a gap.

I’d say I have either 0% chance of winning here due to the gap or like 50% if they don’t care about the gap in light of fresh practical experience

What’s your advice on this situation.

I want to start a startup building either robots or drones, but I really hate the attention and marketing work.

I don’t want there to be a founders biography page on the website, or even an “about us”. I want the public to know as little about me or my background as possible.

Is there a way to start a business like that but with very little attention? It doesn’t need to be a super big scaling startup, just one that pays the bills with enough leftover for some R&D

When I return to China with a PhD I will be 34 years old.

Chances are, I will no longer be very competitive in the job market due to the 35 limit

I want to know if the 35 limit also exist among founders and VCs. Will I have trouble finding co-founders, investors, government funding etc due to my age

The field is robotics/drones

Here in the UK if you answer “how are you?” With anything other than “good”, you’re seen as dramatic and get infantilised.

By my personal observation, in China it’s almost the opposite: you need to be emotionally expressive in order for others to even understand what you’re trying to say. It seems to be almost part of the language. And you need to display the right emotion at the right situation. Whether you actually have those emotions or not.

Is the same engineering degree from say Imperial more difficult than the one from say University of Sheffield?

If you want to maximise probability of 2:1 or above should you actually aim lower?