In the Mojave? Mountain lions, coyotes, maybe a dog, and snakes (though that is more a matter of “avoid” than “defend”).

I’m not sure of your country, but are you tied to it? (For example, do you have family, or are trying to attain citizenship?)

Opening up your search might be helpful. Look at a variety of universities in many countries to see what options there are.

Yes and no. I would say for the field OP is in, a lot of jobs will have B.S. or M.S. as the “required” education, and then M.S. or Ph.D. as “preferred”. The U.S. just dumped $280B into the CHIPS act, so now is a pretty good time to be in semiconductor R&D. The folks I work with seems to have little trouble popping back and forth between industry, academia, and government.

Depends on the job, and how good your read is of the situation. My experience has been that managers guilt trip or do other emotional games when they’re out of other options. In that case, it may be a safe bet to stand up to them.

Other places you’re more replaceable, or the manager doesn’t care and has an axe to grind. Then it’s trickier.

Every (US) job description I’ve had save one had a line to the effect of “… and other duties as required by management.” Not to follow would be considered insubordination and could lead to termination with cause. Job description in this case is just a broad-stroke outline of what the job is supposed to entail.

The “save one” was a job with a strong union presence. In that case, going outside my job description could lead to me and my manager being in trouble.

The $1M salary is really typical of California tech job postings, and it is essentially meaningless. Under the new transparency law, employers have to list the salary range on job advertisements. For many of these speculative or open-application type roles, it’s common to list $90k-$900k as the range.

It makes great headlines, but nobody in that job is actually going to make 900k.

Not in Windows 10/11. You can still “eject” if it makes you feel better, but it’s basically redundant. They reworked the support for removable media so they are always ready to remove except during active read/write operations.

Look how many jobs in the private sector also require a security clearance. Most things in aerospace, but also a lot of enterprise/cloud/telecom computing will have a “federal” arm, and they need cleared workers for that. Amazon, Google, AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft and many other big names have divisions that do classified work. They pay a premium over regular positions because the clearance is a PITA for everyone involved.

And then you use a generator and vault, but there’s some stupid caveat like “you can’t use the ^ character.”

That’s pretty normal for meh-tier kind of jobs in the US, though usually you “graduate” to two weeks sooner, like after a year.

In many workplaces there’s a culture of taking as little as possible of the allowed vacation time. Sometimes it can lead to a small bonus when those days get “paid out” at the year end. Other times, the only encouragement is just pressure from the boss or coworkers. Note that there is neither a legal minimum for vacation days, not a requirement that employees actually use the days they have.

Not just East Germany. If you dig enough, you will find mental health abuse in every country on earth, whether historical or ongoing. Of course in the USSR as you mentioned, also in China, the USA, and elsewhere.

“Abusive” in this case can mean abusive treatments, or treatments against things that are not diseases, such as homosexuality, promiscuity, or unfavorable political ideas.

In the US, read about the published papers of the mkultra project, and look as well into the ongoing existence of centers such as Elan school (now closed) and the Judge Rottenberg center (still in practice).

In my experience, having friends go through mental crises, the modern US system is hard enough to navigate even when one desperately needs and wants care. Try finding yourself a therapist when in such a depression that you can hardly get out of bed, much less search out who takes your insurance, has openings in their availability, and is a good match for your personality. Meanwhile true inpatient care seems reserved for either the fully disabled, or those who have already attempted suicide. Can you imagine if a profession like dentistry made care this difficult to access?

But for people who are either marginalized or truly mentally disabled, this is a harsh system that can make one suspicious, especially when the history of lobotomies, electroshocks, hydrotherapy, and other abuses are within living memory.

I’ve felt this way about twice in my life, and it’s when I had a really well crafted Jupyter notebook running in VSCode.

It’s definitely the kind of thing you want to pop open when boss is showing some new sponsors/customers around.

This really hit me hard once I had a kid.

The degree to which those small early lessons will stick in their mind, much less something that’s ingrained in their heads every single day.

I think I get it now - if kids are hearing this stuff day in and out from the moment they can talk - that they absolutely could be convinced that Trump or Putin or Xi are some kind of divinity. Even when they later learn otherwise, there will be some kernel of that propaganda remaining in their head.

Some people reach a phase where they’re really ready to question these things, but I met plenty of people in college for whom that dissonance was just too unexpected and painful. They simply retreated into what they already identified with.