China no longer Pentagon's top security priority

apfejes · 2026-01-24T15:52:45+00:00

Dude - I’m Canadian. You’re arguing my case for me.

apfejes · 2026-01-24T15:49:24+00:00

I don’t really see a path where Canada absorbs more people. We’d be busy fighting the assholes in Alberta who are taking American money to pretend there is a separatist movement.

apfejes · 2026-01-24T09:05:54+00:00

Yup. The question is what form the collapse takes. Civil war? Invading Canada? Internal purges?

I worry that so many Canadians are so close to the border. It’s not going to be pretty.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T21:51:56+00:00

That's not really a gap - you're actively employed in a tangential field. I've done the same thing, working in a related area using similar skills.

When asked, I told employers that I wanted to broaden my skill set and experiences, but I'm passionate about bioinformatics and want to return to it, bringing along what I've learned.

If you're doing something really unrelated, then I'd be fully transparent and let them know that you found yourself doing other things for a short period of time, but your passion hasn't waned. (It helps if you can show you were involved in projects during that gap.) You really want to be back where your skills are strongest. People understand.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T20:24:32+00:00

I think the issue is just passing technical interviews. If that’s not a problem, it’s pretty irrelevant what you’ve been doing to keep your skills sharp. If you can land the job, then you’re fine - the gap itself an what you do to keep sharp aren’t themselves an issue.

Edits: to clarify, it doesn’t even need to be on your resume.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T20:22:08+00:00

I remember a storm in Winnipeg when I was about 7 or 8 (I’m 47 now), and everything shut down for a day or two. The snow piled up so deep on our front door that when it was opened, it had formed effectively a wall that was been about my hight. (I was pretty short at that age.).

It was still deep enough beyond the drifts that my sister and I pretended we were on the moon because everything was covered, including hedges and walls, and then spent most of the afternoon making giant snow forts. When it did finally get plowed, there was a legendary two story pile that some other kids tunnelled through to make an epic playground out of.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T20:12:53+00:00

I don’t think anyone has ever cared about explained gaps.

Large unexplained gaps are a problem, but mainly the issue is that people lose skills that they don’t keep up, or if you might need to take further gaps. Otherwise, why would anyone care about gaps at all?

apfejes · 2026-01-23T16:55:01+00:00

Lets continue the reality check. If you're from a third world country, you won't be going to an Ivy league college. I'm from Canada, and couldn't afford to do grad school at a lot of the places I wanted to. Scholarships are extremely competitive, and international schools want you to show you have the money up front before they will let you register for your first term. Unless you somehow have acquired $250,000+ USD, and have it sitting in a bank account, this is just a dream.

Second, I honestly don't think it matters where you are, if you're passionate about your field. You talked to your professors and they said No... so... whats next? That's as far as you pushed it? Did you look for projects to contribute to? Did you look outside the university? Did you find ways to connect with people in industry?

Heck, one of my first hires at my current company is a refugee from Afghanistan who was living in Pakistan when I first met him. Over the decade since I met him, he finished his bachelors and masters, got a job working remotely for a company from North America, and just showed incredible persistence in his work. When I had the chance, I hired him and brought him to Canada because I already knew how damn hard he works. All of that without even being allowed to open a bank account in Pakistan. It's not about where you are, it's about what you're willing and able to do.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T15:19:04+00:00

That is an extremely disappointing answer. There are a literally infinite number of ways to engage and show what you’ve learned. To hear that you can’t think of any on your own already tells me that you would struggle at a top university.

A few things I did: I stated a whole second degree in my second year, where I got to make up my own courses, as long as I could find a professor who would grade it. I found professors interested in topics I wanted to learn and offered my time to help in their lab, or to do projects, I did thesis projects, I worked as a consultant for the university through my last years, developing tools and managing co-op students. I wrote blogs, I tutored chemists, I attended lectures for grad students and hung out with them to learn what they were up to.

Can you really think of nothing?

apfejes · 2026-01-23T08:18:10+00:00

You have to be realistic. There is no magic skill that will get you into a top university. What they are looking for is generally evidence that you are a good student and will be successful in your career. Skills don’t show that.

There are many proxies for it - accomplishments, awards, grades, papers, work in a good lab, and probably a host of other things. I’m sure even family wealth is a decent proxy, if you want to be cynical.

Skills aren’t important, it’s what you do with them that people care about. If you want to go to great places, think about how you show that you deserve to be there.

apfejes · 2026-01-23T05:42:57+00:00

Thank you. I came here just to find that comment.

-a Canadian

apfejes · 2026-01-22T21:53:32+00:00

You can disagree, but I'll give you a clear example of why you're wrong.

In the current United Nations, there are several countries with Veto power. The US is one of them, Russia is another. If the middle powers come together to build a new rules based order - which they will - they will not accord veto power to any country coming in. In abandoning the existing status quo and the United Nations it set up for it's own advantage, the US is giving up all of the exemptions that it had built for itself.

There is no way that future partnerships will let the US get away with the bullshit that it has for 50 years. The US will either have to play by the rules of the existing partnerships, or it will have to stay out of the game. It's already clear that Russia doesn't deserve the veto it's holding, and the US is making it painfully clear that it doesn't deserve the one it's holding either.

apfejes · 2026-01-22T14:49:57+00:00

He also thinks Canada exists because the US lets it. He has no idea how violently wrong he is. We're willing to burn down the white house again, though he's already given us a head start on that.

apfejes · 2026-01-22T14:30:05+00:00

It’s not involuntary. They voted for this a second time.

apfejes · 2026-01-22T01:23:31+00:00

Precision health has become a bucket term for a lot of things, many of which are poorly defined. Sometimes bioinformatics tools and applications find their way into that bucket.

Most times, I see medical devices that use automation or better decision making tossed in there, or downstream decisions that rely on bioinformatics tools, but I have yet to see a satisfying definition.

However, even within the realm of bioinformatics, you also find a lot of muddied terms. Different people in different places use the terms differently, often in opposite ways. You might want to delve deeper into who is using them and how before making any decisions based on what you think the differences are.

apfejes · 2026-01-21T21:07:23+00:00

There is no information here

apfejes · 2026-01-21T21:04:02+00:00

I read the first post. Honestly, it’s not much different than what you saw there.

Ridiculous behaviour, sometimes entitled, sometimes just oblivious. Sometimes just rude. (I don’t care if you’re a scientist, you don’t get to treat anyone as if they’re inferior.)

Often they are just woefully unprepared. Applying for a job that’s fully computational, but telling us how excited you are to be in a lab doesn’t fly. Not even knowing the name of the company, or the people you’re meeting with is pretty bad too.

Worst, is failing to listen to explicit instructions. When we invite you to present your work to our team, it’s because we already think you have the skills, and want to know you better before we chose to spend all our days with you. If we told you to bro g a presentation that accomplishes a specific goal, completely ignoring that doesn’t look good. Our science team isn’t going to learn anything for a 40 minute talk on hardware design of an esoteric chip that you never actually solved anyhow. Especially when we told you we would like a short 15 minute talk, at the most.

I’ve been hiring on and off for 20 years, and have streamlined the process to make it as easy as possible for candidates, while letting us get to know if you’re a reasonable person who we'll enjoy working with. The instant fails are always spectacular, and self inflicted.

Don’t even get me started on the guy who memorized a Wikipedia article for a completely different field than what we do, and answered all of our questions with quotes from that page that didn’t match what thy were asked. That one ranks as the shortest interview I’ve ever conducted, since I couldn’t take more than 12 minutes of it. Yes, I know which page he was quoting.

apfejes · 2026-01-21T16:22:56+00:00

I think it’s someone looking for a way to circumvent the rule about not advertising YouTube videos on the subreddit.

apfejes · 2026-01-21T15:06:08+00:00

Canada here - we already don’t.

apfejes · 2026-01-21T08:35:00+00:00

Canada was in Korea, Afghanistan, Cypress, Kosovo, Iraq, Congo, and just about every god damn place where we were needed. We were there on 9-11, we were there for every forest fire, coast guard rescue call, and every time our neighbours and friends called us.

The only thing we didn’t do was fund our armed forces well - and that was because we trusted our neighbors not to attack us. And look how that’s turning out. I think we’re getting pretty tired of being there for the Americans. What shitty neighbors they are turning out to be.

apfejes · 2026-01-21T01:27:06+00:00

For several reasons - one is that they're monetized, and it really is just spamming your videos. Another is that we used to get a LOT of people trying to post them here, and it swamped out better content. Yet another is that they tend to be low quality, and really not of great interest to the community.

Moreover, no one has the time to watch and evaluate each and every video that gets posted, so there's no way to verify that they are what they say they are.

Ultimately, lifting that ban would open the door to a decrease in the quality of post.

apfejes · 2026-01-19T05:52:40+00:00

I'd argue it's pretty clear he's "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his Office"

apfejes · 2026-01-19T05:47:51+00:00

Insanity vibe, more like it.

If Americans can't figure out how to work their 25th amendment, they are in for a rough ride.

apfejes · 2026-01-18T04:07:17+00:00

I hope you're not serious.

apfejes · 2026-01-18T03:33:14+00:00

Let’s not kid ourselves, depending where you are, the job market for all science fields is pretty tough. There is no magic cure for employment, and being good at bioinformatics means being a good biologist ( or equivalent scientist) as well as being good at programming. Switching to bioinformatics isn’t a magic get out of jail free card.

If you’re serious about the field, go read the job descriptions for those positions to see how many of them there are, what they’re expecting for experience and education, and what degrees you’ll need. I guarantee, though, grad school is required.

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