Yep, checks are used a lot by charities and churches, plus migrant workers are often paid by checks, and there’s market nearby that will cash all of their checks for them, and that market is a customer of my bank, so when they bring in their deposit, it’s a stack of checks at least 6 inches tall every day. And that’s honestly not even half of the checks we see a day.
Man, that’s some hyperbole. Ain’t nobody believing you haven’t seen a check in 40 years. It’s not for every day use but there’s always something that needs a check for some dumb reason, like setting up direct deposit or paying the emergency plumber. Stuff comes up.
Believe it, bub. In backwater places like Brazil people have moved on from credit and debit cards to fully digital systems like Pix. Meanwhile my town in Tennessee will take only cash or cheque for taxes.
Other than getting paid for a few labor jobs out of high school, I haven’t seen a cheque used ever, so I can believe it. Banks give sheets with direct deposit info, and any tradespeople I’ve hired have taken various other forms of payment.
For reference, this is in Canada though, so not the default.
Man, that’s some hyperbole. Ain’t nobody believing you haven’t seen a check in 40 years.
Late 80s is only 35 years ago, but other than that believe it. It’s true. In 1991 Maestro launched and everyone moved over to debit card payments.
The cheques only really disappeared in 2002 when the bank guarantees stopped, but I haven’t seen one in the wild since I was a little little lad. I have never ever ever had a checkbook in my own name.
It’s not for every day use but there’s always something that needs a check for some dumb reason, like setting up direct deposit or paying the emergency plumber.
My last emergency plumber was a kid in his twenties. I don’t think he even knows what a check is. But he definitely knows what a debit card is, and has a portable terminal.
That checks out, once you check that task off I’ll send your check, just make sure you check it before depositing it.
EDIT: ChatGPT did a better job at this than I did.
In a game of chess, the king was in check, so the player paused to check his phone, where he received a check for his latest freelance project, after which he decided to check off his to-do list and check his coat at the restaurant’s check-in counter.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who’s retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
There is genuine money to be made in learning the “dead languages” of the IT world. If you’re the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
I’ve seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it’s not worth it.
Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you’ll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that’s a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
I’d honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it’s still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
I’ve been meaning to learn Fortran in part because because of the whole “big bucks for being willing to maintain old software” thing, but mostly because I’d like to work on the sorts of scientific computing software that was (and still often is) written in Fortran.
Yeah man I’ll take plain old php and java any time of day, I can still get enough money from it to pay my lifestyle. And at 5pm I can close my laptop and play vidya with no worries.
COBOL isn’t too terrible, it has its gotchas (like sizing variables for inputs (in which you don’t need space for the datas headers and will break stuff if you do)) but mostly it’s an old language designed to be easy to use
New staff in my workplace first using COBOL (with other build experience) learn it to the point they’re productive in a week or two
This is one of those fantasies people have. You might as well hope to win the lottery.
Imagine being the only person who can play a extremely custom instrument. Unless someone absolutely needs you, you’ll be sitting and hoping to get a job. Worse, a company is more likely to hire some people to rebuild it rather than hope to find this unicorn who can do this.
Source: Been in the industry for 15yrs. I’m one of those guys you hire to migrate old software to a web app. And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.
COBOL case is bit different. You can’t just modernize millions of lines of code that is functionally unique without service disruption - and services that uses COBOL that large often tends to be very sensitive.
The fact that COBOL as a language is both atrocity to either use or read didn’t help that either.
Been in the industry for 10 years and i deeply disagree with you. I work in COBOL.
Not that migrations don’t happen, but in my experience, many, many companies kick that can down the road each year, because migrating huge and critical services is extremely costly, time-consuming and risky. In the short term, just paying people to maintain the dinosaurs is waaaay cheaper.
Also, it’s extremely easy to get a job in it ( my company now hires people with no IT background and tries to teach them cobol from scratch ), because even though it’s a niche, the demand for it still outweighs the supply of people willing to learn it.
Will it die out eventually? Maybe. I’ve been hearing about its death for a decade, so i’ve become skeptical about it in the short-term.
Edit : would also like to point out that it is indeed a fantasy that it pays truckloads of money. Does it happen? Sometimes, but you need to be really good and experienced at it.
I’d rather not dox myself, but i can tell you i’m in eastern europe working for a western european bank. COBOL is still heavily used in the banking and insurance sectors, by companies that started using it 50 years ago.
If you do manage to learn the ropes, the salary does tend to be above average for a mid-level programmer.
There is some logic to running older stuff, a lot of it is a closed system and it’s harder for threats to target it. Banks are a big one that still run a ton of our financial infrastructure on COBOL.
Hospitals also run on a ton of abandon ware, same with machine shops. Ultrasound machines that are still running 95 because for the hospital to upgrade to windows 7 or 10 is millions for a few machines. So you just airgap the systems for security.
Unfortunately, they still have parts that fail, the good news is most of its being replaced with new old stock, so not technically new stuff. I know a good number of companies that have stock piles of basically museum level hardware, to replace failing parts.
If the horizon of the universe is like the horizon of a blackhole then the energy loss through Hawking radiation through the converstion e=mc^2 simply implies that mass is lost from the universe over time. If we extrapolate out this energy/mass loss over time for every mass in the universe then the distance between the surfaces of each grow as a relative change with the exponentially decreasing mass over time, directly correlating the dark phenomena we observe as a geometric quantum event.
Seeing the edit, yes, but that is also wrong. As the first line of the link says, radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation and not microwaves
It is possible to use microwaves for treating cancer (see www.bmc.org/content/microwave-ablation), but the two aforementioned methods do not use them (with the caveat that both “chemotherapy” and “radiation therapy” are very broad categories)
It’s even worse when you bake sourdough. I’ve been cultivating that yeast colony, caring for it, loving it. It thinks I care, but it’s only being prepared for slaughter.
Also, you kill only half of them each time. For the sourdough starter, it’s like a Thanos-snap coin-flip everytime you bake bread. The bacteria in your current sourdough starter come from a long line of statistically lucky ancestors.
I suppose that’s kind of true for all of us, though…
Missing: any sort of physicist who will tell them both that the forward model says that the sun won’t explode for a few billion years, and so far that model hasn’t been wrong.
Too small to supernova and black hole, yes. But large enough to have a decent boom. Probably at least red giant, then a nova (explosion casting off outer layers) leaving a white dwarf remnant.
If I’m around by then, my model of medical science progress is wrong ;)
E: I’m wrong. That casting off of the outer gas envelope is not a nova. It’s just a death throe of some sort.
Minor correction: in a few billion years our sun will expand into its red giant death phase.
Also: our star can't go nova by our understanding of astrophysics. If it actually can, then we might need to throw out a lot of astrophysics, including predictions on when our star will expand.
Also also: the odds of the dice giving double 6s is MUCH higher than our sun going nova at any point in time even if it could go nova and was overdue.
Ah, gotcha. I tried learning Bayesian probability once and failed utterly. One of the only classes I just barely passed (stat was the other). My brain just barely computes it.
(1) the sun went nova (vanishingly small chance) and machine rolled truth (prob 35/36) – the joint probability of this (the product) is near zero
OR
(2) sun didn’t go nova (prob of basically one) and machine rolled lie (prob 1/36) – joint prob near 1/36
Think of joint probability as the total likelihood. It is much more likely we are in scenario 2 because the total likelihood of that event (just under 1/36) is astronomically higher than the alternative (near zero)
I’m skipping stuff but hopefully my words make clear what they math doesn’t always
I asked my physics professor if it was even worth learning latex if I don’t want to pursue physics and he told me not to because it would consume so much time. On the bright side, the documents would look very well formated.
I rather prefer latex over word, but I’m a programmer and I like fiddling with things to make it work properly. It’s not just for scientific papers, any pdf file can benefit from latex even if it’s only for the proffessional look.
I don’t fully agree with Latex being time consuming. It may be, at the beginning, but after then it avoids you a lot of annoyances that come with WYSIWYG editors.
Physics professor here. I tell my students that i will give them unlimited help and assistance if they want to learn latex. I find that most students prefer latex once they get the hang of it.
I’m incredibly biased though. There is rarely a situation that I would prefer to use word over latex.
Yeah there’s definitely a learning curve. A little coding experience makes the task easier. I typically give my students a template that they put their own text into that includes a peer-reviewed journal format and an example equation, table, and figure.
There’s still the “not so short introduction to latex” out there that helped me learn the basics back in the day.
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