throwaway1982x's comments

I agree. It sounds very much like an employment relationship - the fact that you can't/don't feel able to choose your own projects is a big red flag here.

If this were a standard situation within Europe/the EU, I'm confident you would be entitled to claim the rights of employment, including e.g. paid holiday. It's possible that this right would extend to a Chinese employer, although I'm not sure.

If you are genuinely self-employed, you should also have the freedom to employ other people to cover your work.

Find your support network.

You know that you work well with other people, so find ways for other people to help you be accountable.

In fact - it isn't racism, according to the link you have provided.

"Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another."

Superiority is a key word here. The link actually ends up on the page for supremacism:

"Supremacism is an ideology which holds that a certain class of people is superior to others, and that they should dominate, control, and subjugate others, or are entitled to do so."

Also in bioinformatics: I worked up some statistics that turned out to cleanly and robustly contradict my supervisor's previous research.

I was told to reverse my conclusions - refused - and, hey, I no longer work in bioinformatics.

How much of this discount is for tracking, and how much is pure price discrimination?

The barrier of carrying a card allows the supermarket to give a discount to customers who are motivated by that, without needing to give the same discount to everyone.

The value of the tracking is probably irrelevant to how they set the price: it is not that loyalty card discounts have increased since tracking has become more valuable.

By my understanding, global income inequality is improving but global wealth inequality is worsening:

The conclusion that I draw is that while people broadly in this position might accurately perceive that they are now in a more comfortable short-term position than they were, they are at high risk in the medium-term and long-term.

I meant far more frequently than on Earth, and far more extreme.

"Life finds a way" - but if the temperature suddenly jumps 100 degrees because your goldilocks zone librated into the sun, then you ain't got much capacity to evolve protection from that.

I find that it completely unlikely that 'eyeball' planets would have a life-supporting zone.

Over geological time period, the zone is likely to suffer unpredictable and novel variability which is not conducive to developing life.

If it's an example and not a political manifesto, then perhaps it could be written without misogynist and heteronormative (i.e. political) undertones.

It's not an illustrative example because we have to assume an unrealistic misogynist take before it even starts to make sense.

I found this example exceptionally difficult to read and comprehend.

I recognise that this is known as the "Stable Marriage Problem", yet I still feel an aversion to marriage being defined as between a man and a woman (and further, than a man must propose to a woman). So, this scenario cranked my unhappiness up to 11. I was not able to follow it at all beyond "male unhappiness".

Surely it is possible to write this example in a way which recognises diversity of sexuality and does not need to play up to sexist stereotypes - employees looking for work and employers should work fine.

I've never understood this semantic point of statistics.

When used in English, the word "accept" literally means "fail to reject", and has no more implication than that. Do people making this point use a different definition of "accept"?