They have very very very high wages already for PhD students though?
True, their rent costs are also very very very high but based on the current exchange rates the $500 the tag line example person has left over, after rent each month, is comparable to the amount left after rent, food, etc when doing a PhD in the UK 6 years ago in a not London location.
It seems that the PhD wages are very high already to compensate for the very high rent costs.
If the anecdotal evidence given by people in the comments here, concerning TAing and moonlighting at other nearby research institutes (for ~$10K !) are both true and common then what is the problem?
During my PhD I received a £1380/month tax-free stipend from EPSRC, and rented a single room in a shared house for £300/month. So after rent, I had £1080 - about $1400 - left over to live on.
To me, $500/month sounds like very little. I wasn't trying to pay for a child either!
Went to school in the UK so not entirely the same experience as our american cousins, but absolutely nothing like you describe.
The main points are:
* any class that wasn't segregated on ability would usually have at least one individual who didn't want to be there. They would typically disrupt the class. jump up and swear, push over desks, attack other students or the teacher, spit in other students faces, throw chairs at the windows or doors, etc.
* Every time you changed class you had to walk in the corridor. A packed corridor filled with students. If you pass the student or students who don't like you how can you stop one of them sucker punching you? you can't. Tripping you up and kicking you one after the other before quickly moving along to their class? that too, etc.
* Going to the toilet also presented problems. I am male so used urinals, but what if that gang of students who don't like you see you go into the bathroom? if you are using a urinal they can punch you in the back of the head, or grab you and throw you to the ground and put the boot in before you can even react. Taking a dump in a cubicle? be prepared to have bottles of piss, bricks, etc thrown over the top at you, get the door kicked in and punched, door kicked in and a bottle of piss sprayed in your face, etc.
* Walking home from school? hope a gang of people who don't like you don't beat you up and steal your bag/money/shoes ( this one didn't happen to me, but repeatedly to a friend).
The complaints that you have outlined are absolutely minor and tame.
Bullying in school is a problem for the same reason it is in adult life, that is, being punched/kicked/ hit with a brick/ prevented from going to the bathroom without risk of physical assault in an environment that you have no control over can be distressing and harmful.
I did my own PhD thesis a couple years ago on donor atoms in silicon, specifically selenium, forming hydrogen and helium like systems that "could" have been useful for forming a qbit. tldr selenium has 2 more valence electrons than silicon so when it is substitutionally doped into silicon then you get a helium like system, which in some cases ends up hydrogen like when, presumably, imperfections either local or remote cause enough disruption to whisk away/capture one of the electrons, thus forming a hydrogen like system. I didn't investigate the cause of the different molecular like complexes that spring up when you dope silicon like this though, I only probed things with light and did calculations relating to that probing, I didn't do any modelling concerning the diffusion and behaviour of dopants which I kinda regret.
Then you can optically manipulate that remaining donor electron. It didn't really work cause it's hard and the lifetimes of the donor electron systems are not great (tens of ns to ~100ns for some of the systems).
It was then I realised that physics research is a dangerous thing to attempt if you can't stomach the constant uncertainty and risk about your own personal future, when you are found to be not good enough due to not publishing, so I abandoned academia so I could massively reduce that stress and constant anxiety and actually have a life.
So the tldr is that this is not bullshit at all, it is in-fact very interesting and a promising line of work. But it's not going to make anyone's career by itself, and without appropriate pumping of the importance of the work and sufficient mentoring no-one who works on it as a grad student has a future as a researcher.
So no, it's neither Nobel Prize material or total bullshit.
What original commenter is mentioning is "if this isn't bullshit, change the text so that you could push it for Nobel" or publish it in a place where you can find good recognition
True, their rent costs are also very very very high but based on the current exchange rates the $500 the tag line example person has left over, after rent each month, is comparable to the amount left after rent, food, etc when doing a PhD in the UK 6 years ago in a not London location.
It seems that the PhD wages are very high already to compensate for the very high rent costs.
If the anecdotal evidence given by people in the comments here, concerning TAing and moonlighting at other nearby research institutes (for ~$10K !) are both true and common then what is the problem?