I’m a PhD student in India, working in a nano fabrication group. In my group, all my seniors and alumni ahead of me have gone into industry. That seems pretty normal for experimental STEM. But I don’t think that means the PhD was wasted, or that the system only matters if people stay in academia.
This is especially true in fields like nanofabrication and semiconductor fab.
So I don’t see "most PhDs leave academia" as the main problem. The damage does not show up immediately, but a few years later you have fewer people who know how to work on hard technical problems from first principles.
Context, since this is HN and anonymous comments are cheap: I’m a current PhD student at one of India’s top technical institutes, not a professor defending the system from above.
People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.
I've used dwm forever, switched to kde and realized i’d been maintaining my desktop more than using it. Drivers worked, screens behaved, no audio/mic hickups.