alaxhn
"The tech industry was doing poorly and I was faced with a layoff so I took whatever job I could get. While I didn't agree with the actions of the administration I felt like I could be a force for good in an otherwise turbulent environment"
As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa. The reputation hit of disreputable employers is dramatically overblown.
To be honest you can also get through issues with the resume screening process you can generally just change the wording and section headers a bit in order to avoid a quick filter out.
I'm pretty much a closet conservative working for big tech so I've had a lot of practice with this sort of stuff :D
Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.
Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
I don't want a dictatorship. I probably want largely the same things as you. To be safe in and outside of my home. Affordable and quality food healthcare and education. The rule of law.
Fundamentally all people have most things in common with each other but our differences can seem magnified and exaggerated especially with things like social media and the 24 hour news hype cycle.
So far Trump's administration has seemed to address perceived grievances that they have with the university administration. In the comment you replied to I outlined some positive reforms that I would personally like to see as someone who cares deeply about education and wants to see a successful system. Trump's administration hasn't and probably won't make progress in this direction. In other words they are saying "don't do X" and aren't saying "Do Y". I approve of their progress on the former and think they are unlikely to make progress on the latter.
> I'm taking an apolitical position We've been over this already.
Just because you do not wish that your position is political doesn't make it so.
> Your job is to help all those people succeed at math.
Yes. Well our job is at least to help some of them succeed at math because they won't all succeed statistically https://umbc.edu/stories/math-awareness-needed-to-raise-math... "For instance, in 2022, only 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math – down from 39% in 2019.". We disagree on how best to accomplish this but metrics (e.g. PISA, NAEP or any way we have come up to evaluate this) indicate we have not achieved any incremental progress in decades even though cost per pupil has dramatically increased (e.g. student teacher ratio has declined dramatically). So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
> Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations
Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
> There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers that an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"?
It's likely that many of your goals regarding language, cultural, and "disability" (I put this in quotes because some are real and other times people pretend to have a "disability" in order to turn in their homework late) cannot be met in a way that is acceptable to the right so you need to either drop these goals or accept that you are going to lose funding in support if you attempt to accomplish these goals.
"We" are asking you to drop things that "we" consider harmful. Initially "we" attempted to negotiate (https://president.columbia.edu/news/our-next-steps, https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...) but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples of what will happen if "your" side is unwilling to budge on "your" position regarding things like diversity letters in the hiring process in the hopes that the next tier of institutions has a change of heart or at least pretend to for a few years. You and I have a difference of opinion much like I might have a difference of opinion with a fundamentalist christian who wants to use taxpayer money to teach about creationism. I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements. Now that "we" are in power the onus is on educators to decide if this is the hill they want to die on. I still find it very sad that we couldn't reach a compromise that left American institutions in a strong position to be scientific leaders in their space but unfortunately the levers available to political leadership are crude and time is short (I would also argue that "my" leadership is headed up by a geriatric unintelligent narcissist who does a lot of damage when he lashes out but I guess that can't be helped right now).
I hope you have a great rest of your day - I'm done here but I do wish you all the best!
> people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students
I don't remotely understand how this is relevant to whether a particular instructor should be hired or not. If I need to learn math, then I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with. We can take a look at example diversity statements online https://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/_files/examples-submitted-... and we will notice people feel empowered to talk about their sexuality, race, gender etc but they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US" but if you swap words to a new value in the relevant categories i.e. "I am a Latinx queer woman from Mexico" this suddenly becomes relevant to the exercise. If changing the color, sexuality, gender, or place of origin for an applicant is relevant to the outcome then this seems like a discriminatory process (https://www.justice.gov/crt/nondiscrimination-basis-race-col...).
I do think it's perfectly ok for people to disagree with me here and I expect that if their representatives get in power we will see funding and priorities shift back towards more required diversity statements while also shifting to allow admissions processes to take into account things like race, sexuality, and gender etc which is just the reality of living in a democracy.
Likewise the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process and if your response is going to be "this is not up for discussion because it is not a political or ideological matter" well... they are going to disagree with you and if they are in charge might respond by cutting funding and support for your institution. That's just a reality of living in a democracy.
"If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power." I completely 100% disagree with this statement. My partner is an education at a University and remote learning had a huge negative impact on our schools and student outcomes. US academic achievement has been flat for decades despite spending and pupil rations going way up https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. Public schools in certain areas of the country are a complete failure for every student enrolled https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltim... (I choose an example of a left leaning area but obviously there are right leaning examples as well!)
Let me propose what I see as a couple of common sense reforms. Mandate the availability of pre-k nationwide starting at 4. Increase the school year from 180 days to 195 days by reducing the length of summer. If needed make this optional at first. Allow professors to fail students who have not learned the course material and make it illegal for the department to pressure professors to offer the students a way to pass the course.
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Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.
I think the question is which set of ideas are not ok (e.g. clearly "I want to commit violence" is not an ok idea) which set of ideas are a grey area ("I have attended a major event of a US designated terror organization such as a funeral of a leader from a a terror organization") and which set of ideas are ok ("I want to advocate for peacefully advocate for more bike lanes"). There are very strong party affiliations for what ideas are considered ok vs forbidden (e.g. trans rights in the sports world).
As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.
- Clear outperformance (in my judgment) by Canada / Europe as compared to the US (this would indicate policy failure on the part of the US to me) - Large scale war of some sort beyond the level of carnage we are witnessing in Ukraine
> To improve rust belt manufacturing, you would target competitors of industries in that area, not the whole global economy.
If you accept as a premise that the goal is to prevent offshoring our manufacturing base THEN you may also want to develop new industry and not just protect industries in that area. Moreover the goal is presumably not restricted to just that area it is an example of a specific region which was hard hit.
> We imposed a 32% tariff on Taiwan. Simultaneously, we are making it more expensive to manufacture here in the states. We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves, instead of strengthening ties w/ the world?
I don't immediately see how each of these statements relate to each other. I'll just reply to "We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves" by stating that we may want to compete with China on manufacturing output because of national security implications.
> For many countries, there is nothing to negotiate since we already have free trade agreements with them. We may import a lot of goods, but we export a lot of services, like many developed nations do.
The Tariff calculations have a differential rate for each country so it appears to have taken into account to some degree that we need more negotiation with certain relationships. I won't state that this was necessarily done well...
> With regard to raising revenue, think of the tradeoffs. If demand is elastic (given our trade deficit, it has to be!), this will be a tax on many, many American businesses and consumers. Its just moving the taxes from income tax to a consumption tax. That's a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans.
A consumption tax is a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans. I agree with you. It may be the case that this functions as a consumption tax on foreign labor which could increase the negotiating power of poorer/middle-class Americans.
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I really do not mean to defend the specific actions of the sudden global Tariffs. I am attempting to explain how I believe some on the right may see things in case people find this interesting. The furthest I will go is to state that I think the fears about a new great depression may be somewhat overblown.
(1) The comparative advantage of a country is that they do not have strict environmental standards and becomes the low cost leader in a "dirty" industry.
(2) An individual in the rich country loses their job to an individual in the poor country who produces exactly the same level of output at lower cost and the individual in the rich country ends up having to subside on government benefits
For both of these examples, shareholders profit financially from the outsourcing (and so I would argue it is likely happen) even as the world in example 1 or the rich country in example 2 loses out.
- I voted for Trump but do not consider myself a strong supporter (I saw it much more of a vote for who you dislike less sort of situation)
- I don't understand and am not supportive of the approach on Tariffs
- I am an active participate in what most here would consider right wing politics although I don't find myself aligning on every topic (e.g. I am supportive of the abortion laws in California) so I tend to hear a lot of the chatter "from the other side"
- When manufacturing moved out of the US to low cost of living countries, this hurt towns which relied on manufacturing (e.g. the rust belt). Cost is the primary reason why manufacturing moved. Raising the cost on overseas manufacturing may make domestic manufacturing cost competitive. Although economics tells us this will still be a net loss there may be externalities which are not priced into the trade (e.g. the towns falling apart and people becoming despondent / drug addicted might not be factored into corporate profit models)
- Being overly dependent on China or more broadly "foreign powers" for manufacturing represents a national security risk.
- In theory this could be posturing to provide an opening for the US to negotiate more favorable trade agreements. For example Israel, Vietnam, and Argentina have made some statements about reducing trade barriers on US companies.
- In theory it could be beneficial to shift the revenue model of the US towards raising revenue with tariffs while reducing interest rates and other tax rates (e.g. "no taxes on overtime and tips")Some government software and processes are not pleasant to deal with such as the process of obtaining a green card so I don't really fault people for being skeptical of the existing systems without evidence of their robustness.
It's interesting to me why this perspective is popular when applied a certain administration but not popular when applied to other things such as
* Poverty \ * Drug Addiction \ * Homelessness \ * Obesity \ * Undocumented Border Crossings
Companies will settle if the costs of going to trail outweigh the benefits like I said in my original comment. To clarify, the cost benefit analysis includes more than just money as things like reputation and precedent are important too. The reason for settling is sometimes because they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trail (meaning low potential benefit) but not always and this is not even the most common reason to settle. In the article being cited facebook is agreeing "to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight". This is an individual settlement and not a group settlement. Targeting ads at a single user has very low benefits for Facebook (tens to hundreds of dollars) which will not even pay for a single hour of a lawyer's time. It would be absurd for Facebook to counter sue Ms. O'Carrol and counter suits in general are quite rare.
To provide some approximate numbers:
- ~90% of cases settle
- ~1% of cases involve a counter suit
- Facebook legal cost for in house counsel appears to be in the range of $250 per hour equivalent
- Facebook average annual revenue per user in Europe is about $25
Meta and most companies will settle lawsuits when they believe the rewards of continuing the lawsuit outweigh the cost of settling the lawsuit. There is no connection to whether they disagree or agree with the claim of the lawsuit.
As I think you are hinting at, the US is in the process of cancelling many contracts deemed no longer in the interest of the country under a new administration. Contracts can represent a form of obligation similar to debt and there are many companies who will not sign contracts with the government due to the complications involved (or who will request very favorable terms). Unfortunately, there is not really a good rating mechanism (at least that I am aware of) for rating entities that is risky to enter into a contractional relationship with - this stuff is often passed around via word of mouth.
Elon musk has received ~$18 billion over a decade. In exchange he gave us the first broad market electric cars and reusable rockets which were lucrative outside of the public sector. While I have broad concerns about the money going in the pockets of the wealthy from government spending, this doesn't strike me as bad ROI. Just looking at the dollars and cents, the income/capital gains taxes paid by tesla/spacex workers+management over the last decade is almost certainly a substantially larger figure (I think Elon himself paid $11 billion in one year?) so the net "funding" of this "investment" from the government is a negative figure and this contributed to the balance sheet rather than subtracted from it.
While I may agree with you about certain problems we are seeing (e.g. wealth inequality), I think we disagree on the causes and solutions. I primarily blame government and would cite specifics such as 1 a slow down in housing construction that I blame on regulatory change (leading to large price gains which benefit established home owners) and 2 spending on bureaucracy that I view as generally going to well off people 3 skyrocketing cost of education which I generally blame on universities being enabled by incentives often from the government to act like a business and not a public good 4 increased cost of medical care which I generally view as a collection of market failings also caused by (in my view) bad policy (e.g. doctors are protected from immigrants taking their jobs due to the medical credentials not often being able to cross borders) 5 worse demographics (aging population requires more medical care and produces fewer workers). I believe you generally blame billionaires or the "very rich" who you feel are capturing a large share of the economy and I would be curious for you to lay out your case for this.
"You have to be extremely out of touch with reality and its consequences for real people if you think this is the right way to do it. The only people cool with this are prepubescents and immature adults who seem to think that life is like a video game full of NPCs and not of people who live actual meaningful lives like themselves."
I will acknowledge that often cuts are painful, chaotic, and impact real people. The nature of management for large organizations and in this case an enforced tight timeline due to political terms in my view make this inevitable and I am hopeful that there are long term positive outcomes that make the short term pain worthwhile. I don't think this makes me a prepubescent or immature adult and I don't view you or other people in life as an NPC. To be honest I view you as someone who is likely smart living a full life and who can probably be convinced with facts/figures along with a rational argument (although I will acknowledge that this takes time and happens over years / decades and not in a short conversation :D).
If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.
To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...
The sudden nature of these consequences without many real world impacts beforehand also happens at an individual level. It might be tempting to take on credit card debt at the moment and there might not be any real world consequences to running up the balance but if painful measures are not taken to address the situation before a moment of crisis (i.e. inability to service the debt), you are in for a world of pain.