ke88y
I’m pretty damn sure you’re wrong about Europe on a relative basis. The percentages in most of Europe are MUCH higher. Eg Germany is closer to 80% than 50% gov funded.
(Earmarked gifts to an endowment with some level of direction/advice vs a foundation is a real cultural and tax policy difference, but the end effect is what matters and that’s not as simple as you’re suggesting.)
And not to be too flippant, but the question about the world outside of America applies also to the world outside the West ;)
Part of the meta-game of academia is that feedback timelines are long enough that you can play the “wrong” meta-game and still come out ahead. If you don’t want a professorship — or are willing to settle for a super cushy “professor of practice” as an early retirement non-profit thing to keep ya out of the house — then a PhD can be a good place to do hard tech pre-seed work.
Pedantic and profoundly wrong but always in some ridiculous lens always wiggling enough to never let truth get on the way of Being Smart And Right. Peak .edu and the reason it’s so damn hard to justify science spending to the actually hard working tax payers patronizing this stuff.
This won’t get you a Stanford professorship. That’s something you can cry about from your mountain chalet or beachfront vacation home.
That said, even if we accept the general premise of your post, which I don’t, you’re still drawing the wrong conclusion.
To wit: citing something does not imply that the cited thing is “foundational” to the work from which it is cited. One can cite work for any number of reasons. (Admittedly, citation behavior did change with the rise of bibliomaniacs, but of course that further bolsters my overall point, so I’m not sure the daylight on this point does you any favors.)
You identified some counter-examples that miss the point because they’re unrepresentative, unresponsive, and irrelevant.
Unrepresentative because we are discussing literature in aggregate and this behavior is common.
Unresponsive because, in aggregate, inessential academic writing is systematically over-cited in academic writing and essential inputs of other types are systematically under-cited in academic writing. This is true of all academic writing; it’s a bias of the medium and of the medium’s standard bearers.
And irrelevant because there is nothing a priori or essentially nefarious about the above, on its own!
Academics beat ideas and lines of inquiry deep into the ground. Crucially, they do so by pumping out ridiculous quantities of PDFs. For every little variation there is a paper. Outside of academia this isn’t done. Eg: you cite Package X, great! But do you cite the 17 different PRs most relevant to your work, many of which are at least a papers worth or work? No. That’s culturally off. But for the corresponding thinly sliced papers that’s what you have to do.
Conclusion: academic work dominates the citation list because of publication and citation culture, not because academic work dominates the set of enabling contributions.
I do trust that you genuinely do experience the world as you describe here, but I think you’re a fish in water and that Upton Sinclair quote about paychecks comes to mind.
It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.
The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.
As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.
Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists
And even then usually only because it’s expected, not because it was actually useful. (And no, it’s not because academics are more ethical about acknowledging the shoulders they stand on. Academics rarely cite the chip designs, software libraries, lab instruments, instruction documents, training materials, etc. What “counts” as something that deserves a citation mostly boils down to “did you publish it in a venue controlled by other academics”, not “how important was this to enabling your contributions?”)
The fortunate thing about the private sector is that you don’t have to spend years of your life shaping opinion on citation ethics, because people are using your stuff instead of half-interestedly saying that they may’ve skimmed the intro to a pdf describing your stuff. And if people use your stuff and get value from it you can usually extract some of the value that creates. Which means you don’t need vanity metrics to convince some government agency to throw you some coin.
In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product.
In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academic journals/conferences, which generally do a piss poor job of providing incentives for either doing good work or communicating well about that work.
Any time I hire a junior PhD I have to UNDO a ton of academic writing/provlem-solving propaganda and reteach both common sense and normal writing style.
The harsh truth is that private sector scientists tend to do better science and disseminate it in more useful and lasting ways. They are paid better for it.
The academic scientists who are up to private sector standards tend to have diverse funding mechanisms and therefore rely far less heavily on prestige publication for their labs revenue stream. But most professors must publish papers because they are unable to do good work and/or communicate the value of that work to anyone other than their inner circle of friends (who sit on the grant review panels or take stints at federal agencies).
> Leave Pittsburgh once in awhile.
1. These sorts of presumptive comments are presumptive and serve no purpose in the conversation. Believe it or not, you aren't the only person on the internet with your background.
2. Western PA is an enormous region, and it's not just Allegheny County that is doing well relative to West Virginia.
3. Having some base of economic activity outside of coal is still better than nothing, even if resulting employment is concentrated in metro areas.
Why subsidize job training with valuable shareholder capital when you can have universities teach the fundamentals AND teach real world skills?! /s
But given that they are also cutting Mining and Ag programs, I'm not sure what exactly they expect the future of the stat's economy to look like.
Seems desolate in any case.
This is the end-point of WV mentality.
The problem is that, in practice, tiny majors use of very few resources for non-service courses. As a result, the savings from cutting the major are much lower than expected and realizing those savings requires gutting the departments service capacity as well.
Plus you lose all your half decent faculty — and especially the ones who aren’t already senile and/or retired in place.
Usually, if you really do need the service courses, it is better to keep the major but adjust compensation and resource allocation for under-subscribed upper division courses. See math departments as a case study.
More to your point though: who in their right mind wants tenure after doing a useful PhD in math?
Math phds can be extremely remunerative if you focus on studying useful topics, avoid abstract nonsense, pick up domain knowledge, and stay the heck away from low paying teaching jobs like “professor” and “instructor”. Finance, biotech, and tech all pay good math phds comparable to or better than big tech pays mediocre CS phds. Mid six to low seven.
It’s a surprisingly low bar, since most math phds are incredibly romantic about choice of research area.
WV could have taken the path of western PA. Not perfect, still some deep scars, but a flourishing new economy that can help pay for long term recovery and provided youth with some sort of future.
WV chose victimhood over adaptation, for decades, and here we are. The article isn’t just about cutting humanities departments. WV is so thoroughly hollowed out that it can’t even afford to keep its flagship Computer Science department fully staffed. It’ll be left out of the great onshoring because there is not sufficient human capital or infrastructure.
It’s the state government version of a private equity “strip mine the assets and wind it down” operation.
Constant victimhood is a self fulfilling prophecy. Opportunities were there. WV was too busy being obstinate to take them.
West Virginia’s issue — as a state - is a deep seated cultural unwillingness to adapt or change. The decline of goal is the trigger, not the problem.
Interestingly, this remains true. If you want to be a CS professor at a small college, your industry experience is probably more desirable than a PhD.
Just don't expect to be paid more than a 10th of what you make now, and certainly don't expect the respect of your bespangled peers ;-)
The OP definitely asked for the deliveries to stop, and even had a confrontation with the delivery driver. Seems pretty clear that he's expressed his preference that they not enter his property.
For normal people docs with equivalent or more info are definitely provided to tons of intermediaries and available to the gov.
I think this "move the capitol" thing is pushed by people who think "then DC would be accountable to small town America because it would be in small town America!"
Which, LOL, no. That's not how it'd work at all. That small town would lose self rule, be developed into a mid-sized city, become completely divorced from its previous character, and nothing else would change other than building a big ass city in Small Town, IL for no particularly discernible reason.
Which sets aside the fact that Small Town America already has an absurdly disproportionate amount of representation per human inhabitant.
That doesn't make much sense to me. The firms that rent office space on K Street don't have power because of the location of their office... it's the other way around: K Street real estate is rented out by those firms because of the street's proximity to power.
Move the power center and the firms currently renting office space on K Street, DC, USA will instead rent out space on Blah Street, Middlepoint, USA.
More-over, I don't know if moving the capital of the country to the median point as defined in this article makes any sense either. It's one of those "literally everyone loses" propositions because "median" isn't "modal". If anything, it could make sense for the capital to be located at the midpoint by travel time.
But it's all wildly impractical if you stop and think about. The amount of infrastructure alone would require decades of work. And states would have to surrender sovereignty over a big chunk of their (settled!) land. Etc.
My parents own an epic amount of mostly useless junk. But they also have an enormous house with a storage room in their basement the size of my entire condo. Actually, bigger. The useless stuff is all in the storage room. It is neatly organized into bins. None of it is gross or unclean, but most of it is of questionable utility. The storage room has no other possible use; their home is already way bigger than what they need. There's no reason to keep all the crap, but there's also no good reason to throw it out before they die either (they'll pay pros to schlep it all out either way.)
If I kept that amount of crap in my condo it would be straight up hoarding, since there wouldn't be space in my condo to move around! But for them, it's roughly proportional to the one closet in my condo that has old cords, some left over paint, sentimental books from grad school that don't fit on my shelf, my wife's wedding dress, etc.
If I kept that amount of crap in my cabin it would be a that weird mid-point where it's not quite hoarding but also taking up a slightly unreasonable amount of space.
Based on decades of sampling, Manhattan "fucking gross throw your old shit away" very much is midwestern "totally normal amount of stuff in basement storage". The price of storage does matter and we're talking about a range from $1/sqft to $2,000/sqft. Storing extra wrapping paper you got on sale at $2k/sqft is insane. Storing them at $1/sqft saves you a 20 minute drive to the store during holidays for the next few years.
Affordable should mean affordable, not taxpayer-funded.
TBH? I don't think anonymously owning land should be allowed, full stop. If you want police and courts to recognize your arbitrary stat-granted right over a piece of dirt, then own up to what you own.
The problem isn't losing half the value of your property. The problem is that after 20 years, moving on isn't as easy as it sounds. More importantly, selling at any price is way more difficult that it sounds. If you don't GTFO early enough, the muni has lost a ton of revenue without right-sizing so the remaining owners on are on the hook for huge property taxes just to service the debt (further suppressing demand at literally any price).
And there are all sorts of reasons you might not GTFO in time. Just two more years until the first kid is done with HS. And now just two more years for the next kid; still seems unfair to move them. And so on. And then just 2 more years until you've saved up enough for that dream place in the mountains. And then it's too late.
So you are stuck with this albatross that you literally cannot sell. Property values, even at $1, are totally hypothetical. There is no buy side of the market. At all. Enjoy your property taxes, or figuring out how to abandon the property.
It's the suburban muni equivalent of a condo unit that is attractively priced but won't ever move because a contingent of geriatric owners have managed to run up $2k/mo HOA fees by unwittingly turning the condo association into an assisted living facility (but not making it far enough to actually be an assisted living facility).