turkishgetup

America has never been a melting pot - more like a salad palette, with clear boundaries between constituent parts. Melting pot is but a nice-sounding rhetoric. Racial bias aside, people usually prefer to live closer to their own kind. For minorities, this is usually because of better access to their ethnic groceries and cultural engagements.

I do not disagree with general idea in your post - I would just change the first sentence to "The salad palette is what makes America strong."

Hi Mr. Schneiderman,

NY resident here. Thank you very much for your work. I'm proud to have you as our State AG.

In your view, do the fake comments delegitimize FCC's rule-making process, if the FCC does not delay the vote until after the investigation is over? And can the FCC's Net Neutrality decision (regardless of whether or not they vote to repeal NN) be challenged in the court, on the grounds that the integrity of its rule-making process has been seriously compromised?

Thanks!

This is an interesting idea. As far as I understand, many grantors such as NSF place strict limit on each categories (PI salary, student stipend, material, travel), and generally you cannot move extra $ from one category to another. I think your proposed method does look like stream-lining the accounting, though I do not have a strong opinion. From the grantors' perspective, they might prefer the first as the second reduces transparency on where $ goes?

> It looks like it leaves the grantors, universities, PIs, and graduate students in the same financial positions

Because the grantors, universities, PIs, and graduate students are not in the same decision-making positions. PIs and graduate students are absolutely powerless. Grantors may impose rules to give preference to projects from low-overhead institutions, but that's difficult to implement, as the grantors would mostly prefer high impact projects rather than seeking out which school is cheaper. The result would be just higher administrative overhead, and less $ for actual research.

I do realize that many commentators on HN believe that university research is a scam, does not create value, or that graduate students who choose to do a PhD are naively making irresponsible financial decisions, or that grant funding should be reduced in order to weed out the less-capable PIs and RAs/TAs. If I were to take on a perspective from this philosophy, then I would agree that zeroing out graduate tuition is good, as it disincentivizes people from considering a career in academia and imposes a self-limiting mechanism to the academic Ponzi scheme. Personally, I do not believe that defunding academic research is good for society---but restricting university administrative cost would do tremendous good to solve the educational cost problem.

> But from an outside perspective, the current rules look like a money laundering scheme.

> The "tax increase" would stop incentivizing universities to do these accounting tricks and declare tuiton as 0.

You cannot just ask the Universities to "declare" tuition as 0. It is not some money laundering scheme for the purpose of cooking tax books. The universities actually do get all that tuition $ from the funding bodies. The tuition is "waived" for PhD students, because it's paid for by the PI's research grant/funding agencies. This bill does not shift some already-existing tax burden from universities to students---it's creating new tax liabilities for the students.

You cannot just write laws to force Universities to zero out graduate tuition and forfeit all the revenue either, as the Universities would just hike up administrative overhead, cutting a bigger slice from the PI's research grants.

What really should have been done, for curbing student debt and stopping nonsensical measures like this one, is to restrict university administrative expansion, board member salary, campus expansion etc. Universities have expanded too much from their core functions of teaching and research, by adding out-reach programs and program administrative staff.

The reason is that U.S. Immigration laws only allocate 14% of annual quota to employment-based (EB) petition. The majority go to family-based (FB) petitions. Indian have a much higher EB/FB ratios, whereas Chinese have many more FB petitioners, e.g. cross-ethnicity marriages. Chinese also have one more eligible category than Indians---green card for asylees.

Ethnicities/nationalities like Mexicans have negligible skilled EB immigrants and have a much higher reliance on FB to immigrate a whole family to the U.S. (oftentimes derisively called out by Republicans as chain immigration), and thus they face longer FB backlog compared with Chinese FBs and Indian FBs. For example, as of today, the backlog for an Unmarried Child of an Mexican immigrant is 21 years, whereas that of Indians and Chinese are 7. (https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul...) The priority date for a skilled Mexican immigrant programmer, who would be filing for either EB2 or EB3, is current (no backlog).

Since the system is heavily family-oriented, EBs often found themselves in very awkward positions as either the scape-goat for America's economic problems or distractions among partisan fights. A lot of things do not make sense. For example, the spouse of an EB petitioner does not count as "family-based" but takes up one more EB slot, and their school-age children, despite not being employed for work, are counted as "employment-based" immigrants. In addition, to offset the number of green cards given out to Chinese nationals after the 1989 Tian'anmen Square Massacre, a number of greencards are deducted from Chinese EB quota. Just making small changes to these two issues can ompletely eliminate Chinese backlog and greatly shorten Indian backlog. However, the politicians couldn't care any less about sensible solutions. While Democrats typically only pay the lip service, Republicans' common tactic is to hide their anti-immigration attempt behind a big banner of pro-skilled immigrants. The Rs either will try to trade the EBs with zeroing out refugee quota or slashing FBs in half, for example. They may have a good point (U.S. admits more refugees than employment-based immigrants annually), but touching that hot-button issue will never get Democratic votes, and it beginning to increasingly look like Republicans' political show vote.

> If history is any indicator, in political systems this broken, other institutions collect power and either that power is sustained and relieves legal pressure or that power is revoked and the pressure builds until the system comes apart.

Just curious if you can give a good Western example for similar things happening in history?

I found striking parallels between the United States and China's Tang Dynasty. The Tang Dynasty was the most prosperous and influential era of ancient China, in terms of both culture and military. It was marked with culture fusion and immigrants from across the sino-sphere settled in its capital. During the early times of this dynasty, a meritocratic higher education admission system was first instituted to provide an avenue for upward mobility. Life was prosperous and Tang people were fat.

All of that started falling apart after 200 years of reign, and the late stage of the empire was dysfunctionalized by highly partisan power struggles between two fractions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niu–Li_factional_strife). The meritocracy also failed, as the rich could afford better education and examination preparation, and the examiners gave preference to the applicants from wealthy families. You can call it the Imperial Chinese Ivy League legacy. The power of the throne waned, and the emperors were stuck between or murdered by warlords and eunuchs.

Tang Dynasty lasted a total of 289 years. If the United States survives 2065, then it beats Tang’s record.

It occurs to me that many current issues can be abstracted as follows:

When corporations have become powerful monopolies (or regional monopolies) that trample on individual rights and captured regulators, should the citizens still respect the procedural correctness to its literal meaning? Or should we acknowledge that we have a flawed constitution, because while it checks the power of the government, the U.S. visionaries did not foresee the emergence of multinational corporations, structured in highly authoritarian ways, being able to influence public policy to great extent?

I believe we can agree that public goods are typically not as efficient as a _competitive_ private provider. But what if the market is not competitive at all? When ISPs/health insurers/hospital conglomerates essentially monopolizes different regions of the country, should the government step up and provide community broadband, single payer insurance or single provider healthcare? Or should we expect the government somehow being able to restore market competitiveness?