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To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.

That's because you can't create permanent jobs from temporary funding. No individual researcher has the power to create a tenure-track position, because those positions are created by the university. In the case of state universities, tenure track positions come directly from the state budget. Over the last 40 years, states have uniformly decided that providing a college education is not the state's job. State allocations have not kept up with inflation or student body growth. Since 1980, universities have had to meet a 95% increase in student body growth in parallel with a 40% decline in state funding. They've done this by raising tuition and hiring non-tenure-track lecturers.

Research is amplifies that trend. Research grants are nominally to the university, but they will generally move with the principal investigator. Research grants actually take away from faculty's ability to teach classes, and the shortfall is made up by hiring temporary, non-tenure-track lecturers. So, now you have the state commitment to long-term faculty being bought out with short-term contracts.

If you want to increase full-time, tenure-track faculty growth, you need to get state taxpayers to commit to the socialistic principle of state-funded education, raise taxes, and hire faculty. Research contracts won't teach your children.

Except that the "throw away Western civilization" is only ever thrown out there by the "do nothing" crowd as a caricature of progressive proposals. That said, there is ample precedence for the concept of you break it you pay for it, so some wealth redistribution is going to be a factor in most reasonable strategies.

Anyway, the real problem as explained in this series of Nature articles (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html), is that the number of faculty positions has remained relatively constant in comparison to the vast increase in the number of PhDs awarded. As mentioned by another poster above, this system was created and nurtured by the people who got their faculty jobs in the 1970s and 1980s when they faced very little competition. To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.

Because of that, expectations in terms of published research and obtained funding have kept going up to a point where it is very difficult for young people to become independent. Senior established investigators have the better toys, they can take more risks, they have more money, they populate grant panels and can easily stifle competition and control a good part of the review process in top tier journals.

Conservatism is a gross oversimplification of conservatism. The partisanship of US politics has reduced both major factions to caricatures.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, the calm and well thought out response of a typical "Gater". They are ALL like this, read all their tweets, they have 14 year old brat mentalities, spoiled special snowflakes that don't get their way now because they grew up and have to go out in to the big bad world where evil women ask for better representation in a medium they enjoy. Pure lunacy that these childish adults even managed to gather a movement so large. Admittedly that was thanks to sites like Reddit and 4chan. Your entire post proved exactly the kind of people that are attacking gamergate, not actual men, actual men are decent people. . You people are just pathetic little women haters. You embarrass my sex and species and are only doing damage to men."

Wow, see how easy all those replacements were? That's what happens when you make such broad, generalizing statements. I don't at all agree with the parent post you responded to, but it seems that you have a vast, VAST misunderstanding of feminism and the people that this so called "GamerGate" are targeting. I may not -LIKE- Zoey Quinn (at all, even a little, kinda hate her), but what she did has as much to do with gaming journalism as Slashdot Beta has to do with good design.

Your generalizations and stereotypes really don't help your side, let's be honest here. As someone who's heard a LOT about Sarkeesian's supposed man-hate, after watching her videos I didn't find a single damn example (and don't you DARE point out the supposed "testosterone bad!" comment from the Lego video, it's been disproved time and time again.) You pander to people who hate the strawmen(strawwomen?) of "SJW"s, a caricature of actual people who, for the most part, don't care WHAT you do as long as you're not a total asshole about it. I defy you to point out a prominent member of the supposed "SJW" scene who's said something as inflammatory as you're suggesting- and post it with context, I dare you, I DOUBLE dare you.

What's so wrong with wanting more representation in video games? It'd be great to have more stories told from more perspectives, and to have a better balance of gender, race, sexuality, what have you in gaming. THAT is what people like Sarkeesian want- not the complete elimination of games how they are now, as some anti-"SJW"s try to attribute to them.

And meanwhile, they could think like actual capitalists and...

1. Invest in solar equipment themselves
2. Lease it to customers so that some dollar amount of their light bill is permapaid month by month
3. Make that dollar amount less than the value of the energy generated per equipment set
4. Set the lease terms so that an initial investment brings revenue while ensuring a ROI for the customer
5. Profit while profiting on profits

Growth, growth, growth. Energy company CEOs have become so set in their ways that they now caricature themselves as too corrupt and incompetent for their fiduciary duties. They would rather maximize their consumer-screwing potential than profits, and this is an absolute plague on more than one market today. These people need to be taught to make money on new formulas that involve more thought and insight than just being lazy and milking the unwashed masses.

Solar does not have to hurt utility companies. It could make them more profitable than ever before. Common sense says this can go two ways, in fact.

If they don't learn to think like they're businesses and they continue to try and prove how they're simply royalty who doesn't have to be a part of anything, then solar use will continue to climb, and their efforts to combat it will only forestall the inevitable: They will continue to hike rates until consumers either fall into the category of being off the grid or don't have service. Where will their profits be then?

These companies are so blinded by sheer entitlement and complacency that it's almost going to be humorous watching half of them fail for it. Or at least it would be if it didn't mean that many will inevitably end up without service.

A hippie in a diesel Volvo. You realize you are a walking caricature?

For some people, living much past 70 can be an extreme sport.

Seriously, I watched my dad go from a gifted engineer who stood 6' tall and could explain the detailed inner workings of almost anything built by humans at 70, to a shambling drooling barely able to function caricature of a "little old man" by age 75, without a stroke or anything any of a long list of doctors could to point to and say "this is where it went wrong". You reach a point where going out for breakfast is extreme. Fall risks, choking risks, it all adds up.

OTOH my grandmother is 98 and doing fine. Life is seriously unfair.

The bigger problem is that debate anymore devolves immediately to "choice" between false dichotomies, vacuous positions screamed between raving caricatures on the left to insane caricatures on the right.

I apologize for having carelessly left an impression that I disagreed. I actually identified with your points, and I was going off on a tangental rant. This being /., I'm so used to reading America haters on both sides of the Atlantic painting uninformed pictures of violent crime ridden America; and for the same reasons, the distortions inherent of ubiquitous press and entertainment media only capable of creating highly cartoonish caricatures of reality. The serious shame is what it's doing to our children, and thus future generations. When I was a kid, we could leave the house in the summer every morning, and not return until dinner, or even by dark, unless we got hungry and diverted home, or to a friend's home, for chow, sometime noonish. Now kids are prisoners of "play-dates" and hovering parents who are scared shitless by the sick perception that if they divert theirs eyes for a second, Johnny's going to be butt raped and murdered, no question. Why? Because in the statistically few tragic occasions when something, anything, sensational does happen anywhere in any small corner of the country or the world, it's splashed all over CNN, MSNBC or Fox every 15 minutes all day. Did shit happen in the 50's and 60's when I was growing up? Sure. But when it happened in Tallahassee, we didn't get to hear about it all day long in San Diego on 24 hour news networks for 5 freaking days running, with constant streams of "experts" reminding us constantly how we need to imprison our little darlings for their own protection. Life will suck for our grandkids.

That would be a good series finale. Whoever Sheldon mildly idolizes for their scientific prowess (I don't watch the show, looks like just another lame sitcom with some sciency term-dropping) shows up and acts like himself. Not like some lame jock-written caricature of scientifically minded individuals, but actually like a real person who has invested his skill and time into scientific research.

Oh, TFA is wrong in many ways. I was just objecting to the use of the term "modernism", which refers to a cultural and artistic period, not a single philosophy or ideology.

Hmmm, on second look, not a really good example of what I was saying. I can't quickly find a good source anywhere on modernist philosophy. There's of course this, but that's not the same; one could say modernist philosophy is a subset of modern philosophy. So I'm willing to concede the point by lack of time to dig up a good reference. Still, my assertion stands that TFA is one big strawman argument, and part of the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
HTH

"Modernism" is primarily a cultural and artistic movement. While a part of modernism is a response to science and technology, modernism does not embrace or endorse science, reason, or technology. No, whatever term the article was looking for, "modernism" wasn't it.

Dear Alva Noë, the word you're looking for is "modernism", or rather, a caricature thereof. You're basically railing against a strawman on whom you put the label "Spock". I'm a scientists and I'm surrounded by scientists and atheists, yet I know few people who fit your description. Admittedly, some of the folks here on /. come close, but /. is a bit of a freak show in that respect. Either way, it sounds like you're trying very hard to paint modernists, atheists and adherents of science as sticks-in-the mud, which would make you part of the problem.

A rather caricatured vision of religion, probably to suit his ends. As I implied, but will ask explicitly, find a real world case where religious people "put up with" abuse by those in power. The American colonies, for instance, are not examples.

You're absolutely right that its *members* are a diverse group of individuals... but the people who are actually providing 99.9% of the funds that allow them to make as much noise and get as far as they did are a dozen or two billionaire social darwinists who believe their wealth gives them the sovereign right to undo 225 years of liberal democracy in a shameless attempt to bring back the Gilded Age, if not outright feudalism. They might not openly exercise line-item vetoes over the agenda of the local Tea Party cells they finance... but the people who RUN the local orgs know damn well what's likely to get them more funding, and what's likely to get them a cold shoulder. They might privately disagree with a large part of the donors' agenda, but ultimately rationalize most of the doubt away. At least, until the day they accidentally see something they weren't supposed to, the cracks in the façade accumulate until they can't ignore them anymore, and finally conclude that they've been taken for a ride.

In college, I was just about the most diehard Republican you'd have ever met. I was LITERALLY drinking buddies with the guys who are now doing their best to turn the US into the kind of Third World country that would have made even J.P. Morgan blush and hang his head in shame. At one time, I had total religious faith in the infallibility of the all-holy Free Market, and it took more than a decade of seeing firsthand what happens when powerful companies and individuals are allowed to keep becoming more and more powerful without limit.

The Republicans and Democrats might *allow* plutocracy, but the practical outcome of Tea Party power would BE plutocracy. A country where Verizon would be allowed to merge unfettered with AT&T, outbid everyone for spectrum licenses they didn't need just to keep it out of their competitors' hands, and made bulk fiber progressively harder and more expensive to get until only THEY had all the backhaul they wanted. A country where two big airlines could merge, completely dominate air travel markets in half the country, then use their same dominance to rein in the REST of the country as the opportunity presented itself.

I'll be the first to say that the Democrats in the 70s and 80s were completely loony. In fact, they were about as loony as the most extreme third of the Republican Party (or what's left of it) today... or Republicans in the 1920s, for that matter. Back in college, I used to wonder how the Republicans could have possibly become almost irrelevant for much of the middle third of the 20th Century, especially compared to the loony 1960s & 1970s Democrats who looked almost like caricatures of bad taste in clothing (in contrast to the Republicans from the same era, who looked relatively normal). Then 2002 and 2008 happened, and made it unflinchingly obvious... the core of both the Republicans AND Democrats are at opposite loony ends of the spectrum, but at any given point in time, one of them drifts towards relative sanity. Like them or hate them, any alternative to a two-party system that has a shakeup every generation or two and has the mainstream voters drift back & forth between them would be worse.

The Democrats and Republicans might be shameless corporate whores, but even whores have limits and boundaries. Elected Tea Party officials are more like wealthy meth addicts who don't really care what happens around them as long as they're left alone to enjoy their drugs.

If McCarthy was right, it was mostly by accident. The caricature in "The Manchurian Candidate" isn't too far from the truth, except probably not booze-soaked enough.

McCarthy was basically several years late to the game, and was taking advantage of a crises that had already dissipated for his own political ends. There was widespread Communist infiltration of the US government in the 1930s and 1940s - but they were largely purged during the Truman administration once the government realized how bad the problem was.

It's not a caricature, it's a fact. I guess you're one of them, huh.