I think the point about debt was moot because most science and engineering grad students don't have debt.
I don't know the stats, but I'd bet that a lot of science and engineering graduate students have debt from undergraduate loans... but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.
I know I don't and I don't know anyone who took out loans for STEM grad school.
Congratulations! You must not know anyone who went to a crappy school or did their graduate degree part-time!
According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), which is admittedly a bit out of date since the most recent stats are from 2008, roughly 75% of graduate students in engineering and science fields received some form of financial aid or grant. That does NOT mean they all received full rides with stipends -- it means that they might have received something between a few thousand dollars in tuition rebate up to a full ride.
So, approximately 25% of STEM graduate students in the U.S. in 2007-08 were paying FULL PRICE for tuition, with no stipend, no grants, and no financial aid. I'm wiling to bet that many more accumulate at least some debt during grad school, whether that's because they don't receive a complete tuition waiver, or they don't get a stipend, or they don't get a stipend that's enough to reasonably live on. Is it true that "most science and engineering grad students don't have debt"? Possibly. But there's a fairly large percentage who probably do -- at least 25%, and possibly 50% or higher.
Now, if you restrict that pool a bit, you might get to your group of friends. If you look at only full-time STEM graduate students (as opposed to the working dad trying to finish up his master's on the side), you get up to above 85% who receive some sort of funding.
If you restrict it only to full-time doctoral students in STEM fields, you get up to around 95%.
Let me try again: your point is NOT moot about grad school.
My point was that most of those people who are going to schools in STEM fields where they aren't getting aid are mostly going to crappy schools, and they'd probably be better off working rather than dumping money into a graduate degree they have to pay for. I do agree with you that most science and engineering grad students going to good schools don't have debt.
Umm, no -- from the be realistic about your life dept.
If you're independently wealthy and just want a Ph.D. in English lit. or art history, by all means, go for it and pay the $150k or whatever! If you're retired or have money to burn or whatever, I applaud your effort to become more educated. Seriously, I really do. I wish more people who had the means did such things with their money.
But as someone who actually has degrees in fields that are NOT considered "lucrative," because I deliberately decided to do something I enjoy, rather than earn the most money I could... I think I have plenty of experience to give advice here.
And being realistic is not the same as "only caring about money." If there were a higher demand for Ph.D.'s in the field you love, there would be more opportunities for "full rides" for graduate school in your field. If you aren't talented enough to get one of those, the chances that you will subsequently land a nice tenure-track job somewhere are very low.
I know people with Ivy League Ph.D.'s in the humanities who graduated half a decade ago, have a number of publications in top journals, have teaching experience, and they STILL can't find a decent tenure-track job. If you're paying $100k to get your crappy graduate degree from Upper Bucksnort University, you really think you have a chance?!?
I'm not trying to quash anyone's dreams, but you need to ask yourself what you're getting for that $100k+ investment, other than a boatload of debt.
By all means, keep the dream: go out and get a job, save up some cash, and then if when you're 35 or 40 or whatever, go back and get that Ph.D. with the money you saved -- if you still really want to. I admire people like that a great deal.
But shelling out for graduate school when it won't help you be able to do what you want to do anyway, and it could actually HURT your future by having crippling debt and branding you as "overcredentialed" as you try to find a realistic job.
P.S. Yes, I have a job in what I wanted to do, and no, I do not have any debt from graduate school. But I know a few people who do have ridiculous debt from graduate school, have no job or some crappy job that isn't anything that they ever wanted to do, and are struggling to get out of debt... there's no chance that they will ever get a decent academic job.
They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well,
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure the definition of "postdoc" includes some sort of pay. (I suppose there might be some strange European situations where you only get room and board, or something....) I've never heard of a postdoc in the humanities that didn't pay something. In fact, many postdocs in the humanities (Mellon fellows, etc.) pay as well as postdocs in the sciences, though they tend to be more competitive. Some humanities postdocs may pay very little, but if you're not getting paid anything, I don't think you have a postdoc. Maybe you have an "apprenticeship" or maybe you're a "volunteer," but I don't think even humanities programs tend to employ research fellows with no pay.
and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered,
True, though the top-tier humanities schools also cover tuition for graduate students, often with stipends as well.
I'm also reasonably certain that there are plenty of colleges in the U.S. that would gladly take your money to earn a master's degree in chemistry or something. Most Ph.D. programs in sciences and engineering have at least tuition waivers (if not stipends), but lots of schools -- even top-tier ones -- will allow a student to pay for a master's degree.
so the point about debt is moot.
Perhaps I read the GP wrong, but I think there is also a concern about graduate school debt and the effect it may have on subsequent choices. If you go into debt in graduate school, it puts even more pressure on you to be able to get a job immediately out of graduate school, so you can pay off loans. Often the most reasonable choice is a post-doc, which barely lets you earn enough to live on, particularly with debt to pay off. It's all a bad cycle.
Moral of the story still is: don't go into debt to go to graduate school, unless you're getting a credential (professional degree) or something that will raise your salary in a job or profession you're already in. If you're not talented enough to get into the graduate schools in your field that will give you a free ride, chances are you'll never be able to get a job in academia. And yes, that includes the humanities.
And yes, debt can happen to people in the sciences for graduate school, even with a tuition waiver. Grad school stipends are sometimes quite minimal (even smaller than postdoc pay), and I know a few people who had their way "paid" through graduate school in the sciences, but ended up coming out with tens of thousands of dollars in debt... either in loans or credit cards or whatever.
Are you referencing the 1920's, where the rich had no limits and they gobbled up everything and the entire economy tanked(1929, great depression, etc), so we put limits on them, taxed them, built infrastructure, and we had a really good run afterward?
Indeed, the economic regulations and taxation policies that curbed the disparity between poor and super-rich from the Depression until the Reagan era were a great example of John Rawls's "difference principle" from his Theory of Justice.
Effectively, the "difference principle" just states that economic inequalities are often good -- as long as they serve the purpose of not only making the rich richer, but also making lives of those at the bottom of the economic chain better.
There's no doubt that rewarding innovation, creativity, hard work, etc. leads people to invent things that will improve the plight of all people in society. Various technologies, infrastructure, etc. would not be possible unless we reward those who create and invest in it -- and that helps out the poorest people, as well as making rich people richer.
The problem comes when the increase of wealth among the richest fails to improve the life of the poor, or even begins to affect it in negative ways. One can argue that, after decades of increases in worker's rights and safety regulations, etc., a lot of those advances stalled in the 1910s and 1920s, as the richest continued to get richer.
These days, as we see the proliferation of high unemployment, along with permanent temp and part-time workers with no benefits in so many sectors, we're also experiencing a situation where the lowest paid workers' lives are getting harder as the richest are getting easier.
In John Rawls's theory, this is unjust. But it's also stupid economic policy, because oppressing the poor doesn't allow them to work as efficiently, and the rich will gradually experience slower gains. If concentrating huge amounts of money among the superrich while keeping most people as poor peasants actually worked, Europe would never have moved out of feudal society in the middle ages. Instead, the rise of middle class, economically mobile folks who innovated to make everyone's lives better has led to many centuries of improvements for society as a whole.
How about a law that says movie stars can only make 100 times what the lowest wage guy on the movie set makes? Perhaps recording artists should only make some multiple of what some guy in the studio does? Maybe authors can only make some multiple of what the editors at their publishing houses make?
Does anyone really believe laws like that that would lead to net improvements in those areas, or for society in general?
Sure. Why not?
I think such laws would be a stupid way of trying to go about things, even if we were trying to limit income or something.
But is your argument seriously implying that paying an actor $10 million for a movie instead of $30 million is going to affect the quality of the film? Or doing the same thing for a singer or for an author?
HA!!
Look -- there is something to be said for performance pay, up to a point. Actors and singers and writers and other artists obviously can have trouble making good art if they're struggling to survive and working three jobs to keep food on the table. So, sure -- I'm all for paying all of these people who are earning next to nothing a lot more for their contributions to society.
However, for every celebrity artist or singer or writer who brings in millions of dollars of revenue, there are hundreds -- perhaps even thousands -- of artists, singers, and writers in the U.S. who have the same basic ability levels (if not better). They just haven't been touched by the magic fame fairy: none of their YouTube videos have become an internet meme, no random producer or publisher has offered to "make them famous," etc.
If an artist is making enough money to live relatively well -- paying them more is not going to actually improve the art produced by them.
The only thing these enormous salaries do is magnify the "lottery effect" of public fads and whims, as well as create a culture of celebrity for people who like to follow the "lifestyles of the rich and famous."
If you seriously think that paying a Hollywood actor $20 million instead of $500,000 for a movie is going to get you art that's 40 times better -- I don't know what to say. Numerous independent films -- often staring "big name" actors working for fractions of their normal salaries -- say otherwise.
So yeah, I think your proposals are an idiotic way of going about things. But if we're really trying to improve the quality of the art being produced, I think paying a higher percentage to all the other people involved in artistic projects might not be a bad idea... rather than just supporting a few people in their "lifestyle of the rich and famous" (which has nothing to do with better art).
Paging Harrison Bergeron.
What the heck are you talking about? "Harrison Bergeron" is a story about a society that limited people's ability to use their natural skills. Talented people not only weren't rewarded for their skills -- they were actively inhibited from being able to use those skills to benefit society.
However, the present argument is very different. Is Johnny Depp actually going to make a movie that's so much better from an artistic standpoint if we pay him yet another $10 or $20 million on top of his already enormous salary?? But what if we gave out hundreds of bonuses for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars EACH to people in the crew who were responsible for all sorts of other aspects that make the movie great? That would actually be encouraging hundreds of people to use their natural skills to make better art, rather than inflate the salary of one person.
Again, I think your idea as proposed is a little ridiculous. But actually I think it would have a BETTER chance of improving art than rewarding rich people with even more money.
Trying to make everyone equal is stupid -- that's the point of Harrison Bergeron. Spreading money around effectively to result in the best quality final product, on the ot
It should be easy enough for someone here to harvest phonebook or other records from 70 years ago, refresh and randomize birth dates, and begin to flood the identity theft market with fake personalities and random government identity records.
I get what you're saying here, and perhaps it could have some benefits.
For years I've promoted "camouflage" rather than invisibility. I now think the reason it has not taken off (disappearance of AntiPhorm?) is that it's equally a threat to Google, Bing, and advertising-based search engines. We can be less careful of our "identity needles" if we construct bigger "digital haystacks".
I'm less clear about how your proposed ideas work in practice when I read your link.
I understand how it might serve to hide and distort data about your searching and browsing habits if your computer randomly searched and browsed for other things in the background. But it has some pitfalls.
For one, I would never consider using such a system unless it had definitely solved the "child porn problem." What happens if your computer goes surfing on some "bad" sites in the background, and naughty stuff ends up on your computer? I'd really love to hear try to defend yourself when law enforcement comes knocking -- "But it wasn't me! My computer was surfing for kiddie porn!"
And while that may be the worst problem, there are other places on the internet that could potentially get you in trouble if you frequent them too much. That's always the problem with the "if everyone has drunken photos on Facebook, nobody will care" arguments. Yes, maybe that will eventually be true in few decades, but for now, people who want to use such things against you won't care about what other people do. Someone who wants to "get you" or maybe just find a way to throw you out of the resume pile for job applications will only care about the bad stuff that they can find. Whether it's representative of you or not, it won't matter. It's just like cops and the thousands of random laws on the books -- chances are that you're committing some breach of the law right now in some obscure statute. Having too many laws doesn't obscure those: it makes them all the more problematic because any one of them might be held against you at some point. Similarly, if your data is "camoflaged" well enough on your hard drive, law enforcement will probably claim that any of that mess might belong to you... including any weird, naughty, or potentially illegal places your "computer" may have decided to visit randomly.
Now, I suppose you might say that you have some sort of "key file" somewhere that shows your legitimate personal search history. First, I think that you'd be hard-pressed to explain that to law enforcement, but even if you could, it introduces a significant vulnerability in your system. Anyone with access to that file knows your real search history, making your system useless. You might as well just use an encrypted drive or directory for your searches, with that sort of failure point.
Finally, your solution sounds possible if you just want to keep companies from tracking random browsing habits, but I'm not really sure what that has to do with avoiding identity theft. It's not like your computer will randomly log into fake bank accounts in the background or something. If someone's going to steal personal data that's critical to identity theft, they're going to be looking for your access to particular sorts of sites (banks, retailers, etc.), and you won't have "fake access" to those sites to disguise your real transactions.
So how exactly do you "camouflage" any of your legitimate significant financial transactions: the ones that any ID theft person might actually b
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
I quite agree with you. However, there's a subtle irony to including "business" majors here.
A century ago, there really were no "business majors" in college. If you went to college, but you were a rich kid who hoped to work in your father's business someday or whatever, you might be a history major or an English lit major, or maybe even something that sounds more exotic today, like classics or art history. If you were inclined toward the sciences, you might even concentrate in biology or chemistry, while getting your overall "liberal arts" perspective.
Nowadays, many universities see the largest number of undergraduates majoring in "business." At some schools, nearly half or more undergraduates are primarily instructed in "business," rather than one out of many disciplines that was traditionally part of the "liberal arts" perspective in college.
I'm not arguing that we should get rid of business majors or reinstitute some old-school liberal arts curriculum. But, it's very clear that the modern "business major" has actually done more than just about any other discipline in reducing the number and variety of "specialities and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints" that you might encounter among college-educated people.
The sheer dominance of the business major actually has tended to reduce the very thing that the parent poster says we should value.
People say duller knives are dangerous, but my experience suggests the opposite. When my knife set was new, I cut myself badly with them on two or three occasions. Nearly took the end of a finger off once. Now that the knives are a little duller they're safer.
I agree, but I'd qualify this a bit. Very sharp knives are dangerous. Very dull knives are also dangerous. If you're not careful when cutting, I agree that it's best to have something in the middle.
Very dull knives are dangerous in unpredictable ways. You have to use excess force to make them cut, and at times that may just slide off the food rather than cut into it. I can't tell you how many times I've been at someone else's house with a set of terribly dull knives, and I'm asked to slice an onion or something, and the knife just keeps sliding off the skin, rather than cutting into it. I have to exert a lot more force to pierce through the skin, so when the knife slides off, it also hits the cutting board with a bang. I've certainly nicked myself a few times with dull blades just that way.
That's just not a safe way to cut food -- excess force and unpredictable knife motion.
On the other hand, very sharp knives are dangerous is very predictable ways. If you keep your fingers out of the way while chopping, you can always depend on your knife to work like a steady machine. Yeah, if you're not careful you could easily slice into your finger or even slice the tip off. I've sliced myself a couple times with sharp knives, and I have to admit that it's a bit scary, because at least once or twice I didn't even notice it until I saw the blood. Unlike with a dull knife, a sharp knife slicing into a finger is clean and almost painless. A dull knife will leave an awful jagged cut that could take a long time to heal; even a deeper gash from a sharp knife seems to heal very quickly.
Personally, with my own knives, I like to err on the side of predictablity, and therefore I keep them relatively sharp. But I'm not crazy about it -- when I first sharpen them, they are quite sharp. But I don't bother to touch them up until I really start sensing resistance in cutting food.
In sum, both dull and sharp knives can be dangerous. But dull knives can be dangerous even if you're trying to be careful, so I try to avoid them.
That metal stick you see people rubbing knives on? That's a stropper, not a sharpener.
As someone else already said, no. The "metal stick" is used to hone. Honing is something you do to straighten the edge before cutting, since a fine edge will gradually begin to bend and lean in places if not honed.
Stropping is generally done with leather (think of an old-style barber sharpening a straight-edge razor). The stropping step similarly straightens the edge, but the material (leather or sometimes other cloth) also polishes the edge slightly, effectively removing a very small amount of burrs and cleaning up some microserrations on the edge.
Stropping a knife does nothing once the edge is gone. It has to be re-sharpened first.
That's true -- if the knife is dull, stropping won't do much. On the other hand, the "metal stick" most people own is a grooved steel, rather than a smooth steel. A smooth steel hones only. A grooved steel will tear microserrations into the edge of the blade, making it temporarily seem somewhat sharp. Unfortunately, it will also cause the edge to degrade faster, requiring more heavy work with the grooved steel to tear up the edge again.
To my mind, grooved steels are rather stupid devices, but lots of people use them. They actually can temporarily "revive" some cutting power, but in a destructive sort of way. Assuming your knife isn't completely dull, smacking it around with a grooved steel may make it seem a little more usable for a while anyway....
It's not just the summary, but also TFA itself that is misleading then:
[The original Modernist Cuisine] is also one of the most expensive cooking encyclopedias, the original six volume version retailing for $500, with the two-volume that followed after that selling for $115. Now, Nathan and his team have transformed their huge food encyclopedia into an iPhone/iPad app.
I don't know about you, but when I read that, I assumed the app was based on the "huge" original version or even BOTH versions, probably edited in some way to make it work as an app.
But the appstore link makes it clear that you're paying for the modified "home" version. So even if the book is COMPLETELY available in the app, you're paying $80 for a book that costs about $120.
Among the top features that the Modernist Cuisine app comes with are the high-resolutions pictures and the ability to search within the app's own information which will also fetch extra data from Wikipedia and other web services.
Wow, an app that can search its own information! And use that cool web resources like Wikipedia!
As someone who admired the photography from the original book, though, the high-res photography is awesome.
Unfortunately, that's about all the book was good for, at least unless you're some professional chef with a large budget and a bunch of fancy equipment. I find it hilarious that TFA makes it sound like a regular cooking and recipe app:
the recipe cards dynamically adjust the measure of ingredients you'll need to yield a given number of servings, then add these items to a shopping list.
Have people even looked at the book? The exotic ingredients used in many recipes aren't exactly the sort of things you can find at your typical supermarket. Even if you have the centrifuge and other fancy equipment needed to prepare some things, you're going to have to special order a lot of ingredients... not just pack your iPhone in your purse and head off to the grocery store.
The hype for this book was huge, with people claiming that it revolutionize the way we would cook and introduce a whole new "scientific" approach to cooking. That was complete nonsense -- it's more about fancy technology and fancy ingredients, with lots of fun pictures. If you like $600 coffee-table books, by all means, get a copy... or maybe get the photos for a steal in an $80 iPad app.
I know I'm a dissenting voice on this book, but all the blather about using "science" in cooking really bothered me. I'm actually the scientific type of cook -- I have many digital thermometers, scales, a pH meter, and many other precision devices, along with a "lab notebook" (journal) of my kitchen "experiments."
But this book is more about presenting pretentious culinary "culture" that uses lots of technology as if it were "science." That's not science. It's just somebody's wacky cooking vision. I'm not saying the food is bad, but claiming that their approach is "better" is rarely backed up by any data... therefore, it's hardly "scientific."
Anyhow, I could go on about this for some time, and already have here. But from my experience with this book, I'm a little hesitant about recommending the $80 app, unless you just like paying that much for a lot of pretty pictures.
So we are to believe that "helping people" led to the fall of Rome?
Umm, no. Did I say anything about the "fall of Rome"? No. I said "Go read about the fall of the Roman Republic." My post had nothing to do with the Roman Empire as ruled over by a dictator, which it basically was from the time of Juilius Caesar onwards (the last of the reformers I listed -- please note all of them are from about 150 - 50 BCE).
Those Calligula orgies in the blood of killed statesmen -- that's some kind of Progressive socialism?
Caligula lived from 12 - 41 CE, and wasn't emperor until 37 CE, almost a century after the Roman Republic effectively ended. Please re-read my post, and then go read a history book. I was not talking about the decline of military dictatorships (which would have little to do with the U.S. or the TSA today), but with the fall of the Roman REPUBLIC.
The reliance on a military conquest system and not on educating people to create value was an example of a militaristic system -- not navel gazing hippies.
Who said anything about "navel gazing hippies"? I talked about Progressives, though perhaps I would have been more accurate to say "populists." Most of the actions that led to a more centralized federal government with greater powers happened long before "hippies" came along.
The Roman empire lasted quite a while in human history terms. They fell not because of good ideas to help people -- they fell because of Tyrants and a populace that wanted to support an empire of plunder rather than sharing their good ideas with the subjugated nations.
Again, I said NOTHING about the Roman empire. I'm talking about the days of the Roman Republic, i.e., what the U.S. was modeled on by the Founders -- they just broke away from a tyrant, so why would they model themselves after a dictatorship??
In the Roman Republic, there were no tyrants -- anyone suspected of coming close to acting like a king or dictator (excepting temporary dictatorial appointments in times of severe crisis) was often exiled or even outright killed. The populace didn't want to support an empire of plunder, because that didn't come about until Rome had a standing army, which didn't happen until those progressive reformers (Marius, in this case) decided that they could solve military problems AND social problems (poor people without land) with professional soldiers... rather than the older system, where farmer citizens were enlisted and mostly wanted to return to their farms after the wars were over. Under the new system with a standing army, the soldiers fought not to protect their homeland, but to achieve wealth abroad -- since they were not landowners, but rather poor people to begin with -- and then to settle down into new land that was available to them through conquest.
I'm not saying that the Roman Republic was perfect. But a lot of stuff had to break down in that system before it turned into the Empire you're talking about. And a lot of bad stuff came about through attempts to "help the poor" while also having the effect of consolidating power.
Are you just trying to attach blame to Progressives on random historical events?
Umm, no. I was just trying to draw parallels to a gradual infringement of rights in the U.S. by looking at a similar historical evolution, which was also precipitated by a parade of "reformers," most of whom had very good intentions.
These aren't wannabe tyrants. They legitimately believe their ideas would make life better.
You may want to take a history lesson at some point. Go read about the fall of the Roman Republic and how it gradually morphed into a dictatorship. Almost every step along the way was a guy trying to "make things better for the common man," and many if not most of them actually had noble intentions. Take a look at the sequence, from Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius, Marius, Sulla, and Cinna all the way to Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar, most of them were "progressive" reformers, trying to help the downcast and improve the plight of people in Rome in general.
Plato knew this too, and placed democracy as just one step away from a dictatorship in his classification of governments. The quest to help people can easily turn to a quest for power (since the downtrodden tend to give away any power they have to someone who will given them anything)... and pretty soon you find yourself with a tyrant or at least a "noble, well-meaning" dictatorship at first.
All through a sequence of people with good intentions and ideas to "make the world better."
So was Hitler. Seriously -- this is one place it might actually be appropriate to bring him up, along with just about every other wacko dictator in history. Almost all of them started from a place where they legitimately believed their ideas would make life better.
"Tyrants" don't have to be "wannabe." They just happen when somebody's "good ideas" turn out to be really bad for lots of people.
And like all people, when they do something they don't believe in, they rationalize it. They convince themselves that it is for the best. You do this too. We all do.
Yeah, the issue is that you need to draw the line somewhere. There has to be some action you can't rationalize just to make your vision for the world come true. Unfortunately, I seriously think that most people who have the initiative to get very far up the ladder in government usually are the people who don't have that "line," or at least it's so malleable depending on circumstances that they'll do whatever to maintain their position or power or ability to try out their "good ideas" for the world.
So, no, I don't and cannot rationalize the way "rights" have been rapidly redefined in the U.S. in recent years. Most of our public officials are clearly even embarrassed themselves by what they're doing, since they bury their actions in secret documents and clandestine actions or try to hide things in piles of legislation.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to erode rights, and it doesn't take a "wannabe tyrant" to end up with a really, really bad government. It just takes a series of gradual shifts, and people doing what they can to -- as you put it -- "spread their good ideas to more people."
The danger is when people like you fail to see that a sequence of such bad trends can accumulate into something really bad, without necessarily a grand conspiracy of any sort.
No, it's not. Don't be stupid. There's no grand conspiracy out to get you.
Hmm... can you still say that with a straight face after the Edward Snowden stuff?
Look, I'm NOT a conspiracy theorist. I think the 9/11 "truthers" and the "birthers" and whoever else are mostly lunatics.
But when I first started hearing about all the crap that was loaded into the Patriot Act, it was pretty scary. And little-by-little, over the years, more and more crap about SECRET government power grabs has come out. After all the stuff with Snowden, etc., can you seriously go around calling people "stupid" who suggest that the government is gradually increasing its power grab into our rights?
I agree with you that the TSA is security theatre, and Americans wanted something that made them feel safer about flying. But that doesn't explain SECRET initiatives in the past decade or so created by the government that are intent on gradually eroding the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments (among others).
If these "rights overrides" were supposed to make us all feel better about how the government is protecting us, why the heck aren't they made public knowledge?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that there is some secret group of government officials planning to take away our rights piece-by-piece. It's nothing so organized and calculated.
Instead, politicians are generally interested in two things: (1) getting re-elected, (2) having personal power.
Politicians are probably just as scared as many Americans are about having another terrorist attack -- at 9/11, it swung in the way of the incumbent administration, which convinced the People that its bungled attempts to be aware of the terrorists should be forgotten. Instead -- "Hey, look over there -- bad guy in Iraq! He must have some bad stuff. Let's go attack them!" Of course, there's oil interests and all sorts of other power/money crap tied up in that, but let's not get into that now.
The point is: the next time something really bad happens, the public could turn against incumbents. So, all the secret crap is a massive attempt at CYA. Hopefully lots of drones attacking apparent "terrorist civilians," the NSA spying on EVERYONE, etc. will be doing something... and if not, at least it's probably paying a lot of government cronies through contracts and such, who probably can help at election time. Even if they don't manage to prevent an attack, they could trot out all the stuff they did do.
And along the way, the government gradually ratchets up the power they're taking and consolidating, which doesn't generally make any government officials unhappy.
It's not a "grand conspiracy." But the power grabs are deliberate and often kept secret, as they erode our rights. So even if it's not an organized attempt to take away our rights, effectively it does condition us to gradually accept more "flexibility" about our rights (as the GP argued)... something which can be helpful at times for people who like to be in power.
And contrary to the ravings of the conspiracy theorists, this IS a democracy. The people get what they want, for better or worse.
Yeah, sort of. Any psychologist would tell you that people often tend to make bad choices for themselves. They may think they "want" something, but they really don't -- nevertheless, they keep making stupid choices.
Hence, Congress has had approval ratings in the toilet for almost as long as anyone can remember (generally excepting wartime, after 9/11, and such, when one has to be "patriotic" and support our Congressmen!). How is it possible that Congress can consistently have approval ratings in the 10-25% range (and even lower), yet incumbents generally keep getting reelected?
All it takes is a little stump speachifying and a little "bacon" to bring home to the district/state, and people say, "Yeah, let's keep this guy!"
At a constant height, body fat is added to the cross-section. I guess that's part of the rationale for the ballpark guess that is BMI.
Except the "cross-section" has height too. A 6'8" man with a giant beer belly compared to a 5'0" man with a giant beer belly not only adds cross-sectional area, but also a larger "height" over the stomach area where the excess weight is distributed. It's not like short men have a rounded belly, but taller men have a giant bulging rubber tire around the waist and flat upper abs! The bulge is roughly the same shape in 3-dimensions, excepting of course extreme cases (dwarfism, etc.).
Is there a better obesity metric that is as convenient to measure as BMI?
Sure -- how about using height cubed instead of height squared? Or, more likely, the best exponent probably falls between 2 and 3, since you're somewhat right that mass doesn't quite increase cubically when height does. Maybe it's 2.7 or maybe it's 2.3, and I'm sure epidemiological studies could easily come up with the best figure to correlate to bodyfat. And have two separate scales for men and women, just like doctors do for actual bodyfat measurements.
It still won't take into account things like muscle mass vs. fat and body type, but at least it doesn't have a built-in dimensional problem that skews diagnosis whenever you get more than a few inches off of average.
Aside from improving the BMI formula with a simple exponent change, they could also just use another simple measurement. Lots and lots of recentstudies have shown that even taking a waist measurement (or a waist-to-hip ratio) is more accurate at predicting disease than the idiotic BMI formula.
I mean, how screwed up is that? If a formula that can be used with a simple tape measure -- like "if your waist is more than X inches, you're at higher risk," regardless of height, weight, or whatever -- is significantly better than some more complex formula involving squaring numbers and division and accurate scales, why the heck are we still using BMI?!?
And you are fooling yourself if you think that different people don't have widely different abilities to digest various foods. In fact, you are fooling yourself if you think that different people's bodies don't behave differently with regard to what gets burned vs. what gets stored with the calories they do digest.
You're right. However, the effects you mention are just not that significant. If you were talking about a factor of 2 or something, that might be significant. But no study has EVER shown something of that magnitude: where somebody has steady weight or slight gains at calorie input X, but lost weight by switching foods and eating 2X calories. It's simply impossible.
Except for people with severe metabolic disorders, the effect of different foods is probably on the order of +/- 10% or so in terms of calorie extraction from diet depending on food type. For extreme diets, it might be a little more, but even if it varied by 20%, most people don't keep accurate enough weight and calorie intake records (along with constant physical activity levels) to see such a difference. Thus, calorie counts really are about the best first-order approximation to determine what will happen to your weight that we have.
Now, this says nothing about whether a particular diet will make you feel full or be easier to adhere to etc. Different types of diets may give different psychological results which may make it harder or easier to lose (or gain) weight. But a number of comparative studies have not shown significant deviations in weight loss for constant calorie deficits on different diets. What you say is true, but the effect is simply not that big. The effect may seem bigger than it is because of different feelings of satiety for different foods, and because people tend to under/overestimate calorie content of foods based on those feelings, rather than actual calorie content.
Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
That's because MPG is still related to a physical metric. You can see this better if you think of gallons per mile, whose units are (as you note) an area. Yes -- it would actually be an area precisely equivalent to a cross section of a long thin tube of gasoline stretched out to cover the distance your car goes on that amount of gas. MPG is just the reciprocal of that area. Just because you can't figure out how the units are physically meaningful doesn't mean that they don't actually have a physical representation or correlation to the measurement.
Once you multiply the mass by gravity to get weight, you end up with F / L^2, or pressure units. Assuming the length and width of your feet are proportional to the rest of your body, BMI is proportional to the pressure between the ground and your feet.
Absolutely right. Which means BMI might be a good measure of potential for diseases and disorders highly correlated with excess downward "pressure" within the body -- joint problems in the legs, back problems, foot issues, perhaps some circulation issues, etc.
But it's not used for that generally: instead, it's compared to how much bodyfat one has to determine things like "obesity." Except obesity is usually correlated with a three-dimensional addition of fat onto the body frame, not a two-dimensional one. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the formula will overestimate adiposity (fatness) for tall people, while underestimating it for short people.
My theory has been that the ONLY reason this formula ever got any attention at all is because that very defect makes it applicable for both average men and average women. Women naturally tend to have slightly higher bodyfat than men, and they also are shorter on average. That means that the formula will give similar results in predicting adiposity for women and men of average height. But it will be TERRIBLE for predicting it correctly for men who are short and as tall as the average woman, or women who are as tall or taller than the average man.
Non-Academic Administrators include people like me. I'm a librarian.
Yes, I know what the phrase means, and I didn't mean to imply anything bad about all administrative (or "non-academic") positions -- AT ALL. I'm all for libraries and librarians. Apparently, if this blog is to be believed, the issue at this particular school is that there's also a significant amount of jobs going to friends of existing administrators going on in administrative hiring. I have no idea whether these claims are true, but the implication of the blog is that unnecessary jobs are being "created" and sometimes unqualified people are getting them.
This is NOT an indictment of all administrative staff at all institutions, let alone those who provide important services to students.
On the other hand, the reality of budgets at many schools is that administrative costs are rising at alarming rates (along with costs for new buildings and facilities, etc.), while academic budgets are static or going down, with more and more adjunct faculty hired at levels below minimum wage just to cover basic teaching needs.
These are general trends, and this blog seems to claim that one university has some particularly problematic stuff going on. Again, I have no idea how true it is, but that's the subject of this thread.
That "Non-Academic" phrase gets thrown around a lot and frequently includes people like guidance counselors who DO have an impact on student success.
Yep. That's great. SOME "non-academic" growth is certainly necessary at many universities to provide various kinds of student services, whether that's a career counselor or just an extra person at the registrar's office to facilitate student access to records.
The issue is the rate of growth relative to academic areas, making these administrative costs a significant driver of increasing tuition rates, as discussed in manynewsstoriesinthepastfewyears. In many cases, these "administrative" staff have increased anywhere from 5 to 10 TIMES the rate at which faculty and academic staff have increased.
I'm all for providing student services, but if all of these guidance counselors and librarians, etc. are necessary for student success, what had colleges been doing before these giant increases in administrative hiring in the past decade? How could they possibly have functioned before with so few administrators?
I'm not at all saying that administration is somehow "bad" -- it's just that the growth seems disproportionate to other areas, and I'm certainly not the only person to have commented on that trend in the past few years.
Well, it never really worked in the U.S. You can read about the various attempts at prison reform in the U.S. over the centuries here.
Basically, from the late 1700s through at least much of the 1800s, the U.S. had a number of trends in prison structure and style that were intended to "reform" or "rehabilitate" inmates, rather than just to punish them. We can see this in the names of institutions and departments that predate the modern trend toward euphemisms: "reformatory" (where you were "reformed), "penitentiary" (where you learn penitence and experience personal guilt for what you did), "Department of Corrections" or "correctional facilities" (where your deviant behavior or defects are corrected), etc.
Basically, all of this was a reaction to the idea of public punishments -- often fairly horrific -- that tended to be the norm in the 1700s and earlier.
However, all of the attempts at prison reform tended to go in other extremes, which often weren't effective either -- and sometimes made inmates worse. For example, the early "penitentiary" system in U.S. was based on the idea that prisoners would live in complete isolation, only interacting with guards when masked. Guards would never talk to them, and even in some cases would wear cloth on their shoes so prisoners would never even be aware of their presence. The idea was supposedly that the prisoner in complete isolation would be forced to contemplate his crimes (without any other contact with anything else), and thereby gradually realize the error of his ways.
Of course, putting human beings in complete isolation for years often tends to drive them to forms of insanity. So, this system often failed.
There was a parade of other types of reforms, all generally well-meaning, and attempting to put an end to corporal punishment. But the reality was that they often made prisoners suffer severe psychological damage in other ways, and in many cases the guards would still beat and abused them anyway....
Eventually, you also had the segregation of "insane" criminals from the rest, which led to further attempts at "curing" those who had "mental defects," in extreme cases resulting in surgeries and other craziness.
So, I'm not really sure about what the GP is talking about, except that there was a general trend toward (supposedly) non-violent punishment beginning soon after the American Revolution in the U.S. And a lot of reformers wanted to find ways to "fix" prisoners, rather than just punishing them.
In practice, I'm not sure any of those systems ever really worked well. But the ideas were influential in other countries.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
I'm also an external observer to all of this, but I think if you had read further, you might see the point of all of these seeming "petty" details.
Basically, it sounds like a blog aimed at a huge increase in non-academic administration personnel. Apparently, in the past 4 years or so, the number of non-academic administrators and staff has risen by almost 50%, from 76 people to 112 people, while the rest of the university (including academics, etc.) has remained relatively stable. Salaries and numbers of upper-level administrators apparently also have risen significantly.
I have no idea about the internal stuff that might be going on here, but a 50% increase in non-academic staff at a university in just a few years, while the rest of the university doesn't grow, does seem like an issue that people might care about.
But, if you haven't heard, there's a significant concern these days with the large amount of administrators and administrative staff being hired at colleges, which has apparently significantly contributed to the huge increases in college tuition at many schools.
The random stories you refer to apparently are related to the way that some administrators are refusing to hire professors or consider them qualified on the basis of some minor details in their academic credentials:
[The administrator] has also taken it upon himself to uphold the highest standards of the academy by weighing in on degrees and the quality of schools attended by CSU faculty applicants (across disciplines, it seems like he has a Ph.D. in everything). He has apparently decided that no one without a Ph.D. in hand should be hired at Chicago State and has often expressed the notion that CSU faculty should be able to "transfer" to Harvard.
Etc.
The blogger seems to be responding in kind, by picking apart some minor details in the credentials of the new administrative staff.
Is some of this "petty"? Probably.
But that doesn't mean there aren't larger issues buried if you read more than the top two blog posts.
Doesn't even have to be a drive failure for data loss to occur. You accidentally deleted a file? Too bad.
Yes, and...??
First off, most operating systems that clueless consumers use have mechanisms that prevent accidental deletion. Files go into some sort of "trash bin" or "recycling bin" or whatever, and they often sit there for a long time before actually being deleted (unless the clueless user deliberately deletes the file again from the trash bin). Unless these people are tinkering around on the command line (increasingly unlikely these days for your average person), it's pretty rare that they are going to accidentally delete a file completely. And even then, recovery is often possible... but let's not go there.
Compare that to a hard drive failure. Sure, one file accidentally deleted may be an inconvenience, and in the case of some very special file, it might be a disaster. But that's generally nothing compared to losing ALL OF YOUR FILES. Also, with many drive failures, unlike many file deletions, full recovery with advanced tools may not be possible, even if undertaken immediately.
Accidentally stubbing your toe may hurt like heck, and occasionally might even break your toe... but that's not anything like chopping your entire leg off.
Only when he has Private Keys working on his team. He's even been known to do illicit Extractions, mercilessly beating the Tar out of whatever he wants, all the while adhering to a secret "SSH" Protocol.
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year.
Nope. Read TFA, and following the links. There is a GAO report linked therethat contains details of the USPS budget shortfall.
According to the GAO report, $32 billion of the $41 billion shortfall in the past 6 years is due to the pension requirements. If 78% of the shortfall is due to an unreasonable requirement, I think we can say that it's a significant contribution.
As for the rest, the new requirement for pensions came into effect right about the time that first-class mail use began to decline (2008). If the USPS had its normal budget, it might have been able to make investments in its own infrastructure, try to figure out ways to deal with that decline, etc.
Instead, every year it has Congress forcing it into more debt. Imagine if you suddenly had to make payments each year that broke your budget, and just at that moment your sources of income started going down.
People faced with desperate situations make difficult decisions, which sometimes force them into further debt. As an individual, you might be forced to drop some of your insurance coverage, get into credit card debt, etc., rather than investing money in things that would help you recover.
Congress's requirements put the squeeze on the USPS in the same way, at the worst possible moment. I'm not saying everything was managed great, but the USPS was basically balancing the books until this pension requirement came along... and the vast majority of losses since have come from it.
and of course many other creative spelling attempts that are blamed on auto-correct but rather should be blamed on lousy education or the willful butchering of words.
I agree with you mostly. But I have to say -- when I first got my iPhone, I tried Autocorrect for a month or so. I discovered that my phone would NEVER let me type the word "its", i.e., the possessive third-person pronoun. It ALWAYS "corrected" it to "it's", i.e., "it is".
Of course, there were the other inanities Autocorrect introduced -- often any word other than the few thousand most common English words was in danger of being randomly converted to a nonsense phrase or something.
But Apple's Autocorrect was actively promoting the decline of English syntax. I looked like an idiot in emails I would write where I'd forget to go back and fix the words my phone had helpfully "corrected." And there were no convenient ways to fix it. So I turned Autocorrect off, and I've been spelling words correctly again ever since.
Somewhere in here, I think there's a metaphor for what Apple is doing to society.... [just kidding... mostly...]
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I think the point about debt was moot because most science and engineering grad students don't have debt.
I don't know the stats, but I'd bet that a lot of science and engineering graduate students have debt from undergraduate loans... but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.
I know I don't and I don't know anyone who took out loans for STEM grad school.
Congratulations! You must not know anyone who went to a crappy school or did their graduate degree part-time!
According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), which is admittedly a bit out of date since the most recent stats are from 2008, roughly 75% of graduate students in engineering and science fields received some form of financial aid or grant. That does NOT mean they all received full rides with stipends -- it means that they might have received something between a few thousand dollars in tuition rebate up to a full ride.
So, approximately 25% of STEM graduate students in the U.S. in 2007-08 were paying FULL PRICE for tuition, with no stipend, no grants, and no financial aid. I'm wiling to bet that many more accumulate at least some debt during grad school, whether that's because they don't receive a complete tuition waiver, or they don't get a stipend, or they don't get a stipend that's enough to reasonably live on. Is it true that "most science and engineering grad students don't have debt"? Possibly. But there's a fairly large percentage who probably do -- at least 25%, and possibly 50% or higher.
Now, if you restrict that pool a bit, you might get to your group of friends. If you look at only full-time STEM graduate students (as opposed to the working dad trying to finish up his master's on the side), you get up to above 85% who receive some sort of funding.
If you restrict it only to full-time doctoral students in STEM fields, you get up to around 95%.
Let me try again: your point is NOT moot about grad school.
My point was that most of those people who are going to schools in STEM fields where they aren't getting aid are mostly going to crappy schools, and they'd probably be better off working rather than dumping money into a graduate degree they have to pay for. I do agree with you that most science and engineering grad students going to good schools don't have debt.
From the "You should only care about money dept."
Umm, no -- from the be realistic about your life dept.
If you're independently wealthy and just want a Ph.D. in English lit. or art history, by all means, go for it and pay the $150k or whatever! If you're retired or have money to burn or whatever, I applaud your effort to become more educated. Seriously, I really do. I wish more people who had the means did such things with their money.
But as someone who actually has degrees in fields that are NOT considered "lucrative," because I deliberately decided to do something I enjoy, rather than earn the most money I could... I think I have plenty of experience to give advice here.
And being realistic is not the same as "only caring about money." If there were a higher demand for Ph.D.'s in the field you love, there would be more opportunities for "full rides" for graduate school in your field. If you aren't talented enough to get one of those, the chances that you will subsequently land a nice tenure-track job somewhere are very low.
I know people with Ivy League Ph.D.'s in the humanities who graduated half a decade ago, have a number of publications in top journals, have teaching experience, and they STILL can't find a decent tenure-track job. If you're paying $100k to get your crappy graduate degree from Upper Bucksnort University, you really think you have a chance?!?
I'm not trying to quash anyone's dreams, but you need to ask yourself what you're getting for that $100k+ investment, other than a boatload of debt.
By all means, keep the dream: go out and get a job, save up some cash, and then if when you're 35 or 40 or whatever, go back and get that Ph.D. with the money you saved -- if you still really want to. I admire people like that a great deal.
But shelling out for graduate school when it won't help you be able to do what you want to do anyway, and it could actually HURT your future by having crippling debt and branding you as "overcredentialed" as you try to find a realistic job.
P.S. Yes, I have a job in what I wanted to do, and no, I do not have any debt from graduate school. But I know a few people who do have ridiculous debt from graduate school, have no job or some crappy job that isn't anything that they ever wanted to do, and are struggling to get out of debt... there's no chance that they will ever get a decent academic job.
They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well,
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure the definition of "postdoc" includes some sort of pay. (I suppose there might be some strange European situations where you only get room and board, or something....) I've never heard of a postdoc in the humanities that didn't pay something. In fact, many postdocs in the humanities (Mellon fellows, etc.) pay as well as postdocs in the sciences, though they tend to be more competitive. Some humanities postdocs may pay very little, but if you're not getting paid anything, I don't think you have a postdoc. Maybe you have an "apprenticeship" or maybe you're a "volunteer," but I don't think even humanities programs tend to employ research fellows with no pay.
and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered,
True, though the top-tier humanities schools also cover tuition for graduate students, often with stipends as well.
I'm also reasonably certain that there are plenty of colleges in the U.S. that would gladly take your money to earn a master's degree in chemistry or something. Most Ph.D. programs in sciences and engineering have at least tuition waivers (if not stipends), but lots of schools -- even top-tier ones -- will allow a student to pay for a master's degree.
so the point about debt is moot.
Perhaps I read the GP wrong, but I think there is also a concern about graduate school debt and the effect it may have on subsequent choices. If you go into debt in graduate school, it puts even more pressure on you to be able to get a job immediately out of graduate school, so you can pay off loans. Often the most reasonable choice is a post-doc, which barely lets you earn enough to live on, particularly with debt to pay off. It's all a bad cycle.
Moral of the story still is: don't go into debt to go to graduate school, unless you're getting a credential (professional degree) or something that will raise your salary in a job or profession you're already in. If you're not talented enough to get into the graduate schools in your field that will give you a free ride, chances are you'll never be able to get a job in academia. And yes, that includes the humanities.
And yes, debt can happen to people in the sciences for graduate school, even with a tuition waiver. Grad school stipends are sometimes quite minimal (even smaller than postdoc pay), and I know a few people who had their way "paid" through graduate school in the sciences, but ended up coming out with tens of thousands of dollars in debt... either in loans or credit cards or whatever.
So... no, the point about debt is NOT moot.
Are you referencing the 1920's, where the rich had no limits and they gobbled up everything and the entire economy tanked(1929, great depression, etc), so we put limits on them, taxed them, built infrastructure, and we had a really good run afterward?
Indeed, the economic regulations and taxation policies that curbed the disparity between poor and super-rich from the Depression until the Reagan era were a great example of John Rawls's "difference principle" from his Theory of Justice.
Effectively, the "difference principle" just states that economic inequalities are often good -- as long as they serve the purpose of not only making the rich richer, but also making lives of those at the bottom of the economic chain better.
There's no doubt that rewarding innovation, creativity, hard work, etc. leads people to invent things that will improve the plight of all people in society. Various technologies, infrastructure, etc. would not be possible unless we reward those who create and invest in it -- and that helps out the poorest people, as well as making rich people richer.
The problem comes when the increase of wealth among the richest fails to improve the life of the poor, or even begins to affect it in negative ways. One can argue that, after decades of increases in worker's rights and safety regulations, etc., a lot of those advances stalled in the 1910s and 1920s, as the richest continued to get richer.
These days, as we see the proliferation of high unemployment, along with permanent temp and part-time workers with no benefits in so many sectors, we're also experiencing a situation where the lowest paid workers' lives are getting harder as the richest are getting easier.
In John Rawls's theory, this is unjust. But it's also stupid economic policy, because oppressing the poor doesn't allow them to work as efficiently, and the rich will gradually experience slower gains. If concentrating huge amounts of money among the superrich while keeping most people as poor peasants actually worked, Europe would never have moved out of feudal society in the middle ages. Instead, the rise of middle class, economically mobile folks who innovated to make everyone's lives better has led to many centuries of improvements for society as a whole.
How about a law that says movie stars can only make 100 times what the lowest wage guy on the movie set makes? Perhaps recording artists should only make some multiple of what some guy in the studio does? Maybe authors can only make some multiple of what the editors at their publishing houses make?
Does anyone really believe laws like that that would lead to net improvements in those areas, or for society in general?
Sure. Why not?
I think such laws would be a stupid way of trying to go about things, even if we were trying to limit income or something.
But is your argument seriously implying that paying an actor $10 million for a movie instead of $30 million is going to affect the quality of the film? Or doing the same thing for a singer or for an author?
HA!!
Look -- there is something to be said for performance pay, up to a point. Actors and singers and writers and other artists obviously can have trouble making good art if they're struggling to survive and working three jobs to keep food on the table. So, sure -- I'm all for paying all of these people who are earning next to nothing a lot more for their contributions to society.
However, for every celebrity artist or singer or writer who brings in millions of dollars of revenue, there are hundreds -- perhaps even thousands -- of artists, singers, and writers in the U.S. who have the same basic ability levels (if not better). They just haven't been touched by the magic fame fairy: none of their YouTube videos have become an internet meme, no random producer or publisher has offered to "make them famous," etc.
If an artist is making enough money to live relatively well -- paying them more is not going to actually improve the art produced by them.
The only thing these enormous salaries do is magnify the "lottery effect" of public fads and whims, as well as create a culture of celebrity for people who like to follow the "lifestyles of the rich and famous."
If you seriously think that paying a Hollywood actor $20 million instead of $500,000 for a movie is going to get you art that's 40 times better -- I don't know what to say. Numerous independent films -- often staring "big name" actors working for fractions of their normal salaries -- say otherwise.
So yeah, I think your proposals are an idiotic way of going about things. But if we're really trying to improve the quality of the art being produced, I think paying a higher percentage to all the other people involved in artistic projects might not be a bad idea... rather than just supporting a few people in their "lifestyle of the rich and famous" (which has nothing to do with better art).
Paging Harrison Bergeron.
What the heck are you talking about? "Harrison Bergeron" is a story about a society that limited people's ability to use their natural skills. Talented people not only weren't rewarded for their skills -- they were actively inhibited from being able to use those skills to benefit society.
However, the present argument is very different. Is Johnny Depp actually going to make a movie that's so much better from an artistic standpoint if we pay him yet another $10 or $20 million on top of his already enormous salary?? But what if we gave out hundreds of bonuses for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars EACH to people in the crew who were responsible for all sorts of other aspects that make the movie great? That would actually be encouraging hundreds of people to use their natural skills to make better art, rather than inflate the salary of one person.
Again, I think your idea as proposed is a little ridiculous. But actually I think it would have a BETTER chance of improving art than rewarding rich people with even more money.
Trying to make everyone equal is stupid -- that's the point of Harrison Bergeron. Spreading money around effectively to result in the best quality final product, on the ot
It should be easy enough for someone here to harvest phonebook or other records from 70 years ago, refresh and randomize birth dates, and begin to flood the identity theft market with fake personalities and random government identity records.
I get what you're saying here, and perhaps it could have some benefits.
For years I've promoted "camouflage" rather than invisibility. I now think the reason it has not taken off (disappearance of AntiPhorm?) is that it's equally a threat to Google, Bing, and advertising-based search engines. We can be less careful of our "identity needles" if we construct bigger "digital haystacks".
See article on digital haystacks and cookie camouflage http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/09/simpler-ideas-cookie-camouflage-digital.html
I'm less clear about how your proposed ideas work in practice when I read your link.
I understand how it might serve to hide and distort data about your searching and browsing habits if your computer randomly searched and browsed for other things in the background. But it has some pitfalls.
For one, I would never consider using such a system unless it had definitely solved the "child porn problem." What happens if your computer goes surfing on some "bad" sites in the background, and naughty stuff ends up on your computer? I'd really love to hear try to defend yourself when law enforcement comes knocking -- "But it wasn't me! My computer was surfing for kiddie porn!"
And while that may be the worst problem, there are other places on the internet that could potentially get you in trouble if you frequent them too much. That's always the problem with the "if everyone has drunken photos on Facebook, nobody will care" arguments. Yes, maybe that will eventually be true in few decades, but for now, people who want to use such things against you won't care about what other people do. Someone who wants to "get you" or maybe just find a way to throw you out of the resume pile for job applications will only care about the bad stuff that they can find. Whether it's representative of you or not, it won't matter. It's just like cops and the thousands of random laws on the books -- chances are that you're committing some breach of the law right now in some obscure statute. Having too many laws doesn't obscure those: it makes them all the more problematic because any one of them might be held against you at some point. Similarly, if your data is "camoflaged" well enough on your hard drive, law enforcement will probably claim that any of that mess might belong to you... including any weird, naughty, or potentially illegal places your "computer" may have decided to visit randomly.
Now, I suppose you might say that you have some sort of "key file" somewhere that shows your legitimate personal search history. First, I think that you'd be hard-pressed to explain that to law enforcement, but even if you could, it introduces a significant vulnerability in your system. Anyone with access to that file knows your real search history, making your system useless. You might as well just use an encrypted drive or directory for your searches, with that sort of failure point.
Finally, your solution sounds possible if you just want to keep companies from tracking random browsing habits, but I'm not really sure what that has to do with avoiding identity theft. It's not like your computer will randomly log into fake bank accounts in the background or something. If someone's going to steal personal data that's critical to identity theft, they're going to be looking for your access to particular sorts of sites (banks, retailers, etc.), and you won't have "fake access" to those sites to disguise your real transactions.
So how exactly do you "camouflage" any of your legitimate significant financial transactions: the ones that any ID theft person might actually b
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
I quite agree with you. However, there's a subtle irony to including "business" majors here.
A century ago, there really were no "business majors" in college. If you went to college, but you were a rich kid who hoped to work in your father's business someday or whatever, you might be a history major or an English lit major, or maybe even something that sounds more exotic today, like classics or art history. If you were inclined toward the sciences, you might even concentrate in biology or chemistry, while getting your overall "liberal arts" perspective.
Nowadays, many universities see the largest number of undergraduates majoring in "business." At some schools, nearly half or more undergraduates are primarily instructed in "business," rather than one out of many disciplines that was traditionally part of the "liberal arts" perspective in college.
I'm not arguing that we should get rid of business majors or reinstitute some old-school liberal arts curriculum. But, it's very clear that the modern "business major" has actually done more than just about any other discipline in reducing the number and variety of "specialities and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints" that you might encounter among college-educated people.
The sheer dominance of the business major actually has tended to reduce the very thing that the parent poster says we should value.
People say duller knives are dangerous, but my experience suggests the opposite. When my knife set was new, I cut myself badly with them on two or three occasions. Nearly took the end of a finger off once. Now that the knives are a little duller they're safer.
I agree, but I'd qualify this a bit. Very sharp knives are dangerous. Very dull knives are also dangerous. If you're not careful when cutting, I agree that it's best to have something in the middle.
Very dull knives are dangerous in unpredictable ways. You have to use excess force to make them cut, and at times that may just slide off the food rather than cut into it. I can't tell you how many times I've been at someone else's house with a set of terribly dull knives, and I'm asked to slice an onion or something, and the knife just keeps sliding off the skin, rather than cutting into it. I have to exert a lot more force to pierce through the skin, so when the knife slides off, it also hits the cutting board with a bang. I've certainly nicked myself a few times with dull blades just that way.
That's just not a safe way to cut food -- excess force and unpredictable knife motion.
On the other hand, very sharp knives are dangerous is very predictable ways. If you keep your fingers out of the way while chopping, you can always depend on your knife to work like a steady machine. Yeah, if you're not careful you could easily slice into your finger or even slice the tip off. I've sliced myself a couple times with sharp knives, and I have to admit that it's a bit scary, because at least once or twice I didn't even notice it until I saw the blood. Unlike with a dull knife, a sharp knife slicing into a finger is clean and almost painless. A dull knife will leave an awful jagged cut that could take a long time to heal; even a deeper gash from a sharp knife seems to heal very quickly.
Personally, with my own knives, I like to err on the side of predictablity, and therefore I keep them relatively sharp. But I'm not crazy about it -- when I first sharpen them, they are quite sharp. But I don't bother to touch them up until I really start sensing resistance in cutting food.
In sum, both dull and sharp knives can be dangerous. But dull knives can be dangerous even if you're trying to be careful, so I try to avoid them.
That metal stick you see people rubbing knives on? That's a stropper, not a sharpener.
As someone else already said, no. The "metal stick" is used to hone. Honing is something you do to straighten the edge before cutting, since a fine edge will gradually begin to bend and lean in places if not honed.
Stropping is generally done with leather (think of an old-style barber sharpening a straight-edge razor). The stropping step similarly straightens the edge, but the material (leather or sometimes other cloth) also polishes the edge slightly, effectively removing a very small amount of burrs and cleaning up some microserrations on the edge.
Stropping a knife does nothing once the edge is gone. It has to be re-sharpened first.
That's true -- if the knife is dull, stropping won't do much. On the other hand, the "metal stick" most people own is a grooved steel, rather than a smooth steel. A smooth steel hones only. A grooved steel will tear microserrations into the edge of the blade, making it temporarily seem somewhat sharp. Unfortunately, it will also cause the edge to degrade faster, requiring more heavy work with the grooved steel to tear up the edge again.
To my mind, grooved steels are rather stupid devices, but lots of people use them. They actually can temporarily "revive" some cutting power, but in a destructive sort of way. Assuming your knife isn't completely dull, smacking it around with a grooved steel may make it seem a little more usable for a while anyway....
[The original Modernist Cuisine] is also one of the most expensive cooking encyclopedias, the original six volume version retailing for $500, with the two-volume that followed after that selling for $115. Now, Nathan and his team have transformed their huge food encyclopedia into an iPhone/iPad app.
I don't know about you, but when I read that, I assumed the app was based on the "huge" original version or even BOTH versions, probably edited in some way to make it work as an app.
But the appstore link makes it clear that you're paying for the modified "home" version. So even if the book is COMPLETELY available in the app, you're paying $80 for a book that costs about $120.
Among the top features that the Modernist Cuisine app comes with are the high-resolutions pictures and the ability to search within the app's own information which will also fetch extra data from Wikipedia and other web services.
Wow, an app that can search its own information! And use that cool web resources like Wikipedia!
As someone who admired the photography from the original book, though, the high-res photography is awesome.
Unfortunately, that's about all the book was good for, at least unless you're some professional chef with a large budget and a bunch of fancy equipment. I find it hilarious that TFA makes it sound like a regular cooking and recipe app:
the recipe cards dynamically adjust the measure of ingredients you'll need to yield a given number of servings, then add these items to a shopping list.
Have people even looked at the book? The exotic ingredients used in many recipes aren't exactly the sort of things you can find at your typical supermarket. Even if you have the centrifuge and other fancy equipment needed to prepare some things, you're going to have to special order a lot of ingredients... not just pack your iPhone in your purse and head off to the grocery store.
The hype for this book was huge, with people claiming that it revolutionize the way we would cook and introduce a whole new "scientific" approach to cooking. That was complete nonsense -- it's more about fancy technology and fancy ingredients, with lots of fun pictures. If you like $600 coffee-table books, by all means, get a copy... or maybe get the photos for a steal in an $80 iPad app.
I know I'm a dissenting voice on this book, but all the blather about using "science" in cooking really bothered me. I'm actually the scientific type of cook -- I have many digital thermometers, scales, a pH meter, and many other precision devices, along with a "lab notebook" (journal) of my kitchen "experiments."
But this book is more about presenting pretentious culinary "culture" that uses lots of technology as if it were "science." That's not science. It's just somebody's wacky cooking vision. I'm not saying the food is bad, but claiming that their approach is "better" is rarely backed up by any data... therefore, it's hardly "scientific."
Anyhow, I could go on about this for some time, and already have here. But from my experience with this book, I'm a little hesitant about recommending the $80 app, unless you just like paying that much for a lot of pretty pictures.
So we are to believe that "helping people" led to the fall of Rome?
Umm, no. Did I say anything about the "fall of Rome"? No. I said "Go read about the fall of the Roman Republic." My post had nothing to do with the Roman Empire as ruled over by a dictator, which it basically was from the time of Juilius Caesar onwards (the last of the reformers I listed -- please note all of them are from about 150 - 50 BCE).
Those Calligula orgies in the blood of killed statesmen -- that's some kind of Progressive socialism?
Caligula lived from 12 - 41 CE, and wasn't emperor until 37 CE, almost a century after the Roman Republic effectively ended. Please re-read my post, and then go read a history book. I was not talking about the decline of military dictatorships (which would have little to do with the U.S. or the TSA today), but with the fall of the Roman REPUBLIC.
The reliance on a military conquest system and not on educating people to create value was an example of a militaristic system -- not navel gazing hippies.
Who said anything about "navel gazing hippies"? I talked about Progressives, though perhaps I would have been more accurate to say "populists." Most of the actions that led to a more centralized federal government with greater powers happened long before "hippies" came along.
The Roman empire lasted quite a while in human history terms. They fell not because of good ideas to help people -- they fell because of Tyrants and a populace that wanted to support an empire of plunder rather than sharing their good ideas with the subjugated nations.
Again, I said NOTHING about the Roman empire. I'm talking about the days of the Roman Republic, i.e., what the U.S. was modeled on by the Founders -- they just broke away from a tyrant, so why would they model themselves after a dictatorship??
In the Roman Republic, there were no tyrants -- anyone suspected of coming close to acting like a king or dictator (excepting temporary dictatorial appointments in times of severe crisis) was often exiled or even outright killed. The populace didn't want to support an empire of plunder, because that didn't come about until Rome had a standing army, which didn't happen until those progressive reformers (Marius, in this case) decided that they could solve military problems AND social problems (poor people without land) with professional soldiers... rather than the older system, where farmer citizens were enlisted and mostly wanted to return to their farms after the wars were over. Under the new system with a standing army, the soldiers fought not to protect their homeland, but to achieve wealth abroad -- since they were not landowners, but rather poor people to begin with -- and then to settle down into new land that was available to them through conquest.
I'm not saying that the Roman Republic was perfect. But a lot of stuff had to break down in that system before it turned into the Empire you're talking about. And a lot of bad stuff came about through attempts to "help the poor" while also having the effect of consolidating power.
Are you just trying to attach blame to Progressives on random historical events?
Umm, no. I was just trying to draw parallels to a gradual infringement of rights in the U.S. by looking at a similar historical evolution, which was also precipitated by a parade of "reformers," most of whom had very good intentions.
These aren't wannabe tyrants. They legitimately believe their ideas would make life better.
You may want to take a history lesson at some point. Go read about the fall of the Roman Republic and how it gradually morphed into a dictatorship. Almost every step along the way was a guy trying to "make things better for the common man," and many if not most of them actually had noble intentions. Take a look at the sequence, from Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius, Marius, Sulla, and Cinna all the way to Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar, most of them were "progressive" reformers, trying to help the downcast and improve the plight of people in Rome in general.
Plato knew this too, and placed democracy as just one step away from a dictatorship in his classification of governments. The quest to help people can easily turn to a quest for power (since the downtrodden tend to give away any power they have to someone who will given them anything)... and pretty soon you find yourself with a tyrant or at least a "noble, well-meaning" dictatorship at first.
All through a sequence of people with good intentions and ideas to "make the world better." So was Hitler. Seriously -- this is one place it might actually be appropriate to bring him up, along with just about every other wacko dictator in history. Almost all of them started from a place where they legitimately believed their ideas would make life better.
"Tyrants" don't have to be "wannabe." They just happen when somebody's "good ideas" turn out to be really bad for lots of people.
And like all people, when they do something they don't believe in, they rationalize it. They convince themselves that it is for the best. You do this too. We all do.
Yeah, the issue is that you need to draw the line somewhere. There has to be some action you can't rationalize just to make your vision for the world come true. Unfortunately, I seriously think that most people who have the initiative to get very far up the ladder in government usually are the people who don't have that "line," or at least it's so malleable depending on circumstances that they'll do whatever to maintain their position or power or ability to try out their "good ideas" for the world.
So, no, I don't and cannot rationalize the way "rights" have been rapidly redefined in the U.S. in recent years. Most of our public officials are clearly even embarrassed themselves by what they're doing, since they bury their actions in secret documents and clandestine actions or try to hide things in piles of legislation.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to erode rights, and it doesn't take a "wannabe tyrant" to end up with a really, really bad government. It just takes a series of gradual shifts, and people doing what they can to -- as you put it -- "spread their good ideas to more people."
The danger is when people like you fail to see that a sequence of such bad trends can accumulate into something really bad, without necessarily a grand conspiracy of any sort.
No, it's not. Don't be stupid. There's no grand conspiracy out to get you.
Hmm... can you still say that with a straight face after the Edward Snowden stuff?
Look, I'm NOT a conspiracy theorist. I think the 9/11 "truthers" and the "birthers" and whoever else are mostly lunatics.
But when I first started hearing about all the crap that was loaded into the Patriot Act, it was pretty scary. And little-by-little, over the years, more and more crap about SECRET government power grabs has come out. After all the stuff with Snowden, etc., can you seriously go around calling people "stupid" who suggest that the government is gradually increasing its power grab into our rights?
I agree with you that the TSA is security theatre, and Americans wanted something that made them feel safer about flying. But that doesn't explain SECRET initiatives in the past decade or so created by the government that are intent on gradually eroding the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments (among others).
If these "rights overrides" were supposed to make us all feel better about how the government is protecting us, why the heck aren't they made public knowledge?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that there is some secret group of government officials planning to take away our rights piece-by-piece. It's nothing so organized and calculated.
Instead, politicians are generally interested in two things: (1) getting re-elected, (2) having personal power.
Politicians are probably just as scared as many Americans are about having another terrorist attack -- at 9/11, it swung in the way of the incumbent administration, which convinced the People that its bungled attempts to be aware of the terrorists should be forgotten. Instead -- "Hey, look over there -- bad guy in Iraq! He must have some bad stuff. Let's go attack them!" Of course, there's oil interests and all sorts of other power/money crap tied up in that, but let's not get into that now.
The point is: the next time something really bad happens, the public could turn against incumbents. So, all the secret crap is a massive attempt at CYA. Hopefully lots of drones attacking apparent "terrorist civilians," the NSA spying on EVERYONE, etc. will be doing something... and if not, at least it's probably paying a lot of government cronies through contracts and such, who probably can help at election time. Even if they don't manage to prevent an attack, they could trot out all the stuff they did do.
And along the way, the government gradually ratchets up the power they're taking and consolidating, which doesn't generally make any government officials unhappy.
It's not a "grand conspiracy." But the power grabs are deliberate and often kept secret, as they erode our rights. So even if it's not an organized attempt to take away our rights, effectively it does condition us to gradually accept more "flexibility" about our rights (as the GP argued)... something which can be helpful at times for people who like to be in power.
And contrary to the ravings of the conspiracy theorists, this IS a democracy. The people get what they want, for better or worse.
Yeah, sort of. Any psychologist would tell you that people often tend to make bad choices for themselves. They may think they "want" something, but they really don't -- nevertheless, they keep making stupid choices.
Hence, Congress has had approval ratings in the toilet for almost as long as anyone can remember (generally excepting wartime, after 9/11, and such, when one has to be "patriotic" and support our Congressmen!). How is it possible that Congress can consistently have approval ratings in the 10-25% range (and even lower), yet incumbents generally keep getting reelected?
All it takes is a little stump speachifying and a little "bacon" to bring home to the district/state, and people say, "Yeah, let's keep this guy!"
Similarly, all it takes is some minor continuo
At a constant height, body fat is added to the cross-section. I guess that's part of the rationale for the ballpark guess that is BMI.
Except the "cross-section" has height too. A 6'8" man with a giant beer belly compared to a 5'0" man with a giant beer belly not only adds cross-sectional area, but also a larger "height" over the stomach area where the excess weight is distributed. It's not like short men have a rounded belly, but taller men have a giant bulging rubber tire around the waist and flat upper abs! The bulge is roughly the same shape in 3-dimensions, excepting of course extreme cases (dwarfism, etc.).
Is there a better obesity metric that is as convenient to measure as BMI?
Sure -- how about using height cubed instead of height squared? Or, more likely, the best exponent probably falls between 2 and 3, since you're somewhat right that mass doesn't quite increase cubically when height does. Maybe it's 2.7 or maybe it's 2.3, and I'm sure epidemiological studies could easily come up with the best figure to correlate to bodyfat. And have two separate scales for men and women, just like doctors do for actual bodyfat measurements.
It still won't take into account things like muscle mass vs. fat and body type, but at least it doesn't have a built-in dimensional problem that skews diagnosis whenever you get more than a few inches off of average.
Aside from improving the BMI formula with a simple exponent change, they could also just use another simple measurement. Lots and lots of recent studies have shown that even taking a waist measurement (or a waist-to-hip ratio) is more accurate at predicting disease than the idiotic BMI formula.
I mean, how screwed up is that? If a formula that can be used with a simple tape measure -- like "if your waist is more than X inches, you're at higher risk," regardless of height, weight, or whatever -- is significantly better than some more complex formula involving squaring numbers and division and accurate scales, why the heck are we still using BMI?!?
And you are fooling yourself if you think that different people don't have widely different abilities to digest various foods. In fact, you are fooling yourself if you think that different people's bodies don't behave differently with regard to what gets burned vs. what gets stored with the calories they do digest.
You're right. However, the effects you mention are just not that significant. If you were talking about a factor of 2 or something, that might be significant. But no study has EVER shown something of that magnitude: where somebody has steady weight or slight gains at calorie input X, but lost weight by switching foods and eating 2X calories. It's simply impossible.
Except for people with severe metabolic disorders, the effect of different foods is probably on the order of +/- 10% or so in terms of calorie extraction from diet depending on food type. For extreme diets, it might be a little more, but even if it varied by 20%, most people don't keep accurate enough weight and calorie intake records (along with constant physical activity levels) to see such a difference. Thus, calorie counts really are about the best first-order approximation to determine what will happen to your weight that we have.
Now, this says nothing about whether a particular diet will make you feel full or be easier to adhere to etc. Different types of diets may give different psychological results which may make it harder or easier to lose (or gain) weight. But a number of comparative studies have not shown significant deviations in weight loss for constant calorie deficits on different diets. What you say is true, but the effect is simply not that big. The effect may seem bigger than it is because of different feelings of satiety for different foods, and because people tend to under/overestimate calorie content of foods based on those feelings, rather than actual calorie content.
Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
That's because MPG is still related to a physical metric. You can see this better if you think of gallons per mile, whose units are (as you note) an area. Yes -- it would actually be an area precisely equivalent to a cross section of a long thin tube of gasoline stretched out to cover the distance your car goes on that amount of gas. MPG is just the reciprocal of that area. Just because you can't figure out how the units are physically meaningful doesn't mean that they don't actually have a physical representation or correlation to the measurement.
Once you multiply the mass by gravity to get weight, you end up with F / L^2, or pressure units. Assuming the length and width of your feet are proportional to the rest of your body, BMI is proportional to the pressure between the ground and your feet.
Absolutely right. Which means BMI might be a good measure of potential for diseases and disorders highly correlated with excess downward "pressure" within the body -- joint problems in the legs, back problems, foot issues, perhaps some circulation issues, etc.
But it's not used for that generally: instead, it's compared to how much bodyfat one has to determine things like "obesity." Except obesity is usually correlated with a three-dimensional addition of fat onto the body frame, not a two-dimensional one. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the formula will overestimate adiposity (fatness) for tall people, while underestimating it for short people.
My theory has been that the ONLY reason this formula ever got any attention at all is because that very defect makes it applicable for both average men and average women. Women naturally tend to have slightly higher bodyfat than men, and they also are shorter on average. That means that the formula will give similar results in predicting adiposity for women and men of average height. But it will be TERRIBLE for predicting it correctly for men who are short and as tall as the average woman, or women who are as tall or taller than the average man.
All of this does come from basic unit analysis.
Non-Academic Administrators include people like me. I'm a librarian.
Yes, I know what the phrase means, and I didn't mean to imply anything bad about all administrative (or "non-academic") positions -- AT ALL. I'm all for libraries and librarians. Apparently, if this blog is to be believed, the issue at this particular school is that there's also a significant amount of jobs going to friends of existing administrators going on in administrative hiring. I have no idea whether these claims are true, but the implication of the blog is that unnecessary jobs are being "created" and sometimes unqualified people are getting them.
This is NOT an indictment of all administrative staff at all institutions, let alone those who provide important services to students.
On the other hand, the reality of budgets at many schools is that administrative costs are rising at alarming rates (along with costs for new buildings and facilities, etc.), while academic budgets are static or going down, with more and more adjunct faculty hired at levels below minimum wage just to cover basic teaching needs.
These are general trends, and this blog seems to claim that one university has some particularly problematic stuff going on. Again, I have no idea how true it is, but that's the subject of this thread.
That "Non-Academic" phrase gets thrown around a lot and frequently includes people like guidance counselors who DO have an impact on student success.
Yep. That's great. SOME "non-academic" growth is certainly necessary at many universities to provide various kinds of student services, whether that's a career counselor or just an extra person at the registrar's office to facilitate student access to records.
The issue is the rate of growth relative to academic areas, making these administrative costs a significant driver of increasing tuition rates, as discussed in many news stories in the past few years. In many cases, these "administrative" staff have increased anywhere from 5 to 10 TIMES the rate at which faculty and academic staff have increased.
I'm all for providing student services, but if all of these guidance counselors and librarians, etc. are necessary for student success, what had colleges been doing before these giant increases in administrative hiring in the past decade? How could they possibly have functioned before with so few administrators?
I'm not at all saying that administration is somehow "bad" -- it's just that the growth seems disproportionate to other areas, and I'm certainly not the only person to have commented on that trend in the past few years.
When was this?
Well, it never really worked in the U.S. You can read about the various attempts at prison reform in the U.S. over the centuries here.
Basically, from the late 1700s through at least much of the 1800s, the U.S. had a number of trends in prison structure and style that were intended to "reform" or "rehabilitate" inmates, rather than just to punish them. We can see this in the names of institutions and departments that predate the modern trend toward euphemisms: "reformatory" (where you were "reformed), "penitentiary" (where you learn penitence and experience personal guilt for what you did), "Department of Corrections" or "correctional facilities" (where your deviant behavior or defects are corrected), etc.
Basically, all of this was a reaction to the idea of public punishments -- often fairly horrific -- that tended to be the norm in the 1700s and earlier.
However, all of the attempts at prison reform tended to go in other extremes, which often weren't effective either -- and sometimes made inmates worse. For example, the early "penitentiary" system in U.S. was based on the idea that prisoners would live in complete isolation, only interacting with guards when masked. Guards would never talk to them, and even in some cases would wear cloth on their shoes so prisoners would never even be aware of their presence. The idea was supposedly that the prisoner in complete isolation would be forced to contemplate his crimes (without any other contact with anything else), and thereby gradually realize the error of his ways.
Of course, putting human beings in complete isolation for years often tends to drive them to forms of insanity. So, this system often failed.
There was a parade of other types of reforms, all generally well-meaning, and attempting to put an end to corporal punishment. But the reality was that they often made prisoners suffer severe psychological damage in other ways, and in many cases the guards would still beat and abused them anyway....
Eventually, you also had the segregation of "insane" criminals from the rest, which led to further attempts at "curing" those who had "mental defects," in extreme cases resulting in surgeries and other craziness.
So, I'm not really sure about what the GP is talking about, except that there was a general trend toward (supposedly) non-violent punishment beginning soon after the American Revolution in the U.S. And a lot of reformers wanted to find ways to "fix" prisoners, rather than just punishing them.
In practice, I'm not sure any of those systems ever really worked well. But the ideas were influential in other countries.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
I'm also an external observer to all of this, but I think if you had read further, you might see the point of all of these seeming "petty" details.
Basically, it sounds like a blog aimed at a huge increase in non-academic administration personnel. Apparently, in the past 4 years or so, the number of non-academic administrators and staff has risen by almost 50%, from 76 people to 112 people, while the rest of the university (including academics, etc.) has remained relatively stable. Salaries and numbers of upper-level administrators apparently also have risen significantly.
I have no idea about the internal stuff that might be going on here, but a 50% increase in non-academic staff at a university in just a few years, while the rest of the university doesn't grow, does seem like an issue that people might care about.
But, if you haven't heard, there's a significant concern these days with the large amount of administrators and administrative staff being hired at colleges, which has apparently significantly contributed to the huge increases in college tuition at many schools.
The random stories you refer to apparently are related to the way that some administrators are refusing to hire professors or consider them qualified on the basis of some minor details in their academic credentials:
[The administrator] has also taken it upon himself to uphold the highest standards of the academy by weighing in on degrees and the quality of schools attended by CSU faculty applicants (across disciplines, it seems like he has a Ph.D. in everything). He has apparently decided that no one without a Ph.D. in hand should be hired at Chicago State and has often expressed the notion that CSU faculty should be able to "transfer" to Harvard.
Etc. The blogger seems to be responding in kind, by picking apart some minor details in the credentials of the new administrative staff.
Is some of this "petty"? Probably.
But that doesn't mean there aren't larger issues buried if you read more than the top two blog posts.
Doesn't even have to be a drive failure for data loss to occur. You accidentally deleted a file? Too bad.
Yes, and...??
First off, most operating systems that clueless consumers use have mechanisms that prevent accidental deletion. Files go into some sort of "trash bin" or "recycling bin" or whatever, and they often sit there for a long time before actually being deleted (unless the clueless user deliberately deletes the file again from the trash bin). Unless these people are tinkering around on the command line (increasingly unlikely these days for your average person), it's pretty rare that they are going to accidentally delete a file completely. And even then, recovery is often possible... but let's not go there.
Compare that to a hard drive failure. Sure, one file accidentally deleted may be an inconvenience, and in the case of some very special file, it might be a disaster. But that's generally nothing compared to losing ALL OF YOUR FILES. Also, with many drive failures, unlike many file deletions, full recovery with advanced tools may not be possible, even if undertaken immediately.
Accidentally stubbing your toe may hurt like heck, and occasionally might even break your toe... but that's not anything like chopping your entire leg off.
Only when he has Private Keys working on his team. He's even been known to do illicit Extractions, mercilessly beating the Tar out of whatever he wants, all the while adhering to a secret "SSH" Protocol.
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year.
Nope. Read TFA, and following the links. There is a GAO report linked therethat contains details of the USPS budget shortfall.
According to the GAO report, $32 billion of the $41 billion shortfall in the past 6 years is due to the pension requirements. If 78% of the shortfall is due to an unreasonable requirement, I think we can say that it's a significant contribution.
As for the rest, the new requirement for pensions came into effect right about the time that first-class mail use began to decline (2008). If the USPS had its normal budget, it might have been able to make investments in its own infrastructure, try to figure out ways to deal with that decline, etc.
Instead, every year it has Congress forcing it into more debt. Imagine if you suddenly had to make payments each year that broke your budget, and just at that moment your sources of income started going down.
People faced with desperate situations make difficult decisions, which sometimes force them into further debt. As an individual, you might be forced to drop some of your insurance coverage, get into credit card debt, etc., rather than investing money in things that would help you recover.
Congress's requirements put the squeeze on the USPS in the same way, at the worst possible moment. I'm not saying everything was managed great, but the USPS was basically balancing the books until this pension requirement came along... and the vast majority of losses since have come from it.
and of course many other creative spelling attempts that are blamed on auto-correct but rather should be blamed on lousy education or the willful butchering of words.
I agree with you mostly. But I have to say -- when I first got my iPhone, I tried Autocorrect for a month or so. I discovered that my phone would NEVER let me type the word "its", i.e., the possessive third-person pronoun. It ALWAYS "corrected" it to "it's", i.e., "it is".
Of course, there were the other inanities Autocorrect introduced -- often any word other than the few thousand most common English words was in danger of being randomly converted to a nonsense phrase or something.
But Apple's Autocorrect was actively promoting the decline of English syntax. I looked like an idiot in emails I would write where I'd forget to go back and fix the words my phone had helpfully "corrected." And there were no convenient ways to fix it. So I turned Autocorrect off, and I've been spelling words correctly again ever since.
Somewhere in here, I think there's a metaphor for what Apple is doing to society.... [just kidding... mostly...]