Don't worry, your friends and family will help upload all your personal information to Facebook to sell to advertisers, to make sure you don't miss out on anything.
"Post-capitalist"? We're reaching the zenith of everything Capitalism has sought to achieve. Record income disparities with unparalleled wealth for the super-wealthy, concentrating control over every aspect of society in the hands of a tiny elite. Thanks to Facebook, "the markets" (a.k.a. billionaire investors) even control human social interactions once considered sacrosanct from corporate intrusion. The Capitalist economy is all about the ascendancy of the 1% (and the 0.01% within that).
There are reasons --- besides mushy sentimentality --- that people in rural/agricultural communities to this day keep around both cats and dogs. House cats, barn cats, hunting dogs, herding dogs --- these aren't simply pets, but working members of the community. And cats that grow up around dogs can stand their own ground pretty well; there's nothing like watching the baffled terror of an unsuspecting dog who tries picking on a cat which isn't a pussy.
Re-using the same "high security" or "very high security" password across financial institutions, etc., is a recipe for disaster. You may have very high security standards... but it turns out sometimes those tasked with taking care of the peons' data don't (and fail on simple precautions like salted hash password storage). Whichever institution has the crappiest security gets hacked (maybe even that old bank you moved your money out of years ago), and suddenly all your accounts are vulnerable.
The proper and secure way to do things is one high-security passphrase, that decrypts your (well-backed-up) encrypted store of thoroughly unmemorable random character passwords for each institution. It takes a couple extra seconds to look up the password for each site, and puts additional control over security in your own hands (which care more about you personally losing all your monies than some random bank contractor). And, for anything that you use moderately often, you'll end up remembering the random-jumble password just fine after the first several times typing it in.
Cats have traditionally played very important roles in pest control --- keeping rodents out of granaries, etc. --- which is how they gained widespread acceptance and favor in human societies. A farm or city with a few semi-domesticated cats around was greatly preferable to swarms of rats. Ancient Egyptian civilization --- the ones who put cats on the level of gods (which status the cats have never forgotten) --- was able to become a powerful empire through large-scale storage and distribution of grain, requiring methods (such as cats) for preventing mass-scale spoilage of food supplies due to vermin infestation.
Right, so, in summary, BTC shifts further costs to consumers (who lose out by needing to spend money that provides benefits to hoarders) to favor the profits of wealthy investors (who get to hoard the profit-accumulating money, at the expense of consumers). To me, this is a big negative for a currency, since I'd prefer to not trickle-up wealth while grinding down the common man. However, I suppose this makes BTC look great to the tiny wealth-hoarding class at the top.
Family social conditions are certainly a big part of this --- and the US ultra-Capitalist system has been extremely destructive of family structures compared to more civilized countries. Forcing parents to work multiple minimum-wage jobs, with ever-changing erratic hours, does not permit for a stable family life --- you're not at home with the kids when you're working 80 hours a week to keep a home. Nor does the US global-chart-topping incarceration rate, for minor or non-existing offenses, which results in huge numbers of already underprivileged kids being further stripped of family. Functioning family units are among the first victims of Capitalist exploitation, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history.
I want to be rich. Is it so horrible to want to have enough money to fund my dreams?
If your dream is to mercilessly grind millions into poverty, then yes, you are horrible for wanting to fund them. I actually have no problems with people who build up money to satisfy "dreams" of the "travel around the world by sailboat" or "establish a youth symphony orchestra for inner city kids" type. However, this represents a minuscule proportion of the apparent "dreams" of the ultra-rich, which generally seem to revolve around becoming ever richer and richer with no regard for human life and suffering.
I'm willing to accept being poor for a while in order to have a chance to get what I want.
How generous of you. However, a shitload of people aren't given a chance to accept being poor, but are thrust into it from birth, with infinitesimal chances of ever reaching beyond grinding poverty. I wouldn't object to a world where a person living a decent, comfortable life could choose to lower their standard of living on a gamble for greater gains. But, that's not the case today --- the rich start with much and get more, stripped from the poor who start with little and end with less.
The nice thing about pure capitalism is that the people who gain power are the ones who work for it
Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Oh, my sides! I'm sure the Walton (Wal*Mart) heirs who were *born* into immense fortunes have personally put in so much more work than the approximately *half of all US families* who together own the same amount of wealth. Not to say that the ultra-rich don't sometimes have to put in some work; but it's not the work that distinguishes them from people who put in immense lifetimes of work and never come anywhere near being rich.
However, bitcoin speculators may have other sources of wealth to handle the "eating" part of their needs. Assuming that you aren't both living hand-to-mouth and paid wages in BTC, then you'll be inclined to sit on your BTC while spending your $$ to buy daily bread. People do buy computers now --- but rarely more than a limited amount that does not exhaust their total resources, or cut into their retirement fund stocks. The practical upshot is that BTC is more likely to remain a deflationary speculative gambling instrument, rather than a useful currency for buying food (a function far better facilitated by existing mildly inflationary currencies, which favor economic activity over hoarding).
The experiment quoted only indicated the breakdown of social structures after straining resource availability through sufficiently high population density. Prior to this, the "culture" wasn't in a state of war and turmoil.
Human social structures may be an order of magnitude bigger, but we've also got a few orders of magnitude bigger brains. This includes the critical ability to intellectually analyze the functioning of social structures and make changes, rather than rolling along with instinct until all hell breaks loose. Those who consider a state of war and brutality to be inevitable among humans are those who want to deny the existence of human minds, and their ability to analyze and alter social arrangements (denial of which is usually prompted by the brain-denying party profiting from a current state of violence and dysfunction).
The fact that employers are expecting unpaid free labor is not because employees are coming out of the "ivory tower" with any less practical educations than they always have. It's because employers, faced with more employees than they need (a situation they soundly encourage) are able to get away with pitting the potential labor pool against each other to accept ludicrously low wages, while skipping the job-specific training that employers would have provided in the past. There were no "good old days" when PhD's stepped out the door ready from day one to do exactly what employers needed --- instead, employers would make a long-term investment in an employee to mentor and train them in real world specifics; building expertise over several years at the start of a life-long career (not a 12 month temporary gig).
As I have pointed out above, the tenure system has already been steadily in decline for several decades. Schools have fewer tenured positions; and they do not have a monopoly on course content. Indeed, tenured researchers often have the least to do with teaching, which is planned by administrators and foisted off on low-paid adjuncts. If the power of tenured professors within institutions was a negative factor on the quality of instruction, then the quality of instruction should have been steadily rising over the past few decades as the position of tenured professors has become marginalized (their "disproportionate level of power" is in decline). The fact that the correlation goes the opposite way empirically counters your entire argument --- in the "good old days" when academia seemed more "connected" to the world, tenured professors were an unchallengeable cornerstone of academic institutions.
If academia has become any more distant from the private sector, it is because the private sector has itself moved away from all norms of human decency and career professionalism. Educated workers are treated as expendable, temporary labor to be shredded up and spit out, not lifetime-career professionals deserving respect. Companies have become ever bigger and more management-heavy, replacing leadership by people who understood engineering/science/whatever-the-company-was-doing with cookie-cutter empty suit MBAs. If you want to talk about "concentrated power" problems, the "concentrated power" problem is that of multimillionaire management class with an iron grip over industry, who are more than happy to shit all over the lives and careers of mere PhDs.
By "money is left to its own," one of course means "the rich are left to their own" (being the ones with the most money, which controls how money is used to produce more money for the rich, etc.). "Capitalism" left to its own is an inevitable slide into oligarchy, with an oppressive tiny elite at the top. The "invisible hand of the free market" is not a beneficent God working for the good of all if only entrusted with our full hearts; it is the manipulating iron fist of whoever has the most money, squeezing the labor and life out of those with less.
The US has to spend more on education because it spends so much less on providing a decent quality of life for overwhelming numbers of children outside school. Lack of living wage and labor protections, along with a generally terrible social safety net and public commons, means that millions of kids arrive at the school door in no condition to learn. When you can't afford nutritious meals at home, regular healthcare, or a clean and calm environment to sleep in, or access to extra-curricular educational and cultural enrichment, it's no wonder the schools have trouble producing decent results. Countries with uniformly better educational outcomes aren't severely cutting corners on the rest of the fabric of society, making students suffer environments of severe inequality, exploitation, and poverty. The entire degraded societal fabric of poverty and inequality makes changes in any one area seem so futile and expensive in the US --- which is used as an argument against improving any one area. But, really, you need a mass overhaul of the whole, to build the foundations of a functioning society (rather than an exploitative oligarchy).
Tenured professors at the top are not the reason there are too few academic positions. They are not pushing for that --- saying "oh noes, keep the department tiny and never add new positions". Unlike in the private sector, the top professors are not an immense drain on the resources of the institution: compensation ratios between top positions and median/lower workers are not hundreds to one. Those tenured professors are probably making more like a 5:1 wage ratio compared to less-than-fast-food-wages gradstudents at the bottom (and 10:1 would be exceptional). Removing them from the system doesn't free up vast resources for increased pay and positions at lower levels (unlike in private industry, where the tiny percentage at the top walks off with the vast majority of the money, personally pocketing billions of dollars stolen from the wages and jobs of workers).
Limitations on good positions for educated people are not imposed from "within" by tenured department chairs. They come from "without," in terms of the total amount of funding available to universities, to be used to hire folks and run research groups. When government research funding is flatlined (or declining in real dollars), in order to save a microscopic fraction of the percent off the budget so the ultra-wealthy will not have to pay more taxes, then there is no way to expand employment opportunities for highly qualified individuals. Similarly, the unavailability of jobs outside the academic sector to take advantage of well-educated individuals, cannot be blamed on what a handful of professors is doing; this is a systematic result of our immensely unequal society, focused on serving the desires of a tiny wealthy elite while generating mass poverty and unemployment for everyone else.
For the president's kids, certain logistical considerations make this nigh impossible. Consider that those kids are way up near the top of the list as the world's juiciest kidnap/assassination/crazy-whackjob-murder targets. If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to be going to the same public school as the president's, because any such school would necessarily need to be utterly isolated and cut off from the outside world, under constant heavy guard and severely restricted access.
I do certainly favor the general principle, though --- and, in cases where the complicating logistics of being a super-high-profile celebrity do not exist --- I think it's highly hypocritical when elitist goons with kids in private school infiltrate school boards and the upper public school administrative chain, for the specific purpose of destroying public schools to save on taxes.
Funny how the situation has nearly been reversed: going to the bustling Big City was once viewed as a way to achieve anonymity, privacy, and freedom not available in slower-moving small-town life (where your neighbors, employer, and vendors knew everything you were doing). Where do you go today for the mythical idyllic private contemplative life, if you're an ordinary middle-class person without millions of dollars stashed away to live privately with no job or nosy neighbors?
Creeping technological surveillance doesn't just hit you when you intentionally go out to be a partying socialite. Just walking down the street; taking the bus; picking up some groceries at the grocery store increasingly puts you at risk of having your every move and action entered into tracking DBs. When everyone around you is wearing Google Panopticons, you're not going to get tagged and tracked just for partying with friends --- you'll be tagged and tracked just for standing next to people in line for the mundane (and formerly practically anonymous) activities of daily life. Personal behavioral changes can only go so far when the "niches" available for private life are eroded away from all sides.
Blaming all these societal/academic issues on tenure is incorrect. The tenure system has its problems, but it also yields large advantages to academic work. Most importantly, it puts a few professors above the fray of very short-term, ignorant, simplistic-metrics-driven management decisions. There's a lot of important long-term progress to be made in fields of study that doesn't always fit into the "publish-or-perish" and "maximize each year's grant money" models; placing quality over quantity is a possibility protected by the tenure system.
Given that tenure positions are becoming rarer, with far more professorships being ephemeral and low-paid (especially for teaching positions), the tenure system can hardly be blamed for the educational outcomes from universities. If anything, if tenure was a problem, then things should have gotten much better over the past few years alongside the erosion of the tenure system.
Blaming any part of the external job market situation on tenure is downright ignorant. Graduates aren't working at McDonalds because of decisions made by some tenured professor; the job market is set by decisions from a super-wealthy oligarch class far from the ivory tower.
What does this idiotic made-up fantasy story have to do with anything?
Gradstudents are at the core of getting stuff done in the lab in your own research group. If you're neglecting your gradstudents' effectiveness, you're destroying your own research group from the inside out. Not that some advisors don't neglect gradstudents --- but they do so such that gradstudents learn enough anyway (through peers / self-study / etc.) to keep the lab going.
After that, foisting off a failing student as a prize postdoc --- in your tiny subfield where everyone knows everyone else --- isn't gonna happen more than once, since it will ruin your own reputation in the field to have incompetent idiots going about naming you as their graduate advisor. Tenure may protect you against repercussions from your university administration, but when all your colleagues (including those sitting on funding agency science panels) decide you're an incompetent dick, say goodbye to having funding for a lab and students.
we'd all benefit if intercontinental telecommunications links had 50% lower latency.
How so? I can't recall any personal harm from overseas communications latency taking a few extra milliseconds; I still seem to be able to get all the data I need from over yonder. Besides oligarchical leeches manipulating markets abstracted from any practical or beneficial use, how do the rest of "we all" benefit from latency reductions beyond reasonable-for-human-time-scale-interaction latencies?
And I think impediments against cars should be far greater; alongside extensive expansion of public transit infrastructure. I certainly don't think that all traffic rules and car manufacturing safety regulations should be removed --- noting that the 40k+ per year murdered in car incidents is significantly less per capita than car-related deaths prior to extensive restrictions on what car manufacturers were allowed to dump on the public for quick profit. I would also note that extensive restrictions on how cars are allowed to operate are responsible for air quality in areas such as the Los Angeles basin not brutally shredding the lungs of anyone in the region. So, yes, strict restrictions favoring the public good over private profit derived from "tragedy of the commons" are --- on a life and death scale --- highly beneficial, as demonstrated by the automotive sector.
Don't worry; I'm sure Scalia et al. would be overjoyed to support any Supreme Court case claiming that ethically challenged corporofascists deserve the fullest special protection of the law.
Thank you for resolving the "fucking moron or paid shill" question.
I'm never more than 3 clicks away from an offline mode
Yes, and I'm sure that you and most smartphone users assiduously select "offline" mode in every possible situation. If "online" usage benefitted you, but violated the personal privacy norms of strangers around you, I'm sure you'd be enthusiastic to turn your smartphone into a dumb brick with zero access to convenient online services. Wait; nevermind; your answer to the conundrum above, along with that of every other Google-megacorporate-advertiser-cock-sucking technofetishist, seems to indicate that I shouldn't entrust responsible public action to your self-centered whims. Do you honestly swear to shut off your damn phone every time it might violate the common decency norms of those around you (movie theaters indicate not...) --- and would you, and every other Glasshole, respect the privacy of fellow citizens with your megacorporate advertiser head-mounted panopticon?
If and when they push out a product that's constantly recording, then you'll have legitimate reason to complain.
Because it's never worth having the least bit of foresight and being worried about the inevitable path towards profit-maximizing asshattery that such products will follow. Would you like to place any bets that Google won't be working towards maximizing the amount of data flowing towards their creeper cloud?
Wearable computing is going to be normalized whether you like it or not
Well, then, you've no reason to waste time responding to me. I, however, believe that mass public revulsion and reaction against oppressive moves are capable of changing the outcomes of history. Sorry, the "accept the ass-fucking you peons will get without complaint" line of argument doesn't convince me; I'll continue to push for rejection of unchecked mass privacy violation. I would note that improved privacy rights, backed by public demands, are available in civilized parts of the world --- the US lags in this area of public rights, as in much else; but I haven't entirely given up hope of change for the better.
That's funny. Do you remember what the original Luddites did? You've got some nice role models for your "forethought and conscience".
Yes, they smashed power-looms that were resulting in brutally terrible working conditions for the common man, in return for massive profits for a tiny elite wealthy class. Such actions resulted in concessions benefitting the majority of humanity --- as they have throughout all later history, when working-class revolts against the brutality of Capitalists have secured everything that makes life in developed countries tolerable today. I do admire my role models, and study their ideology and action.
Furthermore, while it might be difficult to perfectly match light levels while standing behind the canvas, cutting-edge artists of the era (of which Vermeer was certainly an example) were quite focused on, and capable of, understanding the effects of light to the next level. Vermeer might well have walked over to the wall and closely compared brightness levels in cleverly quantitative ways in order to get the lighting right --- it's the kind of stuff cutting-edge people were really concerned with at the time, and the reason deeply insightful light and color relations appeared in the best artwork of the era. Such paintings were not slapdash works from untrained-eye impressions; Vermeer was known for painting slowly, giving plenty of time for meticulously studied naturalistic results.
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Don't worry, your friends and family will help upload all your personal information to Facebook to sell to advertisers, to make sure you don't miss out on anything.
We need this translated into Orcish, too, so the professional global warming denialists can properly read and respond to it.
"Post-capitalist"? We're reaching the zenith of everything Capitalism has sought to achieve. Record income disparities with unparalleled wealth for the super-wealthy, concentrating control over every aspect of society in the hands of a tiny elite. Thanks to Facebook, "the markets" (a.k.a. billionaire investors) even control human social interactions once considered sacrosanct from corporate intrusion. The Capitalist economy is all about the ascendancy of the 1% (and the 0.01% within that).
There are reasons --- besides mushy sentimentality --- that people in rural/agricultural communities to this day keep around both cats and dogs. House cats, barn cats, hunting dogs, herding dogs --- these aren't simply pets, but working members of the community. And cats that grow up around dogs can stand their own ground pretty well; there's nothing like watching the baffled terror of an unsuspecting dog who tries picking on a cat which isn't a pussy.
Re-using the same "high security" or "very high security" password across financial institutions, etc., is a recipe for disaster. You may have very high security standards... but it turns out sometimes those tasked with taking care of the peons' data don't (and fail on simple precautions like salted hash password storage). Whichever institution has the crappiest security gets hacked (maybe even that old bank you moved your money out of years ago), and suddenly all your accounts are vulnerable.
The proper and secure way to do things is one high-security passphrase, that decrypts your (well-backed-up) encrypted store of thoroughly unmemorable random character passwords for each institution. It takes a couple extra seconds to look up the password for each site, and puts additional control over security in your own hands (which care more about you personally losing all your monies than some random bank contractor). And, for anything that you use moderately often, you'll end up remembering the random-jumble password just fine after the first several times typing it in.
Cats have traditionally played very important roles in pest control --- keeping rodents out of granaries, etc. --- which is how they gained widespread acceptance and favor in human societies. A farm or city with a few semi-domesticated cats around was greatly preferable to swarms of rats. Ancient Egyptian civilization --- the ones who put cats on the level of gods (which status the cats have never forgotten) --- was able to become a powerful empire through large-scale storage and distribution of grain, requiring methods (such as cats) for preventing mass-scale spoilage of food supplies due to vermin infestation.
Right, so, in summary, BTC shifts further costs to consumers (who lose out by needing to spend money that provides benefits to hoarders) to favor the profits of wealthy investors (who get to hoard the profit-accumulating money, at the expense of consumers). To me, this is a big negative for a currency, since I'd prefer to not trickle-up wealth while grinding down the common man. However, I suppose this makes BTC look great to the tiny wealth-hoarding class at the top.
Family social conditions are certainly a big part of this --- and the US ultra-Capitalist system has been extremely destructive of family structures compared to more civilized countries. Forcing parents to work multiple minimum-wage jobs, with ever-changing erratic hours, does not permit for a stable family life --- you're not at home with the kids when you're working 80 hours a week to keep a home. Nor does the US global-chart-topping incarceration rate, for minor or non-existing offenses, which results in huge numbers of already underprivileged kids being further stripped of family. Functioning family units are among the first victims of Capitalist exploitation, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history.
I want to be rich. Is it so horrible to want to have enough money to fund my dreams?
If your dream is to mercilessly grind millions into poverty, then yes, you are horrible for wanting to fund them. I actually have no problems with people who build up money to satisfy "dreams" of the "travel around the world by sailboat" or "establish a youth symphony orchestra for inner city kids" type. However, this represents a minuscule proportion of the apparent "dreams" of the ultra-rich, which generally seem to revolve around becoming ever richer and richer with no regard for human life and suffering.
I'm willing to accept being poor for a while in order to have a chance to get what I want.
How generous of you. However, a shitload of people aren't given a chance to accept being poor, but are thrust into it from birth, with infinitesimal chances of ever reaching beyond grinding poverty. I wouldn't object to a world where a person living a decent, comfortable life could choose to lower their standard of living on a gamble for greater gains. But, that's not the case today --- the rich start with much and get more, stripped from the poor who start with little and end with less.
The nice thing about pure capitalism is that the people who gain power are the ones who work for it
Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Oh, my sides! I'm sure the Walton (Wal*Mart) heirs who were *born* into immense fortunes have personally put in so much more work than the approximately *half of all US families* who together own the same amount of wealth. Not to say that the ultra-rich don't sometimes have to put in some work; but it's not the work that distinguishes them from people who put in immense lifetimes of work and never come anywhere near being rich.
However, bitcoin speculators may have other sources of wealth to handle the "eating" part of their needs. Assuming that you aren't both living hand-to-mouth and paid wages in BTC, then you'll be inclined to sit on your BTC while spending your $$ to buy daily bread. People do buy computers now --- but rarely more than a limited amount that does not exhaust their total resources, or cut into their retirement fund stocks. The practical upshot is that BTC is more likely to remain a deflationary speculative gambling instrument, rather than a useful currency for buying food (a function far better facilitated by existing mildly inflationary currencies, which favor economic activity over hoarding).
The experiment quoted only indicated the breakdown of social structures after straining resource availability through sufficiently high population density. Prior to this, the "culture" wasn't in a state of war and turmoil.
Human social structures may be an order of magnitude bigger, but we've also got a few orders of magnitude bigger brains. This includes the critical ability to intellectually analyze the functioning of social structures and make changes, rather than rolling along with instinct until all hell breaks loose. Those who consider a state of war and brutality to be inevitable among humans are those who want to deny the existence of human minds, and their ability to analyze and alter social arrangements (denial of which is usually prompted by the brain-denying party profiting from a current state of violence and dysfunction).
The fact that employers are expecting unpaid free labor is not because employees are coming out of the "ivory tower" with any less practical educations than they always have. It's because employers, faced with more employees than they need (a situation they soundly encourage) are able to get away with pitting the potential labor pool against each other to accept ludicrously low wages, while skipping the job-specific training that employers would have provided in the past. There were no "good old days" when PhD's stepped out the door ready from day one to do exactly what employers needed --- instead, employers would make a long-term investment in an employee to mentor and train them in real world specifics; building expertise over several years at the start of a life-long career (not a 12 month temporary gig).
As I have pointed out above, the tenure system has already been steadily in decline for several decades. Schools have fewer tenured positions; and they do not have a monopoly on course content. Indeed, tenured researchers often have the least to do with teaching, which is planned by administrators and foisted off on low-paid adjuncts. If the power of tenured professors within institutions was a negative factor on the quality of instruction, then the quality of instruction should have been steadily rising over the past few decades as the position of tenured professors has become marginalized (their "disproportionate level of power" is in decline). The fact that the correlation goes the opposite way empirically counters your entire argument --- in the "good old days" when academia seemed more "connected" to the world, tenured professors were an unchallengeable cornerstone of academic institutions.
If academia has become any more distant from the private sector, it is because the private sector has itself moved away from all norms of human decency and career professionalism. Educated workers are treated as expendable, temporary labor to be shredded up and spit out, not lifetime-career professionals deserving respect. Companies have become ever bigger and more management-heavy, replacing leadership by people who understood engineering/science/whatever-the-company-was-doing with cookie-cutter empty suit MBAs. If you want to talk about "concentrated power" problems, the "concentrated power" problem is that of multimillionaire management class with an iron grip over industry, who are more than happy to shit all over the lives and careers of mere PhDs.
By "money is left to its own," one of course means "the rich are left to their own" (being the ones with the most money, which controls how money is used to produce more money for the rich, etc.). "Capitalism" left to its own is an inevitable slide into oligarchy, with an oppressive tiny elite at the top. The "invisible hand of the free market" is not a beneficent God working for the good of all if only entrusted with our full hearts; it is the manipulating iron fist of whoever has the most money, squeezing the labor and life out of those with less.
The US has to spend more on education because it spends so much less on providing a decent quality of life for overwhelming numbers of children outside school. Lack of living wage and labor protections, along with a generally terrible social safety net and public commons, means that millions of kids arrive at the school door in no condition to learn. When you can't afford nutritious meals at home, regular healthcare, or a clean and calm environment to sleep in, or access to extra-curricular educational and cultural enrichment, it's no wonder the schools have trouble producing decent results. Countries with uniformly better educational outcomes aren't severely cutting corners on the rest of the fabric of society, making students suffer environments of severe inequality, exploitation, and poverty. The entire degraded societal fabric of poverty and inequality makes changes in any one area seem so futile and expensive in the US --- which is used as an argument against improving any one area. But, really, you need a mass overhaul of the whole, to build the foundations of a functioning society (rather than an exploitative oligarchy).
Tenured professors at the top are not the reason there are too few academic positions. They are not pushing for that --- saying "oh noes, keep the department tiny and never add new positions". Unlike in the private sector, the top professors are not an immense drain on the resources of the institution: compensation ratios between top positions and median/lower workers are not hundreds to one. Those tenured professors are probably making more like a 5:1 wage ratio compared to less-than-fast-food-wages gradstudents at the bottom (and 10:1 would be exceptional). Removing them from the system doesn't free up vast resources for increased pay and positions at lower levels (unlike in private industry, where the tiny percentage at the top walks off with the vast majority of the money, personally pocketing billions of dollars stolen from the wages and jobs of workers).
Limitations on good positions for educated people are not imposed from "within" by tenured department chairs. They come from "without," in terms of the total amount of funding available to universities, to be used to hire folks and run research groups. When government research funding is flatlined (or declining in real dollars), in order to save a microscopic fraction of the percent off the budget so the ultra-wealthy will not have to pay more taxes, then there is no way to expand employment opportunities for highly qualified individuals. Similarly, the unavailability of jobs outside the academic sector to take advantage of well-educated individuals, cannot be blamed on what a handful of professors is doing; this is a systematic result of our immensely unequal society, focused on serving the desires of a tiny wealthy elite while generating mass poverty and unemployment for everyone else.
For the president's kids, certain logistical considerations make this nigh impossible. Consider that those kids are way up near the top of the list as the world's juiciest kidnap/assassination/crazy-whackjob-murder targets. If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to be going to the same public school as the president's, because any such school would necessarily need to be utterly isolated and cut off from the outside world, under constant heavy guard and severely restricted access.
I do certainly favor the general principle, though --- and, in cases where the complicating logistics of being a super-high-profile celebrity do not exist --- I think it's highly hypocritical when elitist goons with kids in private school infiltrate school boards and the upper public school administrative chain, for the specific purpose of destroying public schools to save on taxes.
Funny how the situation has nearly been reversed: going to the bustling Big City was once viewed as a way to achieve anonymity, privacy, and freedom not available in slower-moving small-town life (where your neighbors, employer, and vendors knew everything you were doing). Where do you go today for the mythical idyllic private contemplative life, if you're an ordinary middle-class person without millions of dollars stashed away to live privately with no job or nosy neighbors?
Creeping technological surveillance doesn't just hit you when you intentionally go out to be a partying socialite. Just walking down the street; taking the bus; picking up some groceries at the grocery store increasingly puts you at risk of having your every move and action entered into tracking DBs. When everyone around you is wearing Google Panopticons, you're not going to get tagged and tracked just for partying with friends --- you'll be tagged and tracked just for standing next to people in line for the mundane (and formerly practically anonymous) activities of daily life. Personal behavioral changes can only go so far when the "niches" available for private life are eroded away from all sides.
Blaming all these societal/academic issues on tenure is incorrect. The tenure system has its problems, but it also yields large advantages to academic work. Most importantly, it puts a few professors above the fray of very short-term, ignorant, simplistic-metrics-driven management decisions. There's a lot of important long-term progress to be made in fields of study that doesn't always fit into the "publish-or-perish" and "maximize each year's grant money" models; placing quality over quantity is a possibility protected by the tenure system.
Given that tenure positions are becoming rarer, with far more professorships being ephemeral and low-paid (especially for teaching positions), the tenure system can hardly be blamed for the educational outcomes from universities. If anything, if tenure was a problem, then things should have gotten much better over the past few years alongside the erosion of the tenure system.
Blaming any part of the external job market situation on tenure is downright ignorant. Graduates aren't working at McDonalds because of decisions made by some tenured professor; the job market is set by decisions from a super-wealthy oligarch class far from the ivory tower.
What does this idiotic made-up fantasy story have to do with anything?
Gradstudents are at the core of getting stuff done in the lab in your own research group. If you're neglecting your gradstudents' effectiveness, you're destroying your own research group from the inside out. Not that some advisors don't neglect gradstudents --- but they do so such that gradstudents learn enough anyway (through peers / self-study / etc.) to keep the lab going.
After that, foisting off a failing student as a prize postdoc --- in your tiny subfield where everyone knows everyone else --- isn't gonna happen more than once, since it will ruin your own reputation in the field to have incompetent idiots going about naming you as their graduate advisor. Tenure may protect you against repercussions from your university administration, but when all your colleagues (including those sitting on funding agency science panels) decide you're an incompetent dick, say goodbye to having funding for a lab and students.
we'd all benefit if intercontinental telecommunications links had 50% lower latency.
How so? I can't recall any personal harm from overseas communications latency taking a few extra milliseconds; I still seem to be able to get all the data I need from over yonder. Besides oligarchical leeches manipulating markets abstracted from any practical or beneficial use, how do the rest of "we all" benefit from latency reductions beyond reasonable-for-human-time-scale-interaction latencies?
And I think impediments against cars should be far greater; alongside extensive expansion of public transit infrastructure. I certainly don't think that all traffic rules and car manufacturing safety regulations should be removed --- noting that the 40k+ per year murdered in car incidents is significantly less per capita than car-related deaths prior to extensive restrictions on what car manufacturers were allowed to dump on the public for quick profit. I would also note that extensive restrictions on how cars are allowed to operate are responsible for air quality in areas such as the Los Angeles basin not brutally shredding the lungs of anyone in the region. So, yes, strict restrictions favoring the public good over private profit derived from "tragedy of the commons" are --- on a life and death scale --- highly beneficial, as demonstrated by the automotive sector.
glassholes aren't a protected class
Don't worry; I'm sure Scalia et al. would be overjoyed to support any Supreme Court case claiming that ethically challenged corporofascists deserve the fullest special protection of the law.
I'm not a paid shill.
Thank you for resolving the "fucking moron or paid shill" question.
I'm never more than 3 clicks away from an offline mode
Yes, and I'm sure that you and most smartphone users assiduously select "offline" mode in every possible situation. If "online" usage benefitted you, but violated the personal privacy norms of strangers around you, I'm sure you'd be enthusiastic to turn your smartphone into a dumb brick with zero access to convenient online services. Wait; nevermind; your answer to the conundrum above, along with that of every other Google-megacorporate-advertiser-cock-sucking technofetishist, seems to indicate that I shouldn't entrust responsible public action to your self-centered whims. Do you honestly swear to shut off your damn phone every time it might violate the common decency norms of those around you (movie theaters indicate not...) --- and would you, and every other Glasshole, respect the privacy of fellow citizens with your megacorporate advertiser head-mounted panopticon?
If and when they push out a product that's constantly recording, then you'll have legitimate reason to complain.
Because it's never worth having the least bit of foresight and being worried about the inevitable path towards profit-maximizing asshattery that such products will follow. Would you like to place any bets that Google won't be working towards maximizing the amount of data flowing towards their creeper cloud?
Wearable computing is going to be normalized whether you like it or not
Well, then, you've no reason to waste time responding to me. I, however, believe that mass public revulsion and reaction against oppressive moves are capable of changing the outcomes of history. Sorry, the "accept the ass-fucking you peons will get without complaint" line of argument doesn't convince me; I'll continue to push for rejection of unchecked mass privacy violation. I would note that improved privacy rights, backed by public demands, are available in civilized parts of the world --- the US lags in this area of public rights, as in much else; but I haven't entirely given up hope of change for the better.
That's funny. Do you remember what the original Luddites did? You've got some nice role models for your "forethought and conscience".
Yes, they smashed power-looms that were resulting in brutally terrible working conditions for the common man, in return for massive profits for a tiny elite wealthy class. Such actions resulted in concessions benefitting the majority of humanity --- as they have throughout all later history, when working-class revolts against the brutality of Capitalists have secured everything that makes life in developed countries tolerable today. I do admire my role models, and study their ideology and action.
Furthermore, while it might be difficult to perfectly match light levels while standing behind the canvas, cutting-edge artists of the era (of which Vermeer was certainly an example) were quite focused on, and capable of, understanding the effects of light to the next level. Vermeer might well have walked over to the wall and closely compared brightness levels in cleverly quantitative ways in order to get the lighting right --- it's the kind of stuff cutting-edge people were really concerned with at the time, and the reason deeply insightful light and color relations appeared in the best artwork of the era. Such paintings were not slapdash works from untrained-eye impressions; Vermeer was known for painting slowly, giving plenty of time for meticulously studied naturalistic results.