For most meetings, I write on the agenda, then scan it, and almost never look at it again. For meetings I chair, I have an outline of the agenda on my laptop (omnioutliner) and add children bullets as needed. For research, I use Moonreader or Acrobat to capture/export highlights & comments.
Two things I came across recently on this topic: 1) Walmart has recently been taking right around the full corporate tax rate (31% is what they paid in the last year on record, iirc); 2) the guys and some expert types at Freakonomics or PlanetMoney or SomeOtherMoneyNerdBlog recommended reducing the corporate income tax rate to something like 20-25% AND closing loopholes. The consensus was that this would get corporations paying their taxes here, because it would be close enough to what they're saving by cheating, factoring in costs for legal liability and the PR hit. BUT they all agreed this would never happen because one side would fight the loopholes and the other side would fight the tax decrease and, well, it's not always election year but IS always fundraising time.
FWIW
"In April [2005], the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious watchdog group, claimed that there have been numerous incidents of religious bias and official promotion of fundamentalist Christianity at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Col."
http://www.monitor.net/monitor...
"A 2010 survey found 41 percent of non-Christian cadets faced unwanted proselytizing, even as the religious majority felt that their freedom of speech was being infringed upon."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"I am on staff at USAFA and will talk about Jesus Christ my Lord and savior to everyone that I work with.”
http://www.jta.org/2013/11/21/...
I don't think it's just protecting against idiot users. It's also about shoving us into the "cloud" where we can be somehow monetized, either by network access, storage volume, or information collection. Why else would iPhoto drop local networking except to put your photos in Apple's servers? Or Android Marshmallow require you to allow MTP every time you hook up a USB cable except to make noncloud file exchange a little bit more of a PITA? Sure there's "curation" at the Apple Store, but there's also control, information gathering, the possibility of add revenue and so on. I guess I sound cynical, but I'm not sure you can actually be cynical enough about all this.
I wish I had mod points today. I study Modernist lit, but I came to it by way of medieval lit. It is absolutely unsurprising for parchment to be much older than the text on it. That sort of thing is extremely common. It's really troubling to me that the summary and so many posts here keep saying "paper"; parchment is an entirely different thing, and it was used much differently. It's quite hard to get a good animal skin free of blemishes, and then hard to get that animal skin down to a finished product. The resulting parchment is expensive and tended to be reused numerous times. It's not uncommon for a parchment to be 100s of years older than text on it. This news story is interesting but also really a nonstory. I hate to be this way, but the only reason it's a story is the sort of "gotcha" anti-Islam slant that's put on the science. I haven't seen the original research yet, but if it was at all couched in this sort of "bang, Islam busted" sort of way, it's really quite irresponsible. (NB: I'm a big old atheist, and would love to see debunking of any and all religions. But this ain't that.)
My wife, a former stewardess for a European carrier, just suggested that this might, in part, be about safety. She thinks that decreasing the thickness of the luggage, but not the other dimensions to any significant degree, suggests that the European carriers may have been pushing toward underseat stowage of the carryons, which is much safer than the overhead bin. Basically the overhead bins are too flimsy to keep luggage from flying around. She also believes that this is a follow-on effect of charging for checked luggage. Anyway, not arguing against anyone's position, but her theory made sense so I was looking for a good place to share it.
I'm on the fence as to whether my next laptop will be a Macbook. I'm not up on messing with security certificates. It took me about 10 seconds to get from Anonymous Coward's tip to a blocked CNNIC certificate. I think that it's within the scope of regular users. My cousin just did it, and she runs a modeling agency and was trained in, well, modeling. Macs do have a pretty easy interface. Say what you will, but that allowed me to do my little thing and get back to wasting time on the internet instead of grading papers.
I understand your position, and I appreciate the references to Diamond Age. But, my kids have school teachers fishing for information on my family. You know, the usual stuff about "do mommy and daddy do drugs?" Our government and retail and other services have their noses so far up my butt, I'm burping their boogers. The cops are roaming around with stingrays and x-rays, and some airports are still using rapey scans. And my kids are always running up to me reciting their need for the latest tacky plastic crap that teaches really stupid things--or some garbage about how an adult or other child is teaching them about eternal damnation or Sky Daddy and Zombie Boy. And all this despite the fact that we don't watch commercial TV in our house. But they get enough at school. Anyway, point is: in a climate like this, it's hard for me to call any reaction to this sort of "cloud-enabled" toy an over-reaction. Burroughs was a nut, indeed, but he was on the money on "the paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."
"Nonsensical" seems a bit strong. The article describes language's real "rules" as conventional, coming from usage, and labels more pedantic approaches to rules as stylistics. That seems to me to be pretty accurate. The description doesn't approach registers of speech, and we do need to consider those. But there are lots of "grammar rules" that are really just elements of style best ignored and which are often misused. Some examples: don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split an infinitive, "passive voice." That last one is a hoot because most of the people who complain about its use can't define it accurately and fail to recognize that it is often valuable. It's also a good example of how there are better ways to approach this sort of thing than applying these particular rules. People commonly attack the "passive voice" because it confuses the actor. So it's much better to talk to people about making agency clear in a sentence, or about why one might be trying to obscure agency. Anyway, that's all my two cents. (I am an English professor, and I've taught for almost 25 years, but I am not a linguist nor a composition expert. So, I'm offering an informed but not quite expert opinion.)
I'm an assistant professor, the lowest rank. And I'm in the humanities My salary is just very slightly over $50k. I am paid more than most of my colleagues because my institution was bidding against another similar institution. A starting humanities prof will earn in the mid-40s, as of now. A few years ago it was the low 40s. I'm getting the numbers based on what I know about several R1s, one very, very well-endowed, and from lesser schools. Event at the highest rank, I--and my colleagues at peer institutions--will never see six figures. I don't have any polemical intent. This is just FYI because I hear crazy figures thrown around. In the humanities, you have to hold a quite well-supported endowed chair to hit six figures. I know it's different in STEM. At my school, which is more or less bankrupt, a lot of the STEM folks start in the mid 70s.
I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....
I've been there, first a grad student and now a professor. I also teach people about how to write, so I follow the research on this. First, as you age, this will happen some; it started for me in my early 40s. Second, you don't need a lot of these distractions. You might get push-back from people; you might think you need this stuff, but start aggressively using airplane mode on your phone. Use software on your computer that blocks distracting domains for a set period of time, or even go somewhere without internet access to work. Or leave your networked devices at home. Simple. Third, the body is part of this, nutrition, sleep, cardio exercise, are all shown to have significant impact on ability to concentrate. Fourth: pay attention to your moods, set work goals, don't whip up on yourself while making yourself work, etc. Fifth and final: keep all activity sustainable and form good habits (avoid bad habits like butt-chugging caffeine, popping Ritalin, or maintaining a marijuana fog).
"Without the state protecting them, they will fall under their own overwhelming incompetence." - King Neckbeard.
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw
I'm assuming the question is Windows specific, and I use MacOS and Ubuntu, and haven't really had to use Windows since Windows 3.... So I'll just be only marginally helpful and say/ask, "Aren't there a ton of apps out there that do that already?" I know on Mac there's lots of little doodads that pop up a ruler. And doesn't OneNote, and a lot of other stuff, do that handwriting recognition? I know it's baked-in on MacOS; isn't it on Windows too? And doesn't any app, really, have the ability to make a template when it has "Save as", or if the file-system can lock a file? I'd bet Windows even has an equivalent to the Mac stationery file-attribute. Me, I get by with TextEdit (rtf editor), Keynote (presentation), and a free app called Highlight that throws a transparent drawing layer over my screen. I know everyone's uses are different, but--just to be clear--can't most of your problems be solved with some screen mirroring and a regular app? The bonus then is that you can transport your stuff to machines that don't have that bloated piece of Smartboard excrement on them.
Common Core as a set of curricular guidelines isn't bad at all. The problems I see are: 1), the "coercion" -- cash-strapped districts really do have to jump at any money, so they rush into implementation; 2) more high-stakes standardized testing; that shit has already dominated and f*cked-up education; 3) corporate domination; Pearson and others stand to make fat, fat stacks of cash on the tests and the materials, and that's why they all poured money into the campaigns. I've seen first-hand what the Person vertically-integrated education ecosystem is like. They sell you shit in development, shit that doesn't work, and shit that's just plain shit. I hate them. NB: college professor at an institution that had a contract to use only Pearson; spouse is in instructional tech and shares my opinion. The best thing we could do is hire more teachers, pay them a little better, and start doing something to reduce the stranglehold that corporations like Pearson have on the education system. Stuff like Kahn Academy is fine, but I don't think online education gives students what they need, which is contact with an educated, adult mentor/teacher. (And, yeah, I know, a lot of teachers we have now don't fit that bill, but that's what young people need.)
I used to work at a planetarium helping school kids with telescopes. Our preferred scope was a dobsonian. I'd recommend a 4.5" dobsonian. The one sold by Orion isn't a bad deal, and they're pretty good quality. But that's $250. You can sometimes find a used dobsonian. A 6" or 8" would be a really good scope. I like the dobsonian because there's little to mess with. Too often the fancy scopes get between you and observing. And you might not even need a scope. There's a whole lot to be done with the naked eye or a cheap pair of binoculars (7x35 or 8x40 being good cheap choices, 7x50 being really nice). If you are on a really tight budget, a dobsonian is very easy to build. You'll need the mirrors, a spider, and a focuser. The rest of the stuff you can get at wally world or hardware stores. If you go that route, the best bang for your buck is usually a 6" f8 scope. But you can low-ball and even build as small as a 3" scope. In fact, a 3" f10 is a very, very simple mirror to grind. You'd done before you know it. You just then need to find someone to silver or aluminize it for you; it used to be easy to send a mirror off for surfacing like that.
YES! I am a university professor, and I can tell you that books are written saying this same thing. They go back to the early 1900s. The basic argument, from the academic side in the early days (like 1930s), runs like this: "University is for theory and cultural polish, community college is theory/polish for poorer or less-prepared people. Sure, industry wants us to do their training for them in junior colleges, but they should do it themselves. Besides, professors aren't good at professional training because we'll always be trailing the innovations of industry." To a degree that's a true statement. Sure, you can pull in engineers to do some teaching. But you won't get cutting-edge engineers at the junior college, and not many engineers (or other professionals) will give up the salary to be a professional. I, personally, differ in that I believe the "soft skills" and the theory and even education in the humanities all make better engineers. But I know that is not a widely-shared opinion on/.
I study feminism. I don't know where you are getting your historical information, but it's inaccurate. Yes, there were the nuts and extremists, like Valerie Solanas. There were and are women who hypothesize that patriarchal behaviors--which are distinct from or are a subset of male behaviors--are bad for humanity. And there are many, many other lines of thought from utopian free-love to men-are-bad. And stuff off in other directions. After a lot of study, I personally decided that the majority of feminist thought was positive for humanity, including men like myself. You can dismiss that as thought-crime, or you can do more reading. That's a bit of work, and it IS comfortable, isn't it, to have a scapegoat or a villain on which to hang all your troubles?
The MLA and others have reasons to not be forthright about the real issue: universities don't hire tenure-track professions nearly as often as they used to. Nowadays, over 70% of your humanities courses are taught by people off the tenure track, most of whom aren't even working full-time. The issue isn't "overproduction" of PhDs in the humanities as so many like to say. It's that universities don't want to pay for faculty. I know many may say "Good, those are useless elitest shits anyway." OK. Maybe we are. BUT consider what happens if getting the doctorate is as hard as it is now with as little payoff. Who can do that? Middle-class kids, or people who won't be taking on any risk to make this gamble? What then happens if we make it even harder to get the professorship by admitting fewer people into PhD programs. I'll tell you, from my experience, that having gone to good schools as a kid, having the right class markers, all that, those still make getting the PhD easier. As a first-generation college student, I struggled and struggled to get my doctorate and eventual professorship. If you reduce the number of people like me--ones who started out poor or middle-class or hispanic or black--you're only going to make it harder for the "token" students who do get admitted to hang in there with Biff and Buffy. Note also, I'm not talking about the Ivy leagues. I was a midwestern state school for my doctorate, and my classmates included the daughter of a VP of one of the big three automakers, the child of a megachurch preacher, a couple of heirs, and several people who were "comfortable" or who had family business they could fall back on. This was out of a group of 18. As far as I know, there were only three of us who were actually from backgrounds that meant our failure would have serious consequences. Anyway, I'm going on and on. The term for this is casualization of academic labor. Because we like big words. But what it means is that some of the things that seem like they'd punish the elites would only lead to more elitism.
And it won't be cheap for long in the US. The natty gas industry is lobbying for it to become a "foreign policy tool." They want to ship it across the sea, somehow making it cheaper on the European market than Russian gas. I wonder who'll end up subsidizing that? The struggling US economy, or the almost bankrupt European economies, or Germany?
Slashdot Mirror
For most meetings, I write on the agenda, then scan it, and almost never look at it again. For meetings I chair, I have an outline of the agenda on my laptop (omnioutliner) and add children bullets as needed. For research, I use Moonreader or Acrobat to capture/export highlights & comments.
Two things I came across recently on this topic: 1) Walmart has recently been taking right around the full corporate tax rate (31% is what they paid in the last year on record, iirc); 2) the guys and some expert types at Freakonomics or PlanetMoney or SomeOtherMoneyNerdBlog recommended reducing the corporate income tax rate to something like 20-25% AND closing loopholes. The consensus was that this would get corporations paying their taxes here, because it would be close enough to what they're saving by cheating, factoring in costs for legal liability and the PR hit. BUT they all agreed this would never happen because one side would fight the loopholes and the other side would fight the tax decrease and, well, it's not always election year but IS always fundraising time.
Holy Jesus Weebles! Slashdot ate my paragraph breaks again! Sorry about that.
FWIW "In April [2005], the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious watchdog group, claimed that there have been numerous incidents of religious bias and official promotion of fundamentalist Christianity at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Col." http://www.monitor.net/monitor... "A 2010 survey found 41 percent of non-Christian cadets faced unwanted proselytizing, even as the religious majority felt that their freedom of speech was being infringed upon." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... "I am on staff at USAFA and will talk about Jesus Christ my Lord and savior to everyone that I work with.” http://www.jta.org/2013/11/21/...
I don't think it's just protecting against idiot users. It's also about shoving us into the "cloud" where we can be somehow monetized, either by network access, storage volume, or information collection. Why else would iPhoto drop local networking except to put your photos in Apple's servers? Or Android Marshmallow require you to allow MTP every time you hook up a USB cable except to make noncloud file exchange a little bit more of a PITA? Sure there's "curation" at the Apple Store, but there's also control, information gathering, the possibility of add revenue and so on. I guess I sound cynical, but I'm not sure you can actually be cynical enough about all this.
I wish I had mod points today. I study Modernist lit, but I came to it by way of medieval lit. It is absolutely unsurprising for parchment to be much older than the text on it. That sort of thing is extremely common. It's really troubling to me that the summary and so many posts here keep saying "paper"; parchment is an entirely different thing, and it was used much differently. It's quite hard to get a good animal skin free of blemishes, and then hard to get that animal skin down to a finished product. The resulting parchment is expensive and tended to be reused numerous times. It's not uncommon for a parchment to be 100s of years older than text on it. This news story is interesting but also really a nonstory. I hate to be this way, but the only reason it's a story is the sort of "gotcha" anti-Islam slant that's put on the science. I haven't seen the original research yet, but if it was at all couched in this sort of "bang, Islam busted" sort of way, it's really quite irresponsible. (NB: I'm a big old atheist, and would love to see debunking of any and all religions. But this ain't that.)
My wife, a former stewardess for a European carrier, just suggested that this might, in part, be about safety. She thinks that decreasing the thickness of the luggage, but not the other dimensions to any significant degree, suggests that the European carriers may have been pushing toward underseat stowage of the carryons, which is much safer than the overhead bin. Basically the overhead bins are too flimsy to keep luggage from flying around. She also believes that this is a follow-on effect of charging for checked luggage. Anyway, not arguing against anyone's position, but her theory made sense so I was looking for a good place to share it.
Oh to have mod points! Yes, yes, big fat conduit with nice slow bends. And "blind" wall plates just waiting for use. Future-proof it.
I'm on the fence as to whether my next laptop will be a Macbook. I'm not up on messing with security certificates. It took me about 10 seconds to get from Anonymous Coward's tip to a blocked CNNIC certificate. I think that it's within the scope of regular users. My cousin just did it, and she runs a modeling agency and was trained in, well, modeling. Macs do have a pretty easy interface. Say what you will, but that allowed me to do my little thing and get back to wasting time on the internet instead of grading papers.
I understand your position, and I appreciate the references to Diamond Age. But, my kids have school teachers fishing for information on my family. You know, the usual stuff about "do mommy and daddy do drugs?" Our government and retail and other services have their noses so far up my butt, I'm burping their boogers. The cops are roaming around with stingrays and x-rays, and some airports are still using rapey scans. And my kids are always running up to me reciting their need for the latest tacky plastic crap that teaches really stupid things--or some garbage about how an adult or other child is teaching them about eternal damnation or Sky Daddy and Zombie Boy. And all this despite the fact that we don't watch commercial TV in our house. But they get enough at school. Anyway, point is: in a climate like this, it's hard for me to call any reaction to this sort of "cloud-enabled" toy an over-reaction. Burroughs was a nut, indeed, but he was on the money on "the paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."
"Nonsensical" seems a bit strong. The article describes language's real "rules" as conventional, coming from usage, and labels more pedantic approaches to rules as stylistics. That seems to me to be pretty accurate. The description doesn't approach registers of speech, and we do need to consider those. But there are lots of "grammar rules" that are really just elements of style best ignored and which are often misused. Some examples: don't end a sentence with a preposition, don't split an infinitive, "passive voice." That last one is a hoot because most of the people who complain about its use can't define it accurately and fail to recognize that it is often valuable. It's also a good example of how there are better ways to approach this sort of thing than applying these particular rules. People commonly attack the "passive voice" because it confuses the actor. So it's much better to talk to people about making agency clear in a sentence, or about why one might be trying to obscure agency. Anyway, that's all my two cents. (I am an English professor, and I've taught for almost 25 years, but I am not a linguist nor a composition expert. So, I'm offering an informed but not quite expert opinion.)
I'm an assistant professor, the lowest rank. And I'm in the humanities My salary is just very slightly over $50k. I am paid more than most of my colleagues because my institution was bidding against another similar institution. A starting humanities prof will earn in the mid-40s, as of now. A few years ago it was the low 40s. I'm getting the numbers based on what I know about several R1s, one very, very well-endowed, and from lesser schools. Event at the highest rank, I--and my colleagues at peer institutions--will never see six figures. I don't have any polemical intent. This is just FYI because I hear crazy figures thrown around. In the humanities, you have to hold a quite well-supported endowed chair to hit six figures. I know it's different in STEM. At my school, which is more or less bankrupt, a lot of the STEM folks start in the mid 70s.
You left out "or how scary/threatening it is," like bears, wolves, big cats, and so on. Of course habitat destruction "helps" a lot there too.
I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....
I've been there, first a grad student and now a professor. I also teach people about how to write, so I follow the research on this. First, as you age, this will happen some; it started for me in my early 40s. Second, you don't need a lot of these distractions. You might get push-back from people; you might think you need this stuff, but start aggressively using airplane mode on your phone. Use software on your computer that blocks distracting domains for a set period of time, or even go somewhere without internet access to work. Or leave your networked devices at home. Simple. Third, the body is part of this, nutrition, sleep, cardio exercise, are all shown to have significant impact on ability to concentrate. Fourth: pay attention to your moods, set work goals, don't whip up on yourself while making yourself work, etc. Fifth and final: keep all activity sustainable and form good habits (avoid bad habits like butt-chugging caffeine, popping Ritalin, or maintaining a marijuana fog).
"Without the state protecting them, they will fall under their own overwhelming incompetence." - King Neckbeard.
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw
I'm assuming the question is Windows specific, and I use MacOS and Ubuntu, and haven't really had to use Windows since Windows 3.... So I'll just be only marginally helpful and say/ask, "Aren't there a ton of apps out there that do that already?" I know on Mac there's lots of little doodads that pop up a ruler. And doesn't OneNote, and a lot of other stuff, do that handwriting recognition? I know it's baked-in on MacOS; isn't it on Windows too? And doesn't any app, really, have the ability to make a template when it has "Save as", or if the file-system can lock a file? I'd bet Windows even has an equivalent to the Mac stationery file-attribute. Me, I get by with TextEdit (rtf editor), Keynote (presentation), and a free app called Highlight that throws a transparent drawing layer over my screen. I know everyone's uses are different, but--just to be clear--can't most of your problems be solved with some screen mirroring and a regular app? The bonus then is that you can transport your stuff to machines that don't have that bloated piece of Smartboard excrement on them.
Anthropology and Sociology are not typically considered STEM but "social sciences."
Common Core as a set of curricular guidelines isn't bad at all. The problems I see are: 1), the "coercion" -- cash-strapped districts really do have to jump at any money, so they rush into implementation; 2) more high-stakes standardized testing; that shit has already dominated and f*cked-up education; 3) corporate domination; Pearson and others stand to make fat, fat stacks of cash on the tests and the materials, and that's why they all poured money into the campaigns. I've seen first-hand what the Person vertically-integrated education ecosystem is like. They sell you shit in development, shit that doesn't work, and shit that's just plain shit. I hate them. NB: college professor at an institution that had a contract to use only Pearson; spouse is in instructional tech and shares my opinion. The best thing we could do is hire more teachers, pay them a little better, and start doing something to reduce the stranglehold that corporations like Pearson have on the education system. Stuff like Kahn Academy is fine, but I don't think online education gives students what they need, which is contact with an educated, adult mentor/teacher. (And, yeah, I know, a lot of teachers we have now don't fit that bill, but that's what young people need.)
I still wear an analog watch for those reasons. AND so that I can "subtly" glance at it when it's time to end a conversation.
I used to work at a planetarium helping school kids with telescopes. Our preferred scope was a dobsonian. I'd recommend a 4.5" dobsonian. The one sold by Orion isn't a bad deal, and they're pretty good quality. But that's $250. You can sometimes find a used dobsonian. A 6" or 8" would be a really good scope. I like the dobsonian because there's little to mess with. Too often the fancy scopes get between you and observing. And you might not even need a scope. There's a whole lot to be done with the naked eye or a cheap pair of binoculars (7x35 or 8x40 being good cheap choices, 7x50 being really nice). If you are on a really tight budget, a dobsonian is very easy to build. You'll need the mirrors, a spider, and a focuser. The rest of the stuff you can get at wally world or hardware stores. If you go that route, the best bang for your buck is usually a 6" f8 scope. But you can low-ball and even build as small as a 3" scope. In fact, a 3" f10 is a very, very simple mirror to grind. You'd done before you know it. You just then need to find someone to silver or aluminize it for you; it used to be easy to send a mirror off for surfacing like that.
YES! I am a university professor, and I can tell you that books are written saying this same thing. They go back to the early 1900s. The basic argument, from the academic side in the early days (like 1930s), runs like this: "University is for theory and cultural polish, community college is theory/polish for poorer or less-prepared people. Sure, industry wants us to do their training for them in junior colleges, but they should do it themselves. Besides, professors aren't good at professional training because we'll always be trailing the innovations of industry." To a degree that's a true statement. Sure, you can pull in engineers to do some teaching. But you won't get cutting-edge engineers at the junior college, and not many engineers (or other professionals) will give up the salary to be a professional. I, personally, differ in that I believe the "soft skills" and the theory and even education in the humanities all make better engineers. But I know that is not a widely-shared opinion on /.
I study feminism. I don't know where you are getting your historical information, but it's inaccurate. Yes, there were the nuts and extremists, like Valerie Solanas. There were and are women who hypothesize that patriarchal behaviors--which are distinct from or are a subset of male behaviors--are bad for humanity. And there are many, many other lines of thought from utopian free-love to men-are-bad. And stuff off in other directions. After a lot of study, I personally decided that the majority of feminist thought was positive for humanity, including men like myself. You can dismiss that as thought-crime, or you can do more reading. That's a bit of work, and it IS comfortable, isn't it, to have a scapegoat or a villain on which to hang all your troubles?
The MLA and others have reasons to not be forthright about the real issue: universities don't hire tenure-track professions nearly as often as they used to. Nowadays, over 70% of your humanities courses are taught by people off the tenure track, most of whom aren't even working full-time. The issue isn't "overproduction" of PhDs in the humanities as so many like to say. It's that universities don't want to pay for faculty. I know many may say "Good, those are useless elitest shits anyway." OK. Maybe we are. BUT consider what happens if getting the doctorate is as hard as it is now with as little payoff. Who can do that? Middle-class kids, or people who won't be taking on any risk to make this gamble? What then happens if we make it even harder to get the professorship by admitting fewer people into PhD programs. I'll tell you, from my experience, that having gone to good schools as a kid, having the right class markers, all that, those still make getting the PhD easier. As a first-generation college student, I struggled and struggled to get my doctorate and eventual professorship. If you reduce the number of people like me--ones who started out poor or middle-class or hispanic or black--you're only going to make it harder for the "token" students who do get admitted to hang in there with Biff and Buffy. Note also, I'm not talking about the Ivy leagues. I was a midwestern state school for my doctorate, and my classmates included the daughter of a VP of one of the big three automakers, the child of a megachurch preacher, a couple of heirs, and several people who were "comfortable" or who had family business they could fall back on. This was out of a group of 18. As far as I know, there were only three of us who were actually from backgrounds that meant our failure would have serious consequences. Anyway, I'm going on and on. The term for this is casualization of academic labor. Because we like big words. But what it means is that some of the things that seem like they'd punish the elites would only lead to more elitism.
And it won't be cheap for long in the US. The natty gas industry is lobbying for it to become a "foreign policy tool." They want to ship it across the sea, somehow making it cheaper on the European market than Russian gas. I wonder who'll end up subsidizing that? The struggling US economy, or the almost bankrupt European economies, or Germany?