So, here's the deal, @JoeBiden is good at presidenting. And Donald Trump is real real real bad at it. And that matters. To billions of people. Take what Biden has done this week and ask yourself WWDJTD? https://t.co/te7JwCkGIQ
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) November 17, 2023
Heartening read for a Saturday morning:
… In short, Biden did one other thing that Trump never mastered. He was presidential. He was a gracious host. He laid out an agenda that had been carefully negotiated and orchestrated by his excellent diplomatic team. In fact, listening to him deliver those remarks on Thursday, I was struck by one other thing that Trump was never able to achieve, nor would he ever be able to replicate should he, God forbid, return to America’s highest office.
Biden was comforting. He was a good president doing what good presidents do. He was representing us with intelligence, dignity, and decency. Such accomplishments are much more difficult to achieve at a global summit with the complexity of this Asia-Pacific event than they may appear to be to the casual observer. But watch closely and value them appropriately…
I gave away my BlueSky invites, and then some kind commentors sent me a whole bunch *more* invites, so I think I’ve given one to everybody who asked. If I missed you, please let me know! Or if you were too shy to ask — now is your chance!
Time is bending weirdly in our political reality… I stockpiled this thread a mere week ago…
It's hard to explain how dysfunctional the @HouseGOP is, and the degree to which their own internal divisions are superseding every normal function of government. But I'm going to try with a short story about this week in the house. Thread:
— Sean Casten (@SeanCasten) November 10, 2023
1. First: We operate on a 9/30 fiscal year but the (McCarthy) led house couldn’t agree on how to fund prior to. They tried to just say “cut everything by 30%”. That didn’t pass. So they said “let’s just fund at current levels for 45 days”. That cost McCarthy his job.
2. For context, when Dems had the majority we got all our appropriations done by August 1 so the Senate could finalize and POTUS could sign. @HouseGOP still hasn’t done that.
3. Also, you may recall this summer the @HouseGOP threatened to default on US debt unless we agreed to future spending rules. A deal was struck that passed the House and was signed into law to do so. The 30% cut was not consistent with that law. (AKA, it was illegal)
4. By contrast, the straight 45 day continuing resolution that cost McCarthy his job was legal (in the sense that it did not violate the June agreement and bought us time to do so). OBEYING THE LAW WAS A RED-LINE FOR THE @HOUSEGOP. So they fired McCarthy.
5. They then used the first 20 days of that 45 day period to fight over a new speaker. Should we pick someone who hates gay people, fought to overturn the election or creeps on his son’s porn? It took a while, but the @HouseGOP finally said YES to all three.
6. That leaves a lot of work to do by a party that doesn’t like laws, is at war with itself and an inexperienced leadership team. But off we went. Last week, we were supposed to vote on transportation funding. Rs couldn’t agree so Johnson never brought a bill to the floor.
7. (This isn’t just a Johnson problem. McCarthy previously chose not to bring an agriculture funding package to the floor because Rs couldn’t agree. Still don’t have a path on that one.)
8. This week, we were supposed to vote on a funding package for our financial services & general government. Minutes before we were supposed to vote on that yesterday they pulled it on account of internal squabbles too.
9. Note: ALL of these bills violate the law we passed last June. But having discovered that Ds won't vote to break the law, they are trying to pass these with all R votes. But they're big mad at each other so even that's not possible. https://t.co/RHwudZOh4C
— Sean Casten (@SeanCasten) November 10, 2023
10. Now to the question on the mind of every libertarian troll who’s read this far. “If government is going to run out of money and you aren’t even voting on bills to fund it why are you wasting my tax dollars in DC?” Well, here’s what they did bring up for votes this week:
11. A bill to prevent the government from using the word “latin-x” – a bill to cut WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s salary to $1 – a bill to defund the office of gun violence prevention – a bill to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau –
12. A bill to cut SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s salary to $1 – a bill to defund the office of gun violence prevention – a bill to prevent the government from developing greenhouse gas disclosure rules – a bill to eliminate 50% of the budget for the consumer product safety commission.
13. These things aren’t urgent. They aren’t helpful. And they aren’t going to become law (See: laws require Senate + POTUS approval). But they keep the idiot wing of the @HouseGOP from turning on their rookie manager. And waste 435 people’s time on the House floor.
14. And so now we are 7 days from a shutdown. Still no path to fund. Still no sign of anyone in the @HouseGOP willing to stand up to their extreme fringe. Still no discernible leadership talents from their new Speaker. Right now it’s annoying. But in 8 days, its disastrous.
15. Because if they can’t get their s**t together, 8 days from now soldiers, air traffic controllers, food safety inspectors, IRS agents, border patrol… all go without pay. Some will be furloughed. Food, heating, housing assistance. Every government function.
16. PLEASE @HouseGOP. Grow up. Stop fighting with your brother and sister in the backseat. Either act like the adults you claim to be or at least have the dignity to go to your room so the adults can babysit your sorry selves. Too much is at stake. /fin
And then again, just yesterday… Having been financially burned by leaping too high when the right-wing nutters cried Jump!, Fox News threads a cautious needle reporting “LeVar Burton accused of ‘threatening physical violence’ against moms group at book awards ceremony”:
Actor LeVar Burton made an incendiary comment against parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, while hosting the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening.
The former host of the beloved children’s television series, “Reading Rainbow,” made the dig at the group during his opening remarks.
“Are there any Moms for Liberty in the house? No?” he asked while surveying the room. Burton then joked he would fight the moms if they had been in attendance.
“Good! Then hands will not need to be thrown tonight,” he remarked, as audience members cheered and Burton chuckled…
Burton, a literacy advocate, served as the honorary chair of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, in October. In a press release for the event, Burton slammed efforts to remove books from libraries.
“Books bring us together. They teach us about the world and each other. The ability to read and access books is a fundamental right and a necessity for life-long success,” Burton said in the statement. “But books are under attack. They’re being removed from libraries and schools. Shelves have been emptied because of a small number of people and their misguided efforts toward censorship. Public advocacy campaigns like Banned Books Week are essential to helping people understand the scope of book censorship and what they can do to fight it,” he said.
In a statement ahead of the event, the National Book Awards said they expected to hear “political” or even “controversial” speeches from honorees…
Many people are saying, but we’re not gonna go there this time. See, they *can* learn!
Some of the recent global crankiness is, I assume, a combination of post-pandemic PTSD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the predictable upcoming year-end-holiday stress. Me, I’m just taking one day at a time until mid-January…
OzarkHillbilly
Re Levar Burton: Took FOX long enough to get there. They are losing their touch.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Eternal quibble
It’s Fox. Not an abbreviation as, say, ABC or PBS.
/pedant
NotMax
Damn. Something must have come into bloom now that we’ve gotten some rain after months of basically none. Sinuses runny and eyes watering like nobody’s business. May have to resort to an antihistamine.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Your problem, not mine. :-)
Baud
@NotMax:
I thought it stood for Fucking Obnoxious Xenophobes.
mrmoshpotato
Happy Saturday to all. Go Golden Gophers!
My brain decided to wake up with
Uno dos, one two tres quatro
Ay, wooly bully
Watch it now, watch it
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Bombard it with Benadryl.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: It does. Just look at their history since (checks) 1996.
Baud
What happens in mid-January?
Spanky
@Baud: The holidays recede in the rear view mirror.
Baud
Black Friday NFL game?
I can’t believe how commercialized football has gotten.
OzarkHillbilly
Backlash after Fox Sports reporter admits making up coaches’ quotes
Here I thought this was SOP at Fox.
@Spanky: What holidays?
NotMax
@Baud
William Fox had quite the checkered history as a wheeler-dealer, including losing control of the company which bore his name (now still a going concern under Murdoch) and serving time on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and defraud the U.S.
Princess
Casten is a treasure.
Also too someone here predicted that Fox headline before it happened. I guess we’ve learned from DougJ.
circular reasoning
I’m wondering about the ruling in CO that TIFG incited insurrection but can’t be removed from the ballot because the relevant section may not apply to the POTUS of VP. Does that finding have implications for the many congress critters that it clearly does apply to? It seems like the logic used to determine he is guilty of incitement could be applied to several of them, no?
mrmoshpotato
How fun. Can a bunch of these assclowns resign (like, the entire GOP), so the adults can run our legislative branch again?
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
How the bidding war going for naming rights to Baud Stadium?
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Funding runs out for half the government on January 19th.
You know, Mike Johnson’s ‘laddering’ idea.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Chicago area folks: I’ll be at the Highland Park Library today from 1-4 at their local author fair. Come talk to me and the other writers. I’ll be the little old lady in jeans and Chucks
ETA: Casten used to be my rep. I think he’s part of the class of 2018, but he’s starting to emerge.
Geminid
That’s some clear thinking and good writing by Representative Casten.
Sean Casten is another talented member of the talented House Class of 2018. These new representatives brought valuable experience in many fields. In Casten’ case, before he flipped a red seat Casten owned and managed a company working on the the clean energy transition: an actual “Corporate Dem”!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: You beat me to it. But I was gonna go with Odious
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
None of those cheapskate billionaire owners are willing to pay me enough.
Geminid
@Baud: “How much does Baud cost? If you have to ask, you can’t afford him.”
NotMax
@Geminid
Baudcoin to the rescue.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I don’t want to see anyone hospitalized a la Senator Sumner in the 1856 caning incident. But I do think the shoving matches are inevitably heading toward some GOP-on-GOP fistfights and I’m good with that.
Geo Wilcox
@NotMax: Wet leaves will do that to me every time.
mrmoshpotato
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Does the House GOP have a playground?
Geminid
@mrmoshpotato: These Republicans clearly need some form of constructive recreation. I think they should bring on some real clowns to teach them juggling. They need to work on life skills because a lot of them will be looking for jobs after next year’s election.
Suzanne
@Spanky: This year, my company decided to set a 100% deadline for our project on January 26. I was like…. that’s a terrible idea. Half the team is in the country on various kinds of work visas, and a lot of them go home for 2-4 weeks at the holidays. I’ve already said I’m not skipping out on my PTO!
narya
I think about that top item a lot. Biden’s quiet competence is very reassuring–and boring, the way it’s supposed to be! Staff work behind the scenes, preparing him for the meetings; he meets with the foreign leader(s); he says some things, mostly (but not entirely) anodyne; and the world moves on, comfortable that two big adversaries are trying to work together where they can and avoid hostility where they can’t. Nearly every damn president has done it that way, except that fucking orange clown. But because it isn’t big and splashy, everyone except we politics nerds doesn’t understand how important it is. And, on some level, THAT is fine, too! As long as there isn’t a dangerous person in the WH.
eclare
Excellent thread by Rep Casten. Thanks AL.
OzarkHillbilly
@narya: But where is the fun in that?
narya
REDUCED PRICE PENZEY’S GIFT CARDS. Your occasional Penzey’s alert: $50 gift cards for $35, and if you buy two, you get a free “choose love” mug. Also too: with any purchase, you get free Transgender Remember Vanilla Sugar (a little sample packet).
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
eclare
@narya:
But they didn’t have the bestest chocolate cake EVER like TFG and Xi did at Mar-a-Lardo!
Quiet competence is vastly underrated. I have always thought drama was overrated, I want it on my reality shows, not reality.
narya
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t want “fun” in my international (or national) politics! A little whimsy, sure; maybe the occasional bit of goodwill or pandas, but otherwise, keep it boring.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
Good morning! 🙏
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
narya
@rikyrah: Good morning–and you can get Penzey’s gift cards for yourself, not just as gifts for other people. :-)
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Rep Casten is the real deal.
It’s so heartening to see this gen of Dem reps shine.
Baud
narya
@eclare: Honestly, that was one of the things that drove me most insane–the constant braggadocio. Here’s a cup of STFU, you orange menace,; go ahead and drink it down.
Suzanne
@Baud: There’s supposed to be some announcement affecting people — uh, me — who now have higher balances due to interest than they — uh, we — started with.
I just checked yesterday, and Nelnet has finally processed my application for the new SAVE plan, which brings payments down to something resembling sanity (roughly a car payment) and keeps interest from continuing to spiral. So, next week, I will make my first student loan payment in quite some time.
ian
I don’t know if I agree that once a funding bill passes, voting against that funding level is breaking the law. This seems more like a rhetorical/political argument than a legal one.
zhena gogolia
The NYT tells me (front page) that young people complaining about the economy on TikTok “spells trouble for Biden.”
But 4 indictments are no problem for Orange Hitler.
hells littlest angel
Elon Musk continues to move fast and break things.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Congrats. From what I can tell, there are a slew of smaller things in student loans that Biden is doing in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. But it’s adding up to a decent chunk of relief, and I expect more is on the way.
Baud
@ian:
Agree.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … TheHill.com:
I think it’s things like this that has prevented the supplemental being passed quickly.
Nothing is done until it’s done. But this shows that there’s real discussion about what can pass in the big supplemental and how everyone knows that it’s an opportunity to address their favorite issue outside of the budget caps. As usual, it probably will have some stupid things in it, but those can be usually fixed later. And it’s good that interest groups are speaking up now so that the monsters can’t sneak in poison pills.
I have confidence in our team and they’ll do the best they can.
We’ll see what happens.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
If the NYT went this hard against Trump, Republican voters would be angry and flood to the polls.
Just another way the two parties are not the same.
Trivia Man
@NotMax: It’s not spelled Faux?
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Based on the discussions on this blog the last couple of days, I HATE DEMOCRATS
I’ll have to spend my last years in a Putinesque authoritarian hellscape because they don’t like what Biden said about Israel, or they have to pay higher interest on a house. They’ll regret it, but it will be too late. Cf. voting for Hillary / losing Roe v. Wade, BUT ON A MUCH LARGER SCALE.
Suzanne
@Baud: It seems like a terrible insult that I paid on these things for so long and the interest still grew.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Don’t judge now. The time for judging is a year from now. We need to peak on election day, not today.
OzarkHillbilly
@narya: Spoil sport.
Scout211
Starship go boom, take two
eclare
@Scout211:
Hahaha…
Baud
@Scout211:
Did it destroy the launch pad again?
hells littlest angel
@Scout211: Someday SpaceX will send astronauts almost to the moon.
Spanky
Here’s some good news from the courts:
My kinda people, but I’d like to see more of them.
Kay
@Baud:
As you may have noticed, I love bankruptcy – the statute, the courts, all of it – and this is big, big news. Just a tiny ripple right now but should pick up speed. Practitioners are talking about whether they can put them into a Chapter 13 – where they make payments for 3 to 5 years and then the balance (and any interest on the balance) is forgiven.
I wanted the government to do a version of a 13 for student loan debtors – they already do in a way but it’s dumb and cumbersome and messy and the payment period is WAY too long. It would be better through a bankruptcy court – they’re debt experts.
I think this solves some of the “unfairness” problem, where people who paid think it’s unfair and also is a check on people borrowing too much knowing it will be forgiven.
OzarkHillbilly
@Scout211: Well, he’s got the “breaking things” down pretty well, not so sure about the “move fast” part.
Scout211
It just happened, but the reports so far state that it was a “successful launch” so it sounds like the launch pad survived.
eclare
@Spanky:
The FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) clubs were ubiquitous when I was growing up. Luckily I was not an A so I never had to take a stand. I like to think I would have joined the Satanists.
SenyorDave
Th beginning of the end for X (formerly Twitter)?
Just hours after losing major advertisers on X thanks to his expressing support for antisemitic statements, Elon Musk slammed the departing companies as “the greatest oppressors,” of free speech while hawking the social media’s paid subscription service.
When he bought Twitter, Musk borrowed billions from banks who are taking a big hit. How long before they sue him to try and recover some of their losses.
Barry
Anne, could I get a Blue Sky invit?
bdecicco
20001
at the
yahoo with a dot and a com.
Thank you!
eclare
@Kay:
Also hopefully a check on banks lending too much, knowing it will never be forgiven?
GregT
Annie,
Is it possible to get one of your BlueSky invites?
Kay
@eclare:
Banks, yes, but also colleges and universities. It would tighten up the whole system, but in a transparent and fair way where everyone would know what was going on. My biggest problem with student loan forgiveness is it is unfair as between groups of students. I don’t think you can forgive one group and then just leave the next group to come along debt burdened. That’s nutty policy. It doesn’t make any sense.
eclare
@Kay:
Yes that is a big problem.
Kay
@eclare:
A 13 is “no frills” living for 3 to 5 years. You keep your house, car and any retirement savings but you have to live simply for the repayment period. I think that’s enough of a disincentive not to borrow recklessly while also keeping people going to college.
MazeDancer
@narya: Can vouch for Penzeys mugs. Drinking from one now.
Have two.Yes, I am a frequent enough customer that I have qualified twice for the free mug giveaway.
Can’t imagine what it would be like to live within driving/walking distance to a Penzeys store. Every newsletter, I’d be in there.
MinuteMan
@NotMax:
Fungus and mold, probably.
Scout211
@SenyorDave: Elon’s new response on X:
Oooooh! Media Matters had better watch out! They don’t get to have the free speech that everyone on X gets to have. They should be very, very scared now. Elon’s gonna file a lawsuit!
Gin & Tonic
@Spanky:
What is “approximately four”? Five? Three? Seven?
bbleh
@AnneLaurie: Or if you were too shy to ask — now is your chance!
If you happen to have any left, I’d happily take one, assuming my snark is not too toxic to loose upon the wider world. I assume they email? harrycreetin aaat hotmail dot commm. And if not, eh, next time. Thank you!
lowtechcyclist
@Scout211:
I always thought Starship self-destructed by releasing “We Built This City.”
eclare
@Scout211:
The companies pulled ads because they no longer wanted the service. I can’t wait to see Elmu’s lawyers explain to a judge how that is “fraudulent.” I look forward to “why the fuck are you wasting my time with this bullshit?” written in exquisite legalese.
Chief Oshkosh
@circular reasoning: I don’t think there’s any binding precedent to read into this. It’s just one branch of a logic tree taken to achieve a predetermined outcome. I think it will be very difficult to find a judge anywhere who will keep a candidate off of a ballot based on the 14th. Not because that is or is not a correct understanding and application of the law, but because very few judges will be confident, and, possibly, brave enough to say “no, the electorate is not allowed to consider this person as a candidate.”
OTOH, from my layman’s POV, if you go to the trouble of saying that the candidate, a once-sworn federal officerholder, engaged in insurrection, then fuck you if can’t apply the 14th correctly. It ain’t that murky:
Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: What happened to the Baud-Lite sponsorship?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I have three Bluesky invites if AL runs out. Email me dawinsor (at) dawinsor (dot) com.
lowtechcyclist
@SenyorDave:
Oh, that’s hilarious! They’re ‘oppressing’ free speech by not supporting his platform, IOW exercising their free speech!
@Scout211:
Elmo:
The nerve of them, having the temerity to quote his words! No wonder he’s pissed at them.
RaflW
Good gravy, that LeVar Burton piece by Fox. Paragraph one says he made ‘incendiary’ comments and then, golly, two whole (small) paragraphs later, “Burton then joked he would fight the moms.”
INCENDIARY.
I know there are no legit journalists left at Fox. But do some of the pretend journos feel even the tiniest bit of embarrassment any more? Are the brain worms that thorough?
bbleh
@zhena gogolia: @Baud: If the NYT went this hard against Trump, Republican voters would be angry and flood to the polls.
I don’t think that’s quite right. First, Republican voters (yes yes #notAllRepublicanVoters) are ALWAYS angry — they’re anger junkies. If they aren’t angry about something, and Fox isn’t handing them something RIGHT NOW to be angry about, then they’ll INVENT something. NYT stories about Trump would of course make them angry — at least right then — but (1) just the words “New York Times” will make them angry, and (2) there will be a million other things between now and election day to make them angry, and this would be long forgotten. (In fact, it likely would be gone in a few days.)
And second, I don’t think that’s why The NYT has adopted their present editorial policy. It’s true that for any such story they would immediately be yelled at, threatened with death, etc. — again for a few days, until the next shiny object pops up — and probably more to the point, their editors and publishers would be tsk-tsked by their social circles, possibly even not invited to dinner parties!! I think both reactions from the MAGAtariat have been instantiated, and so they pull their punches instinctively. BUT …
I don’t think that’s the MAIN reason they don’t go after Trump. I think the main reason is twofold: first, they really do want a horse-race, and I think they justify this by some sort of imagined “duty” to harass the sitting president because Free Press blah blah blah (which duty never seems to manifest quite as much when it comes to Republican presidents). And second — and most importantly — as observed elsewhere, their main readership just doesn’t want to see a lot of criticism of Trump. The occasional, reasoned criticism, perhaps, just as for Biden, but nothing that could be perceived as “piling on” — as justified as that is — because it would make very comfortable people somewhat less comfortable. That is, The NYT (please remember the ‘The’ is capitalized, thank you very much), or at least its political “reporters”, have taken on the role of a well-heeled minister of a well-endowed suburban church: to comfort the comfortable. All is well, no need to get upset. (Except about inflation, of course.)
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me, and it’s hard to see any exception for the President or VP, given the ‘any office’ part:
He took that oath when he was inaugurated as President, which is an office of the United States. ISTM that the courts’ only wiggle room is the standard for proving that he engaged in insurrection.
I’m sympathetic to the notion that a criminal conviction should be necessary, otherwise it would be a bit too easy to use this Amendment as the basis of excluding people from any and all branches of government because they participated in a protest or something like that.
Glidwrith
@narya: Thanks for posting about Penzy’s specials. I’ve been stocking back up!
Ken
And almost return them almost safely to the Earth
(Rumor has it that Von Braun lobbied against that qualifier, as it would make the task easier.)
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
And we respect that! That’s why the first ‘T’ in ‘FTFNYT’ is capitalized.
Spanky
@Gin & Tonic: LOL. Yeah, I wondered about that too. I’m guessing that attendance varied from 0 to maybe 7 or 8, the way high school clubs do.
Chief Oshkosh
@lowtechcyclist:
Agreed. But when the judge includes in the ruling that the subject DID engage in an insurrection, but then doesn’t apply the law as clearly written, it greatly weakens the law. in this instance, it more-or-less declares the law to be meaningless. Would’ve been better all around if Judge Weaky McWeak had kept the written ruling shorter, with no whiny blather.
JML
@Kay: Yeah, the student loan version of Chapter 13 might work. Probably need to put a check on med students, though. One of the reasons they made it so hard for people to discharge student loan debt through bankruptcy in the first place was because of doctors beginning to abuse the system: run up huge loans through medical school, declare bankruptcy in residency, start their fancy practice and big salaries having already dumped the loan debt.
I still think too much focus is just on student loan debt, though: no one is talking about how we adequately fund public higher education, and one of the reasons we’ve gotten into this mess is how much states have disinvested from their public universities over the past 30 years. It dumps a huge burden on students to fund their education, but it also makes the schools very enrollment dependent to the point that any demographic shifts or declines makes it very difficult to manage and suddenly you have school valuing programs based on revenue generation, which is deeply unhealthy as well.
Ken
But didn’t the company call the previous launch successful? There were definitely statements about gathering valuable data.
(I suspect some of that data was “keep Elon further away from any decision-making.”)
Jeffro
I’ll take credit for kicking off the Faux-Fox L.B. “throwing hands” headline contest a day or two ago, but there were many worthy entrants. =)
(It’s not hard; just start with the dumbest, most inflammatory take that you can think of, and then keep going if you have to. As long as you arrive at the dumbest, most inflammatory take possible, you win!)
OT x 2:
1)Graham Nash was a hoot last night and his band was AMAZING…they kept switching instruments and/or playing multiple instruments at one time…unreal!
2)College GameDay is happening RIGHT NOW over at JMU and I’m sad that I can’t take part in the
drunken insanity that is a hallmark of the Dukesfestivities but I couldn’t make it this time around. One more for the bucket list!Have a happy Saturday peeps!
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: Yesterday I heard a report on the radio that said that the judge wouldn’t keep him off the primary ballot, but might revisit it for the general election ballot.
I briefly skimmed the decision (102 page .pdf) last night and didn’t quickly see that language.
I did see a lot of hemming and hawing that (roughly) “the president and VP were in the amendment language early on, but then removed” and “the president’s oath is different and doesn’t fit the language” and “there’s nothing in the record to guide me so I have to be circumspect” and so forth. Lawyers are trained to argue about anything. It’s a defensible opinion, especially if one really is trying to interpret the language exactly as written (as counter-intuitive as it clearly appears).
Judges hate to be reversed, so she was trying to be careful on the immediate consequences of her ruling.
The strong decision that he did participate in the insurrection is a clear win for “… or your own lying eyes.”
We’ll see what happens next.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@JML:
I think if you fixed the debt the other issues would rise to the surface and get attention because once the debt starts to be forgiven the whole system is losing money, which will, ahem, get their attention :)
I think one of the reasons health care providers eventually got on board for the expansion of Medicaid under Ocare is medical debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy. They weren’t getting paid.
You could set up a special loan system for physicians (and probably dentists and veterinarians) – their situation is different than 99% of borrowers. Maybe subsidized interest rates or something in return for non dischargable in bankruptcy. The policy shouldn’t be set up for the 1% of borrowers who have 300-500k in loans. That’s nuts too. The average student loan debt is about 40k. Perfect for a Ch 7 or a Ch 13.
PaulWartenberg
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Dorothy, good luck today!
I just got a book cover ordered with Fiverr, hope to get a self-published thing together soon.
Also, NaNoWri’ing this month. Up to 29k words so far.
Layer8Problem
@bbleh, @lowtechcyclist:
And of course, even when omitted (like on the very top of the front page in that gothicky font), the ‘F’ is implicit.
And I just found out that that font is called Chomsky. Ironic, that.
sab
@JML: That is such an important point.
Frankensteinbeck
@bbleh:
Case in point: Dominion. Fox didn’t want to run it, had to because their viewers would leave if Fox didn’t push that conspiracy. Personally, I think the process is Fever Swamp -> Fox more often than Fox -> Fever Swamp. Trump didn’t make up his conspiracy theories about the election being stolen. He yelled that the election was stolen and his voters swarmed to tell him how.
They’ve said more than once that if everyone is complaining, they’re doing their job. They gloat when we call them out on their bullshit.
So in general, I think everything you said is correct and wise.
Kay
@JML:
I have to say I don’t really believe they excepted student loans from bk because physicians were abusing it. I was active in opposing the last bankruptcy “reform” and the amount of bullshit lenders threw out was just amazing. They always say there will be massive abuse and catastrophe if their sweet deals go away. They insisted that people wouldn’t be able to get credit cards or car loans if people could still file bk- have you noticed a shortage of credit cards in the US? Yeah, me neither. At one point they floated this ridiculous flat out LIE that people wuld be able to discharge child support. They’re shameless.
Kay
I don’t read or pay for the NYTimes but according to social media they have an expose of how RFK Jr is a grifter who has made millions and millions off small donor supported environmental groups – so, good job! There’s a shocker, huh? RFK Jr. is a fraud and a crook. Did not see that coming! :)
Suzanne
@JML: I don’t care if med students abuse bankruptcy. We have a significant physician shortage.
AFAIAC, we should be incentivizing as much higher education as people want to get.
Baud
@Kay:
Probably realized RFK was taking more votes away from Trump.
narya
@MazeDancer: Even though I live in the Forbidden Zone of Chicago proper (they aren’t allowed to operate in the city–the family split up, and The Spice House part of the family got to keep the city), but I live walking distance from the Evanston store. I’ve had to rein myself in–I have so! many! spices!–and really limit myself to what I actually need. That said, I made an exception for the free vanilla, even though I have several unopened bottles; I got some Raspberry Enlightenment. Back when I had a team, I liked to give the gift cards as a holiday gift. Also: for me, at least, no such thing as too much vanilla; it will get used.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@PaulWartenberg: Thanks! Let us know when you publish.
I’ve never done NaNo. I already pressure myself enough!
narya
@Frankensteinbeck: I think originally Fox helped create the fever swamp, but it’s now out of their control. You can’t unfuck that poultry.
Mike Molloy
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I seem to be in, thank you!
Glidwrith
@Scout211: The report also says the booster blew up after separating. Wasn’t it supposed to be reusable?
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I think that discussion is more about fear of what the marginal voter who voted for Democrats in 2020 will do in 2024. If you want an eye-opening experience listen to “The Wilderness” podcast. One of the O-Boys (Favreau, I think) interviewed Obama to TFG voters. It will raise your hair. One man liked both AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene “because they stand up to the establishment”! These people don’t vote for the same reason Democrats like us do, that’s for sure.
Glidwrith
@MazeDancer: San Diego has a branch and the joyous high from the scents when you walk through the door is wonderous.
Kay
This was an amazing story because while not all of the women were “privileged”, many, maybe most, of them were. They were educated, better-off women who would not hesitate to report abuse. They made a lot of noise.
They were completely ignored. For YEARS. There are tens of them- maybe more than hundred when it’s all thru. The physician basically raped them (state statute definition of rape) during OB exams and Columbia and law enforcement did NOTHING.
That’s how much we LOVE pregnant women in the US. They can be raped during medical treatment and our prestigious insitutions and law enforcement ignore it and cover it up.
Layer8Problem
@Kay: Susanne Craig’s article. She’s the one who got TFG’s 1995 taxes, got a Pulitzer for her TFG finance reporting, and shows up on Maddow occasionally.
(and in the interests of pedantry it turns out the Times’ logo font is not Chomsky (“not similar at all”) but custom-made.)
Frankensteinbeck
@narya:
Naah, the crazy and evil was running hot in churches and on the radio before cable TV existed. Fox is a strong amplifier, though, and that is all dangerous bullshit that it is Bad to amplify.
kalakal
@Scout211: In another catastrophic misjudgement Musk had Joe Rogan firing arrows at it as it took off to prove how safe it is.
JML
@Kay: the doctors bit might have been the anecdotal evidence they used to try and keep people angry so they could screw over as many people as possible while keeping attention on something shiny and egregious.
I’m not convinced that there will be any movement to address the structural problems in higher education if/when the student loan crisis is averted. Right now, college education is held in lower esteem than any time in modern US history, and is no longer seen by increasing numbers as a real path to prosperity. People with bad motives are trying to set Labor against colleges, you have increasing divisions between 2-year and 4-year institutions (and they are increasingly being set against each other in the competition for students), and there’s a complicated and messy issue related to the increasing administrative costs for schools (it’s an issue at almost every school, but the scope and reasons for it are very different by institution type, but it gets all muddled together and becomes an easy way to call schools “wasteful”). Very few politicians make higher ed a priority: it’s always last place in any Education discussion, and even allies don’t make it a priority.
And some of it is our own fault (I work in higher ed). We’ve most absented ourselves from the public sphere and presumed that we were fine. We’ve done little to show the value of our work, because for decades upon decades we didn’t need to. It’s still a fabulous investment (annual return on investment from public sources to economic activity is approximately 11 to 1) but hardly anyone is saying it and few are listening. And it doesn’t help when the loudest voices among some of the faculty are also some of the most selfish, insular, and clueless.
Kay
@Layer8Problem:
Good work! It amazed me. I have no idea why he wasn’t just arrested. Why it was left up to Columbia, like they’re a nation-state or something with their own laws. Arrest the rapist! Lets go!
bbleh
@Frankensteinbeck: @narya: I think it’s a positive feedback loop, same as with TIFG, so at this point it kinda doesn’t matter where anything starts or started. Something gets dumped in at some point in the cycle — out of TIFG’s Adderall-addled brain, off of 8chan, out of some Republican focus group, out of the mouth of some lunatic some Fox reporter is talking to, who knows — and it’s immediately picked up and recycled by the rest of them, until either it’s replaced by some new Outrage Of The Moment or it becomes enshrined in the Canon of Outrage, whence it is repeated endlessly as part of the great magma pool of grievance that fuels MAGAism.
eclare
@kalakal:
Hahaha…brilliant.
Kay
@JML:
I don’t know why people have to go to such extremes. One can support trades training and also support liberal arts degrees. Among my children I have one electrician, two who pursued science/engineering and a liberal arts person. You don’t have to choose. That’s the beauty of it. There’s a place for everyone.
Shalimar
@Scout211: By “fraudulent”, Elon clarifies that they “misrepresented” how often ads appear with Nazi posts. In other words, everything in the report was true. Good luck with that one in court.
Another Scott
@Glidwrith: Not this time, but ultimately they hope to reuse it (I think). They were just dumping it this time.
Here’s a non-Twitter video.
I was surprised by all the vapor clouds. They seemingly don’t care about all the heat gain (from poor insulation) in their cryogenic lines, etc. I hope their electronics, etc., are protected from all the condensation those cold clouds cause!
Shockingly, all the engines in the first stage worked properly when they didn’t have the thing sitting on the pad for 10+ seconds blasting away at the unprotected concrete underneath. Good job!
:-/
The first stage seemed to work fine up until engine cutoff and 2nd stage separation. I assume the first stage was damaged by their wacky “blast the top of the first stage to get 10% more payload” maneuver, causing it to crack and leak fuel which the main engines ignited uncontrollably causing the explosion. But, we’ll see.
The 2nd stage looked like the exhaust changed at 7:07 and 7:40 before it went dark a little after 8 minutes. Some things still need to be fixed there as well.
So, progress. But the thing still needs a lot of work before they put people on it. It’s good that NASA is working on options.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@Shalimar: It’s nice that Musk confirms he believes there’s an acceptable level of Nazi-adjacency. Or I guess, confirms again…
Gin & Tonic
Being a kid in Ukraine:
Mike in NC
Three things missing from the personality of the racist, fascist, rapist that squatted in the White House for four terrible years.
JML
@Kay: 100%. which is why i say “people with bad motives”. They’re trying to set Labor against the universities not because they give two shits about Labor, but because if they can set universities and Labor against each other then it’s less time and resources available to fight back against the corporatists.
College isn’t for everyone. And neither are the building trades. Both should be seen as viable options for kids that want and can succeed in those lives. One isn’t inherently “better”, but neither is it worse.
Uncle Cosmo
Two generations back I worked in the engineering department of the defense division of a major US tech company[1] as a major go-to guy for writing proposals[2].
Each autumn the civil servants at DoD worked in a frenzy to finalize their Requests for Proposals and release them just before they went home for the holidays. Due dates for responses were always in early January. The general attitude of the Feds was
It was even worse where I worked – the corp shut down the operation at year’s end and forced us to take leave (out of our generous 10 days a year) for the non-holiday workdays. But we still had to get the proposal(s) out so we worked through the holidays. Did they offer us compensatory time for that? Hell, no.[3]
[1] Now a shell of its former self, having sold off the defense division in the first stage of its catastrophic implosion. Just FTR…
[2] I did more writing than engineering – the department loved having a good writer on staff so they could blow off the proposal center, most of whose writers were (to put it politely) innumerate.
[3] One of a number of reasons why I shed no tears after the corp started to implode (laying me off in the first great wave, so I got the best severance package). I did manage to get a decent job with a better employer a few weeks after the layoff…
dr. luba
@AnnieLaurie: I have 5 Bluesky invites I. just e-mailed to you….I think. If you didn’t get them contact me.
Baud
@Kay:
That’s liberal talk. Might even be woke.
MomSense
@JML:
I think part of the problem is that colleges/universities added layers of middle management, didn’t increase wages for maintenance, buildings and grounds, outsourced dining services to shitty companies that exploit workers, pay athletic directors and coaches more than the academic side equivalent, and completely take advantage of their teaching fellows/assistants – doctoral or post doc teachers who do all the work without steady pay or benefits. Then there is the massive exploitation of the athletes who make hundreds of millions for their schools and end up with sub par education, broken bodies and fucked brains.
Tuition keeps increasing to the point where it only works for elites.
One of mine went to a state school on scholarship, lived at home and worked full time. One started at community college and then transferred to a private college for the last two years. My youngest is attending community college free and after his second year will transfer to a state school.
We finally have free two year community college and it’s fantastic.
twbrandt
@eclare: if he even files. He has a habit of threatening to file lawsuits and then not following through, not unlike a certain orange clown we occasionally discuss around here.
Kay
@twbrandt:
You don’t have to “go to the courthouse” to file a lawsuit so I suspect he’s just angrily lashing out again.
Baud
@Kay:
I wouldn’t mind it if Media Matters could take discovery.
Anoniminous
@MomSense:
Community colleges are amazing resources. Here in New Mexico it was $1,720 per semester for in-state tuition before our Pinko Commie Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham from Redsville-on-the-Rio-Grande signed the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship Act making college tuition-free at public colleges and universities for New Mexican citizens.
Other MJS
Yeah, but did Biden fall in love with Xi?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV6mVmAVQU4
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
I guess I don’t see the gap between the Presidential oath (“preserve, protect, and defend”) and the 14th Amendment (“support”). How is preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution not inclusive of supporting it?
Glad I went into mathematics, rather than law.
Anyway, off to the meetup.
Another Scott
@MomSense: You outline the problems we’ll.
I think that at least part of the problem with the explosion of management positions is that taxpayer support has fallen off a cliff, so universities and profs/researchers have to continuously chase grants. If the grants are from the DoD, then there are all kinds of contracting rules that have to be followed, especially these days, so you need staff and lawyers and patent attorneys and budget people and export control experts and all the rest keeping on top of the paperwork. I’m sure there are similar (but different) constraints with NSF and DoE and NIH and… contracts.
Cutting taxpayer support has all kinds of costs that people don’t usually think about, but they are real.
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
@Anoniminous:
It’s life changing. Some of the disconnect we experience (excluding the bad faith actors) is because older generations don’t realize how dramatic the increase in the cost of college education has become. You will hear them say things like I worked at X fast food place part time while I was in college for spending money as their reason why X fast food place shouldn’t have to pay 18/ hour. That’s when you have to ask them how much their college tuition, room and board cost because it sure as shit wasn’t $35,000 – $64,000 per year.
Or when they say if those damned kids would just give up their lattes and avocado toast, blah blah blah. They do not comprehend what things cost now except for gas prices.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I’ve been watching math videos on YouTube. It’s a nice break from the less than logical world.
RaflW
@Geminid: I’m fine with bare knuckle cage matches for the GOP. I don’t think rooting for injuries is wrong for these miscreants.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: An “officer of the United States” has a specific meaning under the Constitution.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: Thanks.
I hope someone does a deep dive and publishes an article on the history of the text and any reasoning why the president and VP were removed from the earlier language of the amendment. (Maybe she points to something like that in the decision, but my quick skim left me with the impression that she was kinda flying blind on the reason why that happened.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: I think many of these people online are chaos agents and they’re supporting DSA’s goal of destroying Democratic.Party. I have also noticed on various blogs/Twitter TL’s that many Democrats immediately gravitate towards “Democrats” whose brand is built on criticizing Democrats. I find that curious.
surfk9
Heading out to the California Democratic Party nominating convention in Sacramento at which I am a dlegate. Will report back this evening on the festivities.
Suzanne
@MomSense:
This makes me crazy. My mom is a mid-Boomer, and I looked this up…. during her college years, taxpayers paid (on average) 75% of the bill at public universities. So someone her age should more accurately say, “I worked in the summer to pay 25% of my college expenses”. Contrast with students today, and taxpayers pay roughly 10-12% of the bill. Students and their families (and via student loans) pay almost 90% of the cost of their attendance. And if you asked most people about this, they would have no idea.
But it is unbelievably obnoxious to hear the olds opine about laziness and entitlement on this issue.
Anoniminous
@MomSense:
99,999 times out of 100,000 when someone over 40 starts a sentence with “While I was in college … ” the rest of the sentence can be ignored.
Soprano2
@Kay: Plus, it doesn’t fix future problems. We need a good permanent solution.
Baud
@surfk9:
Excellent.
Baud
@Anoniminous:
Not really fair. There’s a fundamental difference between public policies that I benefit from and public policies that I pay for that benefit others.
Anoniminous
@Soprano2:
Every other major industrial power has free education up to and through university. The US doesn’t because the Finance Industry makes too much money from student loans.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anoniminous:
Off the top of my head, both Canada and the UK don’t have free university education. I would guess there are others.
bbleh
@Anoniminous: I think also because it’s still very much a mark of class status and a doorway to advancement that a large, very status-conscious segment of society wants to keep limited.
Alas for the Pat Brown days, when greater access to higher education was seen as good for society generally. Now thanks to Saint Reagan and His Apostles and followers, there is no such thing as “good for society,” only for individuals.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: My impression is that university on Europe is more exclusive too. I haven’t looked it up recently, however.
Matt McIrvin
@Kathleen: I think there’s a vulnerability in liberalism that is sort of the flip side of the paradox of tolerance: liberals want to critique liberalism, because self-criticism is part of a realistic worldview that learns and grows.
Non-liberals do not want to critique their illiberalism; they are rigid people who consider loyalty to the point of embracing absurd contradictions as a virtue. They mostly want to critique liberalism, just like the liberals.
This makes liberalism stronger as a way of engaging with the world. It also makes liberalism weaker in a head-to-head political fight where bullheaded tenacity looks like strength. (The old joke: “a liberal is a fellow who won’t take his own side in an argument.”) And it means that liberals can be dangerously attracted to figures who couch their illiberal arguments in seemingly rational terms. This includes both centrist/neocon intellectual types, and burn-it-all-down radical leftists as well.
twbrandt
@Kay: Ken (Popehat) White took to xitter to point that out in quote tweet of Musk’s threat, and it’s wonderful:
zhena gogolia
@Baud: It also tends to be kind of crappy.
That said, I wish the taxpayers were still paying for college. I could NEVER have gone to a good college if things had been the way they are today.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree. Liberals tend to overcompensatie in attempting to avoid being illiberal.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: That’s an insightful comment.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I would like to see one of those charts that you see for federal spending, that explains what exactly universities spend their money on. What are we getting for the high tuition?
Omnes Omnibus
When I went to my 25th reunion, the then-Madame Omnibus remarked that the campus was like a park. So that’s one thing.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: I went to a very well-known (and now top $) university. My roommate one year covered his tuition by working the summer as a house painter.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I think this is part of the mechanism behind the cycle American politics has been stuck in for at least the past 40 years and probably longer than that.
Because liberalism is fundamentally weaker in a head-to-head political fight, liberalism can never win, for good and for all time. It can only win when the weakness of its alternatives at confronting reality is on stark display. So we’re always the cleanup crew, leading the nation in recovery from some disaster, never the people who remain in charge when the cleanup is done.
And the struggle is eternal. Unless, one of these times (maybe in the next few years), they destroy democracy so completely that we just can’t come back. In which case I don’t know what happens. Maybe we just die a lot, like a great big North Korea for a while. But I don’t think these ideals can be completely killed in us.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Lots of ITS people and sports and highly paid administrators, as far as I can see.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, it was a very different time.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
different-church-lady
Once again I fear we are over-estimating the electorate’s desire for competence.
CindyH
I too would like a blue sky invite if available
crhenshaw
at
gmail
dot
com
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Liberals is always changing to match the needs of the times. That’s why we can never win and must always struggle.
kalakal
@Omnes Omnibus: The UK did it in stages, when I went tuition was free and you got a support grant. Then the grant was withdrawn but tuition was free. in 1998 tuition fess were introduced of up to £9,000 pa*. It’s now £9,250. If you’re Scottish, Scottish University fees are £1,850, to the rest of the UK they’re £9,250. Foreign students get taken for a lot more
*everyone instantly charged the max, where I was working we ran the numbers every way and the lowest we could get was £8,800.
Kay
@Kathleen:
This is true on the Right too, though, especially the last ten or so years. The idea that Republicans fall in line is outdated. They bitch constantly, have purity tests, have factions, etc. It’s not a Democrat or liberal problem. It’s a turning away from institutions and organizations problem. I also think it’s bloated egos, honestly. No one wants to be the rank and file. Everyone wants to run the show. Everyone (supposedly) knows everything- they’re all “doing their own research”.
different-church-lady
@Baud: More campus buildings.
Baud
@Kay:
Agree on all points.
It’s the dark side of empowerment. Everyone thinks they’re special. Too special.
I suffered from that to some degree myself when I was younger.
Omnes Omnibus
@kalakal:
I knew the UK fees were recent-ish and less than US fees, but I was just pushing back on the idea that only the US charges for university level education.
Kay
@Kathleen:
To me it’s a kind of toxic individualism – me me me, no one is paying attention to me and my issues.
It’s why every time there’s some broad policy initiative there is immediately a tiny group of exceptions who get all the airtime, like how we can’t talk about student loans without people going to “say a….physician goes to…Harvard and thereby benefits from this program unjustly?” It’s the absolute worst with higher ed because 5% of students and schools get all the coverage. The middle number for student loans is 40k. We can solve this problem without designing an entirely new higher ed system. It’s 40k. People have that much in credit card debt or certainly car loans. If they can’t pay it we find a way to discharge it. It will be like 10% of borrowers.
kalakal
@Baud:
here’s a handy dandy table of % of university graduates by country , the US does well, but it’s not quite apples to apples, eg a UK Bsc and a US one are not equal
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346188/countries-world-highest-share-bachelors-degree/
It’s changed massively in my lifetime in the UK when I went it was free but very elitist, about 8% of the population, now it’s nearer to 50%
Baud
@kalakal:
Thanks. Kazakhstan out of nowhere.
kalakal
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes I figured that, I was just wanting to show the relative cost. The UK is interesting in that the fee is the same regardless of the institution and the course. It costs the same to do Physics at Cambridge as it does to do Media Studies at Teeside
MazeDancer
@narya: No one can pass on free Vanilla. I ordered, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I think that’s a bit different–it’s more like the factionalism of old-school Communists. They’ll “self-criticize” and attack one another for insufficient or incorrect loyalty to the Cause. There’s no questioning of whether the Cause itself might be fundamentally flawed. Democrats pride themselves on paying attention to people who tell them that their cause is in some way unjust or rotten. It’s the basis of Conor Friedersdorf’s entire career.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: In my neck of the woods, it’s usually a new football stadium.
/s
But seriously, the Oregon State football coach was the highest paid state employee when I was a young person. Haven’t checked recently.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree that that’s a faction too. The self hating liberals who like Andrew Sullivan :)
I remember when Sullivan liked Obama and we were all supposed to respect him now. Guffaw. He’s always been an ass. He’s also lazy. He doesn’t do the slightest bit of work before he writes something and publishes it. His readers are like “p. 1 is all wrong, p.3 has 4 major errors, in p.7 that person supposedly speaking is dead…” – it’s the English accent! It’s the only reason he’s famous.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
May be the worst thing liberals have ever done.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Surely you know that the dollar is worth far more than the humans that use them……
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Synergy!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
This, based on a Bsky today, might be my fav DougJ-style riff for today:
“I died on the SpaceX ship that exploded today. Here’s why I still believe in Elon Musk.”
Kelly
I graduated from the University of Oregon in 1980. Debt free thanks to plenty of government support. I covered my share of costs with near minimum wage jobs the first 2 years. 1976 minimum wage was $2.30 which inflation adjusts to $12.29 today. The next two summers I scored construction jobs that paid $9, $48.12 in today’s money. I almost didn’t go back to school. Summer construction work was fun. I enjoyed the physical labor, being outside doing manly labor and the money was as good as I expected I’d make in an office with my degree. My dear departed father, a lifetime construction worker and logger told me “It’s fun in the summer. It’s not fun in November when the rain is washing the snow down your neck and the mud is over your boot tops”. I completed my degree.
Glidwrith
@Baud: Liberalism is the continuing fight to recognize more people as humans that deserve basic rights and freedoms. We all deserve to be the captains of our destiny, a privilege reserved in the not-so-distant past for only the rich.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: When things get so bad that most people are actually hurting, that’s when the electorate wants competence. When things aren’t that bad, they start to magnify small complaints and vote based on vibes.
To extend my general theory: if liberals actually themselves preside over a disaster, which is logically possible because people aren’t perfect–e.g. the Vietnam War, the second oil crisis, the Tehran hostage crisis–then we’re in real trouble. Liberalism gets held to much higher standards of competence, and any slip is going to haunt us for about half a century.
Baud
@Glidwrith:
👍
eclare
@Suzanne:
Yeah when I was at UT Knoxville (class of 1990), the state chipped in 70%. I don’t know what it is now, but it is substantially less. States used to take pride in their flagship public universities. Now, like everything else, especially in the traitor states, it is a race to the bottom.
Captain C
@Scout211: He’ll announce he’s driving a cybertruck right up the stairs to the door of the court building. The cybertruck will stall trying to ascend the
first stepthe sidewalk curb and promptly catch fire. Melon Husk will promptly blame John DeLorean and try to sue him, too, even though the latter has been dead for nearly two decades.a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
Deleted, as No one wants to read Ronnach the Tabby’s comments.
Captain C
@Kay:
I haven’t had a chance to do this yet, but the next time some self-important fool tells me this, I’m going to ask to see their lit review. If they respond that they don’t have one, or more likely, don’t have a clue what that is, then I’m going to tell them they’re an unserious terminal fool and I don’t have to listen to them anymore.
MagdaInBlack
@twbrandt: That’s beautiful.
WhatsMyNym
@NotMax:
Somebody should tell the company…
©2023 FOX News Network, LLC
FOX News Media operates the FOX News Channel (FNC)…
:-)
TheOtherHank
My Fox News watching rage-junkie father in law started at THE Ohio State University in the late 40s. I haven’t done the calculation lately, but in 2020 dollars, one semester’s tuition at the THE OSU was around $600. For reference, one semester at Cal Poly (where boy #2 attends) was between $3500 and $4000 in 2020.
ETA: That’s just tuition, not books, lodging, or food.
RaflW
@Matt McIrvin: This goes along with my un-testable counterfactual that, if Bin Laden had been successful (itself a wide open question in this scenario) under a Gore presidency, our democracy as we more-or-less know it now would have shuddered to a stop within weeks of 9/11.
It would have been all-out war against every Democrat, top-to-bottom, in a Republican + journo blame frenzy that would have sundered the bonds of our nation like a sudden mid-air disassembly (they got tricky-sundered instead, in this slow-rolling decades long unraveling, but anyway…)
cain
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Of which the Dems will be blamed for not capitulating to one side or another or interceding between them.
I can see whole slew of articles lambasting Dems on not being the adults in the room. Hah!
Captain C
@cain: “…As always, it is the fault of the Democrat Party for not ensuring that the Party of Personal Responsibility, the Republicans, lives up to its name.” — Bobo, probably
BlueGuitarist
@Baud:
which math videos are you watching?
I posted this one before, which is not an escape from politics: Darryl Charles (“Black Gentrifier”) using FOIL
https://youtu.be/RH1q_2SOkAI?si=Ncjd365078KdJRAJ
eta < 1 minute
Baud
@RaflW:
We owe the Supreme Court a favor.
Gvg
@eclare: What? Schools are not the lenders. The government is. There are rules that forbid schools from denying students loans if they are eligible because that tends to cause lots of fairness problems. Students are innately not a good risk credit wise and there were no loans until the government started guaranteeing them, which mostly meant the poorest couldn’t go.
There are problems with higher costs which have multiple causes and aren’t the same for each state or each type of school so it’s complicated and beyond federal control anyway. A big cause is states don’t care enough to subsidize the state schools like they did 30 years ago and now students are paying more of the real cost. Shortsighted fiscal economics IMO of course.
trollhattan
@TheOtherHank:
Imagine if Poly were part of the UC system–that number really jumps.
Baud
@BlueGuitarist:
I recently watched this one on linear algebra. I had read about it before, but this set of videos that made it click for me.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab
eclare
@Gvg:
I never said schools were the lenders. Also see my most recent post, comment #189, about tuition at UT. I am fully aware of the drastic decrease in state funding.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: As boomer with kid in college I’m pretty well up on how the finances have shifted.
That said, those student loan payments dragged on, and on and on whilst I was working for, say, $1k/month, in addition to those periods of being laid off during the Carter-Reagan-Bush era. Whee!
Gaffer
One of my ad blockers will no longer allow tweets/X, and that’s just fine with me. I was unaware how many BJ posts are retweets so it makes me sad that I can’t follow all the BJ posts that I’ve enjoyed for years now. Hoping ya’ll dump X soon.
Rich Gardner
I’ve applied to be on the waitlist for Blue Sky, but sure, I’ll be happy to accept an invite (if, course, you have any left at this point).
Gvg
@Anoniminous: no they don’t. Student loans are federal not banks. A few banks have contracts to service the loans recently but they aren’t that big a slice. Student loans and not a big attraction in the finance world. Minnow.
Geminid
@kalakal: I think that wasn’t Joe Rogan shooting arrows at the Cybertruck, but rather a YouTube celebrity archer named Joe Rohan. I saw a Twitter thread that about this, with video showing the Cybertruck’s passenger window defeating Mr. Rohan’s best shots.
Thats how I ran into a funny (to me) parody account. Someone snarked, “Well, at least I’ll be safe if I take my Cybertruck out on the Steppes and encounter roving bands of archers.” Someone replied:
That came from an account titled, “Nomadic Warriors for Pritzger.” Its header picture shows a smiling Jay Pritzger decked out in Mongol armor complete with a pointy brass helmet. There is a big hawk on Pritzger’s mailed arm, glaring at the viewer.
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzger claims their goal is to establish an all-powerful “Khaganate” ruled by the Illinois Governor. They are the ones who posted a map of Illinois superimposed on Europe that shows a Prairie State five times bigger than it really is; it stretched through Norway all the way across the Mediterranean to Tunisia. The caption read:
Gvg
@Baud: the same thing you always did. The state no longer pays much if anything. Back in the olden days, almost all states paid most of the cost. People thought they were paying their own way,but it was really taxpayers. Private schools are different.
Different states cut support at different rates and times and cost of living varies a lot which also means salaries and wages for everyone from President to janitor cost higher or lower amounts but that’s why the tuition has gone up. Well a big part of it. Every single school has its own factors. None of the factors I know about are u dear the control of the federal government by the way. Nothing.
Gvg
@Gin & Tonic: The erosion of the minimum wage and the long wage freeze of lower income jobs such as can be held by college students hurts a lot too, not to mention making it harder for poor families to help. My parents worked their way through with low wage and minimum wage jobs but they remember what they could buy and eat and rent on those wages and it’s not comparable. They could do it (60’s) I needed help and current gen can’t.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: @Omnes Omnibus:
ICYMI…
(See the original if any links are mangled. Combining several toots…)
Makes sense to me.
We’ll see how it goes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
@Gvg: It seems to me the state cutbacks to higher education first started in the mid 1970s and then continued on.
That was also about the time New York City turned its municipal university system over to the state, and for the first time, students attending the CUNY system had to pay tuition.
Also worth noting, education on all levels doesn’t allow for much in the way of economies of scale. It’s not like say, manufacturing, where you can implement changes to raise productivity.
A teacher can teach so many students in so many hours, and that’s it. Even huge intro classes have their limits.
Students can take so many classes at the same time, and that’s it — you can’t take a dozen classes at the same time, there’s not enough time to keep up with all the work.
That’s a limitation of a lot of fields. Medicine for one. Even at much reduced time spent on a visit, a doctor can only see so many patients in a day.
Matt McIrvin
@Glidwrith: This is why I get a bit uncomfortable when people describe the right’s ideology as a toxic hyper-individualism, and set liberalism against it as more collective.
It’s really not. Right-wingers are for individualism for me, conformity for thee. They’re always willing to pontificate about the limits of freedom for the little people. Back in the 90s David Frum worried that the problem with the social safety net was that it enabled the masses to do stupid stuff without being mortally punished. Suella Braverman, a British horror I learned about from Tony Jay, actually used the notion of a “universal declaration of responsibilities” to defend police torture in Brazil.
I think it’s the type of collectivity you set against individualism. Conservatives want everyone to fit into a hierarchy and enjoy their place in it, and to conduct their lives according to some set of traditional norms–and everyone above the bottom has a terrifying freedom of action toward the people below them in the hierarchy.
Liberals want people to do what they want unless it hurts somebody or infringes on somebody else’s rights–and they also believe we have a positive collective responsibility to take care of people.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
You’re on fire today.
lee
Has anyone delved into the released Jan6th tapes by the new squeeker?
I’ve seen random comments around ‘the internet’ about how they are exposing the lies about Jan6th.
I mean that is the expected reaction from the fascists. I was just wondering if there was anything at all surprising?
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin:
@Baud: Yes.
Kathleen
@Matt McIrvin: Excellent points all.
cmorenc
@JML:
Doctors who graduate med school with huge debts *should* be able to have those debts forgiven – on condition that they spend at least 4 years practicing in locations that are hugely under-served with physicians. Exactly like the main plot theme from the tv series “Northern Exposure”, but with no guarantee their respective assigned location will be populated by charmingly eccentric characters or gorgeous scenery.
If they bail on their commitment before completing their required term obligation, they will retain the right to do so, they will be free to do so – but at the price that they still owe the entire original debt.
cain
@Baud: Fat good that would do them. GOP voters love grifters. I don’t think it will affect his popularity with them one bit.
cain
and we have a new rotating tag request :)
Kathleen
@Baud: Also the Jon Stewart syndrome. Too kewel for skewel to pick a side. Must maintain skeptical aloofness. But somehow Republicans escape the brunt of the criticism. And valuing the need to “see both sides and be above it all at all costs” long beyond the sell by date is not helpful. NPR knows exactly what it’s doing.
wjca
As an early-Boomer, it makes me crazy that public support for public education has cratered like this. Education, and not just the STEM education that I got, is a public good. And a damn good investment for the country (and, specifically, the state). Refusing to pay for it is nuts.
That said, I do realize that most (all?) states are required to run balanced budgets. So someone arguing for restoring adequate funding needs to be clear about either a) what other state programs should be cut or b) which taxes should be raised and by how much. Or some combination, of course.
Personally, I think it’s a better place to spend money than some. And I also don’t necessarily have a problem with tax increases. (Specifically at the high end of incomes. Where, be it noted, I would be among those paying more.) But either way, it needs to be made clear.
Kathleen
@Kay: Do you think the lower than expected Republican turnout in last Ohio election is a belleweather of the dynamic you described and do you think it may carry over in 2024?
Kathleen
@Kay: I agree with you.
wjca
I’m not sure I’m buying that. But perhaps I am influenced by living in a state where the right has lost any ability to make a persuasive case. Still, no inherent reason why that can’t happen elsewhere.
Tying back to the discussion of public education, one might consider the trend of college educated voters away from the reactionary. Making more of them, via reducing education costs, might have non-economic benefits….
Bill Arnold
@SenyorDave:
Just spent an hour on twitter explicitly looking for antisemitic material. The first pair of keywords I tried worked fine: jews masters
Collected about 30 blatantly antisemitic tweets from the last 2 days as embeds; will sit on them for a week to see how many get taken down, then report the worst of them. At least one straight-up Nazi, who’s account is only a month old.
Anyway, bottom line is that any and all current statements from twitter/X about not tolerating antisemitism are lies.
If i had API access (paid, only, now) I could trivially script up finding hundreds, maybe thousands of blatantly antisemitic tweets per day. With some additional natural language automation, i could reduce the false positive rate by a factor of 10 or 100. Twitter/X could do this, too.
Sister Golden Bear
While it’s a bit early for the weekdays photo posts, here’s interesting photo showing the swirling light trails from the numerous surveillance aircraft over APEC in SF earlier this week. (Not my photo.)
Timill
@cmorenc: Nice idea, but there needs to be a caveat for excessive legal liability: an OB-GYN should be able to refuse Texas or Idaho, without penalty. Which is in itself a can of worms marked ‘extra wriggly’…
Sister Golden Bear
FYI, I also have some BlueSky invites if anyone is in need.
wataguy
I would very much appreciate a Bluesky invite if you still have one. Thanks!
piratedan
back in da saddle and online after errand running. Like other kind jackals, I do have some bsky invites for those interested.
e-mail me @ gmail with the Piratedan7 handle.
Mai Naem mobile
@Bill Arnold: you don’t have to see spend more than a few minutes on any Twitter politics thread to see anti Semitic stuff. It’s disgusting. I can’t believe how awful the site has become in a year. Bluesky reminds me of early Twitter. Funny creative stuff. I can’t see how Musk didn’t see the value of funny creative stuff vs ugly ugly stuff.
eclare
Gawd, the blowers have started up around me. Make.It.Stop.
Ken
The funny creative writers mocked him, the writers of ugly ugly stuff said he was great.
Nancy
Is it still possible to get a BluSky invite – just a lurker asking?
MagdaInBlack
@Sister Golden Bear: That photo somehow makes me think of “Neuromancer.”
lee
My feed on Twitter is oddly normal. I’m very quick to block so I wonder if the algorithm knows that and works accordingly.
trollhattan
@lee:
Whatever you do, don’t tell Melon because he hates that kind of communism.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Is it wrong that Elon’s latest giant rocket and Starship spacecraft going KaBoom 💥 makes me giggle? Pardoning n if this is a double post my phones been weird
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff
I would also love a BlueSky invite if anyone has one still they feel like giving me…thank you!
Baud
I will leave it to the reader to guess which country’s Supreme Court is involved.
piratedan
@Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff: drop me an e-mail, I gots one left
Scout211
@Nancy: If you don’t get a response in the comments, send an email to Anne Laurie or WaterGirl to request an invite code that others have sent them to distribute.
Their emails are listed under the “contact us” link.
Alison Rose
@Nancy: I’ve got some. You can email WaterGirl and ask her to pass it along to me and I’ll send you one.
Subsole
@Suzanne:
Shoot. American healthcare has an everything shortage.
I know there are places in the DFW currently at 30% staffing levels, because Covid just hammered us that hard. We are still dragging ourselves out of the hole TFG put us in with his bullshit.
Sister Golden Bear
@MagdaInBlack: The ending of “New Rose Hotel”
dearmaizie
Do you need an account at BlueSky just to read? If so,
“Or if you were too shy to ask — now is your chance!”
Martin
@Another Scott: So, I have a somewhat rosier take on the OpenAI situation. There are some at least marginally good things happening here. I don’t fault anyone for taking a more cynical take here.
Altman was presumably pushed out due to his presentation earlier this month at their developer event. In that event he was pushing for a more rapid rollout of consumer products based on their work. The coup was almost certainly led by Ilya Sutskever, who is the engineer who oversees efforts to control these systems so they don’t lead to bad outcomes. Ilya is a member of the board and is really widely respected – he’s not a ‘turn VC money into profits’ guy. Altman is the money guy and Altman was the one constantly pushing for more rapid commercialization – with some speculation that ChatGPT is currently losing money – it consumes more compute than it earns in revenue from users, and the whole operation is still mostly remaining afloat due to Microsofts investments. It’s not that the product is inherently unprofitable – there are two ways to solve the problem – slow down commercialization until compute costs come down (as they are basically guaranteed to do) or speed up commercialization so you can extract revenue from users faster than you do compute. Altman was the champion on the latter, and we believe Ilya the champion on the former because he’s seeing the social concern and backlash to LLM and slowing things down so they can get in front of some of the technical challenges leading to ChatGPT just straight up lying also has the benefit of stalling for compute cost to drop. But it risks competitors catching up, which Ilya has never expressed a concern about.
One thing working in everyone’s favor here is that the OpenAI corporation is owned by a nonprofit and it’s the nonprofit’s board that calls the shots, and they’re the one who fired Altman. And the nonprofit is at least a bit more concerned about the research being done here than the profits that the for-profit might earn.
I don’t think this will have a major impact on the trajectory of this stuff, but I feel a little better that the people who remain at OpenAI are the ones who remain and the ones who left are the ones who left. But so much of the underlying technology here is in the public domain now and is going to go largely unchecked. But at least the leader in the space will hopefully be able to shift a bit more in a better direction.
Eyeroller
@Another Scott: At the risk of doxxing myself, I know a *lot* about how R1 research universities operate. Chasing grants has nothing to do with filling in lack of support from the state. It’s how faculty at a research university get tenure and promotions. In fact, student tuition and other funds subsidize research.
Martin
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: A little bit. Like it or not, SpaceX is our national space program. It’s miles ahead of anyone else in the US or outside, and we really should want them to succeed. Ideally that would be under different ownership and leadership. We’ll see if the feds determine Musk to be a national security threat which would force some resolution to this – either an end to federal funding which would kill the company or a forced sale.
Scout211
At this point, yes. But they are planning to release a browser version soon so that the rest of us can read posts without getting an account.
cain
@Martin:
Thankfully, incorporated in the U.S. so they can’t sell themselves to another country like say Russia or China.
mrmoshpotato
@Subsole:
Another round of applause for the stupid, selfish children…
Gvg
@cmorenc: this kind of deal already exists. Surprisingly few take the offer and many are not qualified, in that it is mainly aimed at family and general practice doctors which is what rural and underserved areas tend to need most. Some others too, but not every specialty.
there are some that do it though.
zhena gogolia
This is a very long Saturday morning.
Subsole
@Geminid:
All glory to the ilKhan.
May the light of his banners stretch to the eight horizons, and the bones of all who raise their hands against him turn to ash beneath the wrathful thunder of his Ordu.
twbrandt
FPers must have today off.
piratedan
well those groceries gotta get shopped and that laundry has to get done.
Marc
I live in Oakland and was a recreation pilot for far too many years, so I was also watching the air traffic over the Bay Area during APEC using adsbexchange.com. Low level surveillance consisted of 2 or 3 CHP helicopters, a fixed wing CHP plane with a telescopic camera, plus a DHS helicopter. Higher up at 22 to 24K feet there would be at least one USAF tanker present all day, with some unknown number of fighters and other military aircraft flying with transponders off. I could see the tankers flying over my house when it wasn’t cloudy, twice with fighters immediately behind.
The whole security setup seemed a bit over the top and intended to counter threats from decades ago. It’s 2023, they couldn’t stop the Bay Bridge from being blocked by protesters during the Thursday commute, and I suspect if someone had really wanted to disrupt the conference, having fighters overhead wouldn’t have been much use.
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: Newsmaxx was probably on it yesterday… I had a great quote for them to use. Sorta sad….
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Martin: I want SpaceX to be successful just not under the ownership of antisemitic, racist facist who sells people on the idea of escaping Earth to escape our problems. Who also believes that he needs to breed more white babies, I think he ‘s up to 11 now, but is apparently a crap father.
repeating some of the mistakes of the past is probably not a good direction to go in. Operation Paperclip anyone?
Paul in KY
@narya: He was so so so so so so embarrassing in any diplomatic sphere or situation or moment… God, I just so love Pres Biden’s normalcy & decency & level headedness.
Paul in KY
@Spanky: If that had been the Sauron School District, they would have saved alot of money by just complying…
Paul in KY
@Kay: All the younguns want to be ‘influencers’. A generalization for sure, but alot yearn for clicks on whatever platform they hangout on.
Martin
@Eyeroller: I disagree, and also from a position of expertise. With some important caveats. I’m retired from an R1, and part of my career was being the strategist to balance the books.
At our R1, instruction was break even. It ran a profit and subsidized research in the low instruction cost areas of the campus – humanities, social sciences, etc. and ran a deficit and was subsidized by other things in STEM. Cost of instruction in engineering was 4x what it was in the humanities, mainly due to faculty salary, cost of facilities, class size, TA ratios, etc. Sometimes you have to overstaff the engineering class because if something goes wrong a student gets injured. You can *always* understaff humanities to make budget. It’s shitty, but that’s what you do.
There was some subsidization of state funds and tuition across disciplines, but not a lot – that was a good way to get your provost tossed out by the faculty. In STEM we augmented the budget through some fee services – renting access to equipment and staff to industry, summer camps, training programs to industry, stuff like that, and also through professional MS programs that would charge outrageous tuition for a streamlined and convenient program for working professionals that also doubled as a honeypot for foreign students hoping to land an H1B visa off the back of.
And yes, the faculty did use research as the mechanism to get tenure and promotions but the administration used the faculty to help balance the budget. We had a model I developed to value faculty, kind of like WAR in baseball, and when faulty came in to request a retention adjustment to salary, we’d use to determine if it was worth to try and retain that faculty. And research funding was a big component of that, because the maintenance on the grants directly paid for our contracts and grants staff, but also partially paid for purchasing, HR, and a whole host of broader staff. That maintenance covered upkeep on buildings and facilities, and we were strategic about building purely academic (state funded) or non-academic (research/gift funded) or hybrid (some of each) so we could pierce the state funding barrier one way or the other, and after 2008, we were only piercing it by pulling non-taxpayer dollars to help subsidize academics and core administration. We always had a shortage of state dollars and tuition dollars (except for those professional fees and self-supporting PhD students – you get by appealing to wealthy foreign governments where its cheaper for them to pay students to study abroad than build their own universities – Saudi Arabia, etc.) and so here, you had STEM and medicine research and fee services (operating a hospital, clinics, etc.) usually backfilling budget shortfalls in academics. Research outside of STEM was usually too small to make much difference, to build infrastructure to support, so you wouldn’t see this dynamic there – but it was absolutely in STEM.
So yes, at the faculty level research is just to advance career, but at the administrative level which faculty you let leave to other schools and which faculty you poach from other places (it was very beneficial every time a GOP governor would go after tenure or wokism or whatever bullshit because we’d immediately go shopping for new faculty) is ultimately budget-driven at least in STEM. We didn’t exactly share too much that side of things, because it’s unsavory stuff, we never felt good doing it, but it was inevitable given the larger dynamics.
This is also affected by the budgetary model of the institution. RCM leads to a lot more of this in STEM and a greater focus on service teaching outside of it. Do you have teaching faculty who can lower instructional costs which shifts (either quantitatively or qualitatively) how you evaluate retention offers for faculty. How much use of grad students to teach do you do, which also lower costs (and also helps train good teaching faculty for students pursuing that path)? How badly do you abuse adjuncts and post-docs? And yes, we are extremely aware that these positions are being fucked over.
Speaking to Another Scotts speculation of the explosion of management positions – yeah, he’s pretty much got it right. Almost all of those positions pay for their own salary. Many institutions came to this conclusion before 2008, but almost all did after 2008, that because higher education costs rise faster than inflation (see Baumols Cost Disease), state funding and tolerance of rising tuition was doing to cap those dollars at inflation, and in order to stay afloat we’d have to find other dollars to keep running. Those added administrators were tasked with doing that – patent revenue, gift giving, service revenue, foreign partnerships, enrichment programs, industry training partnerships, sports revenue, merchandise – they all require different skillsets to build, different relationships with the community, industry, marketing skills, and so on. The drop in taxpayer funding shifted universities from being narrowly structured organizations on teaching and maybe research into something more like a large multinational corporation with a million different divisions each with their own P&L.
My thesis through this transition was that it was ultimately unsustainable, that the universities would be better served by seeking productivity gains in teaching to help pull it down from its superinflationary trajectory. But that’s a tough sell because we measure the quality of universities largely by how unproductive they are, rather than how good they are at teaching. I wanted my institution to be brave, ignore the rankings, strike out in this other direction, do the hard work, and then stand in contrast as a way to pull the national conversation in our direction. They chose to not do that. That helped my decision to retire early. I wasn’t interested in driving the place deeper into the ditch.
Martin
@cain: That has no bearing on who they sell to. But the US would block any foreign sale regardless of if they were incorporated or not, publicly or privately traded.
kalakal
@zhena gogolia: There’s a warning in the title of the OP
Martin
@Suzanne: The underlying problem, which nobody in higher ed wants to come to terms with is that higher ed is superinflationary because unlike virtually every other part of the economy, education has produced zero productivity gains in the last century.
Now, we can quibble about whether productivity gains are good or bad, but what can’t be quibbled with is that if the rest of the economy is getting productivity gains, those gains are discounting the inflation rate that they otherwise would have experienced. So when you aggregate it across the entire economy, inflation gets somewhat depressed thanks to it.
So when you then look at relative costs to inflation, education costs keep going up. You can interpret that as education being wasteful (how we generally have interpreted it) or unavoidable, but regardless, the percentage of tax revenues going to education MUST go up every year, because tax revenues are going to track with inflation unless you have population growth or GDP growth notably ahead of inflation. And if education inflation is higher than GDP growth or ahead of population growth (common) then you’ll have to divert an increasing share to education regardless.
So education has three options:
Everyone chose 3. Almost nobody is seriously pursuing 2 (ASU is, for example, to some limited success). And everyone agrees that 1 is impossible in the US.
So it’s not *really* that taxpayer money has been cut, its that taxpayers refused to continue to increase funding year after year.
I went into 2020 seeing Covid as an opportunity to maybe change this calculus – that the pandemic would provide an opportunity to seek those productivity gains that previously nobody wanted to do, but that failed almost completely almost everywhere.
wjca
@Martin: Thank you for this explanation of income and expenses at a large university. Lots of details I hadn’t come across before.
Another Scott
@Eyeroller: Maybe it’s the “blind men describing an elephant” problem. I see parts of the problem via my research work, though I’m not at a university.
But I read things like this, for UVA.edu:
(Emphasis added.)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: Haha, yeah.
Subsole
@MagdaInBlack:
“What in the chicken-fried hell is a ‘Wintermute’???”
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Martin: Those productivity gains, in theory, are supposed to come from remote and recorded instruction. The reason the institutions aren’t going harder after that is because they were already forced to experiment with this during the pandemic. Most determined those experiments were failures. Student performance declined and for some, it declined precipitiously.
NotMax
@Sister Golden Bear
You already have my e-mail. Please shoot me one unless they expire (waiting on a browser version).
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yeah, online and remote instruction are good sources of those gains, but so are changes to assessment, and in high cost areas, changes to experiential learning.
The pandemic experiment was a failure because it was thrown together. Doing online/remote well takes time and expense up front, but Covid was so slapdash that it wasn’t done well. My hope was simply that Covid would illustrate the importance of having online/remote invested in as a hedge against other challenges – such as a pandemic, but also overenrollment, sudden loss of an instructor – things we dealt with all the time. Most students benefit from having that content available in that form, even if you are also providing traditional in-class instruction, and in a lot of cases just shifting *some* of what you do frees up the in-class instruction to be better. But that lesson wasn’t learned. We went into covid unprepared, we half-assed our way through it and rather than learning the lesson of planning ahead, we just doubled down on the thing we wanted to believe. And the reason we don’t change is that online/remote requires that you change how you compensate faculty. That change in model is something they aggressively oppose. This is why in order to change that instructional model you pretty much have to build an entire new institution like WGU.
I think if you saw the curriculum of Open University (UKs largest university) you’d have a different opinion of what was possible with online/remote. Their courses look NOTHING like what you’ve seen in the US. Course development looks more like a documentary production but built from a standard learning outcome framework, but lectures can be given on-site – so they’ll go on location to film the course, there will be professional filming/editing, etc. The content is regularly maintained and updated. And this is productive because you don’t re-produce the content every term, you do it once, you maintain it each term, and maybe after 5 years you re-produce it, but that content can go out to thousands of students. That lets you focus your recurring costs on direct student support, assessment and feedback, and so on where the US spends most of their expenses on repeating the same set of lectures every term, often nearly word for word and then underfunding the direct student support side – TAs, experiential learning, etc. and a lot of that is gatekept by the faculty who routinely fear being replaced by these other mechanisms – mostly because of the way compensation works.
You see some changes in the US in very isolated pockets, but nothing systemic yet.
evodevo
@Gin & Tonic: Yep…when I went to uni in the Sixties/Seventies, you could pay room, board and tuition at state universities with the money you made at a summer job. Started getting out of control in the Eighties, and by the time my son went to my college in the late Nineties, I had to take a job to pay for it, and still required student loans to cover the vig…
Martin
@Another Scott: My public university got 7% of their funding from taxpayers. Less than that came from undergraduate tuition.
A lot of the research funding does feed back into itself – equipment and materials, so that’s mostly zero-sum, but that equipment sometimes does move into instruction in time. But research funding is how graduate students get funded which triggers some taxpayer subsidy, and drives some of the other funding sources like dining, housing, parking, etc.
One thing that was really problematic here in CA was that we were growing off of international enrollments. It didn’t in any way reduce our in-state enrollments – the state dictates how many in-state students we can have (and we can’t go over) but we could add non-state subsidized students paying full freight. A LOT of people got angry off the growth of that enrollment, believing it was denying their kid a seat – which it wasn’t – that was all on the state. But those international students threw of an excess of money which we used to build dorms, classrooms, etc. – infrastructure that would still be there after those students graduated, and if the state did then increase the number of students they’d support, we’d had already built the infrastructure needed to accommodate them from dollar imported from China. It was literally a trade export that built domestic infrastructure that would benefit state residents, but we were told to stop doing that because it made people feel bad.
dearmaizie
@Scout211: Thanks! Wish they’d hurry. Everybody has left Twitter and it’s just a shitshow. I’m suspicious of Threads, have accounts at Mastodon, Post and Spoutible, so that leaves BlueSky. That SOB Musk has just ruined everything. He and trump are both public menaces.
rekoob
@Martin: Responding a bit late to all of this (I was in DC at the Meetup). Extremely interesting and helpful overview — I’ve been on the board of my alma mater, a small liberal arts college, and while we didn’t have the scale of your issues, the scope was indeed quite similar and sounds familiar. Also grateful to Eyeroller and Another Scott for the added conversation. Much to contemplate.
Rob Eberhardt
Hi, I would love a Blue Sky invite if there are any more available <3
Ironcity
@Uncle Cosmo: As one of those awful civil servants, we had to write the RFPs you had to respond to. The schedules were always to get them out by the beginning of the 3rd fiscal quarter (now days 1 July, before 1977, 1 May). We generally had them written but they had to be approved by layers of management contributing what you’d expect. We spent our summers frolicing in briefings, our autumns further pulling our hair out and by the end of the fiscal year management suddenly decided they were ready to go and you got them in time for the holidays and end of the calendar year. Typically 60 to 90 days allowed for preparing and delivering proposals and it is now happy Easter maybe a bunny will help you read all the BS from all the different creative writing exercises different companies provided. I think it is the same misery, just the two different sides.
Barry
@RaflW: “I know there are no legit journalists left at Fox. But do some of the pretend journos feel even the tiniest bit of embarrassment any more? Are the brain worms that thorough?”
For a lot of media places, I believe that it’s pretty clear what you are signing up for when you get one of those jobs. A gag reflex just gets in the way.