elgar1212's comments

This article comes off as a little too polemical. Is there administrative excess in academia? Yes. But the author seems to have an underlying motive

> George Leef, the director of research at the Center for Higher Education Policy, has described the funding of higher education as “a boondoggle” that robs taxpayers, and Shaw has demanded that the legislature “starve the beast.”[0] (George Leef is director of editorial content for the site linked)

In this case, it seems like the underlying motive is to undermine trust in higher education in order to increase support for broader budget cuts.

As much as I dislike university presidents, provosts, etc, the author of that article simply brings up a bunch of grievances and offers no clear indication of a solution

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale

Are all models made in Taiwan though? Where do you find the data to confirm where they source their parts from?

> I was under the impression that most MBP are made in China?

afaik they all are, but this was a purchase from several years ago

Yes, but I got it several years ago and wasn't as concerned about China at the time

Future gens of mbp might not be made in China (but afaik they still are)

> Well, Big Tech is not the only concentrated industry. A bunch of concentrated industries use Big Tech antitrust as a pretext for going after Big Tech—not to end monopoly but to redistribute the industry’s share of the monopoly themselves. So, cable operators, phone companies, entertainment companies. I think it’s fair to say that the big entertainment companies don’t want to kill Google; they just want to take it over. Some of the energy that comes up to break up or tame Big Tech is coming from other sectors that are every bit as much in need of taming and breakup as Big Tech is.

This is the most notable bit of information in the article

The whole big tech thing has three camps: big tech itself, other corporations like telecoms which want to buy out tech companies like verizon bought out yahoo, and politicians in DC who want to blackmail tech companies and control the flow of information[0]

government regulation is a double edged sword, and wherever there's a bunch of money there's a bunch of people who want to take it

[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

I've been considering moving from a mbp to an x1 for a while now, but a couple things are keeping me from it:

- mbp isn't dead (yet)

- x1 is made in china, human rights issues

- x1 is less repairable than other thinkpad models such as t14 or p14 (which are still made in china, however)

- now there is linux support for mbp for dual booting

Here's another one about waterboarding, very odd...

http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diffs/156bbb833d79c589d7791bc8d02f...

Glenn Greenwald - No Place to Hide

Reason why isn't necessarily because of the specifics of the 2013 leaks, but because he documents the interaction between government and press (and how he was demonized and threatened afterwards). Tl;dr the government blackmailed journalists to keep the story from getting published

Also (on a related note because both are about obscure bureaucracy), Kafka's Castle. Kafka bored me at first, but he writes situations that are just a little "off" in a way that's really unique. It's incredibly hard to describe and definitely very surreal, he takes certain aspects of human nature and amplifies them to the point of absurdity

> Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.

A "youth-culture consultant" trying to predict the future? How scientific

Since this whole article is just one big hot take, here's another hot take: eponymous social media as a whole is on the way out. The only stuff anyone can put on eponymous social media is personal brand stuff (think LinkedIn), never anything actually genuine

It's impossible for people to have real engagements under eponymous social media because anything they can say could be turned against them

IG is predominantly just marketing, whether it's people showing off (like LinkedIn), pages trying to build a following with e.g. pet videos so they can make money from ads, annoying influencer "content", or actual overt ads

this is even more infuriating than actual ads, because at least actual ads have the "sponsored" label and don't try to hide it

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying

Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better

The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in

(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)

Some interesting ones:

http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diffs/c5885fe11dbfd31923f7554cf41c...

http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diffs/c5885fe11dbfd31923f7554cf41c...

http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diffs/ca44a9a42489ede43a5f58ccbd0d...

> One of the Navy Network Information Center (NNIC)'s top edits is the Subic rape case.

What's the tl;dr of what happened here? It looks to me like someone in the US military raped a Filipino girl, and then either blackmailed her family or did something shady in order to get her to recant. Meanwhile there were edits on the page to disregard her initial allegations[0]

[0] http://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diffs/c5885fe11dbfd31923f7554cf41c...

> History was always written by the victors, we only see it happen in real time now.

A modern spin on this: history is no longer written by the victors, but by people with literally no life outside of writing crap on the internet

> Tell me about how many people I know who went to a CISSP bootcamp, passed the test, and walk around not knowing shit? It's the same in a lot of universities too.

So because bootcamps are an insufficient means of testing, standardized testing in general is inadequate? And not just this specific test in particular?

> Training someone to pass a test to get in is not the same as finding the right person to go there.

Only if the test is insufficient. "finding the right person" is just a racist, classist dog whistle from a group of people that feel entitled to the right to discriminate

You want to see a living example of this entitlement? Listen to the audio from the recent Supreme court verbal argument regarding the Harvard case. Specifically the "oboe players" comment. Juxtapose this with the historical racist and antisemitic discrimination and ask yourself whether Harvard should be trusted to "find the right person" in this sort of way

> people who are qualified to manage do the managing

It's very convenient that those who are "qualified to manage" consistently come from the same stratum of society

> Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?

Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?

The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing

> Students are only taught rote memorization from primary school onwards. They spend their formative years in before-school and after-school coaching doing more of the same, all to crack that single test which will determine their future (and a large number are driven to suicide because of it). No curiosity, no outside interests, no social skills, no independent thought. All of these are discouraged in favor of memorizing equations.

You do realize that this is the same language that universities like Harvard use to discriminate against Asian Americans (and historically against Jewish people)?

Reading this and knowing that you're talking about South Asians in particular, this comment just comes off as stereotypical and racist

> Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?

Why aren't people angry about this? Why hasn't this been regulated away by now?

Anyone who's been through the university system knows about all the trash emails that these people sit around writing. It's like that's all they do (visibly): they either sit on their asses writing emails or they stand on the stage for graduation day.

What are these people for? Just writing emails? Why don't we just automate their jobs away and slice the cost of tuition?

Here's what we need: legislation to cap the percentage of administrative staff and cap their salaries to be no higher than the average salary of a professor at that university

> The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.

Yeah, kind of like SBF

> I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.

I'd counter this and say the insistence on qualitative standards just opens the door for classist decision making. The second you allow people to introduce qualitative standards, it opens the door for discrimination