>You are simply defining intellectual as “whatever universities do and say
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among
faculty, staff, and leadership.
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
>In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
You ask other scholars in the field to read it and give their opinion on it. It’s this thing called “peer review” that is kind of the basis of all modern academic inquiry.
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
If people can be ranked differently as candidates by different universities and the people at them how can you ever be sure that a person who got the job because of DEI was the worse candidate?
There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that. Every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field that are the most competitive to get published in and are the most respected, someone with a lot of publications in those journals would be objectively better than someone with no publications or with publications in crappy no-name journals that claim they are "peer-reviewed" but basically publish anything that gets submitted.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
>There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Reading more carefully, you're just making nonsensical statements that have no connection to reality. Yes, many of these absolutely are objective.
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
Sure, it’s not infallible, but having other experts in the field read and judge a candidate’s work is at least an honest attempt at assessing merit.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
>I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
I've worked in academic publishing for a long while, and I can tell you from experience that:
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I'm not saying it's only prestige, but to a first approximation, a researcher who has an article published in Nature is highly likely to be better than one who has only published in no-name garbage journal that publishes whatever they are sent. Of course, nothing is certain, but we're talking about probabilities here.
And, as I'm saying, prestige, or probable future prestige, isn't a good proxy for a researcher's value or future value, even if it could be fairly guessed, which it can't. Nature is exhibit A, B and C, as it's the most prestigious journal, but not the most rigorous in any field, and its very existence damages Science by overvaluing the research it publishes, reducing the impact of better journals and the research they publish, and wasting the time, quality of life, and quality of research of scientists who feel like they must do anything they have to to publish in it, or are pressured by funders and/or academic institutions to do so.
But you are talking certainty when you claim DEI hires means that it's possible the lesser person is hired. If you have no objective system to measure merit then it's possible to ever know this
How does anyone know anything? Why even vet candidates at all? Let’s just assign professorships completely randomly then. We’ll have high school dropouts who can’t explain the quadratic formula teach differential equations at Harvard.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
The administration is saying “hire and promote faculty and admit students based on scholarly merit, not ideology and activism”. Universities are saying “no, we want to keep doing the ideology stuff”. That is anti-intellectual.
The people in the administration were not admitted to their universities based on merits, they paid to get in and they paid for their degree. This is especially true for POTUS who holds an entirely fake degree bought and paid for by his father.
The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and then instead advocate for terrorist groups that are hostile to the interests of the US and its allies. No, that isn't the same. Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government? Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
>The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and instead advocate for terrorist groups.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
>Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country?
What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
> If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
They are the ones asking to live in a different country. The burden is on them to demonstrate why they should be allowed to live here, not on us to prove why they shouldn’t.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
No, that's a lie and you know it's a lie. The administration specifically demanded that Harvard must submit to viewpoint diversity audits, hiring faculty and admitting students as necessary to make sure that every department has a balance of viewpoints the government finds acceptable.
No, that wasn't sufficient. The government specifically demanded that Harvard must commission a government-approved external party to audit viewpoint diversity, and must promise in advance to follow its recommendations, for each of the next three years.
No, it's not a lie that the administration said universities should hire and admit students based on merit. The administration's letter is linked from the university's statement. You can go read it. It's the very first two points.
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
> somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
>This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
Yes, you reject the first offer and make a counter offer. That is how negotiating works. You ask for more than you expect to get to find out what the limit is that the other party will go up to. How else would you find the limit? You don't know what the other party is thinking or what all of their priorities are. You can't just magically intuit it a priori.
If that's how negotiating works, and Trump cancelled the funding instead of delivering a counteroffer, shouldn't we conclude that Trump is not in fact negotiating? It seems like your vision of negotiation is that Trump does whatever he wants and everyone else politely begs him to be gracious in victory.
Trump made the initial offer. It was up to the university to make a counteroffer and try to meet in the middle. Instead they flatly refused everything. When one party rejects an offer in a negotiation, the other party often walks away. That’s what Trump did. If you aren’t willing and able to walk away, you’re begging, not negotiating.
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#-----------------------------
Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
I find I'm willing and able to walk away from this discussion. I'll keep your strategic advice in mind the next time a Trump supporter tries to explain why I should not shun them or organize a boycott of their business.
What he explained in his book is that he's an evil, dishonest person, who routinely lies and harms people in negotiations in order to get his way. I agree that being evil and dishonest is often quite effective - if you came up to me with a knife and an outlandish demand that I should give you my wallet, I'd probably concede the negotiation. But I don't at all understand the idea that I have to respect this as some kind of clever negotiating strategy. The innocent researchers whose grants he's cancelled are real people suffering real harm, and they don't become transmuted to a mere negotiating tactic just because Donald Trump doesn't care about them.
Applicants for faculty positions are required to submit "diversity statements" expressing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This statement is evaluated before any of their other qualifications, like their standing in the field, number and quality of publications, teaching experience, you know, the intellectual quality of their work. If they are judged to be insufficiently committed to the DEI ideology, then their application is rejected without further review, regardless of how qualified they might otherwise be. That is anti-intellectual.
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
> growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
> 1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
The administration defines what ideology is and given the current administration claims it’s based on merit and given the nonsense they do economically, scientifically and militarily they are the ideological activists.
Not to mention that they are clearly hired based on gender and skin color.
This is a false dichotomy. Creating manufacturing jobs doesn’t mean there are no retail jobs. We should have both. Different people have different preferences. Even the same person at different times in different situations. Why limit ourselves to one option?
Do you not realize that one country learns how to make useful things like blouses, computers, phones, shoes, and the other country only knows how to make fake money?
What happens when the country that makes everything else realizes they can also make up fake money just as easily as anyone else?
> The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane.
This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead. They get a generous severance and find a new job.
What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever and ever and they can never be let go even when their job was pointless and anything else is inhumane?
Jobs come and go. Every rational adult understands this and makes arrangements for what they need to do if they have to find a new job. Stop acting like these are disabled children that the government is obligated to take care of.
For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.
> For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.
and if you aren't getting what you're owed for that money you have the ability to vote out the people responsible for that and elect people who can deliver what we're asking for. Try voting out the CEO of walmart.
Believe it or not, when a bunch of incompetents aren't dismantling them, most government agencies get their work done. There are a lot fewer "do-nothing"s than you think and a lot of hard workers who are proud to serve their fellow Americans.
You don’t need to vote out the CEO of Wal-Mart. He can’t put you in jail or confiscate your income via taxes. You just go shop at target or somewhere else instead.
The most universally hated companies are also among the richest. Voting with your wallet is a myth. The entire point of a private company is to confiscate your income. They must charge you as much as they possibly can while providing you with as little as they can possibly get away with. Maybe you've even noticed prices going up while enshittification and shrinkflation increases.
The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.
In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.
Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.
I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.
> If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated"
The most hated companies tend to be the ones who have been causing harm for years if not decades and impacting vast numbers of people: Purdue Pharma, Nestlé, BP, Facebook, Monsanto, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, etc. Several of the most hated companies have been directly responsible for killing millions of people. This isn't about "angry reviews online", sometimes it's about getting away with fraud or even murder.
> In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
Your calls also used to be much more private, but now the software, devices, and services you use are spying on you and your communications to varying degrees in ways that would have been illegal when you had a landline. Call quality was also vastly better ("you can hear a pin drop" vs "can you hear me now")
> TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper.
They also take multiple screenshots of every second to spy on what you're watching, they push ads on the screen even when you're playing video games or watching DVDs, and have microphones and camera collecting your personal data.
> Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer.
Cars are also spying on everything you do and reporting your driving habits to your insurance company who will jack up your rates if you drive at night or take a corner too hard.
> New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. I
You aren't counting the fact that parts of games (including parts important to the story) are often paywalled off and the cost of games can end up in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you include the DLC (for example the total cost of the Sims 4 is $1,235) or the games which require ongoing subscription costs, when in the 80s there were countless free player-made mods/maps/skins/expansions etc. Also video games are being used to build psychological profiles of you which then gets sold to data brokers and used to push ads at you (https://www.wired.com/story/video-games-data-privacy-artific...).
> The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s
The PC you had in the 90s was your computer. On your phone multiple third parties like your phone manufacturer, your carrier, and the OS maker can all access your phone remotely at any time, view/modify/add/delete files, applications, and settings without any notice to you at all. They have privileged levels of access to your device while you are left with a locked down account without full access to "your" device. Your computer in the 90s was designed to work for you, but your cell phone is designed to collect your personal data for other people.
> Food has more variety and is cheaper.
Food prices are at historic highs right now and that food is less healthy than it used to be as companies have been able to strip away regulations. The same scientists that the tobacco industry paid to lie to the public and government about the harms of smoking are now being employed by the food industry to convince the government that their additives are harmless (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...) and people are eating worse now than they did in the 1980s which shows in the amount of obesity and disease. I have to admit that we have much more variety than we did. That seems to be on the decline in recent years though and people are increasingly finding empty shelves at the stores.
Some things are better today than they used to be, but many things are actually much worse. Every new technology that does something convenient for you is also being used against you in some way.
Purdue Pharma is not one of the richest companies anymore. They have been sued into oblivion. The fact that some terminally online redditors like to farm karma by posting "Fuck Nestle" every time they're mentioned because of a 40 year old scandal is not really representative of them being "most hated". To 99% of people Nestle is chocolate chips and candy bars. Most people do not care about any of this, except maybe Comcast, and that is a case of regulatory capture.
Yeah, things can spy on you to target ads. If this bothers you, block ads. They can target all the ads they want at me, I'll never see them.
Call audio quality might have been better, but video quality was nonexistent. My mom can see her granddaughter from the other side of the world and that was simply not even possible 20 years ago.
You can still root your phone and most computers are still your own, if this is important for you. For the vast majority of people, they don't even understand what the settings mean and it is a relief that they don't have to deal with them. The average consumer experience compared to editing autoexec.bat and fiddling with .ini files to get a game working on Windows 95 is a vast improvement.
> The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M
You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.
Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).
> This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead
People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
Not that death is required to screw up your life either. This is not a great time to be out of work. Household debt is at an all time high. Credit card delinquencies and utility disconnections are skyrocketing, homelessness is at an all time high. People are already struggling. Those problems are likely to only get worse for anyone who suddenly finds themselves out of work. Adding hundreds of thousands of Americans to the already growing pool of unemployed people all at once means that jobs will be harder to find and offered wages will be lowered.
> What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever
Who said anything about forever? Maybe just don't randomly fire vast numbers of Americans indiscriminately and all at once for zero reason disrupting their lives and interfering with services that people want, depend on, and are paying for?
> People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
No, this could not "easily" happen. People get COBRA to continue their health coverage after losing their job. There is Medicaid and other programs for people who can't afford care. There are state exchanges where you can purchase insurance upon qualifying events like losing your job. There are a million and one ways to deal with this. Contrary to popular belief people in America do not immediately drop dead the second their health insurance lapses. This is nonsensical fear-mongering.
COBRA is a joke. It's way too expensive. Medicaid is on the chopping block, but even then it doesn't cover everything and not every doctor accepts Medicaid and "other programs". Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year because they don't have insurance and can't afford the treatment they need.
1. Cobra is absurdly expensive. “Healthy” people typically opt for no insurance at all, because they’re now unemployed and poor. Some will die. We cannot ignore obvious human behavior to make your argument more convenient.
2. Medicaid is among the programs on the chopping block. Again, we cannot just ignore that little point because it’s inconvenient. This is ALL part of one conservative strategy for starving the beast.
I think the point is that is inhumane to fire someone because of "coding error", from what we know about USA not having a job is affecting your health care so might cost the person life because a "coding error" , so if you are the guy that writes a "findfWhoToFire" function please have some empathy and tripple check your code and write tests, in USA it can cost lives.
I mostly agree with your position. However there are a couple of issues that make federal government work distinct from ordinary business.
1. Fired federal workers typically do not get a severance. Those impacted by the recent reductions in force are not receiving severance packages.
2. Government salaries are usually uncompetitive compared to the private sector; the major difference is the value of the pension. Leaving government service early results in a low pension; the pension is usually only worth it after 20 years of service and if one leaves federal service close to retirement age, to max out the "high-3" pension basis.
3. Because federal jobs are partially a stimulus effort to state economies, workers will have relocated to a region where there is no other employer in their field. Relocation will be necessary to find another job. This is less of a factor for the private sector, where workers typically move to locations where multiple employers offer jobs for their field.
A necessary set of reforms will be to simultaneously a.) raise federal salaries to market rate, b.) replace pension contributions with 401k matching, c.) reduce roadblocks for performance firings for tenured employees, and d.) consolidate contractors into federal employment.
Part of the reason federal employment is inflexible is due to the comparatively low income for many fields; mid-career employees have a low incentive for joining. Likewise, the barrier to leaving early is high due to the sunk cost of the pension. A tenured employee with reduced productivity is difficult to remove. Due to the pension obligations, the government is forced to use contractors to fill out the workforce. Contracting companies often take 50% overhead just to have someone doing the same job as a federal employee.
Such a policy change would take substantial bipartisan cooperation, so it's unlikely to be done in the current political environment.
This is separate from the deferred resignation plan DOGE was offering. Under that plan employees voluntarily resigned and continued being employed for approximately 8 months, with full pay and benefits and no duties. They were free to go get another job during that time. That is more generous than most layoffs.
The pension / relocation are real issues, but if you work in a job that has a demand in the private sector (e.g. Treasury department going to finance), the increased pay from the private sector often more than makes up for the loss of the pension.
What 8 months? If you believe that, you’re a sucker.
Edit: how about all those fired "for cause" even though it's obviously not "for cause"? If you wanna call this shifting goal posts, fine, but consider this - the DOGE is doing something like a "broad spectrum" attack on government employees. Neither their firings nor offers are legal.
DOGE is destroying entire fields. Maybe you built a career in museum curatorship or international development. You don't get paid much but its a decent living and you feel that you are enriching the world.
You don't just wake up without a job. You wake up in a world where you need a totally new career.
There are lots of privately funded museums. Museums are not going to disappear.
“International development” is mostly rich failsons with politically connected parents getting funneled taxpayer money via NGOs and/or a front for the CIA. Good riddance.
"Don't worry, you've got six months of emergency fund and jobs come and go" and "good riddance I'm glad their careers are destroyed those lazy leeches" don't feel like they should be placed so close together.
I personally believe that making mobile games is less valuable to the world than handing out TB meds, but that's just me.
> Foreign governments have long accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of being a front for the CIA or other groups dedicated to their collapse. In the case of Cuba, they appear to have been right.
I don’t think Foreign Policy is considered some crackpot conspiracy theory rag.
USAID was run by the State department, which is known to provide cover for the CIA (every embassy has CIA officers working out of it). This is not a “conspiracy theory”. The CIA does exist and they do spy on other countries.
What do you think the CIA does? Do you think they go to other countries and open an office with a big sign saying “Hello, this is the CIA”?
can just speak for myself, but I wouldn't be employable after a layoff like that... I't get a mental meltdown and afterwards would probably be on disability until I got mentally better. They're literally teaching thausands of people that they aren't reliable and can't be trusted.
I mean, if that's what you're aiming for, good for you, but I'd recon that you'll end up with more people that want your head now than before.
kw is an instantaneous measurement. Energy usage would be kWh (kilowatt-hours). Considering it would take a tiny fraction of a server’s compute for less than a second this would be very small.
The image the AI generates is not copyrighted (except maybe by OpenAI I guess) unless it ends up being an exact duplicate of an existing image. Copyright applies to a specific work. The character may be trademarked like Mickey Mouse, but that is a different IP protection.
> Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money!
He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass.
Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.
The university administration doesn’t discourage that. In some cases they encourage it.
They won’t get denied tenure for protesting the current thing. It’s more likely they could get denied tenure for not loudly protesting the current thing.
I did keep reading after that, but it didn't change anything.
As the sibling notes, academics have no problem suddenly finding their voice when they discover a colleague who's secretly harboring mildly right wing views. The open letters, protests, outrage and demands for resignations flow like water until the administration folds, usually about 0.25 seconds later.
The author describes a problem created by the policies of the university leadership, but refuses to lay the blame at their feet. Instead he/she says things like "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem" and "It’s the phones, stupid." after describing a problem that is 100% caused by the faculty themselves. Because where do the deans come from? Why would they have leverage to dismiss a professor who upheld standards? They came from the faculty, and they have leverage because the faculty created this problem and are willing to propagate it.
The dean is like a middle manager. They are not the university leadership. The actual leadership is the president and board of trustees and the legions of administrators who create and enforce policies. They are not faculty or if they once were like the president and some other upper level positions, they left that path a long time ago.
They care about things like the US News and World Report rankings, and if students are failing classes and it starts hurting their graduation rate and hurting their ranking, they put a stop to it.
I sometimes go down this rabbit hole and wonder why people don't use server-side includes to just have Apache or nginx handle a common header / footer or whatnot. Seems like what they were made for. Are they slow or something?
This is why Harvard students now need remedial algebra classes.
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