Everything is broken and we continue to make it worse. When I worked in an academic lab, we had funding from private and public institutions. Both of them basically forbade ever buying a computer,...
Exemplary
Everything is broken and we continue to make it worse.
When I worked in an academic lab, we had funding from private and public institutions. Both of them basically forbade ever buying a computer, heaven forbid, probably for some of the exact same reasons, questions about how it would be accounted for. This was a long time ago so the expectation was that you would bring your own laptop in and use it for work.
Because of the USA's obsession with documentation and prevention of mis-allocation of funds, or "theft", as it were, I spent a lot of my time making and categorizing orders, and while we could not use our funding to buy a laptop, I had to do things like "buy an extra antibody so that they don't reduce our funding next year" or buy a lot of pipette tips because our consumable budget had been overshot, even though what we really needed was a computer. People seriously underestimate the amount of time wasted, bureaucratic bloat, and thus, money wasted by doing stuff like this. But that doesn't actually apply here, because they neglect to mention that post docs and pretty much any researcher that is not foreign funded, or ironically, an admin position or Professor, make basically slave wages, so they don't actually care about your time, because it doesn't cost them any extra money, because you basically work for free.
I was once told, "in Academia, people are free, reagents are expensive. In private industry, people are expensive, reagents are free". This could not be more true, and it's painful.
The article hits on this lack of understanding of the system by the people who are in charge of funding the system:
“Just because Elon Musk doesn’t understand indirect costs doesn’t mean Americans should have to pay the price with their lives,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) said in a statement.
This line was also just vomit inducing, how clueless and hypocritical:
“Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for ‘overhead’?” Musk wrote in his own post, contending that the old policy was “a ripoff.”
I do not know why there is a large discrepancy between Foundation spending and Federal funding, with regards to shouldering indirect cost, I can only assume it's because of the sheer difference in total spending available to each group. For example, the Michael J. Fox Parkinson's Foundation invested $3million dollars in 33 grants in 2024. Meanwhile, the NIH dedicated $253million to PD funding in 2023. People are expensive, when you provide them with competitive salaries and benefits (Science already takes advantage of the "do it for the betterment of humanity" guilt that researchers feel, and abuse and grossly under pay them, and forget about work life balance), so I understand why smaller foundations don't want any of their money going towards "administrative" positions like, heaven forbid, a grant writer. Or a front desk person who answers calls, emails, and handles any solicitors or visitors to the lab. This is all waste to them, because there are many labs who make either the lab personnel do this, or the PI themselves. It is only because of the abuse of workers' time that people think it's feasible that scientists spend their time doing both.
Sigh, sadly I don't really think this will put a dent in the research community in terms of output. Anyone who has been in Science long enough knows that those very universities that they listed, are already the dominant producers of all research. Those schools can weather this storm, and they can, and they will. People from all over the world will still come and study and do research there because of reputation alone (in addition to top tier facilities and communities), further making the problem worse, as foreign researchers come with their own funding from their countries, further undercutting local researchers wages and opportunities and misrepresenting the true costs of performing research. When research continues to churn out as it always does, won't the people who did the cutting say, "told ya so, they were wasting our money, look what they were able to do without our funding". And everyone will say, "well, we are the best at research and this is what the market dictated, we get the best research from Harvard, the best in the world, they are never wrong about anything and would never lie..."
It always comes down to exploited workers not receiving the full value for their labor. A lumberjack buys a big forest, and starts chopping and selling raw lumber, say he makes $50,000 a year...
It always comes down to exploited workers not receiving the full value for their labor.
A lumberjack buys a big forest, and starts chopping and selling raw lumber, say he makes $50,000 a year (after expenses) doing this. He hires a delivery guy so he can focus on chopping trees, and now this fledgling company is making $100,000 a year. How much should the delivery guy get paid?
The correct answer is $50,000. Because that's how much more the company made with his hire. It matters not that the average going rate for a delivery guy is $20,000.
And so goes it everywhere. The value of an office admin is not "the going rate for an admin adjusted for cost of living." The value is "the sum of all the productivity gains of the scientists because they no longer need to do all the admin stuff." If one full-time admin saves 5 scientists from rotating admin duty 1 day a week, the admin is of equivalent value as the scientists.
Thus, while scientists are all criminally underpaid, a single admin is worth the exact same as a scientist in terms of total value to the organization, and doesn't require an advanced degree to do the work.
It's only because the capitalists intentionally obfuscate and gaslight workers about the value they provide that this is permitted to happen.
In your example, if the delivery guy was being paid fairly (I don't necessarily disagree with your definition), and postulating that while delivering there are times when you are sitting behind...
In your example, if the delivery guy was being paid fairly (I don't necessarily disagree with your definition), and postulating that while delivering there are times when you are sitting behind the wheel and therefore not doing physical labor, the lumberjack would be doing twice as much physical labor while being paid exactly the same. Wouldn't they be incentivized to fire or break the partnership with the delivery person and go back to working alone? This is bad for the delivery person who, having nothing to deliver, is now out of a job, and also for society because there's only half the amount of lumber available, but the lumberjack definitely gets fewer lower back issues.
The idea that the delivery guy isn't doing valuable labor because the labor he does isn't as physically demanding as the lumberjack's seems like an incredibly bad premise. I think the...
The idea that the delivery guy isn't doing valuable labor because the labor he does isn't as physically demanding as the lumberjack's seems like an incredibly bad premise. I think the extrapolation from there breaks down even more given the fact that in our society, jobs that demand back-breaking physical labor are almost always lower paid than labor that doesn't have a physical component.
The reason for that is that jobs which require just pure brawn have the biggest supply of labor to do. Jobs which require specific skills, like driving, have a smaller applicable pool of labor....
The reason for that is that jobs which require just pure brawn have the biggest supply of labor to do. Jobs which require specific skills, like driving, have a smaller applicable pool of labor.
And it does make sense that physical labor jobs are paid less. Otherwise, you end up with too much physical labor, and not enough of the rest of the supply chain. Lumber jacking is quite skilled, but let's pretend it's not for now; if lumber jacks are always paid more than the drivers, what happens is that you have way too many lumber jacks, and not enough delivery drivers. The difference in wages between the rarity of the occupation is a price signal to ensure that those jobs which require rare skills are filled in proportion to the demands of the rest of the economy.
There's no point in having a bunch of chopped lumber, if it's can't be delivered to people who need it. It's just going to rot on the ground.
Well, only if you have an infinite number of jobs for lumberjacks. In reality, the wannabe lumberjacks will take on a different job. This whole argument falls apart once you consider the number of...
what happens is that you have way too many lumber jacks, and not enough delivery drivers.
Well, only if you have an infinite number of jobs for lumberjacks. In reality, the wannabe lumberjacks will take on a different job.
This whole argument falls apart once you consider the number of incredibly high skill/high education jobs that have shit pay, and people do anyway.
'You are easily replaceable' is how we got in this mess in the first place. 'You get paid in line with the value you provide' is how you incentivize everyone to do a good job, and pay across fields stabilizes according to quality of work, not ease of replacability.
I have a local hardware store staffed with a bunch of retired tradesfolk. They all know every square inch of the store, and will give genuinely good advice and direct you to the appropriate part for the job...even if it's not the highest margin part. Because they know that skillset is what differentiates them from the lower-priced big boxed store staffed with minimum wage workers that hire and fire seasonally.
The lumberjack is a metaphor here. I know others replied about the physical labor but I think that's beside the point; this conversation was about the dynamics that take place when people work...
The lumberjack is a metaphor here. I know others replied about the physical labor but I think that's beside the point; this conversation was about the dynamics that take place when people work together.
The delivery driver has a more generic skillset and can deliver all sorts of things; the business can clearly function without them. But the lumberjack is a woodcutting specialist essential for this woodcutting business (they can only be replaced by another lumberjack). The lumberjack will have things they will dislike about working in a group of people versus working alone, and it's perfectly reasonable that they should have the freedom to leave if they can't stand a situation in which the presence of the delivery driver makes their days more miserable as a whole and if they have nothing to lose by leaving. It's not their duty to suffer in order to keep the business operational for everyone else, so it makes sense that the business may choose to pay them more in order to make staying more attractive from a financial perspective.
The exact same dynamic might apply, for example, between researchers and admin positions.
That's where democratic functioning comes in. If both the delivery driver and the lumberjack agree that hazard pay should be a function (driver is at terrible risk for accidents for example), then...
That's where democratic functioning comes in. If both the delivery driver and the lumberjack agree that hazard pay should be a function (driver is at terrible risk for accidents for example), then that is a fair distribution.
Also is an overly simplified example merely meant to get the brain juices flowing. If I had upped that arbitrary $100,000 to $150,000, due to economies of scale, such that each was making $75,000, that eliminates the 'incentive' problem does it not? Or if he hired another lumberjack later, which reduces their hours by 1/3 and they still make the same money.
The lumberjack could have easily paid the delivery driver $25k and pocked the rest, per the status quo, and had numerous applicants beating down the door. But by paying the full value of the labor, the driver is thoroughly incentivized to do the best they can, not merely 'just enough to not get fired'.
And you see that today: places which have stable, well-paid staff are nicer to be at than the places churning employees as fast as possible.
Well, maybe. I'm not arguing that all unequal pay is desirable or necessary. It really depends on the specifics of the business and the tipping point below which the lumberjack is willing to trade...
that eliminates the 'incentive' problem does it not?
Well, maybe. I'm not arguing that all unequal pay is desirable or necessary. It really depends on the specifics of the business and the tipping point below which the lumberjack is willing to trade income for other kinds of satisfaction. On the one hand, there are a lot of businesses and other enterprises operating right now that I feel extract more value from essential personnel than they return in overall happiness and sustenance. On the other, there are definitely way too many obscenely overpaid people, and most of them aren't as essential as they seem to think they are.
Some of these are grants already awarded for this year and I suspect that those will be ordered to be continued. If I understand the conversations I have seen on r/academia and r/professors, these...
Some of these are grants already awarded for this year and I suspect that those will be ordered to be continued.
If I understand the conversations I have seen on r/academia and r/professors, these indirect grants are a huge part of how universities fund the facilities and equipment with which research is accomplished, and also pay the staff who ensure that grant requests are in compliance with specifications etc.
If these funds are not replaced from donors or state budgets, the pace of research will slow down and the amount and scope will shrink and the economies of university towns will contract because of layoffs.
Oh and also bear in mind there is a tremendous overlap between researchers and professors. This will also mean reduced availability of classes. This is, of course, all part of the plan: to gut...
Oh and also bear in mind there is a tremendous overlap between researchers and professors. This will also mean reduced availability of classes.
This is, of course, all part of the plan: to gut every educational system to the bone except for the ruling class.
Education is dangerous - every educated person is a future enemy.
I am an academic. My university charges overhead at just under 50% of expenses - if I need $100, I ask for $150. It is all transparent, and these are negotiated with the federal government in...
I am an academic. My university charges overhead at just under 50% of expenses - if I need $100, I ask for $150. It is all transparent, and these are negotiated with the federal government in advance. Different expenses have different overheads - capital equipment is only ~10%, due to the lower cost to administer these categories.
A university has a dual mission - to propagate knowledge in classes, and to generate new knowledge in research. The overhead pays directly for the facilities that are shared by multiple faculty. Increases sharing of facilities results in cost advantages that makes the research possible...if I had to pay for IT and HR and electricity out of my research grant, I would be unable to do any research, it'd be all gone.
Overhead pays for the maintenance of shared scientific equipment, electricity bills, asbestos mitigation in old buildings, HR, software that I have made available to me through college-wide plans, and environmental health and safety support. It also pays for the administrators about whom academics grumble...but the solution to such a proliferation of admins is not to arbitrarily cut everything. I also get a small percentage of my overhead back to a general fund that lets me fund students on developmental projects, buy computers, and host guests who are giving lectures (and critically touring laboratories/offering gratis advice when they visit).
Major research universities in the United States are struggling to maintain research at the levels that was "normal" for a couple generations. The number of expenses necessary to operate a laboratory (personnel, equipment, and above all infrastructure) have increased dramatically over the last ~30 years, for good reason - they are NECESSARY FOR SAFETY or a result of a more complicated information infrastructure. As a result, even at 50% overhead, top programs (who are in better shape than others) are losing money on their research program.
There is a good economic argument that overhead should be increased, because every program has cut back internal offerings over the last 5-10 years at universities around the country. My costs have gone up to do less. Increasing our overhead to 60% would make possible the addition of desperately needed lab spaces that would do good for the common good. Overhead is an investment in our country's intellectual and human infrastructure - it is not charity to universities, it is the means by which the universities can continue to function as research institutions.
Once again, Musk shows that wealth does not buy wisdom.
The butterfly revolution I can't read the how to accomplish this part of the article but I have seen it claimed online that killing the universities is part of the strategy. Curtis Yarvin is...
I'm aware, sadly. I think that most people aren't, but if we start talking about personalities, it becomes a referendum on more or less unknown people for 90% of people. If we talk about the good...
I'm aware, sadly. I think that most people aren't, but if we start talking about personalities, it becomes a referendum on more or less unknown people for 90% of people. If we talk about the good that universities do, and talk about shared values, I think the conversation goes better.
As long as stakeholders at universities are aware that these policy choices are not due to misunderstanding of how much harm they will cause. The harm is the point. Convincing the public that...
As long as stakeholders at universities are aware that these policy choices are not due to misunderstanding of how much harm they will cause. The harm is the point.
Convincing the public that harming universities is a bad idea might be good strategy.
I sadly already know the answer to this, but didn't a federal judge just get done saying the executive branch could not affect the already allocated spending? He got impeached last time for doing...
I sadly already know the answer to this, but didn't a federal judge just get done saying the executive branch could not affect the already allocated spending? He got impeached last time for doing this once. Now he's on what? Strike 6 in a month
If he's hell bent on anihillating federal budget for his friends, he just needed to want another month and a half and push his congress to slash spending. He didn't need to go full suoervillian to get his goals.
It does seem abnormal, but we're definitely not in normal times. Rebupulicana going for a Capital tax cut isn't new, so I imagine they had to slash some budgets to do it previously. They may have...
It does seem abnormal, but we're definitely not in normal times. Rebupulicana going for a Capital tax cut isn't new, so I imagine they had to slash some budgets to do it previously.
They may have also raised income taxes, but given the "wealth transfer of 2022", where's less and less income to tax as people started shifting to gigs, and companies shifting more to outsourcing for workers. The 99% can't really pay for the 1% as much anymore.
Not all lies are defamation, and this is almost certainly one of them. It's actually a very good thing that it's as hard as it is to sue for defamation in the US. Trump himself has railed against...
Not all lies are defamation, and this is almost certainly one of them. It's actually a very good thing that it's as hard as it is to sue for defamation in the US. Trump himself has railed against the limitations of defamation suits in the US. If anything, it should be made harder by adding federal anti-SLAPP.
I do understand that in most cases. But The government has specific freedoms it cannot tread upon. Freedom of press means we're much stricter when the government intimidates a paper compared to a...
I do understand that in most cases. But The government has specific freedoms it cannot tread upon. Freedom of press means we're much stricter when the government intimidates a paper compared to a private citizen. But I'm not a lawyer.
And anti-slapp would work as well, but Trump hasn't sued them.... Yet.
The move, announced Friday night by the National Institutes of Health, drastically cuts its funding for “indirect” costs related to research. These are the administrative requirements, facilities and other operations that many scientists say are essential but that some Republicans have claimed are superfluous.
...
In a social media post, NIH said the change would save more than $4 billion a year, effective immediately. The note highlighted the multibillion-dollar endowments of Harvard University, Yale University and Johns Hopkins University, implying that many universities do not need the added federal funding.
...
Some scientists said the move could threaten research already underway and noted that their universities have a fraction of the endowments of schools such as Harvard and Yale. Industry leaders also questioned whether the move was legal, pointing to existing law governing NIH funding.
...
Mitchell said he expected organizations to file lawsuits seeking to block the new NIH policy as soon as Monday — and if they are successful, “we will only have lost a weekend” of research, he said. Otherwise, Mitchell warned that there will be “less biomedical innovation, and that is going to contribute to higher degrees of disease and death in the country.”
...
Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate’s appropriations panel, also pointed to bipartisan legislation that she oversaw last year and has been enacted into law, which she noted banned changes to how NIH funds overhead costs. The new policy is “illegal and arbitrary,” Murray said.
...
In its announcement, NIH said that on average, the overhead rate has been about 27 to 28 percent of the direct research funding in the grant but that “many organizations” charge indirect rates of over 50 percent and in some cases more than 60 percent. The agency’s new policy will cap the rate at 15 percent and take effect on Monday, cutting tens of millions of dollars or more in funding for many universities — virtually overnight.
...
Several researchers said that NIH’s high rate of funding for indirect costs helped subsidize the infrastructure necessary for their work — everything from a building’s heating and electricity to personnel. They also said that the government’s willingness to fund indirect costs at more than 50 percent balanced out the lower rate that researchers tend to receive from private foundations, which were more likely to fund 15 percent of the indirect costs.
NIH said it was cutting its rate of funding indirect costs to be more in line with private foundations that fund research, noting that many foundations do not fund indirect costs at all.
...
Republicans had weighed similar measures in the past. President Donald Trump in 2017 proposed capping indirect costs at 10 percent, but the effort did not succeed.
Everything is broken and we continue to make it worse.
When I worked in an academic lab, we had funding from private and public institutions. Both of them basically forbade ever buying a computer, heaven forbid, probably for some of the exact same reasons, questions about how it would be accounted for. This was a long time ago so the expectation was that you would bring your own laptop in and use it for work.
Because of the USA's obsession with documentation and prevention of mis-allocation of funds, or "theft", as it were, I spent a lot of my time making and categorizing orders, and while we could not use our funding to buy a laptop, I had to do things like "buy an extra antibody so that they don't reduce our funding next year" or buy a lot of pipette tips because our consumable budget had been overshot, even though what we really needed was a computer. People seriously underestimate the amount of time wasted, bureaucratic bloat, and thus, money wasted by doing stuff like this. But that doesn't actually apply here, because they neglect to mention that post docs and pretty much any researcher that is not foreign funded, or ironically, an admin position or Professor, make basically slave wages, so they don't actually care about your time, because it doesn't cost them any extra money, because you basically work for free.
I was once told, "in Academia, people are free, reagents are expensive. In private industry, people are expensive, reagents are free". This could not be more true, and it's painful.
The article hits on this lack of understanding of the system by the people who are in charge of funding the system:
Also, I find it interesting, but not surprising that again they list how private endowments are going to cover these costs or should be used to do these things, then list schools with private endowments that are all in blue states...I guess U of Florida is gonna have a grand old time funding themselves this year....
This line was also just vomit inducing, how clueless and hypocritical:
I do not know why there is a large discrepancy between Foundation spending and Federal funding, with regards to shouldering indirect cost, I can only assume it's because of the sheer difference in total spending available to each group. For example, the Michael J. Fox Parkinson's Foundation invested $3million dollars in 33 grants in 2024. Meanwhile, the NIH dedicated $253million to PD funding in 2023. People are expensive, when you provide them with competitive salaries and benefits (Science already takes advantage of the "do it for the betterment of humanity" guilt that researchers feel, and abuse and grossly under pay them, and forget about work life balance), so I understand why smaller foundations don't want any of their money going towards "administrative" positions like, heaven forbid, a grant writer. Or a front desk person who answers calls, emails, and handles any solicitors or visitors to the lab. This is all waste to them, because there are many labs who make either the lab personnel do this, or the PI themselves. It is only because of the abuse of workers' time that people think it's feasible that scientists spend their time doing both.
Sigh, sadly I don't really think this will put a dent in the research community in terms of output. Anyone who has been in Science long enough knows that those very universities that they listed, are already the dominant producers of all research. Those schools can weather this storm, and they can, and they will. People from all over the world will still come and study and do research there because of reputation alone (in addition to top tier facilities and communities), further making the problem worse, as foreign researchers come with their own funding from their countries, further undercutting local researchers wages and opportunities and misrepresenting the true costs of performing research. When research continues to churn out as it always does, won't the people who did the cutting say, "told ya so, they were wasting our money, look what they were able to do without our funding". And everyone will say, "well, we are the best at research and this is what the market dictated, we get the best research from Harvard, the best in the world, they are never wrong about anything and would never lie..."
It always comes down to exploited workers not receiving the full value for their labor.
A lumberjack buys a big forest, and starts chopping and selling raw lumber, say he makes $50,000 a year (after expenses) doing this. He hires a delivery guy so he can focus on chopping trees, and now this fledgling company is making $100,000 a year. How much should the delivery guy get paid?
The correct answer is $50,000. Because that's how much more the company made with his hire. It matters not that the average going rate for a delivery guy is $20,000.
And so goes it everywhere. The value of an office admin is not "the going rate for an admin adjusted for cost of living." The value is "the sum of all the productivity gains of the scientists because they no longer need to do all the admin stuff." If one full-time admin saves 5 scientists from rotating admin duty 1 day a week, the admin is of equivalent value as the scientists.
Thus, while scientists are all criminally underpaid, a single admin is worth the exact same as a scientist in terms of total value to the organization, and doesn't require an advanced degree to do the work.
It's only because the capitalists intentionally obfuscate and gaslight workers about the value they provide that this is permitted to happen.
In your example, if the delivery guy was being paid fairly (I don't necessarily disagree with your definition), and postulating that while delivering there are times when you are sitting behind the wheel and therefore not doing physical labor, the lumberjack would be doing twice as much physical labor while being paid exactly the same. Wouldn't they be incentivized to fire or break the partnership with the delivery person and go back to working alone? This is bad for the delivery person who, having nothing to deliver, is now out of a job, and also for society because there's only half the amount of lumber available, but the lumberjack definitely gets fewer lower back issues.
The idea that the delivery guy isn't doing valuable labor because the labor he does isn't as physically demanding as the lumberjack's seems like an incredibly bad premise. I think the extrapolation from there breaks down even more given the fact that in our society, jobs that demand back-breaking physical labor are almost always lower paid than labor that doesn't have a physical component.
The reason for that is that jobs which require just pure brawn have the biggest supply of labor to do. Jobs which require specific skills, like driving, have a smaller applicable pool of labor.
And it does make sense that physical labor jobs are paid less. Otherwise, you end up with too much physical labor, and not enough of the rest of the supply chain. Lumber jacking is quite skilled, but let's pretend it's not for now; if lumber jacks are always paid more than the drivers, what happens is that you have way too many lumber jacks, and not enough delivery drivers. The difference in wages between the rarity of the occupation is a price signal to ensure that those jobs which require rare skills are filled in proportion to the demands of the rest of the economy.
There's no point in having a bunch of chopped lumber, if it's can't be delivered to people who need it. It's just going to rot on the ground.
Well, only if you have an infinite number of jobs for lumberjacks. In reality, the wannabe lumberjacks will take on a different job.
This whole argument falls apart once you consider the number of incredibly high skill/high education jobs that have shit pay, and people do anyway.
'You are easily replaceable' is how we got in this mess in the first place. 'You get paid in line with the value you provide' is how you incentivize everyone to do a good job, and pay across fields stabilizes according to quality of work, not ease of replacability.
I have a local hardware store staffed with a bunch of retired tradesfolk. They all know every square inch of the store, and will give genuinely good advice and direct you to the appropriate part for the job...even if it's not the highest margin part. Because they know that skillset is what differentiates them from the lower-priced big boxed store staffed with minimum wage workers that hire and fire seasonally.
The lumberjack is a metaphor here. I know others replied about the physical labor but I think that's beside the point; this conversation was about the dynamics that take place when people work together.
The delivery driver has a more generic skillset and can deliver all sorts of things; the business can clearly function without them. But the lumberjack is a woodcutting specialist essential for this woodcutting business (they can only be replaced by another lumberjack). The lumberjack will have things they will dislike about working in a group of people versus working alone, and it's perfectly reasonable that they should have the freedom to leave if they can't stand a situation in which the presence of the delivery driver makes their days more miserable as a whole and if they have nothing to lose by leaving. It's not their duty to suffer in order to keep the business operational for everyone else, so it makes sense that the business may choose to pay them more in order to make staying more attractive from a financial perspective.
The exact same dynamic might apply, for example, between researchers and admin positions.
That's where democratic functioning comes in. If both the delivery driver and the lumberjack agree that hazard pay should be a function (driver is at terrible risk for accidents for example), then that is a fair distribution.
Also is an overly simplified example merely meant to get the brain juices flowing. If I had upped that arbitrary $100,000 to $150,000, due to economies of scale, such that each was making $75,000, that eliminates the 'incentive' problem does it not? Or if he hired another lumberjack later, which reduces their hours by 1/3 and they still make the same money.
The lumberjack could have easily paid the delivery driver $25k and pocked the rest, per the status quo, and had numerous applicants beating down the door. But by paying the full value of the labor, the driver is thoroughly incentivized to do the best they can, not merely 'just enough to not get fired'.
And you see that today: places which have stable, well-paid staff are nicer to be at than the places churning employees as fast as possible.
I agree with your premise but lumberjack/ timber feller is one of the most deadly occupations. Loggers, landscapers face deadly risks felling trees
Well, maybe. I'm not arguing that all unequal pay is desirable or necessary. It really depends on the specifics of the business and the tipping point below which the lumberjack is willing to trade income for other kinds of satisfaction. On the one hand, there are a lot of businesses and other enterprises operating right now that I feel extract more value from essential personnel than they return in overall happiness and sustenance. On the other, there are definitely way too many obscenely overpaid people, and most of them aren't as essential as they seem to think they are.
I call that 'pretty much every manager, proportional to how far removed from the bottom.'
Some of these are grants already awarded for this year and I suspect that those will be ordered to be continued.
If I understand the conversations I have seen on r/academia and r/professors, these indirect grants are a huge part of how universities fund the facilities and equipment with which research is accomplished, and also pay the staff who ensure that grant requests are in compliance with specifications etc.
If these funds are not replaced from donors or state budgets, the pace of research will slow down and the amount and scope will shrink and the economies of university towns will contract because of layoffs.
Oh and also bear in mind there is a tremendous overlap between researchers and professors. This will also mean reduced availability of classes.
This is, of course, all part of the plan: to gut every educational system to the bone except for the ruling class.
Hermann Goering, famed piece of shit #2 Nazi.
I am an academic. My university charges overhead at just under 50% of expenses - if I need $100, I ask for $150. It is all transparent, and these are negotiated with the federal government in advance. Different expenses have different overheads - capital equipment is only ~10%, due to the lower cost to administer these categories.
A university has a dual mission - to propagate knowledge in classes, and to generate new knowledge in research. The overhead pays directly for the facilities that are shared by multiple faculty. Increases sharing of facilities results in cost advantages that makes the research possible...if I had to pay for IT and HR and electricity out of my research grant, I would be unable to do any research, it'd be all gone.
Overhead pays for the maintenance of shared scientific equipment, electricity bills, asbestos mitigation in old buildings, HR, software that I have made available to me through college-wide plans, and environmental health and safety support. It also pays for the administrators about whom academics grumble...but the solution to such a proliferation of admins is not to arbitrarily cut everything. I also get a small percentage of my overhead back to a general fund that lets me fund students on developmental projects, buy computers, and host guests who are giving lectures (and critically touring laboratories/offering gratis advice when they visit).
Major research universities in the United States are struggling to maintain research at the levels that was "normal" for a couple generations. The number of expenses necessary to operate a laboratory (personnel, equipment, and above all infrastructure) have increased dramatically over the last ~30 years, for good reason - they are NECESSARY FOR SAFETY or a result of a more complicated information infrastructure. As a result, even at 50% overhead, top programs (who are in better shape than others) are losing money on their research program.
There is a good economic argument that overhead should be increased, because every program has cut back internal offerings over the last 5-10 years at universities around the country. My costs have gone up to do less. Increasing our overhead to 60% would make possible the addition of desperately needed lab spaces that would do good for the common good. Overhead is an investment in our country's intellectual and human infrastructure - it is not charity to universities, it is the means by which the universities can continue to function as research institutions.
Once again, Musk shows that wealth does not buy wisdom.
The butterfly revolution
I can't read the how to accomplish this part of the article but I have seen it claimed online that killing the universities is part of the strategy.
Curtis Yarvin is deeply influential on Thiel and Musk.
I'm aware, sadly. I think that most people aren't, but if we start talking about personalities, it becomes a referendum on more or less unknown people for 90% of people. If we talk about the good that universities do, and talk about shared values, I think the conversation goes better.
As long as stakeholders at universities are aware that these policy choices are not due to misunderstanding of how much harm they will cause. The harm is the point.
Convincing the public that harming universities is a bad idea might be good strategy.
I sadly already know the answer to this, but didn't a federal judge just get done saying the executive branch could not affect the already allocated spending? He got impeached last time for doing this once. Now he's on what? Strike 6 in a month
If he's hell bent on anihillating federal budget for his friends, he just needed to want another month and a half and push his congress to slash spending. He didn't need to go full suoervillian to get his goals.
Would any congress really slash funding? That sounds unlikely, based on historical evidence.
It does seem abnormal, but we're definitely not in normal times. Rebupulicana going for a Capital tax cut isn't new, so I imagine they had to slash some budgets to do it previously.
They may have also raised income taxes, but given the "wealth transfer of 2022", where's less and less income to tax as people started shifting to gigs, and companies shifting more to outsourcing for workers. The 99% can't really pay for the 1% as much anymore.
The White House sent out a press release calling this story "fake news."
The Post stands by their story
When this administration calls anything fake news that’s pretty much a confirmation that it’s very real
Most certainly, was still worth sharing.
Any chance we can tack on libel while we're at it? Is the White House defaming press potentially a first amendment violation?
Not all lies are defamation, and this is almost certainly one of them. It's actually a very good thing that it's as hard as it is to sue for defamation in the US. Trump himself has railed against the limitations of defamation suits in the US. If anything, it should be made harder by adding federal anti-SLAPP.
I do understand that in most cases. But The government has specific freedoms it cannot tread upon. Freedom of press means we're much stricter when the government intimidates a paper compared to a private citizen. But I'm not a lawyer.
And anti-slapp would work as well, but Trump hasn't sued them.... Yet.
I don't even know what you can sue the government for in regards to libel during normal times.
No clue these days.
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Mirror: https://archive.is/1L1dz