No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?
Readit Newspixodaros commented on Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023) betonit.ai/p/tenure-is-a-... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
pixodaros commented on Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023) betonit.ai/p/tenure-is-a-... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
Hi, tenured professor here! "Professor at GMU" is definitely a scam, but the rest of us work pretty hard.
Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).
This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.
pixodaros commented on Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023) betonit.ai/p/tenure-is-a-... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
Hi, tenured professor here! "Professor at GMU" is definitely a scam, but the rest of us work pretty hard.
I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!
None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.
That actually changed recently, but The Economist (UK newspaper) whines that Americans will no longer be footing the bill for drug development:
We're done with Europeans treating us as suckers. Doing nice things for Europe leads to nothing but contempt from Europeans.
No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
pixodaros commented on I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen
I love to support creators, but I wish there was something common between free and significant subscription price so that I could show appreciation more readily.
Examples I would use without thinking for worthwhile-to-me content:
- "tip" options in the App Store
- 10/year
- 1/month
I know this has been tried in other ways, but I think Substack and Medium could make this work.
My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.
pixodaros commented on I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen
>I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.
100% agree.
Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?
A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).
No one will touch this guy with a ten foot pole. Nothing he did technically was novel - it was just that everyone who had the skills to edit an embryo was unwilling and uninterested in doing so. Having him as part of your organization basically broadcasts to the world that you’re going to be doing wildly unethical things. Not a great path to commercialization of any therapeutic.
Its worse than that. Someone wants to set him up with a lab in Austin TX. Its the CCP which thinks "maybe we should not let the mad scientist out where someone will let him continue his experiments." (A later story says that he will direct assistants in Texas over the Internet). https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3271952/chin...
pixodaros commented on A new threat: Being replaced by someone who knows AI wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-work-u... · Posted by u/zerosizedweasle
Sure. There are however probably also plenty of examples where the opposite is true (people being hesitant to use newer better technologies) like not everyone wanting to use computers early on ("the old lady in accounting" etc), people not trusting new medications, people being slow in adopting tractors, people being afraid of electricity (yes!) etc. Change is hard, and people generally don't really want to change. Makes it even harder if you fear (which ~25% of people do, depending on where you are in the world) that AI can take your job (or a large part of it) in the future
If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but people on this site know how often the cool new thing turns out to be a time bomb.
pixodaros commented on A new threat: Being replaced by someone who knows AI wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-work-u... · Posted by u/zerosizedweasle
You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient for digital art. But a lot of bosses are convinced that if their staff don't find these tools useful for their tasks, its the line workers who are wrong.