241–250 of 328 posts
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Why do we assume that the administration is acting in good faith when all evidence has shown otherwise?
They may not be acting in good faith but there is extremely clear evidence that UCLA has engaged in illegal racial hiring and admissions practices and has supported antisemitism on campus. UCLA chose to give them that ammunition.
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Generally, firing statisticians because you don't like their numbers doesn't improve the accuracy of their estimates, but apparently people need to keep learning this lesson.
As far as I'm aware no statisticians have been fired and no suggestion has been made that they should be. McEntarfer is pretty high up in the food chain; she's there to be accountable for performance, not to crunch numbers.
More generally, this is incredibly dumb in many, many ways. Like, the BLS can't control survey response rates, and the fact that Covid has broken the seasonal models for basically every long-run time series is also outside their control.
One could argue that they should be using IRS tax data to figure this out, but that would be a massive change.
And finally, if the numbers looked good, there would have been no firing (regardless of the errors). It's gonna be an interesting Monday on Wall St.
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And no college being defunded right now has shown any racist behaviors whatsoever. So are you in support of the current defunding?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-29/ucla-set... > The lawsuit, filed more than a year ago, alleged that by not immediately ordering the encampment to be taken down, UCLA provided support to pro-Palestinian activists who “enforced” what it termed a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” prohibiting Jewish students and staff from passing through the camp’s makeshift barricades. Personally I think this is a textbook raci…
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> And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent The reason given was she purposefully changed the numbers to make Trump look bad. There was of course no evidence given for that.
The reason given [0] is that "A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions. Under McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently published…
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The source you cite is written by a man with literally zero training in economics or econometrics. He lost his job in 911 and started a blog in the GFC that gained an audience ( https://mishtalk.com/economics/uk-high-school-student-asks-m... ). Good for him. You assert with absolutely no basis in fact or any supporting citation that "there is a pretty easy path to getting better results." The BLS is run by the world'…
> The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring. And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your emplo…
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They may not be acting in good faith but there is extremely clear evidence that UCLA has engaged in illegal racial hiring and admissions practices and has supported antisemitism on campus. UCLA chose to give them that ammunition.
Could you provide some sources?
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If academics want to make political statements on controversial topics, then that's an entirely different situation to academics having grants cancelled (not just not-renewed, but cancelling already allotted money) when they're not making political statements. By the way, do you have an example of the academics feeling threatened by making political statements?
Seemed pretty consensual, but since you're asking, here's a top result i got on my first search on google's. https://nypost.com/2025/04/23/us-news/psychiatrist-who-criti... And there are tons of other. Gender theory was a pretty big drive for censorship.
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Endowments are often earmarked for certain use cases. They aren't necessarily permitted to spend it as they like.
Maybe taxes should be the same. I don't mind being taxed as much as I hate my taxes going to the wrong thing.
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As long as you are not a "Beamte", i.e. a special case of state employee, yes.
Sorry I don't buy it. Which examples are there of academics going against the government policies and still keeping their jobs and funds? I lived in Germany and the moment you don't do what the government says you get the full shaft. Nobody let's you rebel against the government with no consequences, not in US, not in Germany, not in UK, nowhere. People painting Germany like a bastion of free speech are coping hard.…
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It's hard to prove a negative. Can you show us an example of anything like what's happening at UCLA (collective punishment of an entire institution) or an example of an individual professor being harshly penalized or sanctioned for expressing personal political opinions?
Don't spin this around, what I asked you is not a negative. People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard. So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.