We are entering a new dark ages ruled by the priests of austerity, unable to value anything but short-term money.
Nope, just plain old basic million year old human nature. Always been there, always will.
Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#42I understand a well off nation ruled by democracy due to distributed table-stakes, and a poor nation ruled by a dictator due to centralized table-stakes, but I've never known a well off nation to intentionally sabotage its own table-stakes in order to surrender to dictatorship. Why is this happening? Who supports it? Why do they think it is necessary?
What is kind of interesting is - does it make sense for the environment to actually grow the population of Alaska? Its not like its an easy environment to live in without using an increasing amount of greenhouse gases.
The population should migrate toward areas where the temperature/humidity does not require resources just to be comfortable. The population should also migrate toward where energy that is renewable and trending toward free cost/free carbon (wind/solar) is prevalent.
Alaska is part an artifact of the fossil fuel industry and part a need to maintain the US border.
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#43The Alaska budget cuts are not only to the University. Deep cuts across the board with services Governor Dunleavy feels are unnecessary taking the biggest hit (public health, university, public ferry transportation). However, according to Alaska's constitution the government must come up with a balanced budget. They have failed to do so since revenue shortfalls began. The previous governor used a stopgap measure of u…
While this may be true, Alaska, unlike almost all other states, basically operates without any income or sales taxes. They depend almost entirely on oil revenue and property taxes which obviously isn't sustainable long term.
https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-alaska.as...
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#44I understand a well off nation ruled by democracy due to distributed table-stakes, and a poor nation ruled by a dictator due to centralized table-stakes, but I've never known a well off nation to intentionally sabotage its own table-stakes in order to surrender to dictatorship. Why is this happening? Who supports it? Why do they think it is necessary?
Alaska has a basic income distributed to all residents (oil dividend). Alaskans want that increased regularly, despite falling oil revenue. That money has to come from somewhere, and it's going to be the voting minority. This is not dictatorship, this is pure democracy in action - the popular vote. Tyranny of the majority.
> That money has to come from somewhere, and it's going to be the voting minority. This is not dictatorship, this is pure democracy in action - the popular vote. Tyranny of the majority.
This is a little like discussion of frictionless surfaces and spherical cows in high school physics. In reality, a lot of laws are written for the rich minority.
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very possible that the majority of Alaskans support the governor's plan.
I'm not sure about Alaska, but if you look at voter turn out demographics in California - it's very skewed by senior citizens. Who, unsurprisingly, aren't that excited about education or higher taxes.
We have systems that give equal weight to a vote made by somebody with 5 years left on the planet and somebody with 50 years left. That's a huge incentive divide and it favors short term thinking. In many ways it's unfair and sub-optimal, but I don't foresee it changing.
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#46So being the kind of person who has a lot of random trivia floating around in my brain, this is the first thing that came to mind when I thought of Alaska engineering colleges: Search DuckDuckGo for the following : "[Censored] Evaluation is a study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks using finite element modeling to evaluate the possible causes of [Censored]'s collapse."
Replace censored by WTC 7 and World Trade center respectively.
I did the [censored] thing so as not to trigger cognitive dissonance in the mainstream narrative true believers.
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#47We are entering a new dark ages ruled by the priests of austerity, unable to value anything but short-term money.
I have yet to see a government that believes in Austerity for all. And almost all governments i've seen believe in Austerity for someone else, just not their voter base.
I always remind myself, when I say "The government ought to X" that is someone else's money that I am using the might of the state to forcibly extract from them and spend on _my_ priorities.
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#48This is in some ways a preview of why the theory of basic income replacing other government spending (and therefore being fiscally conservative and libertarian) is false. Alaska is redirecting money from universities to basic income (the oil dividend) and it’s considered an outrage. The same thing would happen for any government program.
Replacing government services with cash seems to be fairly libertarian: decrease the size of government, increase freedom for consumers who would be served by the market instead of these services, no?
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody needs a “deeper and penetrating insight into the finances of state of Alaska” to see the problem here. Cutting a stem program should not be on the top of any budget cut proposal. That’s the problem.
A big chunk of this problem can be solved by eliminating the oil dividend given to all residents.
Imagine the benefits if they'd done that from the beginning.
(We don't even have to imagine. There's an existing example: Norway's socked away $200k per citizen for a rainy day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...)
Re: Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
#50We are entering a new dark ages ruled by the priests of austerity, unable to value anything but short-term money.
The general austerity theory is contradicted by the fact that government budgets in most of the US haven't been reduced. The problem is the largest programs that already eat most of the budgets continue to expand to consume everything that's left. We dramatically increase taxpayer-funded healthcare spending while doing nothing about underlying healthcare costs and then wonder where all the money went.
Such a big issue. We all see the high healthcare and education costs and want healthcare and higher education for all, but our healthcare (current system) is way more expensive than other developed nations' and college prices have only increased over time, turning student loans into college administrators. We'll have to address this inflation either way.