611–620 of 756 posts
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I'm making factual statements not value judgements
"glorified immigration program" is not a factual statement, you'll have to back that up. The programs are in fact degree and certificate programs.
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> There is no shortage of money This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it. It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, ai…
Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death. There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system…
> Relatedly, some federal agencies are discussing the possibility of factoring in geography when they allocate their funds, rather than basing decisions on scientific merit alone. Sounds ironically like "DEI".
DEI is about rewarding and punishing people for immutable characteristics like race and sex. Where people live isn't at all immutable, and a government may rightly do stuff to encourage economic activity (like research) in this area vs. another. In fact, they do it all the time.
Schools like MIT pay PhD students barely above or sometimes below the poverty level of that particular state as monthly stipend. Yeah, research funding got slashed but if they had the will they could have come up with the money for that 20%.
I'm sure it varies by department? Well I'm not sure, I assume...
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My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.
If money is what you are after the PhD offers one of the worst (effort / probability of becoming rich) ratio .
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I think the highest ranked technical universities by the end of this decade will be Chinese. Things are accelerating more than I expected.
And there is no clamor Chinese green card either in politicians in China for students coming from other countries or in people outside coming to China. And if China will be having highest ranking technical universities, it means immigration is not a necessity for technical excellence or ranking as many keep alluding to.
I actually agree with them that China is absolutely on track to surpass us, though the funny part is they never stopped to think about why that might be, nor what it will mean for Western countries and immigration going forward.
The writing is really on the wall for the death of "a country is an economic zone migrants should be free to enter and leave at will" line of thinking, but regaining the cohesion we once had and the previous pressure for migrants to actually assimilate rather than just forming closed satellite communities may take longer still.
It's ok. The top colleges are arguably now in China. China is providing free education in many poor African countries. Chinese is one of many subjects offered. Of course, a smart African college student will have no issue learning English, Chinese, as well her home countries language. The future belongs to China. We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords. Ch…
Conventional wisdom always used to be that China would never compete with the US because they were rote learners and we were more creative. I'd say that is no longer the case. China has been doing a LOT of interesting things. I joke with my son that given the state of the US lately, I'd almost rather move to China.
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It's sad that our government can't pass a bill without it being a katamari ball. One thing, discuss, vote. No "hey if we give you this, you give us this." just simple "do most of us agree on this?" level politics. That's real democracy, not the crap we have today.
Well the popular argument is that it takes so long to pass any kind of bill that smaller bills would just mean more bills and a bigger backlog. I don't really buy that. The real reason is that it's easy to sneak stuff into a bill, so why not? That and trying to attack political opponents by joining something politically disastrous to to an otherwise uncontroversial bill.
I wish our parties didn't view each other as opponents as much as collaboration partners ultimately responsible for the continued well being of the nation rather than only for their own political good.
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If everyone loses but you lose less than the people you don’t like, does that make you a winner?
When an aggressor loses their weapons, everyone else is a winner, yes.