81–90 of 122 posts
Any sympathy I had for him disappeared when he started attacking folks making good points.
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Of course you are correct, nobody is ever promised anything like the ability to fulfill their dreams or to live a decent quality of life. But maybe the universities could pay them a living wage for teaching six classes a week.
You've done a bit of a bait and switch, "fulfill their dreams" and "decent quality of life" are two very different standards. One, sure, we're in a society and sometimes that calls for sacrifice, the other, if we can't promise a decent life we shouldn't be surprised when people break the contract and act in ways that hurt the common good.
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> But I'm not owed a decent salary in return for following my own dreams rather than my employer's dreams. Nobody is. Ok, but he is owed a decent salary for performing an important job. Without guys like this, we don't have a next generation of physicists (most of whom will move into the private sector).
I’m not exactly sure that’s how the world works…
the incentives, the logistics and finances of how we get to a point like that -- well that's where it gets muddier.
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I’m not exactly sure that’s how the world works…
less educators produce less educated, that's absolutely how it works. the incentives, the logistics and finances of how we get to a point like that -- well that's where it gets muddier.
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The extreme here is underpaying the professors and researchers so much in comparison with others (Like University and labs administrators)
> The extreme here is underpaying the professors and researchers so much The problem is not that those people are underpaid. The problem is the morass of regulation that prevents people building enough housing where they want to live, which keeps the cost of housing high. And look - I get it - most of that regulation is there for a reason: it's popular. People like it. People like having rent control, or limited incr…
They have around 5500 faculty members and 31000 staff members (although both of these numbers vary quite a bit from source to source), but many of the faculty are in research positions not teaching positions.
UCLA is usually reports to have a student to teacher ration of around 19:1 and around 45000 students, which would suggest about 2400 teachers, so my proposed 5% housing expansion would let them offer housing to about 1/4 of the teachers.
It would probably have be high density housing, much like typical undergraduate housing, but that should be fine. All the people in it would be doing very similar jobs, likely on very similar schedules, and with similar requirements for their home environment. The more similar you are to your neighbors the higher density can go before people want to start killing each other.
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People seem to think it is easy to have roommates. My roommates were horrible, they wouldn't clean anything, blast music and always a privacy risks.
> People seem to think it is easy to have roommates It seems to me that they think it's easier than being homeless.
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> The extreme here is underpaying the professors and researchers so much The problem is not that those people are underpaid. The problem is the morass of regulation that prevents people building enough housing where they want to live, which keeps the cost of housing high. And look - I get it - most of that regulation is there for a reason: it's popular. People like it. People like having rent control, or limited incr…
All forms of structuring society are "regulation". Capitalism doesn't exist without private property law.
If you're going to count the emergent structure that forms from voluntary cooperation as "regulation", the word loses its meaning.
> Capitalism doesn't exist without private property law.
Sure it does.
Laws aren't self-enforcing: the the thing that makes laws "real" is violence (or the threat of violence) backing them up.
For those who are unable to avail themselves of remedies under the law - typically because they're engaging in illegal behavior - they can skip the law bit and move straight to violence.
Basically every criminal organization or individual operates in this manner.
I'm not saying it's nice to live this way - I very much like living in a place with a (mostly) functioning legal system. But Capitalism very much does exist without private property law.