dukeleto
21d ago
Do you know if the undergrads are any better? My primary experiences have been with international ms (the worst) and PhD (who seem average to slightly above average) students.
I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.
I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.
More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.
This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.
I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.
Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.
So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco
dukeleto
30d ago
There is only a massive oversupply because we allow essentially unlimited numbers of foreign grad students in, so they could easily go away
dukeleto
3mo ago
I agree with the court on this one, there specific language was that using deadly force to defend a vacant property is unreasonable, which seems like the correct judgement to me.
dukeleto
3mo ago
I don’t think trying to impeach judges is a good idea either although I also think this is a fairly obvious political response to the dems and the others in the senate who constantly tried to push Supreme Court reform which was basically just designed to give congress the ability to oversee recusal decisions: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/926/text
dukeleto
4mo ago
Yes they did. It was literally a program for basically everyone who wasn’t a white guy.
dukeleto
4mo ago
That’s interesting that dod scientists are still feds. I work in doe land as a contractor and was always a little jealous of earlier employees because of the pension (I think most doe scientists where transitioned to contractor status in the early 2000s).
I also agree that there are millions of ways we could save money, but that management explicitly prohibits for a combination of legal and protecting managements jobs reasons.
As for DEI stuff, I think it was a little worse (no where near as bad as what you got in universities), for example there was a grant program that would funds to get an intern (if the intern was a women or minority), while our normal internship program required (which doesn’t discriminate based on race or gender) required me to fund any interns I hired. A full time intern can easily cost 30-60k so this a huge inducement. As someone who recently came out of college (and worked hard to get internships), I acutely how it felt to be explicitly excluded from these and other opportunities.
Thank you that was interesting. Quick question on NPs, I thought they typically made pretty good money (google claims around 120k a year in Las Vegas). This is pretty reasonable compensation and is similar to what you can earn as an early career software person.
dukeleto
6mo ago
I think that’s probably true for low temperature reactors. If higher temperature gas or metal reactors become available in the future I think it could be a real bonanza for a place like Texas for direct heating applications in the petrochemical industry (imagine how mad green peace would be over a nuclear heated oil refinery).
dukeleto
7mo ago
They will probably just tie voter id requirements to all kinds of federal money and force states to implement it that way
dukeleto
7mo ago
I agree and would add that the federal government already has lots of experience issuing hspd-12 id cards to their employees and contractors (these include the ability to load certs on them so you could even get nice public key infrastructure), they could just run essentially the same system in parallel
dukeleto
7mo ago
Thanks, I ultimately ended up getting one of these (came down to the fact that the i3s are half on Amazon right now)
dukeleto
7mo ago
Do roombas actually work now? Id love to get one but still have memories of the early generation units which where pretty much worthless on carpet. My place is small (1200 square feet) and a mix of carpet and tile.
dukeleto
7mo ago
I found the Rogan interview to be pretty boring, although trumps speech to the Chicago economic club was actually pretty interesting.
dukeleto
7mo ago
I think your wrong about football coding low status, I mean have you seen how expensive nfl tickets are? Plenty of wealthy high status people enjoy attending them
dukeleto
7mo ago
I got dumped a few weeks ago, and while I there where some other issues I don’t think she could see past the fact that I’m not a progressive
dukeleto
8mo ago
Oregon has actually amended this law and you are allowed to pump your own gas now!
dukeleto
8mo ago
I think is a miss reading of history. Africans where enslaved because they where the most convenient population available that European powers could enslave. Native populations where often enslaved first, but this wasn’t sustainable because there weren’t very many of them and they died very quickly from exposure to diseases from the old world. Asians where not enslaved because there wasn’t any short route to Asia and Asian polities where powerful enough to resist Europeans until the ~1850s.
dukeleto
9mo ago
Oh I didn’t realize that! I guess I’m just on a low enough dosage (I use the 1 mg habitrol losanges he’s) not to notice.
dukeleto
9mo ago
If you are going to use nicotine why not just use losanges? I not really endorsing it but surely is cheaper than zyn..,
dukeleto
10mo ago
I agree, I really think a lot of it is just cope, trump thought he had it in the bag after the combination of getting shot at, the debate and the high coming out of the rnc. I don’t think that Kamala is particularly great but a lot of people don’t like trump and the fact that he is really starting to show his age isn’t helping either.
dukeleto
10mo ago
I think it has more to do with the unemployment rate, I mean oil is staying relatively calm. Edit just read down thread about the carry trade that had been going on.
dukeleto
10mo ago
You don’t even need the ic, just making employers use e-verify would solve this problem
As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.
As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).
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