No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?
Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).
This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.
I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!
None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
They correctly point out that useless parasites like the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that I also mentioned to you, are a quite big part of your drug price problem. Yet you seem to refuse to acknowledge it
The system is packed with opaque middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, many of which are making big rents
Certainly the US healthcare system needs reform. But I believe a big reason why we have paid such high drug prices for so long is because congresspeople in the US believed that it was good for us to subsidize drug innovation for the entire world. That era is over. Like I said, you Europeans had a good thing going, but you just couldn't let well enough alone.
If you really believe that Congressmen in the US thought they were subsidizing foreign nations while their own citizens suffer out of their goodness of their hearts, and not because some Lobbyists donated huge sums to their campaigns and "convinced" them in some meetings, Boy I do have a Bridge to sell you.
American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation
Especially the Republican ones, which have blocked and still trying to block all efforts to bring drug prices down by negotiation.
They are known for being very caring people. Especially for the poor and disadvantaged
The lobbyists probably said something like "it is good for drug companies to make profits so they can innovate new drugs for global benefit".
Same way the defense companies probably said something like "it is good to deter Russia so that Europe can remain free and democratic".
Hilarious, isn't it?
Anyways shouldn't you get back to work so you can afford all the new weapons you're going to have to buy?
"American Politicians are really famous worldwide for being selfless, defending other nations interests to the detriment of their own nation." Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it. Now we're done.
* Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it
We got nothing but hate and laughter for it*
You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll.
I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran (pre-Mullahs) and other countries that were gifted with democracy were also other selfless endeavours by the Americans.
"You're either very stupid believing that the American Engagement in Europe was just charity or just a very good troll."
Europeans always imply that NATO is some sort of vast American conspiracy. But they are hardly ever able to give compelling examples of American benefit. The US benefit from NATO always remains a sort of esoteric wisdom which is mysteriously beyond the grasp of the average American. I suppose if we were more educated on European geography trivia, like you guys, that might help us understand why the US needs NATO so badly.
"Vietnam"
Yes, that was seen as analogous to another very recent war in Korea. If it wasn't for us, the state known as "North Korea" would cover the entire peninsula.
"Iraq"
One of the worst dictators in history, that Saddam Hussein. Europeans laughed at us for our opposition to him. It's why we now have little interest in opposing Putin, who is a herbivore by comparison.
"Afghanistan"
Depending on who you ask, we are either imperialists for displacing the Taliban, or complicit for allowing them to displace us right back. Typical double-bind.
"Iran"
You mean the country which is at this very moment crying out for American intervention, asking the Americans to protect protesters? It's fascinating to me how certain Europeans can simultaneously beg the US for protection, and also assume that the US must be up to no good in other countries where the US gets begged for protection.
Hopefully you can see why I support Massie's bill to withdraw the US from NATO at this point. I'm tired of it all. I want a Swiss foreign policy for the US. Do you also support Massie's bill? Maybe that's something we can agree on.
It seems that you have great difficulties with reading comprehension. I was mentioning Iran (Pre-Mullahs) where the UK and US overthrew a democratically elected president because of Oil. Leading to the current theocratic and oppressive government.
Also your reasons to invade Iraq were made up Lies about Weapons of Mass destruction, and the US propped up the Taliban against the Soviets in the first place.
Both were quite liberal states compared to today, after they were blessed with US intervention
Classic double bind. If we support the Taliban, we are evil for "propping it up". If we oppose it, we are evil for "destabilizing it". The implication is that everything would magically be fine and dandy if it weren't for the US. Of course, your critique does not engage much with the actual reasoning or decision-making process of the US in Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter). But caricaturing the US as an evil empire was the point, after all.
I think your narratives are oversimplified or inaccurate, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
The important point is: Since US intervention is so bad, according to you, can you understand why I want to withdraw from NATO? Can we at least agree on that? Don't you want to save your continent from the evil US intervention such as all the billions we've sent as support to Ukraine?
Why do you think we propped them up against the Soviets? Oh yeah, it was an effort to bring down the Soviet Union so Germany could be reunified, hermanzegerman. Arguably, a rather successful effort. And a huge mistake in retrospect. Germany should've stayed divided. Berlin Wall should've stayed in place. Not our problem. We unified Germany and got 9/11 as thanks.
See why I want out of NATO? The Swiss stay perfectly neutral, they never had a 9/11, everyone loves them. No one blames them for the situation in Ukraine (they contribute little) or anything else. That's what the US was like pre-WW1 with regard to Europe. I want to go back.
> Well yes, we did that for you guys for 80 years after WW2, a very peaceful and prosperous period for Europe by historical standards. We got nothing but hate and laughter for it We got nothing but hate and laughter for it.
Have you thanked the French for getting involved in US wars?
And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Why would I personally thank Euros for "destabilizing the Middle East" when they demonize the US for "destabilizing the Middle East"? That doesn't make any sense. You know the Libya operation was Europe-initiated right? You gonna personally thank the US for going along with it? Lead the way amigo.
>And when you say "we", does that include yourself?
Yes, in the sense that me and my ancestors have been paying taxes to support a military which was supposed to be able to win against the USSR. That money should have stayed in the United States for peaceful purposes. Euros should've defended themselves. If the USSR took over the entire continent that's not our problem. We have to focus on our own problems instead of playing world police.
You can't both demonize the US for its every foreign policy move, and also demand the US protect you. That makes zero sense. You can't both trash the US for its every supposed problem, and also demand that the US pay more attention to Europe's problems. That also makes zero sense. There's nothing coherent in the European ideology beyond just "America Bad". Fine, we'll take our toys and go home. I sure hope it makes you happy.
No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710
My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.
A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).
Its worse than that. Someone wants to set him up with a lab in Austin TX. Its the CCP which thinks "maybe we should not let the mad scientist out where someone will let him continue his experiments." (A later story says that he will direct assistants in Texas over the Internet). https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3271952/chin...
You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient for digital art. But a lot of bosses are convinced that if their staff don't find these tools useful for their tasks, its the line workers who are wrong.
Sure. There are however probably also plenty of examples where the opposite is true (people being hesitant to use newer better technologies) like not everyone wanting to use computers early on ("the old lady in accounting" etc), people not trusting new medications, people being slow in adopting tractors, people being afraid of electricity (yes!) etc. Change is hard, and people generally don't really want to change. Makes it even harder if you fear (which ~25% of people do, depending on where you are in the world) that AI can take your job (or a large part of it) in the future
I use AI and it makes me a lot more productive. I have coworkers who don’t use AI, and are still productive and valued. I also have coworkers who use AI and are useless. Using AI use as a criteria to do layoffs seems dumb, unless you have no other way to measure productivity
AI helps most for low-value tasks as well. The real valuable problems are the ones that can’t be solved easily, and AI is usually much less help with those problems (e.g., system design, kernel optimisation, making business decisions). I’ve seen many people say how AI helps them complete more low-value tasks in less time, which is great but not as meaningful as other work that AI is not that good at yet.
You have to get quite sophisticated to use AI for most higher-value tasks, and the ROI is much less clear than for just helping you write boilerplate. For example, using AI to help optimise GPU kernels by having it try lots of options autonomously is interesting to me, but not trivial to actually implement. Copilot is not gonna cut it.
If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but people on this site know how often the cool new thing turns out to be a time bomb.
People wouldn't keep using old shoes, and I am old enough to remember graphic artists who wouldn't use computers. It takes time. At some point, it will be a no-brainer. Yet, it will not be simply because method A is so much better than method B. It will be because people using method B change, retire, or are fired.
On the other hand, if you have ever been in corporate, you could notice, that some people absolutely refuse to learn how to use Excel. I.e. just simple column filters are beyond capacity of most of Excel users.
For some reason, big companies often tolerate people being horribly inefficient doing their job. Maybe it is starting to change?
If people found this useful for putting out "good" work instead of slop they would use it. I promise you that it's the employees who are right, the output is the same AI slop we see everywhere. If you want to turn your company into an AI slop farm that is questionable logic.
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