Political Discussion

The courts in Italy have ruled it's not illegal if a groping lasts less than 10 seconds.

Man acquitted of assault as grope lasted less than 10 seconds, sparking outrage

In their decision, the judges of the fifth criminal section of the Court of Rome said they acquitted the accused, a 66-year-old man according to Italian state broadcaster RAI, of sexual assault because the whole thing lasted “about five to ten seconds.”

In her testimony, the then 17-year-old girl, according to RAI, said the act happened in April 2022 as she was climbing the staircase at school with a friend.
Click to expand...
 
Bull Shannon said:
This feels so existentially grim. Growing up they warned us about this in school. Nobody did anything (and in fact big business fought action actively) and now it's here.
Click to expand...
My wife and I had the discussion not too long ago about how bad things have gotten with climate denial. In the 70s and 80s, we knew about the hole in the ozone layer. We knew CFCs were causing it and the world got together to ban or severely limit CFCs. And we slowed the growing of the hole. If that same problem cropped up today for the first time, we would do nothing because businesses would only do it if it helped their bottom line and politicians would claim the science isn't settled and the Earth probably caused the hole and not man.
 
RenegadeMonster said:

This clown... How delusional is he?

Bloomington, MinnesotaCNN —
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the operations of the current Supreme Court on Thursday, he lauded it as “government at its finest.”
Click to expand...
Brett Kavanaugh probably.
south-park.gif
 
The house just passed the defense bill / budget and of course McCarthy had to give in to the far rights request to get the bill passed.

What did the far right mandate be in the bill? Well, for starters it prohibits the secretary of defense / military paid for insurance from paying for abortions or transgender treatments.

With that said, this bill likely will not be going anywhere and will end up being sent back to the house.
 
Going to college is once again more expensive this year with the average tuition being more than $40,000 a year.

And you have to remember, that doesn't cover the cost of books, food or housing. Adding those into the yearly costs, an ivy league school like Harvard will costs you more than $95,000 a year to attend. To put that into perspective, the average family only saved $5,011 last year. That means they would take them 75 years to save up enough money to send one child to Harvard.

The average cost of tuition has increased by 747.8% over the last 40 years.

We have all heard for years that universities adding amenities to attract students has been a leading factor in the increase cost of tuition. But studies show that was not the top reasons why tuition increased by 4% yet again this year.

The number one reason was the cost of human teachers. Inflation has lead to professors demanding raises. When I heard this fact and they said "human teachers cost a lot" I was thinking, wtf. Are we saying the solution is to not have "human teachers"?

Now the number two reason is what we were all expecting. Amenities. But I learned more about this, and was surprised that inequality is what is driving this. As the wealth concentrates itself towards the top, the richest American families, who now have more money than ever, do not think twice about spending money to send their kids to top schools. This means universities have found they can charge the top 10% of Americans whatever the hell they want and they will pay it no questions asked. This leads universities into fierce competition against each other to attract these students which often includes massive spending on amenities and luxuries. What I find interesting to note about this is that it's a shift from easy money from anyone and everyone being able to get a student loan and charging whatever you want and spending money to attract any students, to specifically only targeting the top 10%.

This all comes at a time where state subsidies are at a record low. The average state subsidy is now only 6% of tuition. And these subsidies aren't just falling because they are a fixed dollar amount going up against ever increases cost of tuition. No, states are actively cutting their budget and Education is one of the areas that most often takes a hit.


At this rate, we must be getting pretty close to the tipping point where college is not an option for the majority of Americans due to being priced out furthering inequality
 
RenegadeMonster said:
Going to college is once again more expensive this year with the average tuition being more than $40,000 a year.

And you have to remember, that doesn't cover the cost of books, food or housing. Adding those into the yearly costs, an ivy league school like Harvard will costs you more than $95,000 a year to attend. To put that into perspective, the average family only saved $5,011 last year. That means they would take them 75 years to save up enough money to send one child to Harvard.

The average cost of tuition has increased by 747.8% over the last 40 years.

We have all heard for years that universities adding amenities to attract students has been a leading factor in the increase cost of tuition. But studies show that was not the top reasons why tuition increased by 4% yet again this year.

The number one reason was the cost of human teachers. Inflation has lead to professors demanding raises. When I heard this fact and they said "human teachers cost a lot" I was thinking, wtf. Are we saying the solution is to not have "human teachers"?

Now the number two reason is what we were all expecting. Amenities. But I learned more about this, and was surprised that inequality is what is driving this. As the wealth concentrates itself towards the top, the richest American families, who now have more money than ever, do not think twice about spending money to send their kids to top schools. This means universities have found they can charge the top 10% of Americans whatever the hell they want and they will pay it no questions asked. This leads universities into fierce competition against each other to attract these students which often includes massive spending on amenities and luxuries. What I find interesting to note about this is that it's a shift from easy money from anyone and everyone being able to get a student loan and charging whatever you want and spending money to attract any students, to specifically only targeting the top 10%.

This all comes at a time where state subsidies are at a record low. The average state subsidy is now only 6% of tuition. And these subsidies aren't just falling because they are a fixed dollar amount going up against ever increases cost of tuition. No, states are actively cutting their budget and Education is one of the areas that most often takes a hit.


At this rate, we must be getting pretty close to the tipping point where college is not an option for the majority of Americans due to being priced out furthering inequality
Click to expand...
Ha, they say human teachers cost the most but they pay most professors less now than they ever have in history. They also overload the size of classes to have more students per course than any time before in history meaning teachers have more students than ever before and can't give the same quality of education. Likewise teaching is supposed to take a backseat in all R1 and nearly every R2 university to research. When years ago it was expected that a professor could spend as long as is needed to research a topic before publishing, now if you don't have multiple publications per year you can't keep your job. The quality suffers and scientific journals are bloated with subpar research because schools have adopted a market mentality that productivity must raise every year. Meanwhile the highest paid state employees in all but a couple states are the football and basketball coaches at the universities. Most schools are relying on adjunct professors to teach the majority of their classes now too. And adjuncts at most schools get only a couple thousand dollars per class. They have to teach at multiple schools working over 80 hours a week to make under $40k per year. Tuition is not going up to cover costs of teaching. That is a flat up myth.
 
Hemotep said:
Ha, they say human teachers cost the most but they pay most professors less now than they ever have in history. They also overload the size of classes to have more students per course than any time before in history meaning teachers have more students than ever before and can't give the same quality of education. Likewise teaching is supposed to take a backseat in all R1 and nearly every R2 university to research. When years ago it was expected that a professor could spend as long as is needed to research a topic before publishing, now if you don't have multiple publications per year you can't keep your job. The quality suffers and scientific journals are bloated with subpar research because schools have adopted a market mentality that productivity must raise every year. Meanwhile the highest paid state employees in all but a couple states are the football and basketball coaches at the universities. Most schools are relying on adjunct professors to teach the majority of their classes now too. And adjuncts at most schools get only a couple thousand dollars per class. They have to teach at multiple schools working over 80 hours a week to make under $40k per year. Tuition is not going up to cover costs of teaching. That is a flat up myth.
Click to expand...
While true as that may be. I think inflation made a rare event happen last year. The data is not saying the universities are paying teachers more than what they are spending on amenities. But rather that there was an adjustment of salaries last year and that they have passed those salary increases on to what you pay in tuition. So, what attributed to the 4% increase in tuition this year very well could have been salary increases.

Covid and inflation slowed down what schools were spending on new amenities. Which I'm sure won't last long and it will be right back up there in the number 1 spot next year.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
While true as that may be. I think inflation made a rare event happen last year. The data is not saying the universities are paying teachers more than what they are spending on amenities. But rather that there was an adjustment of salaries last year and that they have passed those salary increases on to what you pay in tuition. So, what attributed to the 4% increase in tuition this year very well could have been salary increases.

Covid and inflation slowed down what schools were spending on new amenities. Which I'm sure won't last long and it will be right back up there in the number 1 spot next year.
Click to expand...
Partial agree, because that's true but only for R1 universities. The vast majority of colleges in the US are not R1 schools. Instead, many of the lower tier schools have shrunk, closed departments, and fired tenured faculty for adjuncts who they can pay less and not give benefits to. Many faculty at these schools did not see a cost of living increase, but rather saw their pay cut either as they were furloughed or there was a percentage pay cut across the board which they had to accept if they wanted to keep their job. There are a couple huge reasons why tuition keeps going up.

First, like the post office, we shouldn't be thinking of universities in terms of their operational cost or if they break even financially. They are a service and services cost money to maintain for the good of the country, the world, and people. But as the federal government and state governments have slashed taxes over the last fifty years, education funding has been on the chopping block. It isn't greedy schools taking advantage of student loans, it's the government pushed by the corporate class to unload the financial burden on the workers and make them pay for their own job training. The old adage from post WWII is still maintained that indebted workers are less likely to strike.

By shifting the responsibility onto schools to find operational funding, they've put the business class in charge of the admins. The wrong mentality there were could say does lead to some greed, but they're the ones with inflated salaries. While outside of business and economics departments, most faculty make a fraction of that pay. With those folks in charge they've turned to massive fundraising campaigns. They take they money and build endowments that they treat as investment funds that cannot be spent. And in exchange for large donations from wealthy alum, they give those alum disproportionate control over how money is spent in the universities. Buildings are renamed and remodeled at enormous cost to satisfy their egos and the admin says they have to do it to secure the donations... Which they invest and dole out pennies towards actual education. They also claim that the larger the endowment the more donations they can get. It becomes a means unto itself and the ends, which are supposed to be education, are almost entirely forgotten.

If you want to understand the inequality here, you can look at a school like Harvard that has over $50 billion for approx 30,000 students. Meanwhile, my majority Black school has over 40,000 students and $100,000,000 endowment which is double what it was five years ago. We've added about 10,000 students, about 100 tenure-track faculty, and we got a $2k cost of living increase this year and no raises in six years. All that extra work load has to be either picked up by existing faculty (our class sizes have been forced to increase by 33% in those five years) or part time folks, who we pay absolute garbage poverty wages to. And the crazy thing is that we're one of the luckiest R2 schools. Nearly every other R2 university and every non ranked college in the country had it worse than this. The only difference is that their enrollments collapsed and ours rose. So they had to fire people to keep their doors open. We just had to work more. Oh yeah, and in those five years they changed the research requirements from two publications every five years for full time faculty, to two publications every year. We were told that was the only way we would get the endowment to grow and if we didn't do it that board of regents would revoke our tenure.

Schools could use their endowments to actually fund education, but they won't and it's not a long term solution because a lot of schools have next to no endowment (like mine). And that gives the power to rich aholes who want their name on a building rather than those who actually know what matters in education. The whole system is broken.

I would also mention that in my state, we don't get to keep all of our tuition dollars either. And our tuition is on the very low side nationality at about $7k per year. But that money all goes to the state and then they decide which state schools will get the what amount of money. So the rich schools, like UGA and Georgia Tech always get the most. And the poorer schools get less and less. Part of how they calculate where to "invest" those tuition dollars? How big the school's endowment is. So as ours doubled we started to get to keep more of our tuition dollars, but at the cost of harming other schools in the state. And who is the head of our board of regents? None other than Sonny Perdue who you might remember as a terrible governor and a terrible member of the Trump administration. A man who has no education experience but wanted to bring conservative values back into higher education and agreed not to run for Senate against the current governor's pick to run in exchange for the position.

And this is happening everywhere. I'll be presenting on a lot of this in a couple days at the Society for the Future of Higher Education conference in Nashville. I was invited to be on a panel by an advisor to the Biden administration to critique their new guiding report. Which is marginally better than what's been happening, but is miles from a solution.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
HCA Healthcare has reported a data breach that has exposed more than 27 million of Americans personal information including name, address, SSN and provider they saw.
Click to expand...
I received a letter from Enzo Clinical Labs that states that they identified a ransomware incident of their network. Same info was breached as well as the test performed. They are offering me 1 year of credit monitoring as well as up to $1million identity fraud loss reimbursement. I am beyond livid.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
Going to college is once again more expensive this year with the average tuition being more than $40,000 a year.

And you have to remember, that doesn't cover the cost of books, food or housing. Adding those into the yearly costs, an ivy league school like Harvard will costs you more than $95,000 a year to attend. To put that into perspective, the average family only saved $5,011 last year. That means they would take them 75 years to save up enough money to send one child to Harvard.

The average cost of tuition has increased by 747.8% over the last 40 years.

We have all heard for years that universities adding amenities to attract students has been a leading factor in the increase cost of tuition. But studies show that was not the top reasons why tuition increased by 4% yet again this year.

The number one reason was the cost of human teachers. Inflation has lead to professors demanding raises. When I heard this fact and they said "human teachers cost a lot" I was thinking, wtf. Are we saying the solution is to not have "human teachers"?

Now the number two reason is what we were all expecting. Amenities. But I learned more about this, and was surprised that inequality is what is driving this. As the wealth concentrates itself towards the top, the richest American families, who now have more money than ever, do not think twice about spending money to send their kids to top schools. This means universities have found they can charge the top 10% of Americans whatever the hell they want and they will pay it no questions asked. This leads universities into fierce competition against each other to attract these students which often includes massive spending on amenities and luxuries. What I find interesting to note about this is that it's a shift from easy money from anyone and everyone being able to get a student loan and charging whatever you want and spending money to attract any students, to specifically only targeting the top 10%.

This all comes at a time where state subsidies are at a record low. The average state subsidy is now only 6% of tuition. And these subsidies aren't just falling because they are a fixed dollar amount going up against ever increases cost of tuition. No, states are actively cutting their budget and Education is one of the areas that most often takes a hit.


At this rate, we must be getting pretty close to the tipping point where college is not an option for the majority of Americans due to being priced out furthering inequality
Click to expand...
They did an analysis on this years ago that pointed to increased administrative costs.

During the 1980-1981 school year, public and private institutions spent $20.7 billion in total on instruction, and $13 billion on academic support, student services and institutional support combined, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. By the 2014-2015 school year, total instructional costs had climbed to $148 billion, while the same grouping of administrative expenses had risen to $122.3 billion.

Put another way, administrative spending comprised just 26% of total educational spending by American colleges in 1980-1981, while instructional spending comprised 41%. Three decades later, the two categories were almost even: administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures, while instructional spending made up 29%.

www.forbes.com

Bureaucrats And Buildings: The Case For Why College Is So Expensive

The real problem is that colleges aren’t actually incentivized to keep their costs down: a more expensive price tag can actually signal a higher quality school.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
 
It looks like the United States has provoked / got under the skin of the man child who we know as the leader or North Korea today.

For the first time in 40 years, a US Submarine capable of carrying Nuclear Missiles came into port in South Korea today.

North Korea has responded by tossing ballistic missiles into the ocean. This is still a developing story, but it appears they have launched multiple / at least more than one missile today. One may have traveled over Japan.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top