US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7340

On April 14 2017 09:43 Amui wrote:

If you actually looked at the link, the bomb that was dropped wasn't one of those, and referred to a different bomb, which was an absolutely gigantic penetrator, with a unit cost of 15 million(batch of 20). Still, it probably isn't cheap.

Also, tomahawks cost around 1.9m(see: wikipedia) each. Not cheap, but that salvo didn't add up to anywhere near a billion either.

On April 14 2017 23:30 PhoenixVoid wrote:
As far as I know there is no teacher's college equivalent for university, and a good deal of professors are there to research and write papers, not teach. Not surprising to see such a disconnect between the profs and their students when they lack the ability to engage and communicate. It gets even worse with huge class sizes.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau presents the most detailed picture yet of the dramatic rise in the number of people covered by health insurance since the Affordable Care Act went into effect.

County-level data going back to 2010, when the law was signed, shows a patchwork of people living without health insurance that ticked down slowly for the first three years under the ACA. But, once the online insurance exchanges opened at the end of 2013 and Medicaid expanded, the population living without coverage dropped noticeably.

The recently released Census report is county-level data for 2015. Overall, the nationwide uninsured rate dropped 7.7 percentage points for people under 65 years old between 2010 and 2015, from 18.2 percent in 2010 to 10.5 percent in 2015.

Although the opening of the online exchanges and Medicaid expansion contributed most noticeably to the increase in the number of people with health insurance, other elements of the health care bill went into effect earlier.

For example, since 2010 the law has allowed young people to stay on their parents' health insurance until age 26.

A year-by-year breakdown of the county-level uninsured rate shows how the portion of the population with health insurance has risen as the Affordable Care Act has gone into effect. It also shows the persistent differences in insurance coverage by state and county.

According to the Census data, the U.S. counties with the top five reductions in the number of uninsured people between 2010 and 2015 are large, urban counties: Miami-Dade County, Fla., Los Angeles County, Calif., Orange County, Calif., Cook County, Ill. and Harris County, Tx.

In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, but gave states a choice about whether to expand Medicaid to cover more of their citizens. Under the Medicaid expansion, the federal government made money available to state governments to cover the costs of low-income people who were not previously eligible for Medicaid.

Today, 31 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid. In most of those states, the expansion took effect in 2014, when the online health insurance exchanges also went live.

As NPR's Alison Kodjak has reported, a handful of states that first rejected the expansion have since embraced it, including Louisiana and Montana.

And nationwide, a lot more poor people are covered by health insurance than were before the Affordable Care Act.

People who do not make much money, and who are less likely to have health insurance, have especially benefited. While the national uninsured rate has dropped by 6.3 points since 2013, it has dropped by 8.9 points for those below the federal poverty level and by 12 points for those between 100 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

On April 14 2017 23:29 Danglars wrote:

One of the rare junctures I can agree with you. There's been an explosion of high paying administration jobs.

On April 14 2017 23:55 KwarK wrote:

Most administration is done by senior faculty and senior faculty get a shitload of money by virtue of being senior faculty. Believe me, these places would run a whole lot better if they let actual staff administrators do the administration. My days are a constant battle to make senile professors in jobs that amount to an early retirement understand basic financial concepts. And I work in a STEM department.

Also University finances are public. If you want to see where the money goes, look.

On April 14 2017 11:28 xDaunt wrote:

Sending everyone to college is a stupid idea. Subsidizing liberal arts degrees is even dumber. We need trade schools, not more academic nonsense.

On April 14 2017 23:45 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


I think it's less about entertainment and more about "If the professors aren't clarifying or explaining or adding anything useful to the course, then why bother having them at all, and instead just ask me to read the book/ follow the syllabus on my own time?" If a professor's most important contribution to a course is merely handing out the final exam, then I worry for the students. Students should definitely be proactive and eager to learn, but I also think that professors should be able and willing to help students if office hours are attended.

That being said, I assume you're just referring to college-level students. When students are younger, engagement and enthusiasm are absolutely necessary to keep them motivated.

On April 14 2017 23:59 zlefin wrote:

what do you make of the links dpm provided?

I don't mind administrators per se; but some of them seem like they're being paid too much. and they seem a lot more numerous.

On April 15 2017 00:13 KwarK wrote:

I think if you look at pretty much any business sector from 1970 to the present day you'll see a huge growth in administration. It's become a more productive field since office computers became a thing. I like to consider the example of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed in the early 80s and businesses would commission them but they would take specialized companies weeks to produce and would be delivered on paper. Computers came along and suddenly what a change that would take 10 people 10 days to change to an existing sheet could be done by one person in 30 seconds. But the actual amount of time spent producing spreadsheets increased, despite the process being made a million times more efficient.

In my college the average administrator probably makes around 40k. And sure, there are a lot of us, but quite a lot of shit needs doing. We are constantly audited, every penny needs to be manually assigned to the right grant or course, the right account code within that, the right commodity code within that. Shitloads of budgeting, shitloads of general admin (we're the size of a fair sized town), people constantly fucking shit up and setting fires that need to be put out.

This shit used to be done by faculty, and faculty still monopolize all the actual management positions at the top and proceed to fuck with the admins. The fact that we've freed up the faculty to spend their time doing research and teaching isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, I think we should go further. The current situation is essentially like if the NFL insisted that all senior positions within the NFL be occupied by currently active football players. They don't have the time, the inclination or the skills to run an organization like that and they'd much rather be doing their actual jobs.

On April 15 2017 00:15 zlefin wrote:

i'm talking about the admins making 200k+, not the 40k ones so much. are all these spreadsheets truly necessary? wherein is the societal benefit from all the extra admin work?

On April 15 2017 00:28 KwarK wrote:

Truly necessary is a dumb question. Basically nothing anyone does is truly necessary. If you have good management at the top then they'll say "let's have everyone spend a bunch of time defending their use of space against our claim that they're using it inefficiently" and it'll turn out that there is actually a lot of wasted space and they can save $20,000,000 expanding a department that said it needed more room. If you have bad management then they'll say the exact same thing but just be doing it because they read that UCLA did it last year. The problem is that to the average admin these look like the exact same thing, a memo saying that you have to assign every room within your department percentages that represent its use by each course. That data then can be translated into what portion of the overall department overhead each course is consuming and, if the course has a low number of students and uses a lot of space while another course hasn't got enough space to fit all the students who want to take it, they can change shit.

This is my spreadsheets point. Every organization has gotten colossally better at running itself and assigning resources since the 80s. Every single one. Without exception. Data fuels efficiency. Now, obviously this all comes with overhead and whether the gains justify the overhead expended is a case by case thing. But admin matters. Especially when so much of the money comes from the government.

As for 200k+ administrators. There really aren't so many of them outside of faculty positions. Football coaches and the people at the very, very top. Some of our senior accountants make low six figures (below 200k+) but they're managing hundred million dollar budgets and a large staff of accountants below them, they could make more in the private sector. Honestly the entire idea that we're spending all our money on administration simply doesn't jive with me.

I actually did our FY18 budget for my department last week. We're spending about 7.5% of our money on admin staff and over 50% on faculty, of which about 30% is admin faculty. And the faculty don't actually do admin, it's just that the admin aren't empowered to do their jobs without first explaining to a faculty member why it needs to be done.

On April 15 2017 00:08 Mohdoo wrote:


In my experience, this is only the case in intro level classes. In upper division classes, professors are usually teaching about a subject they are involved in themselves. First year chemistry is first year chemistry and nothing will ever change that. Same with other subjects, I imagine.

The other thing is that a lot of textbooks are quite good and go into even more detail than you'd need for a lot of subjects. In many cases, a textbook contains all the same information. A professor can help you along the way by explaining things in more detail when you go into their office hour or something, but for the most part, I think the idea that people should be able to learn primarily from a textbook is fine. I've always learned well by self-teaching and then using professors for when I get stuck. It requires enthusiasm and drive, and is certainly more mentally taxing than having something carefully explained to you, but with limited resources, I guess that's just how it goes?

My lack of sympathy is mostly for people who believe a university education is you paying for someone to teaching you things rather than to provide a method for you to learn. I think it is a crucial distinction. In one case, it is up to the individual to make the most of what is provided to them. In the other, it is up to the professor to make sure students are learning. I was a very accomplished undergrad and went out of my ways to make sure of it. Meanwhile I knew people who would somewhat give up on a subject because they were able to convince themselves the professor sucked and that they were at some kind of disadvantage or something like that.

This was not an uncommon type of conversation to either hear or be a part of:

"wtf, how do you get all this?? I feel like the lectures are so confusing and poorly organized!"
"yeah, but the book did a good job at ___ and ____, and this diagram really helped"
"ah, yeah, I just can't get myself to sit down and cruise through a textbook for hours on end"

I could. Why couldn't they?

On April 15 2017 00:36 KwarK wrote:
Modern textbooks are a bit of a joke, in case anyone hasn't been to college in the last few years. The textbook company lobbies the department to use its textbooks, the department says "all professors must now teach using McGraw-Hill Connect online learning tools", the students all have to pay $200 for an online e-text edition textbook because it allows them to do the homework and the homework is a mess of "you entered $0, this is wrong, the correct answer is to leave it blank" and "we see you got that question wrong, here is the right answer, would you like to try it again and improve your score". Then their marketing material has the audacity to claim that when courses teach using their online learning tools they do better. No shit, it's not possible to not get 100% when you get unlimited attempts at a question and whenever you get it wrong they give you the right answer.

I would fucking love to have an actual textbook. But I'd love to have bought it 5th hand or borrowed it from the university library or something like that and that's not how it works anymore. Most people no longer have an actual textbook to reference. And they don't need to reference it because their assessment consists of one giant conflict of interest as the online learning company has no interest in ever failing any student.

On April 15 2017 00:36 zlefin wrote:

truly necessary is not a dumb question; sometimes needless rules cause inefficient things to be done in large bureaucracies, especially if gov't is involved.
at any rate, I'd still like to know what you make of the links DPM provided. as I think you'd have useful insight on them.

Research (e.g., research institutes, labs, individual research) – 12%
Hospital services – 11%
Auxiliary enterprises (e.g. residence halls, athletics, dining services) – 9%
Institutional support (e.g. general administration and management, public relations) – 8%
Academic support (e.g. administrators, deans, libraries) – 7%
Public service (e.g. conferences, institutes, reference bureaus) – 5%
Operations & maintenance (e.g. utilities, insurance, maintaining facilities) – 4%
Student services (e.g. admissions, counseling, student activities & organizations) – 4%
Scholarships & fellowships (e.g. grants, awards, stipends) – 3%
Depreciation (losses in capital assets per year) – 3%
Independent operations (indirect enhancement of programs) – >3%

On April 15 2017 00:38 Simberto wrote:


That sounds horrific. I am very glad my university does not work that way.

The worst thing in that direction was a psychology prof saying "Hey, you might wanna read my book on the topic, but there are 50 copies in the library."

On April 15 2017 00:44 KwarK wrote:

The first link addressed the rise in numbers of admins while faculty stayed constant. I think that's completely defensible, the way that big organizations operate has changed dramatically with a huge increase in admins that has resulted, assuming good management, with huge increases in efficiency. My space survey example is a good way of looking at this. In the 70s if the faculty say they need more room then building a new lecture theatre is pretty much the only response. In 2017 the management can turn around and say "really? because to us it looks a lot like you're not using the space you have optimally". Additionally admins have taken over a lot of the duties previously done by faculty (but not all). A raw comparison of faculty:admin employees ratio from four decades apart doesn't tell the whole story, if the faculty were previously doing admin work and now are doing more faculty work because admins are doing admin then you could actually be seeing a proportionate increase in both while the ratio in terms of output stays the same.

The second link contained
Honestly that seems about right from my own department. If they're trying to say anything is too high (athletics probably is) then it's not immediately obvious to me which one that is.

On April 14 2017 09:32 xDaunt wrote:

States need to wise up and bring back firing squads or hanging.