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This is infuriating:
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top aide resigns amid sexual harassment scandal www.theguardian.com
The report found that Cuomo groped, kissed or made suggestive comments to 11 women in violation of the law, prompting local prosecutors to launch a criminal investigation and re-igniting calls for him to resign or be impeached.
The report described DeRosa as a central figure in Cuomo’s office’s retaliation against one of the women, Lindsey Boylan, after she became the first person to speak out publicly.
DeRosa, who often defended Cuomo when he faced public criticism, had been with the administration since 2013. She was given the title “secretary to the governor” in 2017, and was probably the most recognizable face in the administration after Cuomo.
So basically, the guy harasses 11 women and instead of resigning, he gets his secretary (a woman) to resign for him.
Not entirely dissimilar to what happened to Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland www.bbc.co.uk, who almost got her career sunk because her male colleague and boss for years -- Alex Salmond -- harassed 13 women.
It boggles the mind that women in politics keep having to shoulder the consequences for the disgusting actions of their male colleagues, while the men basically go on scot-free.
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People leaving the ship to not be associated with him will continue as long as he doesn't resign. That is to be expected.
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On August 09 2021 21:56 Erasme wrote:
People leaving the ship to not be associated with him will continue as long as he doesn't resign. That is to be expected.
As far as I understand it, she's resigning because of her role defending Cuomo and being ''a central figure in Cuomo’s office’s retaliation against one of the women, Lindsey Boylan'', not because she does not want to be associated with him.
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They're trying to throw a sacrifice to the wolves. This woman will probably be heavily compensated in some way for doing this. However, the fact that she's a woman clearly being used in a deceitful way, I can't see NY letting up. Cuomo is completely toast.
Cuomo is completely deranged. This is what our leaders really look like. In the face of certain doom, unwavering arrogance.
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On August 09 2021 23:16 Mohdoo wrote:
They're trying to throw a sacrifice to the wolves. This woman will probably be heavily compensated in some way for doing this. However, the fact that she's a woman clearly being used in a deceitful way, I can't see NY letting up. Cuomo is completely toast.
Cuomo is completely deranged. This is what our leaders really look like. In the face of certain doom, unwavering arrogance.
This sacrifice doesn't even make sense though. The allegations made weren't about the Cuomo administration in general, they were made about Cuomo himself. They can't just use a fall person and have this go away.
And yes, Cuomo is terrible. I didn't know much about him before the pandemic since I don't live in NY, but his actions during the pandemic from start to finish do not show him to be a good person. He advocated for a cut to healthcare spending while coronavirus was reaching its peak in NY, he forced nursing homes to take in people who tested positive for covid-19, hid covid-related nursing home deaths, and then later published a book giving himself a pat on the back for doing such a good job during the pandemic, and he's a disgusting sexual predator who refuses to step down.
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On August 09 2021 08:31 Sermokala wrote:
I don't think they have any idea on what to do about student loans. If you turn on the interest and demand payments millennials will suffer greatly on any sort of wealth creation and will become very unhappy in a decade or two when they realize they can't retire and their parents generation screwed them over hard.
Making student loans zero percent interest and just government-guaranteed isn't something I think is that crazy. The entire industry is built on US soverign debt. Expecting student to be financed at a much worse rate than any other form of economic investment is just silly. The fact that you can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under the massive interest payments removes any type of sympathy the loan companies may get from me.
Its crazy because it does nothing to address the underlying problem is that schools are hoovering up all this student loan money without actually providing a core product that is of value to the US economy. Not that I think higher education is of zero value, simply that all of the parts of higher ed that have caused its price to increase at 3-5x inflation since ~1980 is not of value. You look at education costs and its not that there are more professors, or better professor compensation, almost all of this inflation is caused by 2 things:
1) Non education staff. These are like the "Student Success Managers" and "Diversity Officers". They provide almost zero value to the country, but have captured a large % of student loan dollars.
2) New Amenities. Because student loans make college funding a black box to students, schools now compete by building new dorms and gyms. Again, a slight improvement for students, but not worth 10k+ a year in tuition. And certainly not worth it to the government to encourage these decisions.
Any student loan reform needs to first address the problem the the very existence of student loans is causing a lot of the problems of student loans. While the loan problem is bad, the bigger problem is that the current model costs 30-60k a year to deliver 5k worth of education. That is a problem regardless of who is paying.
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On August 10 2021 03:24 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2021 08:31 Sermokala wrote:
I don't think they have any idea on what to do about student loans. If you turn on the interest and demand payments millennials will suffer greatly on any sort of wealth creation and will become very unhappy in a decade or two when they realize they can't retire and their parents generation screwed them over hard.
Making student loans zero percent interest and just government-guaranteed isn't something I think is that crazy. The entire industry is built on US soverign debt. Expecting student to be financed at a much worse rate than any other form of economic investment is just silly. The fact that you can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under the massive interest payments removes any type of sympathy the loan companies may get from me. Its crazy because it does nothing to address the underlying problem is that schools are hoovering up all this student loan money without actually providing a core product that is of value to the US economy. Not that I think higher education is of zero value, simply that all of the parts of higher ed that have caused its price to increase at 3-5x inflation since ~1980 is not of value. You look at education costs and its not that there are more professors, or better professor compensation, almost all of this inflation is caused by 2 things: 1) Non education staff. These are like the "Student Success Managers" and "Diversity Officers". They provide almost zero value to the country, but have captured a large % of student loan dollars. 2) New Amenities. Because student loans make college funding a black box to students, schools now compete by building new dorms and gyms. Again, a slight improvement for students, but not worth 10k+ a year in tuition. And certainly not worth it to the government to encourage these decisions. Any student loan reform needs to first address the problem the the very existence of student loans is causing a lot of the problems of student loans. While the loan problem is bad, the bigger problem is that the current model costs 30-60k a year to deliver 5k worth of education. That is a problem regardless of who is paying.
I agree with a lot of this. All universities should just look like community colleges with research labs. There is an ungodly amount of fluff that essentially comes down to the fact that universities compete with each other. It should feel completely and totally irrelevant to Oregon State University whether a student goes to some other university.
My impression is that sports programs are actually a revenue stream for schools, so I don't mind that. But a sports program should never be a financial drain.
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Community college absolutely looks like a more efficient model for instruction - most schooling, after all, is just instructors and classes. Research labs mostly pay for themselves with grants, a few expensive pieces of instructional lab equipment (e.g. an upper level physics lab) excepted. It’s not cheap, but all that could easily be paid for with government money.
The administrative expenses, really what Clutz mentioned, are the real source of waste. Classes aren’t cheap but they don’t break the bank either.
As another thought, maybe not everyone needs to go to a university either. Rationing graduates based on market availability of jobs is probably better than graduating a glut of people who can’t be placed. The freedom to shoot yourself in the foot career-wise is not a good one.
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On August 10 2021 05:43 LegalLord wrote:
Community college absolutely looks like a more efficient model for instruction - most schooling, after all, is just instructors and classes. Research labs mostly pay for themselves with grants, a few expensive pieces of instructional lab equipment (e.g. an upper level physics lab) excepted. It’s not cheap, but all that could easily be paid for with government money.
I think direct funding through govt rather than tuition fixes many problems with university costs. Marketing and perception are both purely negative things for an industry. In an ideal world, an industry does not compete and does not need marketing. Universities should be that way. A university shouldn't have a ball room. There are a great number of things at universities that are honestly abhorrent. Taking away a university's independence to decide how it spends its money and where it gets its money would be a huge net positive for students and society as a whole.
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On August 10 2021 02:28 PhoenixVoid wrote:Now that the bipartisan infrastructure bill is on the verge of passing the Senate, the Democrats revealed their $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that will almost certainly be passed through reconciliation. Expect it to get pared down by moderates like Sinema who already said it looked too expensive, but the gist from Democrats is https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Topline Summary of FY2022 Budget Resolution.pdf.
That list sure looks nice. I hope they will get it through and that the details don't end up disappointing. If they are aggressive on climate change then at least there may be a habitable world for the coming generations.
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On August 10 2021 05:43 LegalLord wrote:
Community college absolutely looks like a more efficient model for instruction - most schooling, after all, is just instructors and classes. Research labs mostly pay for themselves with grants, a few expensive pieces of instructional lab equipment (e.g. an upper level physics lab) excepted. It’s not cheap, but all that could easily be paid for with government money.
I am not familiar enough with the US system to know for sure, but the bolded is definitely not true here. Our universities end up subsidising incoming grant money almost dollar-for-dollar when everything is taken into account; I would be very surprised if the US was any better.
Grant money is short term, project-oriented and highly unpredictable. Research infrastructure needs long-term, stable funding. The building will see thousands of individual grants, and if the lights go off because someone does badly in the yearly lottery, a huge amount of sunk capital is thrown away. You can't mothball most high-end equipment in any reasonable way, and once the incredibly specialised technician has been let go he is very hard to entice back.
It's not just physics that needs this gear, either. The days of doing science with a bunsen burner and the truth are well and truly over - those papers were written 30 years ago. Nearly every new discovery now depends on complex and expensive interdisciplinary gear; electron, fluorescence and confocal microscopes, diffractometers, radio-isotope testing labs, MRIs - these are all hugely expensive and very inefficient to fund with project money.
That's not to say I'm opposed to remodeling the sector - it is in dire need of change. To me the ideal model is some kind of pairing between a college-type organisation that provides teaching, married to a suite of local research institutions with independent, reliable funding that drive research and teach into higher-level courses.
The reason this doesn't exist is that cutting the ribbon in front of a shiny building gets votes, but providing the ongoing money to run that building does not. This means the politicians tend to set the institutes up and then leave them to fight each other for an increasingly small pot of funding. It's no surprise the universities end up absorbing them when the government walks away.
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On August 10 2021 08:47 Belisarius wrote:Show nested quote +On August 10 2021 05:43 LegalLord wrote:
Community college absolutely looks like a more efficient model for instruction - most schooling, after all, is just instructors and classes. Research labs mostly pay for themselves with grants, a few expensive pieces of instructional lab equipment (e.g. an upper level physics lab) excepted. It’s not cheap, but all that could easily be paid for with government money. Are you speaking from firsthand experience, here? I am not familiar enough with the US system to know for sure, but the bolded is definitely not the case here. Our universities end up subsidising incoming grant money almost dollar-for-dollar with respect to services, infrastructure and staff salaries; I would be very surprised if the US was any better. Grant money is short term, project-oriented and highly unpredictable. Research infrastructure needs long-term, stable funding. The building will see thousands of individual grants, and if the lights go off because someone does badly in the yearly lottery, a huge amount of sunk capital is thrown away. You can't mothball most high-end equipment in any reasonable way, and once the incredibly specialised technician has been let go he is very hard to entice back.
Yeah, generally based on my experience in the US as a once-upon-a-time grad student. Professors gain tenure based on their ability to win grants, and those grants pay for their own lab equipment, some amount of grad student salaries, and a percentage that goes to the university for "general expenses" that I believe include the professors' own salaries. In my particular branch of engineering, I've seen pretty substantial multi-year grants in the millions of dollars, though given that my advisor was at the top of his particular sub-field that may or may not be anomalous.
Per my own understanding of how US universities work, besides that university cut of the grants, that income stream is separate from the income stream of student tuition that pays for instructors, classrooms, educational lab equipment, and a various nebulous cloud of "administrative" and "campus life" type expenses that hides a lot of waste. Instructors aren't paid an awful lot (with the exception of tenured professors for whom it is a part-time role and their research is most of what they do), classrooms are what they are, and most lab equipment really is just "bunsen burners and the truth" with the few exception being high-level lab courses in difficult majors that justify expensive equipment (quantum physics labs, organic chemistry, engineering practicals, etc). That's all not very different from what a grade school or community college provides, so it's hard to believe that that'd be an absurdly expensive educational cost. Which leaves the administrative-type expenses, the part that happens to be ballooning and that is the obvious suspect for squandering the alarmingly high tuition costs that the average student pays.
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On August 10 2021 09:00 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On August 10 2021 08:47 Belisarius wrote:On August 10 2021 05:43 LegalLord wrote:
Community college absolutely looks like a more efficient model for instruction - most schooling, after all, is just instructors and classes. Research labs mostly pay for themselves with grants, a few expensive pieces of instructional lab equipment (e.g. an upper level physics lab) excepted. It’s not cheap, but all that could easily be paid for with government money. Are you speaking from firsthand experience, here? I am not familiar enough with the US system to know for sure, but the bolded is definitely not the case here. Our universities end up subsidising incoming grant money almost dollar-for-dollar with respect to services, infrastructure and staff salaries; I would be very surprised if the US was any better. Grant money is short term, project-oriented and highly unpredictable. Research infrastructure needs long-term, stable funding. The building will see thousands of individual grants, and if the lights go off because someone does badly in the yearly lottery, a huge amount of sunk capital is thrown away. You can't mothball most high-end equipment in any reasonable way, and once the incredibly specialised technician has been let go he is very hard to entice back. Yeah, generally based on my experience in the US as a once-upon-a-time grad student. Professors gain tenure based on their ability to win grants, and those grants pay for their own lab equipment, some amount of grad student salaries, and a percentage that goes to the university for "general expenses" that I believe include the professors' own salaries. In my particular branch of engineering, I've seen pretty substantial multi-year grants in the millions of dollars, though given that my advisor was at the top of his particular sub-field that may or may not be anomalous. Per my own understanding of how US universities work, besides that university cut of the grants, that income stream is separate from the income stream of student tuition that pays for instructors, classrooms, educational lab equipment, and a various nebulous cloud of "administrative" and "campus life" type expenses that hides a lot of waste. Instructors aren't paid an awful lot (with the exception of tenured professors for whom it is a part-time role and their research is most of what they do), classrooms are what they are, and most lab equipment really is just "bunsen burners and the truth" with the few exception being high-level lab courses in difficult majors that justify expensive equipment (quantum physics labs, organic chemistry, engineering practicals, etc). That's all not very different from what a grade school or community college provides, so it's hard to believe that that'd be an absurdly expensive educational cost. Which leaves the administrative-type expenses, the part that happens to be ballooning and that is the obvious suspect for squandering the alarmingly high tuition costs that the average student pays.
There's a huge amount of grant income inequality, where the top professors in their fields hoover up the biggest chunks of the funding. This is how you end up with labs with so many people that some PhD students never actually meet their professors until they're ready to graduate. Yes, those labs fund themselves, the remaining 99% of labs rely on university part funding, taking in international students (they usually come with a large pot of consumable money) and small internal pots of funding that you can get to fund another year's worth of consumables. Most of my kit was purchased with my startup fund and I'm actually fairly successful with grant income.
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On August 09 2021 22:38 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 09 2021 21:56 Erasme wrote:
People leaving the ship to not be associated with him will continue as long as he doesn't resign. That is to be expected. As far as I understand it, she's resigning because of her role defending Cuomo and being ''a central figure in Cuomo’s office’s retaliation against one of the women, Lindsey Boylan'', not because she does not want to be associated with him.
Yes, better cut the losses here and now than later. Cuomo still hasn't faced the repercussions of his acts, and i'm fairly certain that anyone still supporting him in his administration will be cleaned out/marked if he's found guilty.
I don't think she's trying to take the fall for Cuomo btw, she's taking the fall for her own actions, and the later she does that, the harsher it will be.
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Cuomos resigning effective in 2 weeks, so looks like he’s finally given in.
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He's had one interesting arc in the past year or so from being lauded as a potential presidential candidate who could replace Biden and handling COVID as a strong leader, to being blasted for covering up COVID deaths in nursing homes and now resigning in disgrace for sexually harassing 11 women. I guess losing pretty much every ally from the White House to the New York legislature gave him no choice but to resign. There was also a New Yorker report that he went after a federal prosecutor that doesn't help.
Also worth noting the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed the Senate quite comfortably with 69 votes, which is getting overshadowed by Cuomo.
On August 11 2021 02:48 Zambrah wrote:
What size was the infrastructure bill originally
going to be? Wasn’t it supposed to be like 3 trillion or something, also did they straight up pass it or use a charge of their reconciliation spell?
EDIT: Wow it looks like they passed it legitimately via normal voting, nice
There's still the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that will get passed with reconciliation that has a lot more of the Democratic wishlist on social spending and environment on it. But that's expected to pass by the fall season apparently.
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What size was the infrastructure bill originally
going to be? Wasn’t it supposed to be like 3 trillion or something, also did they straight up pass it or use a charge of their reconciliation spell?
EDIT: Wow it looks like they passed it legitimately via normal voting, nice
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Never did like Cuomo (or his brother). Glad he won't be running for president.
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
I’d have to echo other posters that in the absence of further reform, forgiving or at least reducing student debt can only go so far.
It’s a less pronounced, but still pretty impactful problem over here too. Tuition inflation does not reflect a commensurate improvement in tuition, and degrees are too much of a gateway to even pretty basic jobs, so people who wouldn’t otherwise want to will still go to college as it’s seen as a near necessity to work up from anything than low-tier jobs. And with a cultural imperative that has a large proportion of people going to tertiary education with government-backed loans there’s not much institutional incentive to cut costs or deliver value for money.
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EPT
