Gravity and Juiceros

Gravity is what allows a cinder block to replace tour Jucero.

Thanks for reminding me about Jucero.

Did YC seriously think because a growth hacker was in charge, you could value a private school like its an overinflated tech company?

Yes. The answer is always “yes”.

It gets even worse when you add YC’s claim that it doesn’t “fund ideas” but rather “fund people.” They didn’t find Austen (a shit person) because he had a good idea (he didn’t). They funded Austen (a shit person) because they liked him (a shit person).

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can’t frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

What do those people think education even looks like?

The same think all coding bootcamps think education looks like: try to take over the world! poorly teach fullstack web development with none of the fundamentals!

So it seems like you’re my former neighbour, then. Depending on how you count, UW might look like it’s both overstaffed and underfunded. This is because i’m mildly certain that most of these TAs aren’t hired as TAs, because nobody really pays them. All PhD students, definitely all at Kampus Ochota, have a requirement to take a certain number of teaching internship hours, which is about 40-60 per year depending on field. (this is, btw, anomaly on national scale and from next year or so new admissions will be paid for these TA hours).

At my faculty (Chemistry; about 220 admitted for BSc, about 80 for MSc annually) that’s enough to man almost all the more entry-level labs (that require more supervision), along with a proper salaried PhD or sometimes two. (We mostly make sure that students don’t do any stupid/dangerous shit, most labs are 12-15 students, first year labs are 30-40 and are limited by size of labs. We’re talking about 1 staff, incl TAs, per 4 to 6 students) I’m not sure how MIM makes use of that human resource, but wouldn’t surprise me if some classes are just led by some PhD students. This is definitely not a resource that Lambda has, so actual costs if anything should be even higher

ERC grants, haven’t seen many of them. European Regional Development Fund, a few grants sourced from Norway and Switzerland, NCBiR, NCN, FNP, some funding straight from ministry, there’s more of this. MIM is a notch or two higher than most of faculties so i don’t doubt it, but these grants are supposed to go for research, not for teaching. There are other sources of funding for that, and especially after new minister of science was installed, that money became available (it’s a special hell to navigate all of this)

That said, our faculty hasn’t been saved from bullshit hype. There’s nanostructure engineering course now, launched some three years ago or so, which is not engineering degree and mostly deals with bulk nanoparticles and such, and this is something that simply does not have much use (some sensors, limited use in catalysis but it has problems with reproducibility and dies quickly). Nano- hype happened mostly in early 00s and started dying around 2015 or so, so it’s not even right on timing. This deters few however and you can find loads of bs papers with shit like catalyst based on chitin nanoparticles made from recycled sustainably sourced beetles or whatever with non-reproductible results published in MDPI or Frontiers. There is, or was, “blockchain and AI lab”, tucked somewhere at CeNT (i take that yall’s have thrown them away from MIM and they inhabited first hospitable room since)

If it makes you feel better, it costs an average of $18,865 for an uninsured American to give birth to a healthy baby, and a tenth of the country is uninsured.

I mean, it doesn’t make me feel better, because I live here. But you don’t, so YMMV. Or I suppose YKMV, in metric, because the US still uses imperial measurements for everything, because we’re too good for real numbers. USA! USA!

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS LEGAL. HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. WHAT THE FUCK.

here’s a fun one for you: because US empire is as US empire does, it does not stop at living there. there are many modes of interaction that will subject you to the same type of shit

in …almost every one of the contracts I’ve had with US entities, there were at minimum included binding arbitration clauses, and often more

such a fucking diseased hellhole

Im reading the article and im baffled. In a way which comes back to your ‘HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE’ thing.

I’m at the ‘try out an engineer for four weeks’ part, and am I missing something? Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period? Are they just bragging about it being unpaid? How is that impressive? (It isn’t like it is free for the hiring company anyway even if they don’t have to pay the first month, programming famously being a non-stacking process where training and managing people into a new team is quite costly, vs hiring more people to lay bricks, a process where you can just hire more people if you want it to go faster).