Yes and no. There are encumbrances and liabilities that emerge that cannot be removed. Diseases, children, aging parents, accidents are all things that happen and can sometimes eat up all available resources.
I don't see this as a contradiction to the parent.
Those things you listed to prove your point can all happen to any of us at age 12, and all of the rest save child-bearing can happen at any age.
All of them are external things that change our situation, sure, but your choice to be "old" or not based on them is still a choice, which was the parent's point.
I'm not an example of anything, but it happens that I was concerned about mortality from about age 7 - not frightened of it, but indignant. This should obviously be the most urgent concern for everybody, yet we do nothing about it, I thought. Before I decide what I'm going to do with my life, I'm going to fix the problem of it ending way too soon. But as it turned out, I would rather die than study molecular biology, so now I just vaguely hope somebody else will fix the problem.
Humanity's earliest surviving major work of fiction, Gilgamesh, is largely concerned with this. Ancient Egyptian literature is obviously full of these concerns, and you can keep on going down the list of ancient civilizations with surviving literature, it's always there. Worrying about this, wishing to find a solution to this problem, and even working at it (and, always, failing) is about as human as anything can be.
The good news is that we are probably a few decades away from robust rejuvenation, that will allow us to live more or less indefinitely absent catching a disease or meeting with a horrible accident or something. In the next 20 years or so we have a very good shot at a first wave of treatments that will extend our quality lifespan to where we will see the next wave, so-called "longevity escape velocity".
And yes, this is an ancient, ancient dream of mankind, one replete with cautionary tales about the Bad Things that will befall you if you attempt to actually solve it. (One such tale, The Substance, was nominated for a few oscars.) But so was human flight. We yearned for it, and our elders told us what fools we would be for even trying with things like the tale of Icarus... and then one day on a hill in Kitty Hawk, NC...
tales against flying? you forget daedalus who made it out just fine sans a son. icarus’s problem was that he overstepped his limits, not that he dared to fly.
from what I’ve seen tales against a search for immortality are in regards to enjoy life while you have it, make relations, laugh, love, mourn, and remember, rather than have your entire life consumed in a desperate attempt to postpone the end, sucking all the joy out of it. we still have a long ways to go to avoiding death entirely, so I’d figure the best course of action is to enjoy life rather than to waste it in hopes of getting some extra time.
Sure, that is more or less what I meant by expressing an aversion to molecular biology: I have some living to do, so I can't invest effort in avoiding death. It is however true that there's a tiresome trope in fiction, the villain whose badness is centered on the search for eternal life. I remember more than one Doctor Who baddie with this quest. It's like a signifier of an evil character, like desiring unusually long life is a sin against destiny, or somehow unfair, and this trope gives life extension a bad rep. This probably stems from witch hunts in the 1500s, and fairy tales.
and yeah bringing up what you've brought up, I see your point. it does seem like the trope has been distilled down to "searching for eternal life is bad" instead of "don't waste everything in the hopes of eternal life".
"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...
School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
"Methodology & Definitions
Staff Headcount
Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
In the US, many Medical schools are schools only in the technical definition of schools. In reality they are more like research and medical centers that also do a bit of teaching on the side. Staff to students ratio could easily be in excess of 10:1
A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school revenue and budget. I remember raising my hand and asking the Dean if tuition was so little, why not just make it free. He gave me a death stare and just danced around the question.
The post you responded to was about how medical schools are “schools” in name only. You may be correct that administrators are useless, but your kid’s experience, assuming they are in medical school is not really evidence because they don’t see more than a sliver of what the school does (and needs to do, by law).
In this case, you've been refuted by an explanation that the growth is almost entirely at the school of medicine, and most of that increase has been in staff that are providing care. And you're continuing to advance the point anyways.
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
Hospitals attached to universities aren't in general "tacked on" but are a part of the educational environment. They exist not only to serve patients but to educate students.
No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.
Total staff numbers are only marginally useful without further breakdown, as that article points out.
A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget.
Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.
(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)
What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.
Externally funded research also come with many compliance, reporting, and other requirements [1]. Administrative staff are the ones who handle these responsibilities. If funding agencies want fewer administrators, require less oversight.
> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.
from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:
> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.
and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:
> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.
given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.
It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environmental health and safety, IT support, etc etc.
A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".
This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)
> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our
> collective knowledge together with its students.
> That’s it.
Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.
Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.
No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.
You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.
Is it? I disagree. The university I went to has a mission to “conduct research, provide education, and engage with the community to improve the lives of people and the environment”. MIT’s is to “educate students and advance knowledge in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship”.
It’s not a problem. You just have a narrow view of what you think our higher ed institutions should be.
> This has had several consequences for the governance of universities: 1) the role of shared governance has receded in importance in the day-to-day governance of universities; 2) the balance of power and authority has shifted toward administrators; and 3) faculty have been subjected to a series of performance measures that disproportionately values productivity over shared governance participation.
Publish-or-perish and shoddy research is a direct result of this shift in the mission, as measurements became all but expected.
By the time I entered uni the 1990s, things were shifting negatively in higher institutions.
I've worked for both big R1 Universities as well as top-tier independent research institutes. I ran computing facilities that supported bioinformatics facilities, and spent my day interacting with both research leaders (PIs/faculty) and administration.
I don't believe point #1 - I have been involved in shared governance bodies as a student and staff, and at least where I've spent time, these bodies are strong.
For point #2, I never saw any shift of authority to administrators. In fact, I left academia because I was given a mission to centralize computing resources to ensure we're responsible stewards of the data we held. Instead, PIs would end-run around shared computing facilities, spending their own grant money on high end workstations, USB drives. I left and went into big tech because I was tired of fighting with essentially 50-100 small fiefdoms. The administrators were powerless, and if they tried to force the PIs to submit, they PIs would simply go someplace else.
For #3, while "impact factor" took on a larger role, I did not see a problematic shift in how we did science. Everyone was given adequate resources to participate in governance. If anything, the outsized influence individual PIs had over how they did their research made it more difficult to ensure data was stored safely, analyses were reproducible, and so on. That, to me, is a greater risk than the fear that administration was telling researchers what to research.
There are problems with higher ed in the US, but I don't understand how to equate a perceived shift away from "shared governance" with deep fundamental issues in the mission of our higher ed system. We need both a focus on educating young people (need to have fresh minds and bodies to keep the research machine churning) as well as basic AND cutting edge research to keep progress moving forward.
For #2, are you saying the administration doesn’t hold the purse strings?
Why the resistance to the top-down approach?
Nobody resists if it means more resources; and faster procurement of resources.
Instead it seems researchers are forced to navigate politics and raise funding.
Or do you mean that each department has its own IT department and it’s resisting consolidation?
For #3: It’s not about resources but about how “impact factor” is measured, and whether it’s useful a useful metric.
Often, for example little attention is given to confirmation of a suspected dead-end. That still requires in-depth knowledge of the subject, is still research, and advances knowledge.
For #2, yes - the administration doesn't hold the purse strings. Each PI gets their own grants, and thus can control how much of the money is spent, barring overhead. I had to make a value proposition for the PIs to explain to them why they couldn't afford NOT to modernize their data storage. Unfortunately, it's cheaper to go to Staples and buy a USB drive than it is to pay for properly archived storage.
The resistance to the top down approach was, to me, misunderstanding the risks of storing their data outside of a safe place, and a fear of losing control of their data.
The last institute I worked at was focused on basic biomedical research - dead ends were what we chased all day!
This is also the fallacy of looking at one metric.
Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?
Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?
University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”
Universities run small cities. That staff number includes the people who mow the lawn, cook food, clean dorms, work security, maintain their networks, etc the list is massive.
This seems like a low-value comment without some data. For example, can you identify the specific jobs which you consider resort-like and how much of the growth they contribute to?
Without knowing more about the numbers, the only one I have an issue with is the number of students. These universities should be doing everything they can to increase enrollment and let in more students.
I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.
Didn't those already exist before? Is there lot more of that type of work? Or shouldn't it be done more efficiently now? Also aren't those increasingly out-sourced so shouldn't count in that stat?
I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
Universities try to hire grad students as TAs to help them out, but sometimes hire outsiders as TAs. It could be because the undergrad major has lots of students but the corresponding graduate major has few.
Obviously this varies from university to university and I know nothing about Cornell.
>I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
virtually every sector of the economy has 'excess staff;' it is not confined to higher ed. It's the obvious conclusion of decades of automation not being realized as less working hours, but in the dilution of responsibilities into more complicated and larger corporate apparatuses. Some of them are called "bullshit jobs" some of them are given credibility, while being utterly purposeless ultimately. This is largely ignored as a general trend because it is usually contextualized to a narrative within each company (as is the case here) rather than seen as a larger phenomenon.
This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.
We might need to know the FTE values to understand what this means. Are staff positions full-time FTE? Are faculty positions full-time, tenure positions? Have they added part-time staff, adjunct faculty, etc.?
The other insane thing is 10 students to one teacher? I don't understand that because when I went to SJSU, I was almost always in a class with 60+. For CS, it was around 30 people in the room.
So you're saying the ratio has improved? An education improving their ratio of faculty to students seems like a good thing.
Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?
Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.
Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?
Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?
It could also just mean they do more research and less education. But hey, let's quickly jump to conclusions, that seems to be a popular hobby nowadays.
Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.
Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.
Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.
"Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other."
I want what you're smoking because that might be one of the biggest fabrications I've heard in a long time.
lol I have never worked as hard as when I worked for an R1 university. My big tech job is way more like a resort vacation, complete with snacks and drinks.
I found 2. One is an ongoing lawsuit and the other seems mostly like stupidity because people keep falling for the stupid AI grift. I can barely trust AI to produce basic boilerplate and they are trying to verify novel research with it?
There's a sign in Otsuka (northern Tokyo suburb) like "Otsuka has half the crime rate of 10 years ago!" Things are the way they are, up until the moment that they change.
Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically
simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.
Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.
There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.
Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.
Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!
Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.
Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.
Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.
On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
Do not break the law in Japan.
There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.
Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.
Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.
In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.
Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.
> On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
In 2024, US police shot and killed 1,173 people [1]. That's 0.35 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
In 2022, Japan had 289 homicides, or 0.23 per 100,000 people [2].
I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
I don't speak Japanese, but if "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese, then maybe that's because such a thing is unthinkable in Japan.
Do you think that physical violence is the only sort of thing that police can unjustly inflict upon you?
I love Japan, have spent a significant quantity of time there, and if I was a billionaire, it'd be the place where I bought the penthouse luxury apartment. So if anything, I am very favorably biased towards the country.
But it also has a 99% conviction rate, and not because their police are so stellar that they always get the perpetrator on the first try. They hold you for extended periods of time and the system is set up to extract confessions. We know that people are weak to being coerced into false confessions even in countries where there is significantly less pressure and attempts to get them out of you.
Also plenty of laws that have penalties that would be considered quite harsh compared to much of the western world - simple possession of pot can get you 5 years in prison, and intent to distribute/profit can get you 10 - and personal stash levels are plenty to bump you into that range.
Police aren't going to arrest you unless they're pretty sure the charges are going to stick, but once you're in custody, they are... well, let's just say "highly motivated" in getting you to sign a confession, and they have a great deal of leeway that is unavailable in the US.
> I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
Many parts of the US are stuck in a bad equilibrium where there is lots of police violence and lots of crime, because the police violence is targeted on the basis of ethnicity rather than whether someone's actually breaking the law or committing antisocial behavior.
> Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.
The Japanese government, like France, doesn't keep track of ethnicity. That number means citizens and everyone just reports it as if it's ethnicity. You wouldn't be able to tell if some of them are half Korean or Chinese.
Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.
Last year, less than 9,000 foreigners naturalized into a population of 123 million.
In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
I said "half" for a reason, I wasn't talking about naturalized citizens but rather their descendants or people with part foreign ancestry. Zainichi Koreans are the main example I think.
Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.
> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education
Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.
> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially
Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".
> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen
What? No.
> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.
For the overwhelming majority of people just becoming a permanent resident is more than enough - there's not a strong need to become a Japanese citizen vs. permanent residency outside of the right to vote, and for overwhelming majority, the trade-off isn't worth it.
But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.
In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).
I'm speaking more generally about all comparisons between countries. The US is constantly compared to the Nordic countries and people constantly wonder why they're so much better on axes like healthcare and education. Very little attention is given to the obvious explanation that it's easier to treat and to educate a relatively homogeneous population.
… In the 1980s, Ireland was _extremely_ homogenous. This was not a place that people came to, it was a place that people left. Today, 20% of the population was born outside the state, and Ireland has one of the highest immigration rates in the world.
Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.
Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.
Strongly disagree. People jump to that when they see a healthy society that's relatively homogeneous, and ignore counterexamples like relatively homogeneous countries, or states within countries, that have poor education/healthcare/etc. It's a post-facto explanation with no predictive power, and people jump to it only because it's superficially obvious.
Please do elaborate—what is the "this" that is not new? People cherry picking words out of which to construct strawmen to attack instead of actually engaging with the ideas actually put forward?
> Genetic profiles? Advocating for racial purity on HN, that's a new one. Wow.
You know full well that's not what I said. Deliberately misconstruing someone's words to make them sound crazy is unfortunately common enough on HN.
One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo, to the point where people genuinely have begun to believe that they don't. There's a world in which we respect the effects of genes while still also respecting individuals as fellow humans. I hope some day we get to that world—many lives will be saved and improved if we can get past this politically-medicated denial of the science of genes.
> Have a Jamaican newborn adopted by a Japanese family in Japan and a Japanese newborn adopted by a Jamaican family in Jamaica and see how each ends up.
If "genetics cause a real difference" here, what are they? If the difference is negligible in contrast to the influence parenting and society have, why not acknowledge that? To just ignore it is pseudo-science.
I didn't respond to that because OP's line of argument was just:
* Misconstrue what I said to be supportive of ideas of racial purity.
* Pretend that I didn't already build in culture into my original argument ("the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for")
Obviously culture plays a role, and culture can be adopted. I didn't respond to that part of their post because I already argued as much. I'm very much in agreement with them that culture is an enormous factor, and in many types of outcomes it's certainly the largest.
Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
What they're missing—and what too many people feel like they're not allowed to talk about—is that genetics also plays a large role in many types of outcomes, especially in the realm of healthcare. Ignoring that because it's politically inexpedient is a problem, and pointing it out doesn't make me an advocate for racial purity: we can talk about the role of genetics and the difficulty in treating a diverse population while still believing that diversity is, on the balance, a good thing!
> Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
FWIW I don't have that impression, that's not what I'm arguing against, I just think the cultural factors (speaking the same language fluidly) are really so much more important that I'd even say they're the only thing that "really" matters. For example, how much does healthcare have to do with social cohesion? If there were no people with myopia or only people with myopia in a country, would they get along better?
Also, consider how women were and are neglected in medicine.
Taking account of genetic differences seems mostly an issue of just actually doing it. If only women or men or Japanese people lived somewhere, the doctor could make a few, tiny, assumptions more. If people are mixed, they have to investigate what's in front of them, and while that may be a bit more work or more costly in a few instances, I think it would just make medicine more robust.
> One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo
I think this hot take should be reconsidered! Surely the above consequence is not anywhere near the top 10. There were entire ethnic groups virtually wiped out, cities leveled, European society set back decades.
And: the cautionary tales for naive reliance on genetic explanations for "good" versus "bad" tendencies in society go way beyond Nazism -- historically, they didn't even start there.
This. There is a fundamental cultural difference which is also reflected in the priorities of municipal governments. Yes, this is a generalisation and yes, it is slowly changing over time. Nevertheless, it’s probably the single biggest driver of this phenomenon.
Culture and mentality. They don't have the same urge to vandalize or graffiti. Same as Singapore.
They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.
To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.
Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.
Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.
At the risk of stereotyping an entire nationality, Japanese culture puts a high degree of emphasis on conformity, obeying rules, obeying social hierarchies and keeping things in a generally orderly fashion.
For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.
There's certainly a lot of tolerance for smoking, that's just not a drug that makes you commit crimes. (Except littering.) But they're only into mild stimulants because of memories of pervitin abuse.
The main difference I can think of is we think it's cool if a celebrity does drugs, but they get insta-canceled so hard they disappear from society entirely.
I don't believe Individualism is the issue, unless you mean by that a specifically American variety if Individualism. Individualism also comes with the idea of individual responsibility, and many relatively individualistic countries are close to, or in certain ways exceed, Japan (e.g., in Japan people tend to leave trash in public spaces to a degree that would be inconceivable in many Western countries).
Japanese are more individualist than Americans. They just don't apply this to graffiti.
They do sometimes litter, throw up in the sidewalk after drinking, and don't wash their hands after using the train station bathrooms.
I mean, Tokyo isn't even that clean. I was just there and saw a rat on the sidewalk every night. They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins. (Also frequently saw aggressive "no dumping" signs on the pile of trash bags. Not very high trust!)
I think by individualism what people usually mean is the general "me, I got mine" attitude & the idealization of not giving a care to what other people think, i.e. "do your thing". I lot of what happens in the East Asian countries from peer pressure/accountability is to be actively defied in the West, and particularly in America. Keeping things clean because otherwise you might get judged by someone else is almost an incentive to litter.
> They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins.
You might have mistaken it with the organised rubbish collection. It is common in New Zealand where business owners pack up rubbish at the close of business in dedicated, pre-paid rubbish bags that they leave in the front of the shop. A garbage truck comes by later and quickly collects rubbish. The cost of the service is included in the price of the rubbish bag, and the garbage truck won't collect a random or unrecognised bag but people do not do that.
It also seems cleaner as rubbish bins require cleaning on a regular basis, and the bags do not.
Given the extent to which it's discouraged, it can' be true as a general rule, regardless of the nations inventions. Although most of those examples in the blurb of the book you linked refer to corporate inventions, not individual inventions.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean I have no idea what I'm talking about. Japanese culture's suppression of the individual in favor of the community is well documented.
My honest opinion of "Japanese society works great because the whole society is formed by a unique strain of humans who lack any sense of individualism" is a pretty shallow take in my opinion, where most of the corroboration are other clueless people repeating the same basic stereotype.
The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression, but if you need academic citations then here's some from even back in the '90s arguing that Japan is not less individualistic than the West, and even arguably is less collectivistic depending on how you measure that. [1][2]
Here's an example purely from a Japanese stereotype that shows a type of individuality that people could generally understand (just in a form what westerners tend to look down on)—the concept of an otaku [3], or in other words, someone who follows some interest much further than anyone thinks is socially "normal" or "reasonable." And yet these people are generally accepted by Japanese society, if not empowered in the form of a respected "craft" culture, in a way that would just make you a total loser in most of the West.
My personal experience actually living in Japan for 7 years now, matches a different common trope in Japanese culture, wherein what people outwardly say to people they don't trust is completely different than what they actually believe and say to people they do trust (honne/tatemae [4]).
And unfortunately for the Westerners parroting these stereotypes, they firmly fall into only hearing the tatemae.
To the original thread, there are plenty of rational, direct reasons for why Japanese cities can be clean and orderly, that aren't that "Everyone in Japan is some kind of brainless drone," but unfortunately people who justify things based on that excuse will never learn what those things are, doomed to make the same mistakes... very drone-like, in my view.
> My honest opinion of "Japanese society works great because the whole society is formed by a unique strain of humans who lack any sense of individualism" is a pretty shallow take in my opinion, where most of the corroboration are other clueless people repeating the same basic stereotype.
It's not just a stereotype though, but a long held opinion and observation, literally the subject of study and research. To an extent more than other countries, this claim is objectively true - or at least I would have said that before seeing your links which reveal the idea to be one that is debated somewhat.
> The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression,
I was never denying individual expression can exist, but that doesn't mean most of society can't still be less individualistic than western countries.
Everything you have written is interesting, and I don't doubt that the stereotype can be exaggerated, over-repeated and misused, but it is a long-held observation about Japanese culture that has been intensely observed and studied. For that reason I think it is wrong to just dismiss it as an incorrect stereotype.
I lived and worked there for several years and I agree with them. Pretty sure my wife, who I met there, would also agree.
You can’t just lob a “you don’t know what you’re talking about” without some actual context like that - this forum is supposed to encourage more useful discussion.
While not as diverse as the US, Singapore is a melting pot of cultures and religions and is arguably safer and cleaner than Japan. Singling it out to diversity simplifies the issue. It's a million other choices and policies that made the US what it is today.
Singapore has a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people (with plenty of ethnic Europeans thrown in for good measure). They’re a mix of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religions.
All that in a space smaller than many American cities. If that doesn’t qualify as a melting pot, I don’t know what does.
As a non-American, Hispanic, white, and black American people in the USA are all "American, American, American", and not really a melting pot if that's the only ethnic groups you're counting.
Wow. Doubling down eh? At this point I have to assume you’re trolling because I struggle to believe anyone could be this obviously racist and/or stupid.
The US is a mix of ethnic Europeans, Africans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, including ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people, and many others besides that.
That's a melting pot.
Singapore is described as "a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people".
That's not a melting pot.
Those are two different things. I don't care one bit if you think it is racist or stupid to point out the difference.
I know this goes against your deeply held beliefs but race is socially constructed. I've heard Americans refer to Italians, Turks and Slavic - and even Roma people - as "white" but tell a German that and they'll look at you with confusion. Tell them that Hispanics are more foreign to you, a white American, than Spaniards are to them, a white German and they'll just think you've lost the plot. Heck, go and tell a Japanese person they're interchangeable with Malaysians and Indians and see how they feel about it. Even throwing Indians and East Asians in one racial category seems frankly insane to me as a European for reasons that should be obvious if you've ever seen them let alone talked to them (and even superficial racism you can use to group all "black" people together doesn't explain it as a Punjab Indian person and a Han Chinese person share no obvious visual features).
China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.
You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).
You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].
If you're alluding to immigration, this cannot be blamed for vandalism and littering. Other kinds of crime, arguably, but not those, there are plenty of middle class shitheads who will happily do their part.
True, but one difference, is they allowed the culture and population to mature as they transformed from a fishing village to international port and commerce center.
And, while they do bring in foreigners, they tend to be domestic maids or medium to high earning foreigners with a decent education and culture.
It's worth adding, that Singapore being clean is not a magical culture thing, but a deliberate government policy. Lee Kuan Yew writes in his memories that is took a lot of effort to make Chinese drivers stop spitting out of the cars for example and make the river not smell of shit.
This is true, but given 60 years it now has become part of the culture there. Maybe if you go out to the poorer places with SEA laborers, you can find betelnut chewers --but those are imported manual labor immigrants and not natives --though maybe you see them in the small islands.
Sure; Singapore (and Japan) do a lot to actively instill and maintain these conditions, from harsh punishments for drug trafficking, penalties for graffiti, good public education, a social safety net, affordable housing, government jobs programs, and so on. Basically, there's no need to whisper about how you need ethnic homogeneity to have clean streets.
What this thread is about *is* culture, and the USA does not have the culture this way, and apparently Japan and Singapore do. Culture being the unchallenged basic assumptions of how people behave and how society works. It has nothing to do with whether culture changed or not, only how it is now.
Singapore may be racially diverse but it has an integrated culture at this point. (Which took a lot of deliberate effort to make happen, don't get me wrong).
Look how hard they're tiptoeing around the issue as if you can't just check and see who commits the who most crime per capita in the US and see that there are zero of those people in Japan. Gee, what could be the issue I wonder.
It's ironic that you talk about "tiptoeing around this issue" and then completely lack the spine to actually go full racist and spell out "black people".
Also, my country has very few black people and still a lot of vandalism, dirtyness, rudeness, so maybe it's something else that explains the special situation of Japan and not just "black people bad".
Lingering colonial attitudes. America, for the longest time was the "exploited space" for Europe and much like India, carries this beaten in attitude that "this is not the nice place". You can find nice places like this but you have to go to the richest enclaves to find it. Japan is its own "nice place".
At what level of $$ investment do angel investors, Silicon Valley VCs and/or boards expect professional, periodic audits?
This is what I personally want to see in non profit board meetings: cash flow, headcount, categorized expenses and a balance sheet. I also want to see a copy of a bank account statement attached to the board docs validating the cash flow numbers. This is not a proper audit - but this builds a paper trail where the CEO is snap shotting an org's financial health in writing at a period in time.
What does a VC who has invested $8M expect in terms of audit?
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
Check out CSS or FAFSA calculators to figure out your expected family contribution. Financial Aid offices at places like MIT that are need blind fill in the gap between your expected contribution and cost of attending with aid.
The answer to your question is it depends. Some assets like your primary home and retirements can be shielded from expected family contribution. If you've got assets sitting in a taxable account....
Also the complexity isn't all tax breaks and loopholes. Much of it comes from the need to precisely specify things.
I remember several times when in my tax classes in law school looking at the history of complicated provisions and finding they started out as short and simple provisions whose meaning was obvious to anyone with common sense.
But then people would find ambiguities that could give them a favorable tax result. There would be a court fight over it, and eventually the provision would be change to be more precise. And so what had been short and simple because longer and more complicated.
I don't remember all the details (law school was 30+ years ago and afterwards I decided I'd rather go back to programming than become a lawyer), but I remember the overall gist of one example.
Some big company around the 1930s or so came up with a clever idea. Next time they were going to pay a dividend instead they did a fractional stock split, such as 1.01 to 1, immediately followed by a mandatory fraction buyback which resulted in each shareholder getting the amount of money they would have gotten if a dividend had been declared, and with no change in each shareholder's percentage ownership of the company unchanged. The company suggested that shareholders report that money as capital gains.
The IRS said it was really a dividend, and the IRS won that dispute. The tax code and/or regulations were updated to reflect that. But there are legitimate buybacks that really should get capital gains treatment, and so those updated rules had a bunch of clauses and steps to go through to apply them to any specific case.
Weird to lump in poor people with people with tax advantaged assets. Poor people generally take the standard deduction, so don’t interact with most loopholes or tax breaks.
I think there's a big difference between policies that benefit vulnerable people and those that benefit powerful people and corporations. It's a false equivalency.
(Policies regarding 401k's and homes can affect powerful people too.)
I agree. The tax code should benefit those most in need. It should also incentivize investment in the country through homeownership and retirement savings. But these are the reasons the tax code will never be “simple”. I’m all in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. But I’m not certain “simplification” will accomplish that. Or even that simplicity is desirable in our tax code.
One of the oldest examples of tax simplification is the flat income tax. This is extremely regressive and disadvantages the poor and middle class. Any exemption would be “complication”.
If there’s good and bad complication then simplicity is the wrong dimension on which to focus.
> I’m not certain “simplification” will accomplish that.
I think it helps democratically - people understand the code and could believe in its fairness.
> One of the oldest examples of tax simplification is the flat income tax. This is extremely regressive and disadvantages the poor and middle class.
I agree, but that's also a perversion of 'simplification'. If you follow that logic, the even simpler tax would be that everyone pays the same amount, not the same rate. E.g., everyone pays $10K, no matter what.
Obviously that's ridiculous, and so is the flat (rate) income tax. Simplicity and fairness is not equal tax or equal rate, but equal sacrifice.
> I think it helps democratically - people understand the code and could believe in its fairness.
Ok but to what benefit? Progressive tax codes are both complex and fair.
> I agree, but that's also a perversion of 'simplification'. If you follow that logic, the even simpler tax would be that everyone pays the same amount, not the same rate. E.g., everyone pays $10K, no matter what.
Ok, then what is true simplification?
This is where I don’t find the argument that taxes need to be simple compelling. What’s the benefit?
Maybe we shouldn't be using things like taxes as a way to incentivize behavior. If we used taxes as just taxes maybe it would be easier to simplify the rules fairly and without having to endlessly litigate the meaning of each word and category involved.
> If we used taxes as just taxes maybe it would be easier to simplify the rules fairly
I agree, though using taxes is an efficient way to incentivize: If you want to fund home ownership, you can either identify each homeowner, cut checks, and mail them; or you can achieve a similar result by reducing taxes for homeowners.
I'm not sure the former isn't worth the extra hassle, for the reason you describe.
Unironically yes. In a democracy any sizable voting bloc is an influential constituency. Just try to cut current social security payments and you'll see they are no joke.
The loudest complaint I see about threads (lack of hyperlinks) doesn't apply there. Also, Threads seems covered in growth-hacking dark patterns, like the notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you".
edit: my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan. This isn't community-funded stuff like Mastodon, it's VC-funded software - there will be a need for revenue at some point and then what happens?
> my big worry about BSky is the lack of any coherent monetization plan.
That's a reasonable concern. I assumed there would be ads at some point, but that's not the way that they are going for now.
> we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.
> notification/activity screen being flooded with "picked for you"
Strange. Have been on Threads since launch and have never seen this.
Nor have I seen any growth-hacking dark patterns other than the For You algorithm pushing high-engagement content which they've said they are sorting out. But a lot of this is because Threads has the legacy of being built on Instagram.
It mostly seemed to happen on the web client - I tend to avoid "apps" I'd click the "heart" to check my notifications and it would be just a firehose of "picked for you" streaming in. Also iirc it launched without a chronological feed.
At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).
