lapsedacademic

I don't follow.

Useless work gets cited all the time. I'm not suggesting that there should be less accountability to be useful to society. I'm just pointing out that bibliometrics is a particularly bad way of measuring utility.

> until then you're just playing bait and switch wrt the current state of things.

Again, I don't follow. How am I playing bait and switch? I don't work in academia.

> replace panchanathan

Fortunately, that's not necessary. You don't put pressure on agencies like NSF by joining the civil service. Even high-ranking civil servants are... well, servants. You put pressure on federal agencies by having tons of money and free time. Which many lapsed academics in CS have in spades ;-)

I've got one I'll sell you for $15K over its 2020 purchase price. Perfect condition at only 20K miles.

I guess I should've clarified. Vehicle prices for equivalent vehicles probably aren't sticky, but the statistic reported here is sticky.

Electrification will increase average sale price. But the amortization schedule will lengthen, operating cost will decrease, and maintenance will plummet. So might still be a win for consumers.

But I don't think avg sale price will come down meaningfully. You'll see a big shift from ICE to E, though, and yes, ICE prices will come down a lot.

> Food price is also highly cyclical and related to supply constraints of pure commodities which always correct.

Suffice it to say that I'm not betting on commodities in either direction but I've got a huge position in Tyson.

The bad news is that the new vehicle and food price increases are almost certainly sticky.

Energy is the big tricky question mark. The big worry post-pandemic was about US shale production never returning, but it's starting to look like we'll hit the 2019 highs in US domestic production some time in the next year or so. I suspect we're past the peak in terms of rate of growth, but it's hard to say if the new prices are sticky or if we'll see a meaningful decline in the next year or two.

(I've started to build a strategy for selling off my energy holdings and I'm still on the fence about what to do with Ford and GM.)

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Income Security are better thought of as insurance and pension systems that happen to be run by the government. This is why they're ear-marked in federal budgets and listed separately on your paycheck.

There are tons of serious pragmatic issues with your suggestions, as well as serious political questions about how to convince people to implement them.

I mean... is his medical condition related to his ability to walk and sleep well? E.g., does he:

1. have trouble walking

2. can't afford a wheelchair

3. has continence issues?

That would explain rolling around at all hours of the night. And sourcing him some cheap/free mats/carpets to cover the floor between his bed and bathroom could help you sleep better.

In any case... sorry you have to put up with that. Having noisy upstairs neighbors sucks.

Do you see the contradiction here? I don't think bibliometrics are useful for measuring utility.

> I don't understand your implicit point that we should let academics fiddle

I'm actually totally okay with letting academics fiddle. They are super cheap and you're mostly just paying them for small amounts of their time.

But, it should be the faculty who are allowed to fiddle. They shouldn't be given resources to direct other people's fiddling time. In particular, I think we should massively reform the graduate student system to invert the power relationship between faculty and students on any highly exploratory projects.

Specifically, for any grant whose purpose is "fundamental science" and/or training (e.g., ALL NSF money as a starter):

1. the agency funds students instead of faculty. So 100% of the money that goes to graduate students on NSF grants should be redirected to a GRFP-like funding model. This means that NSF grants to faculty should only fund PI summer salaries & shared department resources. Never students. Want a student? Recruit them to collaborate with you.

2. NSF should put a hard upper bound on the number of funded teaching hours permissible or required and funded through any sort of stipend.

NB: students can still teach more hours! But then they will be normal W2 employees who are paid prevailing rates, are included in faculty+staff retirement/pension/benefits, get FICA benefits, etc. The point: if your uni takes a single dollar from NSF, then student stipends can only be actual stipends, not back doors for tax-advantaged ad junct labor that excludes universities from paying FICA taxes on behalf of their teaching staff (who happen to be grad students).

I suspect that people who have experience dealing with a maggot infestation -- or any infestation -- will have a very different relationship to grinding maggots.

I wouldn't think twice about grinding maggots, but to do so voluntarily I'd have to have nothing better to do because it's not pleasant work.

I don't think grinding maggots is particularly violent. This is probably because I had to deal with a very serious and persistent maggot infestation. There's really no way to deal with a maggot infestation except to kill them en masse using methods that appear sadistic (e.g., boiling water or chemical treatment).

An alternative title might be "Dealing with a maggot infestation is necessary but unpleasant work... you have to be pretty bored before you decide to do this work voluntarily."

Even in the age of drawing and quartering, penal colonies were used primarily as an alternative to capital punishment. In the age of gruesome physical torture, exile was used primarily an alternative to execution.

Deb Alderson's Global Tel*Link is replacing libraries with locked down tablets that have e-reader apps. Inmates are charged a couple bucks an hour for access to the tablet and are limited to 90 minutes of reading time.

E.g.,

https://www.jurist.org/news/2020/11/allegheny-county-jail-li...

https://moguldom.com/241982/exploiting-prisoners-w-virginia-...

I think prisoners should have the option to work and that they should be subject to all of the normal worker protection laws. Wages can go toward some combination of restitution and improving quality of life in prisons: food, lodging, entertainment in off hours, etc.

Restitution should be limited to a fixed percentage of monthly income (as it is in the civilian world). Why? Because removing positive reinforcement from the act of labor has perverse psychological effects. These effects persist after incarceration and contribute to recidivism.

This sort of system is insufficiently punitive for some, so the politics of these reforms are tricky.

Regarding IP: Yup. It's true. If you're willing and able to do the work to make millions in ARR from your IP then academia can break even. (beware tech transfer... universities can be more predatory than the slimiest of VC firms!)

Even at tippy top R1s that's a tiny fraction of faculty and requires a ton of extra work. But, yeah, it's a good case where academia can make sense.

That's not at all the same. I'm not talking about "a few RSUs" or a "small signing bonus". At all of the largest software employers, salary is at best half of total comp.

This year, my salary is less than 1/4th of my total comp. The other parts of my compensation are a cash bonus and RSUs, both guaranteed in my employment contract, both paid out+earned on the roughly the same schedule as my salary.

And the stock is literally better than cash given the inflation rate.

> retirement

This is actually instructive on how salary data can be wildly misleading.

There are tons of careers where salaries have modestly increased (or decreased on real terms) but where total comp as PLUMMETED as pensions were replaced with 401Ks.

2. There is an obvious difference between a law telling you not to leave your keys in an unlocked car and a law telling you how to dress.

I care about an aircraft being flown safely. But for the love of God, don't put me in the cockpit and make me responsible for flying the plane safely.

Ditto for mental health of undergrads when I'm lecturing. I'm there to teach them how to implement a red-black tree. Do I care about their mental health? Of course. Do I feel any responsibility for it? Hell no.

Sometimes caring about something means NOT taking responsibility for that thing.

3x-5x is more reasonable.

But those numbers are before RSU appreciation, which I suspect you're massively underestimating.

FB granted 5 years ago went from 128 to 326. AMZN 800 to 3200. AAPL 29 to 171. GOOG 800 to 2700. MSFT 62 to 311. (Netflix excluded for the obvious reason.)

So if your total comp is 500K and half or more of that is long-dated stock (or you just didn't sell) then over the last 4-5 years you could very well have been making million a year or so. And 500K is doable for an asst prof.

Not guaranteed, of course. But cash is comp is risky as well. How many professors got a 7% raise to adjust for inflation last year?

10x pre-appreciation is certainly possible after 5-10 years in industry, though. Probably not the norm, but not some crazy impossible out-of-reach number.

But... perhaps this is because after you've made $industry_money for 10 years and hit your late 30s, you realize you'd rather spend all of your time training your biological AGI agents and don't really give a shit about the kinda unpleasant industry rat race, much less the totally brutal higher ed rat race.

Or skiing. Lots of multi-millionaire ski bums in my grad cohort. No idea what they do in the summers. Not my cup of tea, but probably better than writing papers no one will read.

In early retirement, there's time for research. And time to share that research. Just... no incentive to do the rat race thing that's necessary to convince an academic you're "accomplished something". But who cares? You finished the race. You don't have to get paper awards or NSF grants. You just have to do work that matters. Or ski. Or change diapers.

So, I guess, to be even more fair: yes. CS PhDs work through their 30s and then retire. Totally. All the time.

I'm absolutely certain they would. Monopolies are incredibly profitable, after all, and a repeatable strategy for killing off all newcomers is step zero.

I.e., that government rule was created to address a rational but pathological behavior in a market.

Lufthansa could always not fly those routes. But then the business would lose money to fines, possibly lose gates, and maybe go bankrupt.

So, yes, in the name of the business. And of course that business's behavior is completely predictable.

Anyways.

Pointing fingers at isms is a waste of time. Businesses operate in markets. Markets are human inventions. Especially in the case of something like an airline, a Market is a Market in the Stock Market sense not in the Bazaar sense.

The question is: how do we modify market rules without re-introducing the aforementioned pathology?

Which is a REALLY hard question! The simplest solution, from a market perspective, might be charging a fair price for carbon, such that this sort of behavior is no longer rational. Of course, that's a non-started politically, so... here we are.

2. "whatever it costs to actually operate the flight" is... well, good luck negotiating that bill :)

NB: they are not flying empty because no one wants a seat! They would be able to sell some seats! Even at previously-prevailing market rates! And of course could fill the plane if they sold the seats at any price!

They are flying empty because they can't sell enough seats at a high enough price to justify the fixed cost of the number of cabin staff required if there are customers on the flight.

It's about cabin staff regs, not about literally no one wanting to fly.

So... that 20% does matter.

Austin's salary is public data, and I have a really good sample of what people like him make in industry.

Try 5x. Before RSU appreciation.

Maybe 3x. But 3x would imply a VERY chill industry position. "Name your interest space and we'll let you work on that" type of gig. Probably way more chill than academia.

> The freedom and unstructured time to explore fuzzy problems is unmatched.

Industry also provides this. Actually, I find much more freedom in industry than in academia. And, if we're honest, my industry position is probably at least as secure as a faculty position at a public university in a red state.

> I don't know any other job that gives you 6-figure salary and lets you basically do whatever you want for 42% of the year.

In industry research, you can't do whatever you want. But you can usually do what you want.

In fact, the caveat of "prove your worth" is a huge tell. In industry, you REALLY CAN do what you want! Real freedom; just be useful. In academia you have "freedom". By which we mean "raise money".

But even if not... look at it like this: an industry position that pays 5x allows you to work for a year and then take the next 4 off. 2/5 is bigger than 1/5. And that is time you can actually take off. To do whatever. Not "off" in the "better be writing grant proposals!" sense. Actually off.

> Is a 2x salary increase worth giving up that kind of time?

Probably not. But if you can land an R1 CS position in SE, you should be making closer to 5x.