I've been trying for hours to think of a good joke about Spain conquering France but I got nothing.
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SamuelGoldman
4.9K posts
SamuelGoldman
@SWGoldman
busted chopped unc
Washington, DC Katılım Mart 2010
2.6K Takip Edilen9.5K Takipçiler
A bunch of dorks at the bar were watching soccer but it turned out that they are Europeans.
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@LeahLibresco @CharlesFLehman I would happily submit to our new robot overlords if they eradicated mosquitos.
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@CharlesFLehman He who sacrifices liberty for the sake of killing all the mosquitoes…
You know, I’m torn here!
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At long last, we have created the murder drone swarm from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Murder Drone Swarm.
Alex Toussaint@alextoussss
Extremely excited to announce our first air-to-air kill of a flying moth by an autonomous micro-drone. This is a big step towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.
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@zenahitz Not as often or as much as sometimes claimed. aei.org/education/actu…
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@polanskydj I wouldn’t count on that, since it appears that a sufficient number of customers are willing to pay their price!
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@SWGoldman Agreed, so it would make sense to see a wave of closures in the coming years among schools with high price tags but limited cachet. I do wonder what happens among the next tier down, in which there is lower instrinsic value but also smaller price tags.
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This is a big part of discontent with higher ed...and the broader issue of downward mobility among highly credentialed youngish people.
Financial Dystopia@financedystop
Upper-middle-class families are in a weird dead zone with college. They make too much to qualify for meaningful financial aid, but not enough to casually write $100,000 checks every year without it completely changing their life. So the kid looks rich on paper, gets little help, and the parents are expected to absorb the cost of a house down payment every single year. College pricing has also obviously become absurd.
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@DCInbox I always use Pass1234 in hopes someone will hack in and do the review for me
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I bet the young academics on this site don't realize there was a time where you could simply review a paper rather than spending the first 20 minutes updating your profile on editorial manager.
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@polanskydj Yale and handful of others are one thing (fairly or not). NYU etc aren't that.
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@polanskydj Right, that's my point. The undergrad brand is a weaker signal than people think and therefore not worth the price in many cases.
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@SWGoldman Sure, but most of the schools are now providing supplementary benefits that those undergrad programs were once assumed to supply on their own. Or am I too cynical?
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@polanskydj Why? Even if we assume that UMC students are going to do those things it makes more financial sense to spend the money where and when it counts rather than on a weak status signal+lifestyle.
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@SWGoldman I do feel that the references to professional schools and postgrad years rather gives the game away though...
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@polanskydj I don't think it's all that hard tbh. There are 10-20 places with genuine network advantages that might be worth the price. For the rest, most would be better off paying lower tuition and using the savings to subsidize internships, professional school, a few postgrad years, etc.
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@SWGoldman Yeah I think that's right, but not sure how possible it is for most people insofar as it relies upon a certain number of intangibles, plus expected payoffs that are difficult to calculate even for people who know this industry pretty well.
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@polanskydj That answer isn't necessarily "nothing". But you need to do the exercise to figure out if it's worth the difference in price (which I suspect it isn't in the vast majority of cases).
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@polanskydj The question people should be asking is: what do I get for 100k at NYU that I don't get at the in-state flagship?
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And yes, a lot of families do pay sticker price aei.org/education/actu…
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There's a viral social media post that takes an actual quote of mine and attributes it to House Speaker Mike Johnson, with the apparent aim of riling up senior citizens.
So just to clarify:
Speaker Johnson and I are two separate people.
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@AviWoolf Not uncommon among Marxists. Look at the way the USSR supported old school high culture.
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Finished Walter Benjamin's work on reproduction and art. Seems very small "c" conservative despite all the attacks on capitalism. @SWGoldman
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@Rickersam3 @JamesWHankins1 I don't think that was true of Hampshire or the other (mostly local and/or denominational) colleges that have closed recently.
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@SWGoldman @JamesWHankins1 Many liberal arts colleges think of themselves as “research colleges,” reflecting the way their faculty are trained. Where does one go to be trained think on the classic liberal arts fashion, rather than in the modern phd approach?
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I remember a similar story about imminent college closures from about 10 years ago. Then the culprit was falling college-age population. Now it's AI. Reporters never blame the colleges themselves for the malign changes in educational philosophy in the last decade or two, but the rotten branch falls from the tree. washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/…
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