> it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.
Off the top of my head, so may not align exactly with formal definitions, but economics is the study of allocation of resources and how incentives play a large role in how human behavior is influenced by those incentives. I prefer Sowell for a primer but if he’s not to your liking try google, keywords economic incentives and resource allocation.
i have plenty of personal experience with community colleges and those close to me have gone from penniless immigrant to making more than the average tech bro because they attended one while working full time, and paying full tuition without aid. what kept them going was a reasonable roi . the i was their investment of hard earned dollars that they used to pay for their tuition and gave them the incentive to stay in. they had skin in the game so they endured. getting something for free doesn’t instill any obligation, and that’s a common lived experience.
But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.
There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.
Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
> then the effective definition of the word "oppressive" being able to be "interpreted" by executive agencies
I don't get how this could ever be resolved though. You can complain about how "oppressive" is "interpreted" so they can add more words, they can say "people are harmed" and then it's up to interpretation about who is "people" and what is "harm" so then you add more words to define "people" as living homo-sapiens and then it's up to interpretation about what is "living" and on and on.
> If there is a vagueness
There is literally always vagueness. "I never said she took his money" can have 7 different interpretations just based on which word is emphasized.
It's a meaningless tautology that any English sentence has some amount of vagueness and that people will be interpreting its meaning.
Which is exactly why it's important to have a separation of powers where the legislature writes the laws and the courts interpret them. When the same entity is both writing the rules and interpreting the ambiguity in them, that's ripe for abuse.
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
> I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content
This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.
I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.
Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.
The post your are talking about is specifically about NSF proposals. Your experience with interviewing, project choice, contracting or whatever you are referring to is a different thing. It's not so wild to imagine that a different thing has different practices.
Regardless of which ethnic group, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. I belong to, if I want to get an NSF grant, I have to fill out certain paperwork. And, apparently, it’s expected that I would write how my proposal will make the world a better place based on how it impacts DEI factors. The comment is that it doesn’t actually matter what I say there, since everybody says the same thing. There’s never a case where the NSF isn’t sure about whether to grant funds, and then decides that the way one project impacts DEI makes it better than another project.
I've never found this argument of the anti-DEI crowd to be very convincing, because it inherently implies that without DEI measures, such decisions would be entirely meritocratic.
I think the argument is that while there was suspicion and implicit lack of meritocratic procedures before the initiatives, after doubt was removed.
For example, I just started in the 90s and worked in tech but I never heard an HR person or hiring manager say “we’re only going to interview applicants of a majority race” but after initiatives, it became common to hear this toward an underrepresented race or gender.
I want a diverse workforce. But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry. I think it’s better to work on systemic fixes (more graduates, more training programs, etc).
You're making a case against racism happening in the 90s, but you also think that if racism was happening in the nineties then the people doing it would have announced in public "FYI everyone I'm doing the racism now" which makes you seem somewhat detached from reality.
That’s not what I’m saying. Racism happened in the 90s, but it wasn’t explicit discrimination. Explicitly discriminating against certain races now is something new.
Two things can be bad at the same time: implicit racism then and now; explicit racism just now.
Perhaps it would help if you considered concepts like "more and less".
Without DEI measures (as implemented by many American institutions in recent years) such decisions would be more meritocratic.
There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.
> There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.
And it tends to lead to a specific result: A number of slots are assigned for each group but then the set of people with rich parents are disproportionately from one group, so nepotism fills all of that group's slots. Then you get a 0% reduction in nepotism and instead the people without rich parents, but from the same demographic group, are the ones excluded. Which quite justifiably makes them mad.
Are you certain that "DEI programs" (which themselves are a wide range of things, from explicit preferences to hire veterans in US Government jobs to as described ineffective NSF rigamarole) are causing overall less meritocracy, or is it just a particularly visible form, some less qualified black people are getting in instead of equally unqualified white people, and that's notable, while the well qualified folks who get in but wouldn't be considered otherwise aren't noticed because they don't make the news.
I'm not sure about th NSF, but at 3 of the 4 companies I worked at DEI initiatives were explicitly discriminatory. One prohibited white and Asian men from a segment of our headcount. Another set specific percentage quotas for women in OKRs (and those quotas were well above women's industry representation). And another prohibited offers being made until a certain number of women and URM were interviewed for a given role.
Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".
I'm not accusing you personally of doing this, but equating discrimination with lowered standards is a common tactic to try and stigmatize the acknowledgement of discriminatory DEI practices.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but both your comments in this thread really, really scream that you need to step away from the internet and go interact with real humans in the real world.
Nobody except you is talking about woke communism. Nobody except you is talking about "owning the libs". You're making paranoid, nonsensical arguments against people on your side by imagining they're some sort of alt-right strawman.
It's obviously the "you're backing me up with documentary proof that this is a boring sensible thing" interpretation. The original comment had similar intent.
I've been using the plain free ChatGPT for all sorts of things of value.
It's like having the world's greatest tutor available on all subjects at all times. Ask it to recap the key characters and themes of a book and it does it. Ask it to explain the pharmacokinetics of a medication and it does it. Ask it about how to cook a certain dish or improve your turns while skiing or fix a problem in your garden and it gives you a good answer.
I'm not sure how you're trying to use it that's resulting in "trash writing", but my experience is that it's like I can text a friend with a phD in whatever domain at any time and get a response explaining it.
The "hallucination" problem is still very real, it will at times confidently give wrong answers, but it still speeds up the research and learning process for me massively, I just know I need to double-check things it says, but it's much faster to check that an LLM's answer is correct than spend weeks reading textbooks to come up with an answer myself.
You might consider something like the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit.
It gives you an accessible starting point, but is a fully featured programming language and has a variety of sensors, motors, etc which can be made into increasingly complex and diverse robots.
Is your car sitting in your driveway right now? Someone else could be driving it, it's immoral that you don't leave the keys sitting on the roof.
Is your bed or couch empty right now? Someone else could be sleeping there right now.
Do you have money in your checking account? Someone else could be buying the things they need with that money, you should put the cash outside for them to take.
A house sitting empty while the owners renovate, look for tenants, try to sell, etc is a normal and necessary part of a functioning society.
The solution to housing shortages is to build more housing. That's it, that's the whole solution.
To take this further, everyone here has a computer. Obviously you don't use 100% of the cycles all the time, so it is immoral if you do not install a program that allows anyone else to use your unused cycles.
Yes there are power costs with 100% usage vs idle time but there are also cost of upkeep on a house.
It's not absurd. Yes, it's immoral that I am as wealthy as I am (relatively, on a global scale), and it's immoral that I get to eat so much better than others in the same society as I am in. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it, it just means on that axis, I am not a particularly moral person.
I mean, the massive infrastructure waste that exists to accomodate unproductive cars is a real point that degrades where we live.
So much space in towns dedicated to storing cars while they're not being used, taking space away from where housing can be built. As a non-american, I believe that parking lots are immoral as well :)
Except, America does acknowledge it, essentially 24/7 and ramped up around holidays. Almost always to exaggerated and misleading degrees.
Ironically, modern Americans have skewed views in the opposite way of what you're suggesting. Pop culture and public school textbooks present the Indians as being far more peaceful, advanced and egalitarian than they were and the European settlers as being far more powerful and privileged than they were (they were after all, mostly refugees and peasants from oppressed minority groups in their native countries).
In the case of Hawaii specifically, the people historically lived in poverty with frequent wars and violence between rival tribal kings fighting to expand their kingdoms. As the 20th century brought Japanese imperialism expanding across the Pacific, those tribal leaders realized joining the USA was far better than being conquered by Japan and moved swiftly to do so. Today, the people there live far safer and richer lives with more freedom than their ancestors could have imagined, although wealth inequality, drugs and environmental harms remain serious issues on the islands.
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.