laxtonto

Simply put, time is on his side and knows it.

These delays with Trump "negotiating" just mean the blockade stays in effect longer, and more and more oil tankers dock in the US. Trump knows every day he waits, the closer Iran gets to seeing their oil infrastructure implode on itself and potentially see the Iranian people rise up as the IRGC misses more and more payments to its troops.

Trump also gets to keep playing the "good" guy by not bombing Iran more and keeping waves of displaced Iranians from flooding the other Gulf States. People keep wanting to know why the other Arab nations won't let the US and Israel finish them off forget that once the bombing starts and Tehran is reduced to rubble and all the infrastructure is decimated, 60M Iranians are going to be looking for a new home.


He knows he can keep asking for the moon, and Iran will keep saying no. He is just playing out the string until Iran either gives in, gets overthrown internally or lashes out, and he can throw up his hands to the Gulf States leaders and say we tried and revert to bridge and power plant day.

The clock is ticking on Iran, and all their posturing doesn't change that.

Sweet! As there is no longer any fight about pending litigation then he can now be removed from the country to a 3rd world country not in South America.

Technically, that was one of the holdups and his extradition judge has already been hammered by the Supreme Court regarding attempting to interfere 3rd party country deportations.

quote:

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What happens when everyone has a degree? They become worthless.

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Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this, but it is also a chicken-or-egg issue.

Once we went to "No Child Left Behind," everyone was supposed to be college material, and to make this work, the policy required secondary education to dumb down expectations to meet requirements.

As a result, the pool of available applicants for Colleges and Universities worsened. The top will always be the top, but the middle and the floor drastically changed. That means, unfortunately, the dumbing down of the collegiate curriculum to meet the Dept Ed's funding requirements as well.

The percentage that the state and federal governments fund colleges and universities is majorly overestimated by the average person.

Every time I hear the “my tax dollars “ talking point I smile knowing that the abandonment of university and college funding by the state and federal government drove a lot of this.

As an an example, most large enrollment schools receive so little proportional direct funding that they technically qualify as private institutions according to federal designations. That means that what was used to be paid for by the state has to instead be generated in revenues. Unfortunately, it is getting worse not better.

If you cut education funding k-12 and people will scream bloody murder. If you cut university funding and people will parade around the endowment numbers of the top 50 universities and neglect to mention the other 1700 that are running on a shoestring budget now.

Right now, the “student share” ie what isn’t funded elsewhere is approximately 40% in 2025. In 1980 it was 21%, in 1950 it was closer to 8-12%. Pre-WW2 it was closer to 5%.

That means that what was used to be paid for by the state has to instead be generated in revenues. That, unfortunately, has led to academics making profit decisions instead of academic decisions, and well, let’s just say they don’t do it well. Worse, instead, you bring in business-minded individuals, and they don’t comprehend the weirdness and eclectic nature of academia and make revenue-only decisions at the cost of things needed to make academia run.

Also, please don’t conflate grant funded research with state and federal funding. Available grants (for “real” research, not the purple hair USAID lines) continue to trend upward and very simply are way more slanted towards value for the government than if this were ever done via industry. This is one sided, but still great for both sides anyway. The $$ is not equitable, but the schools and, more importantly, the students get access to these higher-level real-world opportunities and are the best real teachers to prepare students for the real world.

The worst part is that we are now, as a society, paying the price of forcing schools to change their funding models. Inflation and the cliff in available enrollment pool combined with a the need to generate revenue for survival has built the bullshite degree Ponzi scheme and now we have to find a way to cull that rot in the system while still providing education to the students to keep the modern knowledge dissemination environment moving forward.

These bullshite degrees are partly driven by the logic of “If you can’t get the money-making demographic to go to your school, you need degree paths that interest and attract other demographics”. Schools started the “blank” studies majors as a way to show differentiation in their programs to attract students and that has had much worse unintended consequences than people every thought it would.

Schools needed to attract students to offset the fixed costs that the state and federal funding cuts to balance their budgets, and never considered what those “options” would do long-term to the rest of the system.

As an example, we complain about a teacher shortage and then never ask why we incentivize our non-STEM students to look at the “blank” studies degree paths instead of education anymore?

A degree in education was the landing spot for many college students who didn’t have a driving direction early and needed a “home” at the university level. Now, between the horrific classroom experiences of the modern day gladiatorial high school environment, the pay of modern teachers, and very simply poor internal marketing of most colleges of education, you aren’t getting those students and instead many drift to the other fringe degree programs instead. It’s a zero-sum system, and education is one of the fields that is taking an enrollment hit for these “blank” study programs.

It’s no longer that I want to go to college, and then some students getting here and realizing I want to be pre-med isn’t to happen, and so you funnel yourself into the other available options and end up in education. Now, many end up in diversity studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, Asian studies, etc., instead of education. And yes, many of those students still go and get a post-bac teaching certification, but the damage is already done on how they view the system and increases the negative feedback loop in our primary and secondary education systems.

The US university system is a mess right now and both academia and the state and federal government are both to blame. And yet, it is still the best in the world.

Here is the point that a vast majority of people miss on this. The US pool of eligible 18-25 year old students shrunk dramatically in the last 3 years. This has caused huge drops in enrollments at many schools and without students you are now looking at potential shutdowns of university campuses across the country.

Normally, I would say let the free market decide who wins and looses, but universities do much more than just provide “useless” degrees. They are the economic driver for many regional economies and smaller towns across the country. They are fixed assets that are something states cannot easily divest from. They are one the major advantages the US on the rest of the globe regarding small scale research and entrepreneurial development.

The simple solution is bring in more Chinese students to balance out the massive reduction we have seen in Indian students. Chinese students are much less likely to get swooped up into the H1B racket and very simply going to be much easier to control.

On top of that, international students pay heightened tuition and have a much more rigid expectations of conduct than those from other countries.

Would I prefer to pack these schools with US students, absolutely. Those students don’t exist right now in the US population. So either dumb down college more and see people complain that student have worthless degrees that they can’t pay off because we need then in the student population, let colleges fail knowing that they are generally a 50+ year investment to become revenue neutral, lift the restrictions from India and other less desirable (and Muslim heavily influenced) regions or bring in Chinese students.

Now it doesn’t seem so black and white does it?

Massie’s problem is that he lost sight what the entire point of the process was, to actually legislate and pass legislation that benefits the country and his district.

Instead, he frequently let his views stop legislation that would benefited his constituents and country instead of getting everything he wanted.

There is a point when you need to admit that getting less than what you wanted is still better than the status quo or worse delaying the potential legislation cycle so the other side gains power and leverage and instead you get an even worse deal passed for your constituents because of your hubris.

It is OK to be a fiscal conservative to help protect the integrity of the system, but he let that come at the cost of everything else.

It is obvious Massie began reading his own press and saw himself bulletproof and let it go to his head. Unfortunately for him, the political landscape changed and because of it, he will most likely pay the price for it.

Funny enough, this is sort of true as you are not allowed to waive the residency requirements for both schools (and all SEC schools require some type of residency) Texas is way more over the top for number of hours and has a few added wrinkles.

It looks like Texas, Vandy, and A&M require 60, UGA at 45, and the rest at 30, but how you do those 30 are up to a variety of interpretations.

Mississippi schools require the last 30 hours completed in the institution (or 25% depending on how it is written) to receive your undergraduate degree. This is typical and can be gamed a bit depending on how you assign transferred credits in major. You can easily set it up to coast as a transfer depending on how well your academic support staff is.

Texas requires 60 hours plus 6 advanced major hours. That means that Jrs and Srs are going to have to do 2 full years of course work for Texas (which gets into the weird APR model) to graduate. The additional 6 in major makes things harder, but then again can be gamed.

Grad is a max of 12 transferred in at the Mississippi schools and only 6 to Texas. That is a big deal for grad students and falls into the question of how many of there students ever actually receive a degree as a grad transfer.

So Sark has a point, but so does A&M and Vandy. The bigger deal isn’t just the hours, it is the upper division course requirements and how easy it is to game that part of the system.

4-3

Reading through it, it seems like they only ruled on one issue (the timing) and not others as it would be moot.

This is the simplest explanation of why Alito is pissed in his response. Essentially, the Justices voted within hours of the Callias hearing and had a decision then, yet the opposition obviously slow walked it back for political means. Worse, they were lazy in doing so and only wrote one dissent.

LINK

If you want to do some other long term crystal ball gazing, think what this does in 2028 maps as well and how easy it would be to make a “compromise” as a R presidential nominee to promise to force congress to develop an algorithm based math driven congressional district map formula.

There is no way that, on the whole, the Red states redistricting is less skewed than the Dems. Knowing that there is a 2030 census, the number of congressmen will shift significantly towards the south and out of blue states. Since we are no where near as skewed as a whole, any automated system will in the long run benefit the Republicans.

Run on forcing “gerrymandering-free” districts across the entire nation and force the dems on voting against it and have them explain why they are against the idea or embrace it and provide more competitive R races in the blue states.

I don’t think people realize how big of thing this is. We are talking about forcing the death of many of the extreme partisan blue districts that have driven a ton of the racial animosity the last 20 years.