Up From Facebook

During my senior year in college, I did an independent research project in a lab that had several PhD students. This was my first personal immersion in graduate school culture. After that was five years of my own grad student career in a lab with several PhD students, four and a half years as a postdoc in a lab with several PhD students, and then a 37 year faculty career in which I mentored seven PhD theses, one masters, and served on committees of 38 PhD students. During this time, academic standards for training PhD students have evolved. In an email exchange with a colleague back in St. Louis, I wrote: "In our funding-driven culture, the luxury of having our students work out their own projects . . . is beyond the resources of most faculty. Faculty end up doing the concept and planning and use the students for execution. The result is that too many students are passive actors in their careers. A good fit for industry, but not for innovative start-ups or for academic PIs." ...

Here’s House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board.”  This is one of those geriatric hobby horses Republicans love to ride. Kevin Drum is having none of it, and he brings the receipts: “I'm hardly in favor of regulation willy nilly, but all the evidence suggests that it hasn't hurt much of anything. Business applications in the US continue to rise. Our economic growth is the best among advanced countries. Construction spending has skyrocketed. The finance industry continues to make mountains of money. Innovation is strong. Business profits as a share of the economy have nearly doubled over the past two decades. “At the same time, air and water quality has improved tremendously over the past 50 years. I...

My wife and I are recently retired. We moved to New England to be close to our grandson and his parents. We’re living independently in a three-bedroom detached house. My parents were able to live independently into their early 80s, when my dad began to dement. My mom was much smaller than him, and wasn’t able to manage him physically, so they moved into a retirement community. The entry fee back then was $300,000, which they couldn’t afford, so one of my brothers and I funded that, and their retirement income could handle the monthly fees. “Most communities charge an entry fee. The average initial payment is about $402,000, but the fees can range widely, from $40,000 to more than $2 million, according to NIC, which tracks costs at some 1,100 CCRCs in 99 major U.S. markets. “Once residents move in, they pay monthly maintenance or service fees. Other continuing care communities operate on a rental model with no up-front fee. The average monthly charge across both types of communities in ...

Republicans have long objected to the ACA, and Trump tried several times to have it overturned; he’s claimed he’ll replace it with something better, but in eight years, he’s never come up with even a rudiment of a proposal. No, both sides aren’t equal: “Vice President Kamala Harris, who previously backed a universal healthcare plan, wants to expand and strengthen the health law, popularly known as Obamacare. She supports making permanent temporary enhanced subsidies that lower the cost of premiums. And she's expected to press Congress to extend Medicaid coverage to more people in the 10 states that have so far not expanded the program. “Trump, who repeatedly tried and failed to repeal the ACA, said in the September presidential debate that he has "concepts of a plan" to replace or change the legislation. Although that sound bite became a bit of a laugh line because Trump had promised an alternative health insurance plan many times during his administration and never deliv...

Kevin Drum over at jabberwocking.com watched the Trump spectacle over at Madison Square Garden so we didn’t have to. He zeros in on Elon Musk: “Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut "at least" $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.1 trillion  last year, not $6.5 trillion. The arithmetic here is simple. If you add up Social Security + Medicare + defense + veterans pensions + interest on the debt you get $3.9 trillion. There's only $2.2 trillion left.   “So Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.”   Note here that Trump promised not to cut Medicare and Social Security. He promised to increase defense spending. And i...

The plutocrats on the right want to dismantle the administrative state, so they say. Of course, their wealth derives directly from the fiction of private property and an administrative state is required to enforce that fiction. Their wealth is monetized in currency, which is another fiction that the administrative state holds a monopoly on.  The Bolsheviks destroyed the ruble through hyperinflation: they printed money at an unprecedented rate, causing the supply of paper money to grow exponentially, and they issued their own paper currencies called sovznaki, or Soviet tokens, to try to deny that they couldn't do away with money. The result was that the ruble's value was reduced to 1/20,000th of its 1917 value.  There’s a huge difference between the agrarian economy of 1917 Russia and 2024 America, but abolishing the Administrative state that underpins the American economy will cause extensive and lasting harm for the majority of Americans. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Donald Tr...

Trump promises to round up the homeless and put them in government internment camps. Only if they seek treatment and counseling, they might then qualify to be moved to housing. Harris takes a “housing first” approach. Get a roof over their heads and some housing stability, then offer the treatments and counseling that can move them toward independence. The Trump approach sees homelessness as a problem for the housed, to be addressed by hiding them from view. The Harris approach sees homelessness as a problem for the unhoused, to be addressed by finding them housing. The Trump approach was tried during the Clinton Administration and largely failed: “Housing first grew out of experimentation that followed a realization those approaches weren’t working, said Watts. One  systematic review  of 26 studies comparing the two approaches found housing first programs decreased homelessness rates by 88 percent and improved housing stability by 41 percent, compared to treatment first model...