Fun fact: Crocs chew their chop-chop, both because they live in an aquatic environment and because they've got those little birds to pick at their pearly whites & keep em gleamin'.
Youre telling me a website made to be like reddit, built and visited by the people of reddit to share content from reddit was supposed to be different to reddit?
The difference is in the ownership but its the same place really.
Shit, that’s what they USED to do, back in the good old days. Now, it’s just “WAAAAAH, WAAAAH, WAAAAHHHHH, THERE ARE TOO MANY ASIANS AND LESBIANS AND BLACKS!”
You realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen grown men get to the point of threatening each other’s safety, over whether or not the hyperspace drives in Star Wars are more realistic than the warp drive from Star Trek?
I never thought I’d miss that shit, but I miss it.
Also, like, can I remind everyone of the cantina scene, from the first fucking movie? NOTHING about that scene says “these producers and writers don’t really buy into the whole concept of diversity,”
Motherfuckers, there were two different kinds of blue alien, aliens with actual butt-faces, a WEREWOLF, some guys with insectoid multi-faceted eyeballs, and a guy with an ultramodernist chair for a fucking head. And the biggest asshole in the place was the fat white guy who didn’t like a specific group (droids) and wouldn’t let them in his bar.
But now, some of y’all think “wokeness” in Star Wars is some kind of NEW thing?
Motherfuckers, there were two different kinds of blue alien, aliens with actual butt-faces, a WEREWOLF, some guys with insectoid multi-faceted eyeballs, and a guy with an ultramodernist chair for a fucking head.
I kinda hate that I immediately pictured each of those as I read that.
I think, honestly, the worst thing about Star Wars fans discussing the intricacies of Star Wars is that there are no intricacies and it’s concerning how many people still missed the points.
Light Side Good Dark Side Bad Shut The Fuck Up About Gray Jedi And The Empire Doing Nothing Wrong
Not only they aren’t cheap, but they are pretty much never profitable. If we are to build things that are not profitable, we could as well build something that will offer a service to the population, like public transportation.
Hell, without competition, even taxis can be held to a standard.
We’re going to pay a fortune for the government to provide safe infrastructure. But they’re going to hire all the right people vet them and make sure they do it right. Until they don’t.
Even NASA had to fall hard to get put back on track. I still think government services are the best option. Damn if the water isn’t fucking muddy. Pun not intended but I kind of like it.
A stadium is a service to the public. Stadiums are amenities, and increase happiness among the citizens that enjoy events. Even Sid Meyer’s Civ game has an amenities concept, because they’re really important for cities. If there’s no entertainment options in the city, then all of the talented people leave. That means all of the corporations with great jobs for talented people leave too. With them goes all the money, and you’re left with urban decay and poverty. Yes, transportation is important, but so are amenities.
Besides what Civ says, a lot of stadiums are built for a one time special event, like the olympics or some world cup.
I’m thinking about the olympic stadium of Montreal (which I think the post was about). It was built for the olympics of 76 and cost around a billion dollars at the time.
Since we don’t have a baseball team anymore, it is used only once in a while for music shows, but the acoustic is horrible because it wasn’t built for it. In my lifetime, I honestly never went inside for an event.
And now, the government is talking about a plan to repair it for an other billion. At this point, the only reason to keep it is because it’s so old and unique. Plus, it would just costs too much to demolish it.
It does bring a bunch of tourists annually, but for local people, it’s either seen as a weird relic of the past or a big scam.
Also, why can’t I just be a peaceful barbarian? Why would my population need amenities anyway? And who told them what is a stadium?
Baseball games aren’t the only thing that happen at baseball stadiums. I agree with you about the A’s though. That’s a tragedy of a team, especially considering their previous highs.
It cost £200 million (£327m at current prices) just for 14km of tram lanes in my local city.
It could buy a decent amount of buses (~£200k each, more for green options), but without infrastructure changes and bus lanes, have fun watching them sit in traffic while everyone refuses to use them.
Raiders and Rams stadiums each cost over a billion and have been built in the last 5ish years. Stadiums should and can be cheap but the NFL owners aren’t doing that. Vegas is also tearing down the Tropicana to build a massive and expensive baseball stadium in its please with a smaller Tropicana on the site as well
I don’t like public stadium funding, either, but outside of Olympic spending, cities are mot routinely paying over $1B in public dollars for a single stadium.
Kroenke should lay his own shit, he’s made billions ripping off fans and married a Walton, you know, the family that makes billions refusing to pay their workers fairly and makes the towns they go into finance the building of the Walmart because they “create jobs” shitty jobs that still require government aid to live on but jobs I guess
It may not be much in comparison to others, but that doesn’t make absolve me of my debt. Practically every other developed nation has this figured out, it’s long past time we caught up.
It’s only better if you think the opportunities from higher-education should only be accessible for those with a wealthy “bank of mom and daddy” or willing to have a heavilly narrowed scope for risk-taking (such as entrepreneurship) because they start their professional lifes already with less assets than liabilities. (Its not by chance that all celebrated US entrepreneurs of this Age are the scions of at least high-middle class or wealthier parents)
If however you mean it in the Economic sense of the US being as wealthy as possible, then it’s not better: maximizing the access to opportunities is the best way to get the best people for a job doing that job quite independently of who their parents are, as that delivers the maximum productivity, and that’s especially important at the high-value-added professions which are the ones for which higher-education is usually needed - limiting access to higher education and hence high-value-added jobs on the basis of money actual goes against making the US be as wealthy as possible as only a fraction of the most competent people to do those jobs have a chance to get them. In fact the problem in the US is so bad that the country has to import foreigners on H1B visas because it can’t even train enough people for some high-value-added jobs.
All this is just the rightwing, purelly economic argument. I haven’t even touched “leftie” things such as Equality.
I’m not saying that college shouldn’t be accessible to the masses. It is and there are scholarships, state funding and loads to support it. What I’m saying is that we should spend tons of tax dollars on college. The government already spends enough we don’t need to blow away more money by paying this exorbitant prices.
Also the cost of tuition varies widely by where you are going.
Well, I agreed that’s a more subtle take on the whole thing.
A hard-nosed take aiming purelly for maximization of tax take in this domain, requires finding a balance between the additional revenue that well educated people will bring to the taxman (not just directly but also indirectly as, for example, they enable other jobs to add more value) vs the money spent now by the taxman to educate them. This purelly economic take does bring considerations about “what is the future tax value of different degrees” and requires that pupil selection uses as meritocratic as possible criteria - and access to money is definitelly not and indication of merit for a degree - so that university education delivers the best people for the job at the end hence maximizing wealth production and thus tax revenue.
Clearly higher-education for everybody for free would not be tax-optimal but that doesn’t mean that not-universal higher-education with money as the main criteria to filter access to those limited places is better. Certainly the current method in the US of restricted access through ridiculously high fees and a statistically meaningless schollarship mechanism (outside sports schollarships it’s minimal and training athletes is seldom justifiable by economics) to pull it a little bit away from the pure monetary filtering criteria, is also far from delivering economically optimal results and hence a higher return.
Somehow other countries manage to have a huge fraction of the population have access to higher education for pretty modest or even no fees whilst still having a higher per-capita income than the US and require importing far fewer, if any, degree-holding immigrants to generate that higher per-capita wealth, so that would indicate that what’s done in the US now is not at all optimal.
It’s valid to look at higher education as something that consumes resources hence cannot be available with no restrictions whatsoever, but if there is indeed limited access and your objective is the best possible return for the country’s economy or even just the taxman, managing the scarcity that comes from the existence of a limit on the provision of it via a pure pricing mechanism won’t deliver the best economic return for the country or even the taxman because theirs is a strategic interest that goes far beyond maximizing the revenue of universities, which is the only thing that higher university fees optimize.
There might be an optimal fee point for the taxman and the economy, which is not zero, but exceeding it reduces the future returns for both because it makes increasing numbers of people who are “the best for the job” in those high value added domains requiring such a degree to not take the degree, so less competent people end up doing the job hence less wealth gets produced and taxed.
I looked up the University of Cincinnati’s finances once because I never realized they were public. I think UC owns non-liquid non-realestate assets somewhere in the 30billion range. They still ask for donations, despite the fact they could give free education to every student for multiple years.
Most donations are restricted to the purpose of the donation. You’d need to know how much of the endowment is for scholarships. Sometimes schools will have an immense amount of money, but can’t actually lower tuition because the money is tied up in other things. If I give money for an endowment that supports future replacement of electron microscopes, that does fuck all for your tuition.
If I give money for an endowment that supports future replacement of electron microscopes, that does fuck all for your tuition.
Presuming of course that they absolutely weren’t going to replace those microscopes without that endowment. If they were, then that endowment frees up some money elsewhere in the budget. Unless literally every penny they hold has strings attached, then the fungibility of money means they could use general fund money they aren’t spending on X because of an endowment on Y instead.
Presuming of course that they absolutely weren’t going to replace those microscopes without that endowment.
In many, if not most, cases there would never be room in a budget for an electron microscope at your average mid sized or small school. Keep in mind we’re talking about a million+ dollar expenditure.
In many cases improvements like a building or an electron microscope absolutely hinge almost entirely on donations, that’s why they are so attractive to a donor. They can make real lasting improvements to a college or university that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Even the endowed scholarships that go to assist with tuition are never as big as people think. If you have a $100,000 endowed scholarship. The school is likely only giving $4,500 of that out each year so they can grow the endowment at the same rate they give out money, thereby ensuring future students get more help.
I’ll paraphrase a real world example. School X has a $100 million dollar endowment, with $65 million going to endowed scholarships, that’s only ~$3 million a year for tuition relief. That same school is looking at a $45 million a year budget. Certainly they could chose to spend down their endowment and give their students 2 years of free school… And then what? Pass on the 3 million a year budget shortfall to future students?
I work in higher Ed, I agree the system is broken, but most schools endowments come no where near being able to give free tuition.
Purelly and entirely because when it comes to money with no strings attached, having X + A money (if A is a positive real number) always beats having only X money, hence why lots of people are pointing out Universities with X in the billions of $ which still ask for donations.
It’s pure unadulterated greed, trying to monetise a (not anymore deserved for most in the US) public image of Universities as places that help people have a better future.
Because they like having money? Running a university is legitimately very expensive and there’s always more to do. I think it’s more common with people who went to business school or became pro athletes, etc. They end up with very profitable careers and a fond recollection of their time in college. It’s worth it to the university to ask almost everyone just in case, because sometimes they find that one whale alum.
Athletics is actually petty profitable, since athletes can’t be paid, so the school gets all the money for sponsorships, tickets, merch, etc.
It can actually be a problem for the schools, since athletics isn’t allowed to be profitable. They have to spend all the money athletics brings in on athletics, which is why the athletics department ends up with all the fancy new buildings.
It kinda does do that, just indirectly. Even if the university can’t profit directly off of athletics, a successful sports season increases application rates and donations. Basically it boosts the brand recognition and brand identity of the school.
It’s still painful to me that the class size at my engineering school basically doubled the year after the university won some basketball championship. I don’t want to believe that people, and especially engineers, are that influence-able but the numbers don’t lie
Remind me again, what is it called when the people generating the wealth are not compensated?
It can actually be a problem for the schools, since athletics isn’t allowed to be profitable. They have to spend all the money athletics brings in on athletics, which is why the athletics department ends up with all the fancy new buildings.
Ah yes, that sounds like a great benefit for students getting an education. Also for the academic staff. Must be great to work at a university as a lecturer and know the football coach earns multiples of your salary.
Do you live in orbanistan (hungary) here we have 2 big stadiums 200m away from each other, and having 10000 person stadiuma in a village where 1800 people lives…
No it isn’t. Prague have. We dont even have a railway (nor normal railway, nor underground) to the airport, only bus 🤣 Outside of the downtown youre mostly fked with the public transport, or at least takes hours to travel.
Where I am, to unlock a cart, you have to insert a coin, and afterwards, to get the coin back, you have to lock the cart to another cart (that’s hopefully part of the pile). It mostly works.
I’ve seen a lot of places here drop this system. I have no idea why. Then again, you could also just go to the info and get a plastic thing to unlock them.
They stop doing it often because it gets homeless people coming to the store specifically to return carts that people didn’t return so they can collect the refund.
I would hope someone realized it accomplishes nothing except being a mild annoyance for customers. Most people return the carts anyway and it doesn’t really stop anyone from stealing them if they really want them (or rather buying them for ~1 euro).
I’m not so sure. It’s a really small push but people from places where it exists only in some places and where in others they don’t return the carts it seems to be working. Here they are returned, but we are so used to the coin system that it might be leftover from that. Anecdotally I’ve noticed people leaving them wherever more if there’s no coin system. But also my area has a lot of first generation and very recent immigrants so they might’ve never been with the system to begin with. Or it’s a cultural thing. Dunno. Might be all the reasons.
Based on your username, I’m going to make the wild assumption that you live in Finland. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have this system in Sweden, and stray shopping carts was never a problem back then. Anectotal and my memory may be a regional thing, sure, but where I live, most people would just put the carts where they belong because it would break the societal norm if they didn’t. And my point is just that this system probably costs more than it pays off for the stores that uses it.
I do think there’s regional variation. In general, we don’t have this system in the US, except for a few grocery stores that are US divisions of European companies. I’ve lived in a few different areas in the country, and in some areas it seems like very few people return their carts and just leave them wherever, while in other areas, people are more conscientious about it. I rarely see a stray cart in the grocery store lots where I live now, for example, but when I lived for a few months in another city, it seemed like everyone just left the cars where they wanted.
I think there’s kind of a peer pressure thing going on, too - people start doing one or the other, and everyone else follows. “He didn’t return, why should I?” vs “Oh, she returned her cart, I should, too.”
They do this at one particular store here. They also pay really well, have incredible prices, and let their cashiers sit in chairs while they check groceries. I like that store.
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