I would think a top performer would like least the tenure system, as they're in demand but their job outlook stunted by (perhaps numerical minority) crusty elements that can't be supplanted.
I would disagree but only, specifically, academia's already broken system. Tenure takes the heat off an academic such that they can deeply, deeply study a system. Academia's still stuck in lines-of-code style measuring sticks of performance so the rush to tenure is often pumping out salami slices worth of papers to secure future funds.
* Academics say publish or perish is terrible and produces warped incentives.
* Academics say they need tenure to protect senior researchers from the publish or perish system.
* But academics seem to be the ones building grant and advancement systems that enforce “publish or perish”.
I don’t get it - it certainly sounds like tenure mostly protects senior academics from systems they built themselves. If publish or perish is so bad why don’t senior members of departments build advancement opportunities that don’t rely on impact factor? Cynically, it almost feels like tenure is enforcing publish or perish, because those with tenure set the rules and the current system protects those who are tenured.
Furthermore, I don’t see why the sort of “deep study” research that the idealized tenured researcher does would need special protection. If the researcher has a track record of success surely the department would tolerate a brief lull in publications while they work on their Magnum Opus? Private industry frequently does multi-year deep research projects without the need for tenure systems.
I think your incorrect assumption is that tenured faculty are running and shaping the universities. Much has been written about the rise of different class in the academy: administrators. For a somewhat extreme position look here [1]. And even tenured faculty are subjected to the performance assessments that can seriously hinder their research agenda. As the saying goes: Tenure has never protected those who really needed it.
The few people I know with tenure are just happy to be out of the academic grind, as it's absolutely brutal. Being tenured also doesn't lock you into a specific university- one of my professors had tenure but took a job elsewhere on a tenure track.
Why not claim you have engineers that deliver the best value to shareholders? Employing the smartest people in the world to make an app to skim money off taxi going from point A to point B can't possibly be a judicious good value use of human resources, especially in the context of the extreme premium those at the absolute top demand.
How in the hell does one not make a profit when literally all they do is skim off the top of unlicensed taxi drivers, using an already fairly functional product?
For the system to function, you've got roughly five variables:
A: Drivers need to get paid enough to want to do it.
B: Riders need the rides to be cheap enough to choose it.
C: The quantity of drivers generally available needs to be consistently high enough that riders can find the rides they need when they want with little wait time.
D: The quantity of riders generally available needs to be consistently high enough that drivers are willing to sign on and wait to accept rides.
E: The overhead of running the business.
Profit comes from the spread between A and B minus E. But A is dependent on D: if there aren't enough riders seeking rides then drivers get fewer of them and need to make more per ride to it to be worth signing on. Likewise B is dependent on C: If they have to wait longer for rides or risk not having a driver available, they won't pay as much or choose to use the service.
The company has knobs they can turn by controlling how much they charge riders and how much they pay drivers. But because of the connections through C and D, they can't turn one without affecting the others.
And it may be that depending on their overhead and the natural density of an area, there may be no valid pricing solution that doesn't lead to the system collapsing from disuse. They have been able to avoid that up until now by infusing the system with "free" investor money, but that doesn't last forever.
By having comically large back-of-house operations.
In a more reasonable scheme the technology portion of a cab company is a small part of their overall expenses, commensurate with the degree of value it brings to the business.
This is true in some white-labeled cab dispatching apps (see: Curb), but not true for ones that chased sky-high valuations with assumptions of pure-software margins (see: Uber, Lyft).
You can afford to pay a huge number of top-dollar engineers and product people when your margins justify it. Being the tech layer on top of cabs turns out to not be in this category of business.
yeah its really odd how so many investors got suckered into thinking that all these "tech" companies that are firmly not tech companies and whose businesses make money in fairly mundane ways based on things happening in the real world are going to make trillions of dollars.
I mean just look at Netflix. They were never a tech company, they were an entertainment company with a tech advantage and thats extremely obvious now. Same thing with something like Carvana. How the hell did they ever manage to convince people they are a tech company and will have tech company margins when they are just selling cars.
Total lack of due diligence and critical thinking, along with the very tech VC mindset where naysayers are poo-pooed for being out of touch luddites. Combined with the very weird incestuousness in tech investment circles where they all have the exact same brain worm.
Remember for the past 10 years where every bit of skepticism about these companies was vigorously attacked as either being a) grossly out of touch idiocy or worse, b) malevolent forces representing a conspiracy of anti-tech incumbents?
You had VCs that were willing to believe literally anything, and naturally an entire cohort of entrepreneurs happy to tell said VCs anything.
The fact that these same VCs haven't been run out of town on a rail suggests the bubble will regrow once things settle down some, and that's disappointing. I for one believe the efficient allocation of capital towards speculative technology is crucial to the advancement of the human race, but the people who've been doing it for the past decade have proven themselves to be credulous rubes who are utterly and congenitally incapable of it.
And often subsidizing the drivers... a marketplace like Lyft or Uber is only lucrative when there's a lot of volume. Otherwise, you're constantly trying to keep a doom loop from happening when there isn't enough supply (drivers) which makes riders upset or not enough riders, which drives drivers (sorry) off the platform.
It's tempting to ask why the subsidies continue given it's not like there are going to be widespread robotaxis anytime soon. Why not let prices settle at the appropriate market level?
But, if one is being charitable, one problem as you say is that there probably really isn't a market for unsubsidized rideshare in a ton of places--even if they are a better service than traditional taxis. I know where I live--50 miles outside of a major city and adjacent to a couple small cities--Lyft and Uber availability is very thin as it is. I couldn't really depend on it for anything.
I always hear this but I'm not sure how they subsidize rides, is it just the 50% off type deals they give out?
When I was a driver nearly a decade ago I would get roughly 70% of the fare and that would be reduced if they used a coupon so it seems more like I was subsidizing the ride. I get that they'd lose a bit of their pie as well.
Recently I see the price I pay on my phone and then see the fare the driver receives on theirs and it's sometimes a good chunk less than 50% of what I pay.
If I sent you a link about a person's funeral to show a person had been born, would you not accept that either? The article is about the funeral of the order.
What do you think happens if you violate a court order? That's the threat behind violating the order of a judge. That it didn't happen doesn't mean my statement was incorrect. If they had actually left in contempt of the order, I would have said it did happen rather than it can happen.
The expensive part is largely the (comparatively) exhaustive appeals process, which means counterintuitively the innocent may be even worse off now that they won't be on death row.
Here you probably mean the innocent wrongfully convicted, but I wonder how an exhaustive appeals process affects the innocent living victims and innocent family members of victims of a rightfully convicted criminal. That they’re forced to relive the trauma of passed crimes again and again every time the death sentence is appealed for over a decade in most cases. It cannot be good for them.
Much better for all involved to reopen a case if and when new evidence of wrongful convictions become convincing enough.
Don't death row inmates get the most exhaustive appeals process of practically any class of prisoners? Honestly if I were innocent I think I'd prefer to be on death row which has the most costly (to the state) and exhaustive of all the appeals processes.
This change could counterintuitively condemn more innocent people.
I picked location US and tried to find popular locations like Panama, Singapore, Bahamas, UAE(Dubai). Nothing came up. Are there any good filters to pick for offshore from US banking? Or something like "exclude my current location from list."
Nice. Yeah it'd also be cool to easily see which European banks accept offshore US customers. It can be a real struggle finding offshore banks that don't mind dealing with FATCA for low value accounts.
Also bear in mind the expected murder chance of the average person from the Netherlands dropped into the US is not expected to be anything like the US average murder rate. The US is not nearly as demographically homogenous as the Netherlands and someone with Dutch heritage experiences much closer to Dutch murder rates in the US.
Apologies for the mix up with the rate. 8x is still on the side of my argument though.
I cherry picked the Netherlands because of the large amount of drug trade there. Every other country in Europe compared favorably to the United States.
From what I can see there is a similar level of diversity in the Netherlands and the US. In both countries around 30% of people are born abroad. In the US around 72% are white and in the NL around 76% are ethnically Dutch. In Rotterdam in particular around half of the population was born to Non-Dutch parents.
None of the above "gun violence"/"senseless violence" things given as reasons for gun control happen to my family on a regular basis either. By your logic I should question the choice of gun control .
