And replace him with who?

According to the state salary database, there are about 3 dozen UW employees who make more than $500,000 a year in 2022 (the most recent year published). A few are administrative staff, many are coaches for sports (which is very dumb), and a few are professors.

Their total salaries sum to $32 million, which is a lot. But when you divide that across the total number of students, it comes out to about $580 per student per year. So even if you stopped paying these people, tuition would only go down about 5%.

That’s assuming that these staff members don’t bring any value, which is not a good assumption. Many of these highly paid people would be highly compensated in this private sector–for example the manager of UW’s investments makes $1 million per year–so rightly or wrongly, the university must pay very high to retain them.

As I said before, the university has received $400 million less from the state (adjusted for inflation) today than it did in the 1980s. The expense of highly paid staff is a drop in the bucket compared to the drop in state funding.

In 1986, my mom paid $386 ($1,106 in 2024) in tuition for a quarter at the University of Washington. In 2015, I paid around $3,700 ($4902 in 2024) for a quarter at UW.

In 1986, UW got $440 million dollars from the state. That’s $1.2 billion in 2024. In 2015, UW got $644 million from the state. That’s $0.8 billion today.

It’s hard to find enrollment data for some reason, but there were less than 30,000 students at UW in the late 80s. In 2015, that figure was closer to 55,000.

Using inflation adjusted figures, the state was contributing $41,000 per student in 1986 compared to $14,500 in 2015. Adding in yearly tuition, the total cost was $44,700 in 1986. In 2015, that’s $29,300 per student.

Importantly, this analysis leaves out private contributions to the university’s budget which makes up a large portion of its funds. However, those funds are usually restricted in how they can be spent.

Most of the buildings on UW’s campus were built in the 50s or 60s. There were some that were from the 20s and 30s or older. Forget cosmetics, most of those need renovations just to remain usable. There were thousands of good, usable computers in the libraries that were always in use. Keeping that fleet running is an expense that just wasn’t around 30+ years ago. Labs equipment has gotten better and more expensive. I used a $100,000 high speed camera when I was in school. My mom sure didn’t have access to that.

Based on my quick, back of the envelope math, education has not gotten 3 to 4 times more expensive, but the state has been contributing less and less money to fund it.

Second, the only reason for the massive amounts of student debt is due to universities massively inflating the cost of an education to milk the government of their federal student loans.

I can’t speak for everywhere, but that’s not true for my alma mater. Tuition has been rising because of a lack of state funding. 20 years ago, state funds made up 2/3 of the University budget. Now it’s 1/3. The difference has to come from somewhere.

Go to an in-state school. Prices are lower. Go to a community college to take your desired program’s prerequisites and transfer to a state university. Or just finish up a degree at a community college.

Good to know, thank you! I’ll have to look closer when I visit a forum next.

Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

No, their airlines are not an ancillary product. They are their main product. According to Boeing’s earnings reports, the commercial aircraft segment of the company made up 56% of total revenue in 2018, 42% in 2019, 27% in 2020, 30% in 2021, 38% in 2022, and 43% in 2023. The rest of their revenue is split between the Defense, Space and Security segment, and the Global Services segment.

Prior to 2017, the vast majority of the earnings for the whole company came from the Commercial Airplanes segment. Since then, that segment has been operating at a loss. Since 2022, both Defense and Commercial Airplanes have been operating at a loss.

If you’re curious you can look up Boeing’s 10-k form. Page 56 has the revenue breakdowns.

Here’s a school bus going up for auction. 117,000 miles. Sitting for 2 years. Current bid $643 with 3 days left.

Why would they love this? More claims means they have to pay out more. Even if they’re assholes and don’t pay out, they still have to process and fight claims which costs money.

I invent something. Since there are no patents, my idea is put in the open. A big company sees my idea and uses its much bigger budget to advertise and out sell me, putting me out of business. How’s that not abusive?

Patents prevent theft. Patents on medicine based on publicly funded research is stupid. I could be persuaded that it’s theft in that particular instance. But in general, no patents are not theft.

For those who don’t know, like me, the Aitken Bible was the first English edition of the Bible published in the US. It was approved by the Congress of the Confederation (the government before the Constitution was signed) in 1782.

I’m sure the judge and the judge’s family’s lives would be immediately threatened by his deranged followers. So that could be part of it.

I definitely agree it’s nonsensical, but it makes a little bit more sense than that. Consensual sex being filmed is free speech as long as it’s not “obscene” (whatever that fucking means).

Still stupid tho.

Who needs “AI” when the simple algorithm they already use works perfectly well?

while 1==1:
    deny_coverage = True

The lidar removal really pissed me off. At best, a Tesla can “see” as well as the human driver. It seems to me that half of the point of using a computer to drive a vehicle should be that it can easily access sensors that us meat bags don’t have access to.

Plus the stupid central instrument cluster in Model 3s and Model Ys is beyond idiotic.

Yeah. I did want to reiterate that usability of the phone was the primary driver of the change, not necessarily battery life.

I got no indication of a dying battery other than needing to charge frequently until Apple implemented a battery health feature. That was after they fixed the shutdown issues.

My iPhone 6 was nearly unusable until they added in CPU throttling. It would try to draw more current than the battery could provide, which caused the phone to shutdown. Sometimes I would get the same issue during the boot process, which effectively created a boot loop. Resolving this issue was Apple’s stated reasoning for implementing the throttling.

I am no Apple fan, but in this case, I think the only thing they did wrong was not communicate what they were doing and not give the user an option to turn throttling on or off.

Honestly, this whole episode screams “Well meaning engineering team fixed a problem, but didn’t consider the optics of such a change.”

They do indeed. My area has them. However, those buses require riders to book a ride a day in advance, which is far from ideal. But even if that wasn’t the case, you’d have to wait for the bus to arrive, then you have an unknown transit time (depending on who else is being picked up and dropped off) to your destination.

There doesn’t seem to be a good option for disabled people’s mobility.

Luckily the train pulls up right next to my disabled grandpa’s house. And it drops him off right at the doctor’s office. No walking required!

Oh wait.

No, they don’t have to be cheaper. In fact, I’d be willing to spend a bit more than I had to just to not deal with negotiation bullshit