BC SOCIETY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

1/Today in @bopinion, I discuss why America has been producing too many PhDs in recent years, and what we need to do to solve the

 2/First of all, many people don't realize just how many PhDs we produce! More than almost any other rich country.
3/And we've kept ramping this number up and up.
4/But the problem begins when PhDs start looking for (usually academic) jobs.

https://t.co/M8hhoap12d
5/The U.S. built a ton of universities and then we stopped.

Professors have tenure.

That means there are just going to be fewer new tenure-track jobs than before. Everyone in academia already knows this well.
6/Here's the market for history professors.

https://t.co/sAwByQikS0
7/Here's the market for anthropology professors.

https://t.co/APb5NbB6Np
8/Here's the market for English and foreign-language professors.

https://t.co/rzzuFsoGCT
9/Now, to make matters worse, college enrollment has been flatlining. Even before COVID-19 came along and kicked colleges' butt.

https://t.co/nsbwhqaoYp
10/And colleges, under huge pressures to cut costs, have switched from tenure-track faculty to adjuncts and lecturers.
11/The life of many PhDs after graduation has thus become "adjunctopia" -- or more accurately, Adjunct Hell. Desperately hanging on year after year, hoping for that big break that never comes.

https://t.co/z9GjZkmAhB
12/Of course, PhDs can go into the private sector. BUT, many doctoral advisors push PhD students toward academia. And grad school culture stigmatizes private-sector jobs as failure...
13/Plus, while STEM PhDs and some social science PhDs can often find private-sector jobs in their fields, many humanities and social science fields don't have good private-sector analogs.

This will lead to underemployment and resentment.
14/And social unrest really is a threat here. Dashed expectations can lead to deep rage at the system. And who better equipped to overthrow the system than a bunch of brilliant underemployed people?

https://t.co/HEp0Hf5Egs
15/Some historians, like @Peter_Turchin, have warned that "elite overproduction" is a recipe for unrest.

https://t.co/23VstFoiAd
16/And the insanely shitty job market for PhDs is taking a massive psychological toll.

https://t.co/Mmuovpg3u5
17/So what do we do about this?

For STEM PhDs, we can have the government employ more. A massive expansion of federal research funding is in the works. We should pass @RoKhanna's Endless Frontier Act.

https://t.co/4Nd91Fcejr
18/But for many humanities and social science fields, a big federal bailout simply isn't in the cards. Nor is the private sector prepared to employ ever-increasing humanities and social science PhDs without severe underemployment.

We need to cut back on production.
19/Some universities are already cutting back on production in these fields.

This will be painful but necessary.

https://t.co/iK92UoN6Zd
20/We need a PhD production system that is more in line with new economic realities -- flat or declining college enrollment, cost-cutting, and the end of the 20th century college building boom.

(end)

https://t.co/o36CkgHRlU

More from We need 3 million vaccinations a day 🐇

Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/Here is a thread about climate change that's going to make a lot of people mad.

Basically, America, on its own, has a LOT power to stop climate change than almost anyone admits.

2/China now emits far more CO2 than the U.S. It emits almost as much as Europe and the U.S. combined.


3/In fact, even this huge disparity dramatically understates the degree to which China is in the driver's seat of climate change.

China, being still much poorer than us, has much more room to grow its economy. Hence, the emissions gap will only grow larger.


4/This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: The battle to halt climate change will be won or lost in China.

America's power - and thus, the power of American politicians, activists, businesses, etc. - to save the planet from climate catastrophe is very marginal.

5/This is just a fact. But it's an uncomfortable one for a people like Americans who are used to thinking that the world lives or dies at their command.

Thus, I see many Americans desperately trying to preserve the illusion of control with respect to climate change.
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/People I know on the Right tend to be obsessed with the idea of "crimethink", taboos, and the (supposedly) oppressive, omnipresent enforcement of liberal cultural norms.

Why?

My new theory: A lot of it is guilt.

2/It's true that in some circles - the media, universities, many big corporations - liberal norms *are* enforced to some degree, and the enforcement has probably gotten stronger in recent years.

But I don't think this explains all of the Right's obsession.

3/The stereotype is that people on the Right tend to be more threat-sensitive. That would help explain the perception that liberal norm-enforcers are lurking everywhere, ready to pounce and anathematize anyone who makes a misstep.

But I don't think that's all of it either.

4/And of course, it's always fun - whether you're on the Right or the Left, or playing a video game, or whatever - to style yourself as the brave iconoclastic rebel fighting against the oppressive forces of blah blah blah.

But I don't think this is all of it, either.

5/The reason I think it's more than these things is that even *in private*, people on the Right express their "crimethink" ideas very gingerly and hesitantly.

I get the sense that they're not just afraid of external censure, but have also internalized liberal norms.
SOCIETY
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Very interesting new report about how America's economic geography has changed since the great recession: https://t.co/l3YE4WzgKx

Short version: Places with lots of skilled workers are doing great, other places aren't. But more people are moving to the former, which is good.

And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.


Rural America continues to languish.
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Noah Smith \U0001f407
Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/Today's @bopinion post is about Trump's taxes, and what they show about how America allocates capital.

We appear to have some big problems.

2/Trump has a bunch of businesses that lose money. Our financial system has lent him money to throw into unsuccessful golf courses, hotels, and so

3/A lot of these loans are loans that Trump hasn't even paid back yet, using loopholes in the tax system to avoid paying taxes on those unpaid debts.

Why would creditors give money to a guy who wastes the money on bad businesses and doesn't even pay them back?

4/One seemingly obvious answer is that capital is just really cheap these days. Companies are able to borrow more easily than at any time in the last few decades.


5/But this presents us with a mystery.

Why hasn't an abundance of cheap capital caused the return on financial capital to fall? Interest rates are low, but stock returns have held up strongly.
TRUMP , POLITICS
We need 3 million vaccinations a day \U0001f407
We need 3 million vacc...
@Noahpinion
1/Alright, gather round, friends, and let me tell you the story of 1930s Japan, and how it's a cautionary tale for 2020s

2/Everyone knows that Japan became militarist, fascist, and (even more) expansionist in the 30s.

But what few people know is that this followed 6 years of coup attempts by EVEN MORE militarist/fascist/expansionist lunatics.

So let's review that history.


3/The first coup attempt was the March Incident in 1931.

Basically, some right-wing army officers planned to stage a riot to provoke martial law, and install a military dictator.

It failed when they couldn't get enough people to riot.


4/The coup plotters weren't really punished, so they just tried again a few months later. Some of their co-conspirators ratted them out and they failed again.

But AGAIN THEY WEREN'T PUNISHED! People defended them, saying they were simply too patriotic. 🤡


5/These coup plotters wanted the following:

1. A military dictator
2. Aggressive military action against Japan's rivals (i.e. every other country)
3. Increased colonial expansionism
4. Some mumbo-jumbo about cultural purity and economic egalitarianism
HISTORY

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s. e. smith
s. e. smith
@sesmith
Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.
TECH , SOCIETY
History Under Your Feet
History Under Your Fee...
@HUFToday
Today is also death anniversary of P.V.Narasimha Rao, the man who liberalized the Indian economy, and opened it up. And more than anything else, provided the much needed stability for India in the turbulent 90s. One of the best PMs IMO. #PVNarasimhaRao


The man who dismantled India's Licence Raj, opened up relations with Israel, adopted a Look East Policy. P.V.Narasimha Rao took over as PM, when India was faced with multiple challenges both on political and economic front in 1991.

Assasination of Rajiv Gandhi, Economic crisis, India was facing a bleak scenario, in 1991 when PVNR became the PM. It is to PVNR's credit that when he stepped down as PM in 1996,more people in India were optimistic about their future, more confident. #PVNarasimhaRao

I was one of those who grew up during the PVNR era, experienced the initial changes he bought along. He introduced far sweeping reforms( forced or otherwise) , when he was just running a minority Govt dependent on allies support. #PVNarasimhaRao

Heading a minority Govt,PVNR managed to pass through crucial bills on economy, not a mean feat at all. He had to deal with the Nehruvian-Socialist lobby in his own party, apart from the Left, but managed to push through the economic reforms. #PVNarsimhaRao
SOCIETY
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Doga Queen //: Beyond Your Boundary
Doga Queen //: Beyond ...
@QueenDoga
We have to talk Crunchyroll yet the fuck again, but this time over a issue with Translation in the Zombie Idol recent episode but first i need to apologize to .@BigBootyWitches because i got it wrong between trans and futa but it turns out we all got played by Crunchy...

first off. One Poster i retweeted turned out to say that Lily, is more of a Ototo No Ko. She later confirms from those that watch the show in Japan that the audio doesnt match the translation and the translation itself was a self insert.

This is the major problem I have. Look, i get it. The west still has no handle on these issues. Other countries dont raise a huge fit about it and in Asia certain countries societies dont really accept it and some reluctantly accept it.

But this continuation of the bullshit from Crunchy since High Guardian Spice is beyond the pale. They lied about helping the Japanese animators. They lied about their new projects and their dubs, Funimation took most of their projects away from Crunchy...

And now, so desperate for relevance and kicks and outrage, they do this self insert, just to get some of their more conservative folk on edge, ranting about how they left one "pozzed" medium with the western animation industry to see the "pozz" get into the only thing left...
SOCIETY
BIG DADDY
BIG DADDY
@bigdaddyvinz
If you often procrastinate, open this

Stop being a perfectionist.

The root of procrastination for most people ain't laziness, it's anxiety.

I know your anxiety will tell you the worst case scenario. It’s a damn liar.

If you're a procrastinator, you will find every excuse not to do what u need to do. But here's an advice: DO IT FIRST, I call it reverse procrastination.
SOCIETY
Diyora Shadijanova \U0001f1fa\U0001f1ff \U0001f1f9\U0001f1ef (\u0414\u0438\u0451\u0440\u0430 \u0428\u0430\u0434\u0438\u0436\u0430\u043d\u043e\u0432\u0430)
Diyora Shadijanova 🇺🇿 ...
@thediyora
at some point we have to recognise that the financial anxiety young people are living through is not normal. monetising all your hobbies is not normal. hustle culture is not normal. glorifying precarious work is not normal. self-optimisation is not normal.

all these issues have a single root and guess what? it's the economic system we live under!! but we're too fucking exhausted to even see an alternative to capitalism because we're so broken and fatigued by it. it doesn't have to be this way, we can seek a different future.

As Mark Fisher argued, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. We've been utterly brainwashed by every part of our society to think that everything we're experiencing right now is extremely normal! But clearly, capitalism is failing us.

How about instead of “manifesting” money on TikTok, we work towards building a more equal society? Just a thought.

Incredible! People in the replies to this are like “people who hustle will be relaxing when they get wealthy”. That’s IF and not when and still, that’s not a given. The fact we don’t see having a regular full-time job as enough “hustling” or whatever is so scary to me.
SOCIETY

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SRI CHAMPAKADHAMA SWAMY, BANNERGHATTA HILL, BENGALURU (KAR)
#bharatmandir

The shrine is dedicated to Sri Vishnu along with Devi Lakshmi and Bhoodevi.
It is built in an area full of Champaka trees.
As champaka flowers are offered to Sri Vishnu here, it is called Champakadhama.


It is believed that King Janmejaya had sarpa-dosha. To get rid of it, he took bath in the nearby pond. He emerged with a golden body and sarpa-dosha was also removed. The pond is called Swarnamukhi and believed to have curative powers.
Sri Vishnu murti was consecrated by him.


It is also believed that this forest area was the Dandakaranya where Sri Ram stayed in exile.
Some believe that the original shrine was built by Pandavas.
The pushkarni/pond is emptied once a year so that the rock at the bottom (which has image of Anjaneya) may be worshipped.
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Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
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Guillaume Chaslot
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The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
SRI BANASHANKARI AMMAN, BANGALORE
#bharatmandir

Located in Southern Bangalore, this is one of the most popular places of worship in Bangalore City.
Devoted to Devi Banashankari, this shrine is visited specially during Rahukala which is believed to be an unfavorable time.


Somanna Shetty, a great devotee of Devi, brought this murti from Badami’s Banshankari Amma Kshetram.
It is said that many years ago, three ladies visited this shrine and requested the pujari to conduct puja for them. Since it was the inauspicious rahu kaal, the pujari refused.


However, upon their insistence, he conducted the puja. When he returned with prasadam, the ladies vanished. This made the people believe that they were none other than the Devi herself. Since then, the people perform poojas here during the Rahukaal.
@GunduHuDuGa


People use lemons as a diya. Lemons are cut from the centre and their pulps are removed, for pouring oil in them.
It is strongly believed that Devi removes all the troubles from the life of her devotees during the Rahukala although it is considered inauspicious for any pooja.
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So, you’re a writer and you’re worried about writing outside your immediate experiences and identities.

Here is the thread of practical advice for you.

EXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES. Why do you want to write this?

Are you trying to solve racism/sexism/colonialism with your work?

As writers we love stories about heroic writers whose work has changed the world. And as such we like to look to our own writing to solve societal problems.

And I understand this completely, not the least because I’ve felt the pull.

But if you’re looking to play saviour with your words, it is unlikely that you will do the marginalised people you are trying to save justice.

And I understand this very often comes from place of good intentions, but there is a reason that most of the moralising plays written by white abolitionists are deeply uncomfortable to read.

It is incredibly easy for works looking to play saviour to become patronising or traffic in simplistic stereotypes that ultimately hurt the people they are looking to rescue.
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