The school should have fired your mom. Students don't always have free time that aligns with instructor office hours, and some issues are best addressed in writing. Whether they like it or not, communicating with students through a variety of channels is absolutely part of a teacher's job. Those who don't want to do it should find another line of work.
This is a misunderstanding of the job of a professor. (I have some experience here.)
Our job is to teach well enough, to research well enough, and to handle administrative stuff well enough, in a context where any one of those could easily be a full time job and it's impossible to do all of them perfectly.
Having a work pattern in which the less important stuff falls through the cracks while making sure the important stuff gets handled is necessary and common. As long as people understand your pattern and can work within it it's generally ok.
There are a lot of college professors who are just barely good enough at teaching and administration to not get fired. Regardless of how important they think their research is, letting other things slide is disrespectful to their peers and students. We shouldn't make excuses for them.
One of my favorite professors put it in a different way. The classic approach is that they are lecturers first, and not teachers.
The professor is the master in their field. They go into class. They lecture on things based on their experience, answer questions, then leave. Students are there to make use of the faculty and the department to achieve their goals. If someone wanted to invent YouTube, they would go to university to study under someone who had invented some complex video compression & streaming algorithm etc. This is where universities output the outstanding individuals.
But in the 21st century, many universities are simply teaching institutions. They make sure the student understands and guide the poor ones. They make mediocre engineers, but dams and highways are built and maintained by mediocre engineers. The government unis were funded per head; literally the goal is to fill the lecture hall with as many heads as possible.
So I don't entirely disagree. In the end, my mom was not promoted to the level everyone expected of her, probably due to things like this. I do believe she actually replied to the important or thoughtful emails and just built this image of inaccessibility to seem fair to everyone.
Sometimes the lazy people have money that you want, or are gatekeepers on getting money from others. So you have to accommodate their laziness if you want to eat.
That is idiotic advice. Email is absolutely not ignorable in any real business. We constantly receive important emails from customers / partners / vendors. If we ignored them then we would fail, and deservedly so. They have to be actioned quickly and with careful attention to detail.
You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.
If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.
That's not how it works in any sort of job with significant individual responsibility. The institution isn't forcing them to do more work. They take it on voluntarily because they're ambitious or competitive or want to advance a worthy cause. Doing the bare minimum is possible: some people make that choice, and even without a union it usually won't get you fired. But those people usually don't accomplish much. You can't have it both ways.
But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up for.
And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.
> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.
Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.
> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.
Generally there is nothing illegal about altering a legal document, or even a strict definition of what counts as a legal document. Under some circumstances it could be illegal to alter a document and use that for fraud, or submit an altered document to a court or government agency. If the doctoring falsely defames someone then you could also open yourself up to a civil suit.
Perhaps I misunderstand what "sue" includes in US jurisdictions but prohibition in this context ought to be criminalisation, i.e. something that happens in the relation between the individual and the state, and to me 'suing' is something that happens in a relation between individuals.
So what's the problem? The vast majority of cancer treatments seek only to put the condition into remission for a while. Realistically that's often all that can be done.
That's so naive. Economic central planning is a fool's errand. Regardless of how good the computers are, it can never work because it's impossible to gather accurate demand data. Only free market economics can ever work at scale over the long term.
Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.
The belief that a central "digital planning engine" could plan the lives of an entire society is an incredibly naive idea from early cybernetics. This doesn't work even in small thought experiments because of information limits. No central system can access all the local knowledge and constantly changing circumstances.
Free market economics is working great for the vast majority of people. Median living standards in capitalism countries are higher than ever. Regardless of ideology the data is quite clear on this point.
crazy, because the two biggest cases of economic central planning are the USSR which grew faster than any civilization ever (a literacy rate of 30% to 100% in 60 years) and China who is currently making the United States world power look like a toddler.
There's clearly something to central planning, it's still up in the air if you can totally plan an economy centrally. I tend to agree with Chibber.
All land in China is state owned, what in the world are you talking about? I can't tell if you don't know about China's state-capitalism or if you're trying to do purity politics about economic governance. Literally no one would describe china as "not centrally planned"
As I stated above, economic central planning can never work over the long term. The USSR didn't last very long, and it turns out that most of their economic statistics were fake anyway. Communists always lie about everything.
China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs. And their economic successes over the past few decades have come about by embracing free market principles. The stuff they tried to centrally plan has largely failed.
Literally no expert believes the USSR fell because of economic central planning. It is truly absurd to look at a 60 historic industrialization and urbanization and see "failure" in the long term.
> China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs.
I don't necessarily disagree with this ruling, but it's sad that EU governments now take in more revenue from fining US tech companies than from taxing local tech companies. An entire continent is on the path of becoming parasites instead of builders. Will they ever adopt a growth and abundance agenda again?
Hard to respect vague laws. Apple can't read the regulators' minds and figure out their interpretations, or instantly pivot when regulators change their minds.
You don't need to read minds to know that abusing your dominant market position in one market to disadvantage your competitors in a different market (advertising) has a very high likelihood of breaking competition rules. That's a textbook example of anti-competitive behavior.
When did they change their minds, can you provide a link to a previous regulatory decision which approved this behavior?
All laws are inherently vague. Some actions are clearly legal and some are clearly illegal. Between them, there is a gray zone, where it can be impossible to say in advance what's legal and what isn't.
If you are an amoral profit maximizer, like the average publicly traded company, it's often rational to take risks by entering the gray zone. Sometimes nobody cares that you do that. Sometimes you manage to get a favorable court ruling. And sometimes the expected gains outweigh the eventual fines.
It's almost always easy to comply with the laws by playing it safe. But shareholders don't like that.
Sure. I'm not here to defend bad behavior by US tech companies. Just pointing out the sad contrast in terms of lack of growth and innovation by EU tech companies.
How is the EU tech company lack of growth related to fining companies for not obeying the law?
Yes, Europe is a laggard in tech, but I don't see any relationship here. Even if they wouldn't fine these companies, EU would still lag, and now that they are fining them, EU companies are not at an advantage, nor growing faster.
Europe just doesn't have the "move fast and break things" mentality because we don't want things like privacy broken. At least not without the user's unpressured choice which is what GDPR is all about.
If we allowed the same kind of unrestricted development we'd have more money and growth but we'd be just like the US. Which I personally don't want for sure. I'm glad to be living here. It's not all about money and economy.
The US is in the middle of a recession if you exclude the AI bubble. Even if you include the AI bubble it's barely avoiding stagflation. I'm not sure "growth and innovation" accurately serves as a contrast between the US and EU tech companies right now.
You must believe that US companies are trying to enter and stay in hostile markets out of the sheer kindness of their hearts. Have you considered that not being present in the second biggest market by GDP may actually be a massive liability by creating a massive opportunity for competitors that will be far better adapted to stricter regulatory conditions? You could just as well advise US car manufacturers to stick to building cars like the Cybertruck and ignore markets that consider it unsafe.
They could, it could be a blessing for competitors in the EU.
But they won't because the EU is a huge market and money speaks, while that happens they need to comply with the laws. Stop breaking the laws and you stop being fined, it's pretty simple for multi-billion/low-trillion market cap companies, innit?
I’d love alternatives that work well, but having used the said Chinese ones, I got no choice but to stick to the behemoths. Telegram may eat a bit into the messaging dominance, but that’s it.
I’m sorry to disappoint you but the EU is unable to create any usable alternatives to US tech chiefly due to lack of SWE talent (among other things). Anyone remotely competent sees the 40k senior SWE salaries offered by European tech companies and immediately crawls through glass just to work at a mid-tier company in the Northern California area of the United States.
I believe that would be true (after food, housing, healthcare, taxes, child-care, etc) only for a very narrow band of senior SWE's. And you are still not considering employment protection. And for junior or mid-level SWE's, not at all true for the overwhelming majority.
Huh no. I'd never work in the US. I won't even visit there as long as the current regime is in place (and the mandatory social media declaration, which I believe is more bipartisan).
I even moved to a lower wage country in Europe even to a pay cut, money isn't everything. Quality of life is. I won't live in a country that is anti-LGBT and with such a culture glorifying toxic masculinity. And at the same time giving a huge middle finger to the world by having the most polluting country in the world per capita quit climate change reduction efforts.
I don't think you understand how badly Trump has destroyed the reputation and goodwill of the US to the rest of the world in just one year. Everyone I know is actively trying to disconnect from US products and services (though admittedly I am in more activist circles)
And salaries here are a lot higher than that. Even here in a lower-wage country. Also, I don't need a car where I live which scraps a whole category of expenses, healthcare is free and I have protections in case I get fired.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
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