hylaride

Top private (and public) universities added relatively few undergraduate seats since 1980, while applications multiplied, helped by the Common App and students applying to many more schools. Admission rates at the most selective schools dropped from roughly 15–30% in 1980 to 3–6% today. Flagship public universities grew somewhat more but have also become far more selective (especially in California).

There has been a decline in total student population since ~2010 when the echo-boom millennials mostly finished school, but that has been impacting the "lower quality" or smaller schools more.

I think what we're seeing with most people complaining about college value is a red herring. IMO, the crux of the issue is that higher education hasn't expanded availability with population growth (made even worse by expanding foreign student enrolment) combined with a general push from everybody to get more and more people into college.

There's also the fact that if everybody has a degree, it ceases to be a differentiator. Over the years, the best and worst colleagues I've ever had have had degrees (or more) from very prestigious schools even. Some of them just couldn't move on from academic thinking, because that's what they pushed themselves for their whole lives.

The spectrum and various other rights are probably worth more than the current kit.

Maintenance and expansion are two different things. Governments of the day tend to favour big announcements for shiny new things, while simultaneously deferring maintenance whenever they can to redirect money to various other priorities.

I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.

Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.

> I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.

I think this is how best to sum it up. We (tech workers) had agency back in the day as we were on the vanguard of something new and there were no best practices in how to manage us. These companies were run by and for tech workers. Today, you'd have all sorts of "stakeholders" telling us what to do. Product managers, various management and/or work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc), and top-down oversight.

At my previous job, I was literally dressed down for doing work on the side to resolve some technical debt that was hindering other work because it wasn't properly pointed. Didn't matter that I did it on my own time - showing initiative beyond the current story board was a no-no. How is one supposed to be happy in such an environment?

It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.

It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.

Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).

Goldeneye for me. My friends and I spent HOURS every Friday night into dawn playing that, shit-talking each other. The licence to kill setting (where one hit no matter what killed you) with no-Oddjob slap fights. I often nostalgically wish I was young and immature again thinking about it.

Robert Moses (ab)used eminent domain. If somebody buys a piece of land and can't build on it, that's not the same problem. Most rules now in place encourage far lower and less walkable development. Even a massive chunk of Manhattan has height restrictions that are lower than what's currently built and grandfathered in.

A lot of this is because during the Cold War, the Soviets couldn't keep up. While quantity as a quality of it's own, so does overwhelming the enemy with a technological edge. The fact that the coalition so totally and overwhelmingly destroyed Iraq's air defences (that had relatively state of the art soviet kit and was very densely deployed) in Gulf War is case in point. There are reports that came out after the USSR's collapse about how horrified the Soviets were about how successful the stealth, jamming, and targeting of the air defences were (among other lop-sided technical advantages).

This is now shifting as the Chinese can technologically keep up and asymmetric warfare means smaller nation states can overwhelm with "just good enough" to make the economic calculations different.

I think the issue is that centralization is more economical due to scale, but that assumes all else (geopolitics or other black swan events) don't impact things.

We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.

In many ways the financial system is a distributed monolith. COBOL is still around because of bugs and issues (sometimes in code, sometimes in the OS it ran on, sometimes in the computer hardware) that have been around for decades are often dealt with downstream with their own exceptions. This is why IBM still sells mainframes. They literally emulate software and hardware bugs from equipment as far back as the 1960s.

I spoke with a semi-retired COBOL programer about a decade ago. They literally often can't fix specific bugs because multiple other consumers (from banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, the central bank) outside of their organization (and subsequent downstream consumers as well) would all need to adjust their code. Rewriting it is grand, but won't fix the spaghetti code mess. This is made even worse in the US, which has a much more fragmented banking system. "Modern" COBOL isn't even that bad, but they can't even use it most of the time. There is SO MUCH that isn't even documented - and if it is, is in a binder that's been shelved decades ago and half of this developers time was going into the corporate archives to dig it up.

This isn't to say that a lot of legacy code can't be modernized, but it's not always that easy.

> The trade-off between quality and speed of development has always been a tenet of software engineering. Agentic coding changes the equation a lot, but the equation is still there.

The quality and speed tradeoff doesn't matter if other incentives aren't aligned. In today's product-driven world, where usage stats are compiled in real-time, features are added and then pop-ups, nudges, etc are added to software to get product usage up. These features may or may not add quality, relevance, etc. But the "success" is measured in usage, forced or not. This is essentially Microsoft today (especially with copilot), but even after every major apple OS update, I get "what's new" pop ups for every Apple app (notes, reminders, mail, etc) on every platform (iPad/iPhone/Mac) that I own. I opened the email app to check my email, don't get in my way!

> Unfortunately activists have done a fantastic job turning gay into a broad political issue encompassing a lot of ideologies that many people find off-putting

This is true of almost everything nowadays. I recoil at almost anything religious for similar reasons, even though I know not everybody that goes to church is a militant anti-abortionist christian nationalist. Nonetheless I will watch `The 10 Commandments` as it's still a very good example of the golden age of Hollywood epics.

>A bigger argument though is that if they've had all these amazing successes why have they never told anyone? Why are all, or at least a lot, of their failures over the decades public but none of their successes?

Because it could expose people, secrets, or methods that are still relevant. The vast majority of former spies are still bound by various legislation about not exposing what they did - most of them have to have their books signed off by their former employers. It's why you should take everything a former spook says (especially people like John Kiriakou) with large grain of salt.

In extreme cases, it can also involve quasi-legal methods or cause diplomatic scandals. "All or a lot" of their failures aren't necessarily public, but only the ones that unravel in a way that gets leaked or exposed to the general public. I can guarantee you that the fuckups of every intelligence agency we've been exposed to is only the tip of the iceberg; even where there is exposure, we very rarely have the full story. Even for WW2 intelligence stuff, we're still getting drips of what "really" happened in many cases.