pixodaros

I don't know where he lives, but I am Canadian so I find it laughable that someone with a few-week bootcamp and a few years of on-the-job coding experience can call himself an engineer in the USA. In Canada "engineer" is a title with serious requirements and responsibilities. I don't see the Bay Area coder crowd rushing to take responsibilities like "if the bridge I design falls, I can be sued and/or lose my license."

Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or Google services, but only Google staffers know exactly how the search algorithm works.

A few years ago they upranked all results on a few trusted domains, so many of those domains filled up with advertising and cheap copywritten content. They framed this as 'fighting misinformation.'

One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week, but easy to post about what you read lots of angry or scary posts about. People who post a lot also tend to have trouble finding useful things to do in their offline life. It is very unusual that he managed to be both a psychiatrist and a prolific blogger and he quit the psychiatry job before he had children or other care responsibilities.

In any serious engineering operation, a failure like this is time to shut down everything and redesign until the same failure cannot happen. We all read Feynman's essay on Challenger right? But these companies want credit when their products work as advertised, but push the blame on users when they emit plausible lies or demonic advice. Taken too far that leads the police walking into HQ, arresting the board of directors, and selling the company for scrap. Just as often that leads to strict regulation so you can't be a cowboy coder or turn any loft into a sweatshop any more.

No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?

Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).

This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.

I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!

None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.

AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.

My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.

A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but people on this site know how often the cool new thing turns out to be a time bomb.

You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient for digital art. But a lot of bosses are convinced that if their staff don't find these tools useful for their tasks, its the line workers who are wrong.

I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads