Posted to the wrong comment, whoops
Thrashy
joined 2 years ago
Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.
You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.
None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reputation as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.
I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…
In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.
A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can't afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products... and that's fine in the short term, but as you mention it's going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.
That’s a strategy as old as Reconstruction, utilizing an antidemocratic compromise baked into the Constitution by slavers who didn’t want the anti-slavery popular vote to have the power to take away their chattel. The brain trust behind Trump’s win aren’t especially clever. They’re just the latest schmucks to be soulless and hollow enough to fully embrace that hate-filled lowest common denominator, half a century after the last bunch finally got pushed out of power.
My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.
Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.
(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)
Well then I hope I can have your vote, because my platform will be to use the sweeping new executive powers carved out by the current administration to throw every member of said administration along with every employee of ICE ERO into the “unextraditable foreign gulag detention” black hole, and only then work with Congress and the courts to make that impossible again.
Still is, at least to an extent. Bought a house 10 years ago for $110k, and while I’ve paid down about $30k of that between my modest down payment and 10 years of mortgage payments, the house has appreciated ~2x, meaning that I could potentially bring a $100k down payment to a new property. Even with everything else appreciating in the meantime, that makes viable many more options than I would have had if those mortgage payments had been rent checks.
In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.
DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.
Got a reference? Pro-UBI and anti-billionaire as I am, I’ve done the math and I don’t think that checks out. Meaningful UBI has an annual price tag in the trillions, and even if you assume 90%+ top bracket tax rates there aren’t enough billionaires in the US to foot that bill. Other programs would have be discontinued and/or rolled in, and tax rates increased across the board.
Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.
For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.