TFA provides examples where private equity has been destructive in the healthcare sector:
> A 2024 Review of Financial Studies paper <https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474> found that private equity acquisition of nursing homes was associated with an ~10% increase in deaths, implying approximately 22,500 additional deaths over the twelve-year sample period.
I was asking for examples where private equity has made things better.
That you did is valuable criticism of my writing. When you get deep enough into "no, you're wrong", "no, you're wrong", it becomes virtually impossible to keep track of who's saying what, unless people actually state their claims explicitly… which I didn't.
Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs.
My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor.
Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a good chunk of university classes are 30-100 people paying for a single dude and a room with chairs to lecture for 5 hours a week. This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.
Right, so broadly the solution you're proposing is subsidies. University will be cheaper from the perspective of the student but we don't actually undergo any meaningful cost cutting it's just the money comes from somewhere else. I don't know about you but I don't think this actually solves the problem of the cost of university ballooning out of control and becoming unaffordable to almost every American if they had to pay for it with what was in their bank account.
I mean it can work so long as the government can bully the university into keeping a lid on the per student costs but large public universities have massive amounts of political capital to sell the cost increases to the government.
Forgive me, are you not proposing to roll these subsidies out everywhere? Because yeah, someone can afford their tuition on minimum wage if they get a full ride scholarship too but that's hardly a solution to the student loan crisis unless we're handing them out to all our undergrads.
My PhD program, in CS (top 20 school), for an American, was basically free back in the early 2000s. At times it seemed like there were more fellowships than students. I'm not sure if that has changed.
I feel like I maybe should've been more explicit about him having gone all the way from undergrad to a PhD was all paid for by being a line cook. Yeah, he didn't actually pay for his PhD program because he got a fellowship but that's also not really the point. He was still able to pay for the expensive part on what was barely over minimum wage for the time.
My CS PhD was not only free, I got a decent stipend, and that's still common, but it often depends on grant funding, which has been less stable lately.
I think this is the strongest disagreement I have gotten from someone who understands my point completely and agrees with it.
This is exactly why I'm saying that university can be made orders of magnitude less expensive is because the primary educational value you get which comes from professors lecturers, and TA's is not expensive at all. Everything else is negotiable and an opportunity to make cuts.
>"I thought Democrats were for bodily autonomy" (with regards to vaccine mandates/passports)
The liberal position on bodily autonomy (and indeed most things) has never been absolute. If an action is likely to cause harm to others (and forgoing a vaccine in the midst of a deadly pandemic is indeed likely to cause harm to others), then reasonable action to curtail the harm is justified. As recently as the 2010s, both parties supported vaccine mandates. I remember conservatives making fun of the antivax movement as liberal lunacy as recently as 2019.
>"I thought liberals were for free speech" (with regards to cancel culture).
Cancel culture is itself a form of free expression and association.
How do you answer questions like "how are other people getting their work done on Windows?" How much leverage do you expect the average white collar worker to have?
Q clearance isn’t “far above top secret.” It’s TS plus Nuclear Weapons Information. The background investigation is exactly the same as TS and almost everyone that works at a DOE lab gets one: almost 100,000 people have access. It requires no polygraph like SCI and higher clearances.
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