Like, I knew of the us higher education industrial complex and how shitty it was. I assumed it was normal shitty, like everything else in this country.

Chat, I just had to pay 60 American dollars to rent a PDF and even once I resigned myself to pay I had to:

• create an account in Macmillan's shit website, which involved rejecting cookies like five times
• Enter my address, which was required but also the address field was not working so I had to start over several times and on different browsers. For a PDF. That I paid $60 so they would email me the "access" link
• Wait for them to email me the link, which took hours. For an automated email to a link to a PDF file
• Find that the link is actually to create a new account on a third party application.
• Get a message that the link expired (it was just sent??) and request a new link.
• Create the stupid account to finally be able to click on a link to open a PDF file on my browser.
• But what if I need to read this literally anywhere else? Well I'll just click the link to "read offline"
• Which has me scan a QR code to download an app on my phone, which also requires an account
• I don't see a way to actually read this on my e-reader?? Offline?? In what world is "read offline" the same as "read on your phone with Internet access"

I fucking hope my professor is getting Macmillan kickbacks because there's literally no other explanation for this

No the professor probably hates this nearly as much. A sort of cartel of book publishers and database owners hold universities hostage: they just kind of dictate what the schools will do and how they will pay. If they don't pay, they lose access to where all the useful research is (and that research is kept within the databases because the same people own the business ends of journals for the most part). If a university wants to try to open things up they have to be, like, MIT. Everyone else is stuck

What I know most intimately is LMS, learning management systems. The oldest and most ubiquitous will outright blame on-campus personnel for their mistakes, in front of those personnel. I've seen it happen; hell, I'm why it happened. I'm the one who asked why the system didn't do what it says it does.

And what are you doing to do? Not have a platform for online classes? Switch? You or got the Identical Service that Didn't Form an Agreement with the Competition Your Honor, We Just Stagnated at Exactly the Same Time. You've got Startup Scraping Student Grades for Smart Management Systems. You've got The One You Already Have but New(tm).

The capitalist takeover of the university system isn't because professors ignore book prices or get kick backs from digital reader companies. It's because the management class is all MBA jackasses who've never taught a class in their lives creating deal after deal to lock their landlord scams into certain financial vectors to siphon money out of the government and the students.

I am a professor (well, that has a specific advanced rank where I'm from rather than anything else, but I fit the US job description).

I wish everyone who sees this thread and thinks "mood" to know this link and use it with our collective blessing:

My entire life, the International Space Station has been a Thing. It started out as a vision of the future of human spaceflight: Space Station Alpha! Vast and luxurious compared to Skylab or Mir! Look at the size of its PV arrays! Think of the science that will be done! Look at these gorgeous space paintings with shuttles docking like it's your average airport terminal!

Was a bit worrying in the early '90s, but by '98 the first module was going up. All throughout the '00s I looked forward to another piece of the puzzle being added. And Science was most definitely done!

It's so normal to think about having a permanently habited presence in space, albeit in low Earth orbit, sure, but it was more than just a quick two-week stint the shuttles would do. Mir set some endurance records, but it eventually said hello to the South Pacific. The ISS was it.

But by 2030, it will also go into The Drink. I guess the expectation is we will have Moon bases by then. I had faith in that in 2010; now I'm not so sure.

If SpaceX flops the Lunar contract, NASA's only option at off world human habitation will be Gateway, the planned way station between the Lunar surface and space, and that's not meant to be a permanently crewed spacecraft. I feel like this is a real risk, that ironically in the end it turned out that COTS opened another spaceflight dark age like what happened when Apollo ended, and NASA sorta coasted aimlessly in LEO while trying to get the shuttle online.

animal liberation is a form of applied anarchist principles.

putting yourself in a position where you decide over the life and death of another sentient being is imposing an unjust hierarchy. the moment you assume this position of power over them, you lose a lot of your ability to empathize with their life and their needs.

you are not going to be able to view another sentient being as your comrade in our shared striving for a peaceful existence if you think of their body as something that can serve you.

I was talking to an art director and realized that a big part of the draw of generative AI for certain people is not what it makes but how they can treat it. Endless revisions, no clear goals, last minute changes, no pushback and no taste of their own to question the user's vision. They don't care that what they get out is bad (and honestly they probably can't tell anyway), they care that here's a machine that works the way they think artists should work - as extensions of their own will.