• he/him

guy who was too into deus ex


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

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



calliope
@calliope

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.


krveale
@krveale

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:



wing
@wing

STANCE is fucked we need money to continue to exist

Short version: our annual fundraiser brought in half our goal and we had to cancel a concert at a large venue because of COVID and we're barely holding on financially. If we don't make this fundraising goal STANCE will collapse in two months. If we don't smash this goal we won't make it to our next annual fundraiser.

I've seen the numbers (note: I'm on the board) and they are bad. Like real bad. Like we were already struggling because 2024 donation numbers are lower than usual and then bam we lost several thousand dollars because of a cancelled concert.

The thing is we don't have access to the thing most choruses outside the extremely small community level have to survive: middle aged to old rich cishet white people. (And South and East Asian people I guess since we're in Seattle.) We're a bunch of trans people. Some stupid high number of us have been disowned by our families and/or fired from jobs when we came out. We don't have the networks to get the big donors that sip wine at fundraisers and then drop a 5k matching donation for naming a thing.

CW HEY GONNA TALK ABOUT SUICIDE IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS

So we get to do the "hey we need some mutual aid so we don't get evicted" thing now which is like, totally on brand for a bunch of trans artists. And the thing is like, STANCE keeps trans people alive. Literally. The number of trans people who stopped trying to kill themselves because STANCE exists is positive. So that's also on brand for "hey we need some mutual aid so we don't get evicted" I guess.

Anyway, if you have money we could use it. If you know someone who is like wow I have these hundred dollar bills and wish I could make the world less shitty for trans people send them our way. We're also happy to sell out to stop have to worry about existing so like, a Microsoft sponsorship or something is also great if you have hookups to that. Tell them it's more cost effective to fund things that keep trans people from wanting to kill themselves than just funding suicide hotlines.

OKAY CW DONE

ALSO POST IS DONE I GUESS

MEOW