“Besides administrators and sports programs, glamorous campus amenities and affirmative action admittees.”
Is affirmative action really that expensive?
I believe in funding affirmative action but yes it is expensive, the university accepts the students into the school and covers much of the cost of their housing and tuition. The actual cost isn't $60,000 per year like the sticker price says, but it is certainly around $8,000-12,000 in operational costs.
And who gets to define "racism"? If I defend my company's policy of only accepting resumes from coding boot camp graduates if they're a woman, Black, or Latin is that racist or sexist? How about if I criticize these policies? I know plenty of people that would call the former racist and also a good number of people that would say the same of the latter.
The US government gets to define racism, if legal requirements to employ a precisely calibrated ratio of whites, women, blacks, and latinos are any guide. This is America, after all, and that’s what freedom means.
The fact of the matter is that, broadly speaking, basic programming is a suite of cognitive processes that pretty much all come online at the same, reasonably above-average IQ, and they are irreducibly complex; they cannot be further simplified except by rote execution of formal process, at which point you should just let the computer handle it.
That's a pretty bold assertion. Or maybe your understanding of "basic" programming is much more advanced than necessary. I'd consider writing a slightly complex ruleset for filtering e-mail "basic" programming. I don't think that "Put that mail in this folder if the subject contains A unless it's from Jack, then put it in the Jack-Folder" a skill that only comes online at an above-average IQ.
I think one of the best newer success stories here is another thing that, like "filters" and "spreadsheets", doesn't even call itself "programming". The Android app Tasker [0] is a "total automation" tool with over a million installs.
>In a more humane age, they were housed in asylums.
Then Reagan happened.
No, the ACLU happened. Because of their efforts, it's much more difficult today to involuntarily commit someone to an institution who thinks that aliens are controlling their digestive system.
That's not to say that state governments weren't happy to empty out and shut down their mental institutions, however.
Actually, Big Pharma happened. And it was the left who argued that asylums were inhumane, more than the right arguing that it was too expensive. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was a real agent of change in how people thought about the problem as well.
It's not fear. It's experience. Having to keep an extra OS and software patched and up-to-date (often times different to the rest of your SoE because it's different software) and keep it safe from real-world threats takes a lot of time and context-switching to do well.
Hosting anything well takes up a lot more effort than the $100+/month we pay to GitHub and even the $7/month I pay personally.
