Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.
It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.
Is SimpleFIN basically the same as something like Plaid? I thought it was maybe an open source thing, but it looks like you still need to sync your bank accounts to their system first?
I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
> In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.
I think trans people who "pass" can do whatever they want, and in practice it won't be an issue. I do support actual sex segregation in any area of life women will have no chance without it (like sports). The bathrooms thing is stupid, I agree.
> In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.
Every academic department already has really strong ideological litmus tests. It got way less intense with Trump's election, but it's still there. It's not subtle. You can be really good at what you do, but if you're religious or conservative you have no hope of getting a job in tons of fields. Sociology, for instance. It has nothing to do with how good you are at what you do, it's overt political testing. It was (in the case of many University of California schools, like Berkeley) actually the first line in hiring decisions.
> In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.
I think this is reasonable if there's an objective standard. "Doesn't support listed terrorist organizations" is a reasonable standard. The standard should be written in.
> In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.
"...in their capacity as university representatives...". So no, nobody loses his or her right to free speech. It's just that when you're acting as the mouthpiece of the University, you shouldn't be political if you want federal $. And I wholeheartedly support this. University presidents being political was a fucking disaster (see Reif at MIT).
I am affiliated and have been affiliated with several top universities, including the two in Cambridge, MA. I'm an academic. I say that because this stuff directly affects my career prospects.
It's too bad MIT has taken this stance. I think the Compact is overall an obviously reasonable, good-faith effort to improve universities in the United States. The one area I'd change a bit is the specific mention of "conservative" ideas:
"...purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
It's entirely fair because these universities do purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. But it's not what I'd want in such a document because next time around it could be "liberal" ideas, or "communist" ideas, or...
Everything else seems on the nose. I would hasten to remind you that the threat is not "we'll force you to do this stuff", it is "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff". Which seems fine to me. Much of the document is merely trying to actually enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It's a power grab that makes the university effectively subordinate to the federal government.
The most important part is the end: if the university violates the agreement, they not only lose funding, they also have to give back what they received the previous year. Such a clawback would be devastating, much worse than merely denying funding going forward. And who determines whether there's a violation? The Department of Justice apparently has sole power to make that determination. There's no mention of any appeals process or oversight.
That means that if the President has a compliant Attorney General, they can demand pretty much anything of the university under threat of finding them in violation, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong.
It could be a reasonable, good-faith effort if it were put forth by reasonable, good-faith people. But it very much was not.
The power grab started decades ago when a distinct minority of the US started to take over our universities by preferentially hiring and promoting those who share their ideology.
Trump is an attempt by the voters (most of whom do not share the ideology) to undo the power grab.
The purpose of a university is to expand knowledge, which is itself not a “conservative idea”.
A university that can’t “belittle” obviously false ideas like “the earth is flat” or “evolution isn’t real” or “the climate isn’t changing” just because they’re popular with whoever’s calling themselves “conservatives” at the time is not capable of functioning.
You’re picking out the quote that reveals the entire document for what it really is, and choosing to ignore it.
Can you imagine the conservatives at MIT (they are there!) being happy that MIT outsourced price-setting and hiring decisions to the White House?
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.
Compelled speech is a bright line the U.S. has, so far, managed not to cross. We should be trying as hard as we can not to cross that line.
You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.
Yes, to the extent that any violation of constitution injures me.
Forcing me to say things I don't want to say under threat of punishment violates first amendment. It's been litigated and so concluded.
The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
Do you think that, to use this site's language, it would be a 1A violation to create a rule under which
> students can be reported for merely expressing their opinions about controversial political and social issues of the day or even if they prefer not to express support for American political allies and wars they may not support
> The fact that it's the 1st amendment indicates that founding fathers thought that it is indeed the greatest injury us government can inflict on us citizens.
By that argument the greatest injury that they were addressing was a weak central government that couldn’t provide for the security and financing of the state. It’s literally called the first amendment because the Bill of Rights was an addendum to the constitution.
It’s the usual trick of writing something so that an uninterested reader assuming the common meaning of words will be completely nonplussed, but a lawyer or judge reading such a document adversarially will reach many unexpected conclusions.
"nonplussed" means "bewildered" or "really confused". Maybe you mean "not worried"?
If you mean "not worried", then yeah, I bet you're right that there are a bunch of things that could be entailed by the language that aren't obvious. Good point.
Keep up the pressure. Write to your representatives. Write and inform the public. Never think somebody else will do it for you. Vote for the right party.
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