bananon

A local university has gone full austerity mode in the last two years, firing staff, forcing their work onto others, reducing department budgets, all the while hiring more executives and middle managers. This has pissed off pretty much all of its faculty, from adjuncts to department heads. Now Texas may be a right to work state, but these profs are in a unique position where a lot of them has tenure and the university will have a difficult time firing them, which is why they’ve opted to making conditions worse so that the profs will quit themselves. The remaining faculty wants to do something besides sending anonymous complaints that get ignored, but they’re floundering. Is there a union/adjacent org that they can turn to for guidance?

Need an obscure book that’s not on the go-to sites and I’m not paying 60 bucks lol

Just broke my wrist, and it takes me like 10x as long to type anything. I had been looking into written alternatives for a while, and this blew me over the edge. I like the Remarkable 2, but I don't think I can justify that much on a device that can only read and write documents without trying one out first. The other option people keep recommending to me is an ipad. I don't have one of those either, but I've used one with a paper screen so at least I know how that feels. My biggest problem with the ipad is the opposite of the Remarkable, there are too many apps and I have no idea which to use. So what apps do you use, if any, or do you use another thing entirely?

Mark Twain once said that God invented war so Americans would learn geography. Evidently, God didn’t try hard enough.

I thought about this yesterday when I was trying to explain the difference between socialism and communism. Even such a simple question requires so much foundational information. I couldn't just say they were different stages of society, because communism is really more a vector of transformation for societies, and to even understand how these societies transform you have to understand dialectical and historical materialism. So I'm revising my post to explain what a dialectic is and I realize I'm already in my third paragraph. Not only is no layman going to read this because its just boring philosophy mumbo jumbo, but I've wasted the last 20 minutes writing out this thing that I eventually just end up deleting anyway.

What we need is a streamlined way of propagating theory for a new online age. The Communist Manifesto was supposed to be the quick and dirty version of theory to propagate, but people don't even read 10 pages anymore. What we need are children's book versions of these ideas, summarized in an easily spreadable copypasta format. Not only do they have to be simple and succinct, but entertaining as well. Getting someone hooked has never been harder, because with so much information at our fingertips, its never been easier to ignore it.

I also think they should be modular, rather than longer masterposts. Someone who asks a simple question shouldn't have to read an entire essay, but if the question requires it we should be able to plug-and-play with additional information. This is the hard part, having separate copypastas for each topic that can work with each other while still being understandable independently. It's hard, but I think its necessary in order to bring editing down to a minimum and increase spreadability as much as possible.

Edit: oh cool I got featured lol

link to whole thread

Honestly by the end of this their struggle session might give us a run for our money. Currently at 8 upvotes and 110 comments. OP is also a new account who has only posted this and in r/Taiwan. Grab your popcorn folks, this one’s juicy.

EDIT: The cowards locked it.