I worked as an Econ professor and visiting academic in top Business Schools in Latin America and the East Coast (USA), and I can tell you that Business Schools make A LOT of money. They charge whatever they want and people (in most cases, their employers) pay them. In many cases Business Schools can amount up to 40/50% of the universities' revenue. That is also why business professors are paid a lot more. I personally know people at London Business School making more than £ 200,000 a year. Salaries at INSEAD are very similar as well. Of course, salaries at top US Business Schools are even higher.

My point is that you cannot run a business where one or two products make money and the remaining 90% bleed it. That is, if you want to run it as a business and attract talent and pay nice wages. If you want to run universities as some type of public good, then good luck. Pay everybody the same and offer as many degrees as you'd like. Good luck hiring competent people...

This is quite a bizarre statement, since universities have been run as a public good for centuries. The idea that they should be profitable businesses is relatively recent. I doubt that the classicists at Magdalen college have ever turned a profit over the centuries, but that doesn't mean that they had trouble recruiting competent people.

That things worked in a certain way for centuries means nothing. Humanities academics are easy to hire, they are many, many PhD graduates, and very few open positions. Also, they make more money in academia than they make in industry. With not money outside options, it is easy to fill those roles.

I'm not suggesting cutting all funding, I think they do provide value in society. However, they shouldn't be demanding salaries that they cannot produce themselves. The fact that Business School professors (as an example, the same could be said by CS professors) make a lot more, doesn't mean that Humanities professor should make the same.

Also, having governments fund most of their budget has many risks. It is very hard for it not to become political and a tool for those in power.

Lots of people demand 'salaries that they cannot produce themselves'. For example, soldiers, nurses, firefighters, etc. etc. I'm not sure why you have it in for academics specifically.

Universities in the UK and many other countries have been heavily subsidised by governments for a long time. In general this does not seem to result in universities becoming a tool for those in power. Quite the opposite in many cases.

Soldiers, and defense in general, are part of the main things a government should provide (we can discuss how much, but that is another discussion).

I am not sure why you say nurses cannot produce salaries. Nurses work in the private sector and provide substantial value.

I do not have it in for academics specifically. In fact, I used to be one. What I am saying is that they are mostly disposable and think of themselves as some superior value.

In the UK in particular, education used to be tuition-free. Now they are running more as a business. I do not see the point of forcing subsidies on people who produce something that not even other academics are interested in. You are basically paying people to sit in a room and discuss something by themselves. Why does a minimum wage worker have to subsidies that? We are all getting hit by inflation, some more than others. Academia is a job with zero risk involved. I don't think it is fair to keep subsidising the dream of a few while having so many better uses for the money, or even reducing the tax burden on society.

[0] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/ac...

>Soldiers, and defense in general, are part of the main things a government should provide

So is education. All developed countries spend public money on education.

>In the UK in particular, education used to be tuition-free.

That is my point. There are abundant historical examples of how a thriving university sector can be maintained without each department needing to be run as its own business.

>You are basically paying people to sit in a room and discuss something by themselves. Why does a minimum wage worker have to subsidies that?

In the UK? In the UK a minimum wage worker pays hardly any tax, so they don't subsidise much of anything. If the question is why society should subsidise that, my answer would be that it should do so if it values historical knowledge (assuming that we're still talking about history PhDs). If you are just saying "history sucks, so let's not spend money training people to be historians", then sure, that is a coherent position.

It is the universal measure of how useful your research is. How do you measure it otherwise? Research is useful if somebody else uses it. Most research in humanities has no use. I'm not against humanities per se, the same could be said about biology, for example. I'm against forcing people to pay very high wages for doing nothing of value. Because, let's face it, academics actually make very decent wages for the zero-risk job they have.

> So is education. All developed countries spend public money on education.

I don't see university-level education as a fundamental aspect of government spending, at least not in its current form. Also, the fact that everybody does it means nothing.

> In the UK? In the UK a minimum wage worker pays hardly any tax, so they don't subsidise much of anything. If the question is why society should subsidise that, my answer would be that it should do so if it values historical knowledge (assuming that we're still talking about history PhDs). If you are just saying "history sucks, so let's not spend money training people to be historians", then sure, that is a coherent position.

'Hardly any tax' is quite a bold statement. You are clearly not on minimum wage. Try living in London on £1,300 a month. Even if they 'only' pay 20%, there is also a 20% VAT on everything they spend.

The fact that almost all governments of developed countries subsidize their university sectors means that the burden of argument lies squarely on those who think that they should not. I understand that you’re one of those people. However, I disagree, and you’ve given no argument in support of that aspect of your position.

Take the example of historical research. Either you want a society which knows its own history of you don’t. You can’t put a price on that. To try to reduce the value of such research to citation numbers or some kind of financial measure is just nonsense.

You keep talking about how things have been historically. Things can change, and historically not everything was done correctly.

> Either you want a society which knows its own history of you don’t.

You don't need hundreds or thousand of History PhDs for that.

There is no point on people studying things nobody cares and nobody will ever care about. If your work never gets used, why force a subsidy on it? Do it with your own means if you like. Or accept the fact that you will have to do it for a very low wage no matter how many PhDs you have.

You seem unable to defend your position other that 'historically it's been this way' and 'unmeasurable value'. There is no point in keeping going with this discussion.

University outputs seem to be comparable in this sense.

The patent for Gatorade alone has brought in probably 100 million to U of Florida.

In one of the universities I worked at they had a four-year long History undergraduate degree. Between 5 and 10 students chose it each year (the entire university has around 5,000 students, give or take). That means that there are around 30 students combined. For these 30 students, there were more than 40 full time academics! There are more professors than students. All this is possible because they had 2,000 undergraduate business students, and 1,000 business postgraduate students paying 3x or 4x what a History student paid in tuition fees. I know this might be an extreme case, but it is not that rare. You cannot run a sustainable business like that. Of course History professors made a lot less than their business counterparts, and they complained a lot.

The success of this basic research feeds back into society with substantially increased tax revenue and reputation to attract the best minds in the world.

I would love to see a source on that, particularly the tax revenue increase and return on investment.

I think it is wrong to fund so many researchers that contribute almost nothing to society with tax payers money. Why force minimum wage workers to give part of their income for academics to sit around and think about something that will probably have zero to no impact, while risking nothing. Let's face it, most academics accomplish nothing and have no impact whatsoever with their research. And I am saying this as an Econ researcher. I believe I contributed nothing to research in Economics while working in academia for 30 years. If I had any contribution whatsoever, it was either by teaching or by my consulting jobs.

Of course a PhD is not the best decision if you are only looking at optimising your path to industry. However, during my PhD I had a fantastic time. I studied what I wanted to, I had a lot of free time to develop any skill I wanted to.

It was also very useful to jump start my career. Instead of having to work for X years until o reach a certain position, I was able to go straight into a high paying job.

I came from a poor and rural part of South America. For me, the PhD was the best and easiest path to getting a top paying job in the US. I'm not saying this is for everyone, but it can be a very nice choice for a career in industry. I even met PhDs from low ranked universities during my career.

Same. And I would say that the PhD "rapidly" forced me to learn to take on large, ambiguous projects and see them from conception to completion. This was, by far, the most valuable result of the experience. Anecdotally, this seems like a rare skill, even in tech -- though it is not necessarily as recognized as it should be.

I put "rapidly" in quotes up there because if I have one piece of advice to PhD students, it's to get the hell out of grad school as soon as you can. Like the parent, I had fun exploring my interests, and it was a period of intellectual freedom that most people never get. I relish that time, but I also regret the costs. I was idealistic and unwilling to compromise my personal goals, which ended up delaying everything. If I could go back and do it over, I'd be more mercenary about finding an already successful collaborative project, contributing a little bit, and getting out. Grad school is a job -- a particularly abusive, low-reward job -- and the only goal is to finish. You get no trophies for knowing more stuff at the end, and spending time gratifying your curiosity or being a perfectionist might seem appealing ("why would I be putting myself through this if I weren't going to indulge my intellect?"), but it's ultimately a trap.

(Unfortunately, the nature of grad school is that nobody who is pre-disposed to wander aimlessly will listen to my advice, while those who understand what I'm saying probably just think I'm stating the obvious.)

I feel the same in many ways. I went into the PhD without a specific project and it was extremely complex. I was fortunate enough work in a theory heavy field, but had friends with more data-related interests. They had a really hard time finding data. Unless you are in top places in the US, data is almost impossible to get.

I highly recommend project PhDs (if you want to choose the PhD route), which are the norm in Europe/UK. You can choose very good universities in cheap cities and have some great 3/4 years. Travelling in Europe is quite cheap, food is cheap enough.

This estimates are for 2021, would like to see what they are now. They probably change the picture a bit.

Don't kid yourself thinking that the EU is a special place that is somewhat exempt of any of this.

The larger point of EU workers having more rights is, on average, very true. The US (and China and Russia) treats their workers very poorly by comparison.

There are limits though.

You have a 3 months period where you can stay in another UE country then the national authorities can ask for your leaving. There are statuses that allows you to stay longer (work, studies, retirement, etc.) but those statuses have requirements and obligations. You can't take your tent, set it up somewhere in another country and declare you live there without some fiscal authorities coming for you at some point.

If I understand correctly you are free to move from and to any states (notwithstanding court orders) in the US .

The only 'requirement' is that the government (may) want to see you can provide for yourself in the form of capital, a job, a retirement pension, etc. This is because most countries in the EU have a social safety net, and some have a very strong one. Without this rule the countries with the most generous social security would see mass immigration from rent seekers with no recourse.

The USA doesn't need this rule because it lacks the strong social security.

Whilst it's great to make generic EU vs. US statements the EU(/EEA) is still ~30 different sovereign nations with their own citizenships.

I'm not so much saying you're wrong as afraid you're right, do you have sources ?

> People who are employed in another EU country are entitled to live there. Jobseekers are also allowed to stay in another country while they are looking for a job. (See the right to look for a job)

> The host country may require them, as "EU migrant workers", to register with the authorities as residents. (See Directive 2004/38/EC)

> Other legal and administrative formalities depend on the length of stay – up to 3 months, more than 3 months, or permanent.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...

> Still looking for a job after 6 months

> […]

> Can you be deported or asked to leave?

> Your host country can ask you to leave if you can't prove that you have a realistic chance of finding work there.

> In exceptional cases, your host country can deport you on grounds of public policy, public security, or public health - but only if it can prove you pose a serious threat.

> The deportation decision or request to leave must be given to you in writing. It must state all the reasons for your deportation and specify how you can appeal and by when.

I couldn’t register in Finland as an EU citizen (when I was one) without an employment contract or proof of self sufficiency. You have three months from arriving to register. It's true that if you don’t you're unlikely to be actively tracked down - but good luck trying to achieve anything here without that registration.

[1] I.e. with a government body responsible for enforcing immigration. It is likely that you would be asked to register to be on the electoral register at the house you are living in. This is not really the equivalent, I am talking about going to the Immigration authority of the country with your passport and papers.

Yes, in addition to alibarber reporting their experiences in Finland, the same is true for EU citizens in Denmark: https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Residence-...

Where you see that you can stay in Denmark provided you're a worker at a Danish company, a student, a self-employed person, have sufficient funds or are from another Nordic country.

So this is very much up to the EU country and Denmark really doesn't want to have people moving there (and the rules for non-EU citizens are even more restrictive).

So in general the EU freedom of movement is "freedom of movement of workers", not just anyone.

Exactly. For Americans (and other) readers there are four freedoms in the single EU market: free movement of goods, capital, services, and workers, known collectively as the "four freedoms".

People and workers may/are often used interchangeably but in laws it is about worker's freedom to move between borders, not people.

I think it's an interesting difference with the united states which is older than the EU but younger than Europe. It also highlights that in law, in modern Europe, capital goods, services and workers have rights to cross borders while the US American citizens are free to cross state borders.

Strangely those laws are all about workers and the market but nevertheless and contrary to the US most EU countries still have a much better social security net (for people) than "neoliberalcapitalisticmoneyhungryonly" US which has freedom at its core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market#People

> Since its foundation, the Treaties sought to enable people to pursue their life goals in any country through free movement.[122] Reflecting the economic nature of the project, the European Community originally focused upon free movement of workers: as a "factor of production".[123] However, from the 1970s, this focus shifted towards developing a more "social" Europe.[124] Free movement was increasingly based on "citizenship", so that people had rights to empower them to become economically and socially active, rather than economic activity being a precondition for rights. This means the basic "worker" rights in TFEU article 45 function as a specific expression of the general rights of citizens in TFEU articles 18 to 21. According to the Court of Justice, a "worker" is anybody who is economically active, which includes everyone in an employment relationship, "under the direction of another person" for "remuneration".[125] A job, however, need not be paid in money for someone to be protected as a worker. For example, in Steymann v Staatssecretaris van Justitie, a German man claimed the right to residence in the Netherlands, while he volunteered plumbing and household duties in the Bhagwan community, which provided for everyone's material needs irrespective of their contributions.[126] The Court of Justice held that Mr Steymann was entitled to stay, so long as there was at least an "indirect quid pro quo" for the work he did. Having "worker" status means protection against all forms of discrimination by governments, and employers, in access to employment, tax, and social security rights. By contrast a citizen, who is "any person having the nationality of a Member State" (TFEU article 20(1)), has rights to seek work, vote in local and European elections, but more restricted rights to claim social security.[127] In practice, free movement has become politically contentious as nationalist political parties appear to have utilised concerns about immigrants taking jobs and benefits.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...

This is part of the FAQ/information forms when asking for information about moving in a EU country for EU citizens.

As an EU citizen, you have the right to move to any EU country for a period of up to 3 months as long as you have a valid identity card or passport. If you want to settle in another EU country but you have no intention to take up any work or education there, you need to prove that you:

    have sufficient resources for you and your family during the time you want to stay in your new country

    have comprehensive health insurance

During the first 3 months of your stay in your new country, as an EU citizen, you cannot be required to apply for a residence document confirming your right to live there - although in some countries you may have to report your presence upon arrival.

After 3 months in your new country, you may be required to register your residence with the relevant authority (often the town hall or local police station), and to be issued with a registration certificate.

You will need a valid identity card or passport and:

    proof of comprehensive health insurance

    proof you can support yourself without needing social assistance benefits: resources may come from any source, including from a third person.

You may live in the other EU country as long as you continue to meet the conditions for residence. If you no longer do so, the national authorities may require you to leave.

There's probably not a great incentive chasing down and expelling other EU nationals unless they are actually causing trouble or breaking other laws.

Maybe on paper. I wonder how much this is used.

The only time I remember this being used in practice, is when Sarkozy ordered the deportation of ~100 Romanian Romanies back to Romania, as part of his attempt to siphon far right votes.[1]

Apart from these few political stunts, I doubt this is often used.

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/toute-l-actu-en-bref/la-france-...

I think as general rule of thumb for all intents and purposes it becomes a problem when you don't have money (or do criminal stuff).

> You may live in the other EU country as long as you continue to meet the conditions for residence. If you no longer do so, the national authorities may require you to leave.

> In exceptional cases, your host country can deport you on grounds of public policy or public security - but only if it can prove you represent a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society.

> The deportation decision or the request to leave must be given to you in writing. It must state all the reasons for your deportation and specify how you can appeal and by when.

Can you do that within any one single country? In Germany I have to register within 4 weeks of moving anywhere, it has to be a place that is registered as residential zone and you need an owner-ship or rental agreement certificate (even when living with your parents). Nothing of that is about your citizenship, so what does it have to do with another country?

I don't think so, this would be surprising.

> Nothing of that is about your citizenship, so what does it have to do with another country?

I am sorry I don't understand this point.

> In Germany I have to register within 4 weeks of moving anywhere, it has to be a place that is registered as residential zone and you need an owner-ship or rental agreement certificate (even when living with your parents).

For the record, in Belgium, when moving to a different administrative territory (for lack of a better word, think cities, small territories) you have to register to your new town hall and a police officer will check you actually moved in.

But if you are homeless and still have a social net the social worker can register a public place as your contact address so you keep your rights and their benefits.

Obviously you would have to pay taxes. Or I miss the point about fiscal authorities finding you.

And the US is a big country. You can work in CA which has unemployment insurance, cheap healthcare coverage, plenty of worker protections, etc.

It is rather laughable looking at the lives of many citizens even in richer countries, though.

Those in power who commit crimes will usually never spend a single day in prison, and when they exceptionally do they get built a special-purpose luxury cell which has nothing to do with prison. The rest of us get tortured and imprisoned because of fake police testimonies.

The situation is not as bad here in France as it is in Belarus/China/USA/Colombia, but it's certainly not as good as human rights declaration imply. If only human rights declarations were respected, then we would have a decent life and nobody would struggle for basic survival (food & housing). Unfortunately, we all know how it goes in the 5th richest nation in the world with 10% of the population living under the poverty line.

It's not like Poland and Hungary are doing so without any kind of repercussions from EU.

They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.

But enough of that, let's look at whether they decided this "for reasons other than technical". A lot of the features (the FaceTime image processing, the dictation and speech stuff, etc.) seem like the kind of thing that was built against their Neural Engine. Intel CPUs don't have custom circuitry for running neural nets, let alone an API that is congruent with Apple's. It makes sense that computers with certain advanced hardware are going to get features that other computers without equivalent hardware can't support.

This is not true. The reasons are technical.

I don't understand why people think they have some special right to tell Apple how to handle their business and demand a direction for their platform. There are plenty of choices in the world, Apple is not a monopoly in the smartphone world, and by far.

75% of the world uses Android [0]. Technology offers a lot of choice. If you don't like the Apple ecosystem, don't develop for iOS or buy an iPhone, pretty simple.

[0]https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Edit: I misunderstood what OP meant by ‘our software’. I was talking about iOS, not the software you develop for iOS/iPadOS

In the sense of your app they don’t. But you play by their rules. If you don’t want Apple deciding things on your software, don’t develop for iOS, it’s simple.

> We must keep in mind the lessons: Inferring cause and making predictions are different tasks.

Models that are causally incorrect can make better predictions than those that are causally correct. Yes, it's a paradox.

https://www.bradyneal.com/causal-inference-course

(These titles are from memory bc I am typing with one hand as I hold a sleeping infant with the other.)

- taddy, et al “deep IV”.

- Greg Lewis at Microsoft research has work here too... the title of that paper I cannot remember.

- Farrell, Liang and Misra, “neural networks for estimation and inference” (econometrica 2021)

- For non neural network based ml informed approaches to causal inference, victor chernozhukov, alexandre Belloni and Christian Hansen have a long series of papers going back to 2011 (sometimes with other coauthors) which are generally based on the LASSO in settings with many instrumental variables.

- chernozhukov, demirer, duflo, et al have a paper on “double machine learning” which is relevant. I think there is relevant work in biostat by Jamie Robins, but that is not my field.

- athey, imbens and wager have papers on random forest based approaches - at least one is in JASA. Might be called “causal forests” ?

- since economists frequently estimate in the GMM (generalIzed method of moments, not Gaussian mixture model) framework, there is some recent work by... Kallus (?) on formulating GMM as an adversarial game. Greg lewis and V. Syrgkanis have also worked on this problem but the title of the paper escapes me.

I would like to teach this material myself so there will one day be a class (inshallah) but so far have not had time to organize it yet!

If you every make a class out of it, please post it here!

I haven't found any CS curriculum that teaches causal inference in any way (maybe in optional courses, but that misses the point) and I think that it is a huge mistake. Causality is more important than simple prediction.

I don't understand why CS people escape causality in most courses, not even mentioning it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-0218-x