I recently moved to a rural home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

I socialize with a bunch of current and former college professors, and they've all remarked on this phenomenon for nearby UVA and Virginia Tech. Interestingly, the one university in the area that is not impacted is the Christian fundamentalist Liberty University. The demographic that attends that school come from a high birth rate subculture. BYU is also not having an issue.

In fact, Liberty has had to expand. I'm not a fan of religious education, but I also think that ALL university tuitions are vastly overpriced to fund the absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators. This includes my alma mater Virginia Tech.

Depends on which administrators you're talking about. The army of staff at my Tier 1.5 university make about $60-90k in an MCOL area. High-level admins make more, of course, but there's not an army of them! There's really only 1-2 "highly" paid people making >$120,000 in the whole IT department.

I'm not sure which other universities have "absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators".

Brown University has 1 administrator for every 2 students.

This is a widely known and discussed phenomenon and is actually a running joke here in the comments.

Honestly, I'm shocked that you're unaware of this, to a degree where you're calling my comment out. I don't know what your news sources are, but they're not keeping you informed.

The "army" part largely resonates with me - I understand that universities have very high staff ratios. I even tried to openly acknowledge that in my response! I specifically used your language in my words: "the army of staff at my tier 1.5 university".

But whats the median pay for those staff members? I’m mainly arguing the “absurdly overpaid” part of the “army of absurdly overpaid admins” claim. Myself and many coworkers in this IT department have left high-pressure 60-80 hour/week jobs in tech / consulting / etc. We took a ~40% paycut (and reduction in benefits! my health insurance is very poor) in exchange for a much more relaxed environment. I was making $140,000 before this, but now I'm making $80,000 - and I'm one of the more highly-paid people in my department.

Nonsense?

Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.

If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.

You just made a massive non sequitur. The government does have waste, as does any large organization, including in the private sector. Whether or not DOGE saved money needs an independent analysis, not numbers which DOGE itself produces.

Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.

Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.

Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...

After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.

Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.

I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.

I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).

I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).

You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.

My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.

I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.

Nonsense in how they approached things. Clinton-era we had govt. cut backs all over the place. It was done according to a plan and according to the law.

This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.

You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

It's juvenile and silly and screams "midwit overly absorbed into political news."

Enjoy your unearned moral superiority. It's a thin blanket against the cold wind of mediocrity, but you do you.

In 2026, if you're genuinely unaware of his white supremacist opinions, perhaps you need to be more absorbed into [sic] political news.

He's alluded to thinking that Asians and Indians are "better" on some metrics so supremacy still seems a bit sensationalist. He certainly doesn't think all races are equal.

The man is officially a dear friend of Israel, he has never defended Hitler, he indeed supports the German far right party, his chatbot had an alignment issue that has been patched within 16 hours.

What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.

I know you are not to be listened to when you dare say "innocent hand gesture made once", when he very clearly made it twice in a row; front, turn and repeat: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/R_6dVlz6mug

That is there, recorded, and you are telling me to ignore what I see.

I know you won't care, this video is not for you, is there in case anyone else starts to belive your lies, they can see for themselves.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then we have to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with a duck.

To me it looks like Musk is overly concerned about discrimination against whites as well as woke ideology, also out of personal experience with his child.

The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.

Wrong.

Hasn't changed the behavior of a single developer on my team.

Not really where I am.

> They should.

Why? Didn't you just claim in your other comment that price will skyrocket on these? Why would a company pay for it then?

> We should hope for extreme levels of competition.

We have them. There are also open weight models.

...the rest is just crazy talk.

My 1st guess is that they made Ribentrop-Molotov deal last year in Alaska. 2nd guess he is drunk on power and inpunity. Or maybe both.

The stupidest answer is the most likely one. Occam's Kazoo.

The goal seems to be to create essentially the geopolitics of 1984 (the Orwell novel, not the historical year), with the superstates of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia replaced (for now) with three imperial zones of influence whose metropoles are the US, Russia, and China (this is the real substance of the “Donroe Doctrine”, though the overt part of that focuses on only the US-centered zone of control), though these imperial zones of control becoming de facto or de jure superstates isn't out of the question.

As in 1984, visible geopolitical conflict with a sufficient perceived degree of real kinetic threat between the empires serves the rulers of each empire by providing the external threat to maintain the apparent need for strong internal control, it also facilitates the transition from the current international status quo to the desired end state by providing a set of threats intended to coerce lesser powers to accede to the dominion of their respective regional overlords.

Because they were transporting Venezuelan oil?

It’s not even clear whether they were actually Russian or if they were just flying the Russian flag to try and not get captured.

But even if they were Russian, it was a clear area in which Putin overstepped his boundary.

These days it's a whole lot of Rust.

These days it’s still a whole lot of Fortran, with some Rust sprinkled on top. (:

Which since Fortran 2003, or even Fortran 95, has gotten rather nice to use.

IDK it's become too verbose IMHO, looks almost like COBOL now. (I think it was Fortran 66 that was the last Fortran true to its nature as a "Formula Translator"...)

We are way beyond comparing languages to COBOL, now that plenty folks type whole book sized descriptions into tiny chat windows for their AI overloads.

The numbers are interesting when you run them.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6920afb3-5f84-8008-827d-907e5f0a0a...

It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.

The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.

And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.

I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.

Entirely ignores? There actually are DEI type initiatives specifically designed to benefit Appalachians, such as https://www.arc.gov/grants-and-opportunities/ or more locally, https://www.ovrdc.org/the-appalachian-community-grant-progra.... Of course, Appalachia isn't just poor white people, there are historically black and native populations within its vast expanse.

Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.

i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.

> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.

i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.