No, the wheels are made of aluminum, not plastic

81. He is a bleached sarcophagus.

He didn’t get better.

Mail in voting across the board could be better than a federal holiday. In Washington, I get everything I need to vote in the mail: a ballot, a voter’s guide, a postage paid envelope. I literally don’t have to wear pants to vote. I can take a week to make a decision about something before I wander over to the nearest mailbox to drop off my ballot.

Never having done it, voting in person sounds awful.

I didn’t imply assassination attempts of the vice president when I was an 8 year old boy. This guy is a lunatic.

Say it isn’t so!

Ah! Thank you for the explanation

If Tesla’s stock crashes, then the value the banks could get from selling it is much lower.

If Twitter and Tesla go bankrupt, the banks will have loaned out billions to own something worthless.

At least I would assume that’s how it works.

I feel gross agreeing with Rand fucking Paul about something.

It’s not ageist to say that young people do not vote at the rates of older people. It’s just a fact.

Good for us for voting in record numbers. They’re still poor numbers.

+52

And replace him with who?

According to the state salary database, there are about 3 dozen UW employees who make more than $500,000 a year in 2022 (the most recent year published). A few are administrative staff, many are coaches for sports (which is very dumb), and a few are professors.

Their total salaries sum to $32 million, which is a lot. But when you divide that across the total number of students, it comes out to about $580 per student per year. So even if you stopped paying these people, tuition would only go down about 5%.

That’s assuming that these staff members don’t bring any value, which is not a good assumption. Many of these highly paid people would be highly compensated in this private sector–for example the manager of UW’s investments makes $1 million per year–so rightly or wrongly, the university must pay very high to retain them.

As I said before, the university has received $400 million less from the state (adjusted for inflation) today than it did in the 1980s. The expense of highly paid staff is a drop in the bucket compared to the drop in state funding.

In 1986, my mom paid $386 ($1,106 in 2024) in tuition for a quarter at the University of Washington. In 2015, I paid around $3,700 ($4902 in 2024) for a quarter at UW.

In 1986, UW got $440 million dollars from the state. That’s $1.2 billion in 2024. In 2015, UW got $644 million from the state. That’s $0.8 billion today.

It’s hard to find enrollment data for some reason, but there were less than 30,000 students at UW in the late 80s. In 2015, that figure was closer to 55,000.

Using inflation adjusted figures, the state was contributing $41,000 per student in 1986 compared to $14,500 in 2015. Adding in yearly tuition, the total cost was $44,700 in 1986. In 2015, that’s $29,300 per student.

Importantly, this analysis leaves out private contributions to the university’s budget which makes up a large portion of its funds. However, those funds are usually restricted in how they can be spent.

Most of the buildings on UW’s campus were built in the 50s or 60s. There were some that were from the 20s and 30s or older. Forget cosmetics, most of those need renovations just to remain usable. There were thousands of good, usable computers in the libraries that were always in use. Keeping that fleet running is an expense that just wasn’t around 30+ years ago. Labs equipment has gotten better and more expensive. I used a $100,000 high speed camera when I was in school. My mom sure didn’t have access to that.

Based on my quick, back of the envelope math, education has not gotten 3 to 4 times more expensive, but the state has been contributing less and less money to fund it.

Second, the only reason for the massive amounts of student debt is due to universities massively inflating the cost of an education to milk the government of their federal student loans.

I can’t speak for everywhere, but that’s not true for my alma mater. Tuition has been rising because of a lack of state funding. 20 years ago, state funds made up 2/3 of the University budget. Now it’s 1/3. The difference has to come from somewhere.

Go to an in-state school. Prices are lower. Go to a community college to take your desired program’s prerequisites and transfer to a state university. Or just finish up a degree at a community college.

Good to know, thank you! I’ll have to look closer when I visit a forum next.

Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

No, their airlines are not an ancillary product. They are their main product. According to Boeing’s earnings reports, the commercial aircraft segment of the company made up 56% of total revenue in 2018, 42% in 2019, 27% in 2020, 30% in 2021, 38% in 2022, and 43% in 2023. The rest of their revenue is split between the Defense, Space and Security segment, and the Global Services segment.

Prior to 2017, the vast majority of the earnings for the whole company came from the Commercial Airplanes segment. Since then, that segment has been operating at a loss. Since 2022, both Defense and Commercial Airplanes have been operating at a loss.

If you’re curious you can look up Boeing’s 10-k form. Page 56 has the revenue breakdowns.