nobody in the past 50 years made a good case for the university sector having a special role and set of rights and duties in society so it just became another industry that can live or die?

doesn't that make the statistics *more* rather than *less* relevant for measles, which has much higher mortality for young children?

econs' physics envy runs so deep that even economic imperialism takes the same justification as physics's own imperialism over the sciences :)

a central plank of the anti-unionisation campaign (from grad students) was that they believed UE was trying to organise graduate students to bail out their terrible financial position

at my university the postdocs were organised by UAW but the abortive graduate students unionisation attempt was with the (more politically radical) united electrical, radio, and machine workers of america (UE), which would have collected sth like $700 annual fees.

(which means the best thing one could do in these discussions is to ignore both of them actually)

certainly the NI setup is much better than the BiH one (although imho part of that is that it has a vaguely acceptable (so far!) fail-safe). my contention is that the proper comparison to Nigeria is that 'NI and Nigeria's problems are too different from GB so best not to try to learn lessons'.

(iirc Bosnia got a lawsuit from a Jewish guy claiming discrimination that he is ineligible for the state presidency but after he won at the ECHR he decided it wasn't worth pursuing the law change because it would destabilise the country which i thought was pretty funny)

in some ways isn't the NI/Bosnia model a solution to a qualitatively different problem (competing claims to sovereignty)? like it may be a bad solution to that problem but it is not trying to solve the same problem as the one places like GB faced/faces.