Get Rid of Tenure and Tax Some University Endowment Funds

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A couple of really interesting ideas in this podcast that I totally buy into.

The first is to get rid of tenure. This I had already concluded many years ago. It’s generally giving job security to people in the least productive stretch of their careers, then passing that on to students who’d have to pay more. The productivity statement is a generality, of course, meaning it applies to most, but  not everyone. However, it’s the same problem governments face with inefficiencies due to the fact they are challenged to fire staff, especially unionized staff.

A related point is the increase of international students who pay the full tuition, huge increases in numbers in some schools. More and more international students are being let in not mostly for diversity’s sake, but for the cash they bring to the schools’ coffers, especially schools that get government funding that fails to meet their wants. That’s also been obvious to me. Having some international students is definitely good, of course, but we have enough diversity in our culture to keep our campuses diverse, if only we’d also remove some systemic barriers to admitting them. Now, whether those massive increases in international student numbers decrease seats to local or national students, or decrease education quality due to class size, the major benefit to huge numbers of international students is for the endowment funds of the schools, not to the students or campus quality.

The second is to tax post-secondary school endowment funds if seats available at those schools funds don’t grow proportionately to the fund growth. Simple argument is that those schools with endowment funds become a for profit entity rather than a not-for-profit because they are hoarding cash and/or spending it on extravagances rather than essentials.

Some other interesting topics regarding better measures for success are also discussed.

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1155609178007904256

Haiku Collection about Return to Viet Nam Completed

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I have a separate blog where I write poetry, with annotations to some poems to give either context or full story to them. I just finished annotating a collection of poems from an epic trip I had over 4 years ago to visit my home country of Viet Nam for the first time since I left as a child in 1980, and I wanted to share it for any readers here who might care for such writings.

Just over 4 years ago, in 2015, I returned to Viet Nam to visit for the first time since escaping the country as a young child in 1980. During this trip, I did a lot of reflection, as well as took notes on people, sights, events, etc. It was an overwhelming amount of information to retell, but I tried to summarize a rough version of it in a collection of 64 haiku formed poems, with annotations, I called Tales of an Expat Tourist. The poems are haiku formed because they are only haiku in form of 3 lines and some order of 5-7-5 total of 17 syllable lines, not following other requirements like lack of use of similes. I generally only write haiku for form, anyway, punctuating with dashes like Emily Dickinson.

I had completed the collection a few years back, writing annotations afterward that took longer. Unfortunately, I forgot about finishing it along the way, thinking I had finished annotations and postings. A search for something in one of those poems showed most had still been in draft posts, never published because I had not annotated them. After a marathon session today, I’m happy to say I have completed them and wanted to share news of that in this post. That’s because to get the poems ordered the way I wanted, I had to artificially back date them in a certain way that was set up a few years back, so they would not appear in the general feed for many readers.

If you care for such poems, thoughts, reflections, etc. I hope you’ll give them a glance or read, and I hope you’ll like some of them. Thank you.

Tales of an Expat Tourist

Learning to Paint, Millennial Style?

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Recently, I took some steps to finally get “painting” off my bucket list of life skills to acquire. In March, I got a handful of Paint-Nite (now known as Yaymaker) coupons that must be used in 6 months, so I’d lose the $100 US if I didn’t use them, in other words. I also had a dozen or so online courses from the platform formerly known as Craftsy, before they were taken over by some other entity, on sale for about $10 each as “foundation theory”, when I had failed to actually take it up with the “doing” part. I was going to supplement the rest of what I’ll need to know with YouTube, online searches, networking with real painters, etc. All instead of spending almost twice as much for just one introductory post-secondary course (not including supplies) that would be the old-fashioned, or at least, traditional, way of learning! It would also be one that would get me far less knowledge and experience. Sure, it’d be less work on my part not to go do all this research, watch and read all this information, some of which isn’t the best, go find people to make friends with to be my “consultants”, etc. However, that just wouldn’t be me… or the innovating and resourceful millennial, for that matter… though I want to be absolutely clear I’m no millennial! You can always take the best of any group and incorporate it into your life to improve it, right?

Forward to the past few weeks and I finally got out to my first Paint Nite, where we painted a slightly challenging scene called Heron Pointe! The results are below. It’s plural because initially, I improvised for some fun to make a Death Star instead of a moon in my painting, when the instructor said something about how the wrong technique resulted in a blotch and “that’s no moon” (same quote by Obi-wan Kenobi from Star Wars). The Death Star looked terrible because the instructor taught us how to paint a moon, not a Death Star, and I’m no prodigy lol.

https://www.instagram.com/p/By_x3D9ndmq/

Upon seeing my output, and reconsidering it, I realized that to give this painting to anyone, whether my Parents or whoever may take it from in the laundry room where I may leave it as I run out of wall space with future paintings, there was going to be a seriously limited audience who might take the painting. As a result, after a recent Paint Nite where we learned to paint a moon (upcoming post), I fixed the Death Star in my painting to be the moon shown below. Flip through the collage to see the full painting. The moon’s not great, but it is far better than the Death Star, and someone might actually want to take this painting off my hand one day. 🙂

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzYEn0ZHcNN/

More of my painting adventures to come in the future!

 

Happy Semi New Year 2019.5! (and Canada Day for Canadians)

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First, for any readers in Canada, as I am based, Happy Canada Day! We are so lucky to be living in what many global polls suggest is the best country in the world!

For everyone, I would like to wish you a Happy Semi New Year for the second half of 2019! Now, what is this “Semi New Year” business, you ask? Well, it’s something I came up with earlier this week in the continual development of my Life Strategy (draft at right) and making it a reality. I am currently making enough changes in my life that they could comprise of a set of New Year’s resolutions. However, it’s not New Year.

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A Life Strategy Map Draft – Part 1

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I am in the midst of designing the next phase of my life, as per the course at Stanford, taught through the book of the same name. In my own innovation to this process, I created what I called a Life Strategy Map (diagram below) to clarify for myself what I really wanted out of life so I can focus my living as much as possible towards achieving outcomes on that map. Since I had, both, the diagram and supporting explanatory text for me to be able to use it, I thought I’d share in case anybody wanted to try the same thing for themselves.

I’ll start with explaining what a Life Strategy Map is, and what it’s supposed to do, along with some instructions on getting the right level of details in it. In a few follow-up posts, I’ll go through mine in hopes it may clarify examples for you, and/or give you ideas for your own Life Strategy Map if you should want to try the exercise.

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