Since the Illinois minimum wage hike went into effect, we’ve been raising the hourly wage for our lab workers in one-dollar increments. Obviously, nobody gave us more money to enable us to pay the higher wage. So we fired half of the workers. And cut lab hours for the existing ones.
It was exactly what I predicted when the law was first passed. I don’t take much credit because a blind monkey in a stupor could have predicted this.
I also predicted that COVID closures would be catastrophic for higher ed. People scoffed into my face back then but now everybody keeps saying, “God, this is catastrophic.” Yes, shocking. If only anybody could have predicted this.
Clarissa's Blog 
Minimum wage hikes AND budget freezes and/or cuts equals less lab workers because obviously higher education’s Baumol’s Cost disease doesn’t actually mean more money going to the departments, or the professors.
How’s your merger with the anthropology department going?
It’s got to be wearisome to be right when nobody listens to you beforehand. And of course every change is catastrophic when when they’re always used as pretexts to cut that budget.
In your use of AI in language classes, how do you get people to distinguish between AI texts and human texts? And what do you and your students think are likely improvements coming down the pike for the AI ones, given the datasets/texts they’re trained on? I’ve only seen English ones but I’m sure there are quirks in the Spanish ones I’d miss.
[Sometimes I’ll read Wikipedia pages in English, French, Spanish and computer translation of the French & Spanish ones and notice the differences. What different language Wikipedias emphasize in the same entry can be very interesting from a epistemological standpoint and just raw language. But I digress.]
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There is software to determine the percentage of AI in a text, and it’s already used by the press. So it’s not particularly useful to teach people to do that job.
The most important thing that students find out about AI pretty fast is that it can correct language mistakes in a text but it can’t create a readable text by itself. A prompt that starts with “write a paragraph about…” inevitably produces soporific word soup.
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As I always say, writing is easy. It’s finding people willing to read what you wrote of their own free will that’s a bitch. AI definitely can’t do that.
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Yes, that is exactly how it works. Rise in wages –> reduction in the number of positions. This works for lab workers, graduate students, postdocs… The raises never come with the corresponding increase in funding.
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These laws let people feel good about themselves because workers are protected from exploition. An additional benefit is that rich universities who can afford to pay these wages are protected from unfair competition by institutions which employ slave labor.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2024/10/20/well-meaning-unemployment-and-starvation/
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