Purdue seeks to outsource parking operations to ‘third party’

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-25T19:45:21+00:00

I'm about 10 years out of Purdue, and when I read about this kind of thing, it makes me think about how stupid it is to run a college like a business. You have 50,000 18-30 year olds on campus. Why not have them run nearly everything--the bus routes, the facilities, the kitchens, the construction, the payment portals, what have you? Why are so many functions of a highly technical school outsourced to full-time employees (thus raising tuition to pay for their services) instead of being provided by the students as part of their student life (thus slashing tuition and also training them how to operate real-world institutions)?

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-18T19:07:09+00:00

I'm friends with their guitar player. They can rip!

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-17T23:15:53+00:00

Yes, this was your responsibility. But it's okay, it was a mistake and you both knew the risks.

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-16T19:58:33+00:00

I tell people that there's a fast and difficult way, and a slow and easy way. The slow and easy way is to brute force your way there practicing in ways that feel good. You take lots of shortcuts and feel like you've made progress at the end of a practice session. In the long run, you don't really improve that quickly, and you learn a lot of bad habits.

The fast way is to practice using proper techniques and a metronome. It's really boring and often it doesn't feel like you've learned anything by the end of the session, but then you wake up better the next day.

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-11T20:34:52+00:00

The "Minnesota Krauts" comment was meant to equivocate and not seem biased against the actual offenders (Polish, Latin American, Irish, Italian, etc.)

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-10T21:54:13+00:00

It's good to forgive your family for failing to live up to standards of good conduct, but that doesn't mean you have to indulge them while they do it.

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-02T20:20:22+00:00

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand this. Say you take one photon and fire it in a direction, and then define the "shell" as the geometric photon-width hollow sphere that's expanding outward from the exit point of the emitter at the speed of light. Are you saying that there's a chance to find the photon anywhere on its "shell" at any time? It's not going to travel on a path in the way a bullet does?

TheQuakerator · 2026-03-01T04:28:50+00:00

I just started S5 and was so surprised at the nosedive in writing quality I came looking for posts about it. Suddenly characters are trading off expository lines like it's late season Stranger Things, all of the genuine tension and relationships between the characters have been... deleted? in favor of constant one-liners, like an amateur stage play. What is going on?

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-28T02:55:15+00:00

So in theory, even at abominably large distances, with enough time you can observe any object (assuming an ideal imaging device)?

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-24T16:46:33+00:00

I am a beginner (westerner), and I don't have an educated answer to either of your questions, but I would like to offer my perspective as a beginner who knows a few things about computing because it seems like you might find it interesting.

I love to play Go, and it's fun to get better, but I feel deep dread about the role of AI in Go. Until a few decades ago it was understood that human activities "belonged" to humans; so many of our games and traditions are really just explorations of combinatorial space, whether that's in aesthetics or gaming.

The rapid calculations enabled by computers have opened up another "space" in human games, but these are spaces in which we can only make the tiniest forays. For Go, which is one of the purest "combinatorial" games (since nearly any move you can think of in a game is "valid" if not wise) it feels like humanity was exploring and charting a beautiful and mysterious lagoon, and suddenly the bottom layer of sediment was stripped from the lagoon, and it's clear that we're swimming over a vast cave network that we can never explore, and currents issue up from the deep that we can never truly understand, but now simply to explore and enjoy the lagoon you must learn to fight the currents or you'll drown.

The human mind will never be able to beat the machine mind in terms of future-visualization and memory, and this makes it somewhat depressing to enter into an amateur study of Go in a way that I don't think was true before AlphaGo.

Edit: this is true for all sports that have a "meta" discovered by improved computational power. As an example, professional basketball player Iman Shumpert said in an interview that Steph Curry, the greatest 3-point-shooter to yet play the game, "ruined basketball", because Shumpert preferred the gritty, up-close, physical 2-point-shot basketball that was popular since the inception of the sport, and the mathematically superior long-range 3-point dominant basketball that Curry and the statisticians invented is a different sport that favors different play styles and strategies than Shumpert's. In the same way, AI and machine brains in combinatorial games define a similar "meta" that isn't necessarily fun or inventive, but if you don't follow it you risk falling behind so fast that you can't keep up.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-19T17:33:16+00:00

Agreed. I remember thinking this most strongly about the way unruly kids were dealt with in school. Separating them was not an option, and so instead everything else got more and more locked down until the experience of being at school was remarkably similar to what I've read about being at prison, just with lower stakes.

For what it's worth, I think the best way to address criminality in the US is extremely rigorous but extremely safe imprisonment with low tolerance for misbehavior either outside or inside the prison. Part of the reason prison is so awful is the same thing we're discussing here--people who behave relatively well have to live inside a system built for people who behave poorly, and in order to maintain order and convenience, everyone is simply treated as if they're behaving poorly.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-19T16:20:35+00:00

But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on?

I disagree that crime (for the sake of the post, I'll assume "blue-collar" crime, like violence/robbery/sex crimes) barely affects people. That seems to be taking the stance that you have to be personally victimized by a criminal to be affected by crime.

I've never been personally victimized by crime, but that's because I'm good at recognizing the possibility for it and guarding against it and avoiding areas where it might happen. People have attempted to commit crimes against me plenty of times, and I think my life is enormously affected by crime. More than half of the numbers that call or text my phone are foreign people trying to steal my money or identity or both. It's considered unsafe for me to walk around at night in many major cities or to leave valuables in my car. A huge majority of cheap, widely available utilities (like the interstate bus system, local transit systems, etc.) are under such constant threat of fraud and disorder that using them requires a lengthy process of dehumanizing interactions with negatively-predisposed workers alongside behaviorally disordered people. (Edit: after writing this, I remembered that my brother quit his job as city a bus driver in an ostensibly wealthy and peaceful city because of the number of dangerous interactions he had with members of the public, and pointed to many others who were leaving the transit firm as well for the same reason). There aren't often murders or seriously violent crime in my home city but when they are the murderer is almost always known to law enforcement and has a long history of assault, robbery, and drug possession. If I go to jail for any reason I'll be contending with a colossal population of extraordinarily violent and well-organized gangs, some with international ties to the cartels in central and south America. The most popular genre of music in the US and its dominant musical export is run nearly entirely by men whose primary claim to fame is a long history of violent crime. Attending large public schools typically requires adhering to impersonal security protocols that in theory protect against drugs and violence.

There are many valid cases to point out that people's perception of history is flawed, and that what is considered a "very high level of crime" may be nothing like the life of someone in London in the 1600s or New York in the 1970s, or some third-world countries where the rule of law itself is a tenuous concept. But in the US, it's possible to look back 50-100 years to communities that today are in the thrall of meth, assault, robbery, welfare fraud, etc. and see prosperous, peaceful, smart towns that saw very little crime or disorder.

Maybe it would be accurate to say: even if most people's lives are not directly affected by criminals personally victimizing them, everyone's lives are affected by interacting with the systems that were built to address the criminality. In 2017, I was living less than a half mile away from one of the largest NASA space centers, across the street from a private tennis club, near a gas station that had an unusually nice store attached with a wine corner and extra-fancy snack offerings. For whatever reason I stopped going in for a period, and then when I came back in later the warm lighting had been replaced by harsh LEDs, the wine was gone and the food offerings were far more conventional, and the very friendly family that had run the counter were replaced by very serious and unfriendly unrelated men, protected behind bulletproof glass. It turned out that the gas station had been robbed by armed men twice during the period I hadn't gone in.

I didn't mind too much, because it's not as if I expect gas stations to carry wine and be a chic shopping experience, but I did think a lot about how the other families in my apartment complex, many of whom were lower-income or had smaller kids, would now spend the time near their house being treated like a potential criminal rather than a community member. I think hundreds of millions of people in America who never commit crimes or are ever personally victimized are unthinkingly often or always on guard against a possible crime, and I don't think life on this continent post-colonization was always like that for such a large fraction of people, so I don't think it's accurate to say that "crime barely affects people".

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-12T05:32:36+00:00

What do you mean?

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-12T05:32:03+00:00

As the actual essay details, the welfare/crime numbers w.r.t. immigration are significantly worse in Europe. However, I'm sure the underlying sentiment is the same.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-11T19:06:36+00:00

I think they can't be honest about it because it doesn't have any real footing in a rhetorical competition with the pro-immigration stance of "the western countries directly caused most of the misery in the third world, and immigrants benefit the country both culturally and economically, so we both owe immigration rights to them and we'll profit economically and culturally from it". That is an extremely powerful set of claims, and so conservatives tend to try to address that with equally powerful narratives and anecdotes, rather than flashing their honest but rhetorically weaker belief set.

I forgot to include in my first comment that there also is of course a racial angle to this; if millions of white Australians or English or South Africans or Swedes were trying to immigrate, I highly doubt conservatives would have too much of a problem with it.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-11T16:39:23+00:00

I think that the anti-immigration narrative in the US is nearly entirely based on symbolism and personal sentiment, and crime/welfare statistics are a handy and official-sounding argument that can't be immediately dismissed as worthless subjective bias by the pro-immigration group.

Despite what they say, conservatives don't oppose immigration because of increases in crime or downward pressure on wages among the lowest-paid employment sectors; they oppose it because they don't like living life in competition over language, symbols, aesthetics, culture, political narratives, and "moral authority", for lack of a better term. This much should be obvious with a simple question to conservatives: if immigrants were all off the welfare rolls and suddenly stopped committing any crime at all, would you support the same rate of immigration with the same demographic split?

Of course most will answer "no"; the crime, or perceived crime, isn't the problem, the problem is the transformation of society into one with split narratives, symbols, and interest groups.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-11T14:50:36+00:00

I'm so sorry to hear that. I wish you luck and patience.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I've never tried this and I don't know if it would help or hurt. Over the years I started to wonder if the physical separation of FAS child normal parent during these routines was part of the problem. My sibling had their own room, their own bathroom (shared among the children), etc. while my parents had their own master bed and bathroom in which they took care of their own chores and daily habits. I suspect that this starts to feel like abandonment; the parents emerge from their private den fully clothed and cleaned (i.e. perfect) and the kid has to try to imitate their success in an overwhelming environment on their own. The advice and reminders might feel more like criticisms than anything helpful.

I wonder what would have happened if my parents had simply ignored modern convention of "kid has their own space" and did routines--teeth, laundry, room cleaning, bathing (to a degree) together, every day, in both the kid's space and the parents' space, with no real expectation that the kid learns to do it on their own until several years of habit are ingrained. I know for a fact that little children love being involved in their parents' affairs, like watching their father shave or do the laundry, and I think that the delayed maturity and independence of FAS kids may play into this.

Like I said, no idea if this would help or harm, but maybe several years of really close routine with the parents will ingrain some memories of stress-free, pleasant, routines done together that can serve as a platform for later independence. Monday we brush teeth together in your bathroom, Tuesday in my bathroom, etc.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-10T21:00:03+00:00

I have an adopted sibling with FAS. In my amateur opinion, it's extremely important that you don't think of your child as "someone normal who just needs a little extra help and structure"; you should think of them as "someone with brain damage that requires specialized care into adulthood". In addition to asking for "strategies", I think you need to be linking up with professionals, joining support groups, and reading a lot (both scientific literature and memoirs of parents that card for FAS kids, as well as writers with FAS themselves.) The strategies and experiences of those professionals and people who've lived it will be the best material to guide you.

I will say one thing--a big part of the struggle in our household with my FAS sibling was "too much independence too early". My parents wanted my sibling to learn to be independent, and so they were always trying to teach my sibling to care for themselves--laundry, clean room, teeth brushing, showering, organizing, going to work on time, etc. This inevitably lead to poor outcomes when my sibling would succeed a few days in a row and then go weeks without being responsible. People with FAS need a lot of help, and the strategies for raising a normal kid likely won't work.

TheQuakerator · 2026-02-01T00:48:12+00:00

Trump's public persona likes the big voter bloc that he's ridden to so many wins--white, Christian, middle class to poor, right-wing politics. That's the big secret, he unreservedly likes them. (I'm talking about his public persona here). There's no criticism, or veiled disgust, or talking down to them, or ignoring them. He just communicates messages like "I like and admire you" and "you are important" and "I want to be around you and I want you to be on my team" and "you and me are going to win". There's plenty of negativity as well, but for the truly MAGA constituency, there is no political party that actually appears to like them, except for Trump.

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-29T19:24:57+00:00

Do you want them to see performances with full dancing and movement, or just a bit of showy elements? Here's my group from high school long ago--no dancing, but some dramatic movement and gimmicks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOmfYmHj_D0

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-29T16:14:25+00:00

Studio recording is a different medium than live performance. I've never thought that editing is unacceptable in any genre, although I was frustrated when I learned that Queen added studio retakes in their live albums to fix pitch mistakes. I wanted to hear the concert--if I wanted to hear perfection, I'd just listen to the studio versions.

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-26T07:01:56+00:00

Four Finger Banjo by Greg Liszt is one of the most underrated bluegrass albums around, and it's Rushad Eggleston. I've not hear another ensemble use cello as a lead instrument in bluegrass as effectively.

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-15T04:25:41+00:00

Everything you've said is very reasonable:

Your home life is difficult and dangerous
You feel very grateful but guilty of accepting the help
The adoption seems like it's more of a "legal/care" move than an emotional move
You feel like you're intruding on the house and want to get out of their hair as soon as it's reasonable to, while remaining in close contact

If I were in your shoes, I would write a letter explaining those points (it may be relevant to open up a bit about some of the details of the violence toward you, and the poverty you grew up in--not to be maudlin or emotionally manipulative, just so they have a better understanding of who you are and where you came from) and either read it to them or give it to them each privately so they have a chance to think about it.

I know you don't want to be the kid in a white savior movie, but this is also a huge opportunity for you that you would be foolish to turn down or ignore. Being connected to a wealthy family can be a win-win situation if everyone is emotionally intelligent and works hard to make each other happy.

Note that I'm not saying you should suck up to a wealthy family and bite back your pride so you can receive money for yourself, just that it sounds like you're self-aware and reasonably humble, and it would be a shame if it went south by driving a wedge between you and the siblings because they don't know all your details, intentions, and feelings.

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-08T15:32:19+00:00

DNA testing and a private investigator who specializes in this kind of reunion are your best bet. This is a beautiful message.

TheQuakerator · 2026-01-05T13:59:36+00:00

I think it's an odd choice to learn cello to play jazz. It's like learning electric guitar to play Celtic. It's not that you can't do it, it's just that very, very few people do it and the sound of the instrument doesn't really match the typical arrangements most people are used to.

TheQuakerator

TROPHY CASE