Thrashy

Anti-discrimination laws in the US apply to discrimination based on what's called a "protected class," which essentially boils down to a small set of personal characteristics you're not allowed to base a decision about a person on. For the purposes of housing, this includes race, skin color, and national origin, gender and sexual orientation, whether there are minor children in the family, and disability.

"Being somebody who the loan officer has a deeply personal vendetta against" is not a protected class, and if the original OP did in fact reject a mortgage application on that basis they'd most likely be legally in the clear. Whether their employer would be happy to know about it is another story, but if it was anywhere near a coin-toss decision I doubt they'd ever have to justify themselves.

Once-upon-a-time print shop employee here: the secret to professional-looking print media is good paper. Almost everything except insanely high volume products is are printed on a color laser printer, and most of the useful difference between a cheap Brother printer and a five-figure digital press has to do with printing larger pages, faster, on both sides automatically and/or on cardstock. If you’re patient, have a small color laser printer, a good template for designing trifold brochures, and don’t need anything bigger than 8.5x11, you can have as many oddly specific pamphlets as your heart desires!

The counterargument is that Missourians keep passing progressive ballot measures while simultaneously voting for people who vocally oppose said measures and immediately repeal them because they see politics as a team sport rather than anything that actually affects them. A progressive message might speak to these voters, but voting R is, some reason, as baked into their identity as rooting for the Tigers is.

I was hoping to avoid credentialiam, but… You assume much of what I do and don’t know. I grew up with a parent in higher education administration, and due to my own career I am regularly in communication with a range of R1 research universities, including two which I am currently preforming long-range lab space demand forecasts for. I have had a front-row seat to how the sausage gets made in higher education for the last three decades, and I am regularly talking to senior leadership at one of the top 5 schools in the US for medical research, specifically about these kinds of staffing issues and how the illegal impoundment of NIH and NSF grants are affecting them.

Am I intimately involved with the budgeting process at Harvard specifically? No, but then I’d wager you probably aren’t either, and it’s not that hard to look up stats about their endowment and do some basic math about them. You’re stuck on this one point that about 80% of is earmarked for specific uses, when their overall endowment is so enormous that that number is practically immaterial to the argument. (10% of it is specifically earmarked for the School of Medicine, by the way, which is where most of the lost grant money was concentrated.)

I am not proposing that there is some grand conspiracy at work to throw researchers out of Harvard. Rather, as the tone and tenor of the article linked above would suggest, Harvard's administration is laser-focused on the money, and is starting from the notion that line must always go up no matter what. I don’t doubt that the usual academic politics is preventing the broader university from thinking that it might be worthwhile to share the load to keep scientists working while Harvard fights this, and that’s a shame.

Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.

Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.

Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.

For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.

Posted to the wrong comment, whoops

You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.

None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reputation as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…

In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.

A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can't afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products... and that's fine in the short term, but as you mention it's going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.