"A department generating high credit-hour production across the university but with few declared majors is not an inefficient department. It is a department whose students are not being counted in the metric being used against it."
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
An excellent analysis of the war on Black studies that also includes a deeply perceptive critique of the neoliberal logic of valuing disciplines based on # of undergrad majors: chronicle.com/article/the-erasure-of-black-…
Mar 15, 2026 at 1:55 PM
The engineering manager's attention budget
Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges
Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press) is simply excellent. Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's … | Cogito, Ergo Sumana | Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Pay Enough or Don't Pay at All*
Abstract. Economists usually assume that monetary incentives improve performance, and psychologists claim that the opposite may happen. We present and disc
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
Have Data Centers Raised Your Electric Bill? Causal Evidence from the United States
We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach. Despite prevailing sentiment, the finding is consistent with economic reasoning: existing large power system fixed costs, economies of scale in transmission and distribution, and declining unit costs for generation imply that durable demand growth lowers average prices. We find patterns of economies of scale for transmission, distribution, and generation costs as well as within and across retail customer classes. We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect.
Have Data Centers Raised Your Electric Bill? Causal Evidence from the United States
We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach. Despite prevailing sentiment, the finding is consistent with economic reasoning: existing large power system fixed costs, economies of scale in transmission and distribution, and declining unit costs for generation imply that durable demand growth lowers average prices. We find patterns of economies of scale for transmission, distribution, and generation costs as well as within and across retail customer classes. We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect.
Intelligence Per Watt: A Study of Local Intelligence Efficiency
Jon Saad-Falcon*, Avanika Narayan*, John Hennessy, Azalia Mirhoseini, Chris Ré
This big university system is embracing AI. Students and faculty aren't all on board
The California State University system offers an early look at what happens when an administration commits to a technology that its own community isn't convinced will improve education.
The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Engineering Organizations Are Flying Blind
A breakdown of what software development teams actually cost, what they need to generate to be financially viable, and why most organizations have no visibility into either number.
Mental Budgeting and Consumer Decisions
Abstract. Consumers often set budgets for categories of expenses (e.g., entertainment) and track expenses against their budget. Because budgets cannot perf
What It Means for Universities to Run Their Own PDS: The Potential of DID as Academic Infrastructure - Nightflight
The AI productivity myth is more harmful than you think
Perceived productivity may be up thanks to AI, but there's debt collecting in the shadows.
I'm no accounting expert, but getting your accounting compared to Enron seems...not great. Fortunately Amanda Iacone is an accounting expert (follow her on LinkedIn. I don't think she's here), and she and our graphics team explain it well.
Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron
news.bloomberglaw.comCollege admissions insanity is substantially explained by this fact: The number of elite entry level jobs (e.g. McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, The Economist) is flat, demand for them has exploded, and hiring managers and people teams have no cap on the # of hires they can make from target schools
SE Gyges
at some point in looking at university admissions scandals it becomes inescapable that elite colleges are, functionally, granting admission to an aristocracy, which makes this sort of thing much, much more legible the lesser noble houses are upset that their children are not being elevated
