Supreme Court's Ruling Practically Wipes Out Free Speech for Sex Writing Online (ellsberg.substack.com)

I wonder why Andreesen doesn’t suggest public funding of higher education, instead of fighting DEI. If education was free for all Americans, it would achieve what he’s arguing for and it would undermine and make DEI efforts completely moot. As far as I can tell, we can afford to fund university for all entirely on the extra income taxes that people with degrees make above people without degrees, at least according to income data studies I’ve read from the Fed. (I’m honestly curious why our country hasn’t come to this conclusion already - it certainly looks today like funding higher education for all would increase GDP and reduce the tax burden.)

UncleMeat · 4h ago

He also writes that the NSF should experience "the bureaucratic death penalty."

Andreesen doesn't actually give a shit about the university system whatsoever. He wants people like him to be at the top of society and everybody else to grovel at his feet.

hollerith · 4h ago

Even better: college degrees for everyone

chomp · 4h ago

That’s what the parent commenter is saying, if everyone has the same opportunity to go to college and get a degree, then colleges don’t need to pick and choose students. Right now, only people with means can do to college, and so universities wind up balancing the scales.

dahart · 4h ago

Yes, that’s definitely what I’m suggesting. Did I accidentally imply something else? I feel like taking the whether someone can afford college off the table would just immediately end this DEI argument and give Americans a boost. Why isn’t Adreesen fighting for that?

malcolmgreaves · 4h ago

Most likely it’s because he doesn’t actually want what he claims. Billionaires become corrupted by their wealth. Like a junkie, they need their fix. And their fix is to see their wealth increase.

davidw · 5h ago

Guy who owes his fortune to public funding of research wants to tear it all down.

davidw · 5h ago

And it's all for some really ugly reasons

https://bsky.app/profile/sifill.bsky.social/post/3ltrkbtyam2...

cameldrv · 3h ago

Yeah specifically NCSA where he and Eric Bina developed Mosaic was created by an NSF grant.

jbverschoor · 5h ago

Bs.. DEI is simply toxic discrimination against non-DEI.

It has nothing to do with equality and it promotes helplessness

DoctorOW · 4h ago

A friend of mine involved with the Coast Guard lemented someone who was fired in Trump's DEI purge. She was hard working, and well respected by those who worked for her, but she was a woman so she was deemed "without merit".

The problem I have with the anti-DEI stuff is that they have no means of proving merit. They're just seeing someone who is a minority and imagining a more qualified white guy.

ethbr1 · 1h ago

The truth here is that bureaucracies are shit at implementing nuance -- they'll do DEI poorly; they'll do anti-DEI poorly.

The original point of merit exams wasn't that they were objective, but that they were outside bureaucratic control, which ended up producing better results than the status quo.

Anti-DEI especially is being implemented in such a rapid manner that it's no surprise incompetent people are making bad calls, because nobody will question them if it's "anti-DEI".

Such is the great harm of strong beliefs + groupthink: they justify bad decisions by covering them as compliant decisions.

UncleMeat · 4h ago

Andreesen says that its been 60 years of "discrimination" against white people. My alma mater didn't even admit women in 1965. He says that immigration is "discrimination." The world he pines for is a world of explicit and massive discrimination against women and non-whites.

Andreesen is calling for the NSF to be destroyed. What does that have to do with DEI? The Trump administration is demanding that universities expressly hire conservatives as faculty and admit conservatives as students. Where's Andreesen's concern about this?

If Andreesen gives a shit about merit, why'd a16z hire Daniel Penny when his entire "qualification" is killing somebody on the subway?

jeffbee · 3h ago

White people are so inferior that they can't compete fair and square with anyone. That is the logical conclusion of what pmarca is saying.

skywhopper · 4h ago

You have been misinformed about what DEI is and does. Folks like Andreessen are outright liars. It’s not reverse discrimination. It’s an attempt to level the playing field.

jbverschoor · 4h ago

No I don’t think I am. We had it in the Netherlands for over 20-30 years. It was called “positieve discriminatie”.

It was supposed to level the playing field for people who are just as/more capable, but did not even get considered.

Instead of that, they don’t consider others anymore, nor do they care about actual capabilities.

It’s very simple… politics set policies by rewarding and punishing with taxes. Companies will “game” anything to reach certain numbers.

No comments yet

gjsman-1000 · 4h ago

… by reverse discrimination in many companies.

Changing words doesn’t change practice. Inventing words like “unhoused” doesn’t fix “homeless.”

jaybrendansmith · 3h ago

It's very simple in my opinion. The discrimination we have in the US is all about wealth, not diversity. If we shift all DEI to simply focus on those who don't come from wealth, we will have solved discrimination without resorting to subjective racial or ethnic or sexual qualifications.

ethbr1 · 1h ago

That's been a sub-strain of post election US Democrat thinking: that it should be more about poor vs rich and less about identity.

Unfortunately, there's a large cottage industry that hitched their careers / thought leadership to identity and are fighting it tooth and nail.

Imho, it's pretty obvious and simple. Two poor folks have more in common with each other these days than the poor with the rich, whatever combination of other identities.

drcongo · 2h ago

This is low key genius.

layer8 · 5h ago

https://archive.ph/TDQk1

drcongo · 4h ago

Why is anyone still listening to this arsehole.

jmclnx · 4h ago

The title should be "The US will pay the price for the insane policies of Trump". I have a name for this guy, but I do not want to get banned :)

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Marc Andreesen says universities will 'pay the price' for DEI

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