[1199] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: A little rational thought---Objective and real power
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Philip Tan Boon Yew)
Thu Mar 14 15:38:55 2002
Message-ID: <200203142005.PAA21142@mass-toolpike.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 15:05:04 -0500
From: Philip Tan Boon Yew <philip@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 14 Mar 2002 11:23:38 EST."
<20020314162337.GV24333@innocuous.mit.edu>
>In short, I don't want your free stuff. I can get my own stuff. I want
>someone to effectively represent my views as an undergraduate to the
>rest of MIT. Not someone to beg for money or build a community for me.
Sure. For those people who run student groups and try to support
student-activity communities that grew organically, they may believe
that extricating more money from MIT's budget is an important part of
a candidate's platform, especially if tuition keeps increasing. It's
not free stuff...some part of it comes from our own money, more of it
comes from the grants awarded as a result of our work as students and
researchers.
Being a treasurer for undergraduate student groups, you can understand
how this might be a valid concern for me even though I'm not an
undergraduate. I, for one, would prefer to get a lot more than $10
from the UA, and I'm not sure to what extent Creighton and Brar will
be able to rise to this expectation. I believe that a person's vote
should be worth a lot more than $10 if you think about the amount of
money the UA controls every semester. If a candidate wants to declare
"Sure, let's just divide the entire UA budget among the students!"
I'd be ecstatic, but they better have a better way of distributing
that instead of sitting in Lobby 10...because then I'd then have to
increase the dues for the groups of which I'm managing the finances,
and collect each one individually. That just sucks for me.
This, of course, comes in addition to the concerns you have mentioned,
which are certainly valid. Do you believe that Creighton and Brar will
be able to _effectively_ represent your views as an undergraduate to
the rest of MIT?
I just mentioned Yoon's record to show how it's not necessarily a good
idea to discount a candidate based on taste by automatically assuming
that a non-EC resident wouldn't be interested in the same things EC
people are interested in, and vice versa. I was picking out a tiny
little point in the email, yes, but none of the candidates just talk
about social events in their platform and I think it would be
similarly unfair to state that any of the candidates are simply
interested in organizing social events.
Philip Tan
-----------
"Stupidity is like nuclear power: it can be used for good or evil.
And you don't want to get any of it on you." - Wally & Dilbert
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Documentation on the use of the mailing lists mit-talk, all-talk,
mit-news, housing-talk, and the mit-talk Zephyr class is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/institvte/talk/
