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Firstly... wow really nice responses, better reasoned than mind and nice tone.

Thankyou, I really appreciate it. I've been working a lot on improving my tone.

I understand the "yea but this time it is different" objection. It's valid. I could be wrong. Machines are already replacing human jobs and cost 1/3 less than poverty level wages to operate. A large part of the population are incapable of working "higher skilled jobs". they won't have jobs to work.

This to me is an echo of the times when tractors replaced horses. People complained, "you can't sing to your tractor!" and tractors could do the work of many men, putting them out of jobs. Some old Gene Autry flicks portray these changing times. Many people in that time moved to cities and needed to restart their lives. It was hard times, for them, but we moved on. It has happened many times throughout history, and it hits some people hard (take this poem, for example, from the early parts of the last century), but society as a whole survives.

Our society is increasingly a "winner take all" society. Instead of having 2000 writers making $50k, we have Rowling making over 1 billion dollars. Instead of having 50 entertainers as in the 1920's we have 1 entertainer who gets really wealthy.

This is an interesting point, I'd be interested in seeing more concrete data. Certainly vaudeville has disappeared, but there are many community orchestras, and groups like "OK Go" can make a living long before they become famous. Is JK Rowling more of an attention-sucker than Charles Dickens was in his day? I don't know. Certainly now even mediocre bloggers can make a living off ads. I just keep getting the impression that you are more pessimistic than the situation warrants. I don't have a link, but I remember reading that as a result of this downturn, lots of people are starting new businesses.

The cost of a degree to get a higher skill job is becoming crippling because people are bidding more and more money for that slot. You can't get out of student debt...for life. It's unique. Next generation (with $90k to $250k debt and no job) is crippled.

I don't know how it is where you live, but here in California we have an excellent state university program. Education costs at UC Merced, for example, are less than $6000 a semester. If costs are truly a concern, you can do your first two years at a junior college where costs are even cheaper, around $100 per class. If you're smart, Stanford is Expensive, but Berkeley is not. I do favor building more state sponsored schools, though. Remember also that people don't need to go to college to become skilled; jobs like ag-inspector, locksmith, and even truck driver can get you decent wages with a little bit of education.

The biggest worry for me about the education program in the US is that the quality of education is dropping drastically. So many schools have become party schools where people don't learn anything. You can graduate with a degree without ever learning to write well, ever learning to speak well, without learning basic logic, and with no real skill other than BSing (and being able to finish projects on time). Party schools have been trying to attract students by making classes easier and easier, even while they raise prices. If they continue on that path, they might find themselves replaced by job training schools like DeVry, or a more prestigious university that figures out how to do online teaching. That is my opinion, of course, my prediction of the future.

yes, health care is expensive and we pay more because of insurance. procedures are offered that would not be if we had to pay for our own insurance. China doesn't take this approach. Not even in the em

Check in LLNL's annual reports, going back to 1944. In none of them will you find a mention by me of knowledge of a poem about Dr. Teller. In fact, if you scour all academic journals, LoC, and wikipedia, you will not find any mention of my knowledge of any poem, outside of J. R. R. Tolkien's Cat . My non-knowledge of poetry about physicists is quite well non-documented.

"beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know"

The Genius of the Crowd - Charles Bukowski

Does anyone remember(presuming you were born) when the big debate was not if video games were art but if anything that was done on a computer could be called art?
Let's stop having these debates and giving the morons who will never understand a voice.
They are the same people who claimed that expressionism wasn't art, surrealism wasn't art, pop art wasn't art. They are a pox on humanity.

"not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world"
  http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-genius-of-the-crowd/
The Genius of the Crowd - Charles Bukowski

Rush has it figured out! http://www.poemhunter.com/song/cygnus-x-1/ http://www.poemhunter.com/song/cygnus-x-1-book-ii-hemispheres/

Rush has it figured out! http://www.poemhunter.com/song/cygnus-x-1/ http://www.poemhunter.com/song/cygnus-x-1-book-ii-hemispheres/

Sometimes I think people on SlashDot are not necessarily the smartest in the world.

It's hard to find people to read bad poetry... and I write a lot of it. So I used the Turk to hire people to read my poetry. This was my post on Turk:

Go to http://www.poemhunter.com/john-kipling-lewis/poems/ and rate the 69 poems found there.

1) If a poem is rated 9 or 10, please leave a comment as to why.
2) If a poem is rated 1 or 2 or 3, please leave a comment as to why.
3) If you rate a poem from 4-8 and feel it could be a 10 with a change, please comment how.

Warning: This site has heavy pop-up ads. Please be aware that the site is very hard to use without a pop-up blocker installed in your browser and potentially an ad blocker.

It worked great. I got good responses and advice as well as getting different viewpoints on my poems. Writers take note.

Vote Independent.
Doesn't matter who it is, doesn't really matter what their position(s) is/are. Just as long as you're not propping up a political party.
Don't donate to political parties. Let them die for lack of funds. New Labour is nearly bankrupt already through alienation of its traditional supporters.
Get rid of political parties and you prevent 'One Man's Vision' fucking up your country.
Stop politicians being celebrities, send them back to the servant's entrance where they belong (they are Servants - never let them Reign)
When new legislation must be debated and voted upon by over a hundred representatives, none of whom owe any allegiance to any of the others, only the most sensible and necessary will survive.

BOTH communists and capitalists suck. Being an apologist for the American puppet is no better than being an apologist for the Soviet puppet. All forces of centralization and power whether religious, capitalist, or communist tend towards oppression, police states, violence and destruction. Lets do better than being apologists for communists, capitalists, or fundies of any stripe.

              "Kraj Majales (King of May)

            And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and
lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the
Naked,
and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy
and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for
their own glamour
in the Future, in the Future, but now drink vodka and lament the Security
Forces,
and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on airplanes but let Indian brown
millions starve
and when Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is arrested
or robbed or has his head cut off..."

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=0&poet =6613&num=27

Your boss does have a somewhat valid idea though, there is a point at which most students of the C/C++ language (or any language) will settle into regurgitation of idiomatic expressions. These people are more technicians than programming artists. The true artists of programming are those people who know languages, operating systems and computer science in general to a depth that they will have jobs regardless of what the economy is doing. The problem is that artists are hard to find. If you consider yourself to be one, I would point this out to your boss and discuss this with him at length. Perhaps you could somehow become involved with the hiring process, or in a sort of continuing education process for programmers at your job.

Good luck with the debate. :)

PS - For anyone who noticed the reference, I did steal the artist/technician concept from a Robert Browning poem. :D