Slashdot Mirror
Geographic Segregation By Education
The wage gap between college-educated workers and those with just a high school diploma has been growing — and accelerating. But the education gap is also doing something unexpected: clustering workers with more education in cities with similar people. "This effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." Most people are aware of the gentrification strife occurring in San Francisco, but it's one among many cities experiencing this. "[Research] also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.
"We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves after high school and spent our 20's living with our parents, partying, and having a sweet car that we could only afford because we lived with our parents."
Here's a thought: Teach your kids the concept of long-term goals... It worked wonders for me.
Who did what now?
Let's continue turning colleges and universities into poor imitations of trade schools. I'm sure it will be a positive impact on real education. Because everybody's gotta go to college, right?
My observation is that people who don't go to college tend to get a job locally. People who do go to college often attend a college outside of the local area, and when they graduate, often apply for jobs nationwide.
The process of going to college makes moving to a new location much more natural.
It's no wonder that college grads will move to places where they can get good jobs, and that this would be places that already have a high concentration of people with college degrees.
They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants...
Work in a restaurant for less than minimum wage.
I'm a research student in London and I did my undergrad here too, what's amazed me is the number of people I know/knew who did their undergrad elsewhere that are now popping up all over the city. Turns out a graduate level job market attracts graduates who in turn attract graduate level jobs... What the summary fails to point out, of course, is that the growth of all the extra facilities - bars, restaurants, dry cleaners etc. - also ensure the job market grows in non-graduate jobs too, so it's win-win for everyone that lives in the lucky city. That city then grows at the expense of its neighbours that lose jobs in all sectors of the market (again, as we see in the UK where London and the south east is a giant black whole sucking up money and talent from the rest of the country). Whether or not you think this is a bad thing varies, of course...
... the college education included acquiring the desire to move to such places?
Personally, I don't consider places like NYC or SF to be desirable places to live. "Clean air"? "Low crime?" "Better schools?" Certainly, compared to other "cities of size". But, to me, the choice isn't limited to which "big city" to live in. And those criteria work to exclude larger cities, in my opinion.
more people with more money in an area require more people with lower skills to do jobs to support them. once again those working and making good money are indirectly helping those without skills get good jobs *for their skillset*
can we really quit bitching about people who make something of themselves??? that is not the america I was taught growing up but i fear thats what the current generation is being taught, to hate people who make something of them selves, IE "the rich"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If that's your cup of tea, and you've the good fortune to select a profession that pays the bills your entire life in your chosen metropolis, I say more power to you. Others may find solace in living more simple, rural lives.
Remember, much of the benefit of higher wages is just more money passing through your hands to accommodate the cities' higher cost of living.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
less crime? OK. clearner air? compared to....? NYC is a big place - its not just Manhattan or the upper East (or West) side. In fact, you might make the argument in reverse when it comes to NYC, that lower "skilled" workers are clustering there and getting the benefits described.
" We've always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, ." -- Mitt Romney
For true equality we need collectivization, or genocide, whichever comes first.
Really?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There's more restaurants because there are more high-income college grads to spend money there. There's less street crime because Johnny the Finance Douchebag isn't likely to do anything worse than public urination. (white collar crime is another matter)
As for better schools, hasn't happened yet at least in NYC -- the system is very uneven and the lengths parents will go through to get their kid in a better elementary school are legendary. Lose the battle, and welcome to the suburbs. If it does happen, it'll again be because the well-educated wealthy college students are there.
Cleaner air is mostly because there's little polluting industry left. Which means fewer blue-collar jobs.
The implied narrative that those rich overeducated scum are hogging all the good places and leaving the poor in high-crime areas with bad schools, dirty air, and no amenities gets cause and effect completely wrong.
Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.
States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.
That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.
We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
TFA focuses on wages, but there is more to life than just that. Also, having an opportunity to do things that are more worthwhile. The simple life is nice, but do you want that to be your entire life, without any real accomplishment that you can look back on? And it is nice to be surrounded by intelligent, educated, aware people with broad horizons, rather than be in a place where those people are rare and hard to find.
Look at all these jobs we've created! means, more and more, subsistence level service industry jobs that will afford the children of these citizens a measurable disadvantage over the offspring of parents with professions.
When measuring ability versus resources, remember that no one scores without the ball.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
I've worked with enough of these self-proclaimed self-taught "experts" to have noticed some trends. One of the most singificant is that they have massive holes in what they know. They may know the basics of using a given programming language, but then they'll have no idea about security, or algorithms, or writing code that performs well. They won't know about Big-O notation and its implications. They don't know anything about relational theory and have no idea about the ACID principles, so they use NoSQL DBs, write what would be simple SQL queries using complex JavaScript code instead, and create "databases" that corrupt or lose data left and right.
The guy with the bachelor's degree may not be an expert, but at least he'll have likely heard at least something beyond the basics. He at least knows that an O(n^4) algorithm isn't going to scale well. He at least knows how to use foreign key constraints when designing a DB.
Hell, even the guy who only managed a couple of years of college before dropping out is probably a better candidate than the self-taught "expert" with no college experience whatsoever.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
More bars, more restaurants, and more dry cleaners makes my point. Bars are negative. Eating in restaurants is negative. And forget dry cleaners! Bars are a disaster as alcohol is now seen as the greatest killer in America. Restaurants are part of the health and obesity epidemic. And dry cleaning should be illegal. Not only are the chemicals used bad for the environment but imagine the transportation required for people to run back and forth to get their laundry. A city is nothing more than a cancer which inevitably reaches out and destroys rural areas. Yes, a city can support a museum. That way people can go see a stuffed animal that used to be common on the very ground underneath the museum. Never spend a penny on alcohol and don't even drink it if it is free. Avoid restaurants! Your wallet will love you and your waist line will look better as well. And if it isn't wash and wear don't allow it in your home.
... people that make more money buy nice things, live in nicer houses, and send their kinds to nicer schools.
Someone actually spent money on this?? Go to Maine and look at old mill towns like Saco/Biddeford and Lewiston/Auborn. Mill towns, where the wealthy lived on one side of the river, and the mill workers lived on the other.
I would say it's obvious to most people and no study was needed, but I guess someone has to justify their wasted college education by getting paid with government subsidized studies so they can live in the nicer part of town.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
Most college graduates are money-seeking who don't understand anything, too.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
So in other words, you're comparing completely ignorant idiots to people who got some amount of formal education. Not a big surprise there. On the other hand, people who do self-education right...
I hope you're not using these people to deride all autodidacts. The self-taught "experts" you speak of are barely self-taught at all, so the comparison isn't really valid.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
As an industry, we also don't need more shitty college graduates who have no idea what they're doing (the majority). And no, not even they understand things like Big-O notation and its implications, because pretty much all they cared about was getting a degree, and the colleges were happy to take their money.
If I seem hostile, it's only because I've seen people lump in idiots who barely even tried to self-educate with people who worked hard to educate themselves. In my mind, I separate college students who go there almost solely to get a degree (in other words, brainwashed losers) and college students who go there to get a better understanding of the universe around them. Why can't others do the same?
Awww. Poor kid. Did someone self-taught code rings around you and make you bitter, much?
Smart & motivated that got a job w/o education >> average struggler that barely scraped a CS Bachelor.
That's not totally true. Just look at blacks in the US. While they were primary located in the southeastern states at first, there were several waves of mass migration. That's how we ended up with major cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Washington D.C. that have black majorities. That's why there are cities as far away as Oakland and parts of New York that have very large black populations.
Although we find large populations of this community at all ends of the country, thousands of miles apart, their living conditions are quite horrible. Those cities mentioned earlier are known as crime-ridden hellholes.
Some people blame it on "poverty". Yet we've seen equally disadvantaged groups of people collectively better themselves within a few decades. We've seen poor Irish, poor Italians, poor eastern Europeans, poor Lebanese, poor Chinese, poor Vietnamese and so forth come to America with literally a few dollars to their name. Yet somehow they manage to become productive members of society. Their communities aren't known for their high levels of serious crime, regardless of where they're located. The Vietnamese are a particularly interesting case, since they arrived here quite recently, from a country that was almost totally destroyed by warfare. Yet we've seen them, as a whole, become productive independent business owners, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other professionals in a generation or two.
Some people will also blame it on "oppression". Maybe this was true before 1965, but things have changed radically since then. Blacks have had more opportunties basically handed to them than any other group. They often get preferential treatment for acceptance into colleges, public service jobs and even private service jobs in some cases. They get astouding levels of financial support. Despite being given so much, we've seen so little progress.
Why is it that, regardless of where they happen to move, and although they're given all sorts of financial and non-financial support, the black community within America has so much trouble forming a society where crime isn't an issue, where drugs aren't abused, where gangs aren't formed, and where even just the most basic of small businesses can survive?
(I'm not an American, by the way, although I have visited many times. And save your false accusations of "racism", please. We're here to discuss real issues. If that hurts your feelings, bugger off.)
First!
If you've fallen in love with the Walt Disney World experience, you now have the option to live in a town designed by Disney itself: Celebration, Florida. Resembling "Main Street, USA" and the "EPCOT World Showcase" writ large, Celebration helps blur the distinction between between Disney and real life, effectively letting you live in a theme park.
Know who doesn't live in Celebration, Florida and its mean income over $75k/yr? The people who work in Celebration, Florida.
It's not hard to find new developments across the US where you see new apartments and condominiums built alongside or even on top of faux city shops (complete with acres of parking) to give the residents the "gentrified neighborhood" experience. But you can bet that the folks who actually work in Whole Foods or PF Chang's don't actually live there. And the folks that work there can't afford to shop there.
I wish that were the case!
Actually, I was woken up at 4 am a couple of nights ago because of the shitty work of a self-taught "expert". An old Perl system that I hadn't even been involved with for a few years now was having serious problems with data loss. Well, to keep a long story short, somehow one of the shitface self-taught "experts" working on this project managed to write a bubble sort function in Ruby that also happened to discard elements of the data being sorted in some cases. And then he rigged up this Ruby code so it was called from Perl, with further data loss happening while marshalling the data between the two.
Well, it gets deployed to the production servers, things get fucked up, he doesn't know what's wrong, so me and another experienced dev get night-time calls to fix it. A few hours later his shitty Ruby hack is gone (I found out yesterday that he spent three weeks working on it!), and the system is working fine again.
The only rings this self-taught "expert" managed to code around me and the other dev were rings of shitty Ruby code. And this isn't the first self-taught "expert" whose fuck-ups we've had to deal with. He's just the latest in a very long line. Yet we never seem to have such problems with those people who have a real Comp Sci or even an Electrical Engineering degree. It's very strange! It's like qualified people are better at their jobs or something, and unqualified people fuck things up! It's so unexpected!
A shocking conclusion. Go Stanford!
The article only discusses domestic segregation, but the elephant in the room is national differences.
If global warming becomes as bad as they say, many heavily populated areas of the world (think India) will become too unproductive to support their population. Other areas (think Canada or Scandanavia) will become more habitable. Clearly the only humane policy will be totally open borders and to allow unlimited migration globally. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
My point is simply to mock the massive hippocracy and parochialism of western societies.
Maybe intelligence = not having to commit crimes and having others willing to invest in the area you live in.
If we are all equals, then anyone can achieve what the rest have achieved. Get off your ass.
How dare all the intelligent, hard working people benefit from their intelligence and hard work!
Intelligence and hard work has little to do with going to college.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is this really about education or is it just self-selection based on wealth? People have noticed the latter for thousands of years.
Since the beginning of the 80, when the current unsustainable debt system started, the growth of all of the so called services and on some level IT jobs have been fueled by the constantly mounting of new debt. If this were not the case, the growth would not have been so rapid, and the others part of the less efficient/not needed economy would have been fast annihilated and not allowed to exist as in the current system. These jobs tend to be concentrated in or around the cities and here it stands very basic relation, between the reason most of the collage graduates are going to these places. In most recent time, the current bubble-debt based system was not allowed to re-balance naturally in 2008, but was fueled by cheap money by the FED. This continuation and inflammation, on it's own, tends to accelerate the movement human resources to these cities, by allowing these regions to mount more and more debt. At some time in the near future, this bubble, and the current debt base system, will deflate rapidly, via inflation (very disruptive for the common people) or any other means, not excluding some kind of sever social disruption/revolution. When this happens these places of concentration will be the hardest hit due to inability of the masses to sustain themselves, without the system allowing debt base/resources extraction to the cities.
Absolutely right. I grew up in an economically disadvantaged area, went to college, and settled in one of the best-performing metro areas in the country. My classmates who skipped college are still there, driving 1-2 hours each way to the closest job they can find, and enduring the double disadvantages of lacking a college degree and living in a depressed area.
When one is living dangerously close to the poverty line, moving away from friends and family will be perceived as unacceptable risky. Only the most ambitious will leave, and most of those people went to college anyway.
Opening the borders is absolutely the quick patch to the issue, but the long-term compounding of the issue to the point of catastrophic failure. While "wealth" may not be a zero-sum concept, planetary resources are absolutely zero-sum. It is possible to use these resources more efficiently, but there is a limit.
If a region's population has outstripped it's resources, it is up to that population to reduce it's own population. I do not advocate killing people, but I do advocate population controls.
Limiting the number of children to 2 per person can almost guarantee the population will reduce itself to a sustainable level.
It requires:
1. No new people are allowed in (closing borders)
2. Once a man or woman has had 2 children, they are medically prevented from having any more.
3. No fertility treatments are permitted (prevents attempts at having triplets and more at once)
*If triplets or more are expected, there should be no penalty. I do not advocate forcing someone to terminate a fetus because it would put them over the limit.
While I believe in the above statements, in my country it would never come to pass because a person's individual freedom outstrips long-term planning. (there is also a large number of people that would argue that it violates their religious freedom)
... or just an ongoing occurrence that is becoming more visible due to the larger amount of data available for analysis?
I saw a report on I think 60 minutes probably 10 or 15 years ago where the black community was up in arms because they were losing out on scholarships. The complaint was they were losing them to the children of recent immigrants from Africa, a group that hadn't gone through the history of slavery because their ancestors didn't live in the US. (The whole point as far as they were concerned was this was to give a leg up to people that as a class had suffered through slavery and racism and recent African immigrants were not in this group but qualified for the scholarships and took them away from the people they were intended for.) To add insult to injury the recent African immigrants tended to be fairly successful and that lead to the complaint they didn't need the help anyway. But like you wrote, these immigrants were a self selecting group who went through all that hassle and they were more likely to be successful in the end.(It looks to me as though any group that intentional migrates will tend to do well because they're the driven to find success while people that are forced to migrate probably won't.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I agree with what you said kosh271 except:
1) if the population reduction is great (say 75% or more) and the need is urgent (say 50 years or less), then birth control can not possibly be adequate.
2) if birth control is inadequate or unattainable (you said it can not come to pass in your country) then what?
None of us want to advocate killing, but the next most drastic step after birth control (and maybe the next most drastic step after that) lead us to ethically taboo places that no one is willing to discuss. That suggests that our fate is demise though inaction because all suffupicientky effective actions are too drastic to consider.
Raise this subject in a room full of activists and you'll empty the room in an eye blink. No one dares to discuss it publicly.
thing with you but I've seen similar stuff with self taught "experts". Let's see, I've seen experts that didn't know what the real difference between a list and array were, let alone knew what a map was. (CS 102 stuff.) Would always try to reinvent the wheel whether it was writing their own quick sort instead of using the built in one or building their own formatting routines that make the same strings as the ones already available in the class they're using. Then there's the whole issue of doing object oriented code because they're using C++ but having no concepts of some pretty basic OO ideas. (Like encapsulation or inheritance. Everything is public and everything is implemented multiple times it classes that really should be derived from one basic class.) Of course I'm guessing yours said the same stuff like "Oh my code is linear, if we need it to run faster get a faster computer." (It wasn't, it was order N^2)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I really thought this was rather obvious, and that everyone already knew it, whether they discussed it or not.
Someone writing code is not "stealing" from anyone else
Yes they are. They are implementing patented processes without a license, implementing copyrighted video game rules without a license (such as all those projects for computer science classes that require students to reimplement a video game created by Alexey Pajitnov), implementing ways to provide taxi or multichannel television services without a license, implementing means to allow end users to trade copies of major label music and major studio movies without a license, writing programs that run on set-top computing platforms without a license, etc. I can provide citations on request.
Public transportation means that you don't have to own a car or pay for gas/insurance.
Unless you get an ultimatum that if you don't come into work on one of the 58 days a year when buses don't run, you'll lose your job. In my city, this includes New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the first Sunday of the year, the second Sunday of the year, ..., and the fifty-second Sunday of the year.
The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.
I drew a different conclusion from this article. I know the article's focus was on attracting college graduates so that the city can prosper, but I instead considered the contrapositive: If a city is not prospering, then it has a lower-than-average percentage of college graduates. I see it as another confirmation of residential segregation.
More and more, there is becoming a "separate and not equal" divide in communities based on their socioeconomic status. As a teacher, I see it all the time in schools: there are some schools that leverage the taxpayer for new buildings, new technology, higher salaries, and less stressful work environments, while many others struggle due to an inability to levy. Instead of governments focusing on what to do about producing and/or attracting college graduates, perhaps it should instead consider what to do about the absence of them in their community.
... and I thought Hitler died a long time ago.
a large number of people that would argue that it violates their religious freedom
Is there any violation of personal freedom greater than dictating whether or not someone can reproduce? Who the fuck gave you or anyone else the authority to decide whether or not the earth was overpopulated or who should "be allowed" to have children?
If triplets or more are expected, there should be no penalty. I do not advocate forcing someone to terminate a fetus because it would put them over the limit.
That's real big of you, you murderous prick.
Look at recent history you brainless cock. The easiest way to reduce population growth, assuming you really believe that to be a good thing, is to encourage economic growth by reducing government interference in people's lives. Best part is, it's non coercive! The solution to the problem that you claim exists is to increase personal freedom, not reduce it.
At least here in Norway this trend probably started even earlier, but we have a significantly larger proportion of dual-income university-educated couples. (This trend is supported by our one-year parents leave with pay, where the parents have to share this time, and by public kindergartens when the children are a little older.)
I suspect that a strong driver for this big city concentration is the fact that most couples meet sometime during their university studies, and when this switched from being men getting their MSc's meeting the girls from the nursing schools, to being men & women at the same university, they would have really strong incentives to try to settle in a city with a big enough employer base that both would have multiple job alternatives.
I.e. my wife & I have lived in Oslo for almost 30 years now, we have always had lots of employment options, while my youngest brother and his wife live in a far smaller town:
In their area it has significantly harder to locate alternate (and interesting) employment when bad times hit the company one of them worked at.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Or better yet all Americans could volunteer to die , that would free up 25% of resources used for a measley 5% of total population.
Unfortunately, in the land of liberals & socialist, individualism has been lost. Now, it's about the collective. Except of course, for the elitist in our society. THEY continue on as before, but tell everyone else how to live, what to eat, where to work, how to think. Life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness. If you don't want to pursue it, then don't ask me for a handout, when you are in your 30's, broke, homeless, hungry. I worked my butt off when I was in my teens & 20's, all the while, some of my friends in the backwards small town I lived in, did nothing but drink, party & have fun. Last time I went back there, some, NOW in their 50's are still doing the same f'in thing, with no ambition, nothing to show for life, except a stack full of bills, and living on government assistance. In other words, they are LAZY! And they want ME, to "give" them free food, free housing, free healthcare. THAT my friends is why collectivism, and socialism DOES NOT and will NEVER work! Hell, even the original settlers in America figured it out! They started out as a collective, and almost killed off the colony because some worked and some didn't, but those that worked their butts off, didn't like the idea of giving the fruits of their labor, to the lazy asses that did nothing. Once they gave everyone a small piece of land, and said what is yours is yours, and the fruits of your labor belong to you and no one else, and if you want to sell your excess, you may. This inspired people who wanted to better their family, and the community as a whole. Just going to college, getting a lame ass 4 year liberal arts degree, isn't going to cut it, IF your degree is in something not useful to the country as a whole. Getting a degree in underwater basketweaving, or some other lame ass thing, won't do anyone any good, if there is ZERO demand for that degree. And, the other problem with so called higher education, is with "big college". You hear those on the left complaining about big oil, big pharm etc, but no one says anything about "big college". What is meant by that term? How about university professors, university presidents, and some coaches, making upwards of 6 or 7 figures? Results then should be we are graduating the best and brightest. LOL, NOT happening. We have some college educated people that come out of college, dumber than they went in! Public education, today, thanks to political correctness, and the 60's radicals, that are in charge of everything, is nothing more than re-education camps, to get children use to the idea that government is good, and people, conservatism, God is bad. By the time they have been molded by years of socialist teachings, politically correct, history revisionism, when they graduate, they are "socialist". My nephew, almost 40, started out that way. When he got out of college, he though government was the end-all answer to everything. Only when he got out in the working world, having lived off his parents from birth though college, did he finally get it. His first job out of college, paid xxxx dollars per month. He thought he had it made in the shade, until that first paycheck came, and he found that his paycheck, thanks to all the taxes & withholdings, was about 30% less than he expected. Along with becoming born again, he changed and is now a true conservative (not to be confused with the RINO republicans), believes it is up to each of us, on our own or with our family, to make it in this world. The other problem, in my opinion, is the total lack of respect, that people in society have for their fellow human being. We see it constantly, someone down and out, getting beat up, mugged, on the street and does anyone come to this persons aid? Nope, we just whip out our phones to record it all. What happened? Why have are we a broken society? The absence of religion in everyday public life. The government, has pretty much stripped out any reference to religion, in society, starting with education. The so called "establishment clause" says "Congress shall make no law res
For an urgent crisis, I would propose food aid from other regions which is laced with birth control.
There would be no need for killing. It would severely limit the population in crisis from getting worse and over time. The region will have its population reduced to the point where aid is no longer needed.
With no aid needed, a sustainable population level will have been reached.
What I want to know, why are people modding up such an opinionated piece of drivel from an anon coward? This so called debate is old and sad. People choose to learn what they think is important. Most employers seem to think getting the work done FAST and not blowing things up is important. I have worked for employers for 20 years now and taught myself what I needed to know. I also went to school and took calc, chem, physics, have read constantly for my whole life, whatever, it didn't have a damn thing to do with what I work on now or my approach to learning. That started from when I was young, not college. So this talk of making a big distinction between those who go to college/university and those who do not, is "uneducated" and a false start to any conversation.
You know, this is a problem with the babysitting/jail system, er... the public education system in America. The schools in this country squander huge amounts of money, and time to FAIL to educate children, instead it's to keep them busy and physically accounted for until they're old enough to be thrown into jail. If they happen to pick up an education, somehow, by accident, all well and good, I suppose.
The problem is that it's not nearly hard enough to graduate, and too easy to fail out.
For every child who drops out of school, someone at the school should basically be FIRED. (Also, dropping out should be illegal, so this would never happen. You can graduate EARLY, and once you graduate, you can walk, but... no failing to complete school.) There should be someone at the school whose job it is to make sure every single child graduates, and deserves to graduate. (Retarded children excepted, naturally. They should be educated too, but it's understood it might take 'slow' children longer to get there. For certifiably "developmentally" or "cognitively" disabled kids, an alternate path to the same destination should be provided, if it isn't already.)
Moreover, (at the risk of pissing off all the small-minded, knee-jerk people who will pitch a fit about how horrible this idea is...) make it so that children aren't legally adults until they've graduate high school. PERIOD. You don't graduate, you're still legally a kid. Your parents have to support you, you are obliged to live with them, (unless of course, you can't by order of a court, if, for example, you're being abused, etc.) and OBEY them, etc. So you're 25 years old, say, and you haven't graduated high school. You can't vote, you can't stay out past 10, you can't DRINK, you can't SMOKE, you can't enlist, you can't work, you can't drive, (and that's another thing, from now on, driving is for adults only, since you're handling a LETHAL WEAPON when you get behind the wheel...) until you GRADUATE HIGH SCHOOL. In a perfect world, that's how things would be.
Instead of arbitrarily making 18 years from the day a person is born when society proclaims you're an adult, how about if you get those rights and privileges when you can demonstrate you're READY for them?!? Revolutionary idea, I know.
At the same time, for any kid who isn't passing all classes, the school day should be like the workday, like as in, eight to five. Getting off early is for people who are doing well, and don't need the help/micromanagement. Kids wouldn't sit there, from 3 to 5 in the afternoon, they'd get additional personalized education tailored to their needs until they are back on the glide-path to graduation, rather than set to crash MILES short of the runway!
This wouldn't be a punishment, it would simply be a recognition that the education system will not be ALLOWED to fail a child, (in any sense of that expression,) the measures that might seem to punish a kid are only to facilitate the system being able to do its duty by the student. Each year, as time goes by, you ratchet up the standards until they're back where they were decades ago when a high school diploma fucking meant something. Today it means precisely shit, and don't tell me that the world is so much more complex today that they can't teach what they used to teach, because that's 100% pure bullshit. English isn't harder, or more complex, and the few words that have been "added" over the last 50 years like "Twitter" and "Trekie" and "Twerk" don't need to be taught. Math isn't any harder or different, Spelling hasn't changed appreciably, geography... there's about 1 country more than 50 years ago, and it's easy to remember, because its name is the same as the one it used to be part of, except it has the word "South" prepended to it. Reasoning, A.K.A. critical thinking hasn't changed, and though subjects like American History and World History might be slightly longer than 50 years ago, because there's 50 more years of it, it shouldn't be allowed to go by the wayside. The reason is
Funny...as someone doing the hiring and firing for my company and another for the last 20 years....the top developers we've had have by and large been self taught programmers(many with degrees in something unrelated, like business or biology, or none at all). We get way too many guys with MS in CS who can't fucking use source control properly or talk to their fellow man. Sorry, the software development labs that have sprung up in my alma mater and CS departments around the nation to teach software engineering practices vs. just cs knowledge are little more than the zealotry/whims of the professors/ta's running them. And they can't teach what is really needed....self learning and getting things done.
If you are hiring good people they will know when an optimization is needed and when it isn't and design/build accordingly. Maybe you're hiring practices are the problem?
Also, the most stark difference i see between reality out there and your statement is the DB knowledge. Hands down, CS graduates...the higher the GPA..the more shit they are at any type of real DB implementation. Never understood that, but your statement just reminded me of that.
I have to preface this by saying I don't currently have the position that any place needs population controls like this right now, so you don't lump me in with this. But your arguments are wild.
... and I thought Hitler died a long time ago.
Not really. He sterilized "undesirables" and hoped to do it before they had one child, so it wasn't so nondiscriminatory as this proposal.
He was after eugenics -- in many cases, using non-heritable criteria -- not population control.
In some ways this is like going after somebody who killed in self-defense in court by saying "you know who else killed people? HITLER!".
Is there any violation of personal freedom greater than dictating whether or not someone can reproduce?
Uhh, yeah. For instance, you can be locked in a cage. Or killed. Or enslaved.
Disallowing reproduction is definitely on the list, but it's not at the top.
Who the fuck gave you or anyone else the authority to decide whether or not the earth was overpopulated or who should "be allowed" to have children?
Reality may give us that authority.
We might not be there yet, but his hypothetical had, as its premise, the notion that the region *could not sustain those numbers*. That means you don't have kids, or you kill people, or you export people. If there's a third option, that means you could sustain those numbers and the premise is contradicted.
That's real big of you, you murderous prick.
Now you're making shit up. He did not advocate murder.
is to encourage economic growth by reducing government interference in people's lives
There are a lot of places with weak governments and poor economies. The idea that government interference causes babies is novel.
Education on birth control and unrestricted access to birth control -- both of which are typically, though not necessarily, provided by governments -- have the most consistent record or stabilizing population sizes. General population wealth and low infant & childhood mortality rates is also significant, but people have lots of funny contradictory ideas about how to improve that.
If your name seems to indicate that you are black, it actually means much more.
Black children in well-off educated families don't get those kinds of names. They get regular names like William, Jack, Karen, Jennifer, Mark, and Amy. Businesses are quite happy to interview and even hire these people.
If you have a "black" name, you're not merely black. Your mother endorsed the ghetto culture. You were almost certainly raised in that culture. You probably accept it and might know little about anything else.
So this isn't quite exactly racism. It's about a very harmful culture that just happens to be strongly associated with a particular race.
The post presumes a whole load of tripe.
First, there's a HUGE difference between a BS degree in ANYTHING and being "educated". The grads coming out of most colleges today seem about as clueless as a 9-year old in the sixties and I find most to be unusable in any practicale sense for any REAL work. I'm sorry but the engineering grads I encounter are all CAD-dependent, lack any practical skills, and any common sense. The software folks are worse - too frequently incapable of controlling HARDWARE (they seem to all be taught to code in script languages on black boxes with full dependence upon garbage collectors and such), working on micros without an OS, coding in assembly, etc. Four years of writing tablet apps and creating web pages while getting stoned and drunk is just a joke. There are dead sheep all over the planet who deserve to get theur skins back. We've had a tidal wave of easy student loans and we've propagandized an entire generation into thinking that it needs to go deeply into debt to attend a 4-year college in order to get a job and be seen as "educated" - but the very same leaders pushing this have also been pushing the mass-importation of cheap foreign labor so that effectively all the new tech jobs last year were filled by foreigners and all those American kids with their crappy degrees, and huge debts will have a hard time ever getting ahead.
Second, the idea that the big cities are where the air is cleaner is a joke - one example: NASA just put out a map of the US that showed NO2 levels, and all the worst levels are in the big preogressive cities. The claim that the big cities are where the best food, best schools, etc are is similarly a highly-subjective folly. The huge school districts are the ones that tend to shuffle-around all the worst teachers because they have more places to hide them and it's easier than facing-down the unions; it's FAR harder to hide bad teachers in smaller cities. The giant universities are not necessarily "better" either - some of the scools that turn out the best grads with the lowest debt levels and the highest satisfaction are smaller.
The piece reads like the sort of garbage you expect from an elitist moron in a big left-leaning city - a typical "bubble boy" who is so supremely limited in his world view and world experience that he does not even recognize how ignorant he is of what lies beyond the bubble.
I have yet to give the article a full and close read, but I wonder if the prevailing wisdom is actually true. First, I noticed the charts used in the article are 14 years out of date. I could understand 2010 but not 2000.
Today I see many college educated students flipping burgers with those without even a GED. Add to those folks 40 to 250k of college debt and you really have to question the theory. Then there are the non-college people out there making millions of bucks.
Obviously there is a difference between a smart, hard working GED holder and the dumb, and lazy GED holder. The same is true of those with a BS, MS, MA, PHd or whatever new acronym may be out there. Colleges also differ widely by who you get to rub elbows with too. Harvard vs. UMSL would be an example.
I think my point is that a BS for BS sake is pretty much a loser unless you are a winner in the first place, and the degree is in something other than 3rd century romantic poetry in gender relations.
And there is the age factor. Over time the college graduate will open more doors simply because college is used as litmus test for those applying. They do this not because a college graduate is better than a non-college graduate for the job, but because EEOC will not allow for entry examinations etc.
The issue is very nuanced I would think, and the stats could be curved to whatever liking you want.