What could possible embody masculine dominance and penis waving more than an online encyclopedia? And what could be more sexist than allowing anyone to contribute? Those damned facts and the misogyny they purport. I mean, I would love to contribute to Wikipedia, but it's just such an aggressive, hostile environment. I click 'edit' and I'm presented with these aggressive text boxes that I can modify, it's just so intimidating.
Obviously males should be banned from Wikipedia so the 13% of female contributors can all get together and instead of posting facts in regard to each topic, they can talk about how these topics make them feel.
You're right, it is just like congress, where anyone can contribute and is held accountable for said contributions. Where large influential corporations and religions are locked out of the system for being dishonest and all the finances are covered by a community of volunteers. Just like congress.
I agree, but unfortunately it's an opinion that can't be expressed without being construed as inflammatory. Parents don't like to hear that having children contributes to the world's demise. But money can be spent to encourage population control: promote adoption, condoms, birth control, and (gasp) abortion. Some people refuse to acknowledge that there are no population controls in our current society --- wars don't take out the percentages they used to, reproduction is outpacing the effectiveness of disease, and to top it all off people are living longer -- maybe this is because it conflicts with their "life is sacred" beliefs, maybe because it won't be a problem until after their dead, but very few people care. Regardless, lowering the population is much more important than keeping everyone alive. The issue just presents a moral dilemma most are uncomfortable addressing.
The reason for the concern over H1N1 was the 1918 flu pandemic which was also an H1N1 strain and killed 5% of the world's population. The whole point of having organisations like the CDC is to prevent a repeat of that.
All flu outbreaks killed in much greater numbers a hundred years ago than flu outbreaks today. There was no evidence to suggest that H1N1 would be just as deadly, and it wasn't. When the big H1N1 scare was out, myself and several people I know got horribly sick. I don't know if it was H1N1 b/c I didn't go to a doctor about it, but had it gotten bad enough that I had to seek medical attention, I'm sure the medical aid I would have received would be much better than I would have gotten in 1918. Lots of things killed people in 1918 that are of no concern today.
As for that narcolepsy link: If it's on the Huffington Post, it's automatically wrong. They are setting themselves up as the internet epicentre of pseudoscientific crap.
Nice fallacy. Good thing I know everything in your post was wrong, because it was written by you.
I agree. We shouldn't take vaccines for diseases our immune systems have the ability to defeat on their own. I'm all for vaccines that protect against horrific diseases like measles, but I'll never take a flu shot. I eat healthy food and I exercise. Occasionally I get the flu, but it never lasts as long as it does with friends/co-workers who have poor diets and never exercise.
I think the problem with this debate is that it's being framed as pro-vaccine/anti-vaccine. I'm somewhere in the middle. We can't expect to abolish all diseases through vaccines and attempting to do so may have its own dangers. Vaccines should be used when no other medical solution exists. Just like anti-bacterial soap/hand sanitizer. Using it excessively lessens its effectiveness. But some people think that b/c they wash their hands 10x a day they're protecting themselves from disease. At the same time, I'm glad my doctor washes his hands 10x a day because I don't want him touching some other patient (who is likely ill) in strange places and then doing the same to me. The flu vaccine is the same way: some people have medical conditions that prevent them from living a lifestyle as healthy as my own. They may need the flu vaccine. But it shouldn't be given to healthy individuals or those whose health problems are a result of bad dieting and lack of exercise.
I think it's more them just trying to paint Google as the bad guy. Or make people think that Chrome isn't as full featured without a Microsoft add-on, which leads to the assumption that Microsoft's a more competent software company and they might as well use IE.
I think that exposing the atrocities and corruption behind militaries goes a long way toward reducing the support they receive from citizens. It's still taboo to accuse the military of being anything but a noble institution in the States, but Wikileaks has done a lot to expose the flaws in that assumption. Wikileaks has also done a lot to inform people of the futility of our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus dropping public support for these endeavors. So that promotes peace and in turn opens the doors to fraternity between our nation and those who currently fear we invade them for some bogus reason.
I cannot see how people can remain objective when it comes to considering Wikileaks as a candidate for the peace prize given the political controversy surrounding it.
I can't see how you can't objectively award someone something like the Nobel Peace Prize unless there is a stand-out candidate like Ghandi. When you have a list of dozens of individuals who have all done great things to promote peace, singling one out as the best is likely to be subjective. I don't have a problem with Obama winning. I think he probably did more to promote peace than Liu Xiaobo did. Liu's Xiaobo's main influence was winning the prize and what it symbolically meant as China attempted to censor the news. Not many people had heard of him before he won the prize. Don't get me wrong, he's sacrificed a lot for his beliefs, but on an international level Obama clearly had accomplished more. It's not that the world was tired of Bush, it's that they were scared of him and his party. His response to 9/11 sharpened the divide between the Muslim world and the west. Just by being elected Obama not only repaired our reputation with many countries, but he also gave Muslims less reason to be extremists. Bush was a terrorist recruiting tool. He invaded a Muslim country to pillage it and force his ideals onto the population. Obama may not have instantly resolved the conflict between the western world and Islamic terrorists, but his presence has given peace a chance it didn't have before his election. Certainly that's deserving of a prize for peace.
That's awesome, Slashdot slapped you on the wrist for using too many caps. Your caps were appropriate in this case, but it's a clever way to knock some sense into those idiots who type with caps locked on all the time.
I hate replying to myself but upon reading the article, I was wrong: they're not using their servers to search Google, they're piggybacking off of data Internet Explorer stores. I still think Google could figure out an algorithm to exploit this and send bunk information (wouldn't it be funny if Bing returned pornography results for practically anything searched?), it would just be a little more complicated. Fortunately, they have the software engineers to do it.
Or, Google could just ban IE, but that's pretty risky. When IE users visit Google they could be met with a page that says, "We're sorry, we are no longer compatible with Internet Explorer because it returns our search results to Microsoft, effectively slowing down your computer in the same manner as malware. Please try Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera."
It'd be a hell of a way to run IE into the ground, but they'd risk losing some customers to Bing or Yahoo. I think it would work. If IE wasn't copying Google's search results, then they couldn't ban IE without making it an anti-trust issue. But now they have a legitimate reason to ban it. I say do it, go for the jugular.
I've noticed in a lot of these Google vs. Bing articles, someone would give an example search to demonstrate Google's better search ability. Then someone would reply to the post later saying, "Well Bing can find it now, and it hasn't even been that long."
Maybe Google could deny Microsoft's servers access to their website. Or maybe get real clever and set up an algorithm that sends MS servers bogus information when they inquire to make their search results completely irrelevant.
Yeah, what could be more geeky than starting an underground bare-knuckle boxing club?
I don't get where you got the Tyler Durden thing. You make it sound like geeks are all part of some massive social club that can organize and turn society into anarchy. Those people that haul your trash, connect your calls, and drive your ambulances: most of 'em aren't geeks and your awesome coding skills ain't shit compared to what you depend on them for.
'Don't fuck with us' my ass. Look how well the Anonymous war on Amazon, Ebay, ect. went. You don't just have a 'pretty bad programmer's ego,' you have a massively out of control ego.
And tell that bitch who wanted to check her Facebook page to get a fucking iPhone or Android or something. She's just as out of touch as you are.
I'm a geek and I was never picked last for kickball: those were always the fat kids.
These articles are so dumb. Something like geek culture can't be clearly made sense of in an essay. Non-fiction is a horrible medium for explaining social phenomenon, just look at sociology, the saddest excuse for a 'science' in academia. A documentary might work, but essay. ..probably not. Because an essay seeks to be conclusive and there's not much conclusive about social behavior. It's always tendencies and trends. People are individuals, so describing group behavior is a fool's errand because there will always be those who buck the trends.
Read a work of fiction written by a geek about geeky characters. Or just go out in the real world and meet some geeks (or just visit Slashdot). Those are much better ways to understand "geek culture" than measuring the Spider-Man movies' success.
My take (which is just as horribly flawed as the article): Pop culture is dead. Who's the biggest rock star in the world right now? Mick Jagger by ticket sales, Lil Wayne by album sales; but neither, really. There's no longer a single sensation the majority of Americans follow. Ever since the late 90s, there hasn't been a music style or movie genre or philosophy to define the current generation. The internet has given people access to explore their own interests with an endless amount of possibilities.
Geek isn't a term you can objectively define. In an upscale neighborhood the kid that programs is a geek. In a rough neighborhood the kid that plays too many video games is a geek. I guess the closest definition I could make would be 'a social outcast who becomes absorbed in uncommon hobbies.' So, pretty much it's just a term for introverts.
Apple products are sold internationally. Plus, the economic problems in America have hurt the lower-middle class and the poor. The rich have only been getting richer, and they're Apple's main customer base. Then you have to consider that catastrophe might not strike.
Overall, I think you have far too much confidence in your argument.You speak your claims with more conviction than they warrant. There is no certainty in economics.
Lincoln started a Civil War, he was among our worst presidents, if not the worst. He encouraged General Grant to send as many soldiers to their deaths as possible b/c the north had the population to take the hit and the south didn't. The only thing distinguishing Grant and Lincoln from barbarians was the idealism that fueled their beliefs: that the citizens they were charged with protecting mattered so little that they could be sent to certain death for "the sake of preserving the union." Lincoln is personally responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any single other person or war.
Of course, he'll always be glorified because he opposed slavery. Because killing people is so much more honorable than enslaving them (ooops. ..all those northern immigrants who were forced into the army as soon as they got off the boat. ..). It doesn't take a genius to realize that modern farming equipment was rapidly making slavery obsolete and unaffordable. Forget the over half a million killed, it was worth it b/c it ended slavery!
Another interesting thing about the Civil War: the southern states that seceded were geographically isolated from the northern states and not one of those states gave their electoral votes to Lincoln. The south seceded for the same basic reason the original 13 colonies broke from England: taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence argues that when a government ceases to represent its constituents the people are entitled to break their ties with the government. To say, "we believe in the union but not your right to break from the union, should the government stop representing your states" is hypocritical b/c of how the union was founded in the first place. It's our revisionist history that admires Lincoln. Looking at the facts, he was a dishonorable man who had the most dishonorable presidency.
Almost any research for stem-cell studies are going to be at least, in part, funded by the government. Every university that does research falls under that 'government money' umbrella. It's not like we can depend on the pharmaceutical industry to do the right thing -- that's what this entire story is about.
If I were a researcher I would ignore the IP claims and fight it in court. A precedent needs to be set to prevent patents in regards to stem cell research. Patent some tool you've constructed for your lab, sure, but it's absurd to patent the concept in general with patents like "stem cells applied to fight diabetes." That's not even a specific process and they don't even have a working 'product' yet. It needs to be acknowledged that stem cells, as natural biological material, cannot be patented in any way, no matter what you do to them. Like plants (but unfortunately with plants big pharma will extract certain chemicals and patent the isolated chemical -- a precedent needs to be set to ban that as well).
Current policy is the problem, but it's always a fallacy to say "government is the problem." Unless you support anarchy (and by anarchy I don't mean some utopian Chompsky anarchy that never has nor will exist, I mean chaos), then government cannot be a problem in and of itself. Government policy can be a problem, but here the problem is that the government isn't investing in education.
When you personify the government as some crazy anti-individual you only illustrate how out of touch you are with reality.
Way to cite your own post, btw. Here's the problem with your argument: manufacturing jobs will be lost to robots, so it really doesn't matter if we lose them to foreign countries in the short term. In the long term they're gone. We need to create a society of educated individuals whose jobs cannot be replaced by computers, robots, and machines. This starts with education and it requires the government's support.
Sports are the only thing that gets children from lower-middle class/poor households into college without drowning them in debt. Coaches are able to make those kids care about their grades and remain disciplined. There's a lot wrong with education in the U.S., but sports are probably the one thing that has kept us somewhat afloat.
What's wrong is that higher education is a private industry. If you want to get a masters in basket weaving, you should have to pay for it. But if you want to get a degree in engineering and you can pass prerequisite testing, the government should pay for it.
When it comes to certain markets, capitalism is so problematic it fails: education, health care, public transportation, soldiers, public safety, and incarceration. To name a few. Those are issues that need to be resolved. Shut down sports and you've completely ruined the country's economy and education system. I know you're just advocating shifting the focus away from sports, but as long as athleticism is more valuable than straight A's, it's actually a better path to a degree. Straight A's only gets you accepted to a major university, it doesn't pay for it.
You don't have to convince me, but what I find extremely frustrating about this situation is that most would discard your anecdote b/c you mentioned European schools. That makes you a snobby socialist elite who thinks Europe is better than America. So many Americans seem to believe that as long as we delude ourselves into believing we're the best, we are.
Then there are those who send their children to private schools and don't believe they should have to be taxed to educate the poor. Those who send their children to public schools, but don't want to be taxed for it b/c they don't expect/encourage their children to seek higher education. And of course, the ever popular Rand belief in the individual. The schools are only as good as the individuals who attend them. If you fail to become educated it's your fault and no one else's.
With the rise of charter schools, I don't know what can save our education system other than a constitutional amendment federalizing it. As much as the Democratic party angers me, I feel obligated to support it because the opposing party is wholly opposed to education. We have two major political parties and one opposes education. That's just absurd. Ayn Rand and John Wayne/Ronald Reagan are piss-poor teachers. This idea that everyone has an equal opportunity is a lie, and it's a lie that's taught by our public schools.
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What could possible embody masculine dominance and penis waving more than an online encyclopedia? And what could be more sexist than allowing anyone to contribute? Those damned facts and the misogyny they purport. I mean, I would love to contribute to Wikipedia, but it's just such an aggressive, hostile environment. I click 'edit' and I'm presented with these aggressive text boxes that I can modify, it's just so intimidating.
Obviously males should be banned from Wikipedia so the 13% of female contributors can all get together and instead of posting facts in regard to each topic, they can talk about how these topics make them feel.
You're right, it is just like congress, where anyone can contribute and is held accountable for said contributions. Where large influential corporations and religions are locked out of the system for being dishonest and all the finances are covered by a community of volunteers. Just like congress.
I agree, but unfortunately it's an opinion that can't be expressed without being construed as inflammatory. Parents don't like to hear that having children contributes to the world's demise. But money can be spent to encourage population control: promote adoption, condoms, birth control, and (gasp) abortion. Some people refuse to acknowledge that there are no population controls in our current society --- wars don't take out the percentages they used to, reproduction is outpacing the effectiveness of disease, and to top it all off people are living longer -- maybe this is because it conflicts with their "life is sacred" beliefs, maybe because it won't be a problem until after their dead, but very few people care. Regardless, lowering the population is much more important than keeping everyone alive. The issue just presents a moral dilemma most are uncomfortable addressing.
The reason for the concern over H1N1 was the 1918 flu pandemic which was also an H1N1 strain and killed 5% of the world's population. The whole point of having organisations like the CDC is to prevent a repeat of that.
All flu outbreaks killed in much greater numbers a hundred years ago than flu outbreaks today. There was no evidence to suggest that H1N1 would be just as deadly, and it wasn't. When the big H1N1 scare was out, myself and several people I know got horribly sick. I don't know if it was H1N1 b/c I didn't go to a doctor about it, but had it gotten bad enough that I had to seek medical attention, I'm sure the medical aid I would have received would be much better than I would have gotten in 1918. Lots of things killed people in 1918 that are of no concern today.
As for that narcolepsy link: If it's on the Huffington Post, it's automatically wrong. They are setting themselves up as the internet epicentre of pseudoscientific crap.
Nice fallacy. Good thing I know everything in your post was wrong, because it was written by you.
I agree. We shouldn't take vaccines for diseases our immune systems have the ability to defeat on their own. I'm all for vaccines that protect against horrific diseases like measles, but I'll never take a flu shot. I eat healthy food and I exercise. Occasionally I get the flu, but it never lasts as long as it does with friends/co-workers who have poor diets and never exercise.
I think the problem with this debate is that it's being framed as pro-vaccine/anti-vaccine. I'm somewhere in the middle. We can't expect to abolish all diseases through vaccines and attempting to do so may have its own dangers. Vaccines should be used when no other medical solution exists. Just like anti-bacterial soap/hand sanitizer. Using it excessively lessens its effectiveness. But some people think that b/c they wash their hands 10x a day they're protecting themselves from disease. At the same time, I'm glad my doctor washes his hands 10x a day because I don't want him touching some other patient (who is likely ill) in strange places and then doing the same to me. The flu vaccine is the same way: some people have medical conditions that prevent them from living a lifestyle as healthy as my own. They may need the flu vaccine. But it shouldn't be given to healthy individuals or those whose health problems are a result of bad dieting and lack of exercise.
I replied to the wrong comment. My comment is totally irrelevant to the parent.
I think it's more them just trying to paint Google as the bad guy. Or make people think that Chrome isn't as full featured without a Microsoft add-on, which leads to the assumption that Microsoft's a more competent software company and they might as well use IE.
I think that exposing the atrocities and corruption behind militaries goes a long way toward reducing the support they receive from citizens. It's still taboo to accuse the military of being anything but a noble institution in the States, but Wikileaks has done a lot to expose the flaws in that assumption. Wikileaks has also done a lot to inform people of the futility of our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus dropping public support for these endeavors. So that promotes peace and in turn opens the doors to fraternity between our nation and those who currently fear we invade them for some bogus reason.
If it weren't for them, the events going on in the mid-east right now wouldn't happen.
There, I said it. Agreed?
Yeah, because the internet wouldn't exist without Facebook and Twitter. . .
I cannot see how people can remain objective when it comes to considering Wikileaks as a candidate for the peace prize given the political controversy surrounding it.
I can't see how you can't objectively award someone something like the Nobel Peace Prize unless there is a stand-out candidate like Ghandi. When you have a list of dozens of individuals who have all done great things to promote peace, singling one out as the best is likely to be subjective. I don't have a problem with Obama winning. I think he probably did more to promote peace than Liu Xiaobo did. Liu's Xiaobo's main influence was winning the prize and what it symbolically meant as China attempted to censor the news. Not many people had heard of him before he won the prize. Don't get me wrong, he's sacrificed a lot for his beliefs, but on an international level Obama clearly had accomplished more. It's not that the world was tired of Bush, it's that they were scared of him and his party. His response to 9/11 sharpened the divide between the Muslim world and the west. Just by being elected Obama not only repaired our reputation with many countries, but he also gave Muslims less reason to be extremists. Bush was a terrorist recruiting tool. He invaded a Muslim country to pillage it and force his ideals onto the population. Obama may not have instantly resolved the conflict between the western world and Islamic terrorists, but his presence has given peace a chance it didn't have before his election. Certainly that's deserving of a prize for peace.
...and the wisdom of the crowd is always right, then?
Depends on the crowd.
Your anecdote obviously proves your point, whatever that was.
Learn to read.
Manual (non-computerized) alignment racks. I think you can buy typewriters still but I wouldn't be surprised if they disappear.
That's awesome, Slashdot slapped you on the wrist for using too many caps. Your caps were appropriate in this case, but it's a clever way to knock some sense into those idiots who type with caps locked on all the time.
I hate replying to myself but upon reading the article, I was wrong: they're not using their servers to search Google, they're piggybacking off of data Internet Explorer stores. I still think Google could figure out an algorithm to exploit this and send bunk information (wouldn't it be funny if Bing returned pornography results for practically anything searched?), it would just be a little more complicated. Fortunately, they have the software engineers to do it.
Or, Google could just ban IE, but that's pretty risky. When IE users visit Google they could be met with a page that says, "We're sorry, we are no longer compatible with Internet Explorer because it returns our search results to Microsoft, effectively slowing down your computer in the same manner as malware. Please try Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera."
It'd be a hell of a way to run IE into the ground, but they'd risk losing some customers to Bing or Yahoo. I think it would work. If IE wasn't copying Google's search results, then they couldn't ban IE without making it an anti-trust issue. But now they have a legitimate reason to ban it. I say do it, go for the jugular.
I've noticed in a lot of these Google vs. Bing articles, someone would give an example search to demonstrate Google's better search ability. Then someone would reply to the post later saying, "Well Bing can find it now, and it hasn't even been that long."
Maybe Google could deny Microsoft's servers access to their website. Or maybe get real clever and set up an algorithm that sends MS servers bogus information when they inquire to make their search results completely irrelevant.
Yeah, what could be more geeky than starting an underground bare-knuckle boxing club?
I don't get where you got the Tyler Durden thing. You make it sound like geeks are all part of some massive social club that can organize and turn society into anarchy. Those people that haul your trash, connect your calls, and drive your ambulances: most of 'em aren't geeks and your awesome coding skills ain't shit compared to what you depend on them for.
'Don't fuck with us' my ass. Look how well the Anonymous war on Amazon, Ebay, ect. went. You don't just have a 'pretty bad programmer's ego,' you have a massively out of control ego.
And tell that bitch who wanted to check her Facebook page to get a fucking iPhone or Android or something. She's just as out of touch as you are.
I'm a geek and I was never picked last for kickball: those were always the fat kids.
Good point. I bet Zuck's face could be doctored to look strikingly like Palpatine's. . .there's an idea.
These articles are so dumb. Something like geek culture can't be clearly made sense of in an essay. Non-fiction is a horrible medium for explaining social phenomenon, just look at sociology, the saddest excuse for a 'science' in academia. A documentary might work, but essay. . .probably not. Because an essay seeks to be conclusive and there's not much conclusive about social behavior. It's always tendencies and trends. People are individuals, so describing group behavior is a fool's errand because there will always be those who buck the trends.
Read a work of fiction written by a geek about geeky characters. Or just go out in the real world and meet some geeks (or just visit Slashdot). Those are much better ways to understand "geek culture" than measuring the Spider-Man movies' success.
My take (which is just as horribly flawed as the article): Pop culture is dead. Who's the biggest rock star in the world right now? Mick Jagger by ticket sales, Lil Wayne by album sales; but neither, really. There's no longer a single sensation the majority of Americans follow. Ever since the late 90s, there hasn't been a music style or movie genre or philosophy to define the current generation. The internet has given people access to explore their own interests with an endless amount of possibilities.
Geek isn't a term you can objectively define. In an upscale neighborhood the kid that programs is a geek. In a rough neighborhood the kid that plays too many video games is a geek. I guess the closest definition I could make would be 'a social outcast who becomes absorbed in uncommon hobbies.' So, pretty much it's just a term for introverts.
They could at least merge Zuckerberg's face with that of a Klingon. . .
Apple products are sold internationally. Plus, the economic problems in America have hurt the lower-middle class and the poor. The rich have only been getting richer, and they're Apple's main customer base. Then you have to consider that catastrophe might not strike.
Overall, I think you have far too much confidence in your argument.You speak your claims with more conviction than they warrant. There is no certainty in economics.
Lincoln started a Civil War, he was among our worst presidents, if not the worst. He encouraged General Grant to send as many soldiers to their deaths as possible b/c the north had the population to take the hit and the south didn't. The only thing distinguishing Grant and Lincoln from barbarians was the idealism that fueled their beliefs: that the citizens they were charged with protecting mattered so little that they could be sent to certain death for "the sake of preserving the union." Lincoln is personally responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any single other person or war.
Of course, he'll always be glorified because he opposed slavery. Because killing people is so much more honorable than enslaving them (ooops. . .all those northern immigrants who were forced into the army as soon as they got off the boat. . .). It doesn't take a genius to realize that modern farming equipment was rapidly making slavery obsolete and unaffordable. Forget the over half a million killed, it was worth it b/c it ended slavery!
Another interesting thing about the Civil War: the southern states that seceded were geographically isolated from the northern states and not one of those states gave their electoral votes to Lincoln. The south seceded for the same basic reason the original 13 colonies broke from England: taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence argues that when a government ceases to represent its constituents the people are entitled to break their ties with the government. To say, "we believe in the union but not your right to break from the union, should the government stop representing your states" is hypocritical b/c of how the union was founded in the first place. It's our revisionist history that admires Lincoln. Looking at the facts, he was a dishonorable man who had the most dishonorable presidency.
Almost any research for stem-cell studies are going to be at least, in part, funded by the government. Every university that does research falls under that 'government money' umbrella. It's not like we can depend on the pharmaceutical industry to do the right thing -- that's what this entire story is about.
If I were a researcher I would ignore the IP claims and fight it in court. A precedent needs to be set to prevent patents in regards to stem cell research. Patent some tool you've constructed for your lab, sure, but it's absurd to patent the concept in general with patents like "stem cells applied to fight diabetes." That's not even a specific process and they don't even have a working 'product' yet. It needs to be acknowledged that stem cells, as natural biological material, cannot be patented in any way, no matter what you do to them. Like plants (but unfortunately with plants big pharma will extract certain chemicals and patent the isolated chemical -- a precedent needs to be set to ban that as well).
Current policy is the problem, but it's always a fallacy to say "government is the problem." Unless you support anarchy (and by anarchy I don't mean some utopian Chompsky anarchy that never has nor will exist, I mean chaos), then government cannot be a problem in and of itself. Government policy can be a problem, but here the problem is that the government isn't investing in education.
When you personify the government as some crazy anti-individual you only illustrate how out of touch you are with reality.
Way to cite your own post, btw. Here's the problem with your argument: manufacturing jobs will be lost to robots, so it really doesn't matter if we lose them to foreign countries in the short term. In the long term they're gone. We need to create a society of educated individuals whose jobs cannot be replaced by computers, robots, and machines. This starts with education and it requires the government's support.
Sports are the only thing that gets children from lower-middle class/poor households into college without drowning them in debt. Coaches are able to make those kids care about their grades and remain disciplined. There's a lot wrong with education in the U.S., but sports are probably the one thing that has kept us somewhat afloat.
What's wrong is that higher education is a private industry. If you want to get a masters in basket weaving, you should have to pay for it. But if you want to get a degree in engineering and you can pass prerequisite testing, the government should pay for it.
When it comes to certain markets, capitalism is so problematic it fails: education, health care, public transportation, soldiers, public safety, and incarceration. To name a few. Those are issues that need to be resolved. Shut down sports and you've completely ruined the country's economy and education system. I know you're just advocating shifting the focus away from sports, but as long as athleticism is more valuable than straight A's, it's actually a better path to a degree. Straight A's only gets you accepted to a major university, it doesn't pay for it.
You don't have to convince me, but what I find extremely frustrating about this situation is that most would discard your anecdote b/c you mentioned European schools. That makes you a snobby socialist elite who thinks Europe is better than America. So many Americans seem to believe that as long as we delude ourselves into believing we're the best, we are.
Then there are those who send their children to private schools and don't believe they should have to be taxed to educate the poor. Those who send their children to public schools, but don't want to be taxed for it b/c they don't expect/encourage their children to seek higher education. And of course, the ever popular Rand belief in the individual. The schools are only as good as the individuals who attend them. If you fail to become educated it's your fault and no one else's.
With the rise of charter schools, I don't know what can save our education system other than a constitutional amendment federalizing it. As much as the Democratic party angers me, I feel obligated to support it because the opposing party is wholly opposed to education. We have two major political parties and one opposes education. That's just absurd. Ayn Rand and John Wayne/Ronald Reagan are piss-poor teachers. This idea that everyone has an equal opportunity is a lie, and it's a lie that's taught by our public schools.