The most literate army in the history of the U.S. was the one which fought the Civil War and none of them were taught in anything larger than a one room school house.
As to why being exposed to the lessons over and over is a good thing, I take it you have never been in a situation where you had to be retaught something you were taught once, years ago?
Well, schools have always been too slow for me. The only subjects I ever struggled with are quantum computing and general relativity.
My question is, why blindly repeat the subjects when you can send the failing ones back, and the passing ones to the next level? A big part of why US education sucks is "lowest common denominator" teaching, where the worst students sets the pace for the class. In other countries, the students are spilt into classes based on ability, and the best class moves at a much faster pace. They keep the high-performing students engaged and can cover more material. Meanwhile, the low-performing students in the slower classes don't feel stressed because things are taught at a pace they can internalize.
Single motherhood is primarily a consequence of Democratic and progressive policies at the state and federal level.
Single motherhood is due to the lack of family planning. Who was it that pushed for abstinence only sex education? Who's fought against abortion? And now who's giving out contraceptives? Maybe you should stop shooting yourself in the foot and blaming it on the other guy.
If you have a one room school house, you need A teacher. If you scale up so that you have 5 rooms of students, you need 5 teachers AND a principal.
The students get a better education because of that. Now there's a science teacher and a math teacher who actually studied those subjects, as opposed to that one teacher who is supposed to be great at everything, but often isn't.
More importantly, the older students are exposed to the basic lessons year after year, resulting in those lessons being reinforced over time.
Why have them learn basic arithmetic over and over again when they should be moving on to algebra, geometry and trigonometry? Isn't that just wasting their time?
There is therefore no consistent, convincing evidence that ingested
asbestos is hazardous to health, and it is concluded that there is no need to establish a
guideline for asbestos in drinking-water.
So discharge of asbestos - a natural fiber - into Lake Michigan is a problem because - why?
Just curious, what would happen if some of that asbestos washes on shore, where it dries and gets carried away by wind?
Nobody is saying it won't have any effect at all, but you need to take into account the fact that the waste water is 5 billionth of the total water in the lake. It's environmental impact is basically nothing compared to the positive economic impact of being able to start this factory.
If you can't build the LCD screens in the US where the consumers are, then you are building them elsewhere and shipping them here, the process of which probably produces more pollutants than the factory itself.
It's not really artificial intelligence yet. Sure 95% of the time it can identify objects in a picture, or listen to an audio recording and transcribe the text 90% correctly, or translate from one language to another 60% of the time, or drive a car in 98% of the situations. That makes it a bit smarter than a chimp perhaps, but "intelligent"?
As always, it's the 80% of the features that take 20% of the work. The remaining 20% is the hard part.
It really feels like if you know what you're doing it should be possible to build a team of actually good programmers and put everyone else out of business by actually meeting your deliverables, but no one has yet. I wonder why that is.
You mean Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like? People may not always like what they do, but they manage to get things done and make plenty of money in the process. The problem for a lot of other businesses is not having a way to identify and promote actually good programmers. In your example, you could've spent 10 minutes fixing their query and saved them days of headache, but how much recognition will you actually get? Where is your motivation to help them?
- animals - highly dependent on the road time. Many highways are fully fenced. Many highways traverse built up areas and are surrounded by sound barriers. You're far less likely to come across animals on a highway than you are a residential road.
Road kills happen all the time on the highway. I see one every month.
- items fallen off trucks - Really? Why not throw getting struck by a meteor in and ban all autonomous driving until we successfully create an infinite improbability drive.
I've dodged a dozen things that have fallen off trucks that could've killed me. I have not been hit by a meteor once.
- other irresponsible drivers - Why worry about them? Let them cut around you. Very few irresponsible drivers actively cause an accident
I've had a semi try to merge into my lane as I was passing it. There was no where for me to go, but honking caught the driver's attention.
Part of the problem here is that a lot of people are making really irrational choices about all this. If anyone is uncertain, they should go to community college and drop out quickly if they have issues
Yeah, that's a good point. It's not the rational students that you have to worry about. And community college is a good middle ground.
For instance, what if it turns out that video games or real life parks where there's a large number of human NPC actors become popular with the wealthy in the near future and it soaks up a lot of the out of work unskilled workers?
That could be interesting, but I think my problem with these proposals is scale. Can entertainment really soak up 40 hours a week for ~3 billion people? Even rich people don't have time for that much entertainment, and there's not enough of them go go around.
It also assumes the problem doesn't get solved in some other way first, and that the collapsing economy doesn't lead to a violent revolution that would make a venture like this hard to start.
A nice solution would be UBI or some variant of that. Maybe one where the machines producing the bare necessities are owned by the public, and their products are simply distributed to everyone. If you want luxury, you can still work and pay for that yourself.
If you really make $120k after 4 years of work, then it's almost exactly the same as your loans for going to some place like UC Berkeley for 4 years (in-state). However, by then you'd have 4 years of work experience, and you should be getting raises or looking for better paying work. If instead you spent 8 years in school, then you're still a new-grad looking to get new-grad pay.
You're right. But the assumption you made in the earlier post was "if you're smart". Well, if you're smart, then college is going to work out in your favor.
Would you rather hire a plumber that's been doing it for 10 years or one of the dozen fresh out of training? Workers with experience in their field can still demand a premium.
Not a lot of premium. They're both licensed and required to provide warranty. If a new guy will do it for $100, the most I would pay for experience is maybe $130. If a flood of new guys push the low price to $40, then the old guys are screwed too.
taking on any job with a higher barrier to entry is always a bigger risk by definition. If you picked the wrong high barrier to entry job to train in, it's a catastrophe
It's not that bad. Bigger risk for a bigger reward. Even if you fail, you can still go to trade school for $1000 and the loan repayments can be deferred until you're employed. And really, after the first year of college, you'll know whether you can succeed academically. By the end of the 2nd year, you'll know if there's companies willing to hire you, because they'll be offering you internships. If neither of those happen, you need to change majors or quit before you collect 6 years of student debt.
For a student with poor grades it might even be that college has such a low chance of success that it's a terrible idea, while the trades job remains within realistic reach.
I agree. If you hate studying and have never gotten better than a C in any class, you probably shouldn't go to college.
it's possible the "people will find new jobs we're not expecting" crowd is right.
I highly doubt they will be enough to take the place of low-skilled work. The new jobs we are seeing are ever more niche and unstable. A quick glance at a job board brings up a bunch of "specialist", "analyst" and "technician" jobs. Those are decent jobs ($65k or more), but they're all different and there's not a huge demand for any specific one. It's also hard to find training for them, so the best you can do is go to university and hope that a well-rounded education means you can learn the rest on the job.
At some point you can wrap up automating everything that matters. If anything, automation work is more limited due to it being in project form (you automate a thing once, but you can wash dishes every day).
The number of things you can automate is equal to the number of jobs that people can possibly have, which is quite a lot. Since running the machines will always cost less than hiring humans, everything that's done on a regular basis is worth automating. If it's done infrequently or it's complicated to automate, that just means the payback period is longer. But given enough time, it'll be worth doing. Eventually you won't be able to find things to automate, but by then there's no jobs left anywhere else either.
Keep in mind who preaches it (teachers) and what their motivations might be.
I can tell you what their motivation is not - they're not in it for the pay or prestige. If they were, they wouldn't have become teachers in the first place.
Personally I don't care what someone's job is and I don't want to know - but at the same time I acknowledge I'm part of a minority.
Questions about your job are usually dick-measuring contests (but with money). If you tell them you make more than they do, or own more houses than they do, they'll shut up very quickly.
But why you want to associate with those people is beyond me. There's plenty of non-judgemental people out there.
...or, if you're smart, you can go into plumbing when you graduate high school and get paid $40,000/year while other schmucks are paying for college. You'll only come out a couple hundred thousand ahead
Or if you're even smarter, you'll pick a major that nets you an $100k job straight out of college and pay off your student loans in 2 years. Then you can laugh at the "schmucks" who's still working while you retire to the Caribbean by age 40.
55 years old, 30 years cutting meat, now what? Going to school full time 2, 3, or 4 years now, while he supports a family is difficult to do.
30 years working means he should have plenty saved up to pay for school, maybe even enough to retire. Complacency, more than anything else, screwed him over.
Besides, if an 18-year-old can secure a school loan, why can't he do the same?
You're right on most counts, but I don't think trade jobs are safe just because they can't be automated in the near future. Automation will put millions of low-skilled workers out of jobs. A good chunk of them will try to get training in something that's harder to automate. Now what do you think they'll be studying? Plumbing or automation? If millions people are looking for jobs, you can bet the ones with the shortest training period and the lowest entry cost will get flooded first.
Another problem is that the number of pipe leaks scales pretty linearly with the population size. If 5 new plumbers show up in your neighborhood, you can bet on losing business. Meanwhile, the demand for automation is unlimited. As long as there's someone out there doing work manually, there's an opportunity to automate and do it cheaper.
It took me 8 years to finish college but I didn't have a cent of student debt.
That may or may not be a good thing. If you're making $80k out of college, those 4 extra years of not working adds up to $320k, which is probably a lot more than your student debt.
One of the other guys there was a decent dotNET programmer and he was self-taught. One day, we all took about an hour to code up programs to brute force the answer to a riddle. He wrote his in C# or something and I wrote mine in PERL. Both of us got the right answer but mine executed in much less time than his. He just couldn't understand it. He had never been taught about speed.
That's what I see as well, the self-taught guys are great at the stuff they've studied or worked on previously, but occasionally they run into something they've never encountered before and they don't even recognize it as a problem. Only a few of them really try to study the craft and learn everything.
Slashdot Mirror
The most literate army in the history of the U.S. was the one which fought the Civil War and none of them were taught in anything larger than a one room school house.
Source please. Research in IQ suggests otherwise.
As to why being exposed to the lessons over and over is a good thing, I take it you have never been in a situation where you had to be retaught something you were taught once, years ago?
Well, schools have always been too slow for me. The only subjects I ever struggled with are quantum computing and general relativity.
My question is, why blindly repeat the subjects when you can send the failing ones back, and the passing ones to the next level? A big part of why US education sucks is "lowest common denominator" teaching, where the worst students sets the pace for the class. In other countries, the students are spilt into classes based on ability, and the best class moves at a much faster pace. They keep the high-performing students engaged and can cover more material. Meanwhile, the low-performing students in the slower classes don't feel stressed because things are taught at a pace they can internalize.
Single motherhood is primarily a consequence of Democratic and progressive policies at the state and federal level.
Single motherhood is due to the lack of family planning. Who was it that pushed for abstinence only sex education? Who's fought against abortion? And now who's giving out contraceptives? Maybe you should stop shooting yourself in the foot and blaming it on the other guy.
If you can meet all your goals and deadlines in 30hrs then enjoy the rest of the week off
Right... As opposed to simply assigning you more work to fill the remaining 10 hours.
If you have a one room school house, you need A teacher. If you scale up so that you have 5 rooms of students, you need 5 teachers AND a principal.
The students get a better education because of that. Now there's a science teacher and a math teacher who actually studied those subjects, as opposed to that one teacher who is supposed to be great at everything, but often isn't.
More importantly, the older students are exposed to the basic lessons year after year, resulting in those lessons being reinforced over time.
Why have them learn basic arithmetic over and over again when they should be moving on to algebra, geometry and trigonometry? Isn't that just wasting their time?
A$201 million to improve water quality through reducing fertilizer use and adapting new technologies and land management practices
Is fertilizers even the problem here? What does land management have to do with the ocean?
A$45 million for sea country management, coastal clean-up days and to raise awareness
Isn't this just feel-good stuff?
Also, no mention of global warming? It's considered a major factor.
Why don't they switch from selling fish to selling mussels?
There is therefore no consistent, convincing evidence that ingested asbestos is hazardous to health, and it is concluded that there is no need to establish a guideline for asbestos in drinking-water.
So discharge of asbestos - a natural fiber - into Lake Michigan is a problem because - why?
Just curious, what would happen if some of that asbestos washes on shore, where it dries and gets carried away by wind?
Nobody is saying it won't have any effect at all, but you need to take into account the fact that the waste water is 5 billionth of the total water in the lake. It's environmental impact is basically nothing compared to the positive economic impact of being able to start this factory.
If you can't build the LCD screens in the US where the consumers are, then you are building them elsewhere and shipping them here, the process of which probably produces more pollutants than the factory itself.
It's not really artificial intelligence yet. Sure 95% of the time it can identify objects in a picture, or listen to an audio recording and transcribe the text 90% correctly, or translate from one language to another 60% of the time, or drive a car in 98% of the situations. That makes it a bit smarter than a chimp perhaps, but "intelligent"?
As always, it's the 80% of the features that take 20% of the work. The remaining 20% is the hard part.
I think you'll find most readers here understand precisely why you are very selectively arguing and trying hopelessly to defend your position.
Oh? Then tell me, what is my position?
It really feels like if you know what you're doing it should be possible to build a team of actually good programmers and put everyone else out of business by actually meeting your deliverables, but no one has yet. I wonder why that is.
You mean Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like? People may not always like what they do, but they manage to get things done and make plenty of money in the process. The problem for a lot of other businesses is not having a way to identify and promote actually good programmers. In your example, you could've spent 10 minutes fixing their query and saved them days of headache, but how much recognition will you actually get? Where is your motivation to help them?
- animals - highly dependent on the road time. Many highways are fully fenced. Many highways traverse built up areas and are surrounded by sound barriers. You're far less likely to come across animals on a highway than you are a residential road.
Road kills happen all the time on the highway. I see one every month.
- items fallen off trucks - Really? Why not throw getting struck by a meteor in and ban all autonomous driving until we successfully create an infinite improbability drive.
I've dodged a dozen things that have fallen off trucks that could've killed me. I have not been hit by a meteor once.
- other irresponsible drivers - Why worry about them? Let them cut around you. Very few irresponsible drivers actively cause an accident
I've had a semi try to merge into my lane as I was passing it. There was no where for me to go, but honking caught the driver's attention.
Easy to get around that by putting something heavy in the drivers seat.
Part of the problem here is that a lot of people are making really irrational choices about all this. If anyone is uncertain, they should go to community college and drop out quickly if they have issues
Yeah, that's a good point. It's not the rational students that you have to worry about. And community college is a good middle ground.
For instance, what if it turns out that video games or real life parks where there's a large number of human NPC actors become popular with the wealthy in the near future and it soaks up a lot of the out of work unskilled workers?
That could be interesting, but I think my problem with these proposals is scale. Can entertainment really soak up 40 hours a week for ~3 billion people? Even rich people don't have time for that much entertainment, and there's not enough of them go go around.
It also assumes the problem doesn't get solved in some other way first, and that the collapsing economy doesn't lead to a violent revolution that would make a venture like this hard to start.
A nice solution would be UBI or some variant of that. Maybe one where the machines producing the bare necessities are owned by the public, and their products are simply distributed to everyone. If you want luxury, you can still work and pay for that yourself.
If you really make $120k after 4 years of work, then it's almost exactly the same as your loans for going to some place like UC Berkeley for 4 years (in-state). However, by then you'd have 4 years of work experience, and you should be getting raises or looking for better paying work. If instead you spent 8 years in school, then you're still a new-grad looking to get new-grad pay.
You're right. But the assumption you made in the earlier post was "if you're smart". Well, if you're smart, then college is going to work out in your favor.
Would you rather hire a plumber that's been doing it for 10 years or one of the dozen fresh out of training? Workers with experience in their field can still demand a premium.
Not a lot of premium. They're both licensed and required to provide warranty. If a new guy will do it for $100, the most I would pay for experience is maybe $130. If a flood of new guys push the low price to $40, then the old guys are screwed too.
taking on any job with a higher barrier to entry is always a bigger risk by definition. If you picked the wrong high barrier to entry job to train in, it's a catastrophe
It's not that bad. Bigger risk for a bigger reward. Even if you fail, you can still go to trade school for $1000 and the loan repayments can be deferred until you're employed. And really, after the first year of college, you'll know whether you can succeed academically. By the end of the 2nd year, you'll know if there's companies willing to hire you, because they'll be offering you internships. If neither of those happen, you need to change majors or quit before you collect 6 years of student debt.
For a student with poor grades it might even be that college has such a low chance of success that it's a terrible idea, while the trades job remains within realistic reach.
I agree. If you hate studying and have never gotten better than a C in any class, you probably shouldn't go to college.
it's possible the "people will find new jobs we're not expecting" crowd is right.
I highly doubt they will be enough to take the place of low-skilled work. The new jobs we are seeing are ever more niche and unstable. A quick glance at a job board brings up a bunch of "specialist", "analyst" and "technician" jobs. Those are decent jobs ($65k or more), but they're all different and there's not a huge demand for any specific one. It's also hard to find training for them, so the best you can do is go to university and hope that a well-rounded education means you can learn the rest on the job.
At some point you can wrap up automating everything that matters. If anything, automation work is more limited due to it being in project form (you automate a thing once, but you can wash dishes every day).
The number of things you can automate is equal to the number of jobs that people can possibly have, which is quite a lot. Since running the machines will always cost less than hiring humans, everything that's done on a regular basis is worth automating. If it's done infrequently or it's complicated to automate, that just means the payback period is longer. But given enough time, it'll be worth doing. Eventually you won't be able to find things to automate, but by then there's no jobs left anywhere else either.
Keep in mind who preaches it (teachers) and what their motivations might be.
I can tell you what their motivation is not - they're not in it for the pay or prestige. If they were, they wouldn't have become teachers in the first place.
Personally I don't care what someone's job is and I don't want to know - but at the same time I acknowledge I'm part of a minority.
Questions about your job are usually dick-measuring contests (but with money). If you tell them you make more than they do, or own more houses than they do, they'll shut up very quickly.
But why you want to associate with those people is beyond me. There's plenty of non-judgemental people out there.
...or, if you're smart, you can go into plumbing when you graduate high school and get paid $40,000/year while other schmucks are paying for college. You'll only come out a couple hundred thousand ahead
Or if you're even smarter, you'll pick a major that nets you an $100k job straight out of college and pay off your student loans in 2 years. Then you can laugh at the "schmucks" who's still working while you retire to the Caribbean by age 40.
55 years old, 30 years cutting meat, now what? Going to school full time 2, 3, or 4 years now, while he supports a family is difficult to do.
30 years working means he should have plenty saved up to pay for school, maybe even enough to retire. Complacency, more than anything else, screwed him over.
Besides, if an 18-year-old can secure a school loan, why can't he do the same?
You're right on most counts, but I don't think trade jobs are safe just because they can't be automated in the near future. Automation will put millions of low-skilled workers out of jobs. A good chunk of them will try to get training in something that's harder to automate. Now what do you think they'll be studying? Plumbing or automation? If millions people are looking for jobs, you can bet the ones with the shortest training period and the lowest entry cost will get flooded first.
Another problem is that the number of pipe leaks scales pretty linearly with the population size. If 5 new plumbers show up in your neighborhood, you can bet on losing business. Meanwhile, the demand for automation is unlimited. As long as there's someone out there doing work manually, there's an opportunity to automate and do it cheaper.
They don't say it directly. It comes from constantly promoting office jobs as the thing to aim for while ignoring and marginalizing trades.
So it's microaggression?
If that is enough to turn you away, then you're not cut out for blue collar work.
It took me 8 years to finish college but I didn't have a cent of student debt.
That may or may not be a good thing. If you're making $80k out of college, those 4 extra years of not working adds up to $320k, which is probably a lot more than your student debt.
One of the other guys there was a decent dotNET programmer and he was self-taught. One day, we all took about an hour to code up programs to brute force the answer to a riddle. He wrote his in C# or something and I wrote mine in PERL. Both of us got the right answer but mine executed in much less time than his. He just couldn't understand it. He had never been taught about speed.
That's what I see as well, the self-taught guys are great at the stuff they've studied or worked on previously, but occasionally they run into something they've never encountered before and they don't even recognize it as a problem. Only a few of them really try to study the craft and learn everything.