and not just the finger bang. Listen to him and his rhetoric. It's pretty much the 5 minutes of Hate from 1984 stretched out into an 2 hour program. He's made multiple references to blood libel. His audience has already been shown to be a little unhinged (maybe not 'a little'). This isn't me trolling. He's argued that Sandy Hook was a false flag for Pete's sake. He argued that chemicals in our water are turning us Gay.
Furthermore, Jones has many, many times hinted at armed rebellion. He's done this to people who he knows are armed and who have shown themselves to be more than happy to use "2nd amendment solutions".
Now, in Jones' divorce trial he admitted that he doesn't believe any of the nonsense he spouts. That it's all an act. But if anything that makes it worse. He knows the risks of what he's doing. He knows he could be pushing some nutter over the edge and he doesn't care. Google, OTOH, cares, because they don't want the lawsuit when one of them finally snaps and shows up at some QANON target and shoots the place up.
DMCA is for copyright. This isn't about copyright, this is about negligence. Jones' listeners already have a history of going off half cocked. My guess is google, Twitter, etc are worried about a negligence lawsuit the next time one of them fires a gun if it hits something.
They could hide behind common carrier, but that's a very high bar to meet. It means being a dumb pipe, like the telephone company. It wouldn't be worth it. They couldn't even ban trolls from flood posting and the like. No social network could survive that.
Instead they're policing their network as best the can. Make no mistake, they didn't want to kick Jones & his ilk off. His viewer's money spends the same as everyone else's and they'd be happy with the advertising dollars. The final straw was when he mimed shooting Bob Mueller.
If you want a sci-fi take on what they're afraid of go read this. I'm not saying Jones is trying to get somebody killed, but I'm saying words have power (as that Pizzagate business proved) and Jones is using them recklessly.
because that's what got Alex Jones banned. The final straw was when he mimed a gun shot talking about Mueller. The platforms are worked one of his listeners is going to go off and shoot somebody. This isn't idle speculation either.
I looked up a few of the ones you listed. Manveer Heir is walking the same fine line Jones did with what can only be described as a left wing dog whistle. You're right, he's hot garbage (just trying to make a name for himself stirring up controversy). But I couldn't find an implicit let alone explicit call to violence against white people. The rest are either opportunists or, in Sarah Jeong's case, a dumb kid saying angry things. Again though, couldn't find any calls to violence.
Banning Jones and the like isn't something these platforms want to do. Remember, they're corporations who sell advertising. All they care about is eyeballs. They could care less how they get them. Hell, the reason Trump's president is the media gave him $6 billion in free advertising so they could get eyeballs to do their own ads to. They're worried about getting sued if they don't act and one of Jone's listeners acts on his (pretty blatant and at times outright overt) suggestions of violence.
"Antifa" is blown out of proportion by media. They're the American equivalent of soccer hooligans. And the most the left does is "Punch Nazis". I've yet to see one of them mime a shooting or show up with guns.
TL;DR: The Left isn't getting banned because they don't lean on violence.
See here. I dip my card at the store and by the time my stuff's in the bag I'm done and the bank has recorded the transaction and updated my balance. I know there are attempts to fix this (proof of stake coins come to mind) but they've got problems (proof of stake is open to all sorts of attacks from bad actors flush with cash).
tech companies have been doing a non-stop ad blitz to get kids to code. As somebody in IT the first thing I tell anyone who asks is "Don't send you're kids to IT, a Math degree is fine but no programming".
American companies don't hire rank and file code monkeys anymore. They outsource or use H1-Bs if they need somebody onshore. The last thing on earth you should do is go to school for programming. Yes, there are still top end programming jobs in cryto and security, but that's not really programming, it's math. A math degree is fine (albeit probably the hardest one out there). But skip comp-sci. Go be a nurse or something.
And I can't believe I have to say this on a science forum...
The funding got cut. Congress responded (to the crisis they created) by guaranteeing bank loans, which lead to lots of loans (since it was a can't lose proposition). Students Then borrowed the money because a college degree is Necessary to do the job. bR>
Jeez, it's like I'm talking to a wall here.
I'm angry for a reason. I'm not just raging to rage. I'm not some 20 year old with too much testosterone.
My point is the rage of the working class is being largely ignored. It's how we got a proto-dictator like Trump (and yes, I will call him a proto-dictator. He praised Kim Jon Un's people standing in attention and President Xi of China granting himself the presidency for life). I call out Pelosi because she's one of the ones ignoring me.
Everything _is_ politics. Everything we do and think has broad implications on society as a whole, even the really stupid stuff, when it's scaled up to a national level. When you ignore the working class getting the crap beaten out of them sooner or later they're going to do something to fix that. If we're lucky we get sound policy (hey, it happened in Europe). If we're not we get dictatorships and war. Now's the time to choose which one.
But Hey, go right on dismissing all this as "just politics" like it doesn't matter. Right up until it bites us all in the ass, hard.
when Netscape was a thing. It was too slow and clunky. Fast processors and JavaScript compilers fixed that.
They're already giving Win 10 to OEMs for $5-$7 dollars on Chromebook class computers. Adjusted for inflation that's cheaper than the $5 you'd pay for WinXP on a Netbook back in the day (the figures tend to leak because OEMs are pretty pissed at Microsoft).
Moreover the writing's on the wall for Microsoft's intentions. They want to go the Mac route of making both hardware and software and having a locked down store. Win 8 was supposed to do that with the surface but failed. Remember SteamOS? That was Valve panicking. Notice how it went on the back burner when the Windows store collapsed?
But they haven't completely backed off, they've got custom Wine ports now for individual games. OEM Chromebooks like the 15.6" Lenova for $600 are the same thing. OEMs are getting ready for a post Windows world when Microsoft shuts them out.
Not sure if it'll work for them. We might go back to the days when hardware and OS are inextricably linked (Amiga, Atari ST, C64, Atari 800, etc) but with only 2 players. That'll suck hard. But either way Microsoft wins since Office runs on a Chromebook in a browser.
You do realize that comes from right wing think tanks funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers who just don't want to pay for your schools, right? Also, I realize you might not have kids not, and maybe not every (they're not right for everyone) but you're still going to depend on the labor of the next generation.
Anyway, as mentioned above Public University's do _not_ tie tuition to demand. If they did tuition would be much, much higher as they are turning qualified students away left and right. Instead what they do is a balancing act of trying to keep tuition low enough while paying for the facilities and as many teachers as they can find (there continues to be a teacher shortage due to low pay, bad working conditions and that teaching is just plain hard). Colleges are trying to maximize graduation throughput.
Seriously, go down to your local community college and talk to some of the teachers and maybe even a few admins.
I know a lot of teachers and one thing I've _never_ heard anyone say is that they schools have too much money. Hell, I've never heard _anyone_ say their department in _any_ line of work would be better off with less money. Nobody thinks like that.
Let's assume for a minute your post is legit, you do realized the first thing they'll do is cut your pay, right? Then your staff? Especially if they're all really just in it for the money like you imply.
unless you're a borderline genius or you just don't need school because you already know the material. 2 years at community college does not prepare you for the work load of even a public University. Doing your undergraduate work a at CC was something you did back in the day when you'd been working in the industry for some time and just needed to bang out a degree to get higher pay or a promotion. Heck, these days most public universities don't have enough space for their own students let alone ones transferring in who are likely to fail....
that would be too obvious. If you're kid's tuition went from $900/semester to $9000 the next you'd notice that and be pissed. It was gradually dialed back and replaced with loans.
Outside of community colleges (which run courses that exist only for elective purposes) there are no basket weaving courses, transgender or otherwise.
We gree on one thing: Getting the Government out of student loans. I want college tuition to be free to all. Kids are the future. And I don't mean that in a namby pamby sort of way. I mean we need them to grow the economy for us old folks so we can retire off their earnings. Where the hell do you think the money from a 401k comes from? Leprechauns? Again, we could import trained workers via the H1-B program, lifting the caps entirely so that we don't need to educate local talent, but once you open that Pandora's box it won't be closed, and they'll take your job too. Indentured servants beat regular employees every day of the week.
don't pay your taxes and you'll go to jail. We accept a certain level of tyranny in exchange for the benefits of a functioning government and civilization.
You're right Communism doesn't work, but your reasons are wrong. It's because you never get passed the "Dictatorship of the Proles". Basically, when you do the large scale ownership transfer (transferring, let us remember, the _means_ of production, not the fruits of said production) inevitably a violent dictator inserts themselves into the chaos that follows and takes it all for them selves. Happened to Russia, happened to China. Communism is too radical a change all at once. Especially since that change is usually happening in the background of a major economic collapse (since that's usually what got folks to approve the change in the first place).
The solution is Democratic Socialism. Don't bother with the ownership change. Instead, regulate what folks can do with their property. Money is _power_. Never forget that. With enough money someone can and will control your access to food, shelter and medicine and with that they control _you_. To prevent that We form Democratic governments to regulate how much wealth individuals can have.
As for America vs Eastern Europe, that has more to do with your former country being severely damaged in WWII and America getting away scott free. America was able to consolidate it's wealth during the late 40s, 50s and 60s while the rest of the world recovered. It didn't help that Russia kept screwing with Eastern Europe the whole time (or that we were occasionally butting our heads in and causing trouble).
he was already worried about the ruling elite living too far from the squalor they created to care about it. His entire economic system was predicated on the assumption that the rich would live near the poor and that they wouldn't shit in their own backyard. If he were alive today he'd be a Democratic Socialist.
You're putting the cart before the horse. The loans came after a decade+ of federal funding cuts. College was _always_ expensive. We were subsidizing it. We stopped in the late 90s (thanks, Clinton) and what do you know, tuition went up. Congress was stuffed full of the economic right wing. There was no political will to restore the subsidies (nobody wanted to pay for it) but _plenty_ to back private loans against default (gotta protect those banks from the evil, evil humanities majors, after all).
It's all a narrative you've been fed to keep the gravy train of low taxes and big corporate subsidies going; and you've bought it hook, line, sinker. Get woke friend.
the problem. College was _always_ this expensive. We haven't done anything radical to colleges. The dorms aren't that nice. There's a few that are and they're for the rich kids. You pay extra to get into them, there's fewer of them and most kids pay for the cheap dorm or off campus living (or with their folks). I'm putting a kid through college right now.
Public Universities are _public_. They don't operate on supply and demand. They don't raise prices just because they can. Again, I'm putting a kid through college and saw this first hand. My kid's program had half as many slots as qualified (GPU > 3.8) applicants. They used interviews, sports and volunteer activities to sort out who got in (no, they did not use skin color). If it was supply & demand they'd have just raised tuition unit they only had the # of applicants for slots. Like you do for a Britney Spears concert or a sports game.
What made the price of college sky rocket was Clinton & Bush slashed federal funding. Again, college was _always_ expensive. You didn't notice because 70-80% of the cost was paid by the federal government. The Mega Corps allowed this because they needed a trained workforce. Now that they've got H1-Bs and outsourcing they don't need us anymore; and they wanted those tax dollars back. So they bought off Congress & the last several presidents for tax cuts and had funding slashed. You and your children have been made obsolete.
Go drag your ass down to your local University and pull up some college newspapers on microfiche from the late 90s/early 2000s. You'll find story after story, all meticulously researched by college economics professors, discussion this and how loans would start cropping up leading to a debt crisis. What you will _not_ find is any discussion of this in the regular newspapers (outside of a few left wing rags). Our mass media is owned by billionaires and they squashed these stories.
they're kids. Since when is 18 an "adult". Hell, even science says you're brain's not done developing until 25, but ignoring that can we really expect someone in their late teens to fully understand all of the ramifications of a choice that big? And even if they do can they really predict how much a given degree is worth?
But let's ignore all that. Are you a Doctor? How about a mechanical engineer? Or a financial analyst? Are you all of those things? Are you John Galt? If not then at some point you're going to depend on the labor of these students. You're gonna need them to care for you, or build your roads, or manage your 401k. And you're gonna need them working so that 401k grows.
You're directly benefiting from their education. Meanwhile you're blowing them off. You're old enough to know better (you can use a computer after all). Stop being short sighted and selfish. This is a civilization, and your line of thinking is going to see it toppled.
welders often have a ton of nasty health problems in their 50s and 60s from decades of breathing vaporized metal. There are ways to alleviate the problem but, well, the mostly require gov't intervention or companies don't bother and we just put a party in charge that's deeply opposed to gov't intervention...
and the high pay for underwater welding skews the figures on income for welders. Most welders make $15-$18/hr. In 2018 that's not a middle class life. That's a bare minimum living wage and you better hope you never get sick or injured...
the stuff that makes the median income look good is underwater welding. It's crazy dangerous. Do it wrong and you blow up.
$50k year isn't a lot of money any more. And you'll live in the middle of nowhere on oil fields to get it. That's fine when you're 18 and drive 3 hours into town every weekend. Not when you're 25 and want kids (and schools for said kids).
Also, wages for welders aren't going up but inflation _is_. The only people who's livelihoods aren't being eaten alive by inflation are folks with STEM degrees, especially Medical.
what happened is that federal subsidies were cut in the 90s and the cost of college was passed directly onto students. I was in college when it started and the folks at the economics dept predicted these prices and that there'd be loans (guaranteed by the government) to cover them. You can thank Clinton and Bush for this mess (and Obama for not fixing it, but to be fair he had his hands full with the market crash Bush left him and the batch of right wing "establishment Democrats" the voters gave him).
it's hard not to rage sometimes. I've got friends and family who stuggle daily to get the healthcare they need (one of whom's a type-I diabetic). I'm paying through the nose for my kid's college (she's in for medicine, her books in year 3 for 1 semester were $1400). Meanwhile people keep telling me she should just be a welder a few make $26/hr ignoring that's only the top 10% and they're doing dangerous work.
It'd be one thing if I couldn't use the Internet to see how the rest of the world solved all these problems with ease, or if America was a poor country, but again, I've got the Internet. I know better.
Hell, 70% of Americans want Medicare for All and even if the Dems take the House it won't even get a vote there. Nancy Pelosi will shut it down for her corporate masters. She won her primary against a challenger that wanted Medicare for All.
So yeah, I rage a lot. I rage because I keep seeing the same damn mistakes for no good reason and people voting not just against their interests, but litterally against policies they support. How am I not supposed to get angry?
We spent just shy of $50 billion on it. I'd say it was a resounding success (for the defense contractors). Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to make a payment on some student loans.
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and not just the finger bang. Listen to him and his rhetoric. It's pretty much the 5 minutes of Hate from 1984 stretched out into an 2 hour program. He's made multiple references to blood libel. His audience has already been shown to be a little unhinged (maybe not 'a little'). This isn't me trolling. He's argued that Sandy Hook was a false flag for Pete's sake. He argued that chemicals in our water are turning us Gay.
Furthermore, Jones has many, many times hinted at armed rebellion. He's done this to people who he knows are armed and who have shown themselves to be more than happy to use "2nd amendment solutions".
Now, in Jones' divorce trial he admitted that he doesn't believe any of the nonsense he spouts. That it's all an act. But if anything that makes it worse. He knows the risks of what he's doing. He knows he could be pushing some nutter over the edge and he doesn't care. Google, OTOH, cares, because they don't want the lawsuit when one of them finally snaps and shows up at some QANON target and shoots the place up.
DMCA is for copyright. This isn't about copyright, this is about negligence. Jones' listeners already have a history of going off half cocked. My guess is google, Twitter, etc are worried about a negligence lawsuit the next time one of them fires a gun if it hits something.
They could hide behind common carrier, but that's a very high bar to meet. It means being a dumb pipe, like the telephone company. It wouldn't be worth it. They couldn't even ban trolls from flood posting and the like. No social network could survive that.
Instead they're policing their network as best the can. Make no mistake, they didn't want to kick Jones & his ilk off. His viewer's money spends the same as everyone else's and they'd be happy with the advertising dollars. The final straw was when he mimed shooting Bob Mueller.
If you want a sci-fi take on what they're afraid of go read this. I'm not saying Jones is trying to get somebody killed, but I'm saying words have power (as that Pizzagate business proved) and Jones is using them recklessly.
because that's what got Alex Jones banned. The final straw was when he mimed a gun shot talking about Mueller. The platforms are worked one of his listeners is going to go off and shoot somebody. This isn't idle speculation either.
I looked up a few of the ones you listed. Manveer Heir is walking the same fine line Jones did with what can only be described as a left wing dog whistle. You're right, he's hot garbage (just trying to make a name for himself stirring up controversy). But I couldn't find an implicit let alone explicit call to violence against white people. The rest are either opportunists or, in Sarah Jeong's case, a dumb kid saying angry things. Again though, couldn't find any calls to violence.
Banning Jones and the like isn't something these platforms want to do. Remember, they're corporations who sell advertising. All they care about is eyeballs. They could care less how they get them. Hell, the reason Trump's president is the media gave him $6 billion in free advertising so they could get eyeballs to do their own ads to. They're worried about getting sued if they don't act and one of Jone's listeners acts on his (pretty blatant and at times outright overt) suggestions of violence.
"Antifa" is blown out of proportion by media. They're the American equivalent of soccer hooligans. And the most the left does is "Punch Nazis". I've yet to see one of them mime a shooting or show up with guns.
TL;DR: The Left isn't getting banned because they don't lean on violence.
See here. I dip my card at the store and by the time my stuff's in the bag I'm done and the bank has recorded the transaction and updated my balance. I know there are attempts to fix this (proof of stake coins come to mind) but they've got problems (proof of stake is open to all sorts of attacks from bad actors flush with cash).
that was the entire point.
tech companies have been doing a non-stop ad blitz to get kids to code. As somebody in IT the first thing I tell anyone who asks is "Don't send you're kids to IT, a Math degree is fine but no programming".
American companies don't hire rank and file code monkeys anymore. They outsource or use H1-Bs if they need somebody onshore. The last thing on earth you should do is go to school for programming. Yes, there are still top end programming jobs in cryto and security, but that's not really programming, it's math. A math degree is fine (albeit probably the hardest one out there). But skip comp-sci. Go be a nurse or something.
And I can't believe I have to say this on a science forum...
The funding got cut. Congress responded (to the crisis they created) by guaranteeing bank loans, which lead to lots of loans (since it was a can't lose proposition). Students Then borrowed the money because a college degree is Necessary to do the job.
bR> Jeez, it's like I'm talking to a wall here.
I'm angry for a reason. I'm not just raging to rage. I'm not some 20 year old with too much testosterone.
My point is the rage of the working class is being largely ignored. It's how we got a proto-dictator like Trump (and yes, I will call him a proto-dictator. He praised Kim Jon Un's people standing in attention and President Xi of China granting himself the presidency for life). I call out Pelosi because she's one of the ones ignoring me.
Everything _is_ politics. Everything we do and think has broad implications on society as a whole, even the really stupid stuff, when it's scaled up to a national level. When you ignore the working class getting the crap beaten out of them sooner or later they're going to do something to fix that. If we're lucky we get sound policy (hey, it happened in Europe). If we're not we get dictatorships and war. Now's the time to choose which one.
But Hey, go right on dismissing all this as "just politics" like it doesn't matter. Right up until it bites us all in the ass, hard.
right here
Microsoft is willing to give some ground on Windows in exchange for subscription revenue for office.
when Netscape was a thing. It was too slow and clunky. Fast processors and JavaScript compilers fixed that.
They're already giving Win 10 to OEMs for $5-$7 dollars on Chromebook class computers. Adjusted for inflation that's cheaper than the $5 you'd pay for WinXP on a Netbook back in the day (the figures tend to leak because OEMs are pretty pissed at Microsoft).
Moreover the writing's on the wall for Microsoft's intentions. They want to go the Mac route of making both hardware and software and having a locked down store. Win 8 was supposed to do that with the surface but failed. Remember SteamOS? That was Valve panicking. Notice how it went on the back burner when the Windows store collapsed?
But they haven't completely backed off, they've got custom Wine ports now for individual games. OEM Chromebooks like the 15.6" Lenova for $600 are the same thing. OEMs are getting ready for a post Windows world when Microsoft shuts them out.
Not sure if it'll work for them. We might go back to the days when hardware and OS are inextricably linked (Amiga, Atari ST, C64, Atari 800, etc) but with only 2 players. That'll suck hard. But either way Microsoft wins since Office runs on a Chromebook in a browser.
You do realize that comes from right wing think tanks funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers who just don't want to pay for your schools, right? Also, I realize you might not have kids not, and maybe not every (they're not right for everyone) but you're still going to depend on the labor of the next generation.
Anyway, as mentioned above Public University's do _not_ tie tuition to demand. If they did tuition would be much, much higher as they are turning qualified students away left and right. Instead what they do is a balancing act of trying to keep tuition low enough while paying for the facilities and as many teachers as they can find (there continues to be a teacher shortage due to low pay, bad working conditions and that teaching is just plain hard). Colleges are trying to maximize graduation throughput.
Seriously, go down to your local community college and talk to some of the teachers and maybe even a few admins.
I know a lot of teachers and one thing I've _never_ heard anyone say is that they schools have too much money. Hell, I've never heard _anyone_ say their department in _any_ line of work would be better off with less money. Nobody thinks like that.
Let's assume for a minute your post is legit, you do realized the first thing they'll do is cut your pay, right? Then your staff? Especially if they're all really just in it for the money like you imply.
unless you're a borderline genius or you just don't need school because you already know the material. 2 years at community college does not prepare you for the work load of even a public University. Doing your undergraduate work a at CC was something you did back in the day when you'd been working in the industry for some time and just needed to bang out a degree to get higher pay or a promotion. Heck, these days most public universities don't have enough space for their own students let alone ones transferring in who are likely to fail....
that would be too obvious. If you're kid's tuition went from $900/semester to $9000 the next you'd notice that and be pissed. It was gradually dialed back and replaced with loans.
Outside of community colleges (which run courses that exist only for elective purposes) there are no basket weaving courses, transgender or otherwise.
We gree on one thing: Getting the Government out of student loans. I want college tuition to be free to all. Kids are the future. And I don't mean that in a namby pamby sort of way. I mean we need them to grow the economy for us old folks so we can retire off their earnings. Where the hell do you think the money from a 401k comes from? Leprechauns? Again, we could import trained workers via the H1-B program, lifting the caps entirely so that we don't need to educate local talent, but once you open that Pandora's box it won't be closed, and they'll take your job too. Indentured servants beat regular employees every day of the week.
don't pay your taxes and you'll go to jail. We accept a certain level of tyranny in exchange for the benefits of a functioning government and civilization.
You're right Communism doesn't work, but your reasons are wrong. It's because you never get passed the "Dictatorship of the Proles". Basically, when you do the large scale ownership transfer (transferring, let us remember, the _means_ of production, not the fruits of said production) inevitably a violent dictator inserts themselves into the chaos that follows and takes it all for them selves. Happened to Russia, happened to China. Communism is too radical a change all at once. Especially since that change is usually happening in the background of a major economic collapse (since that's usually what got folks to approve the change in the first place).
The solution is Democratic Socialism. Don't bother with the ownership change. Instead, regulate what folks can do with their property. Money is _power_. Never forget that. With enough money someone can and will control your access to food, shelter and medicine and with that they control _you_. To prevent that We form Democratic governments to regulate how much wealth individuals can have.
As for America vs Eastern Europe, that has more to do with your former country being severely damaged in WWII and America getting away scott free. America was able to consolidate it's wealth during the late 40s, 50s and 60s while the rest of the world recovered. It didn't help that Russia kept screwing with Eastern Europe the whole time (or that we were occasionally butting our heads in and causing trouble).
he was already worried about the ruling elite living too far from the squalor they created to care about it. His entire economic system was predicated on the assumption that the rich would live near the poor and that they wouldn't shit in their own backyard. If he were alive today he'd be a Democratic Socialist.
You're putting the cart before the horse. The loans came after a decade+ of federal funding cuts. College was _always_ expensive. We were subsidizing it. We stopped in the late 90s (thanks, Clinton) and what do you know, tuition went up. Congress was stuffed full of the economic right wing. There was no political will to restore the subsidies (nobody wanted to pay for it) but _plenty_ to back private loans against default (gotta protect those banks from the evil, evil humanities majors, after all).
It's all a narrative you've been fed to keep the gravy train of low taxes and big corporate subsidies going; and you've bought it hook, line, sinker. Get woke friend.
the problem. College was _always_ this expensive. We haven't done anything radical to colleges. The dorms aren't that nice. There's a few that are and they're for the rich kids. You pay extra to get into them, there's fewer of them and most kids pay for the cheap dorm or off campus living (or with their folks). I'm putting a kid through college right now.
Public Universities are _public_. They don't operate on supply and demand. They don't raise prices just because they can. Again, I'm putting a kid through college and saw this first hand. My kid's program had half as many slots as qualified (GPU > 3.8) applicants. They used interviews, sports and volunteer activities to sort out who got in (no, they did not use skin color). If it was supply & demand they'd have just raised tuition unit they only had the # of applicants for slots. Like you do for a Britney Spears concert or a sports game.
What made the price of college sky rocket was Clinton & Bush slashed federal funding. Again, college was _always_ expensive. You didn't notice because 70-80% of the cost was paid by the federal government. The Mega Corps allowed this because they needed a trained workforce. Now that they've got H1-Bs and outsourcing they don't need us anymore; and they wanted those tax dollars back. So they bought off Congress & the last several presidents for tax cuts and had funding slashed. You and your children have been made obsolete.
Go drag your ass down to your local University and pull up some college newspapers on microfiche from the late 90s/early 2000s. You'll find story after story, all meticulously researched by college economics professors, discussion this and how loans would start cropping up leading to a debt crisis. What you will _not_ find is any discussion of this in the regular newspapers (outside of a few left wing rags). Our mass media is owned by billionaires and they squashed these stories.
they're kids. Since when is 18 an "adult". Hell, even science says you're brain's not done developing until 25, but ignoring that can we really expect someone in their late teens to fully understand all of the ramifications of a choice that big? And even if they do can they really predict how much a given degree is worth?
But let's ignore all that. Are you a Doctor? How about a mechanical engineer? Or a financial analyst? Are you all of those things? Are you John Galt? If not then at some point you're going to depend on the labor of these students. You're gonna need them to care for you, or build your roads, or manage your 401k. And you're gonna need them working so that 401k grows.
You're directly benefiting from their education. Meanwhile you're blowing them off. You're old enough to know better (you can use a computer after all). Stop being short sighted and selfish. This is a civilization, and your line of thinking is going to see it toppled.
welders often have a ton of nasty health problems in their 50s and 60s from decades of breathing vaporized metal. There are ways to alleviate the problem but, well, the mostly require gov't intervention or companies don't bother and we just put a party in charge that's deeply opposed to gov't intervention...
and the high pay for underwater welding skews the figures on income for welders. Most welders make $15-$18/hr. In 2018 that's not a middle class life. That's a bare minimum living wage and you better hope you never get sick or injured...
the stuff that makes the median income look good is underwater welding. It's crazy dangerous. Do it wrong and you blow up.
$50k year isn't a lot of money any more. And you'll live in the middle of nowhere on oil fields to get it. That's fine when you're 18 and drive 3 hours into town every weekend. Not when you're 25 and want kids (and schools for said kids).
Also, wages for welders aren't going up but inflation _is_. The only people who's livelihoods aren't being eaten alive by inflation are folks with STEM degrees, especially Medical.
what happened is that federal subsidies were cut in the 90s and the cost of college was passed directly onto students. I was in college when it started and the folks at the economics dept predicted these prices and that there'd be loans (guaranteed by the government) to cover them. You can thank Clinton and Bush for this mess (and Obama for not fixing it, but to be fair he had his hands full with the market crash Bush left him and the batch of right wing "establishment Democrats" the voters gave him).
it's hard not to rage sometimes. I've got friends and family who stuggle daily to get the healthcare they need (one of whom's a type-I diabetic). I'm paying through the nose for my kid's college (she's in for medicine, her books in year 3 for 1 semester were $1400). Meanwhile people keep telling me she should just be a welder a few make $26/hr ignoring that's only the top 10% and they're doing dangerous work.
It'd be one thing if I couldn't use the Internet to see how the rest of the world solved all these problems with ease, or if America was a poor country, but again, I've got the Internet. I know better.
Hell, 70% of Americans want Medicare for All and even if the Dems take the House it won't even get a vote there. Nancy Pelosi will shut it down for her corporate masters. She won her primary against a challenger that wanted Medicare for All.
So yeah, I rage a lot. I rage because I keep seeing the same damn mistakes for no good reason and people voting not just against their interests, but litterally against policies they support. How am I not supposed to get angry?
but I'll post it later.
We spent just shy of $50 billion on it. I'd say it was a resounding success (for the defense contractors). Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to make a payment on some student loans.