I'm all for forcing doctors into organic chemistry and ME's into thermodynamics. And, contrary to popular belief, as an EE I use electromagnetism all the time when drawing lines on schematics or devising solutions to new problems. In fact no part of a EE program taught me to draw lines, or even how to design hardware for reals, it was all theory. And bring it on. The technical portion (including the pure science) was what I went there for.
But most of that degree is pure bullshit, realistically forced on us to pad the bill.
Great. But I went to school to learn engineering to learn something specific, and to get a degree saying that i had a level of proficiency at it so that I could get a return on the rather large investment. I was not there to be well rounded, or exposed to the fine arts, that is someone else's agenda. If that someone else wants to pay my tuition, I suppose I'd have to accept it, but when asked for cash this person was mysteriously absent.
I'm glad your liberal arts have paid off for your PhD thesis and you are enjoying it. To each his own, but just as I am not dictating to you that you should not take such courses, I do not wish to be forced to take such courses. I can understand a doctor who has to go through the same agony I went through, and then 6 more damned years on top of it, wanting to trim the fat, and i don't see any measurable value in forcing him. We're talking about people who can't even start living their lives until their 30s, being weighed against some humanities classes. It's not even a discussion.
Your essay has three basic premises. All of which I disagree with: 1) Doctors caring for people, 2) creativity stems from education, 3) engineers are technicians (by extensions: technicians are uneducated fools).
1) A doctors job is to diagnose and correct my condition, if possible. I will agree to the extent that people do not always state their symptoms precisely, but I'm fairly certain that Shakespeare isn't going to boil "I feel nauseous" into nausea, vertigo, sour stomach, etc. You work with people, you understand them better. Some feel computers work that way too. I do not care so much if my doctor is unable to treat my psychology, though I could see a psychologist if I wanted some strong drugs, or a therapist if I wanted to talk about my mother. In point of fact, my doctor IS an ass, I don't care though because he seems to figure out what is wrong with me, even when some of the things have been fairly rare. I'm glad he hit the books in the hard sciences, and he can continue being a one dimensional ass, and I'll recommend more people to him.
2) If creativity was learned from higher education, why do so many artists never attend? The principle is the same in technical fields as in others. School teaches you the output of others before you, so that you do not have to waste your time recreating what has been done. School cannot teach you to be creative, that's silly.
3) The job of an engineer is to understand the principles of science to solve problems. The job of a technician is usually to execute fixed tasks. The job of a doctor is to understand the principles of medicine to cure patients, the job of a medical technician is to execute fixed tasks at the direction of a doctor. I suppose technicians do not need to think, but I personally prefer the ones who do because they usually do a really good job. As an anecdote, my sister broke her ankle, the doctor, probably one who had a BA in Fine Arts, wrote down that she needed to have an xray of her leg. The technician said "hey, you have a broken ankle, why am I xray'ing your leg?", and she went back to the doctor. That's a great technician right there.
Agreed. Public shame is a great way of helping the shamed leave the company, and also everyone else who is thinking "There but for the grace of God go I".
no no no. Being a scrum master is a stepping stone to being promoted to manager. Managers don't need to know details. The first step is forgetting, for some that first step is much, much easier than others.
He probably didn't break the law, and that's the sad truth. There's a very fine line, maybe a smudge, between being paid for votes, and being paid because you support a platform. They amount to the same thing, at the end of the day, but one is illegal and the other isn't. What he said on Fox news was probably not illegal either, once put in this framework. It would shake my confidence if I ever had any.
And many of us have been trolling government computers by filling our heads with porn, funny imgur images, and an awful lot of of corporate angst. Take that uncle sam!
No the assumption is that you don't have the capacity to solder a BGA at home. You don't do this with a soldering iron, you do it in an oven, and you have to place the part precisely enough that it can self orient. I have heard of hobbiests doing this chip-to-pcb with larger pitched BGAs, but not fine pitch, and not chip to chip. I just don't think this is a good use of time or money, considering you will probably break a few.
But if you really want to do it, the gerbers are out there. There are lots of cheap board fabs, use one of them, then just go acquire the parts from digikey.
Now hold on. He'll learn his lesson if and when there are no brick and mortar stores and your only comprehension of a product is an online picture. That Droidster B1onique 7000 will l lose its luster after you receive it and it shatters when you exhale on it. And if we don't think this anti-commoditization practice wouldn't then spread to online sources, you must not have flipped to QVC lately.
On the other hand retailers are a different form of legalized rape. Neiman Marcus will sell the same product that Nordstrom sells for only 10-100x more, and Nordstrom will easily cost 2x what some other store might charge, for the exact same product. The online model does enable customers to avoid this form of abuse. Now Neiman will of course talk about how their sales staff and overall shopping experience is greatly enhanced, and, I'm sure it is, I mean valet parking? But if you know what you want and you aren't made of money..google is your friend.
I personally have absolutely no problem with using my local car dealer for the test drive, but internet shopping the best price. I give the local guy the first whack, but he's always $2k-$3k more than the guy who is 45 minutes north of him. There's no way the local guys costs are THAT much higher, he's charging me based on what he thinks I will pay, and he's letting me walk based on his ability to find another sucker. That's fine, that's how business works. However neither one of us OWES the other guy anything, until he makes me sign some form of binding agreement to take the test drive.
The best model I've seen is at Fry's down here. They will match internet pricing, I've done it, it's as easy as it sounds. Morally, I'm not sure where i stand on this, two wrongs don't make a right. But you can choose to support your local business, and pay your local taxes. Or you can choose to support the person offering the best deal he can afford.
I care way more about American factory workers with no jobs, than the working conditions of Chinese factory workers who took their jobs. In the US we had this big battle to improve working conditions for our own people, the battle was won after riots, police initiated shootings and general chaos reigned almost 100 years ago. WW2 and the cold war provided a nice distraction from that and we were prosperous (we can argue the reasons for such prosperity elsewhere, but in spite of unions and factory condition improvements, we were prosperous), but as the cold war wound down we started undoing those gains by sending work overseas to people who had no such protections and cost less. Rumor has it this same movement started elsewhere, earlier, to roughly the same effect.
Now I'm supposed to care about some people in China who took our jobs by undoing exactly the same things that have now become their problem. Nope. I hate to see anyone suffer, but hurting Apple which at least DESIGNS the things in the US strikes me as both not helping the Chinese, not helping Americans, and not solving a problem I care about. HP and Dell have all but outsourced their design with a few skeleton teams being expected to keep entire lines of products afloat, mostly through a lot of paperwork and screaming. Hurting Apple helps the management of those companies continue to outsource. Smart move.
Every other computer brand is manufacturing and usually designing in China (or worse), at the same companies Apple uses. If you want to boycott, you have to boycott computers period.
I'd have shortened this to "the movement is largely made up of male computer nerds who pursue programming as a hobby, regardless of its income potential". While women in the field generally went there for the profession, not the hobby.
YMMV, etc. etc. But men seem far more inclined to indulge their inner geek while at home. Even ignoring open source software in particular, I do not know many women in technology in the workplace who spend their free time on ANY hands on technical pursuit. I know plenty who like to do research or follow technical journals though.
Having some familiarity with Intel and it's workalikes as an employer, I think I can say the selection process, while more competitive than your local best buy, probably is not as exclusive as a professional sports team. One could dedicate herself to studying math and science, rather than falling into prostitution, and have a very strong chance of being employed by Intel, or a tech company. Certainly offshoring and the devaluing of STEM trained individuals has had a negative impact on the industry, but many of us have managed to voluntarily leave our jobs, and get new jobs in this industry even during the deepest depths of recession.
I won't deny that prostitution is a perhaps more noble career choice than working the welfare system over for handouts, but I think you swung well past considered realism and are deep into pessimism.
Never use a turn signal in NY or Texas roads. This signal tells unfriendly drivers to speed up and box you in. What you do is you get halfway into the lane, THEN signal. It's like saying "haha, I win".
Satanist, perhaps is small error. But I think a lot of functional athiests continue to celebrate the holidays they grew up with even if they don't believe in the religious nonsense behind it. This describes almost anyone I know through work or school (although not my family, who finds this idea offensive, and we just don't talk about it), as well as the Sikh family I was standing behind in line to get pictures of my son with Santa.
My kids are growing up with Santa and the Easter bunny, the whole deal. It doesn't matter that my wife grew up an athiest in a country that doesn't like religion, or that I have no belief in sky wizards or their offspring. You can excise that cleanly from the Christmas season, and be left with a functionally enjoyable holiday. If the kids ask one day what the lyrics mean, or why mom keeps trying to talk about "the reason for the season", we'll tell them. I suspect they will care as much as I did.
In the past stores may have just assumed Christian unless otherwise specified, and for the most part it doesn't matter, Jews might be in the market for sales in that time frame as well. With this new "information", you could theoretically try to send more specific religious marketing, but you'd fall on your face.
I don't agree. If you're salary and making 6 figures it's because you provide a valuable service for your 40 hours a week, so much that the company doesn't want to risk losing you as they might to contractors who are always looking for their next gig.
Salaried employee doesn't mean "free overtime", it probably doesn't mean punch-in/punch-out either, but I work for a large company you've probably heard of and management truly believes salaried employee means 60 hours on an average week, and nights+weekends at their judgement. That's just an abuse.
With all that said, I don't consider email (provided there is no requirement I respond) to be the greatest evil. Spending all 60 hours of my week in meetings because management has a poor, inefficient organization, staffed with "just good/cheap enough" labor for a job category, split across several countries, with the expectation that I train these weasels, that's the evil.
Sometimes. When it's not being with held for some reason, or when someone hasn't apparently borked the database. It took me two weeks to get ICS, the repository tool kept strangulating itself for some reason that mysteriously cleared up.
Anyway most people don't need or want this, it's nice to know it's there if I feel ambitious.
Not just government, any job which consists of a lot of overseas work (anything in HW engineering, unfortunately). Trying to make times work between US east/west and central time zones, India, china and/or malaysia means telecommuting.
I couldn't pick half my coworkers out of a lineup. I also don't have this "credit" problem, I know who did what based on long chains of emails. My boss knows the same.
I can't say now that I have kids, that I like telecommuting as much as I did before then (or may like once the kids are in school all day), but most of the arguments I hear against it always have the smell of bullshit.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another)
Well in practice this is usually because some MBA type over/underfunded some effort. When not that it is usually just sheer incompetence, there really is no "bar exam" for engineers or scientists, some people have engineering degrees but are worth more on fire to heat siberian homes. All this has a reason, this isn't pure pessimism. One does not necessarily need to hire a team of superstars to do every project, and one does have a fixed budget to work within. MBAs are inexpertly attempting to juggle all this to maximize profits, by engineering a system of people. They frequently fail, but it's not understood why.
It's a BS post anyway. Engineers aren't "trained to eliminate inefficiency" at all, engineers are trained to solve problems by (ab)using science. Sometimes the problem is to eliminate inefficiency, although not as often as people think. Many of us had to take a semester or two of psychology or sociology to meet accreditation standards, but I haven't found that most of us have respect for it. We can't "use" it in the same way we can use physics or chemistry, and it doesn't help that the "proof" for many theories in soft science sounds bogus to us. (Worse, our HR departments frequently try to use their own half baked understandings of sociology or psychology to increase productivity. This always pisses everyone off.)
Although it is true that what goes up must come down, engineering is knowing exactly how fast it will come down based on how hard it was launched up, and what factors will contribute to errors as it comes down, and how we can mitigate those factors, etc.. I can't design a corporate org structure to have my engineers produce 10% faster, while maintaining my current budget using psychology or sociology. I can't design a commercial spot that will definitely compel 3 million consumers (+/- 5%, to control under/over supply) to buy my product. The MBA types have mechanisms to do this which are NOT based on social sciences at all, the results vary wildly but assuming the MBA in question was doing his job, should minimally accomplish his business objectives.
Once someone can do this sociology or psychology will be respected, and engineers will be using these skills to do their job. Until then, it is "useless" to the corporate world, and as such it is not going to be easy to get a job with these degrees. So the question is how much government funding should be given to kids who want to pursue degrees in fields that aren't likely to result in gainful employment. I think very little, the purpose of that money is to get people the skills they need to get good jobs. Subsidizing science/art for science/art's sake is noble but should be a very small % of our budget.
Removing such programs from school, chasing down people who study heresy...that's the kind of brain dead thinking that will handicap a nation. I encourage enemy governments to do this as much as possible.
Regardless, the government is not subsidizing education so that the low income bracket can educate themselves on things that may be useful in a thousand years. The intent is to try to help them move out of the low income classes, and off the dole.
If you're a rich kid and want to study native american history in the hopes that maybe you can realize Asimov's psychohistory, and your parents will pay for it, knock yourself out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for forcing doctors into organic chemistry and ME's into thermodynamics. And, contrary to popular belief, as an EE I use electromagnetism all the time when drawing lines on schematics or devising solutions to new problems. In fact no part of a EE program taught me to draw lines, or even how to design hardware for reals, it was all theory. And bring it on. The technical portion (including the pure science) was what I went there for.
But most of that degree is pure bullshit, realistically forced on us to pad the bill.
Great. But I went to school to learn engineering to learn something specific, and to get a degree saying that i had a level of proficiency at it so that I could get a return on the rather large investment. I was not there to be well rounded, or exposed to the fine arts, that is someone else's agenda. If that someone else wants to pay my tuition, I suppose I'd have to accept it, but when asked for cash this person was mysteriously absent.
I'm glad your liberal arts have paid off for your PhD thesis and you are enjoying it. To each his own, but just as I am not dictating to you that you should not take such courses, I do not wish to be forced to take such courses. I can understand a doctor who has to go through the same agony I went through, and then 6 more damned years on top of it, wanting to trim the fat, and i don't see any measurable value in forcing him. We're talking about people who can't even start living their lives until their 30s, being weighed against some humanities classes. It's not even a discussion.
Your essay has three basic premises. All of which I disagree with: 1) Doctors caring for people, 2) creativity stems from education, 3) engineers are technicians (by extensions: technicians are uneducated fools).
1) A doctors job is to diagnose and correct my condition, if possible. I will agree to the extent that people do not always state their symptoms precisely, but I'm fairly certain that Shakespeare isn't going to boil "I feel nauseous" into nausea, vertigo, sour stomach, etc. You work with people, you understand them better. Some feel computers work that way too. I do not care so much if my doctor is unable to treat my psychology, though I could see a psychologist if I wanted some strong drugs, or a therapist if I wanted to talk about my mother. In point of fact, my doctor IS an ass, I don't care though because he seems to figure out what is wrong with me, even when some of the things have been fairly rare. I'm glad he hit the books in the hard sciences, and he can continue being a one dimensional ass, and I'll recommend more people to him.
2) If creativity was learned from higher education, why do so many artists never attend? The principle is the same in technical fields as in others. School teaches you the output of others before you, so that you do not have to waste your time recreating what has been done. School cannot teach you to be creative, that's silly.
3) The job of an engineer is to understand the principles of science to solve problems. The job of a technician is usually to execute fixed tasks. The job of a doctor is to understand the principles of medicine to cure patients, the job of a medical technician is to execute fixed tasks at the direction of a doctor. I suppose technicians do not need to think, but I personally prefer the ones who do because they usually do a really good job. As an anecdote, my sister broke her ankle, the doctor, probably one who had a BA in Fine Arts, wrote down that she needed to have an xray of her leg. The technician said "hey, you have a broken ankle, why am I xray'ing your leg?", and she went back to the doctor. That's a great technician right there.
Depends on what you're smoking.
Agreed. Public shame is a great way of helping the shamed leave the company, and also everyone else who is thinking "There but for the grace of God go I".
no no no. Being a scrum master is a stepping stone to being promoted to manager. Managers don't need to know details. The first step is forgetting, for some that first step is much, much easier than others.
You can say this for any degree. Half of my EE degree was bullshit filler courses, but without them the school can't be accredited.
Hmm the fbi seems less Stallone, and more Cartman. "YOU WILL RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAE!"
He probably didn't break the law, and that's the sad truth. There's a very fine line, maybe a smudge, between being paid for votes, and being paid because you support a platform. They amount to the same thing, at the end of the day, but one is illegal and the other isn't. What he said on Fox news was probably not illegal either, once put in this framework. It would shake my confidence if I ever had any.
And many of us have been trolling government computers by filling our heads with porn, funny imgur images, and an awful lot of of corporate angst. Take that uncle sam!
No the assumption is that you don't have the capacity to solder a BGA at home. You don't do this with a soldering iron, you do it in an oven, and you have to place the part precisely enough that it can self orient. I have heard of hobbiests doing this chip-to-pcb with larger pitched BGAs, but not fine pitch, and not chip to chip. I just don't think this is a good use of time or money, considering you will probably break a few.
But if you really want to do it, the gerbers are out there. There are lots of cheap board fabs, use one of them, then just go acquire the parts from digikey.
Now hold on. He'll learn his lesson if and when there are no brick and mortar stores and your only comprehension of a product is an online picture. That Droidster B1onique 7000 will l lose its luster after you receive it and it shatters when you exhale on it. And if we don't think this anti-commoditization practice wouldn't then spread to online sources, you must not have flipped to QVC lately.
On the other hand retailers are a different form of legalized rape. Neiman Marcus will sell the same product that Nordstrom sells for only 10-100x more, and Nordstrom will easily cost 2x what some other store might charge, for the exact same product. The online model does enable customers to avoid this form of abuse. Now Neiman will of course talk about how their sales staff and overall shopping experience is greatly enhanced, and, I'm sure it is, I mean valet parking? But if you know what you want and you aren't made of money..google is your friend.
I personally have absolutely no problem with using my local car dealer for the test drive, but internet shopping the best price. I give the local guy the first whack, but he's always $2k-$3k more than the guy who is 45 minutes north of him. There's no way the local guys costs are THAT much higher, he's charging me based on what he thinks I will pay, and he's letting me walk based on his ability to find another sucker. That's fine, that's how business works. However neither one of us OWES the other guy anything, until he makes me sign some form of binding agreement to take the test drive.
The best model I've seen is at Fry's down here. They will match internet pricing, I've done it, it's as easy as it sounds. Morally, I'm not sure where i stand on this, two wrongs don't make a right. But you can choose to support your local business, and pay your local taxes. Or you can choose to support the person offering the best deal he can afford.
I care way more about American factory workers with no jobs, than the working conditions of Chinese factory workers who took their jobs. In the US we had this big battle to improve working conditions for our own people, the battle was won after riots, police initiated shootings and general chaos reigned almost 100 years ago. WW2 and the cold war provided a nice distraction from that and we were prosperous (we can argue the reasons for such prosperity elsewhere, but in spite of unions and factory condition improvements, we were prosperous), but as the cold war wound down we started undoing those gains by sending work overseas to people who had no such protections and cost less. Rumor has it this same movement started elsewhere, earlier, to roughly the same effect.
Now I'm supposed to care about some people in China who took our jobs by undoing exactly the same things that have now become their problem. Nope. I hate to see anyone suffer, but hurting Apple which at least DESIGNS the things in the US strikes me as both not helping the Chinese, not helping Americans, and not solving a problem I care about. HP and Dell have all but outsourced their design with a few skeleton teams being expected to keep entire lines of products afloat, mostly through a lot of paperwork and screaming. Hurting Apple helps the management of those companies continue to outsource. Smart move.
Every other computer brand is manufacturing and usually designing in China (or worse), at the same companies Apple uses. If you want to boycott, you have to boycott computers period.
Yar, I think we all be appreciatin' a nice booty! Shiver me timber.
I'd have shortened this to "the movement is largely made up of male computer nerds who pursue programming as a hobby, regardless of its income potential". While women in the field generally went there for the profession, not the hobby.
YMMV, etc. etc. But men seem far more inclined to indulge their inner geek while at home. Even ignoring open source software in particular, I do not know many women in technology in the workplace who spend their free time on ANY hands on technical pursuit. I know plenty who like to do research or follow technical journals though.
tl;dr
Having some familiarity with Intel and it's workalikes as an employer, I think I can say the selection process, while more competitive than your local best buy, probably is not as exclusive as a professional sports team. One could dedicate herself to studying math and science, rather than falling into prostitution, and have a very strong chance of being employed by Intel, or a tech company. Certainly offshoring and the devaluing of STEM trained individuals has had a negative impact on the industry, but many of us have managed to voluntarily leave our jobs, and get new jobs in this industry even during the deepest depths of recession.
I won't deny that prostitution is a perhaps more noble career choice than working the welfare system over for handouts, but I think you swung well past considered realism and are deep into pessimism.
Never use a turn signal in NY or Texas roads. This signal tells unfriendly drivers to speed up and box you in. What you do is you get halfway into the lane, THEN signal. It's like saying "haha, I win".
Satanist, perhaps is small error. But I think a lot of functional athiests continue to celebrate the holidays they grew up with even if they don't believe in the religious nonsense behind it. This describes almost anyone I know through work or school (although not my family, who finds this idea offensive, and we just don't talk about it), as well as the Sikh family I was standing behind in line to get pictures of my son with Santa.
My kids are growing up with Santa and the Easter bunny, the whole deal. It doesn't matter that my wife grew up an athiest in a country that doesn't like religion, or that I have no belief in sky wizards or their offspring. You can excise that cleanly from the Christmas season, and be left with a functionally enjoyable holiday. If the kids ask one day what the lyrics mean, or why mom keeps trying to talk about "the reason for the season", we'll tell them. I suspect they will care as much as I did.
In the past stores may have just assumed Christian unless otherwise specified, and for the most part it doesn't matter, Jews might be in the market for sales in that time frame as well. With this new "information", you could theoretically try to send more specific religious marketing, but you'd fall on your face.
I don't agree. If you're salary and making 6 figures it's because you provide a valuable service for your 40 hours a week, so much that the company doesn't want to risk losing you as they might to contractors who are always looking for their next gig.
Salaried employee doesn't mean "free overtime", it probably doesn't mean punch-in/punch-out either, but I work for a large company you've probably heard of and management truly believes salaried employee means 60 hours on an average week, and nights+weekends at their judgement. That's just an abuse.
With all that said, I don't consider email (provided there is no requirement I respond) to be the greatest evil. Spending all 60 hours of my week in meetings because management has a poor, inefficient organization, staffed with "just good/cheap enough" labor for a job category, split across several countries, with the expectation that I train these weasels, that's the evil.
Sometimes. When it's not being with held for some reason, or when someone hasn't apparently borked the database. It took me two weeks to get ICS, the repository tool kept strangulating itself for some reason that mysteriously cleared up.
Anyway most people don't need or want this, it's nice to know it's there if I feel ambitious.
Engineers try not to talk ever. Marketing won't shut the hell up.
Not just government, any job which consists of a lot of overseas work (anything in HW engineering, unfortunately). Trying to make times work between US east/west and central time zones, India, china and/or malaysia means telecommuting.
I couldn't pick half my coworkers out of a lineup. I also don't have this "credit" problem, I know who did what based on long chains of emails. My boss knows the same.
I can't say now that I have kids, that I like telecommuting as much as I did before then (or may like once the kids are in school all day), but most of the arguments I hear against it always have the smell of bullshit.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another)
Well in practice this is usually because some MBA type over/underfunded some effort. When not that it is usually just sheer incompetence, there really is no "bar exam" for engineers or scientists, some people have engineering degrees but are worth more on fire to heat siberian homes. All this has a reason, this isn't pure pessimism. One does not necessarily need to hire a team of superstars to do every project, and one does have a fixed budget to work within. MBAs are inexpertly attempting to juggle all this to maximize profits, by engineering a system of people. They frequently fail, but it's not understood why.
It's a BS post anyway. Engineers aren't "trained to eliminate inefficiency" at all, engineers are trained to solve problems by (ab)using science. Sometimes the problem is to eliminate inefficiency, although not as often as people think. Many of us had to take a semester or two of psychology or sociology to meet accreditation standards, but I haven't found that most of us have respect for it. We can't "use" it in the same way we can use physics or chemistry, and it doesn't help that the "proof" for many theories in soft science sounds bogus to us. (Worse, our HR departments frequently try to use their own half baked understandings of sociology or psychology to increase productivity. This always pisses everyone off.)
Although it is true that what goes up must come down, engineering is knowing exactly how fast it will come down based on how hard it was launched up, and what factors will contribute to errors as it comes down, and how we can mitigate those factors, etc.. I can't design a corporate org structure to have my engineers produce 10% faster, while maintaining my current budget using psychology or sociology. I can't design a commercial spot that will definitely compel 3 million consumers (+/- 5%, to control under/over supply) to buy my product. The MBA types have mechanisms to do this which are NOT based on social sciences at all, the results vary wildly but assuming the MBA in question was doing his job, should minimally accomplish his business objectives.
Once someone can do this sociology or psychology will be respected, and engineers will be using these skills to do their job. Until then, it is "useless" to the corporate world, and as such it is not going to be easy to get a job with these degrees. So the question is how much government funding should be given to kids who want to pursue degrees in fields that aren't likely to result in gainful employment. I think very little, the purpose of that money is to get people the skills they need to get good jobs. Subsidizing science/art for science/art's sake is noble but should be a very small % of our budget.
Removing such programs from school, chasing down people who study heresy...that's the kind of brain dead thinking that will handicap a nation. I encourage enemy governments to do this as much as possible.
Regardless, the government is not subsidizing education so that the low income bracket can educate themselves on things that may be useful in a thousand years. The intent is to try to help them move out of the low income classes, and off the dole.
If you're a rich kid and want to study native american history in the hopes that maybe you can realize Asimov's psychohistory, and your parents will pay for it, knock yourself out.