I _did_ say 'of the same quality' - I wasn't trying to compare flat pack particle board to solid oak.:)
Yeah but that was kind of my point. As an individual I can't buy any flat pack level crud at all, but if it were even possible it would be in the realm of $5 worth of "psuedowood" to make the average walmart flat pack $19 bookcase. I mean, lets be realistic, they aren't turning that "wood" into a kit for free or at a loss and local lumber yards are always so much cheaper than retail floor space for absolutely everything else....
Or going the other way, yeah I bought my solid oak and it was expensive but maybe a hundred something of the finest oak is competing against a "genuine Amish hand crafted $1000" bookcase, so I still come out ahead.
LOL give him a break, after standing around in calf deep snow below freezing in howling winds getting liquid coolant all over my hands (awesome windchill) I don't think I could handle even the most basic division problem. A pretty good indication of hypothermia is getting all cloudy headed.
Of course, if the thermostat failed again today, 75 degrees, cloudy, light cool breeze, plenty of time, I'd change it myself... but this is a cool day in late July not February...
Another example is when the start cap blew out on my air conditioner compressor on a 95 degree sunny 100% humidity evening before I had to wake up for work at 4am the next morning, I had the HVAC guy swap it in an hour for darn near $200 even though I could have very slowly and tediously done it myself on a day like today. Most of the delay in the replacement isn't actually installing the cap, its that I'm not even sure where to drive to buy a high temp rated start cap at 7pm on a sunday night, but the HVAC guy has one in his truck, so...
Unless your website is very basic, in which case it will probably never get noticed.
Ah see there's the problem. Noticed by who?
He has a contract to get the word out online about an architect, provide content and information that someone who hires architects finds interesting when google search drops them on the front page. If, instead, it gets turned into a game of "let me try to impress other web developers by whacked out trendy style hacks, with a secondary side theme of advertising his office as long as it doesn't conflict with my artistic vision too much and don't waste my time and stylistic effort by forcing me to include actual content" then it will fail because the only new business will be other web developers who also happen to be looking for an architect AND thought it was stylish and trendy, in other words just about no one.
I can always fix any bug found, because I know where it lies. If I had used some tool to generate it, there'd probably be parts of the code that I wouldn't understand and wouldn't know how to fix.
Note that fix is defined not only as technical bugs, which are hard when handcoding and impossible with a GUI, but also "fix" as in the guy who signs your paycheck saying move this there, or slightly lighten the tone of gray across the site.
"website coding" is very much like womens high fashion clothing. All that matters is what it looks like and who's promoting it. All form, no substance.
Therefore making engineering style analysis is a complete waste of time. It's like arguing which womens wedding dress is more structurally sound, or making the primary design decisions about womens fashion shoes by doing a finite element analysis. You're going about it wrong.
That said, it seems very difficult to do anything involving CGI without knowing how to hand code, so you'd best learn how. Not impossible, no, but you have to restrict yourself to weird brittle workflows and dependencies, or restrict yourself to weird platforms. Will an architect's website involve anything CGI related? Probably not.
Most likely just a huge whomp of content free shiny flash and animation. The kind of place I'd go to solely to find the "contact us" page and assume anything so highly polished is a waste of time to look at. So whatever is trendy and cool looking is the way to go. Which probably means WYSIWYG editors.
What there is, however, is a criminalization of it. No homeowner can simply mod his own house without having at least one non-trivial license and having some Powers That Be sign off on his work.
That's a sand state thing. In the civilized areas of the country, not so much of a problem.
The knowledge is still there for those who seek it, but it is not as widely distributed as it used to be.
Where are we? On the internet! I wouldn't have been able to do half the crazy stuff I've done if I had not got on the net in '91. In fact almost all of the crazy stuff I do somehow involves the net either for inspiration and ideas, or purchasing, or instructions, or FAQs, or tutorials...
Considering the median income after real world inflation has dropped every generation since 1970 your tongue in cheek answer isn't too bad. Maybe you can still afford a prefab window now, but in your grandson's generation he's not going to be able to afford a pre-fab window, so unless you learn how to teach him to make windows... he's not going to have windows at all. And that would suck. So learn to make windows while you can.
if possible, know enough of the basics to shave off some diagnostic time
Much more important to know the basics to be able to evaluate the product/service and select your spot on the price/quality curve.
There's also convenience. Do I know how to change the thermostat in my car engine? Yeah. Could I do it cheaply? Yeah. Will I do it in February in 6 inches of snow at 20 degrees? Hell no its going to the shop an I'll pay $150 with a smile.
I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality
Having done some carpentry and built some bookcases both walmart and "real" you cannot even buy veneer particle board of a quality level as low as walmart flat packs. Literally unavailable to retail consumers. So I cry bogus on that claim.
The real problem is people who can't appreciate quality. I can and have built bookcases out of solid oak and hand rubbed finish, which end up costing quite a bit and look beautiful. However the average joe just wants the $19 saggy walmart bookcase. Sort of like McDonalds "food" vs real restaurant.
real CPUs use relays. The expensive part is figuring out memory. At a buck per relay and 22 relays per bitslice, a modest 8 bit ALU is pretty cheap and affordable, and per hour you spend designing and building is one of the cheapest "tech" hobbies out there. However, at a buck per relay, one mere kilobyte of memory is not quite as affordable.
It would be nice if we could move on from "the Romans were great guys and we should be more like them".
LOL I know this is a late post, but you're cherry picking one idea that killing Julius might have been a really bad idea, therefore that somehow ? implies Julius was a nice guy.
No, pretty much every leader in my post sucked, well other than Drusus who's gotten the martyrdom sainthood whitewashing treatment and to a lesser extent "Super Gracchi Bros" who were icky in a crooked businessman sense but not so evil in a political sense.
The thing with Julius is the people loved him, by and large, and he was a known quantity. The intense fear was killing him would result in another Sulla. It took awhile but eventually they got their Emperor Nero and a couple other losers just as bad but not as famous. If they just let Julius retire in peace maybe...
I imagine old Jules would have invaded and subjugated a few more countries
You know he was planning some of that when he was assassinated. Not sure a guy with as much sole power as himself could have survived politically going to the front, and if he didn't go to the front, since he managed to kill most of the good military leaders, they'd lose. So go to the front and have a palace revolution back home and/or some centurion gets paid off to kill him on the front where he has few powerful rich supporters, or stay home and have a miserable defeat. He was in between a rock and a hard place.
I agree with "the Romans were great guys" great is in important and interesting and educational to study. I would like to disagree with "we should be more like them" but I can't because human nature has not changed much if any in a mere couple centuries, so we have our modern Colosseum, modern gladiators, the politics of the late republic are about the same as the current USA, its pretty much the same, so like it or not, studying them is studying us, and we may as well take advantage of them as a "research experiment". Like all research experiments, not all of what they did worked, of course, so should not be reimplemented, but quite a bit did.
In most cases, you should lie about salary. Tell them you are taking a job that pays more, allows you more control of your work and offers more benefits.
LOL I told them I was taking less money. It was a dramatically better job, but corporate HR types would never understand the tech and lifestyle reasons. The lower salary blew their little minds. The department and the whole company was shutting down anyway, so its not like I had coworkers to defend, and the lower salary was still a very large multiple of unemployment, so I was happy.
The best engineering solution is always the one with the fewest parts, smallest, cheapest and simplest. Oddly enough a exit interview is an engineering problem, and all questions are best answered as "no comment" or at most, just recite basic demographic-type facts to basic demographic type questions. I was ordered to attend an interview, not to dictate a 30 page business administration term paper or be a part time management consultant.
Sure would be nice to have a "tip jar" donation button. *click* *click* *click* I sure would be sending quarters by the dozens...concept has been around for decades...
Its called in game advertising. If you know you cannot make money in the app store on "sales" you can make money selling ad space.
Its not that big of a deal, either. So the first big money grab was done by people selling in the ITMS. That doesn't mean every money grab for the rest of history has to also be there.
Can you refute Godel's theorem of incompleteness? Does that not offer a concrete, mathematical definition of God?
No more or less than whatever it is structural engineering says about a cross. Not getting it.
Perhaps it says that the universe is the best simulation of itself and that trying to simulate it is pointless.
Centuries of scientific progress beg to disagree? I guess it depends on the definition of pointless. Seems to have a point to me.
When Google grows some more personality, you may find yourself agreeing with them
Many already worship at the altar of the Mighty Living GOOG (I am something of a follower myself) and others worship the holy shining symbol of APPL. As for which is greater, it remains to be seen if Jobs resurrects or not. If/when he does, all bets are off.
The idiots who killed Drusus and then implemented all his reforms anyway?
The lunatic Sulla who gained a dictatorship and slaughtered thousands of his rivals?
The folks who killed the Grachii bros instead of allowing reform?
How about the Triumvirate a generation earlier? The only reason Julius got in charge was because the other idiots in the triumvirate got killed... if they had some succession plan other than ultimate centralization of power...
How about the nuts and crooks who killed Julius? Endless debate about what he would have done if not killed. The people loved him and if given a vote would have elected him for life anyway, much like the USA president FDR.
The roman republic was dead a long time before Octavian or even Julius was on the scene.
You could claim the first mis-step was "the" cause, but there were about a dozen trivial chances to easily recover, none ever taken.
If you have 100 scientists in a room each one with a different theory for an unexplained phenominon, like the exapnsion rate of the universe, does that mean that they are all wrong? No, not really
Wrong analogy, because religions are stories not scientific theories. If they were scientific theories, they would make falsifiable predictions about the future given an initial set of conditions. The 100 scientists in a room could trivially all screw it up and output nonsense predictions.
For what its worth, you have the God analogy backwards. No religeon claims to have invented God.
That implies their God and discussions about their God existed before their religion was invented. I don't think so.
You're talking about the creation myths they tell themselves, not the evidence seen from outside their religion.
For example. Before Greco-roman paganism existed, did people talk about their gods a lot? No. Before the stories existed, they didn't exist therefore were not talked about. Now, sure, after the religion was created, some kids going to ask his dad where the stories came from, and dad isn't going to explain the whole hash pipe thing, so you'll get more stories, about how the gods told them the stories, a whole set of creation myths. The stories they tell themselves do not mean Apollo and Zeus etc actually created paganism. This seems a nearly universal feature of religions... man creates gods, gods take credit for creation.
You're confusing education with training. A biomed engineer merely has advanced training, and possibly a half ass ultra minimalist education in the liberal arts just to make the deans happy. The poetry major has an actual education. Its pretty easy to tell the difference, if you're learning what to do or how to do, its training, and if you're learning how to think, you're getting an education. The word "do" appears a lot in training, and the word "think" appears a lot in education.
The real problem you refer to is best described as a noob electrician is paid a heck of a lot of money as an apprentice to learn how to be a journeyman and later a master, but for no apparent reason a EE is expected to pay thru the nose for his first few years. Another example is degrees are offered in CS and IT but none of the grads know anything about troubleshooting or architecture or systems analysis or design.. they've got the worst of both worlds, they have to pay thru the nose for the first 4 years and then noob about as what amounts to being an apprentice for a couple years before they rise out of negative productivity land. Some do their "apprenticeship" before graduating high school, they're the real "computer guys".
An intelligent young lad showing promise and delusions of grandeur should apprentice to an engineer, biomed or computer, for a couple years until he makes journeyman. Maybe if he wants to strike out and work for himself he can go for a master level.
There is a mistaken belief that apprenticeship programs involve no theory. This is wrong. At the CC, while earning my associates before going on to get the BS, I took some electronics classes with some apprentices... they're a pretty sharp bunch. Now an apprentice mason, maybe not so much book larnin' there. But an electrician is basically an assocates degree in electronics with a bit less small signal work and a bit more power electronics work. In fact that was pretty much how the curriculum went, they moved on to the VFD and CNC lab while I moved on to the RF lab... of course another difference was they were being paid (quite a lot) to attend while I was paying to attend...
well there needs to be a high tech training system like todays trades without the liberal arts part.
Its called a community college granting an associates degree and the market has spoken and they're utterly worthless. I have one, I know all about this. All corporations treat them as about equivalent to a high school diploma, and entrepreneurs don't need someone to hold their hand to learn anyway. The training is exactly as you describe, no educational courses, all training in the field and related subjects. So I sat thru calculus at the CC, but not sculpting class.
This is not to say community colleges are worthless... the best way to look at it is I paid about 1/10th as much for my first 64 credits as I paid for my last 70 or so credits. And, frankly, the instructors at the CC are universally better than the TAs at university, having experienced both. The one or two university classes I had that were taught by full professors were the best of all, but the key words are one or two, the rest all being taught by outside consultants or TAs.
Some, key word some, apprenticeships are pretty high tech. Your average slashdotter would probably be floored if they knew what a modern tool and die maker knows...
Oceans and deserts are even closer, and probably the investment needed to sustain a lot of people is smaller.
We've already done New Orleans, not so well, and Vegas, OK so far. The hard part is making a colony thats not a drain on the rest of the environment; self contained.
Also too close makes it too easy to cheat, look at everything we send to N.O. and Vegas. Antarctica would have to be self contained, other than O2 and H2O and solar energy which makes it a good training ground... tough, but not too tough.
People who have careers and money to spend and cultural activities to take part in don't spend so much time screwing.
Unlikely. "everyone knows" if you get a bachelor pad downtown in the hip urban areas then you'll get laid every night. Supposedly. Also see endless "I can't date until I buy a junker car" and "I can't get laid until I get an apartment and move out of mom's basement" and "rich guys get all the chicks" and "I need to get a job after school to pay for dating if boy and clothes so boys notice me if girl" etc etc.
Aside from examples and logic, if its anecdote time, it certainly applies to the first half of my life... I can't even think of a situation where I didn't get laid where I thought to myself, "self, if only I was unemployed, had no money, and never went anywhere or did anything, then, right now I'd be on top of her"
I think the US is one of the exceptions, where the more affluent population continues to have more than multiple children.
LOL its the other way around, pretty intensely. High school dropout and no skills and no job = minimum 7 kids in the trailer, "career oriented woman" = no kids.
Slashdot Mirror
I _did_ say 'of the same quality' - I wasn't trying to compare flat pack particle board to solid oak. :)
Yeah but that was kind of my point. As an individual I can't buy any flat pack level crud at all, but if it were even possible it would be in the realm of $5 worth of "psuedowood" to make the average walmart flat pack $19 bookcase. I mean, lets be realistic, they aren't turning that "wood" into a kit for free or at a loss and local lumber yards are always so much cheaper than retail floor space for absolutely everything else....
Or going the other way, yeah I bought my solid oak and it was expensive but maybe a hundred something of the finest oak is competing against a "genuine Amish hand crafted $1000" bookcase, so I still come out ahead.
Thankfully, there's no division involved.
LOL give him a break, after standing around in calf deep snow below freezing in howling winds getting liquid coolant all over my hands (awesome windchill) I don't think I could handle even the most basic division problem. A pretty good indication of hypothermia is getting all cloudy headed.
Of course, if the thermostat failed again today, 75 degrees, cloudy, light cool breeze, plenty of time, I'd change it myself... but this is a cool day in late July not February...
Another example is when the start cap blew out on my air conditioner compressor on a 95 degree sunny 100% humidity evening before I had to wake up for work at 4am the next morning, I had the HVAC guy swap it in an hour for darn near $200 even though I could have very slowly and tediously done it myself on a day like today. Most of the delay in the replacement isn't actually installing the cap, its that I'm not even sure where to drive to buy a high temp rated start cap at 7pm on a sunday night, but the HVAC guy has one in his truck, so...
Unless your website is very basic, in which case it will probably never get noticed.
Ah see there's the problem. Noticed by who?
He has a contract to get the word out online about an architect, provide content and information that someone who hires architects finds interesting when google search drops them on the front page. If, instead, it gets turned into a game of "let me try to impress other web developers by whacked out trendy style hacks, with a secondary side theme of advertising his office as long as it doesn't conflict with my artistic vision too much and don't waste my time and stylistic effort by forcing me to include actual content" then it will fail because the only new business will be other web developers who also happen to be looking for an architect AND thought it was stylish and trendy, in other words just about no one.
I can always fix any bug found, because I know where it lies. If I had used some tool to generate it, there'd probably be parts of the code that I wouldn't understand and wouldn't know how to fix.
Note that fix is defined not only as technical bugs, which are hard when handcoding and impossible with a GUI, but also "fix" as in the guy who signs your paycheck saying move this there, or slightly lighten the tone of gray across the site.
"website coding" is very much like womens high fashion clothing. All that matters is what it looks like and who's promoting it. All form, no substance.
Therefore making engineering style analysis is a complete waste of time. It's like arguing which womens wedding dress is more structurally sound, or making the primary design decisions about womens fashion shoes by doing a finite element analysis. You're going about it wrong.
That said, it seems very difficult to do anything involving CGI without knowing how to hand code, so you'd best learn how. Not impossible, no, but you have to restrict yourself to weird brittle workflows and dependencies, or restrict yourself to weird platforms. Will an architect's website involve anything CGI related? Probably not.
Most likely just a huge whomp of content free shiny flash and animation. The kind of place I'd go to solely to find the "contact us" page and assume anything so highly polished is a waste of time to look at. So whatever is trendy and cool looking is the way to go. Which probably means WYSIWYG editors.
What there is, however, is a criminalization of it. No homeowner can simply mod his own house without having at least one non-trivial license and having some Powers That Be sign off on his work.
That's a sand state thing. In the civilized areas of the country, not so much of a problem.
The knowledge is still there for those who seek it, but it is not as widely distributed as it used to be.
Where are we? On the internet! I wouldn't have been able to do half the crazy stuff I've done if I had not got on the net in '91. In fact almost all of the crazy stuff I do somehow involves the net either for inspiration and ideas, or purchasing, or instructions, or FAQs, or tutorials...
Considering the median income after real world inflation has dropped every generation since 1970 your tongue in cheek answer isn't too bad. Maybe you can still afford a prefab window now, but in your grandson's generation he's not going to be able to afford a pre-fab window, so unless you learn how to teach him to make windows... he's not going to have windows at all. And that would suck. So learn to make windows while you can.
if possible, know enough of the basics to shave off some diagnostic time
Much more important to know the basics to be able to evaluate the product/service and select your spot on the price/quality curve.
There's also convenience. Do I know how to change the thermostat in my car engine? Yeah. Could I do it cheaply? Yeah. Will I do it in February in 6 inches of snow at 20 degrees? Hell no its going to the shop an I'll pay $150 with a smile.
I've noticed that in general it's cheaper to buy a new bookcase than to buy the wood to build your own of the same quality
Having done some carpentry and built some bookcases both walmart and "real" you cannot even buy veneer particle board of a quality level as low as walmart flat packs. Literally unavailable to retail consumers. So I cry bogus on that claim.
The real problem is people who can't appreciate quality. I can and have built bookcases out of solid oak and hand rubbed finish, which end up costing quite a bit and look beautiful. However the average joe just wants the $19 saggy walmart bookcase. Sort of like McDonalds "food" vs real restaurant.
I make my own silicon wafers!
real CPUs use relays. The expensive part is figuring out memory. At a buck per relay and 22 relays per bitslice, a modest 8 bit ALU is pretty cheap and affordable, and per hour you spend designing and building is one of the cheapest "tech" hobbies out there. However, at a buck per relay, one mere kilobyte of memory is not quite as affordable.
It would be nice if we could move on from "the Romans were great guys and we should be more like them".
LOL I know this is a late post, but you're cherry picking one idea that killing Julius might have been a really bad idea, therefore that somehow ? implies Julius was a nice guy.
No, pretty much every leader in my post sucked, well other than Drusus who's gotten the martyrdom sainthood whitewashing treatment and to a lesser extent "Super Gracchi Bros" who were icky in a crooked businessman sense but not so evil in a political sense.
The thing with Julius is the people loved him, by and large, and he was a known quantity. The intense fear was killing him would result in another Sulla. It took awhile but eventually they got their Emperor Nero and a couple other losers just as bad but not as famous. If they just let Julius retire in peace maybe...
I imagine old Jules would have invaded and subjugated a few more countries
You know he was planning some of that when he was assassinated. Not sure a guy with as much sole power as himself could have survived politically going to the front, and if he didn't go to the front, since he managed to kill most of the good military leaders, they'd lose. So go to the front and have a palace revolution back home and/or some centurion gets paid off to kill him on the front where he has few powerful rich supporters, or stay home and have a miserable defeat. He was in between a rock and a hard place.
I agree with "the Romans were great guys" great is in important and interesting and educational to study. I would like to disagree with "we should be more like them" but I can't because human nature has not changed much if any in a mere couple centuries, so we have our modern Colosseum, modern gladiators, the politics of the late republic are about the same as the current USA, its pretty much the same, so like it or not, studying them is studying us, and we may as well take advantage of them as a "research experiment". Like all research experiments, not all of what they did worked, of course, so should not be reimplemented, but quite a bit did.
In most cases, you should lie about salary. Tell them you are taking a job that pays more, allows you more control of your work and offers more benefits.
LOL I told them I was taking less money. It was a dramatically better job, but corporate HR types would never understand the tech and lifestyle reasons. The lower salary blew their little minds. The department and the whole company was shutting down anyway, so its not like I had coworkers to defend, and the lower salary was still a very large multiple of unemployment, so I was happy.
The best engineering solution is always the one with the fewest parts, smallest, cheapest and simplest. Oddly enough a exit interview is an engineering problem, and all questions are best answered as "no comment" or at most, just recite basic demographic-type facts to basic demographic type questions. I was ordered to attend an interview, not to dictate a 30 page business administration term paper or be a part time management consultant.
Sure would be nice to have a "tip jar" donation button. *click* *click* *click* I sure would be sending quarters by the dozens...concept has been around for decades...
Its called in game advertising. If you know you cannot make money in the app store on "sales" you can make money selling ad space.
Its not that big of a deal, either. So the first big money grab was done by people selling in the ITMS. That doesn't mean every money grab for the rest of history has to also be there.
Can you refute Godel's theorem of incompleteness? Does that not offer a concrete, mathematical definition of God?
No more or less than whatever it is structural engineering says about a cross. Not getting it.
Perhaps it says that the universe is the best simulation of itself and that trying to simulate it is pointless.
Centuries of scientific progress beg to disagree? I guess it depends on the definition of pointless. Seems to have a point to me.
When Google grows some more personality, you may find yourself agreeing with them
Many already worship at the altar of the Mighty Living GOOG (I am something of a follower myself) and others worship the holy shining symbol of APPL. As for which is greater, it remains to be seen if Jobs resurrects or not. If/when he does, all bets are off.
Julius Caesar's son Octavian when he killed-off democracy by subsuming all power to himself and leaving the People and the Senate powerless.
An entire wikipedia article begs to differ with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Roman_Republic
The idiots who killed Drusus and then implemented all his reforms anyway?
The lunatic Sulla who gained a dictatorship and slaughtered thousands of his rivals?
The folks who killed the Grachii bros instead of allowing reform?
How about the Triumvirate a generation earlier? The only reason Julius got in charge was because the other idiots in the triumvirate got killed... if they had some succession plan other than ultimate centralization of power...
How about the nuts and crooks who killed Julius? Endless debate about what he would have done if not killed. The people loved him and if given a vote would have elected him for life anyway, much like the USA president FDR.
The roman republic was dead a long time before Octavian or even Julius was on the scene.
You could claim the first mis-step was "the" cause, but there were about a dozen trivial chances to easily recover, none ever taken.
If you have 100 scientists in a room each one with a different theory for an unexplained phenominon, like the exapnsion rate of the universe, does that mean that they are all wrong? No, not really
Wrong analogy, because religions are stories not scientific theories. If they were scientific theories, they would make falsifiable predictions about the future given an initial set of conditions. The 100 scientists in a room could trivially all screw it up and output nonsense predictions.
For what its worth, you have the God analogy backwards. No religeon claims to have invented God.
That implies their God and discussions about their God existed before their religion was invented. I don't think so.
You're talking about the creation myths they tell themselves, not the evidence seen from outside their religion.
For example. Before Greco-roman paganism existed, did people talk about their gods a lot? No. Before the stories existed, they didn't exist therefore were not talked about. Now, sure, after the religion was created, some kids going to ask his dad where the stories came from, and dad isn't going to explain the whole hash pipe thing, so you'll get more stories, about how the gods told them the stories, a whole set of creation myths. The stories they tell themselves do not mean Apollo and Zeus etc actually created paganism. This seems a nearly universal feature of religions... man creates gods, gods take credit for creation.
You're confusing education with training. A biomed engineer merely has advanced training, and possibly a half ass ultra minimalist education in the liberal arts just to make the deans happy. The poetry major has an actual education. Its pretty easy to tell the difference, if you're learning what to do or how to do, its training, and if you're learning how to think, you're getting an education. The word "do" appears a lot in training, and the word "think" appears a lot in education.
The real problem you refer to is best described as a noob electrician is paid a heck of a lot of money as an apprentice to learn how to be a journeyman and later a master, but for no apparent reason a EE is expected to pay thru the nose for his first few years. Another example is degrees are offered in CS and IT but none of the grads know anything about troubleshooting or architecture or systems analysis or design.. they've got the worst of both worlds, they have to pay thru the nose for the first 4 years and then noob about as what amounts to being an apprentice for a couple years before they rise out of negative productivity land. Some do their "apprenticeship" before graduating high school, they're the real "computer guys".
An intelligent young lad showing promise and delusions of grandeur should apprentice to an engineer, biomed or computer, for a couple years until he makes journeyman. Maybe if he wants to strike out and work for himself he can go for a master level.
There is a mistaken belief that apprenticeship programs involve no theory. This is wrong. At the CC, while earning my associates before going on to get the BS, I took some electronics classes with some apprentices... they're a pretty sharp bunch. Now an apprentice mason, maybe not so much book larnin' there. But an electrician is basically an assocates degree in electronics with a bit less small signal work and a bit more power electronics work. In fact that was pretty much how the curriculum went, they moved on to the VFD and CNC lab while I moved on to the RF lab... of course another difference was they were being paid (quite a lot) to attend while I was paying to attend...
well there needs to be a high tech training system like todays trades without the liberal arts part.
Its called a community college granting an associates degree and the market has spoken and they're utterly worthless. I have one, I know all about this. All corporations treat them as about equivalent to a high school diploma, and entrepreneurs don't need someone to hold their hand to learn anyway. The training is exactly as you describe, no educational courses, all training in the field and related subjects. So I sat thru calculus at the CC, but not sculpting class.
This is not to say community colleges are worthless... the best way to look at it is I paid about 1/10th as much for my first 64 credits as I paid for my last 70 or so credits. And, frankly, the instructors at the CC are universally better than the TAs at university, having experienced both. The one or two university classes I had that were taught by full professors were the best of all, but the key words are one or two, the rest all being taught by outside consultants or TAs.
Some, key word some, apprenticeships are pretty high tech. Your average slashdotter would probably be floored if they knew what a modern tool and die maker knows...
Antarctica is ... very restricted to military/scientific missions.
Not for any technical reason just flaky politics. Preparation for a mars colony counts as "scientific mission" anyway.
Oceans and deserts are even closer, and probably the investment needed to sustain a lot of people is smaller.
We've already done New Orleans, not so well, and Vegas, OK so far. The hard part is making a colony thats not a drain on the rest of the environment; self contained.
Also too close makes it too easy to cheat, look at everything we send to N.O. and Vegas. Antarctica would have to be self contained, other than O2 and H2O and solar energy which makes it a good training ground... tough, but not too tough.
Yeah, I wish. More likely is that they'll just dome it up and burn fuel to generate heat and electricity to live the temperate zone life there.
Um, Antarctica or Mars? You've just kind of made my point for me.
People who have careers and money to spend and cultural activities to take part in don't spend so much time screwing.
Unlikely. "everyone knows" if you get a bachelor pad downtown in the hip urban areas then you'll get laid every night. Supposedly. Also see endless "I can't date until I buy a junker car" and "I can't get laid until I get an apartment and move out of mom's basement" and "rich guys get all the chicks" and "I need to get a job after school to pay for dating if boy and clothes so boys notice me if girl" etc etc.
Aside from examples and logic, if its anecdote time, it certainly applies to the first half of my life... I can't even think of a situation where I didn't get laid where I thought to myself, "self, if only I was unemployed, had no money, and never went anywhere or did anything, then, right now I'd be on top of her"
I think the US is one of the exceptions, where the more affluent population continues to have more than multiple children.
LOL its the other way around, pretty intensely. High school dropout and no skills and no job = minimum 7 kids in the trailer, "career oriented woman" = no kids.