College does not teach you marketable, useful job skills. It teaches you how to show up in class, pay attention, memorize useless shit then immediately forget it once you've passed the test
You either went to a truly shitty college, or else more likely never went to college at all.
But I'm sure you're another self-diagnosed genius who is just waiting for his chance to rule the world.
"...college is what teaches people to knuckle under and get stuff done."
Actually college (and there were several) failed miserably at that lesson. 4 Years in the military (non-combattant/non-war time) succeeded where college failed.... not that I'd recommend the military these days. Some sort of real life boot camp outside of a McWalmart job would probably be useful to many.
The military mainly teaches you about teamwork, obeying orders and not fucking things up for everyone else. Nothing wrong with that, but you find a lot of ex-military people (especially the non-officers) are poorly adapted to civilian life where they have to use their own initiative.
Most normal military careers aren't in Special Forces.
There is also something to be said about college/university as a good thing. It forces you to take stuff you’d have no interest in otherwise.
Not tin the UK, where most degrees are single (or maybe dual) subject, and you don't generally have the Major-and-lots-of-minors scenario. This is because at a UK university you are assumed to have had a reasonable all round education already.
The other part of it is well, luck. Business is all about luck - if you just happen to get the right things done and the right people to see it and the people are in the right mood...
Exactly. Bill Gates's DOS wasn't that great a piece of software, neither was Zuckerberg's facebook. Gates was around at exactly the time IBM made the insane decision to buy in their OS, and Zuckerberg lucked into the explosion of internet-enabled mobile phones.
The "skip college' argument is extremely short sighted here, ignores the realities of the hiring landscape, and is really only useful advice for a very, very small percentage of those looking to start businesses.
It's the same problem as basing any argument on extreme outliers. You always get the "my grandfather smoked 4 packs of cigarettes and drank two bottles of whisky a day, and he lived to be over a hundred, so what's all this politically correct health advice for" exceptions to any story.
Saying that people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg became billionaires despite not finishing college is about as useful as saying that John Travolta and Bruce Willis never went to college, so you shouldn't bother as you can end up as a rich and successful actor too.
I've seen quite a few put off college until their 30's or later when they've already established themselves in their field of choice (an option many people overlook but it certainly valid).
That is very hard work if you have a full time job, children, family to visit, friends, hobbies and indeed any sort of social life. It's much easier to study when you're younger, if only because you have so much free time, hard as this may be for current students to believe.
I did a humanities degree, and the course materials (books) were a relatively small part of the cost, plus I seldom went to lectures. It was the small tutorial groups that were the key thing about the course, and that is impossible to duplicate for free online until we get some sort of AI tutor software.
There's nothing wrong with being a blue-collar worker.
Not in theory, no, all labour is valuable and dignified in itself. But in the real world, you get shit on a lot more if you're doing a blue-collar job. Your boss will treat you like you're a moron, your time will be monitored and money deducted for being late or leaving early, you generally have to work through illnesses much more as you're most likely getting paid by the hour, and so on.
In an ideal world, everyone would do a mixture of physical and mental labour according to their abilities. In a capitalist world, blue-collar means you're a second class citizen who's too dumb to get an easier job.
Also, the blue collar jobs that do pay very well tend to be either physically demanding or simply dangerous, and if you're unlucky they'll be both and you still won't get paid that much.
There is qute a lot of romanticising of physical labour on slashdot, presumably in order to fit to the American "anyone can start from nothing and become a billionaire" narrative. The truth is that most poor working people stay that way because not everyone has the brains, guts or luck to break out of poverty.
Electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics... the world needs more of these. They make more than most college graduates, after 4 years of getting paid instead of paying to learn a craft.
I think that's a bit of a myth. Sure, a 21 year old recently qualified plumber who has been learning on the job and getting paid will be better off than a recently qualified college graduate with some holiday experience in McDonalds and ten thousand quids worth of debt, but I bet the same isn't true by the time they're 30 or 50.
Also, a lot of people don't want to do manual work, they'd rather sit in a nice warm office wearing a suit and tie and telling other people to do manual work for them while they post all day on slashdot. Ahem.
A saturated field of overqualified candidates for cheap, desperate labor is much more advantageous for employers.
Not really. Overqualified people tend to move on as soon as they get the chance, and are unlikely to develop much loyalty to the employer if they feel they're being exploited.
What you really want (being cynical) are lots of intelligent but grossly underqualified workers who can't realistically better themselves and who are grateful for the money and logical enough to prefer a poor wage to starving, and who will make your fortune for you. AKA early capitalism before the dilution of the pure free market with socialism...
The people in power never really want the masses to be educated, it just makes them ungrateful.
The world cannot support everyone being a billionaire entrepreneur
Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone even wants to be a billionaire. And no one needs to be a billionaire. I say we should tax the billionaires at 100% in order to fund the next generation by letting them explore their potential interests without having to incur a huge mountain of debt.
No, there is a serious moral (as well as practical) justification for educating everyone in society to the best of their ability. Money is not the be all and end all of life, but even if it was it would make more sense to educate everyone properly in the hope that potential money makers wouldn't be lost in the mix by being too poor/uninterested when young to go to college.
When I was growing up in the UK, university/college education was paid for by the State (at least to first degree level). This was on the basis that (a) everyone should have the same opportunity to get a college education provided they were moderately intelligent enough and (b) as a graduate you would probably earn more money over your career than someone who left school at 16 with no qualifications, and therefore you would pay more tax.
So it didn't matter whether you studied English, Medieval Art History, Sanskrit or whatever, you still got the benefits of being at university, mixing with other intelligent people, discussing all sorts of things and being exposed to ideas for their own sake, not just as tools to make money. When you graduated, then you could think about studying to be a lawyer, civil servant, accountant or whatever.
Now, clearly there were people who did have to decide before they started university what they were going to do, for example if they wanted to be a doctor. But these were the minority of people.
The solution (that nobody seems to want to man up and take) is to slap HR around. Instead they all let HR rule their own little kingdom, making things difficult for everyone else.
Where do people get the impression that HR run corporations? What they mainly do is stop the owners/directors from making stupid "gut instinct" decisions.
I agree... Further more I think we're obsessed with the stories about drop-outs who creates successful tech companies.
It feeds well into the American "anyone can become President" mythology. And it lets capitalists pretend there's no class/wealth divide in society: just as long as you've got brains and don't mind hard work, you too will one day become a billionaire.
The problem is with the fact that people have to pay to be educated. For some reason, here in the UK we decided in our wisdom to move away from free higher education into a paid-for tuition/living costs system which leaves graduates with large debts, albeit not as bad as in the US.
I simply do not understand why in a civilised society everyone shouldn't be properly educated at no cost to the parents. It is illogical for kids with rich parents to be given an even greater initial boost in life by getting access to the best education as well as the money of their parents. The taxes the students will pay later will fund everything. And yes, taxes can be a good thing. And yes, public schools (i.e. fee-paying schools in the UK) should be outlawed entirely.
Listening to others is sometimes a hindrance and a sign of indecisiveness. Sometimes it is much better to have a person who knows what to do and is able to do it regardless of what people say what he should do. Especially when trying to do something new. A lot of opinions is not necessarily better than a single one.
Translation: I am a self-diagnosed Aspie who thinks my 1337 skillz excuse me from socially acceptable behaviour.
And despite my being a combination of a rock star, god and idiot savant, amazingly I still live at home and earn minimum wage because nobody understands my genius.
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on
There is more to life than making money, otherwise a viable career option would be to become a drug dealer or gangster. For those of us who aren't psychopaths, leading an ethical life is more important than getting rich.
Also, art history teaches you how to THINK, the same as with any other degree course.
If you think education is just about job training, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
When the private industries do it (MPAA, ESRB, RIAA), everyone says "Only governments can censor things. This isn't censorship, because it's private industries doing it. If you don't like it, don't watch movies, listen to music, or buy software!"
Asking you to pay to watch listen or use something is not censorship. If you think all cultural, physical and intellectual products should be freely available to all under a communistic Star Trek-type system, fine. I wouldn't disagree. But we'll have to move way beyond capitalism first, and I doubt most slashdotters would want to go there.
Slashdot Mirror
What I do have is focus, drive, ambition, dedication, excellent communication skills, intuition, organizational skills, and initiative.
Plus an almost painful modesty.
College does not teach you marketable, useful job skills. It teaches you how to show up in class, pay attention, memorize useless shit then immediately forget it once you've passed the test
You either went to a truly shitty college, or else more likely never went to college at all.
But I'm sure you're another self-diagnosed genius who is just waiting for his chance to rule the world.
"...college is what teaches people to knuckle under and get stuff done." Actually college (and there were several) failed miserably at that lesson. 4 Years in the military (non-combattant/non-war time) succeeded where college failed.... not that I'd recommend the military these days. Some sort of real life boot camp outside of a McWalmart job would probably be useful to many.
The military mainly teaches you about teamwork, obeying orders and not fucking things up for everyone else. Nothing wrong with that, but you find a lot of ex-military people (especially the non-officers) are poorly adapted to civilian life where they have to use their own initiative.
Most normal military careers aren't in Special Forces.
There is also something to be said about college/university as a good thing. It forces you to take stuff you’d have no interest in otherwise.
Not tin the UK, where most degrees are single (or maybe dual) subject, and you don't generally have the Major-and-lots-of-minors scenario. This is because at a UK university you are assumed to have had a reasonable all round education already.
The other part of it is well, luck. Business is all about luck - if you just happen to get the right things done and the right people to see it and the people are in the right mood...
Exactly. Bill Gates's DOS wasn't that great a piece of software, neither was Zuckerberg's facebook. Gates was around at exactly the time IBM made the insane decision to buy in their OS, and Zuckerberg lucked into the explosion of internet-enabled mobile phones.
Have you considered going back to Harvard for an MBA?
Maybe he doesn't want to spend two or three years of his life networking with assholes and having no free time for family and friends.
The "skip college' argument is extremely short sighted here, ignores the realities of the hiring landscape, and is really only useful advice for a very, very small percentage of those looking to start businesses.
It's the same problem as basing any argument on extreme outliers. You always get the "my grandfather smoked 4 packs of cigarettes and drank two bottles of whisky a day, and he lived to be over a hundred, so what's all this politically correct health advice for" exceptions to any story.
Saying that people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg became billionaires despite not finishing college is about as useful as saying that John Travolta and Bruce Willis never went to college, so you shouldn't bother as you can end up as a rich and successful actor too.
I've seen quite a few put off college until their 30's or later when they've already established themselves in their field of choice (an option many people overlook but it certainly valid).
That is very hard work if you have a full time job, children, family to visit, friends, hobbies and indeed any sort of social life. It's much easier to study when you're younger, if only because you have so much free time, hard as this may be for current students to believe.
I did a humanities degree, and the course materials (books) were a relatively small part of the cost, plus I seldom went to lectures. It was the small tutorial groups that were the key thing about the course, and that is impossible to duplicate for free online until we get some sort of AI tutor software.
There's nothing wrong with being a blue-collar worker.
Not in theory, no, all labour is valuable and dignified in itself. But in the real world, you get shit on a lot more if you're doing a blue-collar job. Your boss will treat you like you're a moron, your time will be monitored and money deducted for being late or leaving early, you generally have to work through illnesses much more as you're most likely getting paid by the hour, and so on.
In an ideal world, everyone would do a mixture of physical and mental labour according to their abilities. In a capitalist world, blue-collar means you're a second class citizen who's too dumb to get an easier job.
Also, the blue collar jobs that do pay very well tend to be either physically demanding or simply dangerous, and if you're unlucky they'll be both and you still won't get paid that much.
There is qute a lot of romanticising of physical labour on slashdot, presumably in order to fit to the American "anyone can start from nothing and become a billionaire" narrative. The truth is that most poor working people stay that way because not everyone has the brains, guts or luck to break out of poverty.
Electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics... the world needs more of these. They make more than most college graduates, after 4 years of getting paid instead of paying to learn a craft.
I think that's a bit of a myth. Sure, a 21 year old recently qualified plumber who has been learning on the job and getting paid will be better off than a recently qualified college graduate with some holiday experience in McDonalds and ten thousand quids worth of debt, but I bet the same isn't true by the time they're 30 or 50.
Also, a lot of people don't want to do manual work, they'd rather sit in a nice warm office wearing a suit and tie and telling other people to do manual work for them while they post all day on slashdot. Ahem.
A saturated field of overqualified candidates for cheap, desperate labor is much more advantageous for employers.
Not really. Overqualified people tend to move on as soon as they get the chance, and are unlikely to develop much loyalty to the employer if they feel they're being exploited.
What you really want (being cynical) are lots of intelligent but grossly underqualified workers who can't realistically better themselves and who are grateful for the money and logical enough to prefer a poor wage to starving, and who will make your fortune for you. AKA early capitalism before the dilution of the pure free market with socialism...
The people in power never really want the masses to be educated, it just makes them ungrateful.
The world cannot support everyone being a billionaire entrepreneur
Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone even wants to be a billionaire. And no one needs to be a billionaire. I say we should tax the billionaires at 100% in order to fund the next generation by letting them explore their potential interests without having to incur a huge mountain of debt.
No, there is a serious moral (as well as practical) justification for educating everyone in society to the best of their ability. Money is not the be all and end all of life, but even if it was it would make more sense to educate everyone properly in the hope that potential money makers wouldn't be lost in the mix by being too poor/uninterested when young to go to college.
When I was growing up in the UK, university/college education was paid for by the State (at least to first degree level). This was on the basis that (a) everyone should have the same opportunity to get a college education provided they were moderately intelligent enough and (b) as a graduate you would probably earn more money over your career than someone who left school at 16 with no qualifications, and therefore you would pay more tax.
So it didn't matter whether you studied English, Medieval Art History, Sanskrit or whatever, you still got the benefits of being at university, mixing with other intelligent people, discussing all sorts of things and being exposed to ideas for their own sake, not just as tools to make money. When you graduated, then you could think about studying to be a lawyer, civil servant, accountant or whatever.
Now, clearly there were people who did have to decide before they started university what they were going to do, for example if they wanted to be a doctor. But these were the minority of people.
The solution (that nobody seems to want to man up and take) is to slap HR around. Instead they all let HR rule their own little kingdom, making things difficult for everyone else.
Where do people get the impression that HR run corporations? What they mainly do is stop the owners/directors from making stupid "gut instinct" decisions.
I agree... Further more I think we're obsessed with the stories about drop-outs who creates successful tech companies.
It feeds well into the American "anyone can become President" mythology. And it lets capitalists pretend there's no class/wealth divide in society: just as long as you've got brains and don't mind hard work, you too will one day become a billionaire.
I simply do not understand why in a civilised society everyone shouldn't be properly educated at no cost to the parents. It is illogical for kids with rich parents to be given an even greater initial boost in life by getting access to the best education as well as the money of their parents. The taxes the students will pay later will fund everything. And yes, taxes can be a good thing. And yes, public schools (i.e. fee-paying schools in the UK) should be outlawed entirely.
Listening to others is sometimes a hindrance and a sign of indecisiveness. Sometimes it is much better to have a person who knows what to do and is able to do it regardless of what people say what he should do. Especially when trying to do something new. A lot of opinions is not necessarily better than a single one.
Translation: I am a self-diagnosed Aspie who thinks my 1337 skillz excuse me from socially acceptable behaviour.
And despite my being a combination of a rock star, god and idiot savant, amazingly I still live at home and earn minimum wage because nobody understands my genius.
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on
There is more to life than making money, otherwise a viable career option would be to become a drug dealer or gangster. For those of us who aren't psychopaths, leading an ethical life is more important than getting rich.
Also, art history teaches you how to THINK, the same as with any other degree course.
If you think education is just about job training, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Then again considering the source... Bill Gates lying about Google? Why am I not surprised?
There is just an outside chance that the slashdot user "Billly Gates" isn't, in fact, the multi-billionaire former CEO of Microsoft.
When the private industries do it (MPAA, ESRB, RIAA), everyone says "Only governments can censor things. This isn't censorship, because it's private industries doing it. If you don't like it, don't watch movies, listen to music, or buy software!"
Asking you to pay to watch listen or use something is not censorship. If you think all cultural, physical and intellectual products should be freely available to all under a communistic Star Trek-type system, fine. I wouldn't disagree. But we'll have to move way beyond capitalism first, and I doubt most slashdotters would want to go there.
I don't identify as right wing. In fact, I don't really like the titles of left or right.
That's what right wingers always say...
I always guess B in multiple choice questions. So far I've had an impressive 24% success rate!
Carlsberg used to give free beer for the workers too, and drinking during the work was allowed just as long you weren't excessively drunk.
I've known several people who worked for breweries. They all drank, and frequently slept, during work hours.