People think that community college is just a buffet they can graze at and they're doing good as long as they are taking 12 credit hours.
Most community colleges have been impacted by budget cuts, too many people demanding classes and too many classes being cancelled. It was bad after the dot com bust, but it was a lot worst after the Great Recession. The four-year degree, with or without community college, is no longer practical.
I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
I hated grade school. Never went to high school. Spent four years in community college (two years for remedial, two years for associate degree). College was easier because I wanted to be there.
You ARE a minority in that no programs exist to help you or cater for you.
I'm also a white male in a minority-majority state (California). Something that horrifies my lily-white, tea-party loving relatives in Idaho. They can find minorities in ethnic restaurants (i.e., Chinese at Chinese restaurant, Mexicans at Mexican restaurant, and Italians at Italian restaurants). If they came to Silicon Valley, they wouldn't use public transportation as mingling with so many people from around the world and speaking so many languages that weren't English would blow their mind. When I visit Idaho, it's white on rice and boring as hell.
There's no minimum quotas for you, and no companies out there going out of their way to fast track you into their programs.
For the majority of my contract jobs, I'm hired over the phone. Skin color doesn't come into play. If it ever did, I have a Mexican uncle as a personal reference. Having a Mexican uncle opens many doors, especially among Latinos.
He just stared at me dumbfounded for a bit, and then suggested some other uninteresting kids book.
I had a similar incident with a library summer reading program as a kid. Read ten picture books during the summer. I did — in one day. The librarian called me a liar. She told me to fetch the books and recite each book word-for-word from memory. Most of these books had five words per picture page and 20 pages per book. I recited ~1,000 words perfectly. That made her madder. She held on to my reading certificate until the end of the program I would later graduate from the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension.
Everyone at school got an award on Award Day 1983 — except for me. My sixth-grade teacher told me that I miss too many classes from being sick and truant to deserve anything special. Besides, I won that Japanese culture textbook (Japanese culture viewed from the white man's perspective in the 1950's) in a drawing earlier that year and didn't deserve to win that. No wonder I hated grade school.
When I transferred from community college to university in 1994, I applied to the Equal Opportunity Program. Being a poor white boy who was the first person in his family to go to college, I got accepted into the program. The Latino guidance counselor told me not to bother with the tutoring resources, because, you know, I was white, and didn't need that much help, and to come back next year to renew the EO&P contract.
My first year in the university ended with my girlfriend and I breaking up, leaving me depress and on academic probation. I got called into the EO&P office to explain my situation to a different guidance counselor. She demanded to know why I listened to that "idiot" from the year before and not follow the program as laid out in the contract. I pointed out the contract language that specifically stated that I must do everything that the guidance counselors told me to do. That took the wind out of her sails. Either way, I got kicked out of the program and the university. Ironically, the academic probation policy changed the following year because 10% of the student body was at risk of being kicked out (typically, it's 3%), which was too much money for the university to let walk away, and many of those students stayed.
I never went back to the university. A decade later, I went back to community college to learn computer programming and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0GPA in my major. That was the beginning of my technical career.
But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me.
I love those games. I play them for FREE all the time, as I don't make any in-app purchases. If the game becomes impossible to finish or deliberately corrupts the saved game file, I'll move on to another game.
All yours did was alert us to the uninteresting fact that you don't need this thing.
Otherwise known as a stupid question to provoke a discussion. Never be afraid to ask a stupid question, as others may want to ask the same stupid question but are afraid of what people may think of them. Thank you for your participation.;)
A rhetorical question is a common rhetorical device where a question is asked by a speaker, but no answer is expected from the audience. This distinguishes it from explicit verbal audience interaction where a speaker asks a question, and then waits for a response or calls on someone to answer it.
But that's not going to happen - you have to be 65 to even start collecting it.
All the baby boomers will be retired in 2030, drawing down their retirement funds and Social Security benefits. That massive sucking sound you hear in the background is all the cash leaving the stock market and Wall Street brokers weeping over their ever smaller annual bonuses. With retirees outnumbering workers, a smaller tax base will have support more people. No one knows how the economy will respond then.
The exaggeration originated with the postal unions, probably the NALC.
From what I read elsewhere, the Republicans co-opted the postal unions into supporting their bill to cripple the postal service. Like most unions, the postal unions went along with it because it was a short-term win and didn't consider the long-term consequences. Of course, the postal service is enshrined in the US Constitution and isn't going anywhere.
Why would my portfolio, which should be mostly bonds when I am close to retirement age, lose 1/2 if its value because stocks went down?
Most people don't have enough money saved in their 401ks and IRAs to be safely in bonds at retirement, and need the extra juice of being in the stock market. Dividend-paying stocks also took a wallop during the Great Recession as share prices — and sometimes dividend payments — sunk to historic lows.
My late father had a private pension from being a union construction worker. He retired at 59.5-years-old because his older brothers kicked the bucket at 60-years-old. He lived until he was 75-years-old. For those 15 years, he had the same consistent income from his pension and Social Security. He spent his pension and banked his Social Security. The money he saved from Social Security paid for six weeks of medical bills, funeral expenses and settling his estate. His death had zero impact on the rest of the family. If he had a 401K, half his income would have disappeared with the stock market crash during the Great Recession and the family would have gotten stuck with the bills.
But why should the government be providing a service that is the physical equivalent of spam?
Because corporations are still paying for the privilege to have spam delivered to your mailbox. A typical advertising campaign require a 1% response rate to make it profitable. While 99% will toss out the junk mail, 1% will respond to it and make the corporation some money.
I understand why the USPS was established back in 1775, but those reasons are no longer valid today.
Let's abolish the USPS. Does that stop paid spam being stuffed into your mailbox? Oh, hell no. It might get worse.
Pension costs are crippling most state and local governments these days.
That's because the politicians made too many sweet deals with the unions during GOOD TIMES without considering the consequences of BAD TIMES happening in the future.
I don't know what's behind the USPS deal, but I know the solution: outlaw pensions.
It's a deliberate attempt to sabotage a profitable federal agency by forcing it to run into the red each year with unreasonable pension obligations with the expectation to shut it down in the future.
401Ks are good enough for all of us peasants that work in the private sector, and they're good enough for our ruling class (and their servants) too.
Never mind that most Americans used to have pensions. The tax law got changed in the early 1970's got changed so the corporations could move away from pensions and Wall Street would get more customers (suckers). If the stock crashes just before you were supposed to retire and the value of your 401K is cut in half, as it did for many people during the Great Recession, tough shit. You should've saved more. And Social Security is going bust in 2030 or thereafter. Maybe your kids will take you in, put you in a nursing home or dump you on the streets. After all, you're a peasant.
Well, the USPS are still there 10 years later, so it must be possible.
Congress yells at the post master general every year for an artificial crisis that Congress created in the first place.
I, for one, expect nothing but the very best from our benevolent and omniscient government.
The post office near my home went from being a 30,000-sqft facility to a 3,000-sqft storefront. Other post offices, large and small, got closed in recent years. Each distribution center now handles mail for four or five zip codes with fewer workers. If my package gets lost at the distribution center, it takes two weeks to find it. Service have gotten worse to meet the impossible demands that Congress puts on it.
We do not owe employees of private companies, but postal workers work for us.
That will change in 2030 when all the baby boomers are retired, retirees will outnumber workers (shrinking tax base), and Medicare/Social Security will consume two-thirds of the federal budget. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. Baby boomers will expect to get back every dime they put into the system and more beyond that for that comfortable retirement they expect. As for the next generation, the baby boomers spent their inheritances and they don't own them a dime.
Slashdot Mirror
People think that community college is just a buffet they can graze at and they're doing good as long as they are taking 12 credit hours.
Most community colleges have been impacted by budget cuts, too many people demanding classes and too many classes being cancelled. It was bad after the dot com bust, but it was a lot worst after the Great Recession. The four-year degree, with or without community college, is no longer practical.
It's okay. That was over 30 years ago. Let it go, man. Just let it go.
But I don't want to be a special snowflake! ;)
I don't know about anybody else, but I thought college was MUCH easier than high school.
I hated grade school. Never went to high school. Spent four years in community college (two years for remedial, two years for associate degree). College was easier because I wanted to be there.
You're a white male looking for help.
With all the white privilege that goes with it.
You ARE a minority in that no programs exist to help you or cater for you.
I'm also a white male in a minority-majority state (California). Something that horrifies my lily-white, tea-party loving relatives in Idaho. They can find minorities in ethnic restaurants (i.e., Chinese at Chinese restaurant, Mexicans at Mexican restaurant, and Italians at Italian restaurants). If they came to Silicon Valley, they wouldn't use public transportation as mingling with so many people from around the world and speaking so many languages that weren't English would blow their mind. When I visit Idaho, it's white on rice and boring as hell.
There's no minimum quotas for you, and no companies out there going out of their way to fast track you into their programs.
For the majority of my contract jobs, I'm hired over the phone. Skin color doesn't come into play. If it ever did, I have a Mexican uncle as a personal reference. Having a Mexican uncle opens many doors, especially among Latinos.
He just stared at me dumbfounded for a bit, and then suggested some other uninteresting kids book.
I had a similar incident with a library summer reading program as a kid. Read ten picture books during the summer. I did — in one day. The librarian called me a liar. She told me to fetch the books and recite each book word-for-word from memory. Most of these books had five words per picture page and 20 pages per book. I recited ~1,000 words perfectly. That made her madder. She held on to my reading certificate until the end of the program I would later graduate from the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension.
Everyone at school got an award on Award Day 1983 — except for me. My sixth-grade teacher told me that I miss too many classes from being sick and truant to deserve anything special. Besides, I won that Japanese culture textbook (Japanese culture viewed from the white man's perspective in the 1950's) in a drawing earlier that year and didn't deserve to win that. No wonder I hated grade school.
When I transferred from community college to university in 1994, I applied to the Equal Opportunity Program. Being a poor white boy who was the first person in his family to go to college, I got accepted into the program. The Latino guidance counselor told me not to bother with the tutoring resources, because, you know, I was white, and didn't need that much help, and to come back next year to renew the EO&P contract.
My first year in the university ended with my girlfriend and I breaking up, leaving me depress and on academic probation. I got called into the EO&P office to explain my situation to a different guidance counselor. She demanded to know why I listened to that "idiot" from the year before and not follow the program as laid out in the contract. I pointed out the contract language that specifically stated that I must do everything that the guidance counselors told me to do. That took the wind out of her sails. Either way, I got kicked out of the program and the university. Ironically, the academic probation policy changed the following year because 10% of the student body was at risk of being kicked out (typically, it's 3%), which was too much money for the university to let walk away, and many of those students stayed.
I never went back to the university. A decade later, I went back to community college to learn computer programming and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0GPA in my major. That was the beginning of my technical career.
You don't have to live in a mansion to have distance between your TV and computer.
If you have children, having the TV and computer in the living room is a good place to monitor their activities.
If it can support my weight (350 pounds) and has good flight/battery time, I'll get one.
But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me.
I love those games. I play them for FREE all the time, as I don't make any in-app purchases. If the game becomes impossible to finish or deliberately corrupts the saved game file, I'll move on to another game.
All yours did was alert us to the uninteresting fact that you don't need this thing.
Otherwise known as a stupid question to provoke a discussion. Never be afraid to ask a stupid question, as others may want to ask the same stupid question but are afraid of what people may think of them. Thank you for your participation. ;)
A rhetorical question is a common rhetorical device where a question is asked by a speaker, but no answer is expected from the audience. This distinguishes it from explicit verbal audience interaction where a speaker asks a question, and then waits for a response or calls on someone to answer it.
http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/rhetorical-questions/
Throw in an Apple dev kit and we got a deal.
Plenty of people in the world aren't you.
Plenty of people on Slashdot don't understand a rhetorical question.
Woosh!
Why would I want to save TV video on a video game console?
You mean they don't troll the trolls on Slashdot like I do at my government IT job while waiting for a script to finish?
But that's not going to happen - you have to be 65 to even start collecting it.
All the baby boomers will be retired in 2030, drawing down their retirement funds and Social Security benefits. That massive sucking sound you hear in the background is all the cash leaving the stock market and Wall Street brokers weeping over their ever smaller annual bonuses. With retirees outnumbering workers, a smaller tax base will have support more people. No one knows how the economy will respond then.
The exaggeration originated with the postal unions, probably the NALC.
From what I read elsewhere, the Republicans co-opted the postal unions into supporting their bill to cripple the postal service. Like most unions, the postal unions went along with it because it was a short-term win and didn't consider the long-term consequences. Of course, the postal service is enshrined in the US Constitution and isn't going anywhere.
Why would my portfolio, which should be mostly bonds when I am close to retirement age, lose 1/2 if its value because stocks went down?
Most people don't have enough money saved in their 401ks and IRAs to be safely in bonds at retirement, and need the extra juice of being in the stock market. Dividend-paying stocks also took a wallop during the Great Recession as share prices — and sometimes dividend payments — sunk to historic lows.
You missed the point. Pensions are scams.
My late father had a private pension from being a union construction worker. He retired at 59.5-years-old because his older brothers kicked the bucket at 60-years-old. He lived until he was 75-years-old. For those 15 years, he had the same consistent income from his pension and Social Security. He spent his pension and banked his Social Security. The money he saved from Social Security paid for six weeks of medical bills, funeral expenses and settling his estate. His death had zero impact on the rest of the family. If he had a 401K, half his income would have disappeared with the stock market crash during the Great Recession and the family would have gotten stuck with the bills.
[citation needed]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/dont-let-business-lobbyists-kill-the-post-office-20120423
But why should the government be providing a service that is the physical equivalent of spam?
Because corporations are still paying for the privilege to have spam delivered to your mailbox. A typical advertising campaign require a 1% response rate to make it profitable. While 99% will toss out the junk mail, 1% will respond to it and make the corporation some money.
I understand why the USPS was established back in 1775, but those reasons are no longer valid today.
Let's abolish the USPS. Does that stop paid spam being stuffed into your mailbox? Oh, hell no. It might get worse.
Pension costs are crippling most state and local governments these days.
That's because the politicians made too many sweet deals with the unions during GOOD TIMES without considering the consequences of BAD TIMES happening in the future.
I don't know what's behind the USPS deal, but I know the solution: outlaw pensions.
It's a deliberate attempt to sabotage a profitable federal agency by forcing it to run into the red each year with unreasonable pension obligations with the expectation to shut it down in the future.
401Ks are good enough for all of us peasants that work in the private sector, and they're good enough for our ruling class (and their servants) too.
Never mind that most Americans used to have pensions. The tax law got changed in the early 1970's got changed so the corporations could move away from pensions and Wall Street would get more customers (suckers). If the stock crashes just before you were supposed to retire and the value of your 401K is cut in half, as it did for many people during the Great Recession, tough shit. You should've saved more. And Social Security is going bust in 2030 or thereafter. Maybe your kids will take you in, put you in a nursing home or dump you on the streets. After all, you're a peasant.
[...] it would be better because you could receive UPS and FedEx packages there also (privately deliveries to PO boxes is banned under current law).
Wrong! I get FedEx and UPS deliveries to my PO box all the time. DHL will drop ship to the post office street address and POB number.
https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/track/sp_definition.html
http://www.fedex.com/us/smart-post/outbound.html
http://www.dhl-usa.com/en/ecommerce/businesscustomers/domestic_products.html#parcel_plus
When was the last time you walked into a post office — the 20th-century?
Well, the USPS are still there 10 years later, so it must be possible.
Congress yells at the post master general every year for an artificial crisis that Congress created in the first place.
I, for one, expect nothing but the very best from our benevolent and omniscient government.
The post office near my home went from being a 30,000-sqft facility to a 3,000-sqft storefront. Other post offices, large and small, got closed in recent years. Each distribution center now handles mail for four or five zip codes with fewer workers. If my package gets lost at the distribution center, it takes two weeks to find it. Service have gotten worse to meet the impossible demands that Congress puts on it.
We do not owe employees of private companies, but postal workers work for us.
That will change in 2030 when all the baby boomers are retired, retirees will outnumber workers (shrinking tax base), and Medicare/Social Security will consume two-thirds of the federal budget. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. Baby boomers will expect to get back every dime they put into the system and more beyond that for that comfortable retirement they expect. As for the next generation, the baby boomers spent their inheritances and they don't own them a dime.