Brutal Legend is one of those games that was always fun, always interesting, always funny. I never wanted it to be over. The setting and the attention and love for the world of music that I grew up with made me so willing to forgive anything about the game that was not awesome. Which is an untestable hypothesis, since everything in the game was extremely awesome.
I would play in the world of Brutal Legend for many more hours (and dollars) if I could.
Like anyone, I'm selective about the events I attend. If there will be people there I would like to see, I'll go. If the interaction becomes uninteresting, tiring, or otherwise unenjoyable, I leave.
An example comes to mind: I was recently helping a new friend celebrate his birthday. I was an outsider and knew only the host; I had only met a handful of the other guests before and only knew "of" them. We were having a good time for several hours. Eventually, some other guests who had already been out drinking showed up. One woman in particular was especially loud, boisterous, and uninteresting. She singlehandledly stopped the interactions that had been happening by yelling over people with inane bullshit, and started having a pity-party and was attempting to land a guilt-trip on the host by complaining about how she hadn't been invited.
I am not sure if this was the natural inclination of this woman, or if this was amplified greatly via the alcohol, or if she felt that the expectation of someone at a party is to simply be loud and boisterous. I concede that there are certainly gatherings and times when that is appropriate, and I've played that role at times, but it seems tacky to me if you play that card and the crowd isn't enjoying it and yet you persist.
There's no reason to change the mood of a group of people who are already visibly enjoying themselves.
So, with interesting conversation having effectively been squelched, I left shortly thereafter.
There were many occasions in college when the point in the evening came when people were ready to stop "generally" socializing and get down to the serious business of smoking pot. That was always my cue to leave, as I had no interest in that sort of activity.
Like I said: my time is too valuable to me to spend it in situations I am not enjoying and don't have other reasons to be enduring.
There are a lot of structural assumptions people make about schooling that are worth questioning. People advocate for public school not because it is especially good, but because it has become the "default". Similarly, people advocate for pervasive university attendance not out of some considered viewpoint, but because it has become the "default".
K-12 and now university "education" are now seen as little more than social conditioning and workforce cog training.
If your personal goals don't involve being a well oiled cog in somebody else's machine, what is the value proposition of the typical American educational experience?
I won't even get into the fact that you carry a gun around with you everywhere.
I live in one of the safest places in the US. If you asked me why I carry it, I'd tell you plainly "incase I need to shoot somebody". My expectations of ever doing so are effectively zero.
The reasons I carry are manifold 1) because I can 2) because gun ownership is upsetting to politicians and small-minded people 3) because at different points in US history, and today in different areas of the country, daily gun carrying was/is simply part of normal life -- not something controversial or to be feared.
I think most people should carry most of the time, and re-create a culture of pervasive, responsible, respctable, gun ownership.
An aside: Until 1934, any child in the US could buy a machine gun from the sears catalog. Should society be focusing on making it hard for kids to get guns, or hard to be a low-quality kid?
Having the skills to cope with conflict is entirely different from having the desire to deal with people who create conflict unnecessarily and who are unable to express their differences without resorting to passive-aggressive behavior, yelling, or physical violence.
I'm married, after all. I know plenty about conflict and about resolving it. Sadly, I didn't learn much of what I needed until _after_ I got married. Luckily I am patient and a quick study, and not too proud to be above reading books about having healthy relationships, etc.
So my problem isn't with conflict, or with differences of opinion, or any such general thing. My preference is simply not to be subjected to the poor social habits of others, especially those I have no personal investment in.
The reason this type of comment tends to be warmly received on slashdot is that slashdot has a skewed intelligence distribution of readership. Intelligent people tend to have trouble relating in "normal" school settings, and so what I've written is perhaps more edgy or black and white than words others might choose for themselves, but inside of many geeks there is some leftover sense that the childhood they experienced had moments of profound injustice, and rather than blindly accepting that these moments were "crucial and necessary lessons", we wonder, if there was truly any value to said lesson, if it could have been shared in a less malicious way?
There are people who need to be abused or hurt over and over to understand that a certain behavior is a poor choice. And then there are others who can learn after just one experience, and yet still others who can intuitively understand that something will be unpleasant without having to experience it first.
If there are some sort of social dynamics lessons that kids should learn, there's no reason to assume that all kids need to learn them the same way (which is the public school model of _all_ learning).
But the "social conditioning" line of argument is so poisonous that I reject it out of hand in my original post. That entire argument seems to be that children should learn to deal with being abused, and that public school is the best place for this to happen.
While I agree that public school is the best place for children to experience being abused, I stand by my original claim that I'd rather teach my children that they don't need to accept abuse.
Homeschooling didn't make me this way - public schools did. And not bad public schools - the best in town. We moved many times in my childhood to navigate the maze of finding "the best" public schools.
Homeschooling might have prevented me from being this way; I might not have been surrounded by such shitty people (especially the school staffs) until I was mature enough to deal with situations more constructively.
So that blows the other unspoken assumption here out of the water.
Specifically, people who criticize homeschool and defend public school always bring up points or tests or criteria that public schools have never met. Public schools do not ensure that kids are "well adjusted", "educated", "happy", "meeting requirements", etc. They ensure exactly none of thsoe things.
So, when people who criticize homeschool bring up these topics, they do so based on their own prejudces and biases, not based on some objective standard.
This is a short and extremely informative read on the history and motivations of public schooling. The story goes back at least as far as Calvinists and the Prussians.
The socialization schools provide is being with people you don't like day-in day-out. That's a real life skill.
I took a different approach.
I chose to work my ass off, outside of school, learning all I could about computers, because I found them fascinating.
This has put me in a social and financial position where I am never with people I don't like.
I used my intellect and drive -- attributes that are hated in public schools -- to create and acquire wealth. I then used that wealth to change "real life" to fit my preferences.
The best results I've seen are my neighbor's kids, who interact very well with adults, but who seem like they will get eaten alive when they go off to college and have to deal with people who aren't inherently nice, logical, and having their best interests at heart.
Maybe they shouldn't go off to college then?
The idea that everyone needs to go to college is a bad idea.
I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning; conditioning our most gifted children to understand that their lives will be controlled by mouth breathing masochists.
No thanks. I won't dump that lie on my kids.
Today, I work for an employer where there are no stupid people and nobody who mistreats me. And I never interact with any human being unless it is on my terms. I carry a gun most places I go because I can, and because when I insist I'd rather not deal with someone, I plan on _meaning_ it.
I consider the idea that a sick and broken world might consider me "mal-adjusted" or "anti-social" a mark of excellence. To be judged normal or sane by a detestable malady of garbage would be a tremendously hurtful insult.
It seems the "free market" wants to be a casino, not a merchantile exchange.
Certainly, actors within the market want that to be the case.
But they cannot acheive this without cooperation from the government.
Corporations aren't stupid. The easiest way to beat your competitors is to lock them out of your markets with legal power.
Tried setting up a competing GSM network in your neighborhood lately? OpenBSM exists, after all. You _could_ do it. But the FCC (on behalf of Verizon, AT&T, etc) would haul your ass into court.
And who gave Verizon the right to blast their harmful radiation onto your property and into yoru house anyway? You didn't. I don't suppose Verizon would be ok if you parked outside their company headquarters and shined lasers into the windows all day.
What's the difference between them assaulting your property with their radiation and you assaulting their property with yours?
They paid more for the laws than you did.
That's the difference.
Your tax dollars are paying for the police that keep them safe from competition and take you to jail if you _try_ to compete with them.
Is it Verizon's fault for pulling the strings this way? Sure. Isn't it your fault for agreeing to be a marionette?
I've read several alternate views of the era of trust busting and robber barons that come to a quite different conclusion. If you're ideologically opposed to anything written by Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, then yes, we're simply not going to agree on this stuff. But most people haven't actually read them, they only know that they don't like the conclusions or the people that espouse those points of view. So I bring it up, even upon the risk that you'll now immediately dismiss me entirely:)
You didn't mention company stores or pinkertons in your original list of bad things, btw.
I'm not blindly pro-anything. It takes a fair bit of reading, arguing, soul-searching, more arguing, more reading, etc to come to a conclusion that is never taught in any school and draws the ire of 99% of all Americans and indeed all humans.
I continue to discuss things as I understand them here (and elsewhere) so that I may have the opportunity to be corrected by lucid argument and sound principles.
If there is a specific book you recommend that shows why government was needed to regulate or solve problems not originally caused by government, I'd appreciate an amazon link.
In exchange, please read, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", by Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Nathanial Branden, etc, if you are not familiar with the work. It's a short read, and a mid-level first exposure to some of the ideas I am suggesting.
And here's the thing about capitalism. It favors big business. It's a pretty viscous dogfight and the way the capitalist system works, the biggest dog wins. And then stops any other dog from getting too big. And then it gets fat. We've been there, done that, it's history. The robber-baron era kinda sucked. It turns out we need regulation to keep capitalists from really winning. But now we have a system that is only capitalistic to a point. And from there it's sort of a cat-and-mouse game between corporations, politicians, regulatory capture, the public, and all of that replicated again in other countries working under different rulesets. Welcome to the issue. Nobody said sociopolitical economics would be simple
You're right. That's why in the software industry, which is known for its tremendous regulation, is where we see small upstarts like Microsoft edge out IBM, and smaller upstarts like Google edging out Microsoft.
What you have described is corporatism, and 100% of the bad things you describe are a result of government perversion of the market place. "Big" is not the natural size of companies, but companies which are 2 standard deviations to the right on the "effectiveness" bell curve will tend to get big. And everyone tends to be better off as a result.
100% of anti-trust litigation in this country is either going after an entity the government helped create and protect or failed competitors of the targeted entity using the club of government to extract revenge.
The bad things about the robbern-baron era were consequences of government. The good things about the era (like the industrial revolution) were the consequences of capitalism.
Workers who don't understand the nature of their relationship are certainly a burden.
Both labor and capital are better together than they are apart. But let's not misunderstand the power dynamics in the relationship.
The capitalist has more money because he is more valuable to society. He can do what the worker cannot. Ultimately, labor is a dead end, and in the calculus of human productivity and progress, it is ideas and ideas alone which matter.
I say that the capitalist is more valuable to society because he has more money; his money is the measure of how much society values him. In a society where all exchanges of money are _purely voluntary_ (ignore for a moment that governments coerce people to transfer money that they otherwise might not), wherever money aggregates, society, collectively, has voted with its dollars and decreed, "there, there is what we value"
The capitalist who (absent government collusion) acquires a great deal of money has contributed tremendously society --otherwise, they wouldn't have paid him so much.
The successful capitalist can walk away from his industry and retire at any time; the margin of wealth he has created will allow him to be idle for the remainder of his days.
The worker has no such option. The worker doesn't have this optino because the worker has contributed little to society - by society's own value judgement system -- the distributed choices of millions of humans.
The worker needs the capitalist grossly more than the capitalist needs the worker.
Absent the capitalist, the worker has insufficient talent, ideas, direction, coaching, motivation -- whatever the case may be -- to be as productive as he would be by himself.
A world without capitalists is a world where men in caves grunt and stack shit in piles, only to tear them down sometime later.
The worker, frustrated by the clear judgement of society and the relative wealth of he and his better, resorts to coercive means to exact jealous revenge on the capitalist. Most people call this "government", but of course, few admit that government is coercive by definition:)
I don't mean to sound so hard on labor - after all, I'm labor too. Without my employer, I am in rough shape. But I don't have a backwards definition of how much value I provide my employer vs. how much value my employer is providing me. I understand completely how lucky I am that someone who is better than I am is willing to share their spoils with me.
More people need to realize this; it is for that reason I have outlined things in such stark and aggressive terms.
Finally, I don't view "sociopath" as a perjorative term. I view it as a red flag that I am conversing with someone who hates individuals and freedom, and worships at the altar of progressive statism.
In your society, do people have the right to keep what they have earned? All of it? Without restriction, without constraint? No?
Then I "hate" your society. I am a sociopath - one who hates society. When a society is based on an immoral premise: that the coercion of some by others is valid, hating such a society is the only moral course of action.
Domestic US manufacturing output has increased most years of the last 10-15 years. But the jobs base of manufacturing _jobs_ has declined.
Pro-labor politicians talk about the decline of manufacturing in the US, but they are really speaking about the decline of manufacturing _jobs_. Manufacturing output continues to generally increase in the US.
For a variety of reasons, labor costs in the US are higher than in other places. Even if some of the compulsory reasons were removed (i.e. minimum wage laws, most labor/safety regulations, etc), at this point people in the US may simply be unwilling to work in jobs with a high liklihood of injury and a low compensation package. So long as there is a generous safety net, there is little incentive for them to do so.
Ultimately, until all of China has a comparable standard of living to the USA, it will be advantageous to outsource certain tasks to Chinese labor. The shifting dynamics of American laws & society vs. Chinese laws and society will make the precise details change over time. The only methods which prevent this from happening are harmful to both the US and China.
There is a fair bit of headroom in Chinese society. It was just recently noted that China's GDP has eclipsed that of the USA. China has more than 4x the population, and so aggregately, China is only about 25% as productively efficient as the US. Large portions of the country are still destitute and life is not so different looking than it was 6000 years ago at the birth of civilization. The currency is artifically undervalued. China is suppressing its domestic populace to attempt to "invest" in methods to undercut American dominance. A person of my means who transferred to China would be very close to having a private chauffer, yet live in a state-built peice of housing without a heater. As the middle (and upper) classes tend to evolve and expand in China, pressure for democritization, labor reforms, etc will continue to mount.
China is currently paying a tremendous cost in environmental damage it does to itself. Whole portions of the nation are being made inhospitable to humans, yet humans live and work there and are being expended to push the nation awkwardly into the future.
At some point, enough of China will modernize and prosper that reforms around regulation, safety, etc will emerge. The productivity will go up, and China will increasingly focus on serving its domestic market (which ought to be 4x the size of the US market it currently serves).
I think the key message for americans is: don't expect to have an American standard of living on a chinese level of productivity. That means guys who push a button in a factory all day will not be retiring at 55 with a corvette and a pension.
"Public goods" (like rivers) are anything but; they are not adequately maintained nor defended because they have no ownership. Furthermore, members of the "public" who depend on those resources have no legal recourse to go after companies which pollute because the government restricts or prohibits it.
You could always refuse to work for a dirty capitalist.
There are a number of options available to you, including the one where you wake up every day, look for your food that day, acquire it, cook it, and sleep in the shelter you built yourself. That way you aren't a "wage slave" or whatever people call it these days.
Of course, you are neglecting the division of labor that has allowed the modern world to be so prosperous if you do that.
One thing "the workers" don't realize is that life as a business owner really, really sucks unless/until you have "made it".
I'm a small fry engineer at a software company. I _never_ worry about if I am going to make sales numbers this quarter. I _never_ worry about cold-calling customers to drum up business. I _never_ worry about all kinds of things that ultimately determine if the company stays afloat or not, can make payroll or not, etc etc.
I show up, I do what I am good at, and the owner(s) of the company are assuming 100% of the risks. Sure, I am subject to the risk of maybe losing my job, but my nest egg isn't on the line. I am not going gray haired from worrying about how to make the entire company's numbers fit.
People who work for capitalists are also participating in the distribution of labor -- they are often putting most or all of the stress and hardship of really having to fend for ones-self on to somebody else.
My father in law has been in the situation of being a business owner. And my wife recalls periods where her parents had to explain to her that they didn't have enough for anything besides box mac-n-cheese, because dad's company wasn't getting paid. (specifically, customers weren't paying for products/services received)
I never worry about whether or not my customers pay my employer. I am sure there is a team somewhere that deals with that so I don't have to.
For most people, having a place where they go every day, show up, and do what they're told, and in exchange they get paid, is a much better deal than what they could otherwise get. They risk losing their job; but fundamentally their employment is not directly tied to the performance of the company. If/when it inevitably tanks, the employee can shift to some other employer. Meanwhile the owner of a failed business has probably lost his health, family, etc.
All that said, it seems that the publicly traded company in the US has allowed the basic capitalist ideal to be grossly perverted. The captains of the company no longer place their personal fortunes on the line; everyone now speculates with others' money. Larger Corporations now have departments that specialize in government influence and rent seeking.
But that aside, your basic problem with capitalism is unsound. There appear to be people with lots of ideas and the acumen for taking risk, and who have bigger goals than what they may personally acomplish. And there are other people who, for whatever reason, don't have the inclination, motivation, or perhaps talent for these things. Yet the two are able to work together for mutual benefit. The capitalist needs talented help. The talented help needs financial/social stability, and tasks suited to their interests and expertise.
Obligatory American Response: "Yeah, but name one important thing that has come from Finland!"
(no, I'm not being serious as I post this to a huge web property that runs the LAMP stack:))
I'm not an expert on what makes the scandinavian societies appear to be full of happy people. Clearly, they are happy with it. The author in the study you cite mentions that he's not sure how to apply what has worked in Finland to the US, owing to the tremendous differences.
One thing that I think _would_ help would be to defederalize education. I think contributors to the success in Finland are related to the homogenity of the populace/culture and fewer overall people.
This could be partially simulated in the US by returning essentially all control of education to the states (which have lower populations, and perhaps more homogenity). Furthermore, it would allow states to compete with different approaches to education (and really, the whole notion of child rearing and attendant social issues (and services) that are on the periphery of education)
One thing I didn't see mentioned was what percentage of the populace went to University in Finland, and the breakdown of how many people went in for which types of degrees. Coming from the American point of view, its difficult to imagine that you could tell every American, "do whatever you want for the next 4 years and we'll pay for it" and that this would be sustainable. So I'm curious to know if people in Finland are inherently better choosers than Americans, or if Finland is more careful about which choies are made available...
I'm hesitant to claim that I know what things are required for people to learn certain subjects effectively. But if I follow your basic line of argument -- that for some people to learn some things, what is really required is discussion time and some shared set of materials, then yes, i think that in the age of infinite information copying, at least half of that is solved.
As telepresence continues to get better and more accessible, the prospect of having round table discussinos remotely becomes more plausible. To get the full bandwidth communication experience, you may need to "really be there" sometimes, but there are other advantages: instead of 20 students and 1 teacher discussing a subject: what about 80 students and 4 teachers in the same session -- all of them geographically dispersed, but unified by this common interest?
The factory learning approach that is what most of us have grown up with is not known to be universally optimal, nor is it a time-tested approach. What we do now is not how it has worked for most of human history.
I think developments like Khan academy and more top-ranked universities putting materials online for free are positive developments.
You postulated that some subjects are intrinsically not "doing" subjects (eg literature) whereas others are more vocational. I think that's probably correct but perhaps not so black and white. I think what is needed is probably a spectrum of experiences to cater to the varitaions of how different learners best tackle different topics.
As an example, I "appear" to sometimes learn "you just need to practice" type activities very quickly, because I am reasonably good at absorbing material I have read. And so for activities like high performance driving or shooting sports, I can show up on day 1 and pehaps outperform certain other novices because I've done a fair bit of reading before hand, and I seem to excel at recalling what I've read when putting things into practice.
Other people are stricly "must do it" learners, and while they will eventually exceed my talents, they require a bit longer to equal and exceed my performance.
For me, mathematics is an interesting mix of "read about it" vs. "do it". I find there is an enormous chasm between how well I think I understand something and how well I acutally understand it, and that chasm only becomes apparent when I try to get to the otherside without having worked a sufficient number of practical problems that require the application of the technique in question.
I think it would be advantageous if the university were decentralized and decoupled a bit more. It shouldn't be a plce you go once during a chaotic period of your life, I think it would be nice if there were seamless transitions of various depths for all kinds of people in and out of life-long learning opportunities.
As an example, a few years prior, I enrolled in a Masters CompSci program at a local university. My intention was to take a course now and then and gradually work towards the requirements for a faculty-track doctoral position, as perhaps a kind of mid-life or nearing-sunset career change.
What was silly is that I needed to go through the application process, I needed to dig up my undergrad transcripts, apply, etc.
Some life priorities changed and I took 1 year off of coursework. I got a letter asking me to fill out a survey of why I dropped out of college. I was pretty astounded by this; I had made no such "decision" and had received no email or other communication saying "hey, send us money or a letter or something declaring your intentions".
The idea that a university degree has a contiguous time component seems strange to me; I abide by the idea that, absent physiological decomposition due to diagnosable conditions, that I will be smarter tomorow than I am today, and that someone who completes the requirements for a PhD sprinkled over a 20 year mixture of industry and academic work is the greatly richer contribution to society than the highschool graduat
Sure. Every day I am thankful that I have a good memory, that I am pretty clever, that I had a dad who was involved, and that he was a kick ass dad.
That said, I know plenty of people who didn't have involved parents, and/or didn't have natural ability or inclination to learning, etc.
They are still able to make a reliable living because they can do something that is of value to others. That's the same reason that I have a job -- somebody who is either more talented than I or works harder than I (or both, usually) is willing to pay me to do the things I can do for him. He wants to do that because of comparative advantage.
It's difficult for me to imagine ballet becoming the largest sector of the economy, as it does not feed, clothe, protect, or house humans. It is very high up on the hierarchy of needs; a society where ballet consumed the majority of resources would be the hypothetical "post scarcity" society, which for a variety of esoteric reasons I postulate cannot exist:)
That said, in such a world where my natural talents are not inclined torward ballet, my rational and analytical facilities can still be made to serve others in productive ways: building sets, scheduling the movements of equipment, projecting attendance and financial concerns; choosing venus of the appriate sizes, _building_ venues of the appropriate sizes; helping people who are aesthetically inclined translate their ideas into workable, physically possible manifestations..
I'm not suggesting that everyone get a job in IT. I'm suggesting that people who don't plan on being self sufficient hermits think about how they are going to serve others and make the lives of others better. I don't get paid to show up; I get paid to contribute my talents and effort to the problems my employer thinks will be profitable to solve.
The stark reality of life is that there are two choices: be completely self sufficient by the power of your mind and your efforts, or figure out how to serve someone else well enough that they pay you enough to carve out a life for yourself.
I have a hard time beleiving that 25% of Americans (which I hear is something like the "real" unemployment figure) are of no use to anybody. I have an easy time beleiving that the intersection of what employers are willing to pay and what the unemployed are willing to work for are kept apart in many cases by a mix of unrealistic expectations (on both sides) and by the tremendous impediments to hiring and firing created by bad governance.
If there are people taking on a six figure debt in their early 20s, and they have no idea how that debt will either make them self sufficient or help them offer considerable value to others, their entire life until that point has been overshadowed by this singular failure of imagination/comprehension/whatever.
My response growing up to "MTV spring break" epsidoes was always, "I sure wish I could get into the (hypothetical) pants of those girls like everyone else must be doing, but I hope all of this is a total fabrication. We can't honestly have so many bacchanalian dimwits who find this enjoyable and a worthwhile expenditure of their time and of other peoples money, can we?"
I had software and IT internships all 4 years I was in school. I wanted the experience and resume bling. That was some of my most interesting work, in retrospect.
Having everyone go to college hasn't made Americans smarter.
It has made universities dumber.
Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.
My dad called some larger IT and software employers' recruiting departments and asked what sort of degrees they screen for, and more importantly, what degree-issuing institutions they look for.
Their answer was, roughly, if you have a CS degree, it doesn't matter where its from (unless its from MIT:))
So I went through the Barrrons College guide and made a list of schools that had CS and separate compE programs; i ranked them by cost and by SAT score of average incoming class. I restricted my search to schools that were ranked above... 50th or 100th? place in "engineering", however arbitrary that is.
Then I went and talked to those schools, got a rough idea of which ones would give me what kinds of academic scholarships, and then chose a subset of state universities to apply to.
Part of this process is being honest about yourself. I beleive that technically, I met all of the admission requirements to get into Caltech. I noted howeer, that their average incoming freshman had SAT and ACT scores around 5 to 10% higher than where I had tested. Additionally, tuition at that time was around $30k/year.
I figured that there was little sense in struggling to get into the bottom half of the Caltech freshman class, only to pay a six figure sum and to have to work my ass off just to keep my head above water and hopefully graduate. Certainly I expect I would have had a more rigorous experience, and networked with higher caliber professors and students, and perhaps had a better pick of employers for internships and eventual employment.
But honestly, while I have _some_ smarts and _some_ drive, there are obviously people who have more of _both_, and I see little reason to compete with them if I don't have to:)
I was accepted to UIUC (then a top 5 CS school), but they knew they were a competitive program and they offered me no financial incentives to attend.
Ultimately, I went to the University of Nebraska, which offered me a full ride, allowed me to coast in non-interesting courses, and allowed me plenty of 1:1 time with professors who were interesting. The more mid-pack freshman class allowed me to differentiate myself easily from my peers in areas where I excelled.
I left school with a good GPA, plenty of knowledge that I didn't have when I started, and a full time offer at a software company you may have heard of. And no student debt.
The point of this is that if we're not equipping American kids to do even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis; if they have no idea why they are _going_ to a university... well, they probably have no business going, and it is abhorrent that US taxpayers are paying for them to go.
I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.
The debt-treadmill of university is insidious. Making it easy to get the money to go means more people are going, and in response to the rising costs that are a natural consequence of more demand, the Feds loan out more money. And so the cycle continues, and we have more and more entrants with less and less ability to pay who have no idea what they are going to do once their 4-6 years of partying are over and they need to start paying off the debt they accured.
And if i refuse to pay the fine, since the regulation was stupid and immoral to begin with?
I'll note that many of these regulations - especially of the price posting variety - are at the state level or local.
Sure. Your state police and local police also have guns and aren't shy about using them.
And how on earth would the brave new Libertarian utopia enforce laws? Is this a world with no courts, no police force or other coercion to keep people on the right side of the law? Is everyone going to be good because they are free enough? I entertain no notion of your accepting anything I would offer.
You're confounding a few different problems here.
Firstly, the distaste for making law and regulation comes from the immorality of governance. The Libertarian (big L) position is that irrespective of its intrinsic evil, _some_ government is required. But because it is inherently immoral, it must be made as small as possible. That way you aren't having shootouts between police and gas station owners who disagree on what signage is appropriate.
A second branch of the conversation, one that is actually related to your litany of closing questions, would be anarchy - the absense of government.
This is the outcome I currently favor, specifically, voluntaryism. You can read about voluntaryism on wikipedia. Then you can read about examples of solutions to the various problems you propose by reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (specifically, the depiction of juries and courts). Also, look up "anarchy dispute resolution organization".
Walter Block and Stefan Molyneux are authors who have written prolifically on the implementation details and possibilities of an anarchistic society. You can read their works to explore some of your questions.
You'll note that I do not give you concrete answers to the questions you ask because I am not sure of the answers. But you are thinking of the problem in a utilitarian way, namely, "can you propose a society which is a pareto improvement from the current society in the following ways and convince me that you are correct"
Sadly, I can do no such thing. For I know not all of the solutions and even if I did, it would be my conjecture of what would happen against your view of how the world currently is.
So I look at the problem a bit differently: is it moral for society to legitimize an entity which initiates violence against others? If it is not, then we must grapple with the implications of this conclusion. This means teaching others about the moral foundations of society and getting more clever people to think about how to solve all of the problems that invariably arise when you ask people who have been living as prisoners to transition towards living as free men.
People may or may not be any better behaved than they are now. The difference is, society will not recognize the moral authority for some to initiate violence against others. The primary entity of human suffering for the last thousand years -- government -- will be seen for what it is and dispensed with.
Finally, who is utopian? Is it the anarchists, who understand that human nature is to accumulate power and to use it for injurious means towards the weak, and therefore refuse to legitimize any concentration of power and refuse to allow the legitimacy of any actor who initiates violence?
Or is it the statist, who concedes that people are attracted to power and to evil, and then builds the institutions of government, giving evil men the perfect vehicle by which to do evil? Aren't the statists, who have a bloody historic record to answer for, and whos innovations come only every few hundred years, and only atop mountains of bloodshed.. aren't they the ones who must be called to account for their utopian fantasies of finding people trustworthy enough to hold the reins of the monsters they bulid? Aren't they the ones who live in a fantsay world where they suggest that this time their schemes will work, despite a record of spectacular bloody failure?
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget..
BRUTAL LEGEND.
Brutal Legend is one of those games that was always fun, always interesting, always funny. I never wanted it to be over. The setting and the attention and love for the world of music that I grew up with made me so willing to forgive anything about the game that was not awesome. Which is an untestable hypothesis, since everything in the game was extremely awesome.
I would play in the world of Brutal Legend for many more hours (and dollars) if I could.
Like anyone, I'm selective about the events I attend. If there will be people there I would like to see, I'll go. If the interaction becomes uninteresting, tiring, or otherwise unenjoyable, I leave.
An example comes to mind: I was recently helping a new friend celebrate his birthday. I was an outsider and knew only the host; I had only met a handful of the other guests before and only knew "of" them. We were having a good time for several hours. Eventually, some other guests who had already been out drinking showed up. One woman in particular was especially loud, boisterous, and uninteresting. She singlehandledly stopped the interactions that had been happening by yelling over people with inane bullshit, and started having a pity-party and was attempting to land a guilt-trip on the host by complaining about how she hadn't been invited.
I am not sure if this was the natural inclination of this woman, or if this was amplified greatly via the alcohol, or if she felt that the expectation of someone at a party is to simply be loud and boisterous. I concede that there are certainly gatherings and times when that is appropriate, and I've played that role at times, but it seems tacky to me if you play that card and the crowd isn't enjoying it and yet you persist.
There's no reason to change the mood of a group of people who are already visibly enjoying themselves.
So, with interesting conversation having effectively been squelched, I left shortly thereafter.
There were many occasions in college when the point in the evening came when people were ready to stop "generally" socializing and get down to the serious business of smoking pot. That was always my cue to leave, as I had no interest in that sort of activity.
Like I said: my time is too valuable to me to spend it in situations I am not enjoying and don't have other reasons to be enduring.
Why?
There are a lot of structural assumptions people make about schooling that are worth questioning. People advocate for public school not because it is especially good, but because it has become the "default". Similarly, people advocate for pervasive university attendance not out of some considered viewpoint, but because it has become the "default".
K-12 and now university "education" are now seen as little more than social conditioning and workforce cog training.
If your personal goals don't involve being a well oiled cog in somebody else's machine, what is the value proposition of the typical American educational experience?
I live in one of the safest places in the US. If you asked me why I carry it, I'd tell you plainly "incase I need to shoot somebody". My expectations of ever doing so are effectively zero.
The reasons I carry are manifold
1) because I can
2) because gun ownership is upsetting to politicians and small-minded people
3) because at different points in US history, and today in different areas of the country, daily gun carrying was/is simply part of normal life -- not something controversial or to be feared.
I think most people should carry most of the time, and re-create a culture of pervasive, responsible, respctable, gun ownership.
An aside: Until 1934, any child in the US could buy a machine gun from the sears catalog. Should society be focusing on making it hard for kids to get guns, or hard to be a low-quality kid?
Oh yay, honorable criticism from an anon!
Having the skills to cope with conflict is entirely different from having the desire to deal with people who create conflict unnecessarily and who are unable to express their differences without resorting to passive-aggressive behavior, yelling, or physical violence.
I'm married, after all. I know plenty about conflict and about resolving it. Sadly, I didn't learn much of what I needed until _after_ I got married. Luckily I am patient and a quick study, and not too proud to be above reading books about having healthy relationships, etc.
So my problem isn't with conflict, or with differences of opinion, or any such general thing. My preference is simply not to be subjected to the poor social habits of others, especially those I have no personal investment in.
The reason this type of comment tends to be warmly received on slashdot is that slashdot has a skewed intelligence distribution of readership. Intelligent people tend to have trouble relating in "normal" school settings, and so what I've written is perhaps more edgy or black and white than words others might choose for themselves, but inside of many geeks there is some leftover sense that the childhood they experienced had moments of profound injustice, and rather than blindly accepting that these moments were "crucial and necessary lessons", we wonder, if there was truly any value to said lesson, if it could have been shared in a less malicious way?
There are people who need to be abused or hurt over and over to understand that a certain behavior is a poor choice. And then there are others who can learn after just one experience, and yet still others who can intuitively understand that something will be unpleasant without having to experience it first.
If there are some sort of social dynamics lessons that kids should learn, there's no reason to assume that all kids need to learn them the same way (which is the public school model of _all_ learning).
But the "social conditioning" line of argument is so poisonous that I reject it out of hand in my original post. That entire argument seems to be that children should learn to deal with being abused, and that public school is the best place for this to happen.
While I agree that public school is the best place for children to experience being abused, I stand by my original claim that I'd rather teach my children that they don't need to accept abuse.
I was publicly schooled my entire life.
Homeschooling didn't make me this way - public schools did. And not bad public schools - the best in town. We moved many times in my childhood to navigate the maze of finding "the best" public schools.
Homeschooling might have prevented me from being this way; I might not have been surrounded by such shitty people (especially the school staffs) until I was mature enough to deal with situations more constructively.
So that blows the other unspoken assumption here out of the water.
Specifically, people who criticize homeschool and defend public school always bring up points or tests or criteria that public schools have never met. Public schools do not ensure that kids are "well adjusted", "educated", "happy", "meeting requirements", etc. They ensure exactly none of thsoe things.
So, when people who criticize homeschool bring up these topics, they do so based on their own prejudces and biases, not based on some objective standard.
Correct.
This is a short and extremely informative read on the history and motivations of public schooling. The story goes back at least as far as Calvinists and the Prussians.
http://mises.org/document/2689/
I took a different approach.
I chose to work my ass off, outside of school, learning all I could about computers, because I found them fascinating.
This has put me in a social and financial position where I am never with people I don't like.
I used my intellect and drive -- attributes that are hated in public schools -- to create and acquire wealth. I then used that wealth to change "real life" to fit my preferences.
Maybe they shouldn't go off to college then?
The idea that everyone needs to go to college is a bad idea.
I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning; conditioning our most gifted children to understand that their lives will be controlled by mouth breathing masochists.
No thanks. I won't dump that lie on my kids.
Today, I work for an employer where there are no stupid people and nobody who mistreats me. And I never interact with any human being unless it is on my terms. I carry a gun most places I go because I can, and because when I insist I'd rather not deal with someone, I plan on _meaning_ it.
I consider the idea that a sick and broken world might consider me "mal-adjusted" or "anti-social" a mark of excellence. To be judged normal or sane by a detestable malady of garbage would be a tremendously hurtful insult.
Your social conditoining doesn't interest me.
Certainly, actors within the market want that to be the case.
But they cannot acheive this without cooperation from the government.
Corporations aren't stupid. The easiest way to beat your competitors is to lock them out of your markets with legal power.
Tried setting up a competing GSM network in your neighborhood lately? OpenBSM exists, after all. You _could_ do it. But the FCC (on behalf of Verizon, AT&T, etc) would haul your ass into court.
And who gave Verizon the right to blast their harmful radiation onto your property and into yoru house anyway? You didn't. I don't suppose Verizon would be ok if you parked outside their company headquarters and shined lasers into the windows all day.
What's the difference between them assaulting your property with their radiation and you assaulting their property with yours?
They paid more for the laws than you did.
That's the difference.
Your tax dollars are paying for the police that keep them safe from competition and take you to jail if you _try_ to compete with them.
Is it Verizon's fault for pulling the strings this way? Sure. Isn't it your fault for agreeing to be a marionette?
I've read several alternate views of the era of trust busting and robber barons that come to a quite different conclusion. If you're ideologically opposed to anything written by Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, then yes, we're simply not going to agree on this stuff. But most people haven't actually read them, they only know that they don't like the conclusions or the people that espouse those points of view. So I bring it up, even upon the risk that you'll now immediately dismiss me entirely :)
You didn't mention company stores or pinkertons in your original list of bad things, btw.
I'm not blindly pro-anything. It takes a fair bit of reading, arguing, soul-searching, more arguing, more reading, etc to come to a conclusion that is never taught in any school and draws the ire of 99% of all Americans and indeed all humans.
I continue to discuss things as I understand them here (and elsewhere) so that I may have the opportunity to be corrected by lucid argument and sound principles.
If there is a specific book you recommend that shows why government was needed to regulate or solve problems not originally caused by government, I'd appreciate an amazon link.
In exchange, please read, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", by Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Nathanial Branden, etc, if you are not familiar with the work. It's a short read, and a mid-level first exposure to some of the ideas I am suggesting.
You're right. That's why in the software industry, which is known for its tremendous regulation, is where we see small upstarts like Microsoft edge out IBM, and smaller upstarts like Google edging out Microsoft.
What you have described is corporatism, and 100% of the bad things you describe are a result of government perversion of the market place. "Big" is not the natural size of companies, but companies which are 2 standard deviations to the right on the "effectiveness" bell curve will tend to get big. And everyone tends to be better off as a result.
100% of anti-trust litigation in this country is either going after an entity the government helped create and protect or failed competitors of the targeted entity using the club of government to extract revenge.
The bad things about the robbern-baron era were consequences of government. The good things about the era (like the industrial revolution) were the consequences of capitalism.
Workers who don't understand the nature of their relationship are certainly a burden.
Both labor and capital are better together than they are apart. But let's not misunderstand the power dynamics in the relationship.
The capitalist has more money because he is more valuable to society. He can do what the worker cannot. Ultimately, labor is a dead end, and in the calculus of human productivity and progress, it is ideas and ideas alone which matter.
I say that the capitalist is more valuable to society because he has more money; his money is the measure of how much society values him. In a society where all exchanges of money are _purely voluntary_ (ignore for a moment that governments coerce people to transfer money that they otherwise might not), wherever money aggregates, society, collectively, has voted with its dollars and decreed, "there, there is what we value"
The capitalist who (absent government collusion) acquires a great deal of money has contributed tremendously society --otherwise, they wouldn't have paid him so much.
The successful capitalist can walk away from his industry and retire at any time; the margin of wealth he has created will allow him to be idle for the remainder of his days.
The worker has no such option. The worker doesn't have this optino because the worker has contributed little to society - by society's own value judgement system -- the distributed choices of millions of humans.
The worker needs the capitalist grossly more than the capitalist needs the worker.
Absent the capitalist, the worker has insufficient talent, ideas, direction, coaching, motivation -- whatever the case may be -- to be as productive as he would be by himself.
A world without capitalists is a world where men in caves grunt and stack shit in piles, only to tear them down sometime later.
The worker, frustrated by the clear judgement of society and the relative wealth of he and his better, resorts to coercive means to exact jealous revenge on the capitalist. Most people call this "government", but of course, few admit that government is coercive by definition :)
I don't mean to sound so hard on labor - after all, I'm labor too. Without my employer, I am in rough shape. But I don't have a backwards definition of how much value I provide my employer vs. how much value my employer is providing me. I understand completely how lucky I am that someone who is better than I am is willing to share their spoils with me.
More people need to realize this; it is for that reason I have outlined things in such stark and aggressive terms.
Finally, I don't view "sociopath" as a perjorative term. I view it as a red flag that I am conversing with someone who hates individuals and freedom, and worships at the altar of progressive statism.
In your society, do people have the right to keep what they have earned? All of it? Without restriction, without constraint? No?
Then I "hate" your society. I am a sociopath - one who hates society. When a society is based on an immoral premise: that the coercion of some by others is valid, hating such a society is the only moral course of action.
Domestic US manufacturing output has increased most years of the last 10-15 years. But the jobs base of manufacturing _jobs_ has declined.
Pro-labor politicians talk about the decline of manufacturing in the US, but they are really speaking about the decline of manufacturing _jobs_. Manufacturing output continues to generally increase in the US.
For a variety of reasons, labor costs in the US are higher than in other places. Even if some of the compulsory reasons were removed (i.e. minimum wage laws, most labor/safety regulations, etc), at this point people in the US may simply be unwilling to work in jobs with a high liklihood of injury and a low compensation package. So long as there is a generous safety net, there is little incentive for them to do so.
Ultimately, until all of China has a comparable standard of living to the USA, it will be advantageous to outsource certain tasks to Chinese labor. The shifting dynamics of American laws & society vs. Chinese laws and society will make the precise details change over time. The only methods which prevent this from happening are harmful to both the US and China.
There is a fair bit of headroom in Chinese society. It was just recently noted that China's GDP has eclipsed that of the USA. China has more than 4x the population, and so aggregately, China is only about 25% as productively efficient as the US. Large portions of the country are still destitute and life is not so different looking than it was 6000 years ago at the birth of civilization. The currency is artifically undervalued. China is suppressing its domestic populace to attempt to "invest" in methods to undercut American dominance. A person of my means who transferred to China would be very close to having a private chauffer, yet live in a state-built peice of housing without a heater. As the middle (and upper) classes tend to evolve and expand in China, pressure for democritization, labor reforms, etc will continue to mount.
China is currently paying a tremendous cost in environmental damage it does to itself. Whole portions of the nation are being made inhospitable to humans, yet humans live and work there and are being expended to push the nation awkwardly into the future.
At some point, enough of China will modernize and prosper that reforms around regulation, safety, etc will emerge. The productivity will go up, and China will increasingly focus on serving its domestic market (which ought to be 4x the size of the US market it currently serves).
I think the key message for americans is: don't expect to have an American standard of living on a chinese level of productivity. That means guys who push a button in a factory all day will not be retiring at 55 with a corvette and a pension.
Have you run a small business that employed other people? Full time?
Most small timers start out as S-Corps anyway. And where does the seed money to secure "creditors" come from, if not the owner?
Most businesses fail, and most business owners lose money on the deal.
Yes, all of those things are bad governance.
Even the part about toxic dumping.
"Public goods" (like rivers) are anything but; they are not adequately maintained nor defended because they have no ownership. Furthermore, members of the "public" who depend on those resources have no legal recourse to go after companies which pollute because the government restricts or prohibits it.
You could always refuse to work for a dirty capitalist.
There are a number of options available to you, including the one where you wake up every day, look for your food that day, acquire it, cook it, and sleep in the shelter you built yourself. That way you aren't a "wage slave" or whatever people call it these days.
Of course, you are neglecting the division of labor that has allowed the modern world to be so prosperous if you do that.
One thing "the workers" don't realize is that life as a business owner really, really sucks unless/until you have "made it".
I'm a small fry engineer at a software company. I _never_ worry about if I am going to make sales numbers this quarter. I _never_ worry about cold-calling customers to drum up business. I _never_ worry about all kinds of things that ultimately determine if the company stays afloat or not, can make payroll or not, etc etc.
I show up, I do what I am good at, and the owner(s) of the company are assuming 100% of the risks. Sure, I am subject to the risk of maybe losing my job, but my nest egg isn't on the line. I am not going gray haired from worrying about how to make the entire company's numbers fit.
People who work for capitalists are also participating in the distribution of labor -- they are often putting most or all of the stress and hardship of really having to fend for ones-self on to somebody else.
My father in law has been in the situation of being a business owner. And my wife recalls periods where her parents had to explain to her that they didn't have enough for anything besides box mac-n-cheese, because dad's company wasn't getting paid. (specifically, customers weren't paying for products/services received)
I never worry about whether or not my customers pay my employer. I am sure there is a team somewhere that deals with that so I don't have to.
For most people, having a place where they go every day, show up, and do what they're told, and in exchange they get paid, is a much better deal than what they could otherwise get. They risk losing their job; but fundamentally their employment is not directly tied to the performance of the company. If/when it inevitably tanks, the employee can shift to some other employer. Meanwhile the owner of a failed business has probably lost his health, family, etc.
All that said, it seems that the publicly traded company in the US has allowed the basic capitalist ideal to be grossly perverted. The captains of the company no longer place their personal fortunes on the line; everyone now speculates with others' money. Larger Corporations now have departments that specialize in government influence and rent seeking.
But that aside, your basic problem with capitalism is unsound. There appear to be people with lots of ideas and the acumen for taking risk, and who have bigger goals than what they may personally acomplish. And there are other people who, for whatever reason, don't have the inclination, motivation, or perhaps talent for these things. Yet the two are able to work together for mutual benefit. The capitalist needs talented help. The talented help needs financial/social stability, and tasks suited to their interests and expertise.
Thanks for the link.
Obligatory American Response: "Yeah, but name one important thing that has come from Finland!"
(no, I'm not being serious as I post this to a huge web property that runs the LAMP stack :))
I'm not an expert on what makes the scandinavian societies appear to be full of happy people. Clearly, they are happy with it. The author in the study you cite mentions that he's not sure how to apply what has worked in Finland to the US, owing to the tremendous differences.
One thing that I think _would_ help would be to defederalize education. I think contributors to the success in Finland are related to the homogenity of the populace/culture and fewer overall people.
This could be partially simulated in the US by returning essentially all control of education to the states (which have lower populations, and perhaps more homogenity). Furthermore, it would allow states to compete with different approaches to education (and really, the whole notion of child rearing and attendant social issues (and services) that are on the periphery of education)
One thing I didn't see mentioned was what percentage of the populace went to University in Finland, and the breakdown of how many people went in for which types of degrees. Coming from the American point of view, its difficult to imagine that you could tell every American, "do whatever you want for the next 4 years and we'll pay for it" and that this would be sustainable. So I'm curious to know if people in Finland are inherently better choosers than Americans, or if Finland is more careful about which choies are made available...
I'm hesitant to claim that I know what things are required for people to learn certain subjects effectively. But if I follow your basic line of argument -- that for some people to learn some things, what is really required is discussion time and some shared set of materials, then yes, i think that in the age of infinite information copying, at least half of that is solved.
As telepresence continues to get better and more accessible, the prospect of having round table discussinos remotely becomes more plausible. To get the full bandwidth communication experience, you may need to "really be there" sometimes, but there are other advantages: instead of 20 students and 1 teacher discussing a subject: what about 80 students and 4 teachers in the same session -- all of them geographically dispersed, but unified by this common interest?
The factory learning approach that is what most of us have grown up with is not known to be universally optimal, nor is it a time-tested approach. What we do now is not how it has worked for most of human history.
I think developments like Khan academy and more top-ranked universities putting materials online for free are positive developments.
You postulated that some subjects are intrinsically not "doing" subjects (eg literature) whereas others are more vocational. I think that's probably correct but perhaps not so black and white. I think what is needed is probably a spectrum of experiences to cater to the varitaions of how different learners best tackle different topics.
As an example, I "appear" to sometimes learn "you just need to practice" type activities very quickly, because I am reasonably good at absorbing material I have read. And so for activities like high performance driving or shooting sports, I can show up on day 1 and pehaps outperform certain other novices because I've done a fair bit of reading before hand, and I seem to excel at recalling what I've read when putting things into practice.
Other people are stricly "must do it" learners, and while they will eventually exceed my talents, they require a bit longer to equal and exceed my performance.
For me, mathematics is an interesting mix of "read about it" vs. "do it". I find there is an enormous chasm between how well I think I understand something and how well I acutally understand it, and that chasm only becomes apparent when I try to get to the otherside without having worked a sufficient number of practical problems that require the application of the technique in question.
I think it would be advantageous if the university were decentralized and decoupled a bit more. It shouldn't be a plce you go once during a chaotic period of your life, I think it would be nice if there were seamless transitions of various depths for all kinds of people in and out of life-long learning opportunities.
As an example, a few years prior, I enrolled in a Masters CompSci program at a local university. My intention was to take a course now and then and gradually work towards the requirements for a faculty-track doctoral position, as perhaps a kind of mid-life or nearing-sunset career change.
What was silly is that I needed to go through the application process, I needed to dig up my undergrad transcripts, apply, etc.
Some life priorities changed and I took 1 year off of coursework. I got a letter asking me to fill out a survey of why I dropped out of college. I was pretty astounded by this; I had made no such "decision" and had received no email or other communication saying "hey, send us money or a letter or something declaring your intentions".
The idea that a university degree has a contiguous time component seems strange to me; I abide by the idea that, absent physiological decomposition due to diagnosable conditions, that I will be smarter tomorow than I am today, and that someone who completes the requirements for a PhD sprinkled over a 20 year mixture of industry and academic work is the greatly richer contribution to society than the highschool graduat
Sure. Every day I am thankful that I have a good memory, that I am pretty clever, that I had a dad who was involved, and that he was a kick ass dad.
That said, I know plenty of people who didn't have involved parents, and/or didn't have natural ability or inclination to learning, etc.
They are still able to make a reliable living because they can do something that is of value to others. That's the same reason that I have a job -- somebody who is either more talented than I or works harder than I (or both, usually) is willing to pay me to do the things I can do for him. He wants to do that because of comparative advantage.
It's difficult for me to imagine ballet becoming the largest sector of the economy, as it does not feed, clothe, protect, or house humans. It is very high up on the hierarchy of needs; a society where ballet consumed the majority of resources would be the hypothetical "post scarcity" society, which for a variety of esoteric reasons I postulate cannot exist :)
That said, in such a world where my natural talents are not inclined torward ballet, my rational and analytical facilities can still be made to serve others in productive ways: building sets, scheduling the movements of equipment, projecting attendance and financial concerns; choosing venus of the appriate sizes, _building_ venues of the appropriate sizes; helping people who are aesthetically inclined translate their ideas into workable, physically possible manifestations..
I'm not suggesting that everyone get a job in IT. I'm suggesting that people who don't plan on being self sufficient hermits think about how they are going to serve others and make the lives of others better. I don't get paid to show up; I get paid to contribute my talents and effort to the problems my employer thinks will be profitable to solve.
The stark reality of life is that there are two choices: be completely self sufficient by the power of your mind and your efforts, or figure out how to serve someone else well enough that they pay you enough to carve out a life for yourself.
I have a hard time beleiving that 25% of Americans (which I hear is something like the "real" unemployment figure) are of no use to anybody. I have an easy time beleiving that the intersection of what employers are willing to pay and what the unemployed are willing to work for are kept apart in many cases by a mix of unrealistic expectations (on both sides) and by the tremendous impediments to hiring and firing created by bad governance.
If there are people taking on a six figure debt in their early 20s, and they have no idea how that debt will either make them self sufficient or help them offer considerable value to others, their entire life until that point has been overshadowed by this singular failure of imagination/comprehension/whatever.
Lincoln. At the time, K and O didn't have comparable programs. They might now.
My response growing up to "MTV spring break" epsidoes was always, "I sure wish I could get into the (hypothetical) pants of those girls like everyone else must be doing, but I hope all of this is a total fabrication. We can't honestly have so many bacchanalian dimwits who find this enjoyable and a worthwhile expenditure of their time and of other peoples money, can we?"
I had software and IT internships all 4 years I was in school. I wanted the experience and resume bling. That was some of my most interesting work, in retrospect.
Having everyone go to college hasn't made Americans smarter.
It has made universities dumber.
Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.
My dad called some larger IT and software employers' recruiting departments and asked what sort of degrees they screen for, and more importantly, what degree-issuing institutions they look for.
Their answer was, roughly, if you have a CS degree, it doesn't matter where its from (unless its from MIT :))
So I went through the Barrrons College guide and made a list of schools that had CS and separate compE programs; i ranked them by cost and by SAT score of average incoming class. I restricted my search to schools that were ranked above ... 50th or 100th? place in "engineering", however arbitrary that is.
Then I went and talked to those schools, got a rough idea of which ones would give me what kinds of academic scholarships, and then chose a subset of state universities to apply to.
Part of this process is being honest about yourself. I beleive that technically, I met all of the admission requirements to get into Caltech. I noted howeer, that their average incoming freshman had SAT and ACT scores around 5 to 10% higher than where I had tested. Additionally, tuition at that time was around $30k/year.
I figured that there was little sense in struggling to get into the bottom half of the Caltech freshman class, only to pay a six figure sum and to have to work my ass off just to keep my head above water and hopefully graduate. Certainly I expect I would have had a more rigorous experience, and networked with higher caliber professors and students, and perhaps had a better pick of employers for internships and eventual employment.
But honestly, while I have _some_ smarts and _some_ drive, there are obviously people who have more of _both_, and I see little reason to compete with them if I don't have to :)
I was accepted to UIUC (then a top 5 CS school), but they knew they were a competitive program and they offered me no financial incentives to attend.
Ultimately, I went to the University of Nebraska, which offered me a full ride, allowed me to coast in non-interesting courses, and allowed me plenty of 1:1 time with professors who were interesting. The more mid-pack freshman class allowed me to differentiate myself easily from my peers in areas where I excelled.
I left school with a good GPA, plenty of knowledge that I didn't have when I started, and a full time offer at a software company you may have heard of. And no student debt.
The point of this is that if we're not equipping American kids to do even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis; if they have no idea why they are _going_ to a university... well, they probably have no business going, and it is abhorrent that US taxpayers are paying for them to go.
I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.
The debt-treadmill of university is insidious. Making it easy to get the money to go means more people are going, and in response to the rising costs that are a natural consequence of more demand, the Feds loan out more money. And so the cycle continues, and we have more and more entrants with less and less ability to pay who have no idea what they are going to do once their 4-6 years of partying are over and they need to start paying off the debt they accured.
And if i refuse to pay the fine, since the regulation was stupid and immoral to begin with?
Sure. Your state police and local police also have guns and aren't shy about using them.
You're confounding a few different problems here.
Firstly, the distaste for making law and regulation comes from the immorality of governance. The Libertarian (big L) position is that irrespective of its intrinsic evil, _some_ government is required. But because it is inherently immoral, it must be made as small as possible. That way you aren't having shootouts between police and gas station owners who disagree on what signage is appropriate.
A second branch of the conversation, one that is actually related to your litany of closing questions, would be anarchy - the absense of government.
This is the outcome I currently favor, specifically, voluntaryism. You can read about voluntaryism on wikipedia. Then you can read about examples of solutions to the various problems you propose by reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (specifically, the depiction of juries and courts). Also, look up "anarchy dispute resolution organization".
Walter Block and Stefan Molyneux are authors who have written prolifically on the implementation details and possibilities of an anarchistic society. You can read their works to explore some of your questions.
You'll note that I do not give you concrete answers to the questions you ask because I am not sure of the answers. But you are thinking of the problem in a utilitarian way, namely, "can you propose a society which is a pareto improvement from the current society in the following ways and convince me that you are correct"
Sadly, I can do no such thing. For I know not all of the solutions and even if I did, it would be my conjecture of what would happen against your view of how the world currently is.
So I look at the problem a bit differently: is it moral for society to legitimize an entity which initiates violence against others? If it is not, then we must grapple with the implications of this conclusion. This means teaching others about the moral foundations of society and getting more clever people to think about how to solve all of the problems that invariably arise when you ask people who have been living as prisoners to transition towards living as free men.
People may or may not be any better behaved than they are now. The difference is, society will not recognize the moral authority for some to initiate violence against others. The primary entity of human suffering for the last thousand years -- government -- will be seen for what it is and dispensed with.
Finally, who is utopian? Is it the anarchists, who understand that human nature is to accumulate power and to use it for injurious means towards the weak, and therefore refuse to legitimize any concentration of power and refuse to allow the legitimacy of any actor who initiates violence?
Or is it the statist, who concedes that people are attracted to power and to evil, and then builds the institutions of government, giving evil men the perfect vehicle by which to do evil? Aren't the statists, who have a bloody historic record to answer for, and whos innovations come only every few hundred years, and only atop mountains of bloodshed.. aren't they the ones who must be called to account for their utopian fantasies of finding people trustworthy enough to hold the reins of the monsters they bulid? Aren't they the ones who live in a fantsay world where they suggest that this time their schemes will work, despite a record of spectacular bloody failure?