The future is fractal.
Okay, that’s probably bullshit, but it sounds better than saying “We can’t predict the future at all, stay frosty.”
This is also not exactly true, but it’s as true as we can make it, in human words, right now. Yeah, sure, the future is still probably composed of days, and the people experiencing it will be human (If not no, what’s the point?) etc, etc, world without end.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. The future I refer to here is the future we prepare for. And the future work and earning activities we specifically prepare for, to be exact. You know, the things education used to do.
Mind you, education never did that very well, but it tended to adapt with the times- ish.
For instance, education always thought in its own internal forums that it was about something it really wasn’t. Like in the middle ages it probably — not sure, wasn’t there. Stop laughing — thought it was about making better and more knowledgeable Christians. Clerics/clerks for the massive church bureaucracy extending across Europe. And it was, sort of, maybe. But what it actually was doing was creating a learned class that could read and write and speak a lingua franca, which allowed diplomacy and commerce to go on. The more were needed, the more the learning apparatus became bigger and more complex and more internationally respected.
Then as education turned to practical things, in the great industrialization, things that used to be considered at best shady crafts like medicine and engineering became part of the system, and people got the stamp of approval of officialdom to practice their craft, for which there was increasingly more need.
Meanwhile, because late-stage industrial revolution needed literate and at least somewhat educated workers, child labor was forbidden and minimum education made the state’s responsibility.
Then things went weird. Partly because, I think, the left thinks an uneducated “proletariat” is more likely to suit their needs. Partly because all states got alarmed and saw people who could actually think as a threat. And partly because they just suck, yo.
So public, mandatory education turned into indoctrination factories. Twenty years ago, I already had trouble finding college freshmen who could express themselves in writing with any degree of clarity.
Look, I’m not being picky. It wasn’t “oh, no, you used the passive voice.” Dear Lord, no. It was more like the best had sentences that made sense by themselves, they just didn’t add up to a coherent meaning. The very best had a paragraph that made sense. The rest made you go “What even?” And the majority just made no sense whatsoever.
The only way to explain it is that they’d learned whole word reading, and therefore thought of words as symbols. But because as symbols written words are very complicated, they only really remembered first and last letter — which was all that was required in school, since they knew the context, and it was all multiple choice — so, claimant was the same word as complaint was the same word as concomitant and what actually got typed was part the student and part the word processor fixing it.
The result was… well, AI is not that bad. And these were people I’d meet or talk to on the phone, who made perfect sense in speech, but weren’t in any way literate, not even vaguely, particularly since they read by the same method.
These people could even, sometimes, write sensible messages on the level of “went shopping” or “where are you?” but anything out of the every day and super-common left them floundering because, again, they weren’t in any way shape or form literate.
I understand that has got worse, with the result that after 12 years of state schooling, most colleges find themselves teaching very elementary reading and math.
And I want to make this clear, this is not the fault of the kids in any way. It’s the schooling that has gotten…. bureaucratized, clerisized (in the original sense. Most teaching schools are temples of the Marxist cult) and rendered anti-teaching. Look, kids would be more literate if left to loiter on street corners, okay?
Now, obviously, most kids learn to read and write, at least somewhat once they’re out of the government prison schools. Over the next ten years all of them — the ones who go to college and the ones who don’t — seem to be come more or less literate, and many even learn to read for fun.
But they should be doing it much, much earlier, okay? And the solution is not to make university free or mandatory. That will just delay their achieving literacy.
In fact, university, free or not is not the solution for anything. With increasing frequency, and depending on the area of the country, if university is the answer, the question is very, very stupid.
It took me forever to realize this. And even longer to realize why. I imagine it’s worse for those embedded in the University system.
Look, guys, I only realized the problem with traditional publishing because having achieved just below top rank success, I realized how little that was, and started digging at why. (Yes, I’m part terrier. Deal.) If I’d been a publisher, editor or an enormously successful author, I might never have started that dig, and never realized that most houses had traded “being commercially successful” (I.e. selling, i.e. what their job was) for “Educating the people” and “Looking good at the cocktail parties me and my homies all attend.”
I’m not inside the university system, though I connived in sending both my kids through it in what might have been the most spectacular misuse of influence and wealth in my life, and the thing I regret most after not homeschooling.
And now you’re all looking at me like I lost my mind. No, listen. These are not your father’s universities. Except in the ways they are, which makes the whole thing worse.
The way they’re not is the way they’ve become just one more avenue for continuing indoctrination and trying the whole Diversity Inclusion and Equity, which is and should be DIE because that’s what it is. More and more the professors, openly or not, view as their job to let minorities and particularly women have the best grades and graduation rates and succeed. This is why University is a terrible bargain for girls more than for boys. They are given the impression they know a lot; actually know nothing; hit the world and become convinced patriarchy is holding them down.
The way they are exactly what they were in your father’s (and my father’s) day is that they are admirably preparing people for the 20th century. Except they’re doing this in an environment where memorizing factoids is counterproductive since the computers in our pocket can give us those instantly. (I’m not against stupid memorization. That’s my other regret. I should have made the kids memorize poems and factoids when they were tiny. You who have small children should do this, all the time. Turns out memory is a muscle. It needs to be exercised. But it doesn’t make much sense in terms of a pedagogical or the main pedagogical objective.) So memorizing long lists of “if/then” is mostly ridiculous, and doesn’t benefit the student. And examining them on those is even more so, which is why we’ve become more and more paranoid about cheating to the stupid point.
The other thing that doesn’t make much sense is the whole hierarchy of learning. Sure, professors who got their degrees a bazillion years ago, like me, are very well informed of the basics of the field. You know, the things you can acquire in a week, with some study online and a few lectures that are free. What is missing is how to apply it to the current age.
Yes, I know I sound like the educators saying “but they don’t need to read. The computer can do that for them.” but I’m actually the opposite. They should have all the very basic abilities. On that they should layer an ability to pick up the more advanced bits as needed. And move on to other advanced bits. Because information and data are more available now than they ever were.
What we’re doing instead is dinning into their heads a narrative where the certification and the blessing from the “experts” is all important. Which is counterproductive. And unbelievably stupid.
What we should be training… well…. reasoning from facts and factoids. Flexibility. Innovation. Ability reason from present conditions and find the best place and time to improve them.
The kids — eh, for me anyone 45 and under — have amazing opportunities at their disposal, and college is — at best — putting blinders on them.
More importantly, it is rendering them unfit for a future where the best security is multiple streams of income, the best guarantee of excelling is to be able to take your losses, roll with the punches and emerge whole on the other side, and the best guarantee of a middle class life is stubborn refusal to give up.
The universities, particularly for highly specialized careers consume a person’s entire youth: six, seven or ten years. Heck, the typical bachelors is now six years, and no, that’s not the students’ fault. Universities multiply and maximize time needed to complete in order to keep being paid more.
The problem is, we do need something like universities. Yes, I know, people can pick up most of it on the fly. But specialized stuff like medicine, engineering, law, physics, etc. still need to be taught. For things like the first three which honestly are all more art than anything else, apprenticeships would work best, given an alternate licensing system. It is my guess too that being ossified those places will be the last to admit it. Honestly, business administration too need apprenticeship more than college.
But Physics, math, chemistry, etc. all the advance, specialized fields need … something like university. Just mostly not university as it is now.
But we even need or could use a university system for the liberal arts. We don’t realize that because those fields were turned into indoctrination first. But I have a friend who used to teach art history, and we do need that, because it’s like a message sent to us from the past. More importantly we need to be able to analyze real history and real economics, and sharpen our wits one against the other, until we find solutions for present problems, or track down where we went very wrong.
We need it particularly because the world is changing at speed. Not in social mores or that, which are imposed from above, in the great part, but in technology. Each bit of technology has repercussions no one is tracking or fully understanding, to the point the crisis in commercial real estate took the idiots in charge by surprise, though it’s been coming for twenty years and was made inevitable for the covidiocy. Instead, as in the days of Noah when they married and were given in marriage until they drowned, our “business administrators” were building and buying showier and bigger headquarters until lockdown. Or even after. Into which they now can’t herd employees at any price in the world. (And why a lot of them went under.)
This is daft. I saw teleworking coming for most desk jobs 20 years ago, and mentioned it here at least 12 years ago.
But these people were educated to think that things don’t change. They don’t learn the basics, but boy do they learn dogma. More unchangeable dogma than any pope ever processed.
So, yes. We need “something like college.” We might need it at multiple times through a life in which tech and jobs will change a few times. What form it takes, I don’t know, but my guess is it will not resemble at all the live in/don’t have a job on the side, etc. etc.
I feel, more than think, because this is not my area and I’m sure there’s factors I don’t know or underestimate (none of them being providing a happy environment for beardo the weirdo, who needs to retire or become a barista already), that what would work is labs and perhaps classes for things that absolutely must be done in groups. (Fewer than anyone thinks, except for stuff like chemistry.) For the rest? Assigned subjects with recorded lectures that can be taken at any time and discussions in something like a discord group, to sharpen mind against mind. Perhaps tutors to oversee groups of students (more like England, or the early-modern system.) And exams. Lots and lots of exams, including certification exams, some of which will be more valuable than others.
The objective should be to learn and become flexible in your ability to analyze facts and to move from “expertise” to “expertise” and adapt when tech wacks their job upside the head and they have to learn something different.
Basics are important, and being able to discuss and adapt what you know is important. But that’s not what we’re training.
For you people with promising kids, yes, sure, things like welding or HVAC do pay for now, but I’m also afraid of those fields becoming crowded. If they absolutely must go to college, try to push them into fields where the training is short because the time, let alone the money, is a massive sunk cost, which in a time when everything changes very fast is not wroth it.
And if you can make sure they have paying hobbies, and two or three sources of income.
Because multiple streams of income, and a wide ability is the best way to stay employed and profitable.
As for us, who are at an age that at any other time would be retirement… well, you know what you’re depending on for retirement. But for most of us it is a losing proposition, both in terms of maybe the money being there, and in terms of us living a lot longer than people used to. You’ll get bored.
So– stay flexible, learn more, multiple streams of income.
And don’t get so wedded to your view of how things are that you can’t change when your job becomes obsolete. Or perhaps something completely different.
Stay ready; stay flexible. Keep riding the wave.
According To Hoyt 
“Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra, 20th Century American Philosopher and Sage
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I’m Terrible!!!!!
I see Sarah’s “Keep riding the wave” and think of a scene in Niven’s & Pournelle’s “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
This west-coast surfer is out on the ocean when he realizes that a tidal wave is coming (and he won’t get safely to shore).
So here he is riding the giant tidal wave and is doing fine until he notices that the wave is sending him straight for a skyscraper. [Crazy Grin]
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I think it was more a bunch of surfers, believing the end of the world was at hand, chose to go out competing with each other for one last time.
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It may have been, but we followed just one of them in the Book.
Oh, I vaguely remember that the one we were following was the last of them on the tidal wave.
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Just checked the book, there were other surfers besides himself that attempted to catch the tidal wave.
Some succeeded but he was the only one remaining when he saw the thirty stories tall apartment building in his way.
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That scene stuck with me. The other one that did was the two scientists on an island.
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IIRC, the island was Santorini, or what was called Thera when it blew in 1696 BC (according to one source) and destroyed the Cretan navy and civilization.
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What’s odd is that every video I’ve seen of tsunami’s, they don’t have the same form as the waves that surfers ride. Rather than a wave, they come in more like a tidal flood of rising water because the actual wavelength of the waves is measured in hundreds to thousands of feet. So the wave slope is too shallow to surf down. Whether the same applies to the splash wave of a meteor strike of that magnitude and closeness to shore, I’m not sure. I suspect Jerry and Larry took some literary license in imaging it that way.
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The “Rule Of Cool” may apply here. :wink:
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Videos of tsunamis did exist then, didn’t they? It’s possible that tsunamis just weren’t very well understood at the time, or may have been super difficult to visualize. On the other hand, considering all the complex things they thought through in those stories, odds are they grokked it and decided to go with the cool factor instead.
I’d argue that the sheer churning chaos of a tsunami hitting the shore is a fearfully cool thing in itself, but there is an undeniable cachet to the image of some crazy human literally surfing on the crest of death.
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Hmm. I think* that the two gentlemen may have had it correct. How a tsunami strikes is dependent on the geology of the coastline. If you look at a USGS map of the LA coastline (https://cmgds.marine.usgs.gov/data/pacmaps/la-shd.html), you will note that it mostly has a relatively narrow strip of shallow water – and then a very steep drop off. The thing about tsunamis are that they are deep waves. When the deep part of the wave hits a cliff, it is like any breakwater – it very quickly goes up, creating a massive surface wave.
*Think. The wave would have to be coming in from a direction where the deep part isn’t “masked” by Catalina Island – and some parts of the coast have a much wider shallow distance for the wave to collapse before it hit the shoreline.
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Hence the name — tidal waves.
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Neither are we inside the university system. I too wish we’d homeschooled, for us that would have been almost 30 years ago, starting. We did extensively oversee and tutor. The other regret we had was talking son into Chemical Engineering instead of just Chemistry. Sure, we had logical arguments. But we also cost him an opportunity he wanted and 100% misunderstood what he really wanted. (Obama had more to do with the lost opportunity in the end.) Dang 20/20 hindsight is a mean B.
(*) Not the process but the hands on aspect.
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Warren Buffet once quipped about endowing chairs in Finance at all the major universities because having his competition believe something that is not so would open many opportunities for him.
In a similar way, I told my nephew, who majored in economics at an Ivy, la di da, that it would be better to become a male hooker since at least he’d be doing something useful. My sister was not pleased. Did I mention that I have graduate degrees in economics and am well qualified to judge their usefulness and accuracy. One book by Haslet or Sowell is all you need.
if I may channel Cato the Elder by going on about my pet obsession, the next shoe in China, local government finance, is dropping. Right now.
For those waiting for recession, initial claims for unemployment insurance spiked sharply this week to over 264K. 250k is a “magic number.” I’ll be waiting to see if it follows through, but the transition from things look good to things are bad tends to be sudden. A “surprise” in fact as people simply refuse to look at things objectively. Things are bad.
Lastly, for young Eleanor. Caravan is a classic “crowded trade”. Shorts were over 50% of float and they’re getting annihilated today. CVNA is up 66%. Margin calls went out at 3:00, I’ve bought popcorn.
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BGE, the Reader would like your take on something. This is from one of the blogs I follow; I don’t agree with him much (and don’t agree with this) but he has a much different view on the current economy than yours and mine. http://scottgrannis.blogspot.com/2023/06/inflation-and-spread-charts-updated.html
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Please don’t take what I write as investment advice, I have no more idea what’s going to happen than anyone —.no one knows nothin. That said, I’m bullish on bonds, very bullish in fact. In that I agree with his analysis, which is substantially the same as mine. I’ve been bullish for some time, which has been a bit painful but seems to be coming good. We’ll see.
He also says, without argument, that we’re going to avoid recession. Now, there’s a case for that assuming the stock market’s current surge is the start of a bull market rather than an uptick in a bear market, and one should respect that. That said, I still don’t see it. I suspect the recession is here and when they finally get around to calling it, right about the time it ends if past experience holds, they’ll date it to April/May. The only question is how deep it will go. I have no idea.
One thing, I don’t use forecasts much in my investments since they’re all useless, worse than useless positively dangerous, I do use certain relationships that have proven accurate over very long terms, but even then what I tend to run is a barbell strategy.. I do really well when things move a lot and fairly meh when things sort of stagger along, like now, it’s very frustrating. I’ll sometimes make what appear to be very aggressive bets, but I always position it so that my losses are limited, I have no tolerance for large losses. None. So far I’ve managed to avoid them and I have no complaints about the returns.
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No worries – the Reader is not looking for investment advice. He is just trying to place economic upheaval in a larger view of the the oncoming unpleasantness.
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Where we are. Hubby got his “education” by being one of the 3 union membership representatives on the Pension/401(k) board and picking the brains of the different financial advisors. Returns historically on our accounts have ran 8% to 10%, year to year, without any losses. This year? Who knows overall. We don’t make a killing but we are beating most other options that don’t delve into speculations.
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One of the things that cost me many facepalms was the repetition of “Nobody could have seen that coming” in the wake of the housing crash in the first decade of this century.
Because I had been following housing bubble blogs since late 2004 or thereabouts, and they not only saw it coming, they applied basic financial logic to show when and where it was going to happen. To the point where we knew when to look for a house (purchased in spring of 2009; not the low point for our area but certainly the low point for the house we bought, as in cheaper than it had sold for since it was built in 1980.)
And on that note, “too big to fail,” should mean “break it up so the components can’t take down the economy,” congressional twerps.
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Let’s just say, and I’m in a position to know, that some of them were, how shall we say, economical with the truth about mortgage securities. Everyone knew, everyone, except the marks, knew.
Alas, I can say no more beyond the fact that 2008 remains the most profitable trading year I’ve ever had. The barbell strategy proved its worth then and continues to today,
Makes it easy to sleep at night.
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That would be:
Too big (a political contributor) to (be allowed to) fail.
…
The other good one is
To serve (the political masters) and protect (the status quo)
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And on that note, “too big to fail,” should mean “break it up so the components can’t take down the economy,” congressional twerps.
To be fair, I don’t WANT our servants thinking in terms of “exterminate that threat.”
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I would go with three, all by Sowell (not familiar with the other): Basic Economics, Applied Economics, and Economic Facts and Falacies. They pretty much give you the tools you need to tear apart most of the crap masquerading as “economics” these days.
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What I was supposed to be quoting was this:
WPDE
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Economics in One Lesson. Henry Hazlitt. I can’t even blame WP, just a brain fart on my part. Sowell’s Basic Economics was the other one I had in mind, though everything he wrote is excellent.
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I think well of Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms.
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More Economics than most liberals have ever gotten. Including the ones with all the fancy degree’s in Economics. This doesn’t go into all the fees, taxes, and special costs from governmental interference.
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I suspect the sudden rush of “aliens are totally real, wink wink” stories that have been coming out are an effort to hide the fact that the economic numbers are getting bad and staying bad.
(That and a lot of the “legacy” industries are seeing things go wrong for them, fast.)
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I suspect it’s to hide they’re lizard people.
What? Would you even be shocked.
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Look, I can accept that Mark Zuckerberg is a Deep One with a really cheap human suit (he’s how rich and he still won’t get a new one?!?).
I can accept that there is a necromantic hamster inside Biden’s head, running that little wheel as fast as possible.
I can even accept that Kevin Bacon isn’t the Secret Master Of The World.
But, lizard people, Great Aunt? Come on now…
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Actually, they aren’t Lizard Men, but are Serpent Men.
Robert E. Howard, in his historical piece “The Shadow Kingdom” wrote about King Kull of Valusia and his battle against them.
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–
No, no, the ex-mayor of Chicago is a Deep One, wearing a human suit made by something that never saw a human, aside from drowned corpses. Zuckerborg is more like a snake.
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Sorry, I’ve been around enough BLUE HADES to know the Innsmouth Look and Zuckerbird has it in spades. It’s the eyes, you see.
Lori Lightfoot? Definitely either a fifth- or sixth-hand skinsuit by someone that…might have seen a human being from where she’s supposed to come from.
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THIS THIS THIS.
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She is wearing hers inside out?
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I’ve seen those things inside out…it’s rather more full of red than the brown you would expect.
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If they are Lizard people, Oh boy are they in for trouble. There should be a series of satellites around this solar system broadcasting out, Danger Humans. Forgive the Lizard People Lord, they know not what they do. To all of you out there that think it’s somehow ungodly for there to be aliens, I only ask one question. “Do you really think God would invent all this wonderful Universe and Not give us some others to play with?” Please, we just need to grow up a bit and move up to the big species table with the others.
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Scary Thought of the Time: What if the Humans are (will be) The Great Old (Maybe Even) Wise Ones? And are learning everything now… over and over again.. the hard way?
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Truely predatory aliens would concentrate on eating our leaders. They’re the most visible, least likely to actually be physically combative in defense of themselves, culling them would improve the species, and since most politicians are bland and tasteless, they shouldn’t upset delicate alien stomachs.
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Leaving the ones alive who can actually do things, including work out ways to deal with predatory aliens? Rather stupid aliens…”First, we eat the incompetents!”
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The alien would have to be a carrion eater to consume Biden, Pelosi, and Feinstein without an upset stomach.
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So…Pak’ma’ra? :-D
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In Australia, the last interest rate increase has finally reached the point where people bank accounts are on average decreasing as they work through what they typically saved during COVID.
The question on why house prices continued to increase has been answered by the numbers that reveal that 25-40% of buyers pay cash ie they own it freehold from the start.
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Chinese credit buyers. They buy real estate all over the world with government money.
Also note that China’s economy is tottering. Unrelated, of course.
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Sometimes government money, sometimes their own money. Because what a lot of Chinese want is land that they themselves own, which they can pass to their grandkids. Everything in Communist China is just leasing long-term from the government.
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To be fair, so is paying property taxes here.
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Yep:
“I finally own my home!”
“Think so, huh?”
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It used to be possible to get your license to practice law by doing what was called “reading law”. Instead of going to law school, the would-be lawyer would clerk for a lawyer or judge. After doing this for a long enough period of time, the clerk could take the bar exam to earn his law license. Calvin Coolidge did this.
I don’t know whether any state bars still allow it.
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A quick check shows that California, Maine, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia do not require that you attend law school to take the bar. The details are different in each one of these states. The Reader thinks this is something that should be pushed for in the rest of the country.
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Indeed – Abraham Lincoln, “Rip” Ford and many another 19th century luminaries just “read law” and immersed themselves in Blackstones Commentaries on English Law … and then hung out their shingle to practice as lawyers. With varying degrees of success, you have to admit.
I’m thinking that a good many people who have educated, or self-educated outside the mainstream will succeed amazingly in future. Like all the kids who win at state and national spelling bees turn out to be … home educated, or educated in tiny school pods.
I count myself fortunate for having been in the 6th-grade class of an eccentric teacher in the LA public school system (when it was top of the line) who in retrospect, seemed to have taught on Montessori lines. We memorized a lot of poetry, and did all kinds of handy projects.
https://celiahayes.com/archives/809
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True they had varying degrees of success. The Reader would take any of them over anyone coming out of law school in 2023.
The Reader’s best year of formal education was 6th grade. The Reader’s father was a field engineer for the Midsized Defense Contractor and had an assignment installing a very high power radio installation in southern Spain. School was correspondence courses (Calvert School if the Reader remembers correctly) and 2 teachers from England hired by the Navy and the Midsized Defense Contractor. We had 12 students from grade 1 – 12 in 2 groups. The Reader’s grammar and writing got significantly better than year – thank you Miss Peacock (yes that was her name).
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Kim Kardashian took and passed the first half of the California bar without going to law school. I don’t know if she continued on or is still working on the second half.
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Having enough law to be able to read and understand basic IP law sounds like an excellent idea in her lines of work, both broadcast and trademark/copyright.
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There is what the law says, and there is what the group of gatekeepers who see a threat to their cartel carefully don’t say about their completely honest choices.
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Flyby c4c.
Whoosh
Also, as one of the aforementioned kids, thanks for the advice! I’ll… At least try to follow…
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D4d
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Looks at soapbox sneaking up from the side I’m just going to stay out of this one for the moment. Some of it is a leeeetle close to Day Job.
I do agree that we need something like college for liberal arts. Too many people don’t understand the symbols and background for things, or the long depth of history behind current events (some of them). Also, learning how to do research in ways besides [Searchengine] searches, and how to evaluate sources are very useful skills. Universities have access to material that’s not easily available elsewhere.
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This. But the true liberal arts are not taught in most universities these days. My alma mater had a classics department when I was there, but it’s long gone, now. My most recent employer is cheerfully allowing the entire Modern Languages department to die, has no philosophy major, nor any of the arts (music, theater, painting, etc.) and yet still prides itself on being a “liberal arts” university.
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[grimace] All too common.
I spent 20 years inside the university system, up until 3 years ago (5 as a student, then 15 in the admin/professional ranks), and the deterioration was alarming and very disheartening. All the crazy shit that I saw from the nutball contingent in my grad program in the humanities somehow became higher-ed orthodoxy. I mean, in hindsight, it was always headed that way; when I first went to college in 1990, the multiculti push was well underway, and there was nowhere else it’d logically end up, and I kind of knew that… But still, by the time I got out, I felt like I had been conned into working for the enemy. Getting a job (a much better-paying one, too) in private industry was one of the happiest moments I’ve had since the kids were born.
There definitely is a role and a need for colleges, or something like them, in the liberal arts. There will always be a benefit to learning from people who already have deep knowledge of a complex and sometimes nebulous subject and can distill it down into an essence that relative beginners can understand. Also, for people who can demonstrate and teach the processes of logic and of thinking for oneself.
Unfortunately, what’s left of the liberal arts in education is increasingly the opposite of any kind of liberality, designed specifically to indoctrinate and disinform. It’s very disheartening.
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Lordy.
I’m ambivalent about most philosophy majors, because so many universities treat them as “survey” courses rather than actual hard-core break-your-brain thinking courses. (I went to a Jesuit university and philosophy is one place they really shine.)
But yeah. If all you’ve got on the liberal arts side is Lit and you count Business as part of your liberal arts core, there’s problems.
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Twenty years ago, I already had trouble finding college freshmen who could express themselves in writing with any degree of clarity.
In 1985, I had a great professor for Philosophy 101 on M, W, F. On T, R we had smaller classes with a teaching assistant. She spent the entire time showing people how to write five-paragraph essays. I hated it. That’s what High School or remedial English is for, not my college philosophy class!
Getting old is weird. Yesterday, I dropped into a local Toastmaster’s meeting.
“How did you hear about Toastmasters?”
“My captain mentioned it.”
“You’re in the Air Force?”
“Not now, that was 35 years ago.”
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Haven’t been now for 35 years. I credit the program for me being able to speak in front of any group without blacking out (speech happens but do not remember it) and throwing up afterwards. Still do not like it. But I can do it.
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Education is Infested with the scourge of Communism, until that is just a class in what not to do, Teaching and Education is best done in the home. Even if the majority avoided Universities their bank accounts have become so bloated they could resist reality for years. Of course if their wishes were granted and Communism won all the billions that those same Universities have will be confiscated. And all those intelligentsia that now enjoy all those big bucks will be paid the same as everyone else. An interesting point to make to those same colleges is that for years, until sports became important, they had barred minorities of color. Don’t be surprised if your bank accounts are what they come for to pay for reparations. Taking down a few statues won’t help when when the Communists want your money. You’ve served your purpose, now it’s time for the gulag. Dumbass.
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I think we have lost something by no longer having memory songs/ games. I know some remnants exist (Old MacDonald, etc.), but I’d read older books (things like Mrs. PiggleWiggle and Lord Peter), and see the characters playing all sorts of memory games that I never heard of.
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” But specialized stuff like medicine, engineering, law, physics, etc. still need to be taught. For things like the first three which honestly are all more art than anything else, apprenticeships would work best, given an alternate licensing system. ”
As far as I know, you can still get into architecture by the apprenticeship route.
Certainly just getting a degree in it doesn’t adequately prepare you for the nitty-gritty of practicing, or there wouldn’t be a requirement to do 1700 to 2000 hours of professionally supervised work in the field before taking the licensing tests.
But you do learn a lot of the basics of engineering and design.
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I hung out with some of the landscape architecture (LAR), civil engineering, geography grad students at Flat State. The grousing about “idiots and CAD” was quite educational. Apparently, the younger kids were all hot-to-trot using computers to design things that structural engineers couldn’t assemble. Materials science and “here are the limits of [thing]” had gone out the window. One pure architecture prof assured students that they could learn materials on their own. Nope! Not the way the professional tests wanted it. Some of the LAR profs were not talking to the pure architecture profs. (Ah, academic warfare.)
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I guess I’m lucky that we did at least have some classes on materials and structures…
But yes. “Idiots and CAD” indeed.
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Off Centaur also put that track on their Quarks and Quests album, the casette of which I played so many times I wore the oxides off the tape.
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Excellent.
I confess, that when I actually start architecting in earnest, I will print out and frame as my cubicle decoration “The Building Code of Hammurabi”.
Building Code
If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, the builder shall be put to death.
If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and a wall cracks, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
And I think it was a great shame that they didn’t do more to impress the seriousness of the architect’s job in our professional ethics class.
It’s a profession that holds in its hands the lives of more people than any other.
And quite frankly that should terrify anyone who wants to practice the profession.
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Yes.
(Also note that I used this song to prove to someone that there are songs about everything. He challenged me with “Engineering?” and conceded my point just a few lines in.)
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“Apparently, the younger kids were all hot-to-trot using computers to design things that structural engineers couldn’t assemble.”
Which is even funnier if you’ve read Brooks’ “Mythical Man Month”, because he identifies (correctly) that one of the major traps software developers fall into is that software is a much more flexible medium than anything physical, and leads young programmers into thinking that the physical doesn’t ,matter.
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Writing There is no Gravity in Software Engineering is on my “when I retire” list.
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The thing that makes me despair is that you would NEED TO 60+ years after Brooks wrote his. 8-(
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In software engineering dog years 60 years is a millennium.
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The Reader notes that while there may not be gravity in software engineering, there is entropy.
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I know (knew…) of an Electrical Engineering prof. (“the late” alas…) who had his ‘colleagues’ (never ‘students’…) Very First Lab was “Test these things to destruction, so you know what happens and what can happen.” He did choose fairly inexpensive components, but the lesson was there – things overload do NOT react “nicely” to the abuse.
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Yup, letting the magic smoke out is bad enough, but designers failing to consider what could happen as a result of a small failure leads to to big expensive showy failures.
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Indeed it can be exciting. Sometime in the early ’90s I had a prototype DEC Alpha workstation. When the production models came out we could upgrade (and with a faster clocked CPU Hurrah!!!). It was a full motherboard swap and a few other changes including a little extension to the power cables that shifted some of the connections. It had some tricky parts (it was not keyed so you COULD connect it wrong). I read the directions and decided rather than do it myself I’d call in Field Service who had the tools and had theoretically been trained. A week later they show up and do the exchanges. The service guy plugs it in to the wall power to test with the case off and all hell breaks loose. Several popping noises, some hissing, sizzling and most impressively two smallish ICs had 2-3 inch tall bright blue flames coming out of them. He quickly unplugged it, luckily it did not set off the fire alarms or sprinklers. Scratch one brand new motherboard and the power supply, total value upwards of $15K. He’d plugged the adapter in wrong. If I’d done it my cost center would have eaten the cost. As it was field service ate the cost and ultimately I just ended up with a production model.
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I really liked my Alpha workstation. It was fast, and reliable. I once went over 2 months without having it crash – rebooted due to a power outage.
I remember having dinner out with some of my childhood friends, who were all in finance in NYC; they were gushing about their upgraded computers at work. One of them turned to me and asked “What do you use?”
“Me? Oh, an Alpha workstation with graphics tablet”
:D
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I worked on the Alpha’s Graphics supporting PHiGS initially on both VMS and Tru64 UNIX. I later worked on graphics drivers for the Alpha NT side until Microsoft gave Alpha NT the shiv at NT 5.0. I liked NT by 4.0 it was a rival to VMS for stability although VMS and Tru64 held some advantages (Windows 2d graphics interface needed support workstation cards and 90’s period CAD and visualization software didn’t use) in performance. But Alphas running NT vs the period Pentium(90-300 MHz) and Pentium Pro (100-200Mhz) were king at graphics as that period intel was poor at IEEE floating point compared to 300-666MHz alphas that retired 2 or later 4 FP instructions a cycle. Lighting and transformation were still done on the CPU. Two things ultimately doomed the Alpha workstations. First Nvidia (and later AMD nee radeon for the graphics side) started moving the lighting and transformation to the card unloading the Intel Cpu’s (which were getting faster, partly from Intel buying out much of the Alpha Hardware manufacturing and engineering), That change meant more data had to flow to the the graphics card to keep the number of Triangles and frame rate increasing. Period PCI bus was already maxed out for bandwidth, there was PCI Express (serial high speed) and AGP (intel proprietary) and Compaq just didn’t see it was worth spending the money to do the engineering, it wasn’t their model.
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In Infantry School, I think that is called ” basic equipment issue day”.
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I’m not sure engineering via apprenticeship is fully feasible; at least 50(! Yikes!) years ago, the math, chemistry and physics courses were necessary. A BSEE at U of Redacted was doable in 4 years, though it didn’t hurt to load up on the “enrichment” crap (2 semesters of Social “Science”, 2 spent in Music appreciation for the Humanities ticket) to get the hours in while the courses were mostly easy. OTOH, other engineering degrees (looking at Mechanical for one) usually needed 5 years and/or summer sessions. I skipped summer until I was getting my MSEE part time. Did it once in the 4 years I was in the program.
Had a couple of undergrad EE labs, which combined with the chemistry served me well in my first job–which position lasted all of three months before I was transferred to a more classical EE position. There’s a moral to that story. Sigh.
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The Reader agrees that a lot of undergraduate material needs to be taught. He just thinks that it doesn’t need to be taught by PhD’s that never saw the inside of a product design team or a factory. A program of work / study, with the engineering material taught by practicing engineers, would do a far better job of producing useful engineers than what the Reader was seeing come out of universities right before he retired, even ones that traditionally focused on graduating working engineers. The Reader would volunteer to teach.
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This in spades for programming. (Lord knows I’ve looked at years old stuff I’ve done and thought “What idiot did that?” and then “What in the heck was I thinking?” Often enough with research the answer is “Oh. That is why!” But not always.)
Hilariously just ran into an example because of our trip (not what I had anything to do with, but …). We stayed at the Super 8 by Wyndham in Jackson, WY (Tetons, JIC). Checked out 2 days early (for reasons not related to the hotel), at 6 am, and came home. Prepaid. The early staff person couldn’t get a receipt then because he had problems with their new system, even crashing the system. Said he’d get his manager to send a receipt via email. Fine. Fast forward to today when I review the receipt and visa card. All I see is a $21 credit. Wait? What? Long story short the $21 credit is because of a rate adjustment prior to arrival, not the actual credit (which can take 2 to 7 days to show, as standard). Called Super 8 and talked to someone who explained the receipt. When done thanked him then asked “Can I find the programmers that wrote this and
beat themberate them?” (Response: “Please!”) “What does it say that I wrote software for 35 years and I couldn’t figure out the receipt without your explanation.” (Answer: Laughter and “It is a problem.”)LikeLiked by 2 people
The phrase in hardware engineering when faced by an outcome of complete disaster or idiocy was ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’.
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In situations like that I make dark comments about doing a design review in a dark alley. Tire iron optional, depending on the outrageousness of the egregious.
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The MSEE program I took had a handful of professors, but the vast majority (75%, maybe) of the instructors were pros taking a second job. The best one had a reputation for hard courses (worked my ass off), but his main job was consulting. Pretty sure he had done a bunch of designs in Silicon Valley. My only regret was not taking his RF design course–could have used it 10 years later.
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THIS. From what I know it’s BAD out there.
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When my nearest brother went in for his grad degree in aerospace engineering, they loved him because he had a couple of years of experience under his belt before grad school. All the ones who came straight from undergrad were freaking out about the wrong things and he had enough knowledge to focus on the things that were actually important.
(This is the one who is a literal rocket scientist now, BTW.)
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Teleworking was a signifiant part of the worldbuilding in Niven and Pournelle’s book “Oath of Fealty” released 42 years ago and I don’t think the idea was original with them.
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A friend of the family was working IT from home, via teletype over an acoustic modem (handset placed in modem cradle) in 1972.
I still remember playing monopoly against the remote mainframe.
In 1972.
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Guy I went to high school with around ’75 was programming the school’s computer to play Monopoly. In BASIC, on a time-shared mainframe, using a teletype with paper tape for storage. Those were the days, my friend.
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Back in the ‘70s, I got tricked into lettering in baseball in high school by the coach, who used the lure of faculty-level access to MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (U of MN mainframe timeshare)) to get me to run his stats for him. (He’d seen me hanging out in the computer ‘lab’, yep, teletype, acoustic modem, paper tape for saving programs.) This snowballed into working as an equipment manager* for the team for two years, and voila – Letter.
*Don’t mess with the equipment manager. One word – Atomic Balm. Okay, two words . . .
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StoryTime, speaking of “Atomic” (and nothing fissile nor even ionizing…)
Once upon a time, I worked at a Post Office (I am feeling MUCH better now….) and I’d bring in a bag of some candy or other from to time and leave it on a cabinet in the scale room (bulk [“junk”] mail is weighed…). Red vines were common. Black got a “Who brought this black [$MANURE]?!” and one night I left a bag of ‘Atomic Fireballs’ there. That night I wasn’t on the dock, but ‘inside’ dealing with sorting and such.
Eventually I did wind up going out to the dock. Some yutz had grabbed a handful and popped them all into his maw. And the Expediter (dock supervisor) saw… and told him since was so greedy about it, he didn’t get to spit them out. So he endured… later he tried to holler at me about it. “The label was a big YELLOW and BLACK WARNING SIGN and the name is ‘ATOMIC FIREBALL’… what were you expecting, cool mint?” He was fuming. And maybe also still fuming – and getting ZERO sympathy from anyone. Any wound was, after all, self-inflicted.
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At one of my favorite jobs many years ago, a coworker gave me a handful of lemon candy. I knew him…I should’ve known…but like an idiot, I popped it all into my mouth at once.
Warheads.
Oh, how they all laughed. I did too. Just not right then.
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I had a factory job while putting myself through community College. Our lunch fridge was plagued by “the phantom muncher”. That (poop)ball would unwrap someone’s sandwich take a huge bite, and carefully re-wrap it.
Well this injun decided it was warpath time.
I made pretty good sandwiches. Mine frequently got hit. So…
I made the Sandwich of Doom. It looked like my usual roast beef. It contained Mount Vesuvius levels of Cayanne pepper and some other seasonings. It could have slagged The One Ring.
Wait for it… wait…
I heard the (muttersomething) screaming.
End of munching. End of just about any pranks.
Heh.
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Asimov mentioned this in one of his Books, one of the Robot detective ones, Robots of Dawn? and the unintended consequences. Everyone lived alone at home, they only socialized over the net. They couldn’t stand to be around other humans, agoraphobia taken to the extreme.
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The Naked Sun.
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See also “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forester.
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Philip Nowlan in, “The Airlords of Han,” (part of the original “Buck Rogers,” story) had the Han young men working from home, ordering goods and having them shipped to their apartments, and so on. The men with real power were the repair technicians.
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Clear back to 1909, that one.
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Plus City by Simak — the earlier stories.
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The Naked Sun
It was the world of Solaria, population 20,000
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And don’t forget the more hands-on variant of teleworking featured in Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo” (1950s?) — tele-operation, not just tele-programming etc. — which we might actually even see in, for instance, early-stage space industrialization Pretty Soon Now. (Humans and their life support systems can stay on Earth; non-automated machinery that has to be on-site in space, is. Obviously a “low latency” connection is something of a must.)
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First published in the August 1942 issue of Astounding, then paired with Magic, Inc. in 1950.
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Imagine a not-a-game where people trained to delay with a 1.25 or 2.5 second delay and did ANALYSE-WAIT-MOVE-WAIT-LOOK-REPEAT…. And when they get good enough, they do the REAL thing… Do they pay or are they paid, or is it just to get the “I HELPED BUILD THE MOONBASE” t-shirt?
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The Soviets put a remote-contol rover on the moon in 1969.
Minimum lag is about 2.5 seconds.
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With today’s internet, it’s possible to become what I call ‘a ten-minute expert’ in many small-ish subjects or aspects of subjects. It’s more like a couple of hours, really, but a motivated student can learn a lot in that time.
That’s not enough to actually do a Real Job, but it might be enough to get a job applicant in the door. And it is usually enough to discuss the topic without sounding like a complete buffoon. (Acknowledging the political component of resistance, such a possibility remains a great disappointment to me when ‘media’ reporters don’t do it for themselves.)
As already noted, also have to assess one’s sources for sanity.
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Fast Futures
…
Vin Deisel and crew in souped-up landspeeders?
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And endless repetitions of “family”, and none of the characters ever stays dead.
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Would watch!
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At least locally, the HVAC/plumbing/electrical contractors actively recruit kids who show the faintest hint of interest to apply for on the job training, which you are paid while doing.
When our new AC/furnace was put in, we had one full on guy and six trainees.
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Do your HVAC place only do retrofits and remodels?
None of the outfits available new my parents will do new construction because the state schedule paperwork (for what you are doing and why and how many windows you have and is it less than a certain percentage of your floor area) are a complete PITA.
I know, I tried to fill them out.
And the experienced guys don’t need them anyway, but, for some reason, probably EPA related, the state wants to know.
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I don’t know– it’s Golden Rule, in Iowa, they might have it listed? — the house is over a century old, and the furnace was from the 90s I think….
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That sounds like an energy efficiency thing, but no idea.
…didn’t the UK show how window taxes were dumbad?
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Probably an energy efficiency thing.
I don’t know if it counts as a tax… this was just for getting the permit.
But they managed to set things up so that if the design of your house meant that you couldn’t answer “yes” to all the questions on the starting questionnaire, none of the rest of the sheet would work.
It wasn’t even to determine if you could get a tax credit. It was purely to determine what kind of heating and cooling load your house would have, and to get the permit from the county, and they would not even considerthat you might have more glazing than was recommended.
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I know it’s not a real option, ALAS, but all such should be sent back with three words, or three letters: GFY!
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Not sent, back, precisely, but, well…
It is somewhat of an advantage to be building in a county where the permit lady at the building department will say, and I quote “You know, most people around here never bother to get the final inspection on their building permits.”
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Though these reasons are likely solid, and I’m sure there are a myriad of other contributing factors, there is a far, far simpler explanation that is simply inherent in human nature: class.
If the lower classes receive an education in any way comparable to the upper classes, what distinction remains to being upper class?
Maintaining status distinction (and staying on top of the social hierarchy) is why, for example, Russian nobility took on the absolutely insane task of speaking French in the 19th century. It kept them separate from the peasants (especially after those dirty wretches were freed.)
It’s part of why billionaires fund ugly art that nobody outside of the rich and academia recognizes as art. Any idiot can like something beautiful, but it takes real taste, distinction, and class to appreciate the ugly. That the hoi polloi detest it only makes it more attractive, because it maintains the status of the speshul peepul.
This desperate need to maintain status divisions, as much as anything else, explains the state of public education. Once you centralize control, the speshul peepul only have to sabotage one target, and the whole system is affected by it.
(And if you ever wonder why Affluent White Females — quite correctly termed AWFuls — are the way that they are, this same need to achieve, and then keep anyone else from achieving, their desperately coveted status.)
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Pa once summed up things with, “$TOWN[1] doesn’t HAVE a Society Class – it just has some people that pretend to it by drinking more expensive alcohol.” I suspect this is pretty much the case everywhere. They’s all hound dogs. The worth-a-damn ones are dawgs.
[1] $TOWN was not $HOOTERVILLE, but it hardly matters. Pretenders are interchangeable.
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And you’re quite probably right.
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What I find so instructive is the attitude changes some of those ‘Big Fish from Small Ponds’ get when they are confronted with the ‘Big Fish from Big Ponds’ . They are rarely if ever accepted and treated much like they treated the others back home in their little pond. Some “Small Pond Big Fish’ get angry and bitter, some have identity crisis they never recover from, others realize how much of an ass they were. The smart ones go back home and go fishing.
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buffs fingernails on his chest
Yeah. I often am.
:P
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I have an English degree. Just got it last year, in fact. (Should have gotten it about 2007-2008, but Circumstances.) Made the most of the continuing COVID lockdowns, could have gotten it earlier if there wasn’t this one class that was only being taught in the Spring semester.
I am a Technical Writer. Important job. Manuals have to be written. Documents have to be generated. All that kind of thing.
Had a job that was a transition from the internship I needed for my degree to a full-time job until the Monday after Thanksgiving.
So I went out looking. Didn’t think I would get a marketing job, because even copywriting was requiring a full-fledged Marketing degree these days.
What I found was…they wanted to hire somebody that a CS degree, an engineering degree, that kind of thing. And their job was to do a whole lot of other stuff, then “oh, we need a writer, too” and pay them writer (and not programmer or engineer) rates because the jobs were “writing” jobs.
I’ve got my second novel out. I’m writing the third and trying to figure out how to market it around things like Mom’s health issues and finding a job (because Dad needs me to find a job and not sit around at the computer for 12+ hours a day) and maybe even something fun…
(Trying to get a second series started. I think there’s space for good space opera with explosions and implied sex and the whole “strange new worlds” thing. And the issues of trying to map game mechanics into Reality.)
Much life going on.
I just wish it made more money.
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The big money apparently isn’t “strange new worlds” but new worlds of “strange”.
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There’s only so much strangeness I’m willing to indulge in before I start thinking I’m wearing hip waders in the cess pool.
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At least you have the hip waders.
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Don’t ask how I got them. I’m pretty sure I got all the blood stains out.
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Just tell em it’s fish blood, then again you’re an author, you’ll probably come up with a great story of how it’s really mulberry stains and involving a fight in a magical dimension where they are indestructible. Of course you win the prince/princesses heart just before being magicked back to earth.
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“I won the princess’s heart.”
“How?”
“…I had to carve it out of her chest because it was the only way to stop her from opening the portal to Hell that she had created.”
“That’s one damn rough isekei there.”
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Win, carve it out of her chest, just a question of semantics really….lol
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Keep on looking for that heart of gold….
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Yep. Giving kids a job is not on anyone’s program.
I’m just glad younger son has a job. Was touch and go for a while. Fingers crossed it continues and goes full time.
Seriously. It’s BAD out there. Particularly for the young.
Eh. We need good space opera. And I’ll help push.
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When I can get the writing done around everything that is going around here, I would be thankful for any help, Great Aunt.
And if there’s ever an anthology, you’re first on the list of people I’ll get in touch with.
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“Twenty years of schoolin’ – put him on the day shift”
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After the regional elections in Italy, PM Meloni is now bragging that there are no left-wing strongholds left in Italy.
^_^
Pride and falls, and all of that. But it’s good news, and backed by hard evidence from the round of elections.
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That is good news. Could use a lot more of that.
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If Milan isn’t a left stronghold…. whoa nelly.
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Apparently the elections all over Europe have ended up with strong right wing results, and by right wing I do mean “not Communist and not insane.”
And the Dutch have decided that they would like to continue eating farm livestock and crops, so no thank you to the left and the EU.
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I also saw an article at Hot Air yesterday that described how the truckers in Canada actually won. Apparently none of the anti-freedon legislation actually passed, the COVID rules were rolled back shortly afterwards, and the lefties lost some notable offices.
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Here you go….
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There’s still an issue, though. The new Dutch pro-farmer party only has a plurality, and not a majority. So it can’t form a majority government without getting members from other parties who are willing to tell the EU to take a long walk off of a short pier. Hopefully it can do so.
In any case, just getting those kinds of results – and for something that isn’t immigration-based – is a big deal.
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In six years, who knows. But apparently, yes, that’s correct right now.
Now if Meloni can just avoid getting tripped up by corruption scandals…
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It’s Europe. By definition its entire existence is a left wing stronghold.
Fools.
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No. They have their left and their right. NOT OURS, but their right is STRONGLY anti communist. This is good. Their other ideas are screwy.
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Claims to be anti-communist.
But since they believe all the same garbage and only disagree on a few minor doctrinal points I seen to reason to split hairs.
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No, honey. THINK. Having them be anti INTERNATIONAL socialism is good for us. It means they leave us the frig alone.
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Good for us doesn’t mean they are good.
If an ISIS 2.0 appeared which thought its only calling was to purge muslims that would be good for us. And they would still be horrendously evil.
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Okay, no. But as far as Europe goes, I’ll settle for “is not actively f*cking with other people”. Have you looked at the place? Put walls on it and call it a madhouse.
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I prefer the plan of moving America off world and then building an orbital defense network to keep anything else from escaping.
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Well, it’s one of my futures. If I figure out how to cross over, I’ll tell you.
Their spaceport has a giant statue of liberty and only pre-vetted people even have the coordinates.
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Escape from Europe? Even though they would need a new Snake Plisken.
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“And they would still be horrendously evil.”
Yes, but also, not our problem.
Which is the important part right now.
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eh, not really
We have a habit of making Sufficiently Bad People our problem.
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… well, there is that.
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Because it is easier to deal with an enemy fighting amongst itself than with a unified one?
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There’s a big difference between a man who fishes for sport and a man who fishes to eat.
The man who fishes for sport sits in his boat, or stands in his waders, and has one fancy pole and reel, He works one line in the water, casting and dragging and all that. The act itself is the sport.
The man who fishes to eat has six bamboo poles and sticks them in the bank at the corner of the river, baits them all and lets the current drag them. Then he goes and chops wood or gets a fire going to cook his fish on.
I’ve said it for a long time. The way to be financially secure is to have ‘multiple lines in the water.’ Sarah says multiple streams of income. Same thing.
And if one of them is a chance to grab the brass ring, all the better.
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“Or even after. Into which they now can’t herd employees at any price in the world.”
Well, unless you’re Elon Musk. And it’s interesting that he sees value in having people face to face.
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It is interesting. But he’s human and has blindspots.
Now, sales, and such, probably value. In software and most such? Oh, heck no.
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Rarely spoke to anyone in my former office. When I did it was because I overheard something where something needed to be said, as in “Um. You know … Right?” But I was never listened to anyway (so why be there?). Latter when it turned out I was correct saying “I said something”, would have been stupid (so why be there?).
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I’d argue that for most jobs, you need to be in person.
Why?
How do you know that somebody on that Zoom call isn’t recording everyone? And one day, when the political winds change that call gets leaked…
If you actually are bugging people in real life, HR will fire the guy doing the bugging first. And hard enough that they’ll bounce. But most companies require your Zoom calls to have your camera and mike on all the time-and that it will be recorded.
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Yeah, about all that. I left academia in part because it was no longer what I signed up to do. There was less and less discussion of ideas and more and more catering to current trends. Younger colleagues were well versed in the trends of the day. Liberal arts is now a means of indoctrination, not an introduction to the world of Western thought and philosophy. I agree with what Sarah and others have said above that there are topics and fields that do need instruction and discussion. And I would argue that the how-to of critical thinking is something that needs to be taught and discussed. Otherwise people read and swallow what they read without actual analysis of arguments etc.
I am saddened by the idea that the liberal arts are dying. I was raised in a house where discussion of all things was the norm and I went to college to further those discussions and to get an introduction to all sorts of fields and topics. I did my MA and PhD with those same underlying assumptions. And my academic career was dedicated to bringing those discussions into the classroom.
Hopefully, the liberal arts can return to what it once was. Meantime, I’ll be over here reading philosophy, history, and politics, and writing my urban fantasy and space operas.
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I miss the seminar discussions, where we batted around ideas on a theme. I miss the over-beer discussions of all sorts of things, with or without “adult” supervision. I miss access to the research materials and the huuuuuuuge library. I don’t miss the politics—departmental and otherwise, and having to bite my tongue and pretend that I was a lot more progressive (or Progressive) than I am.
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Same and same, to both of you. I never made it into academia as a career (wasn’t as suitable for me as I imagined going into grad school), but enjoyed being academic-adjacent for a long time. Until I very much didn’t. Nothing that I liked about it exists anymore.
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…the way they’ve become just one more avenue for continuing indoctrination and trying the whole Diversity Inclusion and Equity, which is and should be DIE because that’s what it is.
Yes. Or as I almost-wrote last Memeday, on the Peter Thiel remark (“It would be healthier that, whenever someone mentions DEI, you just think CCP”) — out of the 6 possibilities combinatorial math says exist, you should say DIE (because that’s what they want our past social and business and academic culture of tolerance and ‘marketplace of ideas’ to do), even though they say DEI (because, at least by my scarce and unreliable Latin, Div-Inc-Eq is truly a secularly-sacred fetish-istic thing ‘of God’ to them…)
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IED
a hidden destroyer of the unaware and the unwary.
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I know you mean/intend the Standard Definition of IED, as explained. BUT…
Since the idea seems to be to always have everyone ‘guilty’ of something so that something can be exploited against whoever…. Intrinsically Extortionist Deception also fits.
Thus: Woke (etc.) == Lying blackmailer
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I don’t think the entire blame for that can be placed on ‘whole word.’ There was a lot of ball-dropping between “the students will be taught that in following years” and “the students were taught that in previous years.” Also, a great deal of simply bad teaching – the ‘how to write a sentence/paragraph/essay’ equivalent of New Math, only with even less logic in the lessons.
‘Whole word’ did cause trouble in that it made students believe they had better vocabularies than they actually did, leading to crazed essay-like word salad, and to the sweating of blood when faced with actual vocabulary tests.
I remember 12th grade college-bound English from 45 years ago where the teacher (or someone) suddenly decided that there should be weekly vocabulary tests. I was the lucky guy who could look over the words given each week, confirm that they were at least nodding acquaintances if not old friends, and then breeze through the test a week later in five minutes. My classmates, in the meantime, sweated that blood – and we were all supposed to be the best students in the school. In fairness, I did have the same problems when it came to memorizing German vocabulary. My knowledge of German never reached that critical mass.
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Deutsch ist nich schweirg. It may cause a lot of swearing (or sound like a lot of swearing), but it’s not schwerig. [evil kitty grin]
Slavic languages make my brain hurt. Czech I can stumble through. Polish? Maaaaaybe. Russian? Nope!
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I’m more inclined to Mark Twain’s view of the German language. Although it may be a case of “All languages are hard, but some are harder than others.”
The Foreign Service Institute rates German as “Category II” for monolingual english speakers to learn – a step more difficult than “Category I” languages like French, Spanish, Dutch, or Swedish. It also rates your brain-hurting slavic languages as “Category IV”
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A Cat-4 Wordicane?
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I believe it. My impression was that Russian can’t decide if it is a Western language (odd alphabet but Greek-based and logical, and grammar that loosely approximates Latin or German) or an Asian language (vocal inflection of nouns determines grammatical function and gender.)
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It’s on the complicated side of Indo-European languages, but it’s well within normal bounds.
I expect that the older stuff is harder; but I was able to puzzle out some Old Slavonic when Roger Pearse wanted to know about some medieval Fathers translations available in that, and needed a general idea of some passages. Of course, orthodox Christian material is a cheatsheet of sorts, just like poetry of a standard kind. You can kinda see where you’re going.
I like Russian. It’s kinda cuddly (pronunciation problems aside), and Russian cursive is fun. I just wish the literature were happier.
OTOH, Greek is just heady. You can get pretty far with the basic basics, and it’s just so cool to find out so much of Western civilization with so little effort (compared to some other languages).
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Ohio State used to have some very exemplary audiotapes of native Russian speakers, and they encouraged summer program kids to make copies of the tapes and take them home.
Seriously, this is the main reason I have any understanding of Russian, because the textbooks STUNK and came from the USSR. Bleh. Even my dad who took Russian at DLI couldn’t make much of them.
We did have a Russian cursive workbook, which I think was also OSU-homegrown.
So I spent six weeks of summer doing self-study of Russian and talking back to my audiotapes, and then writing out stuff in Russian cursive to be turned into the professor. I stink at conversation but my pronunciation is decent, and I can read and write okayish.
(I stink at conversation in ALL my languages, which is unsurprising because I kinda stink at it in English. I need a “stereotypical small talk for dummies” audio set for everything.)
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Anyway… my point is that sometimes it’s easier to learn by ear first, and not worry too much. Nobody can panic if you start out with “Eto dom”, and you can save all your head hurty for trying to pronounce “Zdravstvuitye” instead of Hello.
(Okay, some programs start with teaching you “Privyet” for Hello, but that’s not the one we had to learn. Sheesh.)
15 ways to say Hello in Russian.
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I absolutely LOVED learning ancient Greek. Was so happy when I found out not only that the college taught it, but also that it met the foreign language requirement for my undergrad degree. It was a multifaceted experience that made my brain dance like Christmas lights. Ideas, history, literature, philosophy, all wrapped up with learning the vocabulary (I looove words) and grammar of the language.
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Me too. And it was my minor.
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Apache
The calvinball of human languages. It is utterly alien.
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I’ll point out that they’re still using whole word. They call them other things, but it’s whole word.
Both boys went to school reading, the school tried to break that. Was a fight. And writing… don’t get me started.
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Raises paw Truth. Punctuation, being consistent with tenses in essay writing, logical flow of ideas? Shaky at best, and I see the top of the top, aside from the home-schooled students.
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If Johnny can’t read, it’s hard for Johnny to read articles or stories; and that would make it hard to write, too.
OTOH, a lot of people might be getting their primary reading doses through audiobooks, in which case it might be easier for them to work an essay out orally, and then transfer it to paper.
That’s actually an older way to write and dictate, of course.
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The ‘Valley Girls’ are now grandmothers. That is the world we now live in.
The old man Fall’s down on beach full of paper straws, “Damn you Moon Unit Zappa”.
Curses at sky and shakes fist. Walks away mumbling about young people and sarcasm.
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“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. It isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. It’s that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” Thomas Sowell.
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Well, yes, that’s a problem too. OTOH, it makes thinking very powerful, if Johnny starts to do it.
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I remember the vocabulary homework that I remembered that we were supposed to do — two minutes before it was due.
I got an A on it.
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Had a conversation with my nephew, who said he doesn’t need to know how to write because he is going into programming. This was in the context of his programming teacher, who sent word salad to my sister and she spent way too much time trying to figure out what he was trying to say. The kid worshiped the teacher, and got very upset at the idea that he might be expected to frame a coherent sentence.
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