U.S. Politics 2016: "You Suck!!!" "No, you Suck!!!"

[Swordfish]

Just now, MerenthaClone said:

Yeah, history and psychology are utterly worthless and nobody should ever look at those.  I certainly hate having an ethicist on staff at my hospital, or social workers because I never get a use from them either.   You're on a goddamn book forum decrying the value of literature, for fuck's sake.  I want to help pay for art and film and history and whatever-the-fuck-else "pointless" degree someone wants to get because I like living in a society that isn't populated entirely by STEMlords who masturbate over how much productivity they made for their employer today because they have absolutely nothing else of value in their bleak lives.  

Combating offensive generalizations with other offensive generalizations?

Not particularly persuasive.  One could make the argument that it's exactly the opposite, on a message board likely populated with many STEM professionals.

[MerenthaClone]

1 minute ago, Swordfish said:

Combating offensive generalizations with other offensive generalizations?

Not particularly persuasive.  One could make the argument that it's exactly the opposite, on a message board likely populated with many STEM professionals.

Very clearly not saying that all STEM professionals are as described, given that depending on where you count nursing and/or nurse practitioners, I am one.  Just pointing out that ascribing the entire value of a degree to its productivity is shortsighted as all hell.  

[LongRider]

Wouldn't this education package include vocational ed for those whom would rather study HVAC, Law Enforcement, or many, many other areas of study that aren't a university degree?  A great public education through high school and then a good voc. school would be useful to many.

[Swordfish]

5 minutes ago, MerenthaClone said:

Very clearly not saying that all STEM professionals are as described, given that depending on where you count nursing and/or nurse practitioners, I am one.   

I don't think that is particularly clear, but I get where you are coming from.

Quote

Just pointing out that ascribing the entire value of a degree to its productivity is shortsighted as all hell.

On this we agree.  I do wonder though if those benefits require an entire course of study, or whether there isn't a 'best of both worlds' solution here somewhere, in terms of publicly funded education.

[Castel]

10 minutes ago, Ormond said:

Do campaign managers typically get (or even want) to become Cabinet members? 

That's certainly not what happened with either David Plouffe or JIm Messina, the managers of Obama's two presidential campaigns. People who  enjoy being campaign managers would, I think, rather have titles like Presidential Advisor and White House Chief of Staff than be stuck actually having to manage a governmental department as Cabinet secretaries do. 

Not sure what the deal is. Apparently intrepid reporter Joe Scarbrough is reporting that she did in fact have a position she wanted, she just isn't getting it. What that means -whether it's been taken or it hasn't been given to her yet, or if it's even as a secretary (and not some open role in the WH along with Bannon) -is unknown.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 minute ago, Swordfish said:

I don't think that is particularly clear, but I get where you are coming from.

On this we agree.  I do wonder though if those benefits require an entire course of study, or whether there isn't a 'best of both worlds' solution here somewhere, in terms of publicly funded education.

This - totally agree with this.  There is some middle ground here that will more efficiently use public resources.  We already dedicate, very inefficiently, a lot of public resources to public university level education.  Would rather have a more rationalized system and, honestly, first fix primary and pre-primary education.

[Ormond]

7 minutes ago, LongRider said:

Wouldn't this education package include vocational ed for those whom would rather study HVAC, Law Enforcement, or many, many other areas of study that aren't a university degree?  A great public education through high school and then a good voc. school would be useful to many.

If HVAC is "heating, ventilation, and air conditioning", that would be a non-university degree. However, there are a great many university degrees in Law Enforcement (or Criminal Justice) around these days and I think it helps one to get promoted in many police departments to have a B.A. -- if not directly in Criminal Justice, in something like Psychology or Sociology. 

[Rippounet]

7 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

I think some people do actually enjoy this kind of lifestyle, and more power to them. My SO is one of them. She would gladly spend her life as a full time student if it were free.

I think we got a little high centered on the concept of 'fundamental human right', which was probably not the best approach, but the point is still worth discussion, because the line must be drawn somewhere.

Yes, I guess it must. But it's not easy.

I'd say everyone should have the opportunity to get one degree. It would be up to each individual to choose what kind of degree they want (with what it entails), and of course, they would need to get said degree within a specific number of years. Once they get that one degree, if they want to continue as a student, they'd have to pay for it.

7 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

What does the competitive exam you mention consist of?  Is this essentially a requirement of entry into a program?

It depends what degree you're aiming for. I could give specific examples from my country, but they wouldn't necessarily be all that relevant because all systems have their weaknesses and this has been a subject of debate in the last decades for plenty of logistical reasons.
For some studies the selection happens very early (here, med' students face a competitive exam in their very first year for example), and sometimes the selection occurs for actual training or post-graduate programs. Sometimes it's both (here med' students face another competitive exam to specialize in their sixth year, so only the very best can become surgeons for instance).
Undergraduate programs are more selective than they look too: although technically anyone who has completed high school can enter university, less than half of the students (on average) get their Bachelor's degree. Needless to say, vocational training is always an alternative.

1 minute ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

If you want to study liberal arts or some similar field that's your right, but then you better be independently wealthy, or be willing to starve. But my tax money should not be supporting your lifestyle choice. It is fundamentally unfair.

This is the kind of reasoning that's part of the problem.
First, it's not a "lifestyle." Liberal arts degrees serve many purposes. As @Mlle. Zabzie just said, they do make one employable ; but they also have value for society as a whole, which is pretty much impossible to quantify. In the grand scheme of things, a society thrives through culture and art just as much as it does through technology or commerce. And you never know where the next breakthrough in human progress is going to come from ; technological progress has little value without perspective on the human condition. If you don't want humanity to stupidly self-destroy at some point in the near-future you need historians and philosophers as much as physicists and biologists.
Secondly, it's not "your" tax money versus "their" choice. If the system gives greater opportunity to everyone, then it means you and everyone around you get the same opportunities. You're also paying for your children and grandchildren's futures.
But lastly, it's all about principle. What is the purpose of any society, of any system of government? If it's just about individual survival, then indeed your tax money should only be financing stuff you directly benefit from (and government almost becomes unnecessary). But if society is meant to advance humanity as a whole, to create (or maintain) genuine progress through the betterment of all, then education is an end in itself. The main difference being that in the second case we are not competing with one another but cooperating for the greater good.
It's all about what kind of world you want to live in. If everyone is only working for themselves, then education can only be ultilitarian ; if you also want to work for your nation, for your civilisation, or for your species, then education has a much greater purpose and those who dismiss it do so at their own peril.
 

[Week]

10 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

This - totally agree with this.  There is some middle ground here that will more efficiently use public resources.  We already dedicate, very inefficiently, a lot of public resources to public university level education.  Would rather have a more rationalized system and, honestly, first fix primary and pre-primary education.

This, one hundred times over.

[Kalbear]

I, personally, would much rather live in a very well-educated culture than one that is entirely devoted to giving people a skill that they can use in their job.

Which would seem to be obvious given that we're having a conversation about it on a website devoted to dragons and boobs. Unless Free Northman Reborn's job is to type on a website about dragons and boobs, I'd say that's a wee bit hypocritical. 

[LongRider]

4 minutes ago, Ormond said:

If HVAC is "heating, ventilation, and air conditioning", that would be a non-university degree. However, there are a great many university degrees in Law Enforcement (or Criminal Justice) around these days and I think it helps one to get promoted in many police departments to have a B.A. -- if not directly in Criminal Justice, in something like Psychology or Sociology. 

Yes, HVAC is as you said, and what I mean is like POST for law enforcement which is what many cops use as their training to become cops.  I don't mean that law enforcement shouldn't be studied at a uni level, I'm just wondering if voc ed would be part of the 'free' ed too.  IIRC, the many issues with for profit colleges are voc colleges way, way overcharging for voc certificates and became real ripoffs for students.  Certainly an area of concern for people who don't choose to go onto secondary education otherwise.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I, personally, would much rather live in a very well-educated culture than one that is entirely devoted to giving people a skill that they can use in their job.

Which would seem to be obvious given that we're having a conversation about it on a website devoted to dragons and boobs. Unless Free Northman Reborn's job is to type on a website about dragons and boobs, I'd say that's a wee bit hypocritical. 

I WANT THAT FUCKING JERB!

[Kalbear]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I WANT THAT FUCKING JERB!

Talk to @Ran about it then. I think you can apply. 

[Altherion]

24 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

First, it's not a "lifestyle."

It certainly is a lifestyle choice. I have a second cousin who makes his living fixing cars. Nobody gave him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn his trade. Why should his taxes subsidize the tuition of somebody who wants to go to university?

30 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Secondly, it's not "your" tax money versus "their" choice. If the system gives greater opportunity to everyone, then it means you and everyone around you get the same opportunities. You're also paying for your children and grandchildren's futures.

But what if you either aren't interested in that particular path or not well suited to it? Let's face it, not everybody is academically talented. Why should that option be given public funding when a variety of others are not?

33 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

But if society is meant to advance humanity as a whole, to create (or maintain) genuine progress through the betterment of all, then education is an end in itself.

In principle, yes, but in practice... it's very difficult to evaluate how well the American tertiary education system does this. There is a massive variety of schools ranging from the internationally renowned to "party schools" to community colleges to for-profit outfits such as Trump University. There is nothing even vaguely resembling a universal curriculum; different schools offer different courses and even the same course (e.g. Philosophy 101) is not guaranteed to mean the same thing depending on the school or even the professor. Furthermore, even within a single school, money is spend on activities ranging from cutting-edge research to "safe spaces" (rooms with Play-Doh and toys appropriate to primary school).

Some of this hodgepodge clearly advances humanity as a whole, some of it clearly does not and with some (probably the majority), it is hard to tell. Good luck figuring out which is which and to what extent each should be subsidized.

[Rippounet]

26 minutes ago, Altherion said:

It certainly is a lifestyle choice. I have a second cousin who makes his living fixing cars. Nobody gave him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn his trade.

Sad to hear it. In many European countries his training as a mechanic would have been provided for. Then he might have qualified for a specific interest-free loan to set up shop and/or a significant tax discount for his first years as a professional. In my oh-so-socialist country, some entrepreneurs even get paid a salary for the first two years of starting a business (not everyone knows that, even here ).

Edit: one of my cousins is a mechanic.

By the way, how much did the bailout of the American automobile industry cost already?

26 minutes ago, Altherion said:

But what if you either aren't interested in that particular path or not well suited to it? Let's face it, not everybody is academically talented. Why should that option be given public funding when a variety of others are not?

Who said the others were not  -or should not be?

26 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Some of this hodgepodge clearly advances humanity as a whole, some of it clearly does not and with some (probably the majority), it is hard to tell. Good luck figuring out which is which and to what extent each should be subsidized.

That's... Kind of my point.

[MerenthaClone]

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

It certainly is a lifestyle choice. I have a second cousin who makes his living fixing cars. Nobody gave him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn his trade. Why should his taxes subsidize the tuition of somebody who wants to go to university?

Because he is part of a society and should help improve that society through the fruits of his labors, both directly and indirectly?  And, for that matter, why are we starting with the assumption that your second cousin's life experience is our baseline?  Why aren't we decrying that his trade school wasn't subsidized as well?  Or his start-up costs?  Why just start at a baseline convenient to you and say "well he didn't get anything (besides the benefits of a society that, you know, prevent someone from just breaking his knees for not paying protection money, that guarantee the value of the money that he's paid in, that standardize 9/16cm wrenches to adequate precisions, that provide him courts to get legal redress should someone not pay, and that educated him to a minimum level)" and ignore all the people who got less?  

And, for that matter, what is useful to learn now and what will be useful to have experts around in the future is pretty vague.  For that reason alone I'm not in favor of limiting what higher education we subsidize because life isn't a Civ tech tree.  

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

 

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

This election was not, in any reasonable way, about the issues. 

Clinton's campaign was very big on giving a lot of people regardless of background major benefits and help. Her pre-K schooling benefits everyone, for instance. Her paid family leave benefits everyone. Her medical care expansion helps everyone. If the message was that these were things that were only going to help certain people or going to help minorities, I think that is either a bad misinterpretation or (more likely) that the policy views were never well-articulated in favor of attacking the other candidate and making it all about personality.

This election drove it very clearly that policy issues have nothing to do with how people as a whole vote. Otherwise, why would so many middle-class families vote for a tax increase to themselves so that rich people could get an insanely large tax cut? Why would so many vote to remove their medical coverage? 

That's true, but I think Democrats may have been a little been blind about the types of policies that may appeal to the rural working class. They see their communities slowly withering, while good jobs disappear. The Democratic response is to offer more social spending. The thing is, to put it crudely, they want jobs and revitalized local economies, not welfare. I believe that the vast majority of people would rather not be on welfare, and Democrats are perfectly capable of recognizing this in other contexts.

4 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

This is an excellent point.  With all the focus on higher education, there has not been enough focus on primary education and the fact that it is failing so many students.  Truly to give all access to good outcomes, the educational parity needs to start at the nursery/pre-K level.  (In case it isn't clear, let me be explicit, I am totally FOR universal pre-K, and would expand to nursery).  Even high performing students at less advantaged schools won't end up with the same outcomes because they don't have the same access to opportunity - many haven't even heard of, e.g., small liberal arts colleges that would love to give them money.  Ironically, a low income person could probably go for free to the best universities in the country, but they don't even know to apply.

I actually am a firm believer in a liberal arts education.  I have one.  That said, it isn't for everyone, and it is sold as such in the US.  We don't ahve a balance of educational opportunities for students and students don't know what opportunities are available.

Why, may I ask? It seems like the evidence for the effectiveness of pre-k programs is mixed.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/does-pre-k-work-it-depends-how-picky-you-are/

https://www.brookings.edu/research/we-need-more-evidence-in-order-to-create-effective-pre-k-programs/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/does-pre-k-make-any-difference.html

That last one notes that programs in NJ and Boston worked better, but were pretty expensive.

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

It certainly is a lifestyle choice. I have a second cousin who makes his living fixing cars. Nobody gave him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn his trade. Why should his taxes subsidize the tuition of somebody who wants to go to university?

But what if you either aren't interested in that particular path or not well suited to it? Let's face it, not everybody is academically talented. Why should that option be given public funding when a variety of others are not?

In principle, yes, but in practice... it's very difficult to evaluate how well the American tertiary education system does this. There is a massive variety of schools ranging from the internationally renowned to "party schools" to community colleges to for-profit outfits such as Trump University. There is nothing even vaguely resembling a universal curriculum; different schools offer different courses and even the same course (e.g. Philosophy 101) is not guaranteed to mean the same thing depending on the school or even the professor. Furthermore, even within a single school, money is spend on activities ranging from cutting-edge research to "safe spaces" (rooms with Play-Doh and toys appropriate to primary school).

Some of this hodgepodge clearly advances humanity as a whole, some of it clearly does not and with some (probably the majority), it is hard to tell. Good luck figuring out which is which and to what extent each should be subsidized.

To nitpick, Trump University wasn't (isn't?) a for-profit college along the lines of DeVry or ITT Tech. It was way shadier than that. Those at least offered students a path to some sort of accredited degree, even if they were stuctured so that most students never achieved said degree and the overstated the value in their advertising.

Trump University, on the other hand, was just a way to slap Trump names on a bunch of overpriced real estate "seminars." Students attended cheap or free seminars offering real estate advice which in actuality were nothing but sessions aggressively selling higher priced seminars. This kept going for several levels, bilking marks for upwards of seventy thousand dollars, but never offering any substantive education.

One thing to note is that while this is obviously a scam, it's not illegal. I know of several programs that do pretty much the same thing and are still operating. What got Trump University in trouble was the word "University"

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Who said the others were not  -or should not be?

16 minutes ago, MerenthaClone said:

And, for that matter, why are we starting with the assumption that your second cousin's life experience is our baseline?  Why aren't we decrying that his trade school wasn't subsidized as well?  Or his start-up costs?

Extending the range of activities that is subsidized makes the proposal more fair, but it also makes it less feasible: where is the money for all of this going to come from? If you can convince the 1% to share the wealth, then I would agree with you -- but it is much more likely that this will come from the poor and middle class.

[all swedes are racist]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

Extending the range of activities that is subsidized makes the proposal more fair, but it also makes it less feasible: where is the money for all of this going to come from? If you can convince the 1% to share the wealth, then I would agree with you -- but it is much more likely that this will come from the poor and middle class.

But t would it not also generally benefit the poor and middle class as well?

[felice]

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

If you can convince the 1% to share the wealth, then I would agree with you

Why should the 1% be given any choice in the matter? The 99% don't get to choose how much tax they pay.