OT: College is a rip off

[Kurt Ullman]

Of course he never said that, although you do outline the decaying of SOCIETY rather succinctly.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

And "parents do not have time to spend with the kids" is often because there is only one parent (usually the mother, because the father ran out on her), who is working two part-time jobs with no benefits just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Perce

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Jay Leno's "Street Walking" segment last night (could have been a repeat) interviewed some US-born young people whose ignorance was appalling. One young woman initially said there was only one Senator and two Supreme Court Justices, and could not name a country adjoining the USA! The other two whose interviews he showed weren't much better.

Perce

[HeyBub]

Uh, yeah.

After Katrina, a number of folks got relocated to Salt Lake City, Wichita, Reno, and other places without a tradition of living off the dole for generations. The common refrain was: "All I gots to do is stand behind the counter and make Slurpees? And I gets PAID for it? Damn! Dat's cool!"

[Han]

"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote in news:j7kgv1$epa$1 @dont-email.me:

Maybe Jeopardy should be compulsory viewing and listening, with a quiz afterwards ...

[Han]

"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote in news:j7kgi4$bo9$1 @dont-email.me:

They have an excuse. Too many don't have that.

[Han]

Kurt Ullman wrote in news:Zcadnco-hoKuWQDTnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

Nevertheless, if I have to believe my son-in-law, who teaches math in a paterson, NJ high school, some (more than you'd think) of even those kids seem to long for learning if it is presented with sufficient comprehension oif their situations. Two of his favorite T-shirts are "Sarcasm, just another service we offer" and "There are only 10 people who understand binary, those who do, and those who don't" (or something like that).

[gfretwell]

The T shirt is actually "... 10 kinds of people..." but if it was really accurate it would be "1" since 2 bits represents

4 states.

[Steve B]

WOW! Are you psychic, or just psychotic? Change a few words here and there, and that's me. My Mom ran off with a truck driver, leaving Dad to raise my sis and me in a 8 x 35 "trailer". Now they call them "manufactured homes". Dad was okay when he wasn't working, down at the bar, or somewhere we didn't know where he was.

I had two great role models. I knew what I DIDN'T want to grow up to be like.

Funny, but I believe there are many millionaires, billionaires, or just plain "rich folks", as Barry bigotedry calls them, who came from situations you describe. Even poor little Barry himself raised himself out of the gutters of Kenya to his current position.

Getting shorted or abused or abandoned or neglected in your life isn't license to think mankind owes you big time. 1 out of 2 females is sexually abused in their life. 1 in 3 males. A high percent are neglected or abandoned, or are throw aways, their parents not caring when they leave home, just welcome the relief from the responsibility. So any time you get together with 99 other people, it would be difficult to find the Beaver Cleaver in the group.

People are not responsible for their circumstances. They are responsible for how they react to them, and the choices they make for themselves.

Or, they could just become a liberal.

Steve

[Steve B]

In the future, I would dearly appreciate it if you snipped more accurately, and answer each person individually. You have responded to two posts, and rolled them into one, and answered it rather vaguely.

Outcome based education, I'd guess.

Steve

[aemeijers]

On 10/18/2011 1:38 PM, Peter wrote: (snip)

And that is the conundrum. I'd rather stupid people didn't vote, but I don't trust the government, or anyone employed by them, to decide who is and is not stupid.

[RicodJour]

Do you think that they'd air the interview where the person was pointing out that the question was ambiguous or in error, and Leno was using the English language incorrectly?

Stupid sells on television. It makes some viewers feel superior. It makes me feel like smacking the people responsible for the programming.

R

[RicodJour]

You're joking right? There's nothing remotely vague about Peter's reply. He didn't snip anything at all, so there's no lack of accuracy in it. Your initial line was quoted as Han's reply would not have made sense without it.

BTW, the definition of a decaying society is what an aging person thinks of its current manifestation as seen through the haze of nostalgia.

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

-- Socrates

R

[Ed Pawlowski]

Amazing how many of those kids do well and prosper when they want to. Tough to do, but they do it.

[RickH]

What would make sense is... "there are only 01 people that understand binary, those that do, and those that dont."

[Robert Green]

The late Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's, was an orphan who not only became a millionaire, but donated a great deal of time and money to causes concerning orphans and abandoned children. People like you and Dave can break the cycle, but I think it takes an exceptional person to start with. Most people from bad or broken families just recreate the abysmal circumstances of their youth. Children of drunkards and drug abusers never get an even break from the day they are born because they suffer developmental issues from being exposed to drugs and alcohol in the womb.

Again I thank God that I was born to fairly normal middle class parents who only occasionally tried to kill each other. (-"

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

When I became a systems analyst, some of the most helpful courses I took turned out to be sociology and psychology. Doing requirements analysis requires understanding how people interact. Creating a successful system means learning how to listen to people, understanding what bothers them, how they go about doing their jobs, etc. My undergraduate degree in journalism was also very helpful in figuring out what questions to ask and in writing up specs.

When I left the newspaper business and went back to college I started out as a programmer but quickly moved up because systems analysis requires a lot of soft people skills that too many coders just don't have. Something I heard constantly from clients was "you make this stuff understandable." Most coders that did nothing but code just couldn't communicate with the people they were building systems for and they tended to build systems and add features that pleased THEM and not the clients and end users. When I got the chance to visit Borland way back when, Phillipe Kahn said much the same thing. He looked for programmers that were not characters like you see on the "Big Bang" but that had a well-rounded intelligence.

-- Bobby G.

[Kurt Ullman]

The problem with that is that I haven't seen any indications that the state systems are any better. Multiple foster families, being carted around place to place.

But there in lies the rub, to my mind. Good environments in the System are very rare, at least from my experience in dealing with them.

[Kurt Ullman]

From my experience, probably not a lot different. These are the people who would have thought that Prozac (or antipsychotics) took away the best of them and would have been very non-compliant. You might have a lost a painting or two, but probably not all that much.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Most of the questions were taken from (or based on) the pool that applicants for citizenship are expected to be able to answer. In fact there is no question about a country adjoining the USA, but it's truly mind-boggling that a person born and educated in the USA would not know the answer. When pressed, the young woman answered "Europe," but then said, "Oh no, that's a continent, isn't it?"

The citizenship test asks why the flag has 50 stars. Jay asked her how many stars the flag has, and she answered "53, one for each state."

At one point she told Jay, "I thought you said this was going to be fun."

BTW, I think I got the name of the segment wrong: I think it's "Jay Walking."

Perce