OT: College is a rip off

NO! Why do so many people seem to need simplistic explanations for things that they cannot control and/or understand? Most things that happen to people are the result of complex interactions of luck and their own actions. Accept that, work within that framework and you will be a calmer, happier, better person for it.

Reply to
Peter
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Like you? I don't think so. What is your field of expertise that qualifies you to advise the whole world on the "best" way to live life? My life experience is that people who cannot control themselves or understand what's going on are a special lot, and usually live in facilities near a strawberry farm.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Peter I am surprised that you feel that way. Of course people can control everything in the world. It's quite clear. Tony Robbins does it on an hourly basis.

People that can control everything don't have health problems, don't get divorced, don't have people they love get killed in car accidents or Iraq, can control the voting process, elections, large scale economic conditions, create money at will as necessary, and - my personal favorite - inherently know the strengths and pitfalls of all of their DNA (including the "junk" DNA that is largely stymieing the finest scientific brains in the world) and can easily avoid said pitfalls. Like dying. It's really trivial stuff for someone truly in control.

You are arguing with someone that believes he can control everything in his life, or is at least proclaiming such to bolster his world view. You know - delusional.

Believing that any person exists outside their environment, and is largely immune to it, is a specious argument.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

9 is (decimal) 10 states. zero is a number.
Reply to
gfretwell

I notice that you didn't answer the question.

Reply to
krw

Back in the day, my university didn't even offer a BS degree. However well intentioned, the result was that we all took FLUFF arts classes that provided the least diversion from our intended engineering path. I don't think that French classes and history classes added anything useful that I didn't already know from high school French and history.

Or maybe it was my first lesson in determining minimum requirements and setting priorities ;-)

Reply to
mike

Bingo!

I had to take 18 semester hours of Social Science and Humanities, including one sequence of each. I found a the sequence of "History of Engineering" and "Engineering in Contemporary Society" that fit the Social Sciences requirement. At least it was taught by a full professor of Engineering, rather than a hippy TA who got the short straw. It paid to study the course catalog. ;-)

Reply to
krw

If I want to represent TWO states, I only need ONE bit.

Reply to
gfretwell

But you're not representing only TWO states. You're representing the NUMBER TWO. There *IS* a difference.

...and you *STILL* haven't answered the question.

Reply to
krw

My daughter tried rattling my cage by telling me she had decided not to go to college, she wanted to be a plumber. I surprised her by telling her I was fine with that and then told her how much a good plumber could make.

Jimmie

Reply to
JIMMIE

Did you tell her that you'd front the $100K that the education would cost to set her up in business? ;-)

Reply to
krw

Once again, you are speaking in overly simplistic terms. A binary world: "cannot control themselves" versus can "control" themselves does not exist. I don't even think Ghandi was always able to "control" himself. There is an almost infinite spectrum between poor self-control and good self-control.

And, doesn't creativity require a certain amount of absence of self-control? The highly self-controlled person is not likely to think for himself because he is hard wired to be obedient to authority and is subliminally if not consciously fearful of how to respond if an unfamiliar situation is encountered. A good robot perhaps, but not a creative problem solver.

It is hard to engage you in dialogue because clearly you are HIGHLY self-controlled and can not imagine alternate positions to the ones you profess. You will accuse me of being equally set in my beliefs that contradict yours and we will get nowhere. Neither one of us will ever convince the other. I guess that's OK if we both share the belief that we should live and let live as long as we do not impose our beliefs on each other's space. However, if one of us believes that the other is so sick and misguided that the other doesn't deserve the autonomy to make a choice that really does not affect his space, that's when the real conflict arises.

Reply to
Peter

Thanks for the validation. Do you think Steve will get your sarcasm in the first paragraph of your reply immediately above? I suspect he will take it literally and interpret your reply as an endorsement of his position.

Reply to
Peter

That is the atithesis of "self" control - to be controlled by others - or even what others think - or what you think others think.

Reply to
clare

Number 2 daughter couldn't motivate herself to go to college. She did well enough at school, but didn't have a real vision for what she wanted to do or what she wanted to study, but she was fortunate enough to be offered a summer job in her second last year of school in the general insurance business. She enjoyed it and was offered part time work through her final year of high school - and full time work after graduation - and all of her tuition payed for any courses she took and passed while in their employ. She very quickly progressed through the training for her proffessional designations, and at age 26 was named assistant operations manager of one of the largest general insurance agencies in the tri-cities / golden triangle area. She owns her own home, drives a new car, and enjoys travelling and an active social life.

Number 1 daughter has/had a burning desire to study international development and make a difference in the world. She went to University for 4 years, spent the better part of a year in Southern Africa, came home and worked menial jobs, as well as a few short contracts with World Vision, went back to East Africa for 6 months, came back and did the menial jobs and short contracts again for a year and paid off all her student loans. She then went off to University again to get her Masters degree and is currently back in Eastern Agrica (Rwanda) doing research for her masters thesis. She's accumulating more debt, and has no assets - and is HOPING to get a job in her field.

As far as I'm concerned, BOTH have made good choices - and they are both happy with their lives.

Reply to
clare

Your "conflict" is imaginary. And judging by your fairy tale rhetoric, I can understand you must live in a highly imaginative state. Now buzz off.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Self control is another way of saying discipline, and something controlled is constrained. People in the military are normally thought to have a lot of discipline, a lot of self control and a lot of constraints.

Peter's premise, while overly broad, is still valid, as is yours. You're both just looking at it from the opposite ends of the tube.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

Actually I think it is more like, when the species is stressed it throws mutations and birds are born with all sorts of different beaks and other mutations. The ones that work best with the available food or other environmental factors survive and the rest die out.

Reply to
gfretwell

I reveled in jobs that others ran screaming from. Probably came from overconfidence after learning how to write pseudo-code and to break down seeminging impossibly complex systems into smaller modules. Fortunately, I was doing that at a time when processing power and storage kept increasing dramatically so I had a lot of hardware help taming projects with enormous data/processing requirements. That experience led to one of the longest employment periods of my life at a DoD think tank because they were converting mainframe systems to PC based ones and were pushing the limits of what PC's could do at the time. My experience with large data sets on itty-bitty PC's intrigued them.

FWIW, I was interviewed by five different people for the job, ranging from the ultimate gearhead to the forceably retired sub commander (the go-go dancers on the fantail guy) who was drinking lots of red wine during the interview (he had just had another heart attack and the MD's said it was good for him). (-: Fortunately, I could talk bits and bytes to the gearhead and philosophy to the humanists. I only found out ten years latter one of the humanists really pushed hard NOT to hire me, for reasons only she knows. I think it was because she thought I was gaming them because I had interviewed elsewhere and the other company kept matching and raising the offers I was getting from the think tank. Those were the days when you could not only get the first job you interviewed for, but every other job as well. It's certainly not like that today, so I know how much I have to be thankful for, being at the right place at the right time.

Our think tank had a strict rule about not hiring anyone without a degree as a research fellow. Even my boss couldn't get them to override it to bring someone in who he knew quite well from his old organization. That kid might have done very well but his head-hunter sabotaged him by sending in a resume riddled with errors. It wasn't until a few years later that I saw the kid's actual resume and it was error-free. Never figured out how that happened or why . . .

Back then, having a verifiable resume that proved you could actually do the work was worth WAY more than having a degree that said "trained up but not proven" in essence. Especially to a company that hired a kid right out of school who just couldn't hack life in the real world.

Feydor would be proud.

Will, too. Or was it Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford? We'll never know. Having a broad knowledgebase means that you can interact with a wide range of people and those interactions sometimes make the difference in getting a job.

People skills. Lots of folks develop them without any need for education in the humanities.

I can't recall taking anything away from the interviewing course. I, too, was rammed through a writing course. This time my inclusion was explained by telling me that we have some foreign-born analysts who would feel bad about being singled out for writing courses. That one was OK because I wasn't under time pressure for a deliverable. I got to know a co-worker PhD from the U. of Bologna in math who cracked me up because she confused the words "asshole" and "hassle" with pretty seriously comedic results.

Lots of my work was classified and is either sitting in a safe somewhere or has long ago been shredded and erased. I know what you're saying. I think if I had been born 30 years later, I might have been an architect but my initial experience with Rapidograph pens and vellum at Brooklyn Tech was not good. CAD/CAM would have suited me better.

Rolling out one system required the inclusion of a daily "Your Momma" joke generator to overcome the persistent niggling of one of the end users. She was the Goldilocks type, except no chair was the right size for her. Making the system seem even a little bit human turned out to reduce the griping substantially. Apparently Apple believes so, too, because they've done quite a bit to make their new Siri voice-recognition software humorous.

Reply to
Robert Green

Sometimes the odd shift dramatically in the player's favor. That's the basis for card-counting at blackjack. In the main, however, I believe your observation to be correct.

Reply to
HeyBub

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