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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Just think if we had cheap job training, licensing and college education again. Oh to be able to pay for tuition with a part time job.
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On November 21 2017 10:45 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 09:57 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 21 2017 08:14 Danglars wrote:On November 21 2017 07:40 Gahlo wrote:On November 21 2017 07:30 TheTenthDoc wrote:Speaking of education, the other day I was shown some absurdly long Twitch (or maybe Youtube) ad about how current school curricula are "anti-boy" and that there's a "war on boys" (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFpYj0E-yb4). I'd never heard of PragerU, but apparently it's built around 5-minute conservative pseudo-TED talks. I freely admit I skipped after like a minute when they said normal boys are treated like defective girls in school. An interesting view into what analytics have decided constitutes a good ad for me, I guess? Anecodtal, but with what I had to go through I can't help but at least give the idea consideration. Maybe "war on boys" and "defective girls" is harsh language for the situation though. To the extent that wild labels should prompt reactive disbelief, sure, an actual "war on boys" isn't useful to start out looking why they do worse in elementary and secondary education. When you look at the topics in isolation, like overprescription of ADHD drugs, or reactions to typical young male behavior like engaging in mock fights and finger pistols, or recess time alotted, or reading books shown, I think you can make the case that there's a lot of harm being done. Especially in today's era where everybody has heightened awareness of little things having big effects. Seems interesting that when the right uses an arbitrary (and patently ridiculous) label, you try to parse out the nuanced meaning of it, whereas whenever the left does it, you slam it as gross generalizations, identity politics, etc. etc. Is this true as a general statement? STEM is a pretty broad class, there are probably some subfields where there aren't enough jobs to go around. For instance it wouldn't surprise me if theoretical physics was such a field. But is it generally true for STEM as a whole? No. It's much more complicated. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htmSTEM is such a broad category that you can't really talk about it as a single entity. There are a surplus of Ph.D's in most science fields, but a lack of them in certain areas of the private sector. Conversely, there's a high need for bachelor's level STEM education in fields like software development, but much less needs in other areas of science/math. "War on boys" isn't some generic right term. It's a culture term. It cuts across both political camps. Now if you think the academic success and social development of our youngsters is a politically charged topic, I pity you.
Well, there's definitely a political angle to it that can be defined as socially progressive and conservative, and you're playing into that angle by using the terms that you do which causes the reaction that you quoted. There's also undoubtedly a group of people who are also playing into that angle (apparently through ads - I wouldn't know, I avoid ads like the plague and certainly haven't seen any referring to "war on boys") probably in an effort to win votes? Anyway, this issue clearly cannot be completely removed from politics.
You're absolutely hypocritical in the way you denounce the progressive left-wing for generalization and identity politics while doing the very same thing when arguing on behalf of the conservative right-wing on social matters.
On November 21 2017 09:19 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 08:59 a_flayer wrote:On November 21 2017 08:55 zlefin wrote:
the overuse of adhd labelling started quite awhile before the so-called SJW stuff was kicking in; they're not really related iirc. It's all connected mate. People were being SJW-esque before the term was commonly used. Its certainly not exclusively the problem in overzealous ADHD diagnoses, of course, but it makes sense as being part of the lead-up to the fervent SJW culture that exists today in schools. Although I think that culture is on the decline now - I can't imagine Trump getting elected without that being the case lol. I don't think pharmaceutical companies are SJWs... Show nested quote +The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable.
Profits for the A.D.H.D. drug industry have soared. Sales of stimulant medication in 2012 were nearly $9 billion, more than five times the $1.7 billion a decade before, according to the data company IMS Health.
Behind that growth has been drug company marketing that has stretched the image of classic A.D.H.D. to include relatively normal behavior like carelessness and impatience, and has often overstated the pills’ benefits. Advertising on television and in popular magazines like People and Good Housekeeping has cast common childhood forgetfulness and poor grades as grounds for medication that, among other benefits, can result in “schoolwork that matches his intelligence” and ease family tension.
A 2002 ad for Adderall showed a mother playing with her son and saying, “Thanks for taking out the garbage.”
Sources of information that would seem neutral also delivered messages from the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors paid by drug companies have published research and delivered presentations that encourage physicians to make diagnoses more often that discredit growing concerns about overdiagnosis.
Source
Undoubtedly the pharmaceutical industry carries a large amount of responsibility for pushing drugs on people. There is no denying that.
But remember how part of the conservative argument is that 'Hollywood' is agenda-pushing SJW, etc, blah blah blah? Well, extend that to the whole of television - including the ad breaks. Companies see a social change in how people perceive genders and piggy back on it in an effort to capitalize on it. Sort of the same way how those Guy Fawkes masks are marketed and sold to anti-capitalist protesters.
Eventually, there's advertisements on TV that tell parents their boys that are rowdy are ill and must be treated. These ads are setup in such a way to push the perception of people further towards that idea that there must be no difference between the genders (on top of the more natural change in perception of genders) because if they do that, then that means they make more money. And it is not that they deliberately push the perception of genders further into a specific corner, but that's just how the ads turn out to be the most effective (and they work hard to make them effective - inevitably delivering the underlying message that the boys need to be calmer, which turns out to be sort of like the girls).
Suddenly you get people like TheTenthDoc who say it is social indoctrination that boys are more rowdy/aggressive than girls. Which is - in my opinion - foolish and goes against plenty of research that says otherwise (edit: I see now he has retracted it). Or that girls lean more towards nurturing and social professions as a result of social indoctrination rather than having some level of naturally inclined behavior (and just to make it absolutely clear, I'm talking like 40/60 or 30/70 splits, it's not a 100% thing one way or another).
I'm not saying it is exclusively an SJW thing + Show Spoiler +Which is now also a term that can't be used one way or another without people judging you for it, as has been made evident in this thread by doomdonker - honestly it becomes frustrating to attempt to communicate with these kinds of judgments. The term 'SJW' may not have been around much in the 90s, but social perception of genders has been changing for a long time - I mean did we forget about the 60s? This is a continuous thing and it's not as if it suddenly just stops
So this social indoctrination could be considered part of the natural process of things, rather than something artificial that must be eliminated. Of course, on the opposite side, I would say that the ads are the artificial construct that pushes an agenda. And then, as a response to companies pushing agendas, you get socially conservative people who become upset at what they perceive as unnatural agenda pushing. I think there is absolutely some level of legitimacy to their perceptions.
What you can't (or perhaps shouldn't) do is take the conservative political agenda-driven ads and argue against them as a form of strawman, as those ads are designed specifically to attempt to induce certain perceptions (the term "war on boys" is clearly an exaggeration to begin with, no doubt dramatic music and dark imagery is used to emphasize the point and create an emotional response in the viewer) in much the same way that corporations push their agendas and Russia attempts to capitalize on people's perceptions to push their agenda (in terms of how they are perceived, not why they are designed in that way or how they are designed).
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On November 21 2017 08:11 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 07:37 ticklishmusic wrote:On November 21 2017 07:09 doomdonker wrote:On November 21 2017 06:55 ticklishmusic wrote:
My sense is that in some of the humanities it's possible to slide by somehow, while in STEM things tend to be a little more metric driven with grades corresponding pretty well to future career performance. The example I go back to is this kid I knew who majored in music performance. He somehow graduated with honors, but his violin playing was pretty garbage (I played violin for 10+ years, so I felt reasonably qualified to make that judgement). I guess there's a reason he didn't go to Julliard or some other conservatory, though.
This is fully acknowledging that there is certainly plenty of coursework in the humanities which is really fucking rigorous, especially to someone with minimal training in social science writing and research. In secondary school, that's definitely not really true. You can grind through the sciences through pure ROTE learning and paying for a whole book of practice questions. Eventually, you'll see a question you've seen before and you can spit it out verbatim. I got over 40 in specialist mathematics (top 9% in the state) but I couldn't do shit in university Calculus 201 for that reason. I didn't actually learn how to learn until university and I'm still pretty terrible at mathematics, despite being an engineer by trade. In fact, some of the schools obsessed with metric results will do exactly that and it completely hampers the future development of all students who teach by this method. They rush through the curriculum, because secondary school can seem extremely slow, and spend the second half of the year feeding practice exams to students. I think this is mostly a Commonwealth nation thing however. I was referring to higher ed/ undergrad. My mistake if that wasn't clear. Oddly, my high school experience was kinda the opposite. I took every single STEM AP class at my school, and there was a ton of memorization but most of it was problem solving, (a lot of designing an experiment to validate a hypothesis). For the humanities there were some classes where it was much more memorization based (APUSH and Art History were the big examples), though there were a couple like World History or English Lit where there was a big writing and/or critical thinking component. I also was lucky and went to a pretty kickass high school, and I'd rate most of my teachers there over most of my college professors. I think the idea is not that there is no problem solving being done in maths in school, but that usually the amount of problems that are possible to solve with the knowledge that the students currently have is so limited that you can often brute force especially standardized tests by just memorizing shitloads of questions, answers, standard procedures, random facts, etc.... (And thus skip the one thing that the teacher actually wants to teach you by doing a lot of easy but boring work) You can also be successful by learning the problem solving techniques and basic ideas that are taught in the maths class. In your example, you can either design an experiment to validate the hypothesis, or just know all of the experiments which are usually covered in your school classes and write down the correct one. This is something that i have always found weird. I was always rather good at understanding maths, and thus i got the interesting experience without the boring memorization. But a lot of the students i tutor have no interest in trying to understand the more abstract concepts, usually because they have a self-image with involves not being good at maths based on previous experiences. They want maths to be turned into a memorization class, and are willing to do way more work just to avoid having to gain a deeper understanding. I have the hypothesis that this is based on something going wrong in their earlier educational lives which makes them have a completely different understanding of how math classes work compared to mine, and seeing maths as something that you just need to do. They are willing to put in a lot of effort, but they have a deeply ingrained view of maths being just "Memorize how to solve problem type A1. Memorize how to solve problem type A2...." I have no idea how to change this view. It is so sad because it turns a beautiful and enjoyable thing into an awful chore you just have to get done with so nobody gets angry at you for failing maths.
I once had to TA a "Math for Elementary School Teachers" class that was part of the undergrad program for elementary teachers. It was awe inspiring how much these students exemplified the attitude you describe. Compared to the pre-med or engineering or w/e students that you are trying to teach much more difficult stuff to. The attitude of "im just bad at math" "this just doesnt make sense" was omnipresent. I had more people just start crying because they thought it would make me do their homework for them in that class then all others combined.
I do sadly think that for whatever reason, people who are drawn to a career in elementary education tend to have these attitudes and consciously or unconsciously pass them on the to their students. Ironically, the entire purpose of the class was to try and make them think about and understand things and problem solving techniques rather than just doing math by rote.
I am curious but I do feel a lot of people had good teachers in Highschool who loved math and tried to inspire that in their students. What about earlier on? Because a lot of people come in to highschool with those attitudes pretty ingrained. It isn't just teachers either you see cases where you are tutoring students and their parents attitude and the things they say ("I was never good at math either" is super common) and its pretty obvious they have unfortunately influenced their kids. Its kind of a continuing problem.
The implementation was ehh... but a big part of the reasoning for common core was trying to address this problem.
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They have been here for 7 years, are no threat to the US. 20% of them own homes and they are almost all employed. The only reason to kick these people out is spite and white grievance.
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On November 21 2017 11:37 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 11:01 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 05:13 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 04:40 TheYango wrote:On November 21 2017 02:59 Nebuchad wrote:
I have no problem with the notion that some people play the lottery with sums that aren't insignificant to them and that they're wrong to do so. It isn't a notion that contradicts my initial objection. The people for whom the cost of the lottery is *actually* insignificant don't play the lottery. You have to be exceedingly wealthy for $500 a year to represent effectively no marginal utility. Even people for whom that represents 1/1000th of their yearly income could probably think of a lot of practically useful things that they would do with an extra $500 a year. What's more common is that people *perceive* the cost of the lottery to be insignificant when it isn't because they are poor/inefficient at evaluating their own personal finances and the relative value of small sums of money. A lot of these people would probably respond differently to the lottery if it was framed as "$500 a year" and not "$10 a week". Exactly. The root problem is the financial illiteracy of too many Americans. Let's just put the lotto aside for a moment. These are the same people that don't hesitate to drop $5 for a frappucino from Starbucks instead of brewing their own coffee at home. And don't even get me started on the vacations that they take or the money that they blow on other frivolous shit. The worst part is that these poor financial habits carry on from generation to generation. We're two or three generations into an expanding class of financial invalids who have no concept of how to properly manage money. Fuck music and arts classes in high school. We need to start teaching our kids what a credit score is and why it's important. Be careful what you wish for. The American economy runs on consumption of frivolous shit. Further, with more financial literacy comes more class-consciousness. Do you think people will be happy with low wages when they can't numb the scenes of their slow deaths with $5 sugar and caffeine bombs? I'd rather empower individuals than continue to bear the social and economic costs of their ongoing stupidity. My bet is that class-consciousness would be less of a problem if the lower classes were suddenly given the tools that they need to improve their lots in life.
You benefit quite a bit by your relative position in the social hierarchy. This "bearing the social and economic costs of others' stupidity" (as a hard-working professional who benefits from less competition) stops short of thinking things through to the end.
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On November 21 2017 12:02 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 11:37 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 11:01 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 05:13 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 04:40 TheYango wrote:On November 21 2017 02:59 Nebuchad wrote:
I have no problem with the notion that some people play the lottery with sums that aren't insignificant to them and that they're wrong to do so. It isn't a notion that contradicts my initial objection. The people for whom the cost of the lottery is *actually* insignificant don't play the lottery. You have to be exceedingly wealthy for $500 a year to represent effectively no marginal utility. Even people for whom that represents 1/1000th of their yearly income could probably think of a lot of practically useful things that they would do with an extra $500 a year. What's more common is that people *perceive* the cost of the lottery to be insignificant when it isn't because they are poor/inefficient at evaluating their own personal finances and the relative value of small sums of money. A lot of these people would probably respond differently to the lottery if it was framed as "$500 a year" and not "$10 a week". Exactly. The root problem is the financial illiteracy of too many Americans. Let's just put the lotto aside for a moment. These are the same people that don't hesitate to drop $5 for a frappucino from Starbucks instead of brewing their own coffee at home. And don't even get me started on the vacations that they take or the money that they blow on other frivolous shit. The worst part is that these poor financial habits carry on from generation to generation. We're two or three generations into an expanding class of financial invalids who have no concept of how to properly manage money. Fuck music and arts classes in high school. We need to start teaching our kids what a credit score is and why it's important. Be careful what you wish for. The American economy runs on consumption of frivolous shit. Further, with more financial literacy comes more class-consciousness. Do you think people will be happy with low wages when they can't numb the scenes of their slow deaths with $5 sugar and caffeine bombs? I'd rather empower individuals than continue to bear the social and economic costs of their ongoing stupidity. My bet is that class-consciousness would be less of a problem if the lower classes were suddenly given the tools that they need to improve their lots in life. You benefit quite a bit by your relative position in the social hierarchy. This "bearing the social and economic costs of others' stupidity" (as a hard-working professional who benefits from less competition) stops short of thinking things through to the end.
No it doesn't? You realize that if we stop wasting resources producing useless shit like new cars or cigarettes, we can reallocate that to producing useful shit and the overall pie gets bigger? The economy isn't a zero sum game.
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Well that is one of two we know about in the House.
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On November 21 2017 11:47 Atreides wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 08:11 Simberto wrote:On November 21 2017 07:37 ticklishmusic wrote:On November 21 2017 07:09 doomdonker wrote:On November 21 2017 06:55 ticklishmusic wrote:
My sense is that in some of the humanities it's possible to slide by somehow, while in STEM things tend to be a little more metric driven with grades corresponding pretty well to future career performance. The example I go back to is this kid I knew who majored in music performance. He somehow graduated with honors, but his violin playing was pretty garbage (I played violin for 10+ years, so I felt reasonably qualified to make that judgement). I guess there's a reason he didn't go to Julliard or some other conservatory, though.
This is fully acknowledging that there is certainly plenty of coursework in the humanities which is really fucking rigorous, especially to someone with minimal training in social science writing and research. In secondary school, that's definitely not really true. You can grind through the sciences through pure ROTE learning and paying for a whole book of practice questions. Eventually, you'll see a question you've seen before and you can spit it out verbatim. I got over 40 in specialist mathematics (top 9% in the state) but I couldn't do shit in university Calculus 201 for that reason. I didn't actually learn how to learn until university and I'm still pretty terrible at mathematics, despite being an engineer by trade. In fact, some of the schools obsessed with metric results will do exactly that and it completely hampers the future development of all students who teach by this method. They rush through the curriculum, because secondary school can seem extremely slow, and spend the second half of the year feeding practice exams to students. I think this is mostly a Commonwealth nation thing however. I was referring to higher ed/ undergrad. My mistake if that wasn't clear. Oddly, my high school experience was kinda the opposite. I took every single STEM AP class at my school, and there was a ton of memorization but most of it was problem solving, (a lot of designing an experiment to validate a hypothesis). For the humanities there were some classes where it was much more memorization based (APUSH and Art History were the big examples), though there were a couple like World History or English Lit where there was a big writing and/or critical thinking component. I also was lucky and went to a pretty kickass high school, and I'd rate most of my teachers there over most of my college professors. I think the idea is not that there is no problem solving being done in maths in school, but that usually the amount of problems that are possible to solve with the knowledge that the students currently have is so limited that you can often brute force especially standardized tests by just memorizing shitloads of questions, answers, standard procedures, random facts, etc.... (And thus skip the one thing that the teacher actually wants to teach you by doing a lot of easy but boring work) You can also be successful by learning the problem solving techniques and basic ideas that are taught in the maths class. In your example, you can either design an experiment to validate the hypothesis, or just know all of the experiments which are usually covered in your school classes and write down the correct one. This is something that i have always found weird. I was always rather good at understanding maths, and thus i got the interesting experience without the boring memorization. But a lot of the students i tutor have no interest in trying to understand the more abstract concepts, usually because they have a self-image with involves not being good at maths based on previous experiences. They want maths to be turned into a memorization class, and are willing to do way more work just to avoid having to gain a deeper understanding. I have the hypothesis that this is based on something going wrong in their earlier educational lives which makes them have a completely different understanding of how math classes work compared to mine, and seeing maths as something that you just need to do. They are willing to put in a lot of effort, but they have a deeply ingrained view of maths being just "Memorize how to solve problem type A1. Memorize how to solve problem type A2...." I have no idea how to change this view. It is so sad because it turns a beautiful and enjoyable thing into an awful chore you just have to get done with so nobody gets angry at you for failing maths. I once had to TA a "Math for Elementary School Teachers" class that was part of the undergrad program for elementary teachers. It was awe inspiring how much these students exemplified the attitude you describe. Compared to the pre-med or engineering or w/e students that you are trying to teach much more difficult stuff to. The attitude of "im just bad at math" "this just doesnt make sense" was omnipresent. I had more people just start crying because they thought it would make me do their homework for them in that class then all others combined. I do sadly think that for whatever reason, people who are drawn to a career in elementary education tend to have these attitudes and consciously or unconsciously pass them on the to their students. Ironically, the entire purpose of the class was to try and make them think about and understand things and problem solving techniques rather than just doing math by rote. I am curious but I do feel a lot of people had good teachers in Highschool who loved math and tried to inspire that in their students. What about earlier on? Because a lot of people come in to highschool with those attitudes pretty ingrained. It isn't just teachers either you see cases where you are tutoring students and their parents attitude and the things they say ("I was never good at math either" is super common) and its pretty obvious they have unfortunately influenced their kids. Its kind of a continuing problem. The implementation was ehh... but a big part of the reasoning for common core was trying to address this problem.
For me, I can't give enough credit to my parents. If they hadn't drilled good habits into me from early on - made me do extra curriculars, taught me a lot of stuff outside of school and instilled a love of reading - I'd without a doubt not be where I am today.
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He’s only pointing out the obvious. This thanksgiving should be dedicated to trumps generals.
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From aug 27:
Public service announcements have been drawn up in English, French and Creole. Canadian consulates across the U.S. have been mobilized. And on Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dispatched his nation’s only Haiti-born parliamentarian, Emmanuel Dubourg, to Miami, home to the largest concentration of Haitians in the U.S.
Armed with the Creole language and his own personal tale of migrating to Canada from Haiti four decades earlier, Dubourg was clear everywhere he went: There is no new immigration program for Haitians in Canada.
“It’s not true that Canada is wide open,” Dubourg said when he visited Miami’s Little Haiti Cultural Center Complex ahead of a closed-door meeting with nearly two dozen Haitian community leaders and immigration advocates at nearby Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church. “Crossing the border … is no free pass.”
Some asylum seekers have cited Temporary Protected Status, the special humanitarian program for Haitians that the Trump administration has signaled may end in January, as their reason for fleeing north. But Dubourg blamed “misinformation circulating” on social media for the influx.
The steady stream of asylum seekers —10,000 since the beginning of the year — sweeping into Quebec has strained government resources, with the military being called out earlier this month to build a tent city along the official border crossing of Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle after Montreal’s gigantic Olympic Stadium was opened to shelter refugees.
With some Canadians now questioning the integrity of their immigration system in the wake of the surge, an intergovernmental task force on the topic met for the second time last week. Days before the meeting, Trudeau signaled a slightly tougher immigration stance than he had earlier.
Canada, he said, remains a “welcoming and open” society to those fleeing persecution and in need of protection, but “we are also a country of laws. Entering Canada irregularly is not an advantage. There are rigorous immigration and customs rules that will be followed. Make no mistake.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article169497902.html
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On November 21 2017 12:29 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 12:02 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 11:37 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 11:01 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 05:13 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 04:40 TheYango wrote:On November 21 2017 02:59 Nebuchad wrote:
I have no problem with the notion that some people play the lottery with sums that aren't insignificant to them and that they're wrong to do so. It isn't a notion that contradicts my initial objection. The people for whom the cost of the lottery is *actually* insignificant don't play the lottery. You have to be exceedingly wealthy for $500 a year to represent effectively no marginal utility. Even people for whom that represents 1/1000th of their yearly income could probably think of a lot of practically useful things that they would do with an extra $500 a year. What's more common is that people *perceive* the cost of the lottery to be insignificant when it isn't because they are poor/inefficient at evaluating their own personal finances and the relative value of small sums of money. A lot of these people would probably respond differently to the lottery if it was framed as "$500 a year" and not "$10 a week". Exactly. The root problem is the financial illiteracy of too many Americans. Let's just put the lotto aside for a moment. These are the same people that don't hesitate to drop $5 for a frappucino from Starbucks instead of brewing their own coffee at home. And don't even get me started on the vacations that they take or the money that they blow on other frivolous shit. The worst part is that these poor financial habits carry on from generation to generation. We're two or three generations into an expanding class of financial invalids who have no concept of how to properly manage money. Fuck music and arts classes in high school. We need to start teaching our kids what a credit score is and why it's important. Be careful what you wish for. The American economy runs on consumption of frivolous shit. Further, with more financial literacy comes more class-consciousness. Do you think people will be happy with low wages when they can't numb the scenes of their slow deaths with $5 sugar and caffeine bombs? I'd rather empower individuals than continue to bear the social and economic costs of their ongoing stupidity. My bet is that class-consciousness would be less of a problem if the lower classes were suddenly given the tools that they need to improve their lots in life. You benefit quite a bit by your relative position in the social hierarchy. This "bearing the social and economic costs of others' stupidity" (as a hard-working professional who benefits from less competition) stops short of thinking things through to the end. No it doesn't? You realize that if we stop wasting resources producing useless shit like new cars or cigarettes, we can reallocate that to producing useful shit and the overall pie gets bigger? The economy isn't a zero sum game.
Sorry, you're going to have to define "useful shit" for me. New cars aren't useful? What do you mean by "the economy isn't a zero sum game?"
Do you think we lack capital for investment? Is that why the pie isn't getting bigger at 5% or 6% or 10% instead of 3%? What do you think corporations want to do with all their offshore money?
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Best argument here is "the voters have spoken." We already heard about this before the election, he won anyways. All these other scumbags were predators themselves but still tried to take the high road.
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On November 21 2017 14:12 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 12:29 mozoku wrote:On November 21 2017 12:02 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 11:37 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 11:01 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 05:13 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 04:40 TheYango wrote:On November 21 2017 02:59 Nebuchad wrote:
I have no problem with the notion that some people play the lottery with sums that aren't insignificant to them and that they're wrong to do so. It isn't a notion that contradicts my initial objection. The people for whom the cost of the lottery is *actually* insignificant don't play the lottery. You have to be exceedingly wealthy for $500 a year to represent effectively no marginal utility. Even people for whom that represents 1/1000th of their yearly income could probably think of a lot of practically useful things that they would do with an extra $500 a year. What's more common is that people *perceive* the cost of the lottery to be insignificant when it isn't because they are poor/inefficient at evaluating their own personal finances and the relative value of small sums of money. A lot of these people would probably respond differently to the lottery if it was framed as "$500 a year" and not "$10 a week". Exactly. The root problem is the financial illiteracy of too many Americans. Let's just put the lotto aside for a moment. These are the same people that don't hesitate to drop $5 for a frappucino from Starbucks instead of brewing their own coffee at home. And don't even get me started on the vacations that they take or the money that they blow on other frivolous shit. The worst part is that these poor financial habits carry on from generation to generation. We're two or three generations into an expanding class of financial invalids who have no concept of how to properly manage money. Fuck music and arts classes in high school. We need to start teaching our kids what a credit score is and why it's important. Be careful what you wish for. The American economy runs on consumption of frivolous shit. Further, with more financial literacy comes more class-consciousness. Do you think people will be happy with low wages when they can't numb the scenes of their slow deaths with $5 sugar and caffeine bombs? I'd rather empower individuals than continue to bear the social and economic costs of their ongoing stupidity. My bet is that class-consciousness would be less of a problem if the lower classes were suddenly given the tools that they need to improve their lots in life. You benefit quite a bit by your relative position in the social hierarchy. This "bearing the social and economic costs of others' stupidity" (as a hard-working professional who benefits from less competition) stops short of thinking things through to the end. No it doesn't? You realize that if we stop wasting resources producing useless shit like new cars or cigarettes, we can reallocate that to producing useful shit and the overall pie gets bigger? The economy isn't a zero sum game. Sorry, you're going to have to define "useful shit" for me. New cars aren't useful? What do you mean by "the economy isn't a zero sum game?" Do you think we lack capital for investment? Is that why the pie isn't getting bigger at 5% or 6% or 10% instead of 3%? What do you think corporations want to do with all their offshore money?
I was referring to the fact that Americans buy a new car, on average, every 4-5 years despite the average car having a useful life of 10+ years. Cars lose their value with time (regardless of use), and a better car does little to increase your income. Thus, repeatedly paying for new cars when you have a working car is a horrible financial decision for the average American who has little to no savings. Cigarettes are pretty self-explanatory. These are the sorts of burdens I'm assuming xDaunt is referring to, as people who retire with no savings require wealth/income redistribution to survive. Moving to my opinion, even if I think such redistribution may be morally permissible, I agree with xDaunt that I'd rather have these people taught financial literacy to lead better lives on their own than effectively bailing them out when they're essentially bankrupt.
"Useful shit" is stuff that isn't a zero or negative net impact on society (e.g. as cigarettes are). If humans make intelligent financial decisions, less resources are wasted and consequently the pie of usable resources gets bigger. That's what a non-zero sum game is. We're not competing over a pie of fixed-size.
I'll tell you what corporations want to do with their offshore funds: deploy it to produce more stuff that consumers want, or distribute it to shareholders (who then reinvest it to someone who can produce even more stuff that consumers want than the corporation could have). The problem is that neither decision makes sense when the government is going to take a 40% cut as the funds are repatriated.
If you think there are zero value-creating ideas out there that additional productive capital couldn't help make a reality, you need to spend more time talking to people with some ideas that don't involve class warfare and Marxist revolutions.
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Financial literacy doesn’t change a culture obsessed with conspicuous consumption.
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On November 21 2017 11:42 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 10:45 Danglars wrote:On November 21 2017 09:57 Stratos_speAr wrote:On November 21 2017 08:14 Danglars wrote:On November 21 2017 07:40 Gahlo wrote:On November 21 2017 07:30 TheTenthDoc wrote:Speaking of education, the other day I was shown some absurdly long Twitch (or maybe Youtube) ad about how current school curricula are "anti-boy" and that there's a "war on boys" (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFpYj0E-yb4). I'd never heard of PragerU, but apparently it's built around 5-minute conservative pseudo-TED talks. I freely admit I skipped after like a minute when they said normal boys are treated like defective girls in school. An interesting view into what analytics have decided constitutes a good ad for me, I guess? Anecodtal, but with what I had to go through I can't help but at least give the idea consideration. Maybe "war on boys" and "defective girls" is harsh language for the situation though. To the extent that wild labels should prompt reactive disbelief, sure, an actual "war on boys" isn't useful to start out looking why they do worse in elementary and secondary education. When you look at the topics in isolation, like overprescription of ADHD drugs, or reactions to typical young male behavior like engaging in mock fights and finger pistols, or recess time alotted, or reading books shown, I think you can make the case that there's a lot of harm being done. Especially in today's era where everybody has heightened awareness of little things having big effects. Seems interesting that when the right uses an arbitrary (and patently ridiculous) label, you try to parse out the nuanced meaning of it, whereas whenever the left does it, you slam it as gross generalizations, identity politics, etc. etc. Is this true as a general statement? STEM is a pretty broad class, there are probably some subfields where there aren't enough jobs to go around. For instance it wouldn't surprise me if theoretical physics was such a field. But is it generally true for STEM as a whole? No. It's much more complicated. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem-surplus-yes-and-yes.htmSTEM is such a broad category that you can't really talk about it as a single entity. There are a surplus of Ph.D's in most science fields, but a lack of them in certain areas of the private sector. Conversely, there's a high need for bachelor's level STEM education in fields like software development, but much less needs in other areas of science/math. "War on boys" isn't some generic right term. It's a culture term. It cuts across both political camps. Now if you think the academic success and social development of our youngsters is a politically charged topic, I pity you. Well, there's definitely a political angle to it that can be defined as socially progressive and conservative, and you're playing into that angle by using the terms that you do which causes the reaction that you quoted. There's also undoubtedly a group of people who are also playing into that angle (apparently through ads - I wouldn't know, I avoid ads like the plague and certainly haven't seen any referring to "war on boys") probably in an effort to win votes? Anyway, this issue clearly cannot be completely removed from politics. You're absolutely hypocritical in the way you denounce the progressive left-wing for generalization and identity politics while doing the very same thing when arguing on behalf of the conservative right-wing on social matters.
Yeah you're all washed up on motivations and what caused the reaction. Let's boil down to the real arguments and not toot your own horn on how you see all these angles and provocations and we'd better take this issue back to political sides. I stated specifically the areas of interest on the topic of underachieving male children and young adults. You can go pound sand if you want to generalize my other interactions as just a hypocritical example of this. It's absolutely ludicrous.
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On November 21 2017 11:47 Atreides wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 08:11 Simberto wrote:On November 21 2017 07:37 ticklishmusic wrote:On November 21 2017 07:09 doomdonker wrote:On November 21 2017 06:55 ticklishmusic wrote:
My sense is that in some of the humanities it's possible to slide by somehow, while in STEM things tend to be a little more metric driven with grades corresponding pretty well to future career performance. The example I go back to is this kid I knew who majored in music performance. He somehow graduated with honors, but his violin playing was pretty garbage (I played violin for 10+ years, so I felt reasonably qualified to make that judgement). I guess there's a reason he didn't go to Julliard or some other conservatory, though.
This is fully acknowledging that there is certainly plenty of coursework in the humanities which is really fucking rigorous, especially to someone with minimal training in social science writing and research. In secondary school, that's definitely not really true. You can grind through the sciences through pure ROTE learning and paying for a whole book of practice questions. Eventually, you'll see a question you've seen before and you can spit it out verbatim. I got over 40 in specialist mathematics (top 9% in the state) but I couldn't do shit in university Calculus 201 for that reason. I didn't actually learn how to learn until university and I'm still pretty terrible at mathematics, despite being an engineer by trade. In fact, some of the schools obsessed with metric results will do exactly that and it completely hampers the future development of all students who teach by this method. They rush through the curriculum, because secondary school can seem extremely slow, and spend the second half of the year feeding practice exams to students. I think this is mostly a Commonwealth nation thing however. I was referring to higher ed/ undergrad. My mistake if that wasn't clear. Oddly, my high school experience was kinda the opposite. I took every single STEM AP class at my school, and there was a ton of memorization but most of it was problem solving, (a lot of designing an experiment to validate a hypothesis). For the humanities there were some classes where it was much more memorization based (APUSH and Art History were the big examples), though there were a couple like World History or English Lit where there was a big writing and/or critical thinking component. I also was lucky and went to a pretty kickass high school, and I'd rate most of my teachers there over most of my college professors. I think the idea is not that there is no problem solving being done in maths in school, but that usually the amount of problems that are possible to solve with the knowledge that the students currently have is so limited that you can often brute force especially standardized tests by just memorizing shitloads of questions, answers, standard procedures, random facts, etc.... (And thus skip the one thing that the teacher actually wants to teach you by doing a lot of easy but boring work) You can also be successful by learning the problem solving techniques and basic ideas that are taught in the maths class. In your example, you can either design an experiment to validate the hypothesis, or just know all of the experiments which are usually covered in your school classes and write down the correct one. This is something that i have always found weird. I was always rather good at understanding maths, and thus i got the interesting experience without the boring memorization. But a lot of the students i tutor have no interest in trying to understand the more abstract concepts, usually because they have a self-image with involves not being good at maths based on previous experiences. They want maths to be turned into a memorization class, and are willing to do way more work just to avoid having to gain a deeper understanding. I have the hypothesis that this is based on something going wrong in their earlier educational lives which makes them have a completely different understanding of how math classes work compared to mine, and seeing maths as something that you just need to do. They are willing to put in a lot of effort, but they have a deeply ingrained view of maths being just "Memorize how to solve problem type A1. Memorize how to solve problem type A2...." I have no idea how to change this view. It is so sad because it turns a beautiful and enjoyable thing into an awful chore you just have to get done with so nobody gets angry at you for failing maths. I once had to TA a "Math for Elementary School Teachers" class that was part of the undergrad program for elementary teachers. It was awe inspiring how much these students exemplified the attitude you describe. Compared to the pre-med or engineering or w/e students that you are trying to teach much more difficult stuff to. The attitude of "im just bad at math" "this just doesnt make sense" was omnipresent. I had more people just start crying because they thought it would make me do their homework for them in that class then all others combined. I do sadly think that for whatever reason, people who are drawn to a career in elementary education tend to have these attitudes and consciously or unconsciously pass them on the to their students. Ironically, the entire purpose of the class was to try and make them think about and understand things and problem solving techniques rather than just doing math by rote. I am curious but I do feel a lot of people had good teachers in Highschool who loved math and tried to inspire that in their students. What about earlier on? Because a lot of people come in to highschool with those attitudes pretty ingrained. It isn't just teachers either you see cases where you are tutoring students and their parents attitude and the things they say ("I was never good at math either" is super common) and its pretty obvious they have unfortunately influenced their kids. Its kind of a continuing problem. The implementation was ehh... but a big part of the reasoning for common core was trying to address this problem.
Similar experience here. Students are taught by these teachers and programs to memorize the process to a solution for Type A1 and Type A2 problem. One small twist in the problem statement and it's an ingrained mental route to memorize Type A3's "trick" when they just shuffled givens or said something in a different way. Predictable result as Atreides and Simberto illustrated. I tutor math at the prealgebra to calculus level to Jr High/High School students for fun in my off hours. It's sad how many gifted students get stumped trying to memorize the next thing in an interminable list of things. + Show Spoiler +As an aside, they also hate breaking out four colored pencils to represent 3x as three green boxes and (-x) as a single yellow box.
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On November 21 2017 14:57 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2017 14:12 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 12:29 mozoku wrote:On November 21 2017 12:02 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 11:37 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 11:01 IgnE wrote:On November 21 2017 05:13 xDaunt wrote:On November 21 2017 04:40 TheYango wrote:On November 21 2017 02:59 Nebuchad wrote:
I have no problem with the notion that some people play the lottery with sums that aren't insignificant to them and that they're wrong to do so. It isn't a notion that contradicts my initial objection. The people for whom the cost of the lottery is *actually* insignificant don't play the lottery. You have to be exceedingly wealthy for $500 a year to represent effectively no marginal utility. Even people for whom that represents 1/1000th of their yearly income could probably think of a lot of practically useful things that they would do with an extra $500 a year. What's more common is that people *perceive* the cost of the lottery to be insignificant when it isn't because they are poor/inefficient at evaluating their own personal finances and the relative value of small sums of money. A lot of these people would probably respond differently to the lottery if it was framed as "$500 a year" and not "$10 a week". Exactly. The root problem is the financial illiteracy of too many Americans. Let's just put the lotto aside for a moment. These are the same people that don't hesitate to drop $5 for a frappucino from Starbucks instead of brewing their own coffee at home. And don't even get me started on the vacations that they take or the money that they blow on other frivolous shit. The worst part is that these poor financial habits carry on from generation to generation. We're two or three generations into an expanding class of financial invalids who have no concept of how to properly manage money. Fuck music and arts classes in high school. We need to start teaching our kids what a credit score is and why it's important. Be careful what you wish for. The American economy runs on consumption of frivolous shit. Further, with more financial literacy comes more class-consciousness. Do you think people will be happy with low wages when they can't numb the scenes of their slow deaths with $5 sugar and caffeine bombs? I'd rather empower individuals than continue to bear the social and economic costs of their ongoing stupidity. My bet is that class-consciousness would be less of a problem if the lower classes were suddenly given the tools that they need to improve their lots in life. You benefit quite a bit by your relative position in the social hierarchy. This "bearing the social and economic costs of others' stupidity" (as a hard-working professional who benefits from less competition) stops short of thinking things through to the end. No it doesn't? You realize that if we stop wasting resources producing useless shit like new cars or cigarettes, we can reallocate that to producing useful shit and the overall pie gets bigger? The economy isn't a zero sum game. Sorry, you're going to have to define "useful shit" for me. New cars aren't useful? What do you mean by "the economy isn't a zero sum game?" Do you think we lack capital for investment? Is that why the pie isn't getting bigger at 5% or 6% or 10% instead of 3%? What do you think corporations want to do with all their offshore money? I was referring to the fact that Americans buy a new car, on average, every 4-5 years despite the average car having a useful life of 10+ years. Cars lose their value with time (regardless of use), and a better car does little to increase your income. Thus, repeatedly paying for new cars when you have a working car is a horrible financial decision for the average American who has little to no savings.
People purchasing new cars regularly and selling the older ones that still had years in them declined following the 2008 crash, at least in my area. It also totally wrecked the local used car market. Demand exceeded supply, and used cars these days are barely cheaper than new cars until you're looking at 8+ year old cars. There is definitely value to society in people who can afford to buying new cars well before their current one is at the end of its life.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/58505c97ca7f0c8c018b5678-1190-625/a-timeline-of-rex-tillersons-relationship-with-russian-president-vladimir-putin.jpg)
