New Testingstan

what response to "practicing law doesn't really require special intensive education" is appropriate other than 'HURGLEBURGLE"

A spittake maybe?

Increased primary and secondary school funding.

Ooh! Ooh! I like Straha's option!

Bakustra wrote:noblebright?

The Fey in Dystopic Return of Magic are basically an entire species of sadomasochistic serial killer types who probably only manage to have a society at all because they instinctively submit to anyone stronger than them. They're the villains in an alternate history story where the PoD is they show up around 1900.

I've been doing a project that involved, among other speculations, playing with the idea of a world where black and white morality is actually more-or-less true, and eventually found I'd stumbled into creating something that looked a lot like what you might get if you tried to turn DRM Fey into good guys.

Am I right in thinking the person who delivered that anti-education screed doesn't have more than a high school diploma?

Bakustra wrote:

...
But remember that even many of those don't really need any university education: accountancy, investment banking, arguably even law.

AUGH

fuuuuuuuuck yooooouuuuuuuuu

I really do question what people are thinking when they start arguing that properly handling large amounts of money doesn't require intelligence, training or education.

Because it's not what you know, it's who you know

It is funny how the less people know about the world, the more they are convinced they know all there's to know.

And by "funny" I mean "kinda despairing".

Bakustra, noblebright=opposite of grimdark

Oxymoron wrote:It is funny how the less people know about the world, the more they are convinced they know all there's to know.

And by "funny" I mean "kinda despairing".

yes
though that probably isn't what's going on here, there are plenty of very well-educated people who hold horrendous ideas such as 'blah why waste education on the proles'

Also testifying is Robert Litt, General Counsel, Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel.

He says the surveillance programs have protected the country "not only from terrorists but to other threats to our national security, a wide variety."

prolly like those filthy occupy protesters

Straha wrote:Where the fuck is that screed from?

there is only one place on the internet where the word "brainbug" is thrown around casually

Anyone have the link for context?

I do think that education, at least in America, has been hurt by the fact it has become too 'capitalist'. I mean education is like health care - it shoudl be available to all for the betterment of an individual and society.. and yet that's not the case. The 'quality' of your education is dictated by economic means, and it seems that the perception is you have to spend huge amounts of money on textbooks, schooling, etc. to have a chance. (I'm not even convinced about how much education matters in America.. it seems to be as much or more about who you know than about actual education.)

But the obvious answer there would be 'less capitalism in education' not 'education isn't needed.' at least insofar as I can follow the rambling.

the profit motive is a fucking poison

but also 'education is useful' does not mean 'education is needed' either

i skimmed that thread and something that bugged me was simon_jester saying this: " But that's hardly desirable; it's a huge waste of human potential and technological potential."

is wasting potential a bad thing? to quote from scripture: "let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing"

evilsoup wrote:the profit motive is a fucking poison

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Oxymoron wrote:

evilsoup wrote:the profit motive is a fucking poison

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

If you seriously believe that greed is the only way forward and upward, you're a fucking idiot.

oxymoron is gordon gecko reincarnated as a frenchman

you cannot keep him down

in my fanfictionhypothetical ideal world, post-secondary education would be an ongoing, largely decentralised process freely available to all. Sort of like the Open University
universities would still exist for research and those studies that require expensive, specialised equipment

RyanThunder wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:

evilsoup wrote:the profit motive is a fucking poison

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

If you seriously believe that greed is the only way forward and upward, you're a fucking idiot.

What's worth doing is worth doing for money.

eh somewhat greed is good but the thing is going too far. like my point with the potential thing is that maybe we could do better, could do more.... but do we have to? do we even want to?

I guess if you define it as potential to reach subjective fulfillness or whatever then yeah you would want to but we gotta define this stuff cuz it could also mean potential bourgeois profits or potential technology dreams or so on and so forth


simon's post in context was talking about people doing menial labor or something like that.... maybe i'm weird but I kinda like doing menial jobs.

two of my three favorite jobs I've had were quite menial: groundskeeper at a cemetery and a paper delivery person. and I liked them /because/ they were simple. there were predictable, straightforward, and generally pleasant. it isn't hard to just let your mind do its own thing with your body on autopilot with a simple job, and when it is done, it is done. by contrast when doing a harder task, you don't really know when it will be finished. you might cruise along for half of it in really good time, then hit a problem and be stuck on it for days, then see the solution and implement it in 5 minutes and feel like you just wasted hours on stupidity.

but at the cemetery, if you keep digging or keep mowing or whatever needed to be done that day, you'll keep moving closer and closer to being done. I like that.

then there's the question of cost/benefit. a lot of times, working with computers, I have the choice to automate or not to automate and choose not to automate just cuz it isn't that big of a deal to do it myself. I could potentially speed things up but that just isn't important enough to me to justify spending the time on it




soooo to each his or her own I guess but I don't necessarily see a world where people do simple jobs as being undesirable

RyanThunder wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:

evilsoup wrote:the profit motive is a fucking poison

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

If you seriously believe that greed is the only way forward and upward, you're a fucking idiot.

it's a quote from a movie

I think our culture's dismissive attitude toward manual labor and the people who do it is one of the great toxic attitudes of our society that nobody talks about.

Possibly because even the poorer members of the chattering classes tend to be well-off enough they can imagine their jobs as something temporary until they move up to something better, and thus feel little identification with the manual labor class to get in the way of unexamined pervasive classist attitudes.