Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

[Oxymoron]

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.

This has been a ranting point of mine for a while now.

[adr]

in my fanfiction

booyaka!

(it is a lingo I'm trying to spread)

[Oxymoron]

This has been a ranting point of mine for a while now.

I mean, the whole sum of our culture on Education can be summed up as :

"If you are reduced to work a manual job, if you are reduced to follow vocational training instead of pursuing proper studies, then I am sorry for you son, but it is clear enough that somewhere along the way you have failed."

[Oxymoron]

You are a drone, an üntermensch, one to be pitied for its misfortune.

You are nothing, a rounding error in an equation far above your paygrade.

You are the grease that allow the mechanics of our economic system to run smoothly, a sticky substance without form, gross and disgusting ; something that no proper gentleman would want to get into contact with.

[adr]

in the out of universe of my fanfiction I used to advocate for the schools to target a significant failure rate, like 25% per year, based on the idea that if ppl aren't failing it, the schooling isn't an effective differentiator of talent

that is, if everybody has a college degree, it has lost its competitive advantage, it has lost its elite prestige


but now I've changed my mind and think they should target a 0% failure rate (albeit with 100% voluntary admission, so those who aren't really interested likely won't be there in the first place) cuz if a person flunks out then it is more likely that the system has failed than that the individual has failed, and moreover, poo to competitive advantages

btw the failure is not necessarily the individual school, but like society as a whole. a high failure rate in college could mean the college is incompetent, but it could also mean the high schools didn't do their job, or the students are working too hard just to make ends meet and don't have time to keep up with class, etc. figuring out where the real problem lies is half the battle in actually implementing this

[Oxymoron]

"No child left behind"

[evilsoup]

seriously fuck capitalism

adr when you say school in that post, do you actually mean university? Because I'm all for allowing people to fail degrees, with the proviso that my hypothetical ideal world would be more forgiving in general than reality (and modelled on the Open University, where you can do a degree over five years by correspondence) so retakes would be a thing that would be affordable to everyone (ideally with just a nominal charge).

[Jung]

This has been a ranting point of mine for a while now.

I mean, the whole sum of our culture on Education can be summed up as :

"If you are reduced to work a manual job, if you are reduced to follow vocational training instead of pursuing proper studies, then I am sorry for you son, but it is clear enough that somewhere along the way you have failed."

And there's no need to worry about making sure people who do "menial" jobs can live decently on them, because the assumption is they should be just a stepping stone to something better, and the way to make people better off is getting them into the better jobs. Never mind that somebody has to do the "bad" jobs.

Our society seems to have this idea at the back of its mind that the answer to poverty is not to make the lower paying jobs pay better, but to somehow move everybody into the higher paying jobs, and I guess the rest would be done by ... magic? robots?

[adr]

evilsoup: yes

and i agree people can fail, and of course should be able to try again, but the difference with my older thought was that before i figured the system would be designed that people fail to serve as an indicator of superiority

basically each year of university would act as a brutal filter, so only the truly exceptional would make it to the top and graduate


but now i think higher education is more of a personal thing; you take the class to achieve a personal goal instead of to get bragging rights/competitive advantage for a job


and ideally, nobody would fail in achieving their personal goals



but what about doctors you might ask? you don't want incompetent doctors getting through the system, and incompetents would indeed fail. but if the system is doing its job properly, any motivated individual ought to be able to become competent and thus pass

[adr]

Never mind that somebody has to do the "bad" jobs.

While I agree with the thrust of what you're saying, I want to single this sentence out as not necessarily true.

Imagine we have a fantasy utopia (edit: btw i totally believe such a world is possible in reality, but it is hard), that has achieved a level of special even beyond that of my fanfiction. Full equality, zero coercion.

Who would clean the toilets? Without the need to take a job, any job, to make money, would anyone volunteer to work all day doing such a dirty job?

Now, the answer may very well be 'yes'. Some people just don't like living with filth and clean up after other people's messes. (these people are often called 'parents' lol).

But let's assume it is no, that nobody wants this 'bad' job unless they are forced into it by requirement to make money.


Well.... why can't we all clean our own toilets? Ordinary people do it in their personal homes, so surely they could clean up after themselves in public places too. (or not make messes in the first place. little boys should learn to aim if they must stand!) It isn't like it takes years of specialization, so the argument that it is impractical for everyone to do it themselves doesn't hold much water.

I think a lot of service jobs would disappear in such a world, but this wouldn't a bad thing. Somebody doesn't necessarily have to do those jobs, we can all take equal responsibility for ourselves.

Our society seems to have this idea at the back of its mind that the answer to poverty is not to make the lower paying jobs pay better, but to somehow move everybody into the higher paying jobs, and I guess the rest would be done by ... magic? robots?

immigrants

[Bakustra]

...
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.

well, you know, you probably could train people to do accounting or law with seven years of intensive study starting at the age of 14- i mean, they'd be clueless about anything else and socially isolated from anyone not in the program, but if you're a fascist these are both positives

also, most of energiewende's posts are frustracomedy gold

I think because the consequences of not doing those things would have been either worse or not much better, and certain, while attacking had some reasonable chance of success (at least in comparison to doing nothing).

In WWII in particularly defeating the USSR before US-Commonwealth built up an overwhelming force was the only way for the Germans to win. Even just to defeat Britain on its own, they needed to exploit the industrial potential of their new European empire and they couldn''t do this because of British blockade. So USSR was a question of when, not if, and waiting only made the situation worse. Finally you have to consider that Stalin may have simply attacked Hitler. USSR had been an army-with-a-state for decades at that point, even more extreme than Nazi Germany itself, and most of the programs that produced war-winning weapons were initiated in the late 30s. Even if the USSR never would have attacked Nazi Germany, Hitler would still have needed to commit very large forces to deter them.

For Napoleon, well, he had a better chance of just sitting on his Empire, but he was again faced with British blockade, and defeating Russia was the only way to make his position really secure. Britain had been quite happily fighting him for 20 years, and pretty much controlled all overseas trade at that point. Who's to say it wouldn't have fought him for another 20? His Empire was too precarious for that, as shown by the mass defections when Russia started overruning imperial and allied territory.

[RyanThunder]

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

xD My apologies.

[timmy]

You're so young sometimes.

[Darksi4190]

Well it probably came out before he was born, so there's no real reason for him to know it.

[joviwan]

Wall Street came out in 1987.

The french guy that quoted it was born after it came out.

[Straha]

This is the best thing since ever.

[Oxymoron]

Fact : I have never seen Wall Street. I started by wanting to quote the CEO of Morgan Industry from Alpha Centauri, googling what I thought was one of his quote, and then found that tidbit and it was just too perfect.

[Stofsk]

It's a famous movie line, so much so that I knew it and I haven't even seen Wall Street (though I have seen the scene where that line was uttered).

Morgan's line is really good Oxy, but you wanna know something? Go read or listen to Lal's signature line - and keep that in mind with all the shit that's happened in the last decade and a half, and how scarily prophetic Lal's words are. SMAC was made and came out in the 90s, and yet it could have come out yesterday with the kind of insights it makes about stuff.

[RogueIce]

This is the best thing since ever.

That's pretty funny. And I'm pretty sure is also why the .gov domain exists. I'm not even sure why all local/county/state governments don't just use it by default, unless it's a legacy thing where they made their websites before .gov was available to them, though if it were me I'd just make those domains redirects and switch to .gov or at the least .(state).us which I've seen around.

EDIT: Although his PPS is slightly incorrect, as they'd have to add an "NJ" or "NewJersey" or something similar, rather than just westorange.gov

[evilsoup]

This is the best thing since ever.

[Oxymoron]

Morgan's line is really good Oxy, but you wanna know something? Go read or listen to Lal's signature line - and keep that in mind with all the shit that's happened in the last decade and a half, and how scarily prophetic Lal's words are. SMAC was made and came out in the 90s, and yet it could have come out yesterday with the kind of insights it makes about stuff.

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

-- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

^ This one ?

[Stofsk]

yeh

[Oxymoron]

To be fair, the world we are living in today has been in the making since the end of the Cold War, and even before.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight, but I would say that that kind of warning, on civil liberties, and other themes about technological progress and how it can alienate Man, go back to even earlier than that.

And in that specific case (US and freedom of speech), I would hazard a guess that there had already been a number of scandals on the subject in the 90s.

[Stofsk]

To be fair to whom? I mean sure, a lot of science fiction more or less predicted the way society in the West was heading in; Babylon 5 arguably depicts Space America falling into despotism and JMS was quite clear with his intention to show the process of the slippery slope that a liberal democracy can fall down to turn into a fascist dictatorship.

I just thought it was a kickin' rad quote from a classic computer game

[Oxymoron]

to be fair to myself, it's 13:58 and I got up at 04:00 this morning