'Europe is poor so should live within its means'

I agree with you to an extent on the college front. The data is pretty undeniable that the more schooling you receive, the more money you make (whether the increase in salary is worth the increase in college bills is a different matter). What we need to tell high school students isn't "you have to go to college or you'll flip burgers" but rather "if you go to school, graduate with an english degree, art history degree, etc., then you will have massive debt from student loans and will probably wind up flipping burgers.

Even though I generally speaking agree with your posts there is one thing I would argue with.
sgath92 said:
Sorry, I thought it was obvious. What I propose is that we ditch fair trade. It screws everyone involved; the 3rd world's natural resources are pillaged without really benefiting them, and the 1st world's labor is forced to compete head to head against communist prison labor in China. Nobody wins [well, except the multinationals and their execs].

If China had not opened there market to Western companies, China would still be impoverished backwater that it was 30 years ago. Opening up its markets lifted more people out of poverty than anything else in probably the history of mankind. The workers may had to endure shit conditions, but it has enabled many to actually provide a better future for its next generation.

sgath92 said:


There is no legitimate reason for hotel front desk workers to have college degrees in hospitality. Yet now we have secondary schools that exist solely for people who work in that field.



I disagree with you on this point. I personally work at the front desk of a hotel to help finance my schooling. While yes, to work the reservation aspect doesn't really take all that much skill, there are aspects of the hotel industry where a degree in hospitality is rather important, such as planning/running a banquet staff, running the front-end of the hotel (the stuff behind the scenes that a regular guest will never see), working on innovations to increase occupancy rates, etc.

My brother graduated with a degree in hospitality. It allowed him, pretty much instantly, to go from an overly qualified line cook to become someone who could manage a night shift. Granted, he began to hate it and now does sales for my family's small business, but the degree in hospitality opened up many more career opportunities that he would not have had access to without a degree.

You argue that you don't need a college degree to be able to do those skills. You are probably right, but it's a moot point. Employers won't look at you if you don't, making the college degree that much more important.

sgath92 said:
Capitalism has undoubtedly wet their appetite for our way of life. With the USSR this helped their system of government implode, but with China there is a chance that this would result in major internal conflict considering their existing ethnic unrest, and other social problems.

First of all, unrest depends entirely on the countries economic policies, people aren't going to revolt if they believe it would cause them to lose out economically. And the people at the top of Chinese government know this, they will eventually crack down on corruption, because they need to in order to survive.

This by itself is no big deal. Except, the Chinese as early as six years ago were internally creating military contingency plans for what to do if this oil supply were ever disrupted because of American foreign policy. They are anticipating one day needing to go head to head against the United States to protect their oil supply, and show no signs of caring what that will mean for their people.In fact there is a document that has been talked about in academia relating to this that originates in the Chinese military entitled the Malaccan Dilemma where the Chinese military policymakers were talking about the amount of their people they would have to throw away if our military ever used a single carrier group to disrupt that choke-point in Chinese oil import infrastructure. The jest of it is: as long as they could take out that first responding carrier, they don't care how many casualties on their part would be required nor the amount of civies that would be annihilated in the resulting airstrikes against their homeland.

This is highly speculative, they may have that in their plans, but would they really be willing to have a go at the US, I am not so sure. Whoever rules China surely knows that if the US wants it could annihilate China, and that they would be putting there own lives at risk by antagonizing the US.

Anyway China has the absolute to react if US tries to shutdown its supply, the US can't shit over the world forever and get away with it. China's rise could be beneficial in it provides a counterbalance to the US's global domination.

One of their emerging oil partners is Iran, who will get the bomb unless someone intervenes. If Iran were to get the bomb and nuke Israel, the United States would have to come to our ally's aid [the least reason for which being the fact that we created this Iran mess by the Iraqi War]. Yet since this would seriously get in the way of Chinese oil imports, it would unavoidably trigger China to respond against the US with military force; in other words WW3.

Iran won't nuke Israel, I am certain of that. It is not in Iran's interest. And China won't attack the US, if the US attacks Iran, I am also certain of that. It is not in China's interest.

sgath92 said:
This was just one potential scenario. I am not saying it will happen, I am saying it can happen. Hopefully you're right.

Without trying to sound too vague, lots of things can happen.

Issendorf said:
You argue that you don't need a college degree to be able to do those skills. You are probably right, but it's a moot point. Employers won't look at you if you don't, making the college degree that much more important.Just because that's how things are, it doesn't mean we should be locked-in on this course and just 'make the best of it'. I spent ten years of my life working my way up from an apprentice to a senior technician in the civil engineering field. I was in charge of the design input to projects worth, in some cases, well into seven-figures; I ran a design team of six other people and sometimes more if I was pulling together resources from more than one team for a planning submission; I've authored several guidance documents on efficient design for street furniture, good practice cable design for traffic signals and interpretations and clarifications on statutes regarding road signs; I can plan, organise and execute a successful public exhibition to showcase a project, and I have a basic grounding in the fundamentals of foul and surface water drainage design and 3D modelling. Yet, because I took a route that valued experience over a certificate, when the sector contracted due to the global financial crisis I found myself out of work for 18 months (and counting) because pretty much any industry out there with any reasonable prospects is asking for a degree just to do a job a monkey could. This I'm sure comes across as big-headed but I could comfortably piss all over most of the people that have interviewed me in that time, let alone those who interviewed for the job alongside me. I have a broad and highly transferable skill-set but that lack of a piece of paper, because I'm not of an academic bent, has hamstrung me. Does that seem fair to you? There are an awful lot of idiots out there with degrees, solely because the way they think matches up with academic study perfectly, so quite clearly it's a pointless system if it's failing those of us who aren't quite the square peg that a university wants us to be.


yellowcarpet said:
sgath92 said:
One of their emerging oil partners is Iran, who will get the bomb unless someone intervenes. If Iran were to get the bomb and nuke Israel, the United States would have to come to our ally's aid [the least reason for which being the fact that we created this Iran mess by the Iraqi War]. Yet since this would seriously get in the way of Chinese oil imports, it would unavoidably trigger China to respond against the US with military force; in other words WW3.

Iran won't nuke Israel, I am certain of that. It is not in Iran's interest. And China won't attack the US, if the US attacks Iran, I am also certain of that. It is not in China's interest.There's more chance of Israel going off the reservation and nuking Iran, IMO. I'm more scared of the fundamentalist Jews that already have fissile warheads than I am the fundamentalist Muslims who *might* one day create a fissile warhead.

lawynd said:
There are an awful lot of idiots out there with degrees, solely because the way they think matches up with academic study perfectly, so quite clearly it's a pointless system if it's failing those of us who aren't quite the square peg that a university wants us to be.

Making college compulsory necessarily makes the cost of education increase [increase in demand], but it also makes the quality of schooling decrease exponentially because the system is designed to assume that everyone "should" go to college.

Twenty+ years ago if someone applied to a university and did not have basic, essential skills like reading comprehension the university would unquestionably turn them down. Today? As long as you have a high school diploma they simply don't care about your deficiencies and will put you in these "intermediate" courses designed to teach you stuff you should have learned in middle school. This in return helps decrease the quality of public school by encouraging their administrators to think "It's ok if they can't do this, as long as they pass the state tests they'll just learn what they need to at college." But that's not what college is for! College is not supposed to be there to play catch-up with the stuff you somehow couldn't manage to learn in public school. I was in a 400-level course 9 years ago with a professor who started every class with a geography quiz. He had been doing this for a few years because he found it was no longer being taught in public schools. To his horror, in a private school in 400 level classes he was getting American college students who couldn't find Mexico on a map. And these were perfectly functional students. We're not talking about people who are slow because of physical or mental defect. We're not talking about the types of people who would have not known this because of falling threw the cracks 40 years ago by dropping out. These were kids who had finished public school with a high enough grade to get in, did reasonably well on the SATs, did reasonably well in three years of college already; and were 1-2 semesters from graduating with a BS! The only reason why some of them couldn't do these simple tasks was because of how screwed up the schooling system as whole has been for their generation.

Yet this screwed up schooling system is costing them 2-3 times as much as it did their parents, and they're being weighed down with student loans they cannot shed through bankruptcy if they graduate and find it takes them 10 years to land a "real" job [by this I mean one that uses their degree, not a min wage reatil or fast food job]. I mentioned earlier that student debtors are held to a standard that does not exist for any other kind of debt?

Let me explain that more. In the US if you are a true dead beat debtor living beyond your means by using credit cards and/or multiple mortgages on your house it really isn't hard to shed that debt through bankruptcy. It still sucks to do it & it;ll hurt your credit but it can be done if you have to. And then life goes on.

Unforeseen medical debt from having a medical emergency while uninsured? Same applies. It's actually the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States [despite the stereotype of middle class families living too well for their means]. This says something about our healthcare system, but it also says something about how doable bankrupcy for medical debtors is. They can eventually shed the debts and move on. Even corporations can shed their debts if they become too weighed down by pension programs that have gone into the red.

Yet if someone goes to college and racks up student loans, those loans simply don't go away. Whether your financial difficulties are your own fault [for picking a major like philosophy where there are no jobs that take advantage of it], or whether it's due to stuff purely outside of your control [like the market being destroyed by the housing market, or unforeseen medical problems keeping you from being able to work] you can not get away from the student debt. It will follow you to the grave. If you can't pay on it, it'll just keep growing and growing and growing and eventually you'll be stuck with debt you'd likely not be able to pay off in your lifetime. This is not the way it always worked. In fact under the right circumstances students used to be able to get rid of their debt through bankruptcy like any other person or corporation could. Until President Bush "reformed" the way student debt is handled.

^ I am confident Israel will attack Iran before Iran attacks Israel. Israel has gone into Syria and Iraq before to destroy nuclear facilities. For all the greater numbers of Israels enemies, Israel the US. They don't.
An the statement about Iran destroy Israel, that was a mistranslation. Just the media fails to point that out. Iran hasn't directly attacked Israel yet, why should we think they would do so now.

That's officially the most nihilist post I've read on last.fm - congratulations.

Fortunately, here at least, people are starting to come to their senses on this score, partly thanks to the obscene sums that universities are now charging students, and I fully expect to see a completely different education landscape in the next five years.

lawynd said:
That's officially the most nihilist post I've read on last.fm - congratulations.



Thank you!