& you probably make enough that it is going to cost extra...
On 7/8/24 9:10 AM, ch...@go-mtc.com wrote:
I am all for nationalized health care. But I am old enough that it is
right around the corner for me.
My wife just about croaked in Barcelona last summer. Spent a week in a
hospital there until I arranged a jail break. Paid absolutely nothing.
*From:* dmmoff...@gmail.com
*Sent:* Monday, July 8, 2024 8:16 AM
*To:* 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group'
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays
To the original post: People hung up on college degrees might not be
if they saw what some of the trades are making. I’ve been in
communications & IT for 24 years, but if I’d started as an electrical
linesman instead then I’d be only a few years from retirement. They
are doing hard--and sometimes dangerous—work, but they are getting
paid big bucks to do it. People in master mechanics programs are also
cleaning house right now.
I have a CIS degree. My experience is that college teaches you
/about/ things, but not how to /do/ things. Sometimes you do need
that background about the topic to be good at doing it, and other
times it really didn’t matter. It’s also clear to me that what you
get out of college is proportional to what you put into it (and I
suppose that’s true of life in general), so if someone is going to
college because it’s expected of them and not because of a real
interest in the subject then their outcome will be less optimal than
if they did something they actually liked or at least found engaging.
To Steve regarding funding STEM degrees: I agree whole heartedly with
that, and it’s something I’ve said in other forums. Someone told me
that funding only STEM degrees is equivalent to the government telling
people what jobs they can have. Au contraire, the /economy/ is
telling people what jobs they can have, and this would just be
allocating funding according to economic reality. You can get a
degree in chemical engineering and still become an English teacher if
you happen to be good at that subject, and that’s what you really want
to do, but you’d also have another marketable set of knowledge you can
use in other contexts.
I’ll take you one step further: I consider myself a conservative (a
moderate one; a New York conservative), and I’m on board with
universal healthcare. Let’s do it. Forget the bleeding heart
arguments about it, just look at the economic realities.
1) The systems in other countries result in less health care spending
per capita.
2) In countries with universal healthcare their small businesses and
startups are not handicapped with trying to pay for employees’ health
insurance. Here they have to offer insurance to be competitive in the
labor market, and it’s a major hurdle for having success with a business.
3) We /already/ put about as much public money per capita into
covering people’s medical bills as other countries do, and we’re only
covering a portion of people with specific circumstances. Either get
all meddling fingers out of it and let the market figure out what to
do, or go all in and rebuild the system so it works. We’re one foot
in and one foot out right now and it’s brutally expensive and by many
metrics it’s not all that effective. I know some would argue more in
favor of letting the market handle it, but recall that we’ve done that
before and we had quacks calling themselves doctors and selling all
kinds of bullshit to people. I’m thinking back when Coca-Cola
contained cocaine and was sold as a medicine. If you let the market
run the show completely then you have to accept bad outcomes along
with the good ones. Civil court didn’t fix it all then, and I don’t
see why it would now either.
-Adam
*From:*AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Jones
*Sent:* Friday, July 05, 2024 7:24 PM
*To:* AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays
I think im one of the only conservatives that is pro free higher
education. More as an investment than as an expense
remove all liberal arts, STEM, not STEAM only (you want an art history
degree, you can pay for it), 1:1 community service requirement per
classroom instruction hour, manual labor or degree related community
service only, 90% mandatory score, 95% mandatory attendance, 100
percent drug and alcohol abstinence during the school year, tested
biweekly. Zero criminal tolerance. You pay on the loan until youve
completed the mandatory community service and repay all deferments
from that time period. Then each year you maintain full time
employment, 10 percent is waived for 10 years. but that would actually
require something, so of course it would be too unfair.
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 12:52 PM Forrest Christian (List Account)
<li...@packetflux.com> wrote:
I feel that it's time for college to go through a major revision.
First, I lean quite strongly toward the Mike Rowe worldview in
that we need to quit telling our kids that they need a college
education to make it in this world. Right now if you're in one of
the blue collar trades you're far better off than a lot of the
people who have ms or bs degrees. There will always be a demand
for plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and so on.
On the college side, we need to adjust what we teach to provide
for a condensed program where you cut out most (but not all) of
the non-relevant programs. Yes, it's hard to learn certain
trades without college, but a degree in computer science shouldn't
need a lot of the liberal arts classes.
Finally, we need to reform the student loan program so that we
quit graduating students with degrees in underwater basketweaving
with 6 figure loan balances. Right now, lenders are able to loan
to anyone without risk and as such there is no incentive for
lenders or schools to ensure that the students will be able to
repay their loans from a typical job in the student's chosen
degree program. This has led to ballooning tuition and overall
school costs since there is no pressure to keep costs low.
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024, 10:36 AM <ch...@go-mtc.com> wrote:
With the risk of starting something, I thought I would inject
some observations:
I do watch Charley Kirk on YouTube for a quick fix of watching
him dissolve some of the woke ideology being spouted by young
college kids. For me it is like junk food for my worldview.
Can only take so much of it, like eating too many sweets. And
he can get a bit too alt-right for me at times.
Yesterday he was preaching something that I think he was
partially, perhaps mostly wrong about. He is a college
dropout and preaches that college is a scam and you would be
better off just learning to code and find an internship that
does not require a degree.
I think he is only partially right.
By and large, most BA programs are probably not worth the
money unless they go onto grad school. A BA in art history
doesn’t have much value when searching Indeed for a job. It
can however get you into law school.
And we all know that if you start and successfully run a WISP
you absolutely must be an autodidact. An autodidact with
ambition. Cannot pick up either of those at a college. And
do not need college to be a superior ISP or WISP. It does
however take a special type of person.
But there are a couple of areas where I know, from personal
experience, that you really benefit from formal education:
1) Computer Science – the part where you learn hardware
theory, operating system design, compiler design, advanced
data structures, OO methods etc. Really hard to pick up this
stuff by watching youtube videos. And really hard to get any
good at it unless you are forced to do homework and labs.
Understanding what happens with the hardware, the stack and OS
during a hardware interrupt is important and not so easy to
learn on your own. Try to write some DSP functions from
scratch on your own... or perhaps some machine code to hand
optimize a MCU routine. Much easier if you had a class on
assembly.
2) RF and antennas. Reflection coefficients and the mastery
of Smith charts. EM simulation software and optimization.
S11 and PCB stripline and microstrip layout. Etc etc. Again,
a good autodidact can teach themselves anything. But I tried
for years to master Smith charts and it was not until college
that I finally got to where I could use them. Now-a-days the
software does it all for you but you still need to know.
3) To understand some of this stuff, like DSP etc, you also
need some upper level math, calculus and trig. Hard to do on
your own.
I also imagine that if you want to get into medical school,
classes on chemistry, biology etc are essential. All PE
programs will always need degreed engineers. So yeah Charley,
if you get a liberal arts degree, I would tend to agree with
you that your fathers money was probably wasted. But many of
the BS degrees are not a scam or waste.
--
AF mailing list
AF@af.afmug.com
http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
--
AF mailing list
AF@af.afmug.com
http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
AF mailing list
AF@af.afmug.com
http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
--
AF mailing list
AF@af.afmug.com
http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
