I doubt they would ever go for that but I do think their investments
need to be managed by a blind trust.
*From:* Steve Jones
*Sent:* Monday, July 8, 2024 10:33 AM
*To:* AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] OT Happy Holidays
Id support it to a degree for basic care and privatized insurance for
everything else. but there would have to be fat cut from the national
budget and I dont see that ever happening, Would have the caveat that
no politician can hold any private investments in any company, they
have to liquidate and place their money in a 1% federally insured
account for the duration of their office.
It would never work here, too much grift.
On Mon, Jul 8, 2024 at 11:15 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.
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