And not bathing or really any grooming pretty much.

There are many fields where everyone needs to pitch in and the collective efforts sum up to a result. Digging ditches would be an example. Teaching would be another. One brilliant teacher can't teach millions; but one brilliant teacher can raise the bar with the rest expected to follow. But in theoretical science being a hard working slightly intelligent person is only going to result in a mild contribution at best. Only a very very few extremely brilliant people move things forward. In the more applied areas of science such as food testing hard work is a perfectly viable substitute for brilliance. It really annoys me when the mediocre try and say all the great science is now done by groups. That is true in that all the mediocre science is done by groups of mediocre scientists. But it is still the Feynman sitting alone in a room who make the leaps that everyone else then follows and fills in the blanks.

I see this in Computer Science every day. There are those vast majority of programmers who are rarely using any math beyond X++ and there are those who are taking an ML and figuring out ways to take some aspect of it to the next level.

Rarely is the brilliance separate from hard work but 99% of PhD theses could be and are completely ignored. That was a whole lot of hard work that went into them. But then there are people like Higgs who's hard work + brilliance resulted in the creation of the LHC to verify his brilliance; done by groups of people who worked very hard. I suspect that many of the best bits of the LHC were created by a very very small number of very brilliant people while the rest was plodded in to place by the merely very smart.

This is a perfect example of hiring a bunch of MBAs who then use terms like "Low hanging fruit" and change the company from technology company to high pressure cell outlet with junky high margin accessories.

I love when the darlings of the MBA world like Blockbuster turn out to be so riddled with cancer that they can't survive.

My next prediction is that the MBA riddled aviation world is next. The whole concept of "calculated misery" where they shrink seats not only to pack more people onto the plane but so that they can charge extra for getting what should actually be a mandated minimum leg room is classic MBA "cunning" that will blow up in their BSchool faces. The only problem is that the bastards are the sort who weasel their way into "retention" bonuses.

But to any CEOs who might read slashdot, right now go to HR and tell them to fire every MBA even if they are doing a non financial related job as their Machiavellian training is probably causing massive misery for anyone around them.

I can foresee some classes in Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, or even a newer yet obscure language like Erlang. This way the teachers will feel that they are superior to the students. I program C++ every day, yet some whiz could probably write small amounts of template code that I simply could not parse in my head. But good luck finding an under 20 whiz in Powerbuilder.

The other thing I foresee are a whole lot of frustrated kids who write far better code than was asked for yet will be told that their code is "wrong" because it doesn't match what was expected. For instance a "while" loop being insisted on with a "for" loop being rejected. Especially if it is newer C++ for loop that can iterate through something like a vector.

Then just to piss everyone off I can foresee many teachers being grammar nazis. So if(x==2) would lose you marks because it wasn't if( x==2 ) which would be considered better by that teacher than if( x == 2) but still not as good as if ( x == 2 ). But the same student might as well quit the course if they thought that using the magic number 2 instead of a const or a #define was actually a problem. I suspect that following strict formatting guidelines for some teachers will be more important than having the code even compile.

I would agree that grit is critical to success, but not actually accomplishing anything. Years ago I was offered a Dilbert like bit of advice in an office which was "Don't go anywhere without a clipboard or file in your hand; even if you are heading to a meeting or doing something productive, enough people wander around socializing that not looking productive for even a moment will lump you in with the useless sorts."

But I have seen variations of this in the school system with my favourite example being my nephew going through engineering. They tortured him and his classmates with overwhelming amounts of stuff to learn and work to do. But what they taught him and how they taught him was a combination of useless, out of date, and just the wrong approach. While his innate ability to learn was amazing and resulted in top marks, he still had to work very hard. So the primary thing they tested was his "grit" but they hardly did anything with his near total lack of a single engineering gene in his body. He was completely in the wrong course and should have been in pure mathematics. I suspect that this same course would be repelled by an engineer with a natural Hillbilly/MacGyver ability who wasn't so keen on completing yards of work that their common sense told them was never going to be used and was effectively busy work.

One of the things that I think has happened in much of modern education is that it won't acknowledge that there are two types of people in things like science. There are the great minds and there are the bottle washers; with the bottle washers greatly outnumbering the great minds. So the bottle washers have created a system that gives them a chance to rise to the top while many of the great minds end up becoming garage mechanics because they just didn't have the "grit" to jump through the hoops that the bottle washers set up as an initiation rite.

A near perfect example of the bottle washers taking over would be the ITER fusion project. This is a perfect long term project where whole careers can be spent doing "science" without having to deliver a single thing beyond marketing, hype, and spreadsheets. But I am willing to bet that many of the top people working on that project have qualifications coming out their asses. Qualifications that can only be obtained through pure "grit". While I don't doubt that a few people working on that project are making actual science happen it would be almost despite the top leadership as opposed to because of them.

But seeing that any real scientist must pass these initiation rites it is absolutely a requirement that they have the ability to grit their teeth and appease the stupid gatekeepers.

That said it is very difficult to accomplish much if someone is not willing to put in a huge amount of hard work. The critical difference is that students of today have to do a huge amount of stupid before they are allowed to do anything smart.

I don't even want a radio in my next new car. I literally want a radio, including satellite, as much as I want an 8 track, a cassette player, or even a CD player. I want the sound system and controls to interface with my phone and that is pretty much it. Maybe just maybe I could use a little in car storage for the rare time that I don't have my phone.

I have the spurs and the whip going hard on my startup and one of the first things I would contemplate buying with genuinely spare cash would be a Tesla. Mostly for my inner geek but the concept of walking into a Mall (I don't really like malls) store and saying, "I'll take one in black." and not having a sales dick try and bamboozle me for the next 8 hours really really appeals to me.

I was in a restaurant a few months ago with a friend and at a nearby table there were a group of guys who all fit some strange demographic. They were very well groomed but in a Walmart mannequin sort of way. It was all not-GQ and sort of sad. We stared at the lot of them and just couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with them. Then I realized. We were in a diner near all the car dealerships and this was a bunch of salesmen on a late lunch. I don't ever want to deal with these guys who spend every day trying to figure out ways to rip me off including dressing badly so I think they are stupid.

My test for TV is the commercials. CNN had a prime time advertisement for catheters the other day. My guess is that 5 years ago CNN simply wouldn't have accepted their money; nor could such a niche product afford prime CNN advertising 5 years ago.

What I meant is that due to things like cars being better and inspection requirements keeping most of the total junk off the roads people just don't do that much. Even things like killing your battery by leaving the lights on is much harder as the smarter cars will just turn them off.

There was that chug chug chug as the motor would either catch or almost catch along with the lurching and spring noises of the car bouncing with each engine turnover. But the whole choreographed event is something that I haven't seen in years. Yet even in the early 80s there were people(often students) who's cars pretty much always needed a push start. They would strategize only parking their cars pointing downhill.

I loved when those movies would be brought out. I could stop pretending to pay attention in the dark.

When I was a kid this was a pretty standard noise. The things holding the crappy muffler were themselves crappy and between the heat and road salts they simply didn't stand a chance. I am pretty sure that if you stood by a busy downtown road in 1975 that you wouldn't have to wait an hour for a dragging muffler car to go by.

I am not sure that I have heard that sound in a decade or more.

I simply don't hear radio much anymore. My kids don't listen to it, I don't hear it in cars driving by, I don't hear it much in stores, and I certainly don't listen to it.

But the simple numbers that tell an absolute and unmanipulable truth is the advertising revenue. Every other statistic is a complete and total fabrication created in an effort to prevent the total freefall of existing sales and stock prices. A great example of these desperadoes is that they often show revenues from 2009 to the present. This makes it look like a growth industry but in reality it is a recovery from the disaster that was 2008.

Quite simply people don't want to be told by a bunch of baby boomers what music to listen to. They have a device in their pockets that gives them total control. Remember these are the same sort of people who loved putting one good song on each CD so that people were effectively paying $20 per song.

I really hate when they find one guy with a PhD who just finished a well researched report proving that torture doesn't work and another guy who supports torture and was a general who knows none of the specifics and just keeps using phrases like "Think of the children" or "We must protect the boys in uniform." and after he is pounded into the ground the host will throw in a statement that the FBI thinks that they are justified in trampling rights because they are the "good guys"

Or when the news hosts will say things like "He learned too much math."

Nearly everyone I know has dumped cable and in most cases it wasn't to make their budget better but that once they got Netflix that commercials became insufferable and the cost per cable hour watched then skyrocketed. In my area to have a half decent set of packages you will end up paying around $100 per month. So for people who were just watching the occasional news show and not much else they realized that they were paying pretty much the same per show as the entirety of their monthly Netflix cost.

But then I hear other complaints which is that the news is becoming wildly biased while the quality of most programming is in freefall. I hear that it is becoming clear that many of the new programs are being made on silly low budgets. For instance I was over at a cable using friend's house and the weather reporter was talking to a camera on a tripod. They had eliminated the cameraman. Plus some of the travel shows are basically all selfie shots with a selfie stick or a tripod.

And CNN really took the cake when they had 1000's of hours of reporting on the missing airliner when their only two real facts were that it was missing and that it turned left.

So while in 1994 I would have killed to get my channels a-la-carte at this point it is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.