Roughly 10% ahead of Canada and losing ground rapidly.

Haha, no. It is quite elementary that sacrificing market share while increasing prices is a fine recipe for short term gain and long term pain.

America certainly has it's issues but Putin seems determined to turn Russia into a nuclear armed banana republic. Look at this list. Russia, styling itself a great power, has impoverished its people to a state worse than Croatia and 56 other countries. Not far ahead of Botswana. Amazing power, that.

Well until then I think I will err on the side of caution and use speaker phone and a wired earpeice for phone calls. I'd rather limit my exposure and take personal responsibility for my health, than to go through anything like brain cancer. After all an absence of evidence doesn't mean a link isn't there, all it means is no one has funded any science to find *if* a link exists.

The University's are in the process of being privatized here. A few Venture Capitalists noticed our Federal Gov't would give guaranteed loans out to any school with accreditation. So they bought up a bunch of old Secretary Schools that has accreditation from the 40s and 50s and used those to get loans for students to go to their diploma mills.

Meanwhile we've got a political movement to lower taxes while keeping spending constant so that our country goes massively in debt. The debt isn't really a problem (we owe it to ourselves) but it frightens people. After 30 years we have people exploiting that fear to get cuts in education in the name of saving money. The whole scheme is called "Starve the Beast" and was thought up by our Republican and Libertarian parties. The result is most of our subsidies for state education have been cut.

It is not only what you want. If you have the required talent, you have a strong moral obligation to become good at using it. Otherwise a technological society collapses.

Typical US ignorance. It is.

While I did my PhD at one of the best technical universities in Europe (and on the planet), I was paid about 60% of an industrial salary. Doing a PhD and not getting paid enough to live off it decently is pure insanity. Of course you have some teaching duties (40% in my case), but you learn a lot there too, like presenting stuff and speaking in front of a group. Invaluable in basically any technical job on advanced level.

The British are not really part of Europe...

In most of Europe, you do not need a car, because they have something called "public transportation" that, unlike in almost all of the US, does not suck. Example: Here the longest distance to the next stop (city area, 350'000 inhabitants) is 200m, and during the day its one Bus/Tram every 7 minutes. A car is completely redundant. Instead use the Bus or Tram ride to read, something you do all the time as a student anyways.

Indeed. And if you chose the right one, you also get solid command of a second language out of that, an invaluable asset if you want to do anything international.

That is a road not many can take without sucking badly (and most that take this road do indeed suck badly, many of them do not know it). High-quality education is what allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants. No amount of talent can replace that. In fact, talent is orthogonal to it. You need both to be good.

I do know a number of people in the CS field that had abbreviated educations (BS only) or educations with the wrong focus point (economics, then they were doing IT security work) and that invested in more (MA, PhD in one case). All say that it was very much worth their while. All also say that they could not even see or only very fuzzily see what they were missing before.

A society where somebody looking to get an education can be reduced to that sucks on a very fundamental level. Doing education right takes everything a person has. Adding economic survival to that is just plain wrong and also plain stupid economically. Maybe one of the reasons the US imports so many H1B workers: The domestic talent seems to find it far to difficult to get a good education. A country the size of the US should not have any shortage of highly talented, skilled and educated people. Yet it has.

Indeed. Everything you learn that you are interested in that is. That is one of the main reason to advise people to learn something they have a passion for. The ones doing things for the money will not get a lot of mileage out of their "learning" as it will not become part of who they are and hence they will never be good at it will not stay long with them. That is also a reason why everybody that finds they cannot find passion for a subject to change the subject.

Sure, at the end of the day you have to find some way to make enough money from what you learned to live off it. But you can either live in hell, doing a job you hate and no amount of money will ever compensate for that (although many people think it does). Or you can do something that you at lest love parts of and that you are good at. That usually does not make you rich, but unless you are really unlucky, it should be enough to live decently off it. Just remember that working is what takes most of your awake-time. Making that time more agreeable is very much worthwhile.

Positive Sum Gaming would work if the rich didn't gain when you lose. But they do. They gain power. See here.. Adaption is a slow, painful process. When the industrial revolution hit in the mid 1700s millions were impoverished by automation before the economy caught up in the 1800s. 60+ years of misery. We've seen it happen, I don't see any good reason we should let it happen again just to preserve a misguided notion of "freedom" at all costs.

You're also assuming we have to have 80% of humanity living in abject poverty. But is that really true? Are we as a people so weak that we can't feed or cloth one another? We already know the answer is no. We already produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just need people willing to say it's OK for people to have food, even if they didn't work themselves to death to get it.