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Comment Re:One word summary. (Score 1) 1032

No, the proper one-word summary would be "Greed".
Universities are greedy because they'd shove as many poor souls as possible into a MA without caring whether there's too many of them, as long as they grab some cash from said poor souls (or the banks loaning them).
Banks are greedy because they love handing out that cash and then shaking said poor souls off their earnings, pushing them into life-long poverty.

You expect an 18 year old person to have the wisdom of a 40 year old. Breaking news: they don't. They should be explained why the choice they're about to make is risky, and what's expecting them if they move forward with it. I so far have heard of no bank or university doing such thing. It should be like this:

Poor Bastard (PB): "I wanna major in Philosophy!"
University (U): "Here's a study telling you that there's an overhead of people with MA in Philosophy - it's unlikely you'll ever be able to profess in that branch. Furthermore, we only have 15 seats available because we know more than that will land you in unemployment hell once you are done with us. Do you still want to do it?".
Bank (B): "You will need to pay the University 50K a year tuition and that means you will have to take a big loan from us and likely pay us 2K a month for the next 15 years. Here's a study telling you that 70% of people who currently pay us the loan and have a Philosophy MA don't profess in that area, and 50% are living in poverty. Do you still want to do it?".
If the PB ignores the U and the B and moves forward with it, then fine. It's an informed choice.
With me being unfamiliar with how things are happening in the States, I gotta ask: Is this true? Are future university students making an informed choice?
Here in my country, Universities offer a small number of subsidized seats (you're attending for free), based on your knowledge and high school scores. Say, Philosophy: 10 subsidized seats + 15 paid seats (because they estimate that's the amount of seats required to replace retiring Philosophy teachers). Tuitions are small enough to not overburden students. They're on average equivalent to 3 to 6 average monthly salaries per year, and you can split that tuition into 4 quarterly payouts. To give you an idea of how much that means, I can pay 2 average yearly tuitions for an IT university with one monthly IT salary right now.

Comment Re:Could you tell a difference at distance? (Score 4, Funny) 535

Not really. The E-11 was pretty damn good, and a DC-15A would have ripped through the entire school easily. Not to mention the police.
The plastoid armor, however, was shit. Too many known weak spots, unwieldy, horrible color choice. The only nice thing about it was the helmet, or rather its technical capabilities. Still, it was a couple magnitudes below the Mandalorian helmets.
But we digress.

Comment Re:WHAT! (Score 5, Insightful) 94

" I mean, just think of large corporations that avoid paying tax or buy cheaply from sweat-shops employing child-labour."

When all else is equal...
All companies have these kind of skeletons in the closet. Chinese companies simply seem to have some more on top of those which everyone else lovingly owns.
Lack of regulation might be a reason when seeing this internally (within the country) - and then again, when all else is equal... But here we're talking about international events, and that's where you see companies A, B, C playing by the rules and company D (Chinese, more often than not) trying to cheat its way in.
No more than a couple weeks ago there was a story here on /. about Chinese students taking exams instead of the ones who should. After many, many, MANY such stories over the years one can't help but develop a stereotype.
From fake $ITEM to cheating in competitions, China seems on top of the world as count of occurrences.

I googled "chinese cheating": got 22.6M results, top results are about exam cheating.
I also googled "americans cheating", got 14.8M results, top results are about marital cheating.
Of course, this might not mean much, but it's a start. Anyone wants to send a research grant my way? :)

Comment Re:1982 is an interesting comparison in other ways (Score 1) 74

Which makes no sense as a comparison.
Tech literacy amongst those with Internet access was higher because Internet Access availability was lower. The OP is confusing the cause with the effect.

Cause: internet Access required technical literacy.
Effect: Only those with technical literacy were accessing the Internet.

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