Then we need to start figuring out if there are ways to preserve liberty without privacy, because pretending that most public interactions will not be recorded in the near future is silly. The technology will be there, and it will be too powerful for governments to just outlaw (and as you insinuate they have little incentive to even try). I would rather us not just stick our head in the sand and actually start to evolve as a society. Our civilization changed from small close knit communities where there was very little true privacy to a globalized community where anonymity is easy to attain. I don't find it hard to believe that we can weather the storm of returning to a limited-privacy world again without reverting to tyranny.

Eventually we will get to the point where we just record our experiences without the need of cameras. I doubt this is even 50 years away. Society will have to get used to a post-privacy world eventually. Simple devices such as the Google Glass seem to be as good a start as any.

I shopped extensively at ALDI in my 20s (last decade) and the quality of product is much lower there. The prices are definitely better, which is why I shopped there before my career took off, but it is not comparable on quality. The difference between ALDI and Walmart is greater than the difference between Walmart and Whole Foods. I basically used ALDI to buy cheap bread, milk, and a few canned food items (their selection was low).

I should note that I have been to some Walmarts in poor areas whose produce department was just as bad as ALDI. So the difference between ALDI and Walmart probably does vary by location.

Your taxes will go towards providing assistance to the less fortunate if they were unemployed too. In fact even more tax-funded assistance would be needed. You could just as easily be thanking Walmart for subsidizing our taxes by providing wages to low skilled citizens. (note that I think both of these arguments are silly)

Perhaps an actual answer to his question.

First off, make sure your Associates degree is a transferable associates degree. The fact that you say it is in "Programming and Systems Analysis" instead of just Associates in Arts or Associates in Science leads me to believe it isn't a very transferable degree. You would have needed things like 3 communications classes (English, Speech, etc), 6 behavioral sciences / humanities courses, 2 science classes, and 2 math classes. If it is a transferable degree, then you are half way there.

If it is not transferable, you can try to use CLEP tests to get past many required classes. I was able to get past two humanities courses that weren't part of my associates this way. If you can't pass the tests because you are a bad test taker or something, community college classes are your best bet. It will be easy to pass those classes but it will take a while this way.

If you aren't able to go to college for two years during daytime hours, it will be a bit harder to finish the last 60 credit hours. When I needed a BS while working in 2009 I was forced to use University of Phoenix, but now there are many better options at real schools. I followed up my BS with an MS at a real school, so I didn't mind going to a degree mill. But a quick internet search can find numerous online BS programs at real brick and mortar schools.

I do not suggest going to a diploma mill unless you are going to follow up with a real MS. The government is likely to start cracking down on programs like UoP and Devry soon, and those schools will probably obtain even worse reputations than they already have when that happens. That said, I did get a job with a 50% pay increase by just listing I was 12 credit hours away from my UoP BS degree, so it was useful to me all by itself (my boss later confirmed my resume would never have reached her desk if I hadn't listed I was close to my BS).

I completely agree with you. The difference between humans and any other animal is our ability to comprehend the future and understand that delayed satisfaction can be very beneficial.

There are certification steps necessary for doctors with foreign medical degrees to practice medicine in the US. This includes ECFMG Certification and state licensing. The medical industry does not completely block all foreign doctors, but it limits the numbers of incoming physicians in the same way that it restricts the number of incoming medical residencies.

The full answer is that there is a shortage of capable workers willing to work at the salaries and rates necessary to keep the jobs in this country. The US had a huge head start in the IT field because most of this technology was invented here, but the benefit of that is slowly dwindling. It is similar to the manufacturing benefits we had when automation pioneers like Ford invented their processes in the US. But we are in a global marketplace so eventually all fields need to justify their compensation on a global scale.

If your position does not require a large amount of soft skills (which often don't transfer well between cultures), then you are unlikely to be shielded from global competition. And unlike Wall Street guys, corporate executives, sales, etc, most STEM jobs do not require too many soft skills. Technical skills transfer to other cultures very well so it is quite easy to transfer these. There are still plenty communication costs involved in off-shoring tech jobs, which is why STEM workers still make many times higher salaries in the US than in developing countries, but global pressure still suppresses wages.

The only way to really insulate more technical fields is through state sanctioned monopolistic practices such as unions. This works very well for the medical industry, because without their strict licensing practices we could be flooded with foreign doctors just like we are with H1Bs. It may not be a bad idea to at least create a licensing body for industries such as software development, but that could still limit technological progress.

The unfortunate truth is that in the case of STEM fields, what is best for these employees is not what is best for the country overall. Encouraging more people to go into slightly lower paying STEM jobs instead of banking, financing, law, etc. will help our country compete globally, even though it hurts the individual employees choosing lower compensating fields. The cheaper that we can build our IT infrastructure the better our economy can compete globally.

Luckily STEM workers are still very well paid. While I may be making over $200k per year if I had went into finance, I am perfectly happy with my low six digit salary in the midwest.

In 2010, the combined profits of the six leading tobacco companies was U.S. $35.1 billion, equal to the combined profits of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s in the same year. (Tobacco Industry Profits) It looks like the tobacco industry is doing just fine. They made a lot of money while manipulating public perception, and they are making a lot of money after losing that battle. By holding out and making as much profits as they could for as long as they could, it doesn't look like they sacrificed their future profitability at all.

No, he is saying that if someone should happen to get lucky then that person should still pay a portion of it back to the society that helped allow them to be lucky. If I won $10 million I sure wouldn't complain about paying $4 million in taxes. I don't complain about spending over $50k in taxes each year either, because I am also lucky enough to live in a large house with great schools and can buy almost anything I want within reason. I wouldn't have any of this without the society that I am giving back to, no matter how hard I may have worked for it.

What does it matter if inherited wealth is land or just stock in a company? Oh the poor children just inherited a $10 million farm and can't pay the taxes. Give me a break; take your $6 million payout and say thank you. This isn't the 1800s. If you can't afford to live in the same area your parents lived in, you move. If wealthy people want their kids to be better off, teach them to become productive members of society like they were. Most people in the US do not want a feudal society where wealth continues to accumulate unabated.

I would be surprised if someone like Rush Limbaugh hasn't said something similar about Russia on their US based cable/radio news programs in the past few weeks. I'm sure both of our nations have their own crackpot news agencies.

My counting was just fine (see the numbers properly progressing from 1 to 5). My problem was inconsistencies in my writing, caused by remembering the fifth assignment while writing my comment but not properly revising the previous statement.

While this sounds like posturing that would never actually get passed, I really I hope I am wrong. I went to the University of Phoenix because I was working full time and night program CS degrees at real schools simply did not exist 5 years ago. I knew then that I would only pay for the degree if I was planning on getting a Masters degree at a real school right after. I even called two local schools to ensure they would admit graduate students with UoP undergrad degrees. (BTW, I am in my last semester of my Masters program now)

My UoP degree definitely helped with my career, but only because I was an experienced software developer long before I enrolled. It only helped because of ridiculous HR requirements for applicants with degrees only. The education was atrocious. My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report. They even gave us the commands so all we needed to do was paste them into the console. This may be the most egregious example of the poor curriculum I can think of, but the rest of it was almost as bad.

My fellow students who didn't already know the material were struggling to understand it with no help in sight. I would help them on the forums and over emails, but I knew they would never get the necessary instruction to ever get hired in this field, let alone keep any job they weaseled their way into. It was really sad that they were spending potentially over $50k for a worthless degree. I never said anything to them because I did not want to risk being kicked out after spending so much money.

I hope the government really does start to do something. This problem was primarily caused by real universities that do not offer sufficient night programs for adult students, but it has progressed to the point where government intervention is necessary. These online schools really could provide decent educations if they were forced to. If their programs were decent they would fill a very large void in our country's education system, but in their current form they are nothing more than a parasite.

After reading a great deal about the countries who are improving their schools (in preparation for the schooling of my child), I don't think anyone should claim that our children are being pushed too hard. While we don't need to start pushing our children as hard as the South Koreans, our children are capable of far more than our schools give them credit for. But one reason it is hard to push our children to succeed is that they have parents at home validating that they don't even need to try and rise to the occasion.

Based on my experience with cousins and one of my brothers, I can in some small way empathize for parents who first understand that their "bright" 3rd graders are turning into average 6th graders. Different children hit the limits of their natural ability at different times (even the very bright ones will hit it sometime in college if they push themselves). Successful parents are able to push their kids to excel beyond their natural abilities (my wife's parents did that very well with her), but the poor parents just blame the school system or society.

Uh, are you reading the same post that I am? All he mentioned was arithmetic:

You do know what word arithmetic means right? In truth even calling it arithmetic isn't that accurate, it is better defined as elementary arithmetic (performing the four basic operations on real numbers).