Actually, depending on the advanced degree she goes for, she should be able to get the school to pay her - acting as a teaching assistant or research assistant is usually nets free tuition and a stipend. Not much of one, but still.

With regard to what people did wrong - they usually listened to their elders who insisted that they HAD to go to college ever since they set foot into 1st grade and filled their heads with visions of gloom and doom, catfood sandwiches and living in cardboard boxes if they didn't go to school. It's no surprise that many young people find it extremely difficult to make sound financial decisions and solid plans for what seems to be a very distant time when they've spent their entire lives being told horror stories about what will happen if they don't do this. I have a very hard time blaming the young people who internalized the endless advice they were given when they act on that advice.

Part of the solution is to quit overemphasizing college where it isn't necessary. Another part of it is for parents to actually be better parents - sounds like you did fine, but a lot of parents take their kids as an opportunity to compensate for their own failings and push them to the point where the kids behave even more irrationally than the norm.

Oh, and another part is to put a cap on what an institution that accepts ANY federal money in the form of grants, tax breaks or backed student loans and grants can actually charge for tuition. Tie the cap to the minimum wage, perhaps - something like 50% of the pre-tax earnings from a 20hr/week job at minimum wage per year. If a university can't figure out how to keep the lights on when charging ~4k/student/year JUST for tuition (let 'em charge whatever they want for housing, so long as it isn't required that students live in campus housing), something has gone off the rails.

Oh, and furthermore:

If conditions 1 and 2 above are actually true (I personally think it's racist/sexist bullshit, but those are arguments people trot out on the regular): 2 candidates being equal means to me that the white male candidate must be exceptionally lazy. After else, if whites and males are both socially and biologically more suited to working in the field in general, how then could a white male manage to not do a better job given equal education and experience?

The answer has to be either that white men aren't actually better or more suited to doing this stuff than other races or women OR that if they are, in this particular case, the white male candidate must either be defective or lazy.

I'll say it:

All other things (education, experience, interview, etc.) being equal or close enough between two candidates, one of them being a white male and the other being someone in a racial or gender minority class, yeah, I'm going to hire the person in the racial or gender minority class.

It isn't for a metric - it's because, all other things being equal as you stipulated, a person from a class not normally found in the field is likely going to have had to overcome obstacles and challenges on the way there that the other candidate has not.
Let's look at some reasons why the minority candidate who is otherwise equal to the non-minority candidate is the better pick:

1) In every single discussion of diversity in tech on Slashdot, people will trot out REASONS why minorities don't do well in tech: Black people don't do well because they get called out by their friends and families for acting white if they go to school. Women don't because they get called out by other women for being in such a nerdy profession. Etc. etc. etc. If that is true, then yes, I want the candidate who has demonstrated persistence and determination in the face of hostility. They will be use to adversity and overcoming it, and as a hiring manager I will want that in a candidate.

2) In every single discussion of diversity in tech on Slashdot, people will trot out BIOTRUTHS about women and minorities and why they are not well represented in tech. If that's true, then yes, I absolutely want the candidate who is exceptional and defies their biology to have somehow managed to be equal to the non-minority candidate. There's more potential for them to be exceptional in other ways, and as a hiring manager, I want exceptional people.

3) If everything else is equal, why NOT hire the candidate who will also improve an arbitrary metric? As a hiring manager, I want to not have to have people crawling up my ass telling me to do things just so the team looks better, and this would reduce one more thing people could crawl up my ass about.

So yeah, unless you're a fucking idiot, hire the atypical candidate when they are literally close enough to equal that flipping a coin would be the only "fair" way to determine who to hire. Duh?

We had a deal - those creating works get a period of time to capitalize on those works, after which they go into the public domain, and in exchange for those works being given over to the public, the public agrees to not violate that copyright without facing penalties.

Most works are no longer being given over to the public domain, therefore it's absurd to punish people for pirating them - a contract has to offer something to both sides.

WRT to software piracy (specifically games) - DRM put the nail in that coffin for me. When it became easier to install torrented, cracked games on release day than it did to install legally purchased software, I gave up giving a shit.

That said, contribute to open source (either funds or assistance), and definitely support projects where there isn't an obvious profit motive just the creation of neat tricks.

I won't even dignify "patriotism" with more than a laugh.

Can't pay a competitive wage. Can't offer benefits remotely close to what private employers will offer. Lose a ton of personal autonomy from matters trivial (no 420) to absolutely vital (Wanna move to a different state? Nope. Wanna quit? Nope. Wanna change jobs? Nope.) Be beholden to whatever high-functioning sociopaths make it through our joke of an electoral season.

Oh, you might get to play with some cool toys that you might not have access to as a civilian, I guess. And those who don't have any skills to start with might get some training out of it, though, to be honest, if you're old enough to join a service like this and you aren't at least somewhat self-taught already, you're probably not actually going to ever be good enough to be more effective than "the enemy" at what they will want you to do. You'd get a few competent journeymen out of it, I guess.

Talk about cartoon villains!

You're adorable.

Given that the criteria I listed for "men who can't" have nothing to do with the criteria you used, your comment doesn't really make sense. But, what the heck, I feel charitable - please go ahead and feel like you told me off most righteously.

And, by the way - the "cartoon-quality villains" I "made up"? Read any story on slashdot that talks about women in tech or minorities in tech and tell me people exactly like the ones I used as examples of "men who can't" don't exist.

Men who can, do. Men who can't, blame women, feminists, people of color, H1Bs, and pretty much anyone but themselves.

So, I suppose if someone said they were going to rape and kill your family and then posted the address of your family and pictures of them you would just laugh that off as being completely absurd because, hey, it's online and there's no way online can ever affect the "real world"?

Because that's the context of this discussion. That's the kind of thing that has happened to many of the people who are receiving these threats, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat those threats the same as if they were delivered by any other medium, and I'd hope law enforcement would, too.

Online impacts offline all the time in a great number of ways, and only an idiot would imagine otherwise. There's a reason you and I and a great many people here are using pseudonyms and go out our ways to avoid giving out potentially identifying information and that's because we are damn well aware of the fact that people can and do reach out from online to fuck with people in very real ways.

You spent a non-trivial amount of time and effort fighting with trolls. Unless you're Thor Odinson and these are literal trolls, you lost just by engaging.

I don't mean to sound intolerably cruel and snide, but you're too ignorant to be taking part in this discussion, and the fact that your ignorance was modded insightful says loads about the person who modded you up as well.

There is a shortage of men in nursing (a lowish pay, low prestige field) and people are absolutely bothered by it and trying to remedy it. Just because you aren't aware of it doesn't mean it isn't a thing people are bothered by, and moreover, the arrogance you display in assuming that because you haven't heard of the issue means it doesn't exist is pathetic.

Further, women aren't being forced into tech, we're being pushed out of it by shitlords like you who assume we have a fundamental weakness that prevents us from being as good as men in the work. Do you not think that maybe - just maybe - the fact that you do think we aren't as naturally adept as men could be might influence the way you interact with women in the field vs. how you interact with men?

You aren't being cruel and snide, you're just ignorant and arrogant, and a fucking idiot on top of it because you're pretty clearly incapable of refraining from spouting off your factually incorrect opinion on the subject. If you would be honest with yourself, you'd see that, and you'd probably be pretty fucking ashamed of yourself.

Who am I kidding? People of your ilk aren't capable of feeling shame because feeling shame requires the ability to admit you could be wrong.

Because there's no value in overengineering things that are easy to replace and where the consequences of failure are trivial. Further, most people only need the features of their phones to be "OK" rather than "GREAT" and would rather carry one device rather than 10.

For some things - such as clothing or furniture, or items where there have literally been no earth shattering developments in the last 100 years (like, I dunno, silverware), it's okay to overengineer because doing so is actually efficient. I have a coat and a pair of boots that have lasted me 20+ years, some silverware that's maybe 200 years old, and the average of most of the "important" furniture in my home is over 75 years.

But my phone? I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not even an amateur photographer. I just want pictures I took of people and things and events I found worth photographing that are "good enough." I'm not doing professional video editing, so I just want a video cam that's good enough I can take footage of my dogs doing goofy stuff that I can send to my family. If I'm in a place where I'm watching movies or TV on my phone, it means I'm traveling and therefore unlikely to give much of a shit if the screen doesn't have perfect color fidelity or whatever because, well, there's a bunch of shit going on around me anyway. Ditto for music - why would I aim for some kind of audiophile's wet dream when likely the only time I'll be using my phone for music is when I'm out and about in situations where music quality isn't terribly relevant? Etc. and so on.

It's not that we don't value quality - I think we DO value quality very, very much - it's just that we can recognize that it's kind of stupid to waste time and money and effort on overengineering things that will be hopelessly outclassed in a few scant years.

Buy quality where it matters, buy cheap and replaceable where it doesn't.

If I want someone with the potential to be brilliant, I'd go for the candidate who, despite NOT immersing themselves in the field for the last 4+ years of their life has just performed as well as the candidate who has dedicated their education to the field.

Even if things weren't precisely equal, I'd be inclined to go with the person who isn't trained yet performed well enough to be considered for the job, since they clearly have a lot more potential to grow and clearly have a desire to learn on their own rather than just because they "had" to in university. That person might have some deficits, but they will very likely be able to remedy them, given their already demonstrated desire to learn on their own.

If I'm just hiring a cog and they need to hit a few boxes on a checklist in order to be slotted in to a role where brilliance would actually be harmfully disruptive, then sure, give me the person who treated university like a vocational training course, I guess.

Sorry, but no - I'm not responsible for other people's behavior, no matter how much you feel like I should be simply because I use the same term.

You've clearly got some issue with "feminism" and "feminists" - but it's not an issue I can help you with. .Not my monkeys, not my circus. Be well.

You and I have a very, very different understanding of what feminism is. You're coming at it from a direction and conceptualization of it that is, frankly, alien to me, and while I would love to have a discussion of the details and the genesis for those different approaches, I don't know if that would be terribly fruitful here.

You're basically trying to make me answer for things I've never said and beliefs I do not hold, but that happen to be held by people who use a term I use to describe my thinking. It's like asking a random "Christian" to justify and explain Westboro Baptist's behavior because they both think of themselves as "Christian" despite that term meaning vastly different things. Other than saying "some people are assholes" I really can't be bothered to try and explain their behavior and shrug.

What I can say is what *I* believe and what *I* subscribe to. For me, feminism is recognizing that there is a pervasive and harmful current in society along gender lines, and that it hurts EVERYONE, be they male, female or neither. It's not about victimhood, it's about recognizing that harm is being done constantly and wouldn't it be nice if we could stop hurting ourselves over stupid shit?

What do I mean by "harm"? Here:
Guy has kids, wife makes more money so he stays at home to watch the kids while he works. Guy would get a ration of shit from buddies and probably a great deal from himself. He's been taught his entire life that men work, that childcare is women's work and god forbid he not make at least as much if not more than his wife. That's INCREDIBLY harmful to him.

Guy loses his job. Guy has to take one that pays less. He now may see himself as less of a man because men are defined by their work in many ways; their value gets determined by what they make. Harmful.

Guy goes to see a movie, it's got a sad ending, he's bawling. Has to toughen up and say "it's dusty in here" or hide it, be ashamed of feeling something. Harmful.

Woman goes out to a bar and picks up a guy, they have sex. He's a stud, she's a slut. Harmful - to both parties, actually, since he's being defined by something stupid like his ability to find women to have sex with (making him less of a man if he fails) and she's being denigrated because she's having casual sex.

One common theme to all of these is that a man who doesn't act in a typically manly fashion is often insulted by being described as feminine, showing a general belief that "feminine masculine." Which is why many who try to address this harmful current in society: If feminine were seen as equal in status to masculine, there would be less damage done to ALL genders because it wouldn't be shameful to be more or less masculine or more or less feminine or to do manly things if you're a woman or womanly things if you're a man. Equal in status, not identical in function.