Or teaching them Physics! They may -gasp- figure out that rocks can be thrown!

That explanation is far too simplistic.

There certainly are a lot of people that are incompetent at their jobs. That would support your hypothesis.

Seems senility has set in in your case. And I have been doing this for a while for a living too. Maybe you just have really small customers, as in less than 10k employees? They may still have the flexibility needed, both on the technological side and on the management side. You claim that this is generally possible is just plain wrong.

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.

Sorry, but you have your head on the clouds. This is not how reality works. And no, I do no need to hire you. I can improve things myself, with the added difference that I know what is possible in practice and what is not.

It is not about not having disasters. It is about having them with acceptable low probability and acceptable amortized cost. The nuclear industry has failed spectacularly at that.

The stance "nothing bad must ever happen" is only advocated by people that failed "risk management 101", i.e. people that are really clueless.