Suddenly show up, my ass.

We have two companies in town offering cable broadband. I STILL can't choose who I want to use.

As for DSL choices, it's the phone company or some other company I know nothing about.

It's already a requirement, too, for visa pictures in any country requiring one that I've ever been to.

In fact, Mexico once declined to accept my visa picture since I had an earring in.

Generally I agree that kids should aspire to the highest levels, but let's not pretend that the value of a high school diploma was undervalued by the existence of people going to college.

It was devalued in the workforce by the slipping level of education attained by the end of high school, and the relative ease-of-access to colleges and universities.

I have a college degree, and did well in school. But I can tell you that my grandfather had nothing more than a high school diploma and did quite well as a machinist and later a shop manager. In fact, adjusted for inflation, he made significantly more WITHOUT a college education than I do with one. A college degree these days is like the high school diploma of 4-6 decades ago. It will qualify you for a bit more than an $40,000-year entry level job in cubedom. Thankfully, I no longer work in cubedom.

We have lost nearly all the well-paying (admittedly, mostly trade) jobs that one used to get out of high school, and replaced them with under-paying consumer services (retail) jobs that anyone with an IQ greater than their own shoe size can tackle.

Couple that with having high schoolers performing at middle school levels and colleges that have gone to 'vocational education' en masse, and you have a recipe for the pie we're presently learning to digest.

Pass the pepto, please.

Yeah, definitely. Bonuses for teachers who can up standards according to concrete metrics is the way to go.

Look at all the extremely high-paid and 'bonused' CEOs and executives out there at the helms of those successful retail, media, manufacturing, finance and technology firms out there lining up to suckle at the government's bailout teat.

Oh, wait...

Pardon my rant, but I'm a professional editorial and commercial photographer with a lot of experience in the news publishing industry.

This is exactly what is wrong with the business these days. Media companies can't make any bloody money because they can't tell stories on their own. There is NO reason to pick up the local paper over hopping onto Yahoo! Google or any other electronic source.

Despite large staffs (even after layoffs in most places) and a broad reach, they rely on everyone else to do their work for them, so they can continue to wallow in the mediocre goal of being all things to all people in the lowest common denominator.

From the AP and National Geographic on down the line to the Buttfuck, Iowa Weekly Register, publications need to get it through their fat fucking skulls that GENERATING highest quality content is far more important both to mission and money than just regurgitating information at the speed of thought.

You know why newspapers can't make money? The bloat it takes to run 84 pages of wire shit, box scores and stock quotes (day old, mind you) around the 12 pages of actual, real content worth reading.

But that's OK. Let them continue to take and publish HAND OUT MATERIAL FROM SOURCES. Then they can sit around the board room jerking each other off about 'multimedia initiatives' for the future while their stock and company eats shit and dies.

Places like Voice of San Diego have their shit together (mostly). Right on to the real, and death to the fakers.