Yeah that's true, I agree.

How can you be so certain? Strong AI algorithm could be invented/discovered any time.

America is very close to handing nuclear launch codes to religious lunatics. One more election and it happens.

These people believe God will protect them from literally anything. I know because I have family like this.

They will launch those nukes. And is America's empire fails we are going to have to start doing military expansion to maintain our economy. We are already moving into Venezuela to take the oil for exactly that reason. Canada and Mexico and the rest of South America will follow. Europe will be next and eventually we'll try our chances with China.

The rest of the world ought to be interfering with the Russian interference that's getting us into this mess but they're all hoping that America will collapse letting them take over as the primary world power and letting their currency take over as the world's de facto currency. If they can pull that off then they're a billionaires get to become the first trillionaires instead of our billionaires becoming the first trillionaires.

The problem is everyone is underestimating how fucking crazy my country is. We will launch those nukes folks. Especially if the religious lunatics who are currently running our government finish the project 2025 work they've been planning for 60 years and end up in total control.

'Whoosh' goes the point, as it flies over the moron.

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

Well, I can see that you never made that experience. I have.

Indeed. People with a good education have _options_. And that means they do not have to take crap. Obviously, quite a few assholes do not like to have that type of person around.

It really depends. As degrees in the US are a big business, there are many worthless degrees and many that you can get easily, making them worthless if you did it the easy way.

Funny thing. The largest private (i.e. for profit) University in Germany currently has problems because many students find the degrees are not valuable and they do not learn a lot. No such problems with the regular ones. I think commercial education is just broken because of perverted incentives.

Getting a degree does not absolve you from really learning and being good at things. I think a significant pert of the people with degrees that have trouble finding jobs did select "easy" ones or took it wayyyy to easy getting them. Commercial "education" will make that easy, but you waste your time and money that way.

Hyperloops don't exist and will never exist, because they're infeasible. They're all scams. Stop platforming their proponents.

it has detailed arguments in between making fun of idiots who think hyperloop is real.

If you can't be arsed to learn things though I can't help you. Maybe reddit's "conservative" forum is more your speed then. They'll do a good job of protecting you from knowledge.

Did you know they had a week long gap in new posts when the voting on the Epstein files was going on?

That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.

This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.

Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.

Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that manages to get through that system but when it happens and they get caught they go to jail for decades.

Because people without degrees are often just envious.

I routinely ask my part-time students why they chose to get that degree after all. It is "need more skills for my job", "no career options without that degree" and sometimes "I really want to know more about things". This mostly students that are interested in IT security though, no idea how representative that is.

You know there are people who do this thing called being born and then they grow up and then they have to buy things because you're not born with a 32 GB memory kit. At least I wasn't maybe that's a birth defect...

Away from the build-out being finished. The bubble isn't a bubble it's not going to pop. The infrastructure isn't going to get shut down and sold off it's going to get used.

Like I mentioned on another thread the problem AI solves is wages. Paying wages.

This means that AI isn't going anywhere. Now a whole bunch of companies will collapse and the banks will be in trouble because they would have loaned those companies hundreds of billions of dollars. But you're just going to have to bail those Banks out or they will take the entire economy down with them and you will lose your retirement and your job.

There are solutions to all of these problems but none of them are acceptable to the average voter.

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.