What is fucking depressing is if he were trying to get a job today he'd never be able to do more than sweep the floors at NASA because thanks to HR giving nary a shit about anything but pieces of paper you are no longer "smart enough" for anything of note unless you go into indentured servitude to get the right degrees for the checkboxes.

So you want communism? Will you abolish the state and thus get rid of all taxes? Marx wrote in his newspaper thatit is duty of every individual to stop paying taxes, he was even brought to court for that, before they threw him out. As to promoting Leninism.... I would give a lot to meet you in a dark alley sometime...

To be fair, probiotics and alternative medicine people have said all kinds of ridiculous things for decades as well. I remember all too well the "ruby infused sun water" that was said to be a sure cure for my ear infections as a kid. That's just one of many similarly silly claims, as by recent protests against scam medical practices by actual doctors purposely trying to "overdose" on homeopathics...

The value isn't in having the "right answer" - it's in knowing which answers are are, in fact, right. "Alternative medicine" types tend to babble incoherently, a practice which does, occasional, manage to burble a right answer.

I recently played a few hours of Mario Kart 64 (yep, dusted of the old N64) on a couch with some friends and by the end of it, my lower back was killing me. I never get this when I spend 4 hours playing Civ IV.

Absolutely. If you look at the posture of someone playing a console game, you will see an arched back, pressure on the lumbar, neck pulled back, often feet not flat on the floor.

As you can see from this photo of me playing WoW, PC gaming provides a much more healthy posture:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xAf6...

So where do proper adult gamers sit when they spend quality time playing a game with their own children or with the children they're babysitting?

Playing on a console with a child who is your own or entrusted to your care is borderline child abuse.

My daughter preferred singing songs, hearing me read a book or playing one of the many musical instruments in the house. Or, as she got older, playing with her microscope set or walking through the woods or older still, practicing martial arts and riding her skateboard.

At some point, she liked games, but preferred playing on her PC to consoles, because consoles are for nincompoops. She is now working on a PhD in Mathematics and can kick your ass. At Battlefield 4 or a with a 2-meter staff. Or the puzzle of your choice.

I don't like using the term, "master race", and I don't like to say that it was the choice of PC over consoles that made her grow so straight and true, but the result speaks for itself.

I'm not looking at highest overall pay, but highest incremental pay, vs. if you self-taught that field. CS degrees pay a lot, but their incremental value is not nearly as high, b/c self-taught programmers also get good salaries. Therefore, if you are going to do CS, the incremental value of getting a degree in it vs. just self-teaching is not that high.

Now compare people with liberal-arts degrees to people who are looking for liberal-arts jobs without having a degree. Now here you see a big differential: people looking for liberal arts jobs with no college degree don't have many offers coming.

Not exactly. You know what was true in the past? That a good education made you a better person.

Now, I won't deny for a second that there were numerous social and economic factors in getting the 'right' education from the 'right' schools. It's true that being a 'gentleman' was inextricably tied up with class, economic status and the clannishness of the privileged. But it was still about being the right sort of person rather than a more-or-less necessary precursor to employment. The cost in those days was primarily to keep the riff-raff out, rather than any reflection of economic realities (conditions in some British colleges, for example, were abominable).

In spite of all the hypocrisy and all the cant, a liberal education was designed to improve the person. It had little or nothing to do with employment, except inasmuch as employers at the time wanted 'improved' people for a number of lines of work.

Full Disclosure: It's easy for me to talk. I was one of the last people through a system that actually did focus on a decent general education, at a level of government funding that allowed me to finish 4 years of a double major with only $10,000 in debt, payable at a pittance a month over a ten-year term. I'm an arts major who's also a CTO, by the way.

I think a lot of people are changing aspects of their behavior.

I encrypt most communications with friends and family now, just to be a dick to whoever's doing surveillance. It's not that I care so much about protecting what's in those communications as I just don't want their lives to be one bit easier than they need to be.

Sometimes I run Tor for the most mundane things, like looking for a recipe for chocolate flan cake, or the lyrics to songs by Bombay Bicycle Club. It really doesn't add more than a few seconds to what I'm doing and it gives me a tiny bit of satisfaction.

For all I know, they have a back door to GPG and other crypto, but I can't do anything about that.

Bill Gates himself even says that he's a dumb example of a college dropout. Not only because the odds of following his trajectory are small, but because he was basically at the point of graduating when Microsoft blew up. Had Microsoft gotten its big break 6 months later, he would've graduated, but it got big and he ran with it. He didn't drop out and then roll the dice.

I seem to recall some numbers that the differential value of a college degree is actually highest outside of STEM. Can't seem to find them again, but would be interesting to look at.

It makes sense if you think of it from the "negative" side: how do you fare looking for a job without a degree? If you are looking for tech jobs, a degree is valuable but you can still get a good job without one: CS degrees are not required for all tech jobs, not even all six-figure tech jobs. The incremental value of being a programmer vs. being a programmer with a degree is positive but modest.

But if you are looking for non-tech jobs without even having a liberal-arts degree, then you are effectively hosed. All those mid-five-figure white-collar administrative jobs in a typical Fortune 500 company are filled by people with liberal-arts degrees. Why? Because companies find it a useful filter. Not perfect, but better than nothing: if you want to select for "likely to be a decent employee, show up on time, follow directions, write English sentences coherently", and you have 50 applicants with degrees and 50 without, you just pick someone out of the 50 who have a degree.

they are mostly technophiles who wandered
over from collecting energy crystals and want to tell you what a genius tesla was

Except for the "energy crystals" part, it sounds like you're describing the average Slashdot reader.

You think someone is trying to impose death on you?

Do you really believe in the possibility that 1) there will be a transhumanist "solution" in your lifetime and 2) that you are going to be able to afford it?

Good luck trying to transfer your consciousness to your Dell laptop.

True but in most institutes unless you are an absolutely incredible researcher you have to have a reasonable level of teaching ability or you don't get tenure.

meh, "trans-humanism" takes many flavors, strictly speaking both cybernetic prostheses and gene-therapy etc. falls under "trans-humanism"

And they are both mechanisms of control by the elite.

Face it: when it comes to cybernetic prostheses and gene-therapy, it is very unlikely that you are going to be, as they say, "riding in the car".

As opposed to the "non-breakaway" US culture, where a small portion of very rich people - coincidentally "the very same people who benefit from the suffering of others" - can afford medical procedures that the rest of the population can't?

You're arguing for my position. Yes, of course they are one in the same.

You make it sound as if every transhumanist wished for immortality. I have strong transhumanist inclinations but I believe that immortality is a logical contradiction. How does that compute to you?

It sounds like you're not really a transhumanist. Which is OK, because it's just another mechanism of control by the elites. You're better off without it.