Which would normally be .. where? You know I worked for a number of years without a degree, before going back to school, and I joined IEEE (as an associate member) and ACM. The best technical people I met were through there, not work.

Interestingly, the results in many of those studies have not been replicable.

Calling it "mind rot" is pretty much a tautology -- it's just another name for what's happening, not an explanation of how or why it works.

No, that is just people who've been duped by propaganda demanding that scientists pick sense out their nonsense.

If you've been following Earth science since the 70s (as I have), you'll realize that there was a decades-long, vigorous debate that has gone on that was largely decisively finished by the late 90s. That said indivividual results continue to be debated vigorously, simply because the nature of evidence in a complex system like climate is always contradictory. Some places will warm while others cool. Sometimes will be cooler in places that are generally warmer. Some consequences will not appear when expected and other, unexpected things will happen.

Some misunderstanding of this complexity of course was inevitable when this first became a public issue, but by now it's clear that misunderstanding is supported by a conscious program of propaganda. Like the claim that the world "hasn't warmed since 1998", which was later modified to "the world hasn't warmed *significantly* since 1998," and which will soon become "the world has actually cooled since 2016". The problem with those 1998 comparisons is that they picked the hottest year ever by far as their *baseline*. This doesn't happen by accident; it happens as a result of a conscious and sophisticated attempt to mislead.

So yeah, it's beyond the point where these kinds of objections are worth taking seriously. Science is hard, but you can manufacture bullshit out of thin air. If you don't like the fact that people are ignoring you, join the flat-Earthers and perpetual motionists.

Sure, but that's true of anything that involves more than once person. So like a lot of know-nothings, you've mistaken "simple in principle" with "simple in consequences".

Reallly, the best people? Like Linus Torvalds (U of Helsinki), Guido van Rossum (U of Amsterdam), Larry Wall (UC Berkeley grad school), Ken Thompson (UC Berkeley too), James Gosling (Carnegie Mellon),or Dennis Ritchie (Harvard)? Those kind of "best technical people"?

I expect by "best technical people" you mean "best at the places I've worked", and I'm guessing they draw from the middle of the deck: people with a university degree and mediocre talent, and talented people with a partial university degree. Someone with two or three years of college and real talent is bound to trump someone with no talent and as many years of schooling as you care to.

There are real problems with the university education system, no question. One of them is that it's slanted toward people with lots of money. Even with financial aids and many tens of thousands of dollars of loans, that doesn't help nearly as much as having enough money to pay for an extra semester, which is why many working class people I know found themselves in a position where they weren't quite able to finish their degree. Kids who were just like them, except they had well-heeled professional parents, finished much more often because their parents kept pouring money into their education.

We need people who have been exposed to different ideas and know how to think critically and express themselves.

We also need advanced vocational training (e.g. in engineering, business, and applied art)..

These are two different needs that are not always both (or either) satisfied by college. But it's safe to say it works for some people. It is still theoretically possible to become an architect in some states through a ten year apprenticeship, but the paths to most advanced professions include a bachelor's degree somewhere along the way: engineer, physician, lawyer, teacher, accountant. The kind of person who successfully becomes a well-rounded autodidact will do even better if he can find a school that caters to his type of thinker.

The fundamental problem with higher education is the model is medieval. Five hundred years ago a gentlemen could go school for a few years as a young man, purchase a library on his way back home and spend the rest of his life surrounded by as close an approximation of the sum total of human knowledge as one can wish for. Modern higher education should probably be life-long.

A lot of what they try to teach you in a liberal arts education is wasted on the young anyway. Trust me, when you're forty you'll be able to appreciate what a great book has to say about the human condition a lot more when you're forty than when you're twenty. Think of it as something to look forward to.

Vocational knowledge needs continual touching up too, but beyond that people should strive to become ever better-educated in general throughout their lives, a task that universities aren't particularly engaged in. It seems to me a foolish oversight, since once you graduate as a 23 year-old they spend the rest of their lives trying to finagle their way into your will.

It's semantic recognition. Like what "it" in the prior sentence means -- in this case it's mainly a grammatical placeholder, but note how the various uses of "it" in *this* sentence are different.

The really impressive thing about Siri is how well (although still not human-well) it divines intent, not just phonemes. Add to that a massive scale attempt to get the phonetic recognition part right, and it's a bit like trying to launch a competitor to Google Maps.

Well, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I'm sure many people do. No institution is for everyone. I've known people who've loved working in the military and made a career out of it, and others who did a hitch and were miserable. And it isn't just the luck of where you're assigned -- although that makes a difference. I knew guys who ended up at a desk job in Hawaii and hated it, and others who were infantry in Vietnam and decided to re-up. It's an institution where certain kinds of people thrive and others will probably never be close to content.

But you're missing the point. I'm not saying college is automatically a peak experience; I'm saying to any young people here (as I say to my kids): do everything you can to make it a wonderful experience. Get everything out of it you can. That of course can be said of every phase of your life, but college provides a number of unique opportunities that are likely not to come again.

Nonsense. Your entire comment is nonsense. Education is just a service and fine best for profit. The problem with the USA system I'd government in student loans - issuing then or backing them, thud removing risk from lending. Government removing risk from interest bearing loans creates a perverse effect of banks dropping lending standards, the same thing that happened with every other bubble created by government money and involvement. Housing, stock, bond bubbles are no different from this student loan bubble. It will burst but before it does the colleges will raise tuition (and they have and they are) all the time much above what a free market would bear.

The reason for the most expensive 'education' today as compared to any time before now is the ocean of money pushed into it through the student loans, by the banks who are guaranteed a return by the taxpayer or the Fed printing (doesn't matter).

There shouldn't be any government money in education, today education can be provided cheaper than ever before in history of the world, do the prices do not reflect the reality. The reason of course is that all the price signals are removed from the system by government manipulation of the money and interest, by the Governemnt violent control.

The actual free market is not allowed UB education and it should be allowed. Government should be removed from it and actually from everything.

Well, I've made the same argument to my kids about why they should choose the school that is going to serve them best; that the salary premium you get for that MIT degree goes away when people are comparing track records.

But there is absolutely no doubt that a college education on average is an economic benefit. The lifetime earning of people with a bachelor's degree are 1.66x that of someone with high school diploma -- again on average. Someone who starts out as a tradesman and ends up with a successful contracting business can do very well for himself, obviously.

But college is about more than economics. It's the last time in your life that your job is to learn stuff; you don't realize what a luxury that is until you miss it. It's a time to make friendships and have experiences good and bad that you couldn't have had any other way.

Well, the number one thing is that a degree from an accredited university marks you as middle class and therefore gets you through at least one round of filters for jobs. That works out to a difference in starting salary of about $17,500 more for the college graduate on average, which extended over a lifetime works out to be a big difference, even if you count four years out of the workforce and an average debt of $29000 on graduation. So on average it's a win.

Of course many people differ from average, and quite a few college grads may find themselves below average for salary and above average for debt. People in this category will of course feel very much like you do. An electrical engineering grad starting at around $60K at the start of his career probably won't.

Now there are a number of for-profit universities which have transient adjunct faculties and predatory marketing practices that aren't that different. But I guarantee if you got into an ivy-league school you'd get a very different experience. Or one of those historically Quaker institutions. Or MIT. It's not all the same thing -- although what is available to you financially and academically might not be so diverse.

Oh, for pete's sake you can't shoot people for trespassing on your property either, but that doesn't mean your property is fair game for anyone who wants to tramp around on it.

You miss my point: the law doesn't paint a bright line; it weighs factors like intent, circumstances and method.

Flying over other peoples' property in order to get to your target is a different set of circumstances than poking around on that person's property.

This is already the law, if the machine is over .55 pounds. So even small toys must be registered.