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Comment Re:It's not that bad in most of the US (Score 1) 125

Because the lifetime earning potential, even after paying for that devalued degree, is still much higher than can be achieved without a college degree

While this is true, it's also true that if one subtracts the cost of education from lifetime earnings and amortizes that over the time spent getting an education, unpaid overtime, keeping current in one's career field, etc... the average hourly pay is worse than that of a truck driver.

Yes, you will make more, but you'll give more of your life to your employer and enjoy less of your life.

Comment Re:Pedantic (Score 3, Interesting) 108

Some people have vertigo and dizziness due to a medical condition, or a side effect of a drug they're taking (antidepressants, for example). For these people, seeing the motion of the aircraft (via the window) helps avoid the nausea of motion sickness, and makes the difference between a pleasant trip and hours of nausea and possibly vomiting.

If Delta is going to lie about window seats, this means I can't fly Delta.

Comment Re:oh for fuck's sack (Score 2) 33

You misunderstand institutional security. The end sought is not true security, but rather, plausible deniability. The institutional users want to be able to point to this SBOM and say, "It passed all our security audits", not "Our analysis missed the security vulnerability which brought down our systems." No one in a large institution wants to take the blame for the inevitable security vulnerabiliity, so things like the SBOM provide the requisite blame deflection back to the package maintainer. This way, nobody is held to account, and everyone keeps their jobs.

Seemingly idiotic corporate decisions are much more easily understood when one realizes that a corporation is largely a machine for avoiding responsibility.

Comment Re:Flawed strategy (Score 1) 112

Perhaps you'd like to live in China or North Korea where you can be randomly apprehended and harassed by the police just "because you look a bit sus".

Versus the United States, where a US citizen born in the US can be deported to country they've never been to, where they don't speak the language, just because they look like an illegal immigrant?!

I don't like communism or socialism, but I can't deny that the Western world is having a Soviet Moment, with Britain and the US leading the way in violating civil rights.

Comment Re:So that's not the actual problem (Score 1) 83

Every perspective employer will look at your experience and they will agree that you're valuable and capable of doing good work and profitable work for them but they will also fully expect you to hang around just long enough to get a little bit of experience and then leave.

What this implies is that as soon as someone gains valuable experience, every other employer in the area is willing to offer them more money. Which says very loudly they want to pay below-market rates for labor, and they don't give raises, ever. If I could take a year of experience and make more money anywhere else, nobody at the company is paid for more than a year of experience. Your kid trained for a career with no future.

Like most, I didn't go to college for four years to get a career that didn't pay raises past the first year. I suspect your kid made a bad choice of career field, because apparently - as you describe it - none of the employers in the field want to pay for more than a year of experience. This is precisely the attitude (and employers) graduates are hoping to avoid by getting a degree. Nobody puts in four years of effort with the expectation that they'll be treated like unskilled labor. Yet this is exactly the employer attitude you describe. People have started to realize that the problem all along wasn't a matter of skilled/unskilled labor, but that employers viewed employees as disposable, and rather than train them, made unreasonable demands in the first place.

The problem isn't whether or where you got your degree, but the attitude toward employees imparted by the CEO's alma mater.

Comment Honest question (Score 0, Troll) 50

NASA has been able to make rockets that don't blow up since the 1960's.

Why can't the Australians do it? Was that knowledge filed away in a locked cabinet somewhere, or has rocket science made no strides in the past half century? Why isn't rocket design a "trivial" problem in engineering?

If they took the same approach to computer science, the Australians would still be trying to refine silicon from sand.

Comment Tornadoes (Score 1) 186

Growing up in the Midwest, we were very much aware that nuclear war could end humanity's existence with scarcely more than a half hour of warning. Climate change is positively tame by comparison.

What these researchers misunderstand is that most people are not so privileged that climate change even makes the list of their concerns. It's not that they don't care, but that they just don't have the time or money to do anything effective.

The average person cannot afford an electric car.

The average person doesn't own a home, but if they did would still be unable to afford solar panels.

The average person can't work from home, because their employer insists they come into the office.

The average person can't live without a car, because America was designed and zoned for car traffic. If every American decided to use public transportation tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough trains or busses for everyone.

The average person can't grow their own food, because they don't own (enough) land. Even if they did, modern agriculture - from fertilizers to harvesting and transportation - depends on diesel fuel.

Given that most governments are owned by the fossil fuel companies, it is rather naive to expect governments to do anything more than token measures to address climate change.

It strikes me as a bit odd that people who are rather astute at predicting climate 50 to 100 years into the future can't predict that, in spite of their polemics, nothing meaningful will be done about climate change. Individuals lack the power, and governments lack the incentive. It seems to me that the old joke about consulting rings true for climate science: if you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem.

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