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[Graknorke]

So I can't tell, are you in favour of tuition fees or not?
High school really does not offer specialisation. Out of the 13 GCSEs I did I got to freely choose 3, and 2 I got to select from certain categories. The rest were mandatory. But regardless of that, it's infeasible to want to teach people to a higher general level in the same timeframe, or to keep increasing the level of education without specialisation. If it were so simple to get a high baseline level of knowledge and ability in everything there would be no need for specialists.

[Calidovi]

What value does a college degree grant to a worker if everyone that didn't drop out has one? How will the job system work when people can't discriminate based on education, when everyone is a viable contender for the same position?

Because the point of a university education is specialisation. Guess what, if you're running a garage then a mechanical engineering graduate is going to be more useful to you than an English literature one.

How many worthwhile fields are there for the entire population of America to be employed? You'll still have the guy with his minimum wage job no matter what. It's a horrible cycle for the poor, but it's proven fruitful for the rich colleges, and so we've been forced to get used to it and mold our country around it. Maybe I'm too used to the present process.

[Graknorke]

How many worthwhile fields are there for the entire population of America to be employed? You'll still have the guy with his minimum wage job no matter what.

Honestly I think that looking at it as needing to get enough jobs for people to do rather than people to do jobs is very much backwards, but I appreciate that capitalism kind of forced that one on us if we want people to not be homeless and starving. But the thing is, a lot of those minimum wage jobs don't really need to exist. Online commerce is trashing traditional retail, and even the traditional fast food position is at risk of being made obsolete.
But just trying to hide from the problem by deliberately keeping people at a lower level of education isn't helping anything, it's just perpetuating the exploitation of people who aren't realistically going to be employed at a wage much higher.

[Rolan7]

High school doesn't teach as much as it used to, I want it back up to the level it was at.  I tutored calculus in college to freshmen who didn't really grasp algebra.
And I think it's because "If they're serious about education, they'll pay for a degree".  Tech jobs often don't care what college degree you got, as long as you have one, because it's mostly general education that belongs in high school.  I want it moved back to high school where it used to be, where everyone can get it for free.

College is fundamentally different, it's a place where you pay for a specific degree in a certain subject.  I resent being forced to spend pay for two years of general electives.  Then in my junior year the classes *suddenly* got theoretical, like college is supposed to be.  That's no good for anyone.

I also resent the attitude that community college is, (like a high school degree), something people settle for.  Technical degrees are fundamentally more useful, they're applied.  But nooooo, every kid has to go to 4-year college without understanding why.  Yeah they get theoretical knowledge - in a degree they chose before they could drink! 

Which is ironic since I saw so many aimless college students get drunk constantly because they weren't spending their own money, and had no idea why they were there.  It's a massive tragic waste based on what the older generations think is best.

[TheBiggerFish]

High school doesn't teach as much as it used to, I want it back up to the level it was at.  I tutored calculus in college to freshmen who didn't really grasp algebra.
And I think it's because "If they're serious about education, they'll pay for a degree".  Tech jobs often don't care what college degree you got, as long as you have one, because it's mostly general education that belongs in high school.  I want it moved back to high school where it used to be, where everyone can get it for free.

College is fundamentally different, it's a place where you pay for a specific degree in a certain subject.  I resent being forced to spend pay for two years of general electives.  Then in my junior year the classes *suddenly* got theoretical, like college is supposed to be.  That's no good for anyone.

I also resent the attitude that community college is, (like a high school degree), something people settle for.  Technical degrees are fundamentally more useful, they're applied.  But nooooo, every kid has to go to 4-year college without understanding why.  Yeah they get theoretical knowledge - in a degree they chose before they could drink! 

Which is ironic since I saw so many aimless college students get drunk constantly because they weren't spending their own money, and had no idea why they were there.  It's a massive tragic waste based on what the older generations think is best.

This is why I am REALLY hoping I get lucky with any application to Brown.  When I make it.  They don't have a STUPIDCORECURRICULUMOFSTUPID.  I mean, seriously, I'm well-rounded enough, TYVM, so Y U MAKE ME DO MOAR ROUNDING, EVERYONE ELSE.  Doesn't hurt that it's also a pretty awesome school in general...But seriously, WTF, all you other people who're insisting that you need more general ed.  We do not need more general ed if our high school was ANY good.

[flabort]

How many worthwhile fields are there for the entire population of America to be employed? You'll still have the guy with his minimum wage job no matter what.

Honestly I think that looking at it as needing to get enough jobs for people to do rather than people to do jobs is very much backwards, but I appreciate that capitalism kind of forced that one on us if we want people to not be homeless and starving. But the thing is, a lot of those minimum wage jobs don't really need to exist. Online commerce is trashing traditional retail, and even the traditional fast food position is at risk of being made obsolete.
But just trying to hide from the problem by deliberately keeping people at a lower level of education isn't helping anything, it's just perpetuating the exploitation of people who aren't realistically going to be employed at a wage much higher.

Heh. Even here in Canada the job market is all sorts of messed up. There's always people looking for work, and always jobs available to them, but they won't take them because they're "beneath" them. Colleges are letting teachers go because they can't afford to keep that many staff, and at my work place we're always hiring because we can never keep a stable enough number of staff to run the damn place because they're always quiting. And honestly at this point I'd be perfectly fine with the idea of a robot that can do my job and deal with problem customers. The robot would be able to make exact change, make sandwiches, clean the floors, serve coffee, make sure it doesn't keep coffee past 20 minutes, but also be psychic and know when to make new coffee and when not to overproduce. Or it could make single serving coffees, since our brand just started selling boxes of those, but the stores still use carafes. Also the robot would need to be able to sort baked goods by freshness and bake them as needed, but again not over produce, because while our corporate license wants us to have lots of goods on display, the company that owns our space and pays our salaries is a major stickler on overproduction and frequently butts heads with the license. So the robot would have to know how to not piss either of them off. Also, a robot wouldn't quit and look for a job elsewhere, it would just simply stop working like all the other machines that I already work with. And it would have to be able to politely refuse service when it's component parts stopped working. Oh, not to mention the COLD drinks...

I'm just saying, my job isn't exactly repetitive tasks that any robot could do, but if a robot COULD do my job, I'd be happy about it.

[Descan]

I know you're being facetious, but most "robotic fast food" things are less "Data the Barista" and more "Stick your order in one end, out it pops the other end."

[Flying Dice]

I know you're being facetious, but most "robotic fast food" things are less "Data the Barista" and more "Stick your order in one end, out it pops the other end."

When they should be the exact opposite. Quietly snarky, intelligent, slightly inhuman andr/gynoids serving me coffee? Yes please I'll buy ten.

[Baffler]

A robot could probably take over at least part of my job. I stand at one end of a machine bigger than the trailer I used to live in and drive metal rods through holes in the little aluminium parts that it spits out to ensure they're the right size. Then I look them over to make sure they aren't fucked up in some way, which is quite rare. Then I sort them into a tub. When the tub is full, I put it on a cart. When the cart is full, someone takes it away. Every so often I walk to the other end of the machine and dump a tub full of slightly less precisely machined parts into it. I think if a robot could look the parts over too, the technician assigned to it would be able to load and sort the parts themselves on top of their other work, but until that happens I probably don't have to worry about being replaced.

Automation is going to be painful however it goes though, the system of "work for somebody else's benefit so they give you enough money to keep yourself able to effectively work for their benefit" is pretty thoroughly entrenched.

[Putnam]

how the hell do people still believe the sandra reed fallout 4 leak

it was self-contradictory (gave two very different dates for the non-existent Xbox 360/PS3 release of Fallout 4), disagrees with info from an earlier leak that turned out to be legit (a character mentioned in the earlier leak, Preston Garvey, is a character in Fallout 4 and the image used for the male player character in it matches up perfectly) and, oh yeah, the E3 footage was a goddamn point-by-point debunking of it.

But people still believe it. Goddamn.

EDIT: also people criticizing today's cartoons with "all similar feel" and "low budget low effort"

do they watch today's kids cartoons godDAMN

[EnigmaticHat]

also people criticizing today's cartoons with "all similar feel" and "low budget low effort"

do they watch today's kids cartoons godDAMN

Sometimes ads for adult swim cartoons come up and I'm like "that's competing with Gravity Falls?"

(possibly excepting Rick and Morty, haven't watched)

[Putnam]

rick and morty is tweened as all hell but the art style is good enough to make up for it and the writing is good enough to make it completely moot

[itisnotlogical]

I know you're being facetious, but most "robotic fast food" things are less "Data the Barista" and more "Stick your order in one end, out it pops the other end."

That's exactly what fast food customers want though, based on my experience. They don't want to interact with a human being, they want an all-knowing machine to dispense some cheap slop they can shove in their mouth and maybe not die of food poisoning. They can't even be bothered to take the phone off their ear to check that they aren't rear-ending the next person in the drive through.

I would be glad if a robot took my job; as a matter of fact, I'd be fucking ecstatic. If that happened, then I could get a job cleaning and fixing a cool piece of machinery, rather than dealing with impatient elderly hicks and confused old ladies and idiot stoners and pushy soccer moms with their brats and all the other dregs of society that I deal with as a cashier.

We can already start doing this. Just turn the cash register around and add a vending machine-like bill receptor. The customer rings up their own order, so if they get that part wrong then it's their own bloody fault. That's three to five service employees, no longer necessary. Better for corporations, better for my psychological well-being, better for customers, better for everyone.

[EnigmaticHat]

Well except people who rely on the income to live.

Although at a certain point we're going to have to accept that the machines are taking over.  And once that happens, the only ways to keep down the unemployment rate will be statistical trickery or genocide.

[hops]

My WTF is that I was about to join in on the conversation on robotic fast food workers here, but then I got paralyzed because I was thinking of how to make everything I say sound endearing and make people like me.

The result is this in which I gave up on disclosing my opinion and now is looking like a tool while talking about my flaw, which doesn't help at all.

Now, I could have refrained from posting this embarrassing rant, but from what I've seen of my friends that's not a road I want to go down either.