It’s rich people all the way up!
I really wish e,players had to give a valid justification for requiring a degree. So, any jobs require one for no damn reason other than elitism.
Circle of
lifewageslaveryUnless you live in a country with free education. Or borrow from a credit union. Or work as a contractor. Other that that, very Spot On.
If you’re living in country with free education you borrow money from poor people to get education to make rich people richer and make poor people poorer. Taxes are regresive.
You borrow money from the country who takes it from every taxable entity in it so that everybody can get educated, become less of a burden for the social system, improve the lives of everyone on the country and not make dumb posts on the internet.
Civilized countries offer the poor far more in benefits than they would take in taxes such as the obvious health care and higher education, but housing, food allowances, and even preschool are available without the BS you have to put up with in the US to access such social safety net benefits if they’re even available at all. There’s a huge difference between the poor paying a little into a system that they can access without undue burden vs the US where they pay taxes and get nowhere near the benefits civilized countries offer.
Who are you making rich if you are self-employed? And how is you working making poor people poorer?
Where I’m from taxes are progressive…
It’s just typical americans thinking every democracy is run like their little dystopia.
Yeah, it seems to be very pronounced lately.
They don’t even borrow their money to you, they were granted the right to print that money.
*oligarchs
Under capitalism the people are a natural resource to be exploited for wealth, just like minerals, wood, and arable land.
Communism proved that in death camps you are guranteed work until the day you die.
I’m sorry I must have missed the part of Karl Marx’s writings where he said all peasants must be herded into death camps?
But that’s even besides the point. Communism is a complete paradigm change and very few people are asking for that. Universal Education, Healthcare, and Income are compatible with well regulated market systems. Yeah there’s tankies that want a centrally planned economy run by an authoritarian figure, and there’s anarchists who want everyone to slot into a commune with no higher level of governance, (thus, Communism). But calling social reforms Communism is a bad faith argument and disinformation. Don’t be that guy.
The clue is in the term “Human Resources”. I can’t believe people just accept the existence of this phrase.
Yeah. And “human capital” is another one that just makes my skin crawl.
FWIW, there are a bunch of folks trying to shift the practice over to “People Ops”, while refering to employees as actual people, which is way better. As a bonus, this gives the formerly called HR people a more meaningful scope for their work.
That said, the name or the idea does’t keep some from whitewashing or running with PeopleOps as a kind of virtue signal. Consider this article that minces all of this together while making it sound normal: https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/articles/rise-of-people-ops/
Agreed, but please remember that this is the same under fascism and communism.
The final conclusion of capitalism is one solitary person holding all money. Like some crazy real life form of monopoly.
That’s because the game was specifically meant to show people what capitalism does.
Don’t forget they raise the cost every year to match what it’s gonna cost to keep you on the whole wheel in case you get ahead
Show what they know. I’ve been highly inefficient at it.
Serfdom reinvented
Not a meme
If you are ever stuggling in life, you can always
shopliftsurprise civil asset forfeiture items from a corporate chain store. 😉Hope I’m not thinking too abstractly here:
If you’re an individual with only their bare hands in a society that doesn’t need manual labor, not even necessarily a capitalist society, then that society would have to give you something (education) in order for you to give back to society. Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
“The rich get richer” through things like stock buybacks are their own issue. I just don’t get the implication this is a genuine multi-layer representation of an issue.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
I disagree that all relationships between humans must be transactional, which is what you’re implying here.
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Society invests in the education of its people, and the return is a general benefit to society from its people being more educated. It is not necessary for every single individual to give something tangible and obvious back in order for society to benefit from an educated populace. If you apply the criterion that every individual must give something back, it always turns into a requirement that they give back something tangible, usually money or labour, and the next step is to abolish education in philosophy, the arts, and possibly the more theoretical or exploratory parts of science. The result of this is an impoverished society, not an enriched one.
For it to be a good deal for society to pay for education there only needs to be on balance a benefit to society. That leaves room for the arts and all kinds of human curiosity and creativity that doesn’t yield an immediate tangible benefit. We contribute together, not individually, and some contributions are very indirect. Still, societies benefit from the arts, philosophy, and people with curiosity. And this system can tolerate some people not contributing anything much at all. The investment is in quality of life for the society as a whole.
I don’t know that it’s even conditional. I think we owe society something just anyway. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, I should help how I can: contribute to putting out the fire (actually fighting the fire, calling someone who can), and I should help my neighbor deal with the aftermath (clothes and food and shelter and maybe assistance with paperwork, rebuilding, etc.).
So it’s not transactional, but an underlying permanent obligation to other humans to at least do a baseline amount of good.
I like your point earlier. However, I think what you’re missing is that not everything HAS to be transactional, and that humans can have value outside of what they offer society. Existential value is tragically overlooked.
If you and I are looking at a tree, you might see cubic board feet (I am picking on you here, because you selected the transactional view point earlier), while I would argue that the fact that the tree exists is enough and that if we reap benefits (beauty, oxygen, habitat value for other critters) from its continued existence, that’s great! Let’s plant more trees.
Again, abstract, but worth considering :)
Society gives a person an education
Does it?
People educate each other. In a capitalist society, that may be based upon relationships between strangers that are primarily motivated by money. But even within a very capitalist society, people have other motivations, and we learn a lot of things by observing other people do a thing. They don’t necessarily have to be instructing us for us to get an education from them.
Yes, our current societal structure is largely transactional relationships between strangers for money. However, even within that society there are free educational programs and people willing to teach each other various skills just because they enjoy doing it.
Well I can’t speak for you, but if I have the choice between the two, I’ll take the brain surgeon that went to medical school over the one who learned brain surgery from the internet and people who like to perform surgery on brains for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Credentials are just a shortcut to trust in a stranger’s abilities. Broadly speaking someone who jumped through all of the societal hoops may be more trustworthy, but like all heuristics and facsimiles it fails sometimes as well. There have been well-credentialed, seemingly qualified surgeons from prestigious institutions that wound up being some combination of evil and incompetent, and landed people in the hospital or the morgue because credentialism is not foolproof.
Relatedly, credentials are really what the institutions consistently provide – not education – and they are a large part of the reason people attend them in the first place.
You’re mainly paying for a degree, not abilities and not an education.
Having both a Degree (almost 2 Degrees, since I went to Uni to get one and then changed to a different one half-way, so I’m an EE with part of a Physics Degree) and at the same time being massivelly self-taught because of being a Generalist (to the point that in my career I went down the route of working in that which I learned by myself and did for fun as a kid - computer programming - which was not the focus of either of those degrees), it has been my experience that certain things - mainly the fundamentals - are close to impossible to learn by yourself in a hands on way.
Further, discovering by yourself the best way do something complex enough to require an actual Process is really just going through the same pains of trying stuff out or limping along doing it in a seriously sub-optimal way as countless people in the Past who battled the damned thing until somebody discovered the best ways of doing it, and worst, you’re unlikely to by yourself figure out the best way of doing it even after years of doing it, especially as discovering new ways of doing things is a different process from actually doing the work - you have to actually take time out from doing the work to try new stuff out with the expectation that you might do a lot of wrong things as you try new approaches all the while not producing any useable results.
(No matter what, to learn new ways of doing things, you’re going to have to take time out of doing work to do the learning - because it’s pretty hard to figure out or just try out new ways of doing something without making mistakes and mistakes aren’t a valid product of your work - and if you have to dedicate time for learning the most efficient way is to learn from somebody else, which means either a mentor or a teacher)
It’s not by chance that even before Formal Education was a thing there was already the whole Master + Apprentices way of people learning complex domains (such as Blacksmithing).
Even with the Internet it’s still immensely hard to learn by yourself complex subjects because:
- Plenty of things you don’t know, you don’t even know that you don’t know them - in other words you’re not even aware they exist - so you won’t go looking for them.
- Most of what’s out there is shit for learning. Formats such as Youtube optimize for Entertainment, not Learning, so you’ll be fed by the algorthm countless loud dog and pony shows pretending to explain you things, all with about as much dept as a puddle, whilst the handful of properly deep explanations of things are algorithmed-away because they’re too long and boring.
- Worst, the most experienced domain specialists seldom have the time or the inclination to make posts explaining certain things, worse so for videos (and from experience I can tell you making a good Youtube video is a lot more complex than it seems until you try it). Further what you tend to see is countless posts and videos of people who learned just enough about a subject to think that they know tons about it (and thus can explain it to others) without actually knowing tons about it - in other words, people at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve. In other words, most such “teachers” are just slightly less newbie than you.
Last but not least, you’re not going to figure out the Fundamentals by yourself. No matter how genial you are IQ-wise you’re not going to, for example, rediscover by yourself the various Advanced Mathematics domains, because that stuff took centuries to figure out by the most intelligent people around, often whose only job was to discover things.
So yeah, some things can only be learned from somebody else, the bulk of what you have to learn is much faster to learn from somebody else than by yourself, and since Formal Education with professional teachers is way more efficient a process than apprenticing under a Master (plus it is way broader in what you end up learning, though less deep than learning from a master/mentor) that’s pretty much all that’s available.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains, but it’s pretty hard to find yourself in a position were you get a Mentor and as one who often is one in my area, I can tell you I wouldn’t waste my time mentoring somebody who doesn’t even know the basics (for example, because they shunned formal education) when I could be mentoring somebody ready to directly learn the advanced stuff I know which is what’s worth me spending some time teaching.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains
I agree. I’m not against formal education at all, but was instead giving a counterexample. It is possible to become educated almost solely through formal education despite that perhaps not being the primary goal of the institutions you attend.
Harvard, for instance, is a fantastic place to learn things despite the fact that it is also practically a hedge fund, a gatekeeping organization, and several other things that are unrelated to educating people.
I consider myself an autodidact but I have a degree and without getting one likely would not have rounded out my background knowledge in computer science.
I didn’t say anything about credentials. This is about a proper education for the job.
Would you really go to a brain surgeon that didn’t go to medical school?
You made an argument that because someone went to medical school that they’re more trustworthy…and again broad strokes, sure. You are relying on their credentials though. You cannot possibly conduct a thorough enough background check to know if they are skilled enough to conduct your surgery.
While this is generally more reliable than say…taking their word for it, it also is possible for credentialed people to slip through the cracks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch
I have nothing against universities, but the largely for-profit educational system in America is not the only way formal education can ever possibly work. There are universities in other countries that don’t rely on cronyism, nepotism, discrimination, and wealth to qualify who gets into the programs.
Do you also believe you have a debt to your parents that needs to be repaid?
Legally, no. Morally? Probably. I try to take care of my parents, and make their lives easier where I can, when I can, to try to at least somewhat alleviate how I’ve made their lives harder at earlier stages in life.
Do you keep balance of what they did for you, vs what you’ve done for them? Refuse to help them if they go “into debt” with you?
My parents will never make up for forcing me to exist on earth. I pay a terrible price each day so they could have their precious dopamine hit.
Next time smoke, inject, injest, or boof methamphetamines and leave me the fuck out of it.
Like exasperation said, I feel I owe it to them to make considerate Christmas gifts, call often to socialize with them even if some days I’d rather be playing video games, etc.
And, some people probably don’t feel that obligation because their parents didn’t respect them or help them grow up well.
A good, free education is to the benefit of society.
You do not incur a debt for the 12 years of school you’re already mandated to receive, because that education makes society better. You become a better, more productive adult as a result of it.
But now we find that that education is not enough. Most people are not graduating high school with the necessary skills and knowledge to become that fully functioning adult. So, it is too society’s benefit to extend that education.
This should not be transactional. We the people provide the education, and we the people benefit.
Otoh, there’s always work digging ditches or nursing. Most people would prefer nursing in that scenario. Extend this metaphor to whatever job we’re short of and make that education free until we’re not short of it anymore.
I mean that’s the problem, whichever country you want to do this in, the world has started automating its hole-digging. Not sure why you’re using nursing as an example, since that’s a very specialized field that needs a lot of student loans to get into. Traveling nurses are in high demand.
That’s exactly why I bring up nursing. It’s expensive to learn and society needs a lot more nurses.
Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return
Most advanced countries will give you all of your formal education for free or with a heavily subsidized cost.
It usually don’t create an obligation, or some kind of moral one. Managers have this joke (that for some reason they never think about) where they are deciding of they’ll train their employees, and one asks “what if we train them and they leave?”, so the other respond “what if we don’t train them and they don’t?”. State payed education is just that, but at a society level, and for everything the society expects from people instead of just work.
expecting a return
It’s called taxes. In many normal places, some people qualify (based on secondary education grades or other things like military service) to receive free higher education (basically sponsored by the government) that is paid off later over the years by taxes or contributions to the GDP.
Fuck that, I never asked to be born. Send the bill to my parents.
Ah no, educated citizens is to the advantage of the society. Not in working power but in not falling back to a totalist system with low living standards.
Slavery by any other name
All of us serve the same masters
