> Comics were never supposed to be educational or have any non-entertainment value and primary tarted at hormones soaked male teens.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.
The point I'm making is that we expect people to continue living their lives while going to school, that doesn't change. Getting financial aid isn't a contract to live a strict monastic life nor should it be. Also, the fact that not every single person who gets aid goes on to use it for some optimal standard doesn't mean that it is a waste or that we as a society shouldn't do it.
> I'm in college right now, on financial aid. I'm well aware of the complexities of the FAFSA and probably filed one much more recently than you. But it's nowhere near challenging enough that a bright, motivated student would find it a hindrance.
It wasn't very long ago when I did FAFSA and I knew quite a few bright people who struggled with the process. FAFSA is not a perfect process and leaves a lot to be desired as I'm sure you are aware of.
> Maybe for better actors it requires some intellectual ability, but I'm unconvinced that most of Hanks's community college classes had any impact on his career.
This is an arbitrary thing to say, as clearly to Hanks some of the things he's recalling were significant to his life and his career. We don't get to make decisions for what is important to someone's development, that is up to individual people. There were many experiences that I've had that make me how am I today as a person and professional and I'm sure some folks may want to write that off.
> The latest fads of Fat Acceptance and Healthy At Every Size show the trend quite well.
Fat acceptance is not a fad as you put. It is about people being able to accept and love themselves as they are. Fat people are bombarded with messages that they are not acceptable and they should not be exist. Fatness is described as a thing to be exterminated, which implies that fat people should be exterminated. This is not hyperbole, you can see this message reflected in advertising, media portrayals, and what people say (your own post has elements of this).
> Finally we have far too many people inactive in this country and many others because government benefits programs are sufficient to allow them this lifestyle. Simply put, if you keep paying and feeding people not to work just what do you expect them to do? Idleness is not a good state, its worse when we institutionalize it.
Have you even ever lived on an assistance program like food stamps? The amount of money given is never enough to completely cover's one's needs, folks are constantly looking for and finding ways to raise money by working, whether its official employment or grey market.
> Anecdotal but I am sure many have the same experience, there are two groups of co workers who are out the most, very obese people and smokers. Why should either be acceptable?
Nobody is obligated to live their life if a way you find acceptable. Nobody is obligated to be healthy or to drop unhealthy habits like smoking. Health systems that seek to punish people will not produce good health outcomes, it will simply drive those people away from seeking out medical care when they need it. Accusatory and attacking beliefs about health are what cause doctors and medical professionals to blame health outcomes on that status even when it is unrelated.
> Daily hard exercise - the panting, heart-pounding, drenched in sweat kind of exercise - increases your metabolism.
This is not true for all people and can be highly variable between different people, let alone not necessarily possible for folks with metabolic disorders.
> I believe that most "normal" people are capable of doing enough exercise (combined with good eating choices) that they can lose weight.
The point is there is there no set point of "enough" exercise to induce weight loss. It is highly variable between people and it is very unlikely that any individual can keep weight off in this fashion over a period of time. Linking exercise and weight is a time waster and, more importantly, can dissuade people from exercising when they don't achieve an impossible standard for weight loss.
> For example, say you have a 1-hour lunch break each day. During that lunch break, you could easily go for a 6km run (30-40 minutes), as well as have time for a shower, and grab food. If you're prepared to have a faster shower, and eat a quick snack, heck, you could even make it a 10km run (50 minutes).
First of all, the majority of workers do not have hour long lunch breaks. Second, that exercise during the middle of the work day sounds like a great way to ratchet up stress rather than be relaxing since now you are stuck in a time management game. This isn't an appropriate approach for everyone.
> Either way, I personally know many ordinary people who manage to get a healthy amount of exercise, and achieve their weight goals.
Again, this notion of a "healthy amount" of exercise is a fiction w.r.t. weight loss.
> I also have a friend who quite honestly, eats what seems to be an incredibly unhealthy mix - think large amounts of junk food and deep-fried fast food. However, they manage to stay reasonably slim (think BMI 18) by doing insane amounts of exercise (several hours a day). So it's definitely achievable, assuming you have that sort of willpower.
This person would likely still be a low BMI even without exercise.
> What studies are you referring to, that show that "normal" exercise will not cause weight loss? I'd be very curious to see them.
For a compilation of study data about weight loss, see the first half of Health at Every Size [1] (this is not an endorsement of a HAES lifestyle, but this book does collect the evidence).
You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1]
As a scoop user it should be noted that scoop is much more oriented towards developers. Scoop runs in the Powershell environment and tends to mostly offer posix tools or SDKs as available packages, although git repositories can be added to scoop to provide more packages (there aren't that many of these right now).
A large majority of residencies are funded this way due to the very high cost of residency. As a result, many private institutions won't increase residency numbers on their own due to funding.
The main issue is the cost of residency is massive and is prohibitive for private money to fund anyone's residency.
This is disingenuous. Medical schools would increase resident caps even without the bonus money from Medicare if there was a reason to do so. Reasons go beyond just the Medicare funds that go for those slots.
> Which is completely irrelevant, as are accent/sex/other discriminatory factors that make zero difference to how someone is likely to work within a team.
This is just plain ignorant. Every single place I have worked has had its share of everyday sexism and racism, and that includes how current employees act in hiring interviews. You claim to not notice these things, but what you are saying is that you don't consider those things valid differences that may affect how someone perceives your team or work environment. How can you ever confront issues in your workplace by shoving your head in the sand?
> I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent.
I'm pretty sure if you run statistics you would find that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to have their activity be criminalized, cast as violent, denied access to education formally and informally, and have their intelligence devalued in comparison to a social norm that has implicit bias.
> and although software development is meritocratic, it's not as meritocratic as those orchestras
Software development IS NOT meritocratic and neither are orchestras. There is just as much politics, networking, and problems with "value" in orchestras as in software development.
Orchestras are not a collection of independent workers. Everyone works together as a team and chemistry is very important.
> your team, understands your industry, and cares about your mission
When teams are largely made up of a certain kind of person, using this as criteria for hiring is a sure fire bet to make sure your team stays homogenous and never grows outside of its little comfort zone.
> This is part of the author's larger point: your title does not limit your contributions. You don't need permission (a title) to act a certain way. Titles, then, are an acknowledgement, not a license.
While it's true you can do whatever you want, titling generally functions as a way to control or punish the output of a worker. I have seen folks with lesser titles do something that a manager doesn't agree with and then been censured for it being outside of their job duties. I have seen people with high titles be chided for doing small work that someone felt was below them. I have seen managers become untouchable by anyone below them because the manager title became a shield against any other non-manager's criticism or input.
Titles service to reinforce the employee hierarchy that most business utilize. All the usual problems with that hierarchy are expressed through titles.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.