30 years ago only the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries could have access to a lot of information. Now all you need is to know English and having a reliable internet connection.
> The only thing that will break this is if demand for labor exceeds supply, forcing employers to hire outside traditional parameters.
I don't think that is the "only thing".
Many employers look for degrees because they are seen as valuable. But they are not necessarily valuable in the most obvious way. A lot of time people are not really interested in what you went to school for at all. The are only interested if you have a degree or not.
This signals to employers that they are interviewing somebody that is willing to make major personal commitments and defer reward for years for POTENTIAL gain. There is no guarantees that spending 10's of thousands of dollars will result in a good job. People who pay for degrees are hoping this is true. A employer can take advantage of these people easily.
If I needed somebody to just be a cog in a corporate machine and I know that they are wiling to work their ass off and make huge personal commitments on the PROMISE of future pay... then that is awesome. I know they will work their ass off and make huge sacrifices for years and I really don't have to pay them that much at all to do it. And I know that their debt will keep them scared and living paycheck to paycheck so they are not going to want to risk unemployment because of how devastating this is financially.
This is why when I am looking for jobs and employers make hard demands on educational certificates that they are probably assholes. It's fine to want degrees, but they are not willing to take professional experience as a alternative then that is a huge red flag.
Yeah it's sticky, but you can't expect the current situation to last forever.
If your goal is education there is no need to go to a university anymore. There really isn't even any need to attend K-12 schools.
It may be better to go to formal physical schools, but it's no longer necessary. Not by a long shot.
It's just going to take another few decades for society to adjust to the fact that university degrees are no longer really that valuable and figure out new ways to evaluate individual competency.
Long term the current university system is dead. I expect that some universities will exist for another hundred years, but not in it's current form.
Previous decades you had to go to a university to get access to resources that simply didn't exist in the rest of the world. Large libraries, labs, lectures, etc etc. Nowadays the internet can provide vastly superior resources then any Library for the most part. Sure there are lots of stuff not yet on there, but that issue that isn't going to exist forever.
Quality courses exist for free. Lots of others are available for hundreds were at colleges they cost thousands. Access to experts is something you can pay for. Don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on books. Can concentrate on what is important to you and you can go at your own pace. People who want to network and peers can still have access to one another through meetups and online messaging. etc etc.
K-12 education is terrible for most people. You can get far superior education for your children by simply enrolling them in Khan institute and hiring tutors for subjects you are not great on.
People think you need to government to solve the cost of education, meanwhile individuals and companies have reduced the cost of education to nearly zero in most cases. Just won't get those special degree certificates that everybody covets. But that won't last forever either.
It's entirely possible for a wage earner to become a millionaire in the USA. Anybody with a middle class income can do it. It's not even complicated or hard to figure out. The problem is that it requires discipline and living under your means.
The first step is to eliminate debt and don't make stupid purchases. Debt includes credit card, personal loans, car loans, and mortgages. Stupid purchases are things like expensive vacations, eating from restaurants all the time, or buying new cars, or buying boats. That sort of thing.
Pretty much: if you buy a brand new car you are a moron if your goal is to increase wealth. You want to do things include living in inexpensive neighborhoods, having secondary sources of income, having no adult 'children' and so on and so forth. Woe is to parents that are still paying for their 20-somethings.
If you go drive around your city and you want to see were "middle-class millionaires" live you need to avoid the 'wealthy' neighborhoods. Look for the 50-something living in a older neighborhood driving older economy cars around.
These people are going to have very low credit scores, as well. The best of them are going to have a credit score of 0, which means no credit history for several years.
Do you calculate the cost of purchases by how many payments can afford in a month? If so you are doing it wrong. Instead you should only ever pay cash. If you don't have money in the bank to pay for it you can't afford it.
The S&P 500 has, historically, provided a 12% return over average 20 year period. If you start off at age 30 and invest 500 dollars a month at that rate it would take you about 26 years to make your first million dollars.
6 years after that would be your 2 million dollar mark. 3 years later would be your 3 million dollar mark. By retirement you would have just under 4 million dollars.
If you make $50k dollars a year then that amounts to about 12% of your income.
You think that is too hard?
The average car payment in the USA is at $550. The average credit card debt is $4,717. At 15% interest and doing minimum payments at $189 that card is going to take 10 years to pay off and $22,869 in total. That means that for every 1 dollar you spend the bank makes 4.
If you can afford to make banks rich you can afford to make yourself rich. Just can't do both at the same time.
Although the Soviets certainly were mass murderers before WW2 and British and USA still sided with them.
Hitler was elected under the pretense that he represented socialism that was friendlier to the middle class and workers. This way people could get their socialist improvements to the economy (which was shit due to bad world-wide economy and war reparations) while still having defense against the the sort of upheaval and murderous destruction that the Reds represented.
The take-home lesson of WW2 shouldn't be that 'The other side was evil and we won'. Because the entire Eastern half of Europe and most of Asia was submitted to governments that were incredibly evil due to the Soviet victory.
WW2's lessons are meaningless without WW1. They really are effectively the same war. The treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of the German civilian government are directly responsible for the rise of power of the Fascism in Germany.
The take-home lesson of the 20th century wars is that massive murder and atrocities are only possible because people obey their governments. That 'The people' cannot discern true evil running the state until it's far too late.
Because evil doesn't show up saying "Elect me because I want to gas the Jews". They gain power by promising what you want. By telling you what you want to hear. And once they gain power then it is the average person's willingness to obey authority and carry out orders is what turns shoe makers, engineers, and doctors into mass murderers.
Which is the sort of thing that is happening in many parts of China.
Always remember that in Vichy France when they rounded up the Jews for the holocaust it wasn't the Germans troops that went around arresting them. It was the French police that rounded up people to be put on those trains. It was under the order's of the French politicians. This problem of obeying governments is not something that is limited by national borders.
It's ok to say that you don't really know for a fact and that you are just making assumptions. It doesn't mean you are wrong. It just means that you don't have anything backing your opinion.
If you hide something on my car to spy on me then it's not reasonable to expect it back if I find it. Charging somebody with theft for something like this is effectively rewarding the police for being incompetent.
One of the worst mistakes in modern government is pretending that the people 'serving' have more rights and privileges then everybody else.
That's what the term 'yuppie' implied for a lot of people.
All these people from the late 1960's and 1970's that spoke about dropping out or how awesome it would be join a short lived commune and so on and so forth only to became intensely materialistic and image obsessed in their 30's.
Which then spoke to the idea that a lot of the 'ultra spiritual' stuff that hippie movement was involved in was nothing more then getting wasted and being fashionable. And when it was fashionable to be materialistic and image-obsessed they turned into that.
This may confuse people who associate hippies with anti-war movement, but the anti-war movement was largely a separate from the hippies.
It's monolythic in the same what that the GNU project or FreeBSD is monolithic.
It's a large number of utilities, tools, and daemons that is designed to provide the low-level features application developers and users demand from a modern operating system.
> It's much more than an init system;
Systemd is a init system, but systemd is also a major project that has taken on the task of unifying low-level Linux OS features.
> "Linux monoculture" is a real thing, and systemd makes it seriously more monocultural.
FreeBSD is a monoculture. OS X is a monoculture. Solaris is a monoculture. OpenBSD is a monoculture.
All these systems have their own init systems they designed with no regard towards Linux and replaced older systems and obsoleted them.
> It was not entirely gently pushed on everyone by Red Hat, by making Gnome dependent on it.
Lies and misrepresentations.
> OTOH the history shows that technically poor, and even terrible, things can get wide enough adoption and stick with us for a long time; X is a good example, SysV init is another.
Which is why people are working on replacing both X and SysV.
You want to know the real problem with anything-but-systemd crowd?
This:
> Of course, this approach is not viable if it turns out that too few people are interested in init system diversity sufficiently to do the reasonably substantial implementation work required to maintain a competing implementation of the systemd unit features we care about.
There is no 'If' there. Some people don't want systemd, but the only people doing the work are Systemd. So their choice is to stick with Linux from 2000's or use systemd. Because nobody wants to commit to making any alternative actually work.
Making noise online is annoying, but it ultimately is not something that goes into the decision making of people designing operating systems. People willing to do the work are the ones that get to make the choices.
If somebody comes along and makes a better init system then systemd then they can do it and if it is better it will get adopted.
You can pretend that this is all Redhat's fault, but they are the only real enterprise that made the transition from sysv in Rhel 5, to upstart in 6, and then to systemd in 7.
And, ironically with systemd, migrating to another different init system is massively simplified compared to the work it took to migrate from sysv init. So now moving to a new init system is easier then ever.
Why do I say this?
Because systemd has unified OS design for Linux in a way that never happened with sysv init. Sure people were using 'sysv' and all used shell scripts, but they were all fundamentally different from one another. Only the most complicated shell scripts imaginable (think Apache init) or the most trivial could be made to work on more then one Linux distribution. Meanwhile systemd uses a declarative configuration syntax that all you need to do is create a parser and you could effectively import any systemd application configuration into a system with equivalent or better capabilities in any operating system.
The same can't be said for any of the bash scripts developed by any of the distributions prior to this for their own sysv variant.
> A halflife of 5 years means 10% of the radioactivity is still there 16 years later.
But it's very likely that 10% is irrelevant.
Radioactivity is not a all or nothing thing. It exists all around you right now.
Camping out at a old abandoned nuclear power plant 20 years after it's decommissioned probably gives you less radiation exposure then you would get from a flight from California to Hong Kong.
Even if it was serious you'd have to wait for the patent-enforced monopolies to expire before there is significant benefit to us normal people.
This is one of the reasons why everybody is running around with 18650 lithium ion batteries. It's all 1990's tech that has been evolved and improved on since then by numerous competitive businesses.