The Goat Pen

Bullshit. These are the same type of people who have screamed about tort reform. Tort reform is bullshit as well. Those types of majors are a very small percentage of what students choose.

sardis wrote:

DooKSucks wrote:North Carolina has some of the best state schools in the nation and some of the lowest tuition to boot, but your party is trying to fuck that up in Raleigh. If Art Pope has his way, liberal arts will be decimated at all UNC schools.

sardis wrote:I don't get this college unaffordability. Maybe North Carolina is different than other states, but community college and state universities are already extremely affordable here. My son attends the engineering program at the local state institution and I pay only $4K a semester including books. Community college is even cheaper than that. My son makes that much with his 20 hour near minimum wage job. Now, I still pay his tuition and gladly so since he decided not to pursue out of state, but, to me, it's doable for anyone who really wants to pursue a college education. I think the problem is a lot of these low income kids decide to go to private or out of state institutions with a bogus degree which causes them to rack up debt without much job prospects. Who's advising them to do this?

They are wanting to make sure that the majors that can actually get people employed stay affordable. If you want to major in something like gender studies, well, the state shouldn't have to subsidize that and you need to pay a little more.

Won't matter anyway. Everyone will be a drone in the Borg by 2050.

Nobody outside of North Carolina actually thinks they have the best college schools. That's almost laughable.

Only a small amount of undergrad degrees mean anything towards what you want to be when you grow up.

Under grad degrees are the new HS diplomas

In Tennessee, any kid who graduates with either a) a 21 or higher on the ACT, or b) a weighted GPA of 3.0 or higher can go to any 2 year college in the state for free, as long as they maintain at least a 2.75 GPA.

Of course, my son has opted to play ball at a 4 year private school instead, but he still gets the equivalency of the award, which is $2750 or so...every little bit helps, I suppose...

This can't be serious...

Ultra-wealthy financiers are buying land, homes and airstrips in countries such as New Zealand to escape to in case the poor rise up against wealth inequality.

Fears of political unrest across the United States as in the Ferguson riots and Occupy protests have caused the billionaires to plan their escape to secret hideaways.

Robert Johnson, president of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, told people at the World Economic Forum in Davos that many hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/super-rich-hed ... on-1485263

yea I read that - not sure what to think about it. Hedge fund managers becoming doomsday preppers?

What's a better life, being a multi-billionaire and stuck on New Zealand? or being say a more subdued $20 millionaire and have your freedom.

I don't know that I'd call being in New Zealand "stuck". But I did find it amusing that the first sentence in the "story" told where the billionaires would be going and then in the next sentence said it was a secret...

They should be running skeert. Their day of judgment will come. All are guilty! All are puni-shed!

They've got the Fear, main!

hedge wrote:I don't know that I'd call being in New Zealand "stuck". But I did find it amusing that the first sentence in the "story" told where the billionaires would be going and then in the next sentence said it was a secret...

I was watching Flight of Conchords this morning before I went into work. They were at the managers office who works for the New Zealand Board of Tourism in New York.

Behind them on the wall was a promotional poster for New Zealand and at the bottom it said

"Don't Expect Much.....You'll Love it"

Stu channeling Shakespeare and William S. Burroughs. Not bad...

From the Gin and Tacos blog (with the acknowledgement that outliers exist, this is what David Simon taught me a decade ago):

I assume that most of the like, seven people who read this thing are similar to me demographically: plowing through their 30s or 40s in the wasteland of the economy we thought we would live in as children. On the very off chance that anyone who sees this is young enough that his or her course through life has not yet been cast in stone, here is the sum of what I've learned in life. I wish someone had told me this when I was a teenager. Maybe it will be useful to you.

As a young person – and by that I mean, when I was in high school and college – adults told me that if I tried really hard at the correct things I would be successful in life. Be smart, work hard, and don't succumb to the temptations of idleness and fun. Accordingly I never did anything fun. You are reading the word "never" and thinking it is an example of a writer using poetic license. But I am quite serious. I had no friends in college or high school. Never went to a party. Never got drunk. Never dated (not that it was an option). Never blew off a class. Never went out. I just studied and studied more and kicked the ass of every course or standardized test I came across. And all along I was assured that this would lead to great success eventually.

Here is the thing. None of that is true. I was lied to. And by the time I figured that out it was far too late. Let me tell you a secret about this country: it's not all that different than medieval England in terms of its social classes. Either you were born into money and your life will turn out fine no matter what you do or you were born without it and your life will pretty much be mediocre or shitty no matter how hard you fight it. Oh, you'll be comfortable. You'll make enough to live indoors and drive a functioning car. You'll just never be happy because you will be dependent on a paycheck and whatever you have to do in order to get it will probably be miserable. The only people who get to be happy are the ones who have enough money that they don't have to do things they know they will despise in order to get paid.

So as much as it irritates me to deal with students who refuse to put the slightest bit of effort into their educations, in reality they are all far smarter than I was. Either they are wealthy and no matter how badly they fuck up they will make five times what I ever will and will live great lives or they are plebeians who might as well get in all the fun they can in college before they begin their forty years of soul-crushing drudgery.

That's the great American myth: that working hard gets you anywhere. It doesn't. Working hard makes someone else a lot of money off of your effort. You just end up tired and frustrated. The kids you knew in college with the trust funds and the summer homes in Aspen run the world no matter how hard you work. They make money by exploiting you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it because you don't have a giant pile of money that allows you to walk away from things you find repugnant.

People used to tell me I was smart. Since I didn't figure any of this out until I was in my 30s, I guess they were wrong. Don't make the same mistake. You'll end up waking up one morning to realize the depths of your personal and professional failures, and that it's too late to do anything about them. I promise you'll kick yourself for not having at least the memory of good times to remind you that even if everything is drudgery now, you had fun when the opportunities arose.

Out of the thousands of things I've learned, this is the only one that I think anyone else might benefit from hearing. Regrets are the worst things, and once your life is pretty much over they will pile up at a rate you can scarcely imagine when you are young and full of optimism.

I will say, though, that there are ways to increase your chances of not falling within the exact band of economic existence of your parents (and nowadays the chance is that young people will be in lower economic existence than their parents...even if they make more money). Most people don't know those ways to help your chances and they just lean on the American myth (which is beautiful in that it keeps the engine fed).

So, I agree with the general thesis...even if it is a bit too cynical.

This mirrors what I've been saying is wrong with America for the past 7-8 years. It used to be that all you had to do was work, save a little and necessities wouldn't be an issue. What we're witnessing is the American Dream on Hospice. It's been dying for years and nobody wants to admit it. They'd rather blame the super rich (who are partly responsible) or the gov't (which is partly responsible) or the poor (who aren't responsible), when it fact it's a systemic problem that doesn't appear to be reversible.

I am not better off than my parents, neither of whom had a college degree. Granted, I didn't spend my post-college 20s and all of my 30s saving money and investing in my future. Part of that was because I spent money on drugs and having fun. The other part is that I never really made the kind of money that enabled me to have enough left over to do that (I found ways to pay for drugs by cutting corners that most folks wouldn't consider). Mostly my fault but also a product of wages lagging far behind the consistent rise of living costs.

Unless things change, my future looks pretty bleak if I even have much of it. I'm at the point where just about any type of medical expenses would be catastrophic and I'm no longer expecting to be able to live beyond my so-called retirement age. So, I'm pretty happy that I partied hard and lived it up when I was younger and my only regrets now are that I didn't do more of it.

What a sad paean of bitterness and jealousy. This is life, everybody has struggles and tribulations. Maybe the truly upper crust don't have your problems, but they are almost surely caught up in even dumber and more idiotic trivialities. If you're measuring yourself against the truly elite in this way, its only a yellow brick road to disappointment. It is truly, very, very hard to the point of impossibility to be truly rich. Obviously the best way to do it, is to already be born with it. This guy has chosen to measure his life in dollar bills, and sees only bitterness from his own unrealistic expectations and jealousy that he can't live someone else's life. It's not only money that works this way, but what he says is true any time you define your life by some narrow dream. How many kids with outstanding work ethic but marginal talent are washed out of athletics in favor of kids who simply were born with more natural ability. How many with work ethic and natural ability ended up blowing out their knee at age 17. How many artists are out there thinking they are going to be the next Picasso. At some point you cant let your goals live your life, you have to change your attitude and notice the blessings that you do have and cast away bitterness and stress. Although I'm sure this socialist would love the political message of It's a Wonderful Life, he misses the life lesson. If you're measuring your happiness by how many trips you take and how many places you've been and harboring all that bitterness, soon, your standing on the goddamned bridge ready to jump because you've missed everything great that did happen to you. I'm sure some asshole like Jerry Jones has a good time doing blow off a strippers tit in his suite in his billion dollar stadium, and I've never done that, but that motherfucker hasn't lived my experiences either, some of which were great.

There are class boundaries, but they are not impermeable in this country, I know many classmates that grew up dirt poor and are now relatively wealthy. But anybody that thought they were gonna be the next CEO of Exxon or President of the US or some shit was fooling themselves just as much as the kid who thought he was gonna play for the Astros, except it was probably less fashionable to discourage them.

Post of the year!