I feel like it's too late. I think the ship has sailed. Maybe we could turn it around if we stop encouraging kids to take out $300k in loans for a degree in Marketing.
Big Ford EV Announcement Coming Aug 11th
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OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Germany has a far better structured education system, as @Trav has pointed out, but they've decimated their industrial base with the Energiewende, so even though they've got the education side of it down, it's very difficult to be a competitive industry there with their energy prices.
Very interesting. Good point.
In the 80's I won a Cadillac El Dorado. The company that ran the program didn't get very much in the way of results from their contest. They took their time getting the vehicle for me. They factory ordered a stripped bare bones car. Of course I didn't know this until months later I went to NJ to pick it up. I didn't know they made a Cadillac with no options. It was bare bones, blank sticker. It didn't even have floor mats. Just ac and am-fm radio. I planned to sell it because I was in outside sales and would be driving a better car than my customers. I lived in the DC area and posted it for sale in the Wash. Post. I got a lot of calls but nobody looked at it once they found out it had no options. It took me a while to sell it and I had to heavily discount it. I took the proceeds and bought a Pontiac 6000 STE. Of course my competition went around telling all my customers that I had won a Cadillac and I caught some grief fr it. I was quite surprised that nobody wanted it because it had no options that people wanted.
California has great public education starting with the excellent Community Colleges. I salute and support that. It's only right, as the CA University System did so much for me at such a low cost. I owe them a lot.
The California university system includes three public segments: the University of California (UC), a 10-campus system, the California State University (CSU), a 23-campus system and the California Community Colleges (CCC), a 116-campus system.
The Community Colleges are tuition free. They are our Superpower.
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OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
The system is Germany is "geared" to essentially, at an early age, determine what a child's strengths are, and then help them get into a career/trade that capitalizes on those strengths, this is why they have an extremely strong trades base, while we are clambering to get enough skilled trades together here in other parts of the West to undertake some of our projects.
This is fundamentally quite different from the system here where you are encouraged to get a degree in something, even if opportunities may not necessarily exist for you in it, and you may not be all that good at it. When I was doing my network engineering program, it was clear that problem solving was not a strength for many of my fellow students, which kneecapped them when it came to doing the labs. They could read a textbook and follow a flow-chart, but once you were into a situation where that doesn't work, they were just stalled, unable to proceed. There was actually an error in the textbook that the instructor knew about and, if you followed the book, you wouldn't be able to complete this one lab. I was the only person to get the lab completed. This one student, who was a straight-A's kid and very much the personification of the "super nerd" stereotype, was absolutely flummoxed, because of course he couldn't get it to complete and our instructor started chuckling, and he asked me to explain how I managed to complete it, which I did, and he said "this is the difference between reading the material and understanding how something works."
Many of those kids were in that class because we were in the middle of the .com bubble and IT was where you went if you wanted a good career, not because this was naturally their strongest subject, or even a strong subject for them. Many of them would have been better served doing something completely different, which would have been the case in the German school system, as their strengths would have been determined earlier on and appropriate career/trade paths already mapped out for them.
A marketing degree should not cost $300K in the first place. Tuition is too high. Kids should live at home and go to a local community college.
My tuition at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1990s was never more than $700 a semester. Housing was cheap. You could realistically work your way though school on a part time job flipping burgers, if you were frugal and didn't go to school in the summertime to save money. I don't know what it costs now but it's more than 10X as much, and housing is expensive.
If my kid really wanted to go away to school, I would tell them they should go to some podunk small college town school with a halfway well regarded public university, that has cheap housing. Think Manhattan, Kansas or something like that. K-State is a decent enough school. People are nice there. I've enjoyed my trips up there to see football games. (RIP old Big 12)
Maybe Lubbock for in-state, lots of big city Texas kids go there to Texas Tech. It's not so small that the kids will whine there's nothing to do, but the housing costs are not terrible, and hey it's 3 hours to the mountains in NM.
I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, I would recommend Oregon State, but it's actually not cheap to live there, the cost of housing is fairly high for what it is. Maybe if you moved out to podunkville and commuted to school, that might work.
Made in China 2025 was an initiative to move Chinese manufacturing up the value chain. In 2018 when the initial technology blocks and tariff's started, China put it on steroids. The government couldn't afford to fund advanced manufacturing and prop up the stock market and housing market all at once. So they let the housing market crash (its down 80%) and the stock market crash - It fell about half from its 2018 high. Its recovered quite a bit but is still down about 20%, without factoring inflation.
But now they definitely have awesome cars.
How many Americans would accept there 401K's falling in half and there house value going to 20% in order to re-build our manufacturing sector? We flip out when something at walmart goes up 5%.
We need a lot more than education and tech to solve the problem.
Not the best analysis - but at least wiki puts it in simple terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
But now they definitely have awesome cars.
How many Americans would accept there 401K's falling in half and there house value going to 20% in order to re-build our manufacturing sector? We flip out when something at walmart goes up 5%.
We need a lot more than education and tech to solve the problem.
Not the best analysis - but at least wiki puts it in simple terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
Could you recall the model year?
I love the fact that they made YOU a stripper.
When you did unload it, did the sale cover the income taxes incurred?
I struggle with the idea of determining a career path at an early age. Children grow, people change. In many places, my path would have prohibited my recovery from homelessness and hopelessness.
I fully agree people, sometimes pushed by parents, often by a payccheck or what's in vogue, end up miserable and fail because it really was not the path for them.
When I went back to college for the billionth time, I took an algorithm class at De Anza College (perhaps the best programming college in the Nation at the time). It was a big washout class. I was still struggling in life and pretty depressed due to my own actions. There was an assignment to pseudo-code the Fibonacci sequence, aka "the rabbits". I was surprised when the instructor put my scribbling on the board and declared it the only correct solution. Algorithms was my 1st A. I got better after that. Still don't believe it...
Well "we the people" cannot agree on what sectors of the economy that our government should invest in, this seems to be an issue. I honestly don't care/don't want to choose sides, let's just decide as a country what we want to invest in and move forward.
Have you ever thought that maybe a real educator may have recognized your strength and weakness early on and got you on a path where you didn't end up in the situation you were in in the first place.
4wd
$50 site donor 2026
even with a bridge to nowhere - some folks learned bridge building
Let's just say they did. I had incredible teachers that wrote to my parents and took me aside showing me IQ tests and much more. Part of the problem was I believed them.
My situation was of my own making; for that I am responsible. Teachers and other can lead, but it is up to the individual to pick up the tools. I chose to pick up a bottle and crawl inside for many years.
Ultimately Silicon Valley management gave me a chance; they were incredible teachers and encouraged me to run with my tasks. Then they rewarded me with many things, including more work. I flat-out loved it.
I appreciate your kind words.
So then why doesn't Ford hire a bunch of kids out of High School and train them? That is what big companies used to do.
Our local Community Colleges offer trades degrees. For example, the highly respected De Anza auto mechanics program is usually impacted. Interestingly (on not), they added an EV section for the dead batteries and burned up cars.
When the big thing pushed in school is higher education, high school students aren't thinking of trades that often. For that matter I went to college for a semester until I realized it's not what I wanted to do. I've always had harder labor, blue collar jobs. Even knowing I was a hands on person I still tried to go to college because that's what I felt was expected of me. It saved me a lot of money to figure that earlier on and it didn't take a degree to get a 6 figure income.
This.
SammyChevelleTypeS3
$50 site donor 2023
The thing is we know for certain , inside the USA there is no shortage (at least not around my area) of working age males who apparently have decided and found a way to survive with absolutely ZERO intention of ever working for living. I sure would like to know how they are doing it and where the money comes from. I would guess? hope and even pray it is not all "drug dealer" money financed.
Within the last several years we have had major industries attempt to build big manufacturing job facilities within about a 35 mile area from where I am. Every time , there is a certain group of women who have these (I call them ambulance chaser lawyers) file lawsuits to stop them and I have been told , each time the companies say it is not worth the fight - goodbye! We can go elsewhere. Now there are the same women who never miss a chance to get in the media and moan and cry about all sorts of social issues and boo who underrepresented communities and social and economical inequality while they keep succeeding in running off giant opportunities for many new jobs and all the benefits to the communities they won't stop complaining about. It is all so very frustrating. Of course I am retired and cant work anyway - disabled now. But it is sad how these small groups keep messing things up for people who want and need work. I have heard they have several times got paid off and essentially bribed to shut up and back off to some of the few minor businesses they suddenly shut up about and did not protest or file suits against. It all sounds so very self centered, greedy and sleazy and is only hurting the communities and the people they have so many fooled into thinking they are doing "anything" to better the area.
I guess this is all part of the 80 year cycle.
I randomly came across an article from the WSJ "What Will U.S. Capitalism Look Like in 50 Years? Seven Experts Weigh In The predictions—some hopeful, some less so—offer different visions for the future"
They have a much more optimistic view overall.
I randomly came across an article from the WSJ "What Will U.S. Capitalism Look Like in 50 Years? Seven Experts Weigh In The predictions—some hopeful, some less so—offer different visions for the future"
They have a much more optimistic view overall.
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