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kittykitty1260 63F
15748 posts
9/11/2014 7:12 am

Interesting observation ~.my daughter recently started college and she told me for simply being able to hear the Professor prompted her to get a seat closer to the front. She isn't one of the cool kids, but knew enough to sit within ears distance of what's being said..

“Who says life is fair, where is that written?”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride


AC_Wright 58F
323 posts
9/13/2014 2:27 am

Hi,

I think of your original bit as television-related. The kids you describe sound like Icons from the world of entertainment. You can imagine them as minor characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or any other show or movie that revolves around high school in wealthy suburban environments—each with his/her own sociological background.

On TV, the "cool" kids sitting in the back can be seen as time-wasters for good reason: they are the children of people who own businesses the success of which don't depend on education. Education doesn't matter to them because, as arrivistes at the union of sperm and ovum, their only concerns are social ones since their working lives depend more on hierarchic social connections—a father who can get you jobs or internships with a phone call—rather than on well-developed brain-power.

In this sense, their attitude towards education makes sense because they have the attitudes of a minor nobility: if you need something thought about or kept track of, you hire or compel someone to do it for you.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!


AC_Wright 58F
323 posts
9/13/2014 10:45 am

Where it pertains to math and science and their roles, the brain-drain to the financial sector seems only natural when you consider the works of the economist Stiglitz (“The Price of Inequality”) and the writer on the financial industry, Michael Lewis (“The Big Short” et. al, )

Stiglitz would argue that given an America that has spent a third of a century lessening the tax burdens of the people at the top, drying up funds for scientific research, it is only natural that the financial industry should approach the people with skills that can be reworked into creating new financial instruments.

Lewis’s approach would be more blunt. He would simply say that the financial industry pays far better than science does and that Wall Street needs people with advanced math skills to create instruments which evade already weak scrutiny by the SEC by being couched in mathematical terms the implications of which would require a degree in math to fully understand.

This is true even when the truth of them boils down to, “we’re going to invest your money in shares in a mortgage-based pyramid-scheme bought on margin and then sell bets based on whether or not you fail to realize a return on margin to others.”

Kind of frightening…

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!


AC_Wright 58F
323 posts
9/13/2014 1:03 pm

Hi S!

Happy to have something to respond to.

If I were a dominatrix, I would mold you in handcuffs into the sum of my purposes for you…and that’s enough excitement while the sun is still up! 

When I thought of the TV cool kids who don’t give a damn, I left out mentioning the ones who just don’t care for purely emotional reasons and who are incapable of seeing a community college as something other than as an extension of a high school career where they had already proven that they were nothing to write home about. 

In a sense, a community college can be seen as another chance to discover whatever it takes to apply yourself to the use of the mind by accumulating skill and understanding as an alternative to ditch-digging. 

I left high school without a diploma, took the GED without a study program, passed, and approached the city for options.

My options included: 1) a two-year-college located in the armpit of nowhere and 2) nothing else.

You had to take the subway all the way out to the next to last stop of a subway line, in Queens to get there. It was humiliating. I felt warehoused if not actually discarded. 

Worse still was finding out that the high school system I’d walked away from and which had never, ever asked me to write a single essay had done less than nothing to prepare me for college. Entrance testing revealed that I needed remedial English for writing (I could certainly read. Still can ) but I couldn’t write a single line of acceptable English.

It was a shock to the system to go from someone who’d tested into a regents scholarship to being one of those people before whom a poor, suffering English professor was going to recite the parts of a sentence in English.

My English would still have been a problem had I graduated high school the expected way, but it would have made the humiliation of it a lot easier to handle as something that put me on track to study something that meant something to me. 

As things turned out, I took remedial English and philosophy 100 and got to read Plato’s Meno before I slinked out of the CC and went to Hunter, where I took my first German classes on a non-matriculated basis. 

I tested out of remediation there. I think this was, in part, due to having gone through the basics at my alma mater, “Assend of Nowhere.” In part, later, because I read Strunk and White and The Transitive Vampire which, unlike the former book, made the topic interesting—far less a matter of climbing Mt. Discipline in the pursuit of arbitrary rules.

In any event, I “get” the resentment.

I have seen it. I have felt it and I was deeply moved.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!


AC_Wright 58F
323 posts
9/13/2014 2:43 pm

    Quoting  :

@2ndTimeHere,

Yes.

The big reveal in the financial crisis is the disturbing spectacle of watching the financial sector wag the country.

The losses mounted by companies like AIG and that closed the doors of at least one major firm were gigantic and the public was left holding them in a way that at least one Economist, The Time’s Paul Krugman, pointed out were a clear case of private profit from knife-edged, casino-like speculation funded at public financial risk (“Heads I win, Tails, you lose. ”).

After years of creating financial instruments based on predatory lending, the only victims in the crash are the public. That is, the people who lost their homes when they found themselves paying for houses that were worth less than what was going into them and the taxpayer who was being used as a piggy bank to shore up the too-big-to-fail institutions that knowingly created and offered the instruments that caused the problem.

What we saw at the end of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath was an industry that could wreck the economy at will with impunity despite government oversight.

We live in a society that is falling in love with its CCTV cameras to deter crime and the amounts that went into the bailout were larger than the sum of every bank robbery in United States history but not one person in the financial industry went to jail. In fact, as was loudly touted in at least one Times editorial: not one of them was denied the bonus he had been promised by his firm for being a small part of bringing us to the edge of Great Depression, Part II. 

No one went to jail. No one went to bed without his supper.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!


AC_Wright 58F
323 posts
9/14/2014 3:27 pm

    Quoting  :

Oh, I still remember the feeling. It’s odd. I’ve seen it in others.

I once worked in an office and became all chummy and flirtatious with the security guards in the lobby of the building. One day, one of them wrote a note. It was only a few lines long, but it was still larded with spelling and agreement errors. I clearly remember having to keep from making the face I’d seen others make when I showed them what I wrote: it was the same face you would expect someone to make in the presence of someone who’d farted explosively in their presence and then simply gone on as if nothing had happened.

For me, the most important things about learning my native language have always been matters of motivation and the will to power. I detest Nietzsche’s philosophy but the phrase makes sense here. There as a time in my life when I could not have written a basic sentence. The feelings were there and so was the need. The thoughts were there, as were the ability to appreciate good works (the things I saw), but the tools needed to make sentences happen were absent. Looking back on it, I can only see it as a form of real helplessness. 

I couldn’t write an application letter, or a resume. I couldn’t write stories. I could read poems but not understand the parts that went into them that made the good ones miracles. I could never sell my soul and write advertising copy.

I remember reading Paul Fussel’s, “The Great War and Modern Memory” just for myself. I read Wilfred Owen’s, “Dulce et Decorum Est” and, later, T.S. Eliot’s, “The Wasteland” and Blake’s ridiculous and sublime, “The Tiger” and the things that made them work were impenetrable secrets.

English was a question of power and the way it had been taught to me made me feel as if it was a power with which no one was willing to entrust me—as if the system, of which the teacher herself was the immediate manifestation—chose instead to drown me in bewildering rules and terminology with no end in sight, creating a world in which there was no light at the end of any tunnels and no pot of gold at the end of any rainbows.

The tunnels were just dark places and the rainbows terminated in lifeless fields of sucking mud.

Aspects of my life were a joke: I finally learned the perfect tenses in English through the formal study of German’s grammar. Ha, ha, ha.

In the end, I realized that English and the ability to use it formed a power. I don’t know who taught this to me, which particular writer. It could have been Michael Herr in Dispatches whom you cannot read ten pages of without having your sentence rhythms change to become his rhythms. It could have been Eliot in the Wasteland after Fussel’s pointing out that the voices in the opening passage are the voices of the dead. It might have been M. Duras in The Lover who wrote a book that could make you read, languorously and one-handed, that contained not a single passage of dialog; that held not one word enclosed in quotation marks.

Maybe it was the historian, Tom Holland in Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic where he wrote whole paragraphs of sentences with an internal subordinate clause tacked to the front—simple, declarative sentences are for the weak…

It was all those things. All those things were my freedom and my salvation. They were the kernel of the thing that drove me; that made me want to learn English and to learn to write and to spend what has turned out to be a surprise of a long life learning to ride on English’s back.

If you have the time, you should check out Stiglitz and Michael Lewis’s, “The Big Short.”

Lewis is said to have lifted some of his analysis from a horrible overachieving Harvard undergrad who made sense of the how the instruments worked (nasty, spider-legged statistical analysis of how bad mortgages were to fail causing the instruments based on them to lose worth, precipitating the collapse that required the baillout) but that doesn’t matter. If you read it, you will come to a new and powerful understanding *and* you will be very, very angry.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!



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