And the Democrats are now running a Presidential candidate that couldn't even last long enough in the 2016 Democrat Primary to get a single vote or delegate. And even though she called then candidate a racist and white supremacist, she agree to be his Veep.
And to use that Democrat phrase "thread to Democracy" (even as we are a Constitutional Republic and NOT a democracy), the upper echelon of the Democrat Party (think Pelosi who has admitted to organizing it) organized a coup again the aging President.
And now Kamala is the Presidential candidate, once again, disenfranchising the 46 million Democrats that voted for Biden during the primaries - and she didn't get a single vote. And as of the time of this writing, there is nothing on her website on her policies she supposedly running on AND she's not given a single presser where she'd be forced to be unscripted in her answers.
In essence, we're not getting ANY message from Kamala yet.
Oh, wait - I'm wrong! She decided to take Trump's new policy, not taxation of tips or on Social Security, as her own.
If Trump is so bad, why did Kamala abscond with his idea?
Laura, you used an F word - FORMER. Let me add another F word - FRAUD.
This is exactly why I get upset about comments, this has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article, just an attack on the current candidate.
Actually, my comment is really about the Democrat Party's latest actions simply because of political expediency when they review their internal polls and went "Oh crap, we're screwed" and initiated their own coup against their own Democrat President.
And if you think I was attacking Kamala, everything I wrote is factual and I can prove it. I didn't attack her character, I didn't attack her past words; trust me, there's plenty I could say - but I didn't. I can't even attack policy as she hasn't put anything out of any substance - just gauzy type sentences here and there.
Compare my comment to your post - you went far deeper than I have so far. That said...
I acknowledge that this is YOUR place. A long ago quote that I have on GraniteGrok by LaShawn Barber says it quite well: “On this blog, your speech is a privilege. On your blog, your speech is a right. Learn the distinction.”
It is a privilege for us to comment here - it is your RIGHT to say what you will on your blogsite.
Your article actually said quite a bit about politics, Lloyd — I don’t understand why you’d think that readers of your political commentary should NOT be allowed to comment about current politics.
Upon reflecting backwards in time, much of what you write is technical in nature concerning the design and building of homes et al.
However, the implementation of such, and advocating for such, is purely in the political realm. To get things done, Right, Center, or Left, REQUIRES the involvement of politics where "politics" is the interaction of people trying to decide, within the Body Politic, of what, when, where, by whom, and cost.
And yes, SOMEtimes, it's easy. Most times, not, and often, bitter and nasty.
And that's Life and one cannot ignore it. After all, "YOU may not be interested in Politics but be sure that Politics IS interested in you".
You’re correct in your assertions other than the coup d’état gibberish. Joe was in on it completely. That’s why he waited to a specific date so the DNC could have a coronation without any pushback. If you don’t think Joe, Nancy, Kamala, Adam, Chuck, Everyone on the donor list of the DNC are on the same team, you don’t understand any of this.
Pathetically, they aren’t disenfranchising anyone. The constituency is merrily consenting. This is the demographic screaming for the last six months “democracy is at stake“
Confirming the illusion of choice. The election run up is not the time to change the dominant paradigm . It is immediately after.
If we the people don’t remove big and dark money along with barriers to accessing the ballot, there is no path to Restore the republic.
All of the at least 1000 things that need tweaked, completely revamped, or burned to the ground are simply not possible.
Every and all other issues are ancillary. Even abortion. Make these happen and we the people actually can be the government as intended by the Framers.
Otherwise, it’s going to stay policy, congressional seats, entire executive branch, and we now know, supreme court and federal judicial seats on the bench all for sale.
Lloyd, there is NOTHING wrong in bring stuff from your archives here. After all, it is YOUR blog, not anyone else's. You have the RIGHT to put up whatever you want. Not all of it will appeal to everyone, but someone out there will want to read it. I know this from writing for 18 years.
In allowing comments, you are building a community that has coalesced around your ideas and wishes to be able to talk amongst ourselves about those ideas and information. And not everyone will agree and that should be acceptable to most. Sure, it was heated at times (er, a lot of the time?) but it built that TH community that you had greatly helped to build with your topics. And now here.
After all, cutting out comments was the WORST thing that TH did - they lost eyeballs that came to read their favorite authors and converse. And utterly destroyed that community.
Don't let that happen here.
Believe it or not, even though I disagree, can be contrarian, and have earned the right to be a curmudgeon, I come here for your articles AND the free-flowing comments on your platform that you've allowed to flourish. It will attract a larger audience.
>>”Socially, Trump appears to be feeding a nostalgia for a simpler time when everybody knew their place.” Part of the reason why that is happening is because we as a country are trending older and waxing nostalgic about the past is more common as one ages; a much larger part has to do with the fraying of society as societal norms have been quickly upended and replaced by hedonism and narcissism (think the vast uptick in popularity of labeling oneself as a member of the LGBTQ+ family, “misgendered pronouns”, social media fueled anxiety, etc.) Advances in A.I. have caught many people off guard, whether it’s a social media post or “news” article, that is fake, fraudulent, or misleading. Doctors, scientists, teachers, universities, and news organizations are all suffering from a crisis of faith in trustworthiness (no mention of politicians or lawyers, because they’ve NEVER been trustworthy) in part because there has been no real penalty suffered by those individuals who do not act honestly and with integrity. Two-tiered justice between the haves and the have nots also undermines our society and one’s belief in the power of law and justice. Throw in a heavy dose of politicians buying votes by bailing out corrupt and/or inept people who don’t feel it’s necessary to pay back loans they WILLINGLY took out, or imposing regulatory mandates by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, or flooding the nation’s sovereign citizens with unskilled, unvetted, non-assimilating foreigners, and it’s readily apparent WHY so many people are feeling nostalgic.
Don’t forget, in the 1950’s and 60’s, America was largely the only player on the planetary economic game board as all of Europe, Japan, etc. had been decimated by WWII. We were the manufacturing powerhouse to the world, and having won the war, we had nothing but optimism and opportunities ahead of us. Fast forward nearly 80 years, and we have hollowed out our manufacturing sector via offshoring “investors”, doubled our population, stolen our safeguard of Social Security funds, eschewed patriotism and American idealism in favor of “diversity first“, refused calls for establishing a national language, allowed unrestricted illegal immigration, made no-fault divorce accessible across the nation, destroyed the nuclear family in favor of single parenthood, created a national debt crisis that is largely inescapable, and many other things. It’s little wonder so many people feel lost, anxious, suffer from depression and mental health problems, and generally feel hopeless.
One of my major pet peeves when I was in the corporate world was change merely for change’s sake, and not because it was an improvement in operational efficiency or productivity. At the societal level, change merely for the sake of change, done by appeasing the loud minority whilst subverting the will of the silent majority, is a sure fire way of creating instability and resentment that inevitably leads to tyranny.
So yeah, nostalgia isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Do I want to go back to rotary phones and rabbit ear TV’s? Of course not … but technological advancement without forethought or restriction is going to lead to a lot more bifurcation between people than if we were to more closely consider how interconnections between technology, people, and improved human existence will play out.
Oh my ... change is a constant. Perhaps the pace of change is accelerating? Perhaps the trajectory is cause for concern? ["Slowness to change usually means fear of the new" - Phillip Crosby.]
We get older every day ... that too could be scary? But, how do our kids react to change? Likely the only way to go back in time is to write/read a history book. Heather Cox Richardson is an excellent and prolific historian/author. According to a lot of historical accounts, we might be retreading history rather than advancing because nothing was learned?
I suppose that if I am going to write political posts and allow comments, I can't say no to that. I can't promise that I won't lock comments, but I think only once have I ever deleted one. This is a seven year old post so I am not sure it is worth rehashing.
"Make America Great Again" was a Reagan slogan 43 years ago.
The theme song of "All in the Family", 1973, was about nostalgia for Glen Miller's days 30 years earlier. The song's line "girls were girls and men were men" was nostalgia for when women were not allowed to be doctors and lawyers.
William F. Buckley galvanized conservatives with "God and Man and Yale", about these newfangled Communist (really just liberals) professors rotting our kid's brains with socialism and liberalism and not teaching "Traditional" virtues .... in 1951. Education has been a conservative whipping boy for 73 years now!
Post-WWII you see education being taken over more and more by liberals and Democrats, so much so that academia in general is almost exclusively the domain of their ideology. Presumably we should see students performing much better on standardized tests IF liberalism as a concept was evidentially superior … but we see the *EXACT* opposite. Test scores across the board are all trending down; even the progressive-imposed lowered testing standards are not showing any signs of scoring improvement. So as education became populated by more and more liberal teachers teaching more and more liberal concepts, why have test scores not only not improved but instead declined? Could it be that the foundations of education—reading, writing, arithmetic, and critical thinking skills—have been usurped by dogma and activism, i.e. propaganda?
There’s more than enough evidence to prove that’s EXACTLY what happened and is currently going on.
Have no idea what you are talking about. I retired from engineering after a long career, having taught many engineers who were 10,20,30 years younger than myself. I detected absolutely no fall-off in education or engineering ability.
The contrary, in fact: my generation had just a few percent pioneering women engineers. As I taught successive decades of EITs, there were 10%, then 30% women; generally the best students, they'd had to overcome skepticism and work harder to get to the same place.
Also, I'm not sure why I'm corresponding with "Vindaloo Bugaboo". Normally i stick to real names.
There is the famous (infamous?) Cato (a US Libertarian leaning think tank) that created a graph, from public information, the plotting of the costs of local education vs student achievement. The latter was rather flat - the former increasing its slope (and I wish I could post an image here of it).
Very few school district can boast that spending all that money, even after accounting for inflation, that student achievement has risen for the amount of money spent. And using my usual whipping boys, Baltimore, Chicago, and LA are the poster children for spending gobs more money for no improvement at all (and in many cases, as VB states, less achievement.
I was on my Town's Budget Committee for almost a decade - watched this scenario in real time. The Administration and teachers unions would always respond with platitudes as "deflective excuses" ("it's for the children!!!") - but always wanted bigger budgets and larger paychecks for not showing performance gains (and that it wasn't for the children after all).
Roy, you and I as engineers know that if that lack of performance was shown in the private sector, we'd get fired in a heartbeat.
I would hazard "look at Boeing" right now for a dramatic dropoff in engineering design and implementation in all areas of their businesses. For an egregious example: when is their space capsule going to return, with those two astronauts, back to earth with the helium leaks and thruster issues?
With the emphasis of DEI and "social justice" activities, values, and mandatory classes within college campuses over the last few years, to the detriment of academic rigor, the clock is ticking to when such engineering deficiencies start multiplying and showing up in the media.
Education costs increased sharply for years when women entered the workforce because you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby - they could go get jobs in accounting if you didn't. Previous women teachers had few choices except nurse.
Many other costs have increased sharply with little return - medical costs have gone up far from 1960, but lifespan has not. Still, few would return to the medicine of 1960.
Boeing is considered a classic case of good engineers overruled by bad management that did not understand safety and resilience cost money and can't just be eliminated as waste. Many, many good Boeing engineers quit over the last decade.
>> you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby
Sorry, that's a specious argument. And it isn't just teachers salaries even as they make up the majority bulk of education costs. It's also overhead personell costs that have been embedded - think totally unneeded overhead administration.
To my last point, when I started demanding of the school board of what is their indirect/direct labor costs, they had no idea what I was talking about - yet most upper level manufacturing managers that that number in their heads. As I kept demanding, I started to see those overhead slots become vacant and then disappear from their budgets.
Sadly, after not being on the BudComm for 10 years, they're coming back. I HAVE to get my wife to release me from my "if you let me serve 1 more term, I'll never run for elected office again" promise.
>> Boeing is considered a classic case of good engineers overruled by bad management that did not understand safety and resilience cost money and can't just be eliminated as waste. Many, many good Boeing engineers quit over the last decade
Point taken and agreed to. Also note, there's a BIG reason why many companies (and govt agencies) are no longer requiring college degrees - they have found that the perceived "value add" isn't sufficient for the addition costs. They are about to lose their NASA Starliner project and swallowing the last of that $1.5 Billion loss of their own money.
>>"Education costs increased sharply for years when women entered the workforce because you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby"
Ohh bullshit ... this isn't the 1920's we're talking about wrt rising education costs! A person can look at data strictly from the 21st century and see that Grok's not lying and in fact, the Cato study starts in 1970—long after women were an integral part of the workforce: https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart
>>"medical costs have gone up far from 1960, but lifespan has not."
Actually, any simple Google search can demonstrate life expectancy has increased linearly (albeit slowly) over the past 50 years, save for the last 10 years or so. More money invested in both technology and care has resulted in a commensurate increase in lifespan; increases in education spending have not resulted in higher achievements on the ACT or SAT, graduation rates, or IQ's, and in fact, SAT scores have actually *DEcreased* while funding has gone up dramatically. Which says that if MORE money doesn't result in improvements, there's no need to throw good money after bad.
Ask a college-bound student how to write a 5-paragraph Jane Schaffer argumentative essay using MLA-style formatting and most will either not know how to do it or fail miserably in their attempt. But ask them about critical race theory, gender identity, or DEI initiatives, and you'll get an hour-long scrive. That's the result of indoctrination, not education.
>>”Have no idea what you’re talking about” … well of course you don’t, because you’re dealing with the creme de la creme of the educational system who not only choose to go into EIT but succeed at it. This isn’t about the rarefied air of high IQ, driven, post-secondary engineering students, it’s about *ALL* students in K-12 grades, the 75% high school graduation rate(!), and lower overall academic performance metrics. I’ve been in primary education for 8 years and partnered to a NBCT-certified teacher for almost 22 years and we both have seen the steady downward trajectory of reading comprehension, writing skills, argumentation and debating skills, implicit curiosity, and overall apathy in a Title I school district here in Phoenix. The evidence is overwhelming in demonstrating lower standards-based learning outcomes over the past 20+ years, before you would ever see them because students self-select on whether or not they reach your EIT classes.
tl;dr … Personal experience at the advanced level doesn’t reflect reality.
EITs are just ordinary university graduates, like 57.5% of the Canadian population. The top 57.5% still reflect the whole 100%; if that had declined, so would 57.5%.
But, really, your incredible statement that my personal experience does not reflect reality causes me to drop the conversation right there.
Do you really believe that *EVERY* student has the same capabilities of STEM success, or do university students differentiate to reflect both interest *AND* intelligence? I subscribe to the latter, because—news flash—people aren't identical widgets.
Which means that if you're only seeing those who self-select as EIT's, then you're dealing with a subset of the population which does NOT reflect on the 100% of Canadians but only on that highly educated, highly intelligent subset who choose STEM as their major.
Think of it this way: do ultra-marathon participants reflect the fitness level (or capabilities) of 100% of Canadians, or do they represent a much smaller, specialized segment of the population that outshine human capabilities of even ritualistic fitness enthusiasts?
So yes, drop the conversation right there—YEMV but it doesn't reflect on the student body as a whole.
>> Do you really believe that *EVERY* student has the same capabilities of STEM success, or do university students differentiate to reflect both interest *AND* intelligence?
My experience was no and here's an anecdote from when I was working on my B.S. as pre-med. A bunch of us pre-meds and Engineering types took the EC 101 Micro Economics class - a "gut" class for us (e.g., only need your gut to think and your brain was unnecessary) - a REALLY easy "A".
A female student that was also in the class, an Education major, asked if I could help her with some of the graphing work. I spent almost 2 hours trying to explain how a line was graphed with Y=MX + B. TWO HOURS. This was basic 5th grade math.
She couldn't grasp or do it. She later dropped out of the class.
I'll support what VB said - people are not the same nor are they mere cogs in a "social machine". Now, my wife can't do math either but is one of the best teachers I've ever seen: a natural talent for it and I hope that the young lady I tried to help was the same.
How do make change when their is a group of people who are stuck in the past? First, stop trying to recreate what did not work in the past. Does any one know how much money has been spent trying to electrify everything since what the 90's? It is sad when the only real accomplishment in the last 30 years is taking a computer and phone and putting them together for entertainment. At least in the 50, 60, and 70's; that had ambitions for their countries and the world. What is it today, how can we get everyone into an electric car?
"First, stop trying to recreate what did not work in the past."
Change AND new ideas need to be judged by "did it work, or did it make it worse?". Too many are thrilled with new ideas without looking to the past to see if someone/some people have tried it in the past to see if it DID work. And if it failed, especially multiple times, in the past, don't do it now.
COJ1, ye're talking and pointing out that nostalgia without evaluation is worthless - good job.
Tiny but significant copy edit: FORMER president Trump. We did actually manage to vote him out—even if he didn’t get the message.
And the Democrats are now running a Presidential candidate that couldn't even last long enough in the 2016 Democrat Primary to get a single vote or delegate. And even though she called then candidate a racist and white supremacist, she agree to be his Veep.
And to use that Democrat phrase "thread to Democracy" (even as we are a Constitutional Republic and NOT a democracy), the upper echelon of the Democrat Party (think Pelosi who has admitted to organizing it) organized a coup again the aging President.
And now Kamala is the Presidential candidate, once again, disenfranchising the 46 million Democrats that voted for Biden during the primaries - and she didn't get a single vote. And as of the time of this writing, there is nothing on her website on her policies she supposedly running on AND she's not given a single presser where she'd be forced to be unscripted in her answers.
In essence, we're not getting ANY message from Kamala yet.
Oh, wait - I'm wrong! She decided to take Trump's new policy, not taxation of tips or on Social Security, as her own.
If Trump is so bad, why did Kamala abscond with his idea?
Laura, you used an F word - FORMER. Let me add another F word - FRAUD.
This is exactly why I get upset about comments, this has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article, just an attack on the current candidate.
Actually, my comment is really about the Democrat Party's latest actions simply because of political expediency when they review their internal polls and went "Oh crap, we're screwed" and initiated their own coup against their own Democrat President.
And if you think I was attacking Kamala, everything I wrote is factual and I can prove it. I didn't attack her character, I didn't attack her past words; trust me, there's plenty I could say - but I didn't. I can't even attack policy as she hasn't put anything out of any substance - just gauzy type sentences here and there.
Compare my comment to your post - you went far deeper than I have so far. That said...
I acknowledge that this is YOUR place. A long ago quote that I have on GraniteGrok by LaShawn Barber says it quite well: “On this blog, your speech is a privilege. On your blog, your speech is a right. Learn the distinction.”
It is a privilege for us to comment here - it is your RIGHT to say what you will on your blogsite.
Your article actually said quite a bit about politics, Lloyd — I don’t understand why you’d think that readers of your political commentary should NOT be allowed to comment about current politics.
And, Lloyd, this post is ALL about the political. And your last line makes that quite clear:
"That will be tough, considering what we're leaving them after we burn all the furniture."
Upon reflecting backwards in time, much of what you write is technical in nature concerning the design and building of homes et al.
However, the implementation of such, and advocating for such, is purely in the political realm. To get things done, Right, Center, or Left, REQUIRES the involvement of politics where "politics" is the interaction of people trying to decide, within the Body Politic, of what, when, where, by whom, and cost.
And yes, SOMEtimes, it's easy. Most times, not, and often, bitter and nasty.
And that's Life and one cannot ignore it. After all, "YOU may not be interested in Politics but be sure that Politics IS interested in you".
You’re correct in your assertions other than the coup d’état gibberish. Joe was in on it completely. That’s why he waited to a specific date so the DNC could have a coronation without any pushback. If you don’t think Joe, Nancy, Kamala, Adam, Chuck, Everyone on the donor list of the DNC are on the same team, you don’t understand any of this.
Pathetically, they aren’t disenfranchising anyone. The constituency is merrily consenting. This is the demographic screaming for the last six months “democracy is at stake“
Confirming the illusion of choice. The election run up is not the time to change the dominant paradigm . It is immediately after.
If we the people don’t remove big and dark money along with barriers to accessing the ballot, there is no path to Restore the republic.
All of the at least 1000 things that need tweaked, completely revamped, or burned to the ground are simply not possible.
Every and all other issues are ancillary. Even abortion. Make these happen and we the people actually can be the government as intended by the Framers.
Otherwise, it’s going to stay policy, congressional seats, entire executive branch, and we now know, supreme court and federal judicial seats on the bench all for sale.
Lloyd, please refer to your blog title and stick to it - this re-publication reignites flammable political differences in a foreign country.
You could be right.
Or wrong.
Lloyd, there is NOTHING wrong in bring stuff from your archives here. After all, it is YOUR blog, not anyone else's. You have the RIGHT to put up whatever you want. Not all of it will appeal to everyone, but someone out there will want to read it. I know this from writing for 18 years.
In allowing comments, you are building a community that has coalesced around your ideas and wishes to be able to talk amongst ourselves about those ideas and information. And not everyone will agree and that should be acceptable to most. Sure, it was heated at times (er, a lot of the time?) but it built that TH community that you had greatly helped to build with your topics. And now here.
After all, cutting out comments was the WORST thing that TH did - they lost eyeballs that came to read their favorite authors and converse. And utterly destroyed that community.
Don't let that happen here.
Believe it or not, even though I disagree, can be contrarian, and have earned the right to be a curmudgeon, I come here for your articles AND the free-flowing comments on your platform that you've allowed to flourish. It will attract a larger audience.
>>”Socially, Trump appears to be feeding a nostalgia for a simpler time when everybody knew their place.” Part of the reason why that is happening is because we as a country are trending older and waxing nostalgic about the past is more common as one ages; a much larger part has to do with the fraying of society as societal norms have been quickly upended and replaced by hedonism and narcissism (think the vast uptick in popularity of labeling oneself as a member of the LGBTQ+ family, “misgendered pronouns”, social media fueled anxiety, etc.) Advances in A.I. have caught many people off guard, whether it’s a social media post or “news” article, that is fake, fraudulent, or misleading. Doctors, scientists, teachers, universities, and news organizations are all suffering from a crisis of faith in trustworthiness (no mention of politicians or lawyers, because they’ve NEVER been trustworthy) in part because there has been no real penalty suffered by those individuals who do not act honestly and with integrity. Two-tiered justice between the haves and the have nots also undermines our society and one’s belief in the power of law and justice. Throw in a heavy dose of politicians buying votes by bailing out corrupt and/or inept people who don’t feel it’s necessary to pay back loans they WILLINGLY took out, or imposing regulatory mandates by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, or flooding the nation’s sovereign citizens with unskilled, unvetted, non-assimilating foreigners, and it’s readily apparent WHY so many people are feeling nostalgic.
Don’t forget, in the 1950’s and 60’s, America was largely the only player on the planetary economic game board as all of Europe, Japan, etc. had been decimated by WWII. We were the manufacturing powerhouse to the world, and having won the war, we had nothing but optimism and opportunities ahead of us. Fast forward nearly 80 years, and we have hollowed out our manufacturing sector via offshoring “investors”, doubled our population, stolen our safeguard of Social Security funds, eschewed patriotism and American idealism in favor of “diversity first“, refused calls for establishing a national language, allowed unrestricted illegal immigration, made no-fault divorce accessible across the nation, destroyed the nuclear family in favor of single parenthood, created a national debt crisis that is largely inescapable, and many other things. It’s little wonder so many people feel lost, anxious, suffer from depression and mental health problems, and generally feel hopeless.
One of my major pet peeves when I was in the corporate world was change merely for change’s sake, and not because it was an improvement in operational efficiency or productivity. At the societal level, change merely for the sake of change, done by appeasing the loud minority whilst subverting the will of the silent majority, is a sure fire way of creating instability and resentment that inevitably leads to tyranny.
So yeah, nostalgia isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Do I want to go back to rotary phones and rabbit ear TV’s? Of course not … but technological advancement without forethought or restriction is going to lead to a lot more bifurcation between people than if we were to more closely consider how interconnections between technology, people, and improved human existence will play out.
Oh my ... change is a constant. Perhaps the pace of change is accelerating? Perhaps the trajectory is cause for concern? ["Slowness to change usually means fear of the new" - Phillip Crosby.]
We get older every day ... that too could be scary? But, how do our kids react to change? Likely the only way to go back in time is to write/read a history book. Heather Cox Richardson is an excellent and prolific historian/author. According to a lot of historical accounts, we might be retreading history rather than advancing because nothing was learned?
"...because nothing was learned."
How true!
So, this being a political post, Lloyd, need I hold back? Again, I ask as I don't want comments locked later on.
I suppose that if I am going to write political posts and allow comments, I can't say no to that. I can't promise that I won't lock comments, but I think only once have I ever deleted one. This is a seven year old post so I am not sure it is worth rehashing.
"This is a seven year old post so I am not sure it is worth rehashing."
Rehashing? Logic says otherwise as you brought it back from the dead for whatever purpose. Especially as this is a Presidential year here in the US.
And I dryly note that Laura has already opened the Political Jousting Tournament.
"Make America Great Again" was a Reagan slogan 43 years ago.
The theme song of "All in the Family", 1973, was about nostalgia for Glen Miller's days 30 years earlier. The song's line "girls were girls and men were men" was nostalgia for when women were not allowed to be doctors and lawyers.
William F. Buckley galvanized conservatives with "God and Man and Yale", about these newfangled Communist (really just liberals) professors rotting our kid's brains with socialism and liberalism and not teaching "Traditional" virtues .... in 1951. Education has been a conservative whipping boy for 73 years now!
… and it continues to be, for just reasons.
Post-WWII you see education being taken over more and more by liberals and Democrats, so much so that academia in general is almost exclusively the domain of their ideology. Presumably we should see students performing much better on standardized tests IF liberalism as a concept was evidentially superior … but we see the *EXACT* opposite. Test scores across the board are all trending down; even the progressive-imposed lowered testing standards are not showing any signs of scoring improvement. So as education became populated by more and more liberal teachers teaching more and more liberal concepts, why have test scores not only not improved but instead declined? Could it be that the foundations of education—reading, writing, arithmetic, and critical thinking skills—have been usurped by dogma and activism, i.e. propaganda?
There’s more than enough evidence to prove that’s EXACTLY what happened and is currently going on.
Have no idea what you are talking about. I retired from engineering after a long career, having taught many engineers who were 10,20,30 years younger than myself. I detected absolutely no fall-off in education or engineering ability.
The contrary, in fact: my generation had just a few percent pioneering women engineers. As I taught successive decades of EITs, there were 10%, then 30% women; generally the best students, they'd had to overcome skepticism and work harder to get to the same place.
Also, I'm not sure why I'm corresponding with "Vindaloo Bugaboo". Normally i stick to real names.
There is the famous (infamous?) Cato (a US Libertarian leaning think tank) that created a graph, from public information, the plotting of the costs of local education vs student achievement. The latter was rather flat - the former increasing its slope (and I wish I could post an image here of it).
Very few school district can boast that spending all that money, even after accounting for inflation, that student achievement has risen for the amount of money spent. And using my usual whipping boys, Baltimore, Chicago, and LA are the poster children for spending gobs more money for no improvement at all (and in many cases, as VB states, less achievement.
I was on my Town's Budget Committee for almost a decade - watched this scenario in real time. The Administration and teachers unions would always respond with platitudes as "deflective excuses" ("it's for the children!!!") - but always wanted bigger budgets and larger paychecks for not showing performance gains (and that it wasn't for the children after all).
Roy, you and I as engineers know that if that lack of performance was shown in the private sector, we'd get fired in a heartbeat.
I would hazard "look at Boeing" right now for a dramatic dropoff in engineering design and implementation in all areas of their businesses. For an egregious example: when is their space capsule going to return, with those two astronauts, back to earth with the helium leaks and thruster issues?
With the emphasis of DEI and "social justice" activities, values, and mandatory classes within college campuses over the last few years, to the detriment of academic rigor, the clock is ticking to when such engineering deficiencies start multiplying and showing up in the media.
Education costs increased sharply for years when women entered the workforce because you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby - they could go get jobs in accounting if you didn't. Previous women teachers had few choices except nurse.
Many other costs have increased sharply with little return - medical costs have gone up far from 1960, but lifespan has not. Still, few would return to the medicine of 1960.
Boeing is considered a classic case of good engineers overruled by bad management that did not understand safety and resilience cost money and can't just be eliminated as waste. Many, many good Boeing engineers quit over the last decade.
>> you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby
Sorry, that's a specious argument. And it isn't just teachers salaries even as they make up the majority bulk of education costs. It's also overhead personell costs that have been embedded - think totally unneeded overhead administration.
Here's the chart:
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/2009_spending_naep_chart_2_y_axes.jpg?itok=ek8GEBfH
To my last point, when I started demanding of the school board of what is their indirect/direct labor costs, they had no idea what I was talking about - yet most upper level manufacturing managers that that number in their heads. As I kept demanding, I started to see those overhead slots become vacant and then disappear from their budgets.
Sadly, after not being on the BudComm for 10 years, they're coming back. I HAVE to get my wife to release me from my "if you let me serve 1 more term, I'll never run for elected office again" promise.
>> Boeing is considered a classic case of good engineers overruled by bad management that did not understand safety and resilience cost money and can't just be eliminated as waste. Many, many good Boeing engineers quit over the last decade
Point taken and agreed to. Also note, there's a BIG reason why many companies (and govt agencies) are no longer requiring college degrees - they have found that the perceived "value add" isn't sufficient for the addition costs. They are about to lose their NASA Starliner project and swallowing the last of that $1.5 Billion loss of their own money.
Here's another cost chart - notice the inflection point:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.asp
Current costs are easily approaching/over $20K/year/student.
>>"Education costs increased sharply for years when women entered the workforce because you had to start paying schoolteachers like employees, not housewives with a hobby"
Ohh bullshit ... this isn't the 1920's we're talking about wrt rising education costs! A person can look at data strictly from the 21st century and see that Grok's not lying and in fact, the Cato study starts in 1970—long after women were an integral part of the workforce: https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart
>>"medical costs have gone up far from 1960, but lifespan has not."
Actually, any simple Google search can demonstrate life expectancy has increased linearly (albeit slowly) over the past 50 years, save for the last 10 years or so. More money invested in both technology and care has resulted in a commensurate increase in lifespan; increases in education spending have not resulted in higher achievements on the ACT or SAT, graduation rates, or IQ's, and in fact, SAT scores have actually *DEcreased* while funding has gone up dramatically. Which says that if MORE money doesn't result in improvements, there's no need to throw good money after bad.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Average_SAT_Scores.png
Ask a college-bound student how to write a 5-paragraph Jane Schaffer argumentative essay using MLA-style formatting and most will either not know how to do it or fail miserably in their attempt. But ask them about critical race theory, gender identity, or DEI initiatives, and you'll get an hour-long scrive. That's the result of indoctrination, not education.
>>”Have no idea what you’re talking about” … well of course you don’t, because you’re dealing with the creme de la creme of the educational system who not only choose to go into EIT but succeed at it. This isn’t about the rarefied air of high IQ, driven, post-secondary engineering students, it’s about *ALL* students in K-12 grades, the 75% high school graduation rate(!), and lower overall academic performance metrics. I’ve been in primary education for 8 years and partnered to a NBCT-certified teacher for almost 22 years and we both have seen the steady downward trajectory of reading comprehension, writing skills, argumentation and debating skills, implicit curiosity, and overall apathy in a Title I school district here in Phoenix. The evidence is overwhelming in demonstrating lower standards-based learning outcomes over the past 20+ years, before you would ever see them because students self-select on whether or not they reach your EIT classes.
tl;dr … Personal experience at the advanced level doesn’t reflect reality.
EITs are just ordinary university graduates, like 57.5% of the Canadian population. The top 57.5% still reflect the whole 100%; if that had declined, so would 57.5%.
But, really, your incredible statement that my personal experience does not reflect reality causes me to drop the conversation right there.
Do you really believe that *EVERY* student has the same capabilities of STEM success, or do university students differentiate to reflect both interest *AND* intelligence? I subscribe to the latter, because—news flash—people aren't identical widgets.
Which means that if you're only seeing those who self-select as EIT's, then you're dealing with a subset of the population which does NOT reflect on the 100% of Canadians but only on that highly educated, highly intelligent subset who choose STEM as their major.
Think of it this way: do ultra-marathon participants reflect the fitness level (or capabilities) of 100% of Canadians, or do they represent a much smaller, specialized segment of the population that outshine human capabilities of even ritualistic fitness enthusiasts?
So yes, drop the conversation right there—YEMV but it doesn't reflect on the student body as a whole.
>> Do you really believe that *EVERY* student has the same capabilities of STEM success, or do university students differentiate to reflect both interest *AND* intelligence?
My experience was no and here's an anecdote from when I was working on my B.S. as pre-med. A bunch of us pre-meds and Engineering types took the EC 101 Micro Economics class - a "gut" class for us (e.g., only need your gut to think and your brain was unnecessary) - a REALLY easy "A".
A female student that was also in the class, an Education major, asked if I could help her with some of the graphing work. I spent almost 2 hours trying to explain how a line was graphed with Y=MX + B. TWO HOURS. This was basic 5th grade math.
She couldn't grasp or do it. She later dropped out of the class.
I'll support what VB said - people are not the same nor are they mere cogs in a "social machine". Now, my wife can't do math either but is one of the best teachers I've ever seen: a natural talent for it and I hope that the young lady I tried to help was the same.
How do make change when their is a group of people who are stuck in the past? First, stop trying to recreate what did not work in the past. Does any one know how much money has been spent trying to electrify everything since what the 90's? It is sad when the only real accomplishment in the last 30 years is taking a computer and phone and putting them together for entertainment. At least in the 50, 60, and 70's; that had ambitions for their countries and the world. What is it today, how can we get everyone into an electric car?
"First, stop trying to recreate what did not work in the past."
Change AND new ideas need to be judged by "did it work, or did it make it worse?". Too many are thrilled with new ideas without looking to the past to see if someone/some people have tried it in the past to see if it DID work. And if it failed, especially multiple times, in the past, don't do it now.
COJ1, ye're talking and pointing out that nostalgia without evaluation is worthless - good job.
Nostalgia? No. 99.9% of that dynamic is caused by stupidity. We should’ve had lifeguards in the gym pool generations ago.
Ayn Rand was right. Sadly.