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Vis-a-vis the SCOTUS decision on Senatorial sectarian prayer, I was reminded that this happened several years ago. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ9To30Hz7A Here's to hoping the SCOTUS decision leads to a lot more of it happening 
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May 8, 2014 14:45
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:29 |
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I believed whole-heartedly in the just world fallacy when I was younger, believing that the poor and disadvantaged were thus entirely because they were simply too lazy to go get an education. Then I graduated from undergrad and tried to put my violin performance degree to work for me in the real world by going into music production and sound engineering. Most of my clients were the urban poor that I had previously disdained...and whose ranks I promptly joined. Nothing shines the light of truth quite like living it. Even so, it still took years and countless late night conversations with my incredibly patient new neighbors for it to really sink in. Thanks to my privileged upbringing, I was able to go back and get an engineering degree once I got sick of being poor. Now, I work with people whose outlook is basically identical to what mine was when I was younger  It's somewhat problematic for me, in fact. I feel like my epiphanies living as a temporary poor amongst the more permanent poor were key experiences in growing up and becoming an adult...so I have an unfortunate habit of speaking condescendingly to my coworkers whenever they say things I perceive as "childish", which is nearly daily. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with whomever suggested compulsory Peace Corp service.
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May 10, 2014 02:56
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Warchicken posted:I can probably make more money at Starbucks than as an adjunct. And by probably I mean definitely. But god damnit I want to play opera and orchestral music and teach music, and if I'm gonna do something to pay back my loans that I used to get music degrees it's gonna be music, and if it can't be music then I'll just move to Europe and send them a picture of my rear end in a top hat on the way out of the country because they're the ones creating every part of the situation. Best of luck to you. I tried for a solid decade to make a decent living as a musician, although with only a bachelor's in violin performance. I did the normal playing gigs and teaching lessons thing, and then branched into music production, sound engineering, arrangement writing, and even less musically-related things like sound-for-picture and foley. Anything to pay the bills. I didn't require a day job flipping burgers or hawking electronics, so compared to my musical peers I was wildly successful. Eventually though, I chose to throw in the towel and go back to school for engineering. This country is not kind to musicians. This is why I am so single-mindedly obsessed with early retirement and building and maintaining health. I'm trying to build a future for myself where I have all the money I need, and the health required to live a long time to enjoy it, so I can get back to playing and writing music all the time, as God intended me to do, without the stupid and corrupting obstacle of money. But by all means, god speed to you.
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May 13, 2014 05:45
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A Winner is Jew posted:This is the exact loving reason I'm a socialist. Not everyone can be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer (and for that last one I've been cleaning up their messes for the last 15 years, they aren't smart at all) and it's loving idiotic to think that anyone can make it with enough hard work. I can vouch for this anecdotally. I'm an engineer and I work with dozens of other engineers. In my little slice of engineer-dom, our jobs are largely to sit down in a comfortable air-conditioned space, stare at glowing rectangles all day long, and impress the non-engineers we "work" with ocassionally with our mastery of tech sounding word salad. As a group, we are generally unintelligent, lazy, entitled, and have massive delusions of self-importantance. Most of them believe they work hard, and have no concept of real work. And nearly all of them, even the ones that don't believe that the job they do is difficult, tend to believe that they've earned their inflated paychecks legitimately and that poor people should just be willing to roll up their sleeves and endure the "ordeal" of engineering school (sitting your fat rear end in a chair in an air-conditioned room to read books and play math and science puzzle games for four years. I seriously don't get how so many engineers  about how tough engineering school is).
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May 14, 2014 00:42
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Dystram posted:I was one of those kids who "just didn't get math," now I do Math stuff on Khan Academy and Udacity sometimes and I think it's the coolest and I understand it. This is a very good point. And I for one don't really buy the idea that people "just aren't good at Math". That is a horrible lie people buy into when they have been done a great educational disservice. I suppose having had a good grounding in Math at a younger age is yet one more sign of my privilege though. I guess my perspective on "engineering school is tough" is a bit different. Before I did that, I got a degree in music performance and then survived a chunk of a music career before downshifting life into easy mode. I can't speak to how my BS in Electronics Engineering compares to a degree in Chemistry, Medicine, History, or pre-Law...but I sure as gently caress can compare it to that music degree, and it's not even on the same PLANET in terms of difficulty. And mind you, I don't just have some in-born talent in Math and Science that I lack as a musician. I've always been a talented musician, good enough to obtain through audition a full tuition scholarship to the top private music school in my state, one of only three people out of the incoming class of roughly 200 music students that year to do so. And music school was STILL mind-numbingly, soul-destroyingly difficult. People who whine about how abstract and infuriating Calculus is have never had to deal with Forms and Analysis or fourth semester music theory. People who think juggling four lab sciences is challenging have never had to deal with simultaneously preparing for a violin jury (major instrument), trombone jury (minor instrument), piano jury (proficiency requirement), and composers symposium (write original music, badger people into playing it for you, and herd cats to make it sound good on the big day), while also working on the 15 page report on how the Florentine Camerata affected political change through the arts for the Ancient Musical History class, keeping up with the aforementioned ridiculous Forms and Analysis homework, writing a 30 piece orchestra arrangement from a figured bass melody for the arrangement class, and let's not forget attending rehearsal for the university orchestra and university band and practicing those parts during your free time. Oh, also you're going to play in the basketball band AND in the pit orchestra for every single musical theater performance; these aren't for actual college credit, but if you refuse, the university will take away your music scholarship. Back then, between the mandatory rehearsals and the requisite individual practice time, I averaged seven hours a day just playing my violin, before you even get into other instruments or the less performancy aspects of the degree! I'll admit that music school did manage to take me from being a fairly talented violinist to becoming a multitalented musical abomination...but it was also so ridiculous and stressful, I am still saddled to this day with several irreversible medical conditions, to say nothing of the psychological damage. And then for all of that, I won the pleasure of experiencing the utter hell that is being a career musician in America. Getting a EE was basically a vacation compared to that!
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May 14, 2014 03:31
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:29 |
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vulturesrow posted:So that minimum wage increase to 15$ in SeaTac is working out well. Of course there was really no way to know what might happen. this loving article posted:Employers cannot pay a worker more than the value of their output. In other words, if an employer must pay a worker $15 per hour, they must ensure the worker produces at least that amount, or they must figure out a way to reduce the cost of that labor. So forcing employers to pay workers an artificially high wage creates perverse incentives for employers to find other ways to cut labor costs. You know what? Agreed! Instead of having a minimum wage, why don't we simply have employers pay their workers "the value of their output"?
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Jun 6, 2014 04:07
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