Monday, June 25, 2007

College as Cartel

Classes + Degree

This is what colleges sell. An “education”.

Setting aside, for the moment, my aversion to formal education, this is very odd.

Why classes and the degree? Why not just one or the other?

Why not have one institution dedicated to teaching and another to administer tests for certification of some kind? This works in many other areas (driver’s license, real estate license, AutoCAD certification, etc.). It would necessarily make things run more efficiently, and therefore lower costs to the consumer.

For example, if there was a college with low standards of teaching (say, the teachers were hired based on research performance rather than on teaching skills), and this college was not also selling a degree, it would quickly be run out of business by a more student-oriented college.

As it stands today, this low quality of teaching is common, expected even. Stories about unintelligible foreign professors are ubiquitous among college students. The price of a college education has risen faster than the price of inflation - a phenomenon absolutely unexplainable in a free market situation.

This is worse even than the state of our public high schools ([this comment has been censored by the editor]). Why is it tolerated? — Because a lousy education is the path to a valuable degree.

Huh?

This next part had me stumped for a few days: Why hasn’t the market corrected this glaring flaw? Colleges are, after all, primarily private institutions, unlike high schools. Why haven’t consumers found a way to get a good education, and then get a respectable certification in their field without wasting the time and money?

One factor is the classes + degree set-up of public high schools, which would lead, by habit, to consumers looking for a similar college product. But this can’t be all of it - financial incentives are strong, and should be enough to create colleges far superior to public high schools.

What else? Here is a site demonstrating the huge extent of government interference in colleges.

The only conclusion left to me is that government subsidies (directly to state colleges or indirectly as financial aid), by discouraging the search for cheaper alternatives, have halted innovation of the college system. This, of course, hurts mainly the poor, who could profit immensely from the much cheaper option of auto-didacticism and certification.

Government beneficence saves the day again, eh?

To sum things up:

One can practically get a college education on the internet for free! So why isn’t this approach far more common?
Because the government is picking up the tab.

Just think - you pay taxes to support an outdated college system so that you can pay thousands of dollars too much for an education. Lucky you.

Alternatives: Have Fun

Fortunately, our government has yet to completely blow everything to Hell. There are colleges that will give credit for a class when it is demonstrated that you know the material - no classroom instruction required. Try this site.

This creates some fantastic methods for the acquisition of a free (or very nearly) bona fide college degree.

1) Learn on your own, through textbooks, the internet, iTunes U, and apply for college credit.

2) Even better, since most colleges allow students to attend classes without paying (with the professor’s permission - they don’t get credit, of course), one could attend classes for free at one college, and then apply for credit at another - a real college education for next to nothing. Also, because you’re not registering, you don’t have to worry about being accepted, allowing you to attend whatever high-brow college you’d like. Personally, living in the Houston area, I’m thinking about Rice University.

3) There are also a few “homeschool colleges” that I haven’t yet mentioned that send you the course material, and allow you to learn without paying for some professor’s obscure research and fancy building facades (and swimming pools, and recreation centers, etc.).

So my advice:
Allow the economy to work its magic;
Help poor people get an education;
Drop out of mainstream college as soon as possible.

Seriously. I’m doing it. My parents weren’t big fans of this approach, but that’s OK, I can afford it without them. : )




Billy bitch-slaps traditional American education.



I’ll let you know how it works out.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Melting Pot

Socialist cooperative

The U.S. Congress


Technocratic experts

The U.S. Supreme Court


Totalitarian monarch

The U.S. president


Are we supposed to be superior because we mixed them together?


(It would help if our Constitution was an actual, literal social contract. But no, that would be asking too much.)

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Spiderman 3: Yes, a Film Review

I haven't been a fan of superhero movies in a couple of years (you see six, you've seen 'em all), but in my meanderings at Cinema 6, my workplace, I caught a few glimpses of the newest Spiderman movie, and it struck me as worth watching. So I did.

I went through a few stages:

1) Analyzing the filming technique.
After watching many DVD special features, I've reached a point where I think, "green screen, computer graphics, that guy's definitely a stunt man, bullet time", etc. This lasted all of five minutes.

2) Picking out plot absurdities.
Lady with a British accent reporting in New York?

What?

Sentient black goo capable of surviving interstellar travel via asteroids?

What?

Man walks into the middle of a particle physics experiment?

Huh?! *double take* (Come on now, that was just pitiful.)

But what do you expect from a comic book story?

3) Pondering the economic ramifications of superheros.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a superhero fix things when they go wrong? With fewer things going wrong, bull markets would be more bull-ish and recessions would be less recessive. It would just be cool. I bet superheros would fetch pretty high wage rates, too.

[/specific stages]

Then Parker goes emo, destroys the lives of everyone around him, gets sidetracked by some Nouvelle Vague filmmaking, yeah yeah yeah.

The ending can be seen from a mile away, so I won't bother concealing it.

The sentient goo and the human dirt mound team up, the editors copy and paste some scenes from The Matrix (all three) and a scene from The Empire Strikes Back, and Parker and Mary Jane get back together just in time for the sequel.

It had its moments, but in the end it was just another superhero movie, which would garner it a 3.5. However, the Star Wars reference made me happy, so

4/5

Instead, what I'm looking forward to now is Werner Herzog's new movie. I've heard from my sources that Werner Herzog ist der schitt.


[Intermission]


This might not be a good time to tell you, but I'm leading a double life.

Six or eight hours a day, I wear a special outfit (black and popcorn) and display superpowers (serving drinks, sweeping floors, dealing with grumpy customers, among others).
I go by Cineman. Yeah, that's me.



Cineman, in a rare moment out of costume.


Just thought you should know. Feel free to visit me in Tomball, should you so desire.

By the way, we're getting new shirts soon.

...

I hope they're black.

Mahahahaha. : )

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Hard vs. Soft Atheism, and Silliness

This is a difference I commonly hear expounded upon (especially when a theist accuses atheists of jumping to conclusions without supporting evidence).

It usually goes like this:

"Hard atheists believe there is no God, while soft atheists don't believe in God."

Unfortunately, this means absolutely nothing.

Let's approach the subject with an Aristotelian mindset:

• "Believing that there is no God" is opposed to "believing that there is a God", that is, you can't not "believe that there is no God" without "believing that there is a God".

• "Not believing in God" is opposed to "believing in God", that is, you can't not "not believe in God" without "believing in God".

• There's no logical difference between "believing in God" and "believing that there is a God".

• Therefore, by the law of non-contradiction, it is impossible to not "believe there is no God" (which is the equivalent of "believing there is a God"), and at the same time "not believe in God".

In other words, you can't be a hard atheist without being a soft atheist, and vice versa. It's nonsense to claim such a thing. QED.



No wonder those poor theists are so confused. 8^(
(I think these people are trying to conflate "soft atheism" with agnosticism, and "hard atheism" with, um... stupidity.)

(Myself: Technically, I'm an agnostic, but I usually describe myself as an atheist because people tend to assume that agnostics are half-Christians. "Atheist" gets the point across much better.)

Rush, 1976





YouTube is my hero.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Anarchy

Lysander Spooner shreds the legitimacy of state coercion.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

To the Lemmings:

This note is about global warming.

First, the basics:

Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect (our contribution, that is). To make a long story short, carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is invisible in the visible light spectrum, but opaque in the infrared spectrum in which heat is usually transferred. This means that light will pass through it, but heat will not. This is why Venus' average surface temperatures, at 400 °C, are higher than Mercury's, even though Venus is nearly twice as far from the sun.



The Greenhouse Effect


Or, if you prefer:


Here's some more information for you:

(Sorry, An Inconvenient Truth isn't on Google Video anymore. Try to watch that one first.)

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Here's an article refuting much of this movie.
And another one.
(I do, however, agree with this movie on the rights of third-world countries.)

The Denial Machine

Here's a set of articles that refutes much of this video.

Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading

The IPCC website

RealClimate (a site run by climatologists that often debunks anthropogenic global warming skeptic claims)

Gristmill (another debunking site—yes, I know my links are starting to look biased, but hang with me. I figure any dissenters will already have the opposing information, and it would be redundant to list those sites.)

CDIAC

UCSUSA


After going through this (and some other junk), these are the conclusions I have reached:

There is practically no debate that the Earth is warming up.

There is a large consensus that most of it is anthropogenic, and this theory is well grounded in fact.

People who say "the debate is over" are exaggerating. The scientific deniers, few as they are, still exist.

On Al Gore:
Anyone who makes personal attacks in order to win a scientific debate has some serious bias issues.


Save energy.
Save yourself.


(Hope)

I'll be happy to debate these points, if anyone is so inclined. One condition, though—try to make sure your claim hasn't already been addressed in the links. Answering the same question ad nauseum just isn't fun (for example, the "global cooling" attack on climatologists of the past).