Quote from: moniker on Nov 11, 2023, 07:25 AMI used to share your apparent anger at the "property ownership system", but now I believe that it's not the system but that I am overly concerned about it.

No, it's really OK to be paranoid when they really are out to get you.  Trust me, you CAN'T be too concerned about it.  Property ownership is the legal underpinning of the monetary system, and MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

EAT THE RICH!      



RE 

Two collapse education articles today, one from the Ed PoV, the other from the Job PoV.

1st, from Ed

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/an-academic-transformation-takes-on-the-math-department

This one is about cuts to the only Ph.D. level Math program in WV, which granted is a poor and backward state, but still I think this is representative of a nationwide trend.  The great expansion of higher education which began with the baby boomers graduating many Ph.D.s who needed jobs teaching math had to go do it our at satellite university far from the core of the main schoolss like MIT they learned at.  MIT has only so many tenure track math professors of course, and they're the creme de la creme.  So your more average Ph.D got his tenure at Podunk University.

Problem is, out in Podunk there weren't many students to teach high level math to, so they did research, published some papers and farmed out teaching the beginner classes to adjuncts.  In this WV school, in 35 years the dept head has had 3 Ph.D. students.

So, all the teachers who really know math are either leaving of their own volition or their jobs are being cut.  Leaving a Land of One Eyed Kings, teaching the Blind.

Historically, tenured professors didn't need to worry too much about student evaluations, because their jobs were secure. Teaching faculty don't have this luxury. "Now we have math courses that are basically sixth-grade math," Pantea said. "Pre-algebra."

This was the situation I was in when teaching High School.  I was remediating what I had learned in elementary school.  It was impossible to actually teach Algebra, much less trigonometry or calculus.  Now college teachers are teaching elementary school math.  Nobody this ill prepared in math can possibly take a job in banking or insurance or medical billing.

Which leads us to the Jobs article:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/24/reports-find-colleges-no-longer-produce-ideal-job-/?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAQu4i5mYXI3v_NARi0rbXN4cy1yJcBKioIACIQXBEbMEZz5y5Gid_4CzfDmioUCAoiEFwRGzBGc-cuRonf-As3w5o&utm_content=rundown

Of course they don't, because for the types of jobs they are talking about, you need to do better than 6th grade math.  But that is all most colleges teach now, because they don't have enough students coming in who already know 6th grade math.  They have been socially promoted and graduated HS without knowing HS level math.  Happens all the time.

So now, college has become basically obsolete, not enough teaching jobs of real college level material; not enough students capable of learning it.  What these companies want now is some kind of Online Certificate which says you know how to use an Excel Spreadsheet.  That's what they are hiring you to do, they don't need anything else.

It will not be long before the only places to get a Ph.D in Math will be at the Elite Universities.  The only people getting such a degree will be coming from the Elite class, nobody else will bother with a full 4 year degree.  Hell, even Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.  He didn't need a Harvard degree, just the computer science he learned in the first couple of years he was there to get Microsoft going.

I shudder to think what it must be like trying to teach math at the average Community College today.  What a fucking nightmare.  In the  words of the Chairman of the WV University Math dept:

Goldwasser won't be here: he's one of the senior faculty who volunteered to go...
 "My decision was selfish," he said, finally. "I wouldn't want to work in the kind of department that's going to be left."

This also brings us back around to our Depopulation discussion and why it is happening.  You could look at it as occuring because there aren't enough smart people being born for the smart teachers from prior generations to teach.  Only after the current population of smart people dies off will we start to come into balance with the number of stupid people we have left to teach.  Right now the ratio of smart people to stupid people is too high.  The current surplus of math Ph.D.s will need to forget about doing research and teaching and go work on Wall St instead.

RE

Education and intelligence are often touted as solutions to various problems but I don't think it has done much to raise awareness on collapse or how unsustainable our economic system is. Maybe it is my imagination as I was not alive in the 70s and was much too young to remember anything from the 80s but it would seem people today are much less aware of how unsustainable our lifestyles are.

I mean, back in the 70s people openly thought our society is run on fossil fuels but now this isn't the case. Heck just the other day I hear some guy on QUORA (which is supposed to house intelligent people) saying the "peak oil myth" has been debunked and business as usual will prevail and we need not worry about those worrywarts. Not his words exactly but the thrust of his argument. The guy speaking was a lawyer and has practised law in multiple countries so you can't use the "uneducated/lack of intelligence" as an excuse.

To me I see intelligence as something like this; an intelligent person can offer you a good answer but a wise person can ask the right questions. People aren't asking enough of the right questions and collectively we are lacking in wisdom and humility to see the true picture.

Without wisdom, naked intelligence is as dangerous as giving a baby a gun. The baby will not fully understand the weapon they are wielding and over time will unleash untold damage and carnage. All this intelligence and education is just sending us into a rabbit hole into oblivion. You also got to remember intelligent people are more adept at rationalising any lack of logic or inconsistencies in their world view.

In the end, I don't really subscribe to the notion that if we were more intelligent or more educated the situation would be appreciably different. We are social animals at heart and even the most intelligent amongst us will just follow the herd so to speak. People with contrarian opinions will become outcasts or social misfits and won't fit in enough to make a difference.

Just a couple of days ago in response to K-Dog on why Americans know nothing about the ethnic composition  of Ukraine, I explained it's because they are as ignorant of history as math & science, but all they had to do was go to the library and read.  It's not a Secret.

The problem of course is that most Amerikans educated in the last 20-30 years CAN'T read, even the college educated ones.  This is not newz to long term Diners, since I have on many occasions written about the failure of Public Schools, going back to my own years teaching almost 30 years ago.  Bad as it was back then, based on this article it has clearly got even worse since.  I had to publish the link here since it reinforces what I just wrote.

The various reasons for this we have covered before as well, grade inflation, no child left behind, computers and screen time etc.  Like the reasons why people aren't having kids, it should be common sense but they are not meaningfully addressed.  It's a cultural problem teaching isn't valued, nor is education except for the elite.  They have their own private schools, so they really couldn't give a shit.  The only reason public education was ever funded at all was to serve as a warehouse for kids until they were old enough to work.

For a while in the post WWII period public schools worked OK, at leastt for smart kids and kids from white middle class neighborhoods where property values and taxes were high enough to pay the teachers a decent wage, though they still were better off going into corporate work.  IN the NYC schools where they tracked the smart kids and put them alll together for college prep into a couple of high schools, we got a 1st class education.  But that was 1% of all NYC HS students, and at Stuyvesant we were just about all white or chinese, there were only a handful of black kids or hispanics.  In fact I really can't remember ANY, I just say a handful because there must have been a couple.

There was the occasional inner city success story paraded out also.  Who didn't see "Stand & Deliver", the story of Jaime Escalante teaching Calculus to East LA chicanos?


Inspirational as this is, the number of times something like this was ever pulled off was vanishingly small in 1985, and I doubt you could pull it off today.  Hell, if you can teach algebra you're ahead of the curve, colleges now teach PRE-algebra in their math departments.

In NYC, the typical HS had a trade track, where you took shop classes in machine shop and carpentry, etc, and kids who were poor at math just had to learn something like "business math" and add up numbers on a balance sheet.  Calculators eliminated the need to know even that, and before long kids were graduating without even knowing elementary school math.

Today, Johnny can't read, can't write and can't add or subtract.  You think any of these folks understand how compound interest on a mortgage works?  How to balance their bank account and make a budget?  Gen Z is leaving HS now dumb as rocks.  So dn't count on them to be making very good choices about who their leaders are or fixing what is broken in our society.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html

The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

RE

I can't remember how long it was ago.  I was in Vancouver with Marla (Mrs. Dog) and we saw Edward James Olmos walk across the street.  He was alone.  I turned to Marla and said "Is that who I think it is".

She said yes it is.

We have discussed education before and I was lucky to get a public education of unusual quality.

But we have also, and this applies to all Diner members, improved ourselves online.  Through the years here and elsewhere we have written comments and read extensively.  I am under the delusion that I can write halfway decently, and I know I was not as good as I am the first time I sat in front of a keyboard.

Not everyone has had the same interaction we have had.  I'll guess most people don't read a damn thing anymore since the local newspaper which kept the mass of people somewhat literate is gone.  Video replaced the cognitive brain.  Everyone is bedazzled. 



We bifurcated.  Split off and went our own way.

But why are there not more of us?  There are millions of people in America.  How can so much ignorance persist for so long?  With the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips, why does ignorance persist?  Why do TikTok videos hijack billions of brains.  Why in a city of millions, with all the problems the world has, is there no protest.  Not a whimper that things might be amiss.

M. King Hubbert did not have trouble finding like minded people (the book arrived).  Technocracy was once a thing.  Imagine the Diner with a staff of 100 people doing research and writing articles.  We would be a thing too!

QuoteThe technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted.  (<-- incorrect assumptions of the new deal )

That was not from the book, I had to stop and google the technocracy movement.  The movement was M. Kings 'Diner'.  The FBI file on Hubbert must be as thick as a brick.  In wartime intellectuals are always a target.

QuoteOn October 7, 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organization. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Regina chiropractor, former director of Technocracy Incorporated, and the grandfather of * Elon Musk.

It was later determined that technocrats supported the war effort.

M. King and his fellow 'doomers' flew close to the sun.  Their wings melted.  Now their story is forgotten, but if he were alive M. King might be here with us in the Diner.  Perhaps asking why there are not more of us here.  Perhaps asking why has everything else gone hockey stick but smarts.  Could smarts not have at least grown proportional to population?  To the contrary, there is no increase, and smarts has declined in a mass homogenization.

As if the entire population is pasteurized.

It is disappointing the * old school of Peak Oilers which some of us have roots in, did not know more about M. King. Hubbert and his involvement with the Technocrats.  The new school (this is it) is aware of the technocrats and will be finding out more.



Will this be noticed.

I want my carbon dividends.

* Musk might know more about M. King than we do.

* Old school peak oil  was embarrassed by the deployment of tight oil technology.  Now with the Biden administration using the Hail Mary Pass of American Tight Oil to finance their personal war in Ukraine, that embarrassment may be reversed.  Time will tell.

Not really convinced that better schools would have made that much difference to our collapse journey. From what I hear Denmark, Finland and Japan have the best schooling systems in the world. Do these countries have anyone talking about collapse and the insanity of growth-based economics? Not really. So, I see no reason why things would be all that different even if Americans could read and do math. What you really need is strong critical thinking and people not to adopt herd mentality.

That is the issue. Herd mentality. You can have the best minds in the world but if the prevailing thought says to believe in business as usual that is what people will do. People will only jump on collapse theories when the truth becomes undeniable and then they will lament that is so painfully obvious it was going to happen. However how many of these people are willing to stick their necks before the event and risk being labelled a moron? Not many I suspect.

I took 8 of the NYS Regents exams required for the so-called "Advanced" HS Diploma.  There were 3 for Math, Algebra, Geometry & Trigonometry.  Science had 4, Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry & Physics.  I only took the last 3 of those because I didn't take Earth Science, better known as "Rocks for Jocks".     That was the science class dummies took to fulfill their requirement of having at least 1 science course during HS.  I took the Amerikan History and English exams also.  They also had Foreign language exams, but I didn't bother taking the Spanish one, though I took the required 2 years of a foreign language.  I hated that class, found it very boring.

The tests were good basic science, not college level like the AP tests but if you could pass them you had a decent foundation for going into a college class already knowing the terminology and basic concepts, making understanding college textbooks easier.  I didn't take the AP tests because I was a lazy HS student, I didn't want to work any harder than necessary. lol.

I also taught the science exams during my short tenure as a teacher in a LI Public Skule.  My students generally did not do too well. lol.  They were even less motivated than me during HS and weren't good test takers. 

Any pretense that there are any minimum standards of proficiency or that a HS Diploma means anything besides the fact you attended are history.  Rather than admit that the education system is a complete failure, they just declare knowing any of this stuff as unnecessary.  Which in fact it is for many of the students who will never need to know any of it for the jobs available that they take.  The few highly paid tech jobs in society are gobbled up mostly by the kids of professional level parents who send them to private schools.  The remaining are taken by the 1% of high IQ kids who are autodidacts and can learn in any school just by reading the textbook.  OK, maybe it's 10%, that's about what I found while teaching in a typical lower middle class HS.  Thee parents in that community either were in goobermint jobs like cops, firemen, bus drivers and garbagemen or in the trades in plumbing, electrical or auto mechanics.  Salesmen and Real Estate agents also.  They had no need to learn chemistry, or with the invention of the calculator even how to add and subtract.

If they had dreams of making big money, it was in music or acting or sports.  Or more realistically, as Drug Dealers, and occasionally in legitimate bizness like opening a restaurant.  Quite a few went into the military also with dreams of becoming a pilot or if they were the tough guy type who liked Rambo, Mercs or Bodyguards.  The academic subjects of HS simply weren't relevant what they figured to do with their lives after HS.

What also was lost though was the ability to think in abstract terms, which is why they are so easily manipulated by politicians espousing one ideology or the other.  This has already happened though, all that is going on dropping the exams is acknowledgement of reality.  There's no reason to keep the tests, not enough kids can actually pass them.

It's hard for me to imagine what life must be like today in the typical HS classroom, for the students or the teachers.  It has to be incredibly depressing.  So it goes.

https://nypost.com/2024/06/12/opinion/new-york-is-about-to-make-its-high-school-diplomas-worse-than-useless/

New York is about to make its high school diplomas worse than useless

RE

As the article details, it hasn't just begun, it's been underway for years already.  Part of it is simple demographics, the falling birthrate started back in the 90s, so that translates to fewer college age students each year now.  Many other reasons though, not the least of which is that for many students, a college degree didn't lead to a high paying career, it merely began their working life with a big pile of debt.

In fact in many ways the expansion of universities in the 60s was a failed experiment right from the beginning and just served to devalue the sheepskin and lower the quality of the degree.  For prpfit schools in the business of putting warm bodies in the classroom seats accepted many students thoroughly unprepared for college level work.

The top public and private universities will survive a while longer, although the Trumpenator is making their lives difficult too and their operations will shrink in size.  University education will once again be available mainly to the elite and a few statistical outliers, bright bulbs that periodically turn up among the poor.  Of course now if they're immigrant kids, they'll probably get deported.

The great collapse of US higher education has begun

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/24/the-great-collapse-of-us-higher-education-has-begun

RE

QuoteThe great collapse of US higher education has begun

Yes, but to be more accurate, the great collapse of US middle class education has begun.

JACOBIN.COM • 2025-06-26

A Tech-Backed Influencer Wants to Replace Teachers With AI

Backed by tech money, entrepreneur MacKenzie Price is growing a network of private K–12 schools that promises to replace all classroom teachers with an "AI tutor" that students learn from while glued to their laptop screens.

The proles are not to think critically about society or history.

Get ready for Prager Screw.  The common man is to worry about the price of beer and trivia.  No "big picture" concerns will be appropriate or possible as idiocracy is pursued at warp speed.  A new age of pharaohs defined by the rentier^* economy the conservative billionaire (NAZI) class is building now dawns as our new reality.

It will not take long to create an nation of morons.  Destroying public education will have a very fast payback for 'them'.  In a few years stupidity, and draconian control by the American elite will be ubiquitous.  Recent decades have shown that poor public education is beneficial to the American upper class.  A large part of the American demographic is already malleable, easily manipulated.  And all too willing to play the fool.


* A rentier is a person who earns a significant portion, or often all, of their income from property rights rather than from actively working.

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2025, 06:13 AMIt will not take long to create an nation of morons.

The sentence imples future tense. Where have you been lately to think it hasn't already happened? I give origin credit mostly to the internet, I figure AI is the coupe de grace. Trump is a consequence of this happening as opposed to a prime mover.

Quote from: TDoS on Nov 22, 2025, 09:35 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2025, 06:13 AMIt will not take long to create an nation of morons.

The sentence imples future tense. Where have you been lately to think it hasn't already happened? I give origin credit mostly to the internet, I figure AI is the coupe de grace. Trump is a consequence of this happening as opposed to a prime mover.

You are right, I am a dinosaur who has gone to a library at night more than once in my life, to find when I got home I had explaining to do to my wife.  The paradox is that since I had a decent education and started out old school, the internet and AI do not dumb me down.  I use them both as tools and can I understand their limitations.  A more simple explanation is that my career in electronics inoculated my brain from turning into mush.

And yes, Trump is no more than executioner for the fates.    A nexus of forces made Trump happen.

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2025, 02:19 PMYou are right, I am a dinosaur who has gone to a library at night more than once in my life, to find when I got home I had explaining to do to my wife.

I'm going to have to remember that one, it is a great "men of our age" angle. I loved libraries, didn't have a wife around to need to explain anything to though when I finally came home though.

Quote from: K-DogThe paradox is that since I had a decent education and started out old school, the internet and AI do not dumb me down. 

Nor me. Which is why I irritate people so often I suppose, pointing out when folks appear to have fallen for some of the more interesting.... "facts" and "interpretations" they find online.
 
Can you believe I got banned from peakoil.com, and big chunks of my posting history erased years before RE showed up, for daring to point out the inconsistencies, lack of critical thinking and zero desire to learn the most basic components required to understand the topic? It was quite surprising, coming from a background where intellectual combat was sought out to test the strength of ones ideas. Figured the internet would be more like that. Boy was I wrong!

 

Quote from: TDoS on Nov 22, 2025, 09:35 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2025, 06:13 AMIt will not take long to create an nation of morons.

The sentence imples future tense. Where have you been lately to think it hasn't already happened? I give origin credit mostly to the internet, I figure AI is the coupe de grace. Trump is a consequence of this happening as opposed to a prime mover.

It's always been a nation of morons because the vast majority of homo saps infesting the planet are morons.  The main thing the internet has done is to allow morons to communicate their moronic ideas faster and more efficiently to a global audience.

RE

But, since we are on the internet we must not be morons as we have no global audience.

Quote from: RE on Nov 25, 2025, 02:56 AM

Quote from: TDoS on Nov 22, 2025, 09:35 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2025, 06:13 AMIt will not take long to create an nation of morons.

The sentence imples future tense. Where have you been lately to think it hasn't already happened? I give origin credit mostly to the internet, I figure AI is the coupe de grace. Trump is a consequence of this happening as opposed to a prime mover.

It's always been a nation of morons because the vast majority of homo saps infesting the planet are morons.

Ah....that's a standard smart folks answer. None of the three of us are below average in that regard. And while the normal distribution of alleged IQ doesn't allow your answer to be true..."morons" can sure be shit-stupid regardless of IQ. Peakoil.com being like a shining historical light proving just such a thing. Not the only one of course, reddit isn't bad either if you go way back in the right place. Most of the oil PO sites have disappeared memorializing what was considered the "facts" of the event at that point in time. LATOC would be the absolute GOLD STANDARD but Matt made that disappear because he sure didn't want it coming back on him as he tried to change careers to professional astrologer.

Quote from: REThe main thing the internet has done is to allow morons to communicate their moronic ideas faster and more efficiently to a global audience.

RE

Like a disease. It made people dumber, faster. So sure...it made things worse by spreading stupid shit far faster than it otherwise would have been. And did it really well, which is why it is my marker as a seismic shift.

One quick example. Colin Campball published a global peak oil claim for the world in 1990, in Noroil. Peter McCabe had a far more nuanced article published in 1998 (I was happy to have been a sounding board for him when he was looking for technical holes in his argument) and Colin Campbell came out of the woodwork, as did the French guy, and they went back and forth in print in later publications. It was great! Big ideas from experts fought out in public without the usual internet horseshit. And then the internet gives us peakoil.com....and presto....you can see the difference between the two if you were watching. I certainly did.