Psychology qiestion that has always bothered me

Tannin

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Sorry to bother you all with what ought to be a very simple and obvious question, but I'm afraid I just don't get this one.

Why are Apple users practically always such sanctimonious turds?
 

jtr1962

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Because most of them are teachers. The education field seems to be the last stronghold of Apples. I'm guessing teachers originally embraced Apples because due to their relative rarity they felt there was a certain elitism using them. As we all know, teachers love anything that makes them think they're better than anyone else.

A better way of phrasing your question might be why are most teachers sanctimonious a$$holes (one of my cousins included)?

P.S. So as not to offend anyone here who may be technically involved teaching, by teacher I mean one in a traditional educational establishment, not someone who might happen to be teaching computer classes to a group of mostly blue collar adults. I've found most of those for whom teaching is not their main job description but who teach are not only better teachers than the certified ones, but less apt to think their excrement doesn't stink than an honest to goodness teacher. BTW, to this day I'm 100% certain that my first grade teacher came from Mars or Jupiter but nobody believed me.
 

Will Rickards

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Because their computers cost so much... hehe.
Seriously though my pops would be happier with a mac and he's a cool guy.
He works with quarky all day making the printing plates for big printing jobs.
 

LunarMist

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There are still plenty of photographers and production people using Macs and they are not necessarily sanctimonious.
 

Bozo

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I agree with jtr1962.
Back when I started school, teachers wanted to teach. Now, they want outrageous pay for doing nothing and a extra fat pension for when they start doing even less.
If you would like to see teachers that want to teach and care about their students, look at the Catholic school system. 200% better teachers at one third the cost.

Bozo :mrgrn:
 

Stereodude

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LunarMist said:
There are still plenty of photographers and production people using Macs and they are not necessarily sanctimonious.
The PC has made huge inroads in photography. The PC has not fared as well on the production side.
 

Mercutio

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Bozo said:
I agree with jtr1962.
Back when I started school, teachers wanted to teach. Now, they want outrageous pay for doing nothing and a extra fat pension for when they start doing even less.
If you would like to see teachers that want to teach and care about their students, look at the Catholic school system. 200% better teachers at one third the cost.

That is in my opinion a very twisted view of reality.

Public schoolteachers aren't just teachers any more. They also have to be babysitters. They are sometimes put in the position of having to teach manners and behavioral lessons that should've been learned at home or in a pre-school. They have no strong means of effective discipline, and they have a certain orthodoxy forced on them by administrators and parents. On top of that, they have to put up with the restrictions and requirements of getting their kids through bullshit standardized testing (that 10-year-old better know the difference between simile and metaphor!), leaving less time for other potentially valuable lessons (PE, Health, Music, Art).

So, about this teaching manners an behaviors? My aunt just retired from a 30-year career teaching Phys. Ed. to grade-schoolers in Westville, Illinois - one of the poorest communities in that state. 75% of her kids, for the last 10 years, have had developmental disabilities or complications from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or, yes, Crack or meth-addicted mothers. She had five-year olds trying to smoke or chew tobacco during PE, and at one point literally interrupted a RAPE between a six year old and a five year old (the boy knew exactly what to do. Exactly). Those are extremes of behavior, but given class sizes of over 25 and no teacher's aides, those kinds of breakdowns really do happen.

Or I can look to an experience *I* had over the summer of 2005. My training company participated in a program to teach the children of lower-class parents computer skills. I mentioned some of my experiences at the time. These children were older - mostly 14 or 15, but the things I had to deal with were outrageous: Several of the boys committed acts that would be considered sexual assault if they had happened between adults. I had to break up fights. I had a kid come to class so drunk he pissed himself. My class size was *12* (I saw 48 kids in total, for maybe 48 hours total), and there was absolutely nothing I could do to the troublemakers... not all that different from the power of a public school teacher. I had to deal with the kids' bullshit, and at the same time I had to do my best to teach a normal class and hopefully impart some kind of knowledge on the students in that environment.

At the end of that program, there were kids I would've happily murdered with my bare hands, then danced on their entrails.

So, OK, this is what I see: I see a Public school teacher who is basically stuck in a room with the worst of humanity (Oh no! Not my little Johnny! He's a good boy... except when he's grabbing little Mary's tits and punching Robby for wearing the wrong jeans) for six hours a day. He can't hit them. He can't swear at them. Maybe he can yell at them. He can send them to the principal's office - ooooh, but when he does that, he'll probably get screamed at by said principal and, later on, the parents of that sweet little angel.

For that stress and aggravation, the poor bastard who got an Ed degree gets a couple months off in the summer and a salary that's somewhere between what a McDonald's manager earns (one of my co-workers taught grade school for two years with an annual salary of $16,800) and, if they're really lucky, an ending salary that's close to what I was making, two years out of college with my CS degree. That teacher gets six hours in a classroom, probably another couple hours dealing with whatever extra-curricular he's been railroaded into sponsoring or supervising, and then at least a couple hours grading papers or doing lesson plans when he gets home (it takes me between 2 and four hours to prepare materials for one two and a half hour class if I've never taught it. Probably similar for them)

Given what Public School teachers put up with and what we expect of them, I'm all for giving them whatever they want. Pensions, raises, sex slaves. Whatever.

Besides, I'd say a boy in a Catholic school is running a much higher risk for teh involuntary buttsecks by a priest who might actually not rape little boys if he could just get laid like a normal guy every once in a while.
 

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I'm sorry, but Merc is right on and that is a very sad state indeed.

I think one can trace the decline of "Family Values" in our society directly to the decline of respect given to teachers. When I went to school, teachers were refered to whith the following address "Yes, sir"; "No, Sir"; "Yes Mam"; "No Mam"; "Mr. ..."; "Miss ..."; "Mrs. ..." and no other form of address was acceptable. One didn't talk back, EVER because there would be consequences all the way up to and including the belt or the ruler or whatever other tool that could be used to inflict personal disipline at the time. Parents supported the teachers period.

In todays society, the teachers recieve no respect and have no capability to enforce anything. The children know the teachers have no power over them and treat them accordingly. The parents don't support the teachers and if there is any problem then it is the teachers fault because they are the adults and then they sue...

Basicly, there is a limited window, in a childs life, to learn to respect their fellow man and it is during the early school years. Because of the hobbling of the teachers, that respect is not being taught any more and we have now produced a couple generations of really poor quality adults. It really is a sad comentary on todays society but it is the way it is, and I don't see it turning back to what I think was a better way. Maybe it was an unacceptable cruelty (Like Spanking is considered), but I think it produced a better society.
 

Tannin

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I just love it when Applesucks who are completely unable to tell the difference between a stick of DDR RAM and a bucket of gear oil prattle on and on and on about how much faster Macs are than PCs and how you can't just look at the MHz number because the PowerPC thingummy is so much better suddenly turn around and tell you that Macs are now going to be four times faster than ever before because they are getting an (elderly and soon-for-the-scrapheap) Intel CPU that has been comprehensively outclassed by the best of the PC platform chips for several years now.

Doh.

Oh, and they are so much better than you but they don't actually tell you that in so many words, they just let it shine at 16,000,000 candlepower out of their totally non-smelly, cleaner-than-clean arseholes.

It's not a computer, it's a religion. A weirdo cult one. So, when do we get to see them do the Jonestown thing?
 

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Personally, I find it quite hilarious that Mac preachers spent years telling that their G3/G4/G5-based shiny boxes were so much faster than Intel x86 systems, only to find them switch to Intel and claim that their new architecture will be so much faster than their old one.
 

jtr1962

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Is there anything a Mac does that much better than a PC? Seriously, I don't understand why people even buy Macs or use them nowadays. Basically, you're paying more for a machine which is slower and which requires expensive proprietary everything when something breaks. On top of that, 90% of the software made doesn't have a version which can run on your machine. Macs may have led in certain areas 20 years ago enough to justify the extra cost, but that was then, this is now. Really, what can a Mac offer someone that a PC can't, and for less money?
 

P5-133XL

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The one thing new Mac's have over PC's:

The computers and screens are pretty!

How can one fault eye candy? If it looks streamlined with nice curves == fast, then it must be fast...
 

jtr1962

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Mercutio said:
Public schoolteachers aren't just teachers any more. They also have to be babysitters. They are sometimes put in the position of having to teach manners and behavioral lessons that should've been learned at home or in a pre-school.
On top of that you increasingly have taxpayer-funded day care masquerading as pre-kindergarten. The schools should get entirely out of the babysitting business. If you can't be home with your children until they start school don't have them. If you can't be home when your kids get home from school, or make arrangements for their care, don't have them. Most importantly, if you can't send your kids off to school in first grade properly prepared to learn and to defer to authority, don't have them. I'd cut out all the pre-K stuff in a heartbeat. After that I would start sending any kids home who aren't prepared to learn along with a note the parents saying your child will not be allowed back in school until you teach them respect for authority, and see that they are fed, rested, and prepared to learn. This would be non-negotiable. It's unfair to everyone else that classroom time must be wasted teaching kids things they should have learned at home. And if these kids who were sent back home weren't properly prepared for learning by their parents by a certain amount of time they would be taken away from their parents and put in an environment where they would be prepared, mostly likely a good foster home.

Parents ultimately must be made to learn that free public education requires that they send their kid to school prepared, that they play an active part in their child's education process, and that they back up what the school does, including any needed discipline. I'm also in favor of bringing back corporal punishment. Using sparingly, a tap on the knuckles with a ruler or even a good spanking can be a very effective discipline tool, especially with less intelligent children. They may never understand why they are told to do something, but they will understand that it hurts if they don't do it.

They have no strong means of effective discipline, and they have a certain orthodoxy forced on them by administrators and parents.
And unfortunately that crap goes hand in hand with the concept of public schools. Since the schools are funded by taxpayers, these same taxpayers feel they have a right to through their politicians to foist whatever stupidity is in vogue at the moment into the school curriculum, whether that be teaching about "intelligent design" or gay lifestyles. Schools should stick to teaching academic skills which are needed in the real world. Parents are supposed to teach the other stuff. However, so long as the schools are run and paid for by the taxpayers, these same taxpayers will insist that they have a say in how and what is taught. The concept of public education may look good on paper but it is flawed in practice.

At the end of that program, there were kids I would've happily murdered with my bare hands, then danced on their entrails.
That would actually be doing some of those kids (and everyone around them) a favor. A pity you can't legally act on those feelings.

Given what Public School teachers put up with and what we expect of them, I'm all for giving them whatever they want. Pensions, raises, sex slaves. Whatever.
I don't know how it is over there but here the teachers already have sex slaves-some of their students. Not a week goes by that you don't read about yet another teacher getting laid with one or more of their students. Of course, adding this "perk" to the union contract might be a bit of a problem. :D
 

Mercutio

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Macs do WYSIWYG right. PCs don't. DisplayPDF is a beautiful thing.
Mac security issues are dramatically less obnoxious. Heck, most Mac users don't have Virus scanners.
There's a narrow range of geometry calculations (altivec) that Macs can do better than PCs, but anyone who is sane will be doing those calculations with some kind of GPU regardless.


These guys - my reading of their site is that they're PPC-biased over Intel, and Intel over AMD, but these are very recent benchmarks for current CPUs. Note, in testing, that he's comparing a Quad-CPU G5 to an X2 and a Dual core P4.
 

Tannin

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jtr1962 said:
Is there anything a Mac does that much better than a PC?

Huh? Of course. Macs are enormously, vastly better at some things. The example task that comes most readily to mind is mathematical or, to be more precise, multiplying a factor of three by your credit card balance.
 

mubs

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jtr:

Everything you say about babysitting etc. etc. is on the money. There's one issue you're totally wrong on: pre-school. Children that go to pre-school do significantly better academically. This has been proven. Better off people send their kids to Montessori. That should be extended to all kids, not just the wealthy. Fact: a first grader from India will shame a second or even third grader here with respect to math / science / language skills. Indians are paranoid about sending their kids to school early - trying to sneak them into pre-school by 2 and a half even. AFAIK, pre-school is common in most Asian countries.
 

Mercutio

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Wait. You guys live in places with taxpayer funded preschool?
We certainly don't have that here!

Man, I'm all for controlled breeding. China isn't harsh enough, if you ask me. There should be an exam that makes you eligible for a weekly lottery, or something.

Mercutio rules! Abortions for everyone!
 

jtr1962

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Mercutio said:
Wait. You guys live in places with taxpayer funded preschool?
It's actually more common in the suburbs here than the city, but yes we do unfortunately have that. Unlike preschool which might be beneficial academically if something useful was actually taught, as far as I know these are mostly babysitting services where those in charge just give the kids crayons and a coloring book.

mubs said:
There's one issue you're totally wrong on: pre-school. Children that go to pre-school do significantly better academically.
If the teachers actually make an effort to teach anything. In most preschools they don't. You also don't need preschool to get similar benefits. I could read and write before starting school. My mom taught me.

BTW, preschool is only catching on in Asia because more women are entering the work force. Also, the Asian schools are a lot more cost effective so they can afford it. Not only are class sizes of 50 or more common, but the students actually learn, and the parents back up what the school does, including corporal punishment when needed. That model would work very well here if we could get over the political correctness and obsession with small class sizes, plus the belief that money is the only way to fix problems, which is plaguing our public school system. One philosophy Asian schools have is to not cater to the lowest common denominator at the expense of the brightest students. Just look at our schools here. We spend huge amounts on special ed students who despite the spending will be lucky to hold a job in McDonald's while at the same time allowing the brightest students to fail to live up to their potential by cutting enrichment programs. As a result the US is losing ground in all technical fields to Asian countries, which do nurture their best and brightest, while also pushing those with lesser abilities to develop them to the fullest instead of making excuses for them.
 

Bozo

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I guess your perspective on teachers is based on your envirnment. Here, our public school teachers are well paid for their 180 days of 'work'. In the summer when they are off, most collect unemployment. We have had teachers caught forging students grades so they could play sports. Those teachers were not dimissed, they were moved to another school. Our teachers get paid extra for any after school activity they coach or sponser. The retirement plans pretty much match the salery you were earning when you retired.
But, everyday there are adds on TV and radio for paid tutering. (Sylvan Learning Centers) There is a waitng list to get in!
Yes, we have the same discipline problems as other schools. Yes, I agree it's the parents fault. But the true 'problem child' is a small percentage of the total number kids in class everyday. It's just that you only hear of that child, not the rest. But every year, we graduate dumber kids. Just what are the teachers teaching the rest of the kids? (even ABC news did a segment on our slowly eroding academic levels.)
More gripes:
Why do engineering students have to take Aztek history to get their degree???
Why can't recent high school grads make change for a dollar??
Why is the grammer so bad, that it's hard to read and understand a newspaper article?? (written locally)
Why do recent high school grads, when given a reading test outside the school district, have a third grade reading level???
Why do so many high school grads have to attend a 'summer school' to ensure they don't flunk out of the first semister of college??
Check out Jay Leno's "JayWalking" sometime.

I need to take a blood pressure pill...

Bozo :mrgrn:
 

Mercutio

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Bozo said:
More gripes:
Why do engineering students have to take Aztek history to get their degree???

Music majors still have to take Math classes, too. Someone going to a university - for whatever reason - is going to be made an educated person. Someone going to vocational school is going to be taught just enough to do a job. An engineer who sat through a few University-level history or lit classes certainly has a broader perspective on the world than a guy with his Engineering-Technology certificate. And that's the whole point of going to college.

Bozo said:
Why can't recent high school grads make change for a dollar??

In general, the person doing a job where making change is one of the challenges, is going to be challenged by making change.

Bozo said:
Why is the grammer so bad, that it's hard to read and understand a newspaper article?? (written locally)

1. That's not only the writer's fault, it's also the editor's. And the editor probably wrote for 20 years before he got to be an editor.
Anyway, I think a lot of people over-rely on the tools in their word processors, which, just like using a calculator on a math test, keeps them from really learning the correct way to do things.
In my trainer job, I do my best to intercept all business communication. EVERYONE I work with has problems with business writing (most of which requires a 4th grader's knowledge of English). These are 40-year-old women with college degrees!
This is not a problem limited to recent high school graduates.

Bozo said:
Why do recent high school grads, when given a reading test outside the school district, have a third grade reading level???

Because that's all we expect from anyone. Seriously. That's about the level we expect for business writing, from newspapers or magazines.

Bozo said:
Why do so many high school grads have to attend a 'summer school' to ensure they don't flunk out of the first semister of college??

Because most high school seniors start fucking around instead of paying attention during their senior year of high school, and miss important parts of the math and science classes that they are expected to continue when they start at college. I think it's called "senioritis".
 

CougTek

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Are you guys telling me that my written English is better than the one of most English-speaking American citizen? Despite the fact that I never speak English? Pitiful.
 

Mercutio

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I'm perfectly willing to make that statement, Coug. You do write better than many native English speakers. So does JoJo.
 

jtr1962

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Mercutio said:
Because that's all we expect from anyone. Seriously. That's about the level we expect for business writing, from newspapers or magazines.
That really brings us to another problem with present society-namely that people are getting lazier (and/or maybe more distracted) so that they do just the minimum needed to get by. I rarely see anyone taking the time to learn a new skill unless they absolutely need it. As a result, we have a society of very one-dimensional specialists. I blame a lot of this on the increase in vocational-type training, among other things.
 

Tannin

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The problem with our school systems - whether we mean USA or Australia or any of the many other broadly similar places - is, in my view, very simple. Oh, sure, there is room for enormous debate and change and improvement in education and in education systems, but the key problem, the problem that makes all other problems so intractable, is a simple one: we cannot decide what the education system is for and, as always with things designed to do several things badly instead of one thing well, it fails. Repeatedly. Spectacularly. Predictably.

Is the school system there to provide education? Or a child-minding and unemployment-statistic-reduction service? Because it largely serves in the latter role, and barely at all in the former, it is, overall, a very bad thing indeed. It is a source of great surprise to me whenever I meet a well-rounded, literate young person. These people - Kristi, Sol, and the Soup Nazi are prime examples that posters here will have met - are not such fine people because of the education they have endured, they are fine people in spite of the education system. It amazes me that they have had the resiliance to survive 12+ years of compulsory miseducation in the starte Child-Minding Service and nevertheless make worthwhile, personable, skilled adults.

Why is it that (according to what we all say here) education systems, by and large, worked reasonably well in 1950 or even 1970, but fail so miserably now? Many people cite discipline and respect. OK, I'll buy that, at least to a certain extent, but it is very far from being the whole answer, or even a large part of it.

The key factor is participation - participation in the real sense of the word, where the teacher wants to teach (which nearly all teachers do) and the student wants to learn. I'll give you an example: in my first year at uni, there happened to be a very large mature-age contingent, around 20% of the intake. Eyebrows were raised, and concerns expressed that we, the mature-age students, were deleting the quality of the student pool. To be sure, some of us were a few IQ points short of the school-leaver average, others had children to raise, incomes to earn, housholds to manage. But every single one of us was there because we wanted to be there, not because we weren't quite sure what else to do with out lives, or because we couldn't get on the dole. And by the end of third year, when the final results were in, we, the 20% of mature-age students, made up 18 out of the top 20 places, including 9 out of the top 10. Were we smarter? hell no. We worked harder - because we were there of our own free will.

This example is typical and nothing unusual. Note, by the way, that many of the "older" students were not very old - I was 25, another one was 22, though there was a 60+ year old grandmother too (she found it hard going, especially the stats, but finished with a C+ or better average - i.e., somewhere above the 60th percentile of those that graduated, and did it on sheer determination).

So here is what you do with the education system: you make it strictly voluntary (which means you have to provide an alternative child minding service) and then let people go to school to actually (shock horror!) learn things.

Initially, you get a massive fall in participation rates as young people take the easy option and hang out at the child-minding centres. Hell, pay them a subsidy to go surfing if you want: it will make them happy for a while and be much cheaper than putting them through the school system as we know it. And to those who object that going surfing doesn't teach kids to read and write, wake up and smell the damn coffee, OK? Since when did modern kids learn anything in the modern education system? (Since before about 1980 or so actually, but it's been a gradual degenerative process, you pick whichever year makes you feel comfortable.) They are learning nothing now, so as a society we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing something different, such as paying them to go surfing and - here is the important bit - letting the teachers who want to teach stuff and the kids who want to learn stuff get on with it.

Naturally, over time, many kids would return to education, but on their terms and with some sense of motivation. Teach them when they want to learn, cause no matter how hard you try, you can't ever teach them at any other time.

The other effects are more subtle, but just as certain.

* You get a massive decrease in the time it takes the average student to master a given topic. Motivated students in a motivated environment out-perform have-to-be-there deadheads by a factor of around ten to one.

* You get a substantial increase in the economic productivity of the nation as a whole. You are no longer holding back the smart, motivated students, and they turn into smart, motivated workers. And when it comes to any of the areas where substantial training is needed to get started - science, engineering, and so on - the net national productivity depends much less on how many graduates you turn out than it does on how good those graduates are. So far as national success is concerned, education is much more about quality than it is about quantity.

(Not proof-read or spell-checked, just to prove that my education was flawed too!)
 

Bozo

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All that "making a well rounded person" should have been done in high school. Exposing the student to a variety of subjects. (Music and math were mandatory in Jr High, in my day) This gives the student the knowlege they need to make career choices. See Tannins post on forced learning.

Making change: This person graduated from high school. How is this possible? Counting money is taught in grade school! If this person has a learning disability, it should have been caught before jr high. It's the 'nobody fails, nobody is held back' syndrome. And makes this person unable to function in society.

No, it's not the editors fault. That's one of the biggest problems in this country, nobody is responsible for themselves. It's always somebody elses fault. If you are going to be a writer, then it's your responsibility to learn how to do it correctly. Why should you learn to do it right when you can blame someone else. And that says the editor was pushed through school just like the make change guy. English is manditory in every year of school. See Tannins post on 40+

Someone with a third grade reading level wouldn't be able to read and post in this forum. And if our expectations for a high school graduate are that low, we are indeed a country in decline. "nobody fails...' Our school systems are failing the students.

No, only a small percentage of students get senioritis compared to the total that graduate. Nobody fucked off more than I did in my senior year , but, I still had to maintain a 'C' average to graduate. Otherwise it was summer school or repeat grade 12. Can you imagine if they did that now. You would have to build a second high school for all the repeaters.
In my day 70% was passing, now it's 60%

Bozo

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In "third-world" countries, I've bought things from illiterate street vendors who immediately give correct change (without a cash register or calculator). Try that in a department store here; they're helpless without the cash register. Better yet, if you need to pay $11.17, try giving them $21.25 and see the tremendous confusion the cashier experiences and the curses behind you as the people in line have to wait minutes more.
 

Mercutio

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Rather than once again refute everything Bozo posted, I thought I'd just link to this. Note that the article refers to British college graduates, who are emphatically not in the US.
 

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In "third-world" countries, I've bought things from illiterate street vendors who immediately give correct change
Have you been to my country? If not, then may I warn you. We've got very good people who will count to you your change. Wait, don't put it in your pocket just yet. That change you were given could probably be missing a few hundred pesos. Count it again yourself in front of the vendor. Lay it out, bill for bill. You may probably be surprised!
 

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Paugie, no matter the culture, shape, size or color of humans, they are amazingly similar all over the world. Most of your descriptions of your country and people apply equally well to every part of the world!

Bozo said:
One fifth of the seniors in California can't pass a math and english test to graduate.
So this ain't a new problem, then. Years back, I read a report that linked the downtrend of independent thinking and ability in America to the advent of the boob tube. Like all complex issues, I'm sure there is no one cause, but surely TV is one reason.
 

jtr1962

Storage? I am Storage!
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mubs said:
Years back, I read a report that linked the downtrend of independent thinking and ability in America to the advent of the boob tube. Like all complex issues, I'm sure there is no one cause, but surely TV is one reason.
Sure, TV is one cause of the dumbing down of America but it's far from the only culprit. If you're selective about what you what TV can actually be a benefit. Problem is most people choose the path of least resistance and watch whatever crap is in at the moment. I'm often amazed when I have the opportunity to watch what passes for entertainment on the major networks. Usually this is when I'm in a store passing through the TV section. It's all such mind-numbing garbage that I'm dumbfounded anyone would watch these programs even once, let alone enough to make them popular. To make it all worse, I've frequently found that the less educated/less intelligent the person, the less likely they are to do anything to actually increase their level of knowledge. The only way around this of course would be to put only intelligent programming on but we all know that'll never happen. The networks like a dumb populace which is easily led so they can foist their agenda upon it, even if its done subliminally. Most politicians, especially those on the far left and far right, of course also love to govern a stupid constituency, even if they may give lip service to improving education. People will only become educated independent thinkers when they made to see the advantages. The only way to do that is to start when they're in school. Problem is schools nowadays seem designed to simply train kids to be good consumers and barely competent employees.
 
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