OT: "...four years older and considerably dumber."

I find I'm liking the articles from this site more and more... keep 'em comin', Jim.

Letter-to-the Editor of the NY Post I sent a few days ago...

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Simple solution, President Trump should apply the same rule to Colleges and Universities as for Sanctuary Cities... follow the law, allow free speech without shouting down or violent interruption, or lose all your federal funding.

We had a family meeting two nights ago... two daughters are Scripps (Claremont Colleges) graduates, '84 and '86, two sons and 5 granddaughters are U of A graduates... I am MIT '62.

We all agreed, leave nothing to your alma mater until they start behaving like adults (I wrote MIT out of my estate 10 years ago)." ...Jim Thompson

I should have noted, I CC'd the President of Scripps, just to rub it in a bit >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Try Schlicher's book. It describes the left's dreamland to a 'T'.

Yeah, a world where there isn't an expectation that 8 billion people need to be working their asses off 24/7 to support the lifestyles of some crusty old corporate Republican golf aficionados hanging out in Palm Beach every weekend does sound pretty great.

I think you have already acknowledged yourself to be an uneducated paisan... which also explains your political positions: "Because I'm a loser/dud it must be someone else's fault... probably Chick-Fil-A"... I feel so unsafe... and my dick is falling off >:-} ...Jim Thompson

What's a "paisan"? Is that like Super Mario or something?

You need to pause for a few years and get a decent education. ...Jim Thompson

I wish they would get some decent sort of education. Kids are getting EE degrees without understanding electricity or electromagnetics, much less electronics. Signals+Systems and Electromagnetics are electives, which they don't take because they are hard. They do know a lot about sociology and ethnic studies and craft beers. Some can type some Python.

Big enterprises need to be created and managed. Things like energy production and airplane manufacturing don't work as mom-and-pop enterprises. Government is really bad at doing productive stuff... as in -5 on a scale of 0 to 10.

So there have to be people to run big business. Many of them started the biz, so have a lot of stock certificates, so are billionaires in theory. Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, HP, Ford, BofA, most companies were started by non-billionaires, often dropouts, and created a lot of wealth and jobs.

You prefer, say, Cuba's economic model?

Do you work 24/7 to support some billionaire? Do you golf or anything like that?

It's hard to teach creativity, and in some sense actually designing real circuits for production is a creative art (they do call it The Art of Electronics after all) that is hard to teach. My first attempts at circuit design were real stinkers that didn't even work, it takes practice, and how much practice can even a talented kid get in circuit design in 4 years including all the other stuff that college involves?

They're 18, 19, 20 years old; basically not even fully-functional people yet with no life experience.

There are plenty of wannabe sculpture artists and photographers and screenwriters who come out of college knowing a lot about sociology and ethnic studies and don't cut it in the fine arts field, either. Hey, at least they learned something.

My hypothesis is that if you give kids an opportunity to exercise independent, creative thought starting from an early age, regardless of what the particulars of the discipline they do it in is, they'll end up better engineers.

The Chinese play it the opposite way, they buckle kids down into a very narrow and intensive program of goal-directed rote learning from an early age, they don't even get to take a field trip to the art museum, and they end up like a lot of exchange students my gf teachers: brain dead about life.

I did get a few grants and loans that allowed me to go to college instead of having to rely entirely on my parents (who had no money), and it did keep a roof over my head and off the street when I was in so much pain after an injury that I wasn't able to work for a while.

Next time I'll apply to ExxonMobil for a charitable grant.

No, Che and Castro were murderous thugs, everything Che ever wrote reads like the rantings of an insane person.

Hollywood seems enamored of them, but keep in mind half of Hollywood is striving to become an Operating Level 2 Theatan in some religion founded by a bad sci-fi writer. If Hollywood ever did anything positive for liberals its certainly by accident and not by design.

Golf seems like a sport for people who like to say they're "active" but really prefer to remain sitting most of the time.

Creativity can be taught to some extent, but it's tricky. But an EE grad should be competant with the fundamantals: circuits, signals, electromagnetics. I get kids who are flustered by a 2-resistor voltage divider. An RC lowpass filter is way past their (Starbucks) pay grade.

Maybe they learned a lot of wrong stuff. I got a popular college sociology textbook and forced myself to read it. Astonishing gibberish.

I had two jobs, one designing electronics. There was no charity involved.

It's usually stock certificates, not bathtubs full of hundred dollar bills. A lot of billionaires (Gates, Zuckerman, Buffet) give most of it away.

Golf is a disease. The Brat has a really bad case.

Hey, congratulations, sounds like you had people who cared about you when you were growing up. Not all of us were so lucky. Money was probably worth something back then, too.

I'll pick the circumstances of my birth better, next time.

I could afford college and an apartment and an MG Midget on two jobs. I don't think many kids nowadays could afford a private college by working themselves. Like, $60K or something. Tulane was $1200 a year.

My parents would have financed me, but they were fairly poor, so I did it myself.

I did that once, too. Lots and lots of fancy-sounding words, superciliously crafted to appear at first sight authoritative and incontrovertible, yet on closer examination revealed to be just an endless stream of meaningless verbiage, of no benefit to mankind whatsoever and presumably penned solely for the self-aggrandisement of the author (who without doubt could have found gainful employment in any other field totally impossible.)

I'm sure it can too. The problem seems to be that so few know how to teach it.

NT