"What it's like to fail": David Raether giving signed copies of his memoir
crowd.tc
crowd.tc
This is such a wonderful story that could warm even the coldest of hearts, and I really hope lots of people get behind this crowdtilt campaign :-)
There's good in most things bad, but those things are still mostly bad. People share the positive focus because it's more socially acceptable, and when you're in dire straits, you need to be socially acceptable. (I don't, so I don't fear addressing the truth with anyone who will hear it.)
The truth is that he bought into a dying society (Hollywood, about 5-10 years further along the decline curve than VC-funded so-called "tech") and faced severe age discrimination, because the old and young are the first to bite it when shit goes bad. He also made some big mistakes (8 kids, shallow wife that dropped him) but I still don't see how anyone could watch a man that capable get fucked that bad and not conclude that this is a failing society approaching uselessness and abandon.
The thing that always strikes me about homelessness is not its remoteness, but rather how it seems that any one of us are only a few unfortunate events and wrong moves away being in the gutter, and how most people feel that it could never happen to them. I find David's account brutally honest, enjoyable and yes, uplifting because it shows that there is a real (albeit long and painful) route out of the damning poverty of homelessness, not because of any particularly joyful spin that he puts on his story.
Is he making it uplifting because he's desperate and he wants people to help him? I don't think that's the overriding reason, but maybe, who knows? At any rate, if he's managed to pull himself so far out of the lows that he's able to adopt that strategy rather than just accept a life of homelessness that just happens to him then fair play - he deserves every success he can find.
Decades from now, when the average age of the contemporary HN crowd is 50, if people here are facing the age discrimination of the world that the current VC-istan demigods created, I bet the current crop of HN libertarians will be the first to be up in arms about it.
This is proof that the model of undergraduate, liberal arts education has failed in this country.
What, you say?
The whole point of college is to equip people with the skills so that, regardless of market vacillations of trade-specific supply and demand, the person can always find work. Not to find "a job", but to provide someone with general-purpose skills so their careers are, at least, reasonably protected from the market ups-and-downs that afflict the trades.
The market doesn't buy it. People like him-- educated, capable-- end up unable to find appropriate work. Society has decided that higher education isn't valuable anymore. (It might be right; I'm not going to attack that, either.)
That's a market signal that this $40,000-per-year process that the US calls "education" has lost meaning and value.
It's not that it's lost meaning, the meaning has just changed drastically. Imagine that you're deciding between two candidates for a job opening. As you're preparing for the interview, the reception mentions that the first candidate isn't moving and doesn't seem to have a pulse. Are you going to interview both candidates or are you just going to hire the guy who can fog a mirror?
That's what the modern college degree represents. It's no longer a guarantee of lifetime employment. Instead, it's now the bare minimum qualifier for even being considered for employment. A degree tells future employers that you won't soil yourself at work more than once a month. It's not a glowing recommendation, but it's better than the guy with the high school diploma who will soil himself weekly.
Of course, you can point to great counter example from the titans of industry who don't have college degrees. On the other hand, we've had a vice president who didn't have a pulse. However, they're both statistical anomalies and you're far better off hiring someone with a pulse.
For the record, I'm not saying that this is a good system. Rather, that's just the way I've observed it from watching my wife. She's been searching for work for two years. She's had fast food restaurants request her college transcript as part of the hiring process. Even below minimum wage baby-sitting gigs have fallen through because she doesn't have a bachelor's degree. The simple fact is that there's enough desperate people with degrees that there's not to require one.