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Crakeon Be a nurse or P.A. instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school

I know you probably don't agree with this, but to many people (including myself), not having access to health care or qualified physicians would be considered a pretty big obstacle to personal liberty as well.

(You can't do anything if you're dead, after all.)

Crakeon Would you trust a doctor in a T-shirt?

I don't care what they wear, so long as I can afford to see one. :(

/American citizen

Crakeon Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks

I'd move in a heartbeat if they'd take me, but it's hard when you can't afford education and most countries want you to have a bachelor's at least. So I got to live without either college or health care for five years instead. :( Now I have nervous system problems, so I'm sure they'd want me even less...

Crakeon Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks

When I was obviously ill and in pain in class the other day (I have some ongoing health issues), I had one of my classmates tell me that Obamacare was going to "destroy the entire country" (exact words) because people like me having health insurance would make doctors become underpaid. I mentioned that my health insurance paid $40,000+ to a certain hospital lately, and he complained that it all went to the hospital, not the doctors.

Then he went on some rant about how all the Canadians have to come down here for health care, and that was why you never hear of Canadians having surgery up there. I mentioned I had a Canadian friend who had a 3 part bowel surgery done recently, with very reasonable waiting times, and that of my several dozen Canadian friends, all but one was satisfied with their system, and he was just like, well, that's anecdotal, the statistics don't bear that out. That's not true at all, but he wouldn't hear of it.

Even before my health problems started, I was pro-single payer. But people like my classmate are everywhere, and seem to think that health care SHOULD be expensive and hard to get. It's inordinately cruel.

I've lived here all my life, but I'm actually moving out of state next month partially because my state's refusing to accept federal funds to cover my demographic next year, and I can't live without the medication I'm on. (Plus going to college out of state is cheaper than going to college in state (!). And they wonder why they have such a brain drain problem...)

Crakeon What I Learned In College

Yes, my school had AP courses as well, but only two of them. :( I think it's because my school was rural and poor. I've always been jealous of people who got to go to schools where they could take seven or eight AP courses and get a massive headstart on college.

Crakeon What I Learned In College

A lot of colleges won't allow you to CLEP out of things anymore, sadly. :( There's too much money to be made off of you.

Crakeon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

This makes you, among other things, a feminist.

1. You do not get to decide for me who and what I am or what I identify as. What the hell makes you think that you have the right and the might to tell me who I'm supposed to be?

You can say that--according to your definition of it--Christianity is about being kind to others. Ok. Whatever. That doesn't make me a Christian. And you definitely don't get the right to call me one. (I'm an atheist.)

2. It's funny you mention India. Feminists lobbied heavily (and successfully) for only one biological sex to be legally able to be booked for rape. Spoilers: it wasn't women.

I'll be the judge of that.

Wow, ego. Do you also tell trans people to go kill themselves?

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

As a STEM student, I ask these questions, have been trained to ask them, and like to consider myself quite creative. So many people forget that the philosophers studied by liberal arts students were often mathematicians and men of science, as well. STEM graduates aren't the people getting only half of an education, here. In fact, if historical trends continue, humanities students 500 years from now will be studying the stuff they write.

Crakeon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

"Also, if you're not a feminist by 2013, what are you?"

I'm an egalitarian, because I believe in equal rights for all people, not just one biological sex.

Unless you're a cis female, feminism is very hostile to you. Since I am GLBT, I find egalitarianism much more appealing for this reason as well.

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

Yes, clearly critical thinking and the scientific method have nothing in common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking#Skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Elements_of_...

Obviously, no scientist or engineer has ever stopped to ask themselves "why does it..." or "what if it doesn't actually do..." or "maybe it's not x, but y instead?"

It'd be wise to remember that the sciences were once called "natural philosophy."

Liberal arts courses on the other hand are mostly memorization and regurgitation of the ideology currently favored by the academia's current regime. Before they moved to "~ studies" majors, liberal arts majors used to study the works written and drawn by scientists and mathematicians and engineers. It's easy to see why the humanities would prefer "critical thinking" to be redefined as something fuzzy enough to require no original thought or even an attempt at reaching a logical conclusion.

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

As a dependent student, I couldn't get anyone to loan me $60,000. :( As a freshman at 18, they'd only offer me something like $4500 in student loans, and I ended up not being able to go since I had no access to enough money to cover a $20,000/year in state public school. As an independent student, the most I can get is something like 13K in federal loans (and maybe a 5K pell grant). I can't get anyone to give me a private loan since I have no collateral, even though I have good credit.

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

I like how your brand of "individualism" relies on your parents paying for most of it.

I don't know if you've noticed, but your school costs $60,000/year now.

http://www.syr.edu/financialaid/costofattendance/

For comparison purposes, a minimum wage worker employed full-time (forty hours per week for 52 weeks), would earn $15,080 annually. Are you seriously suggesting that someone work for four years in between each year of their college education?

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

There's nothing wrong with taking english classes as part of a STEM degree. I think it's VERY rare not to.

I'm also not sure why you think critical thinking skills are something that math and science don't require. If you don't have critical thinking skills, you'll have a hard time engineering anything that works or mathing out something correctly. What makes this biased assumption especially weird is the fact that you can actually check whether someone critical thought something out or not to a correct conclusion in the science and math fields. If anything, it's the humanities that need to prove they've anything to contribute to their students' critical thinking skills, because the job market seems to be finding them lacking lately.

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

Pointing out that colleges now offer programs where you learn absolutely nothing at all, in a frantic bid to rake in more ridiculous tuition dollars, isn't bigotry. It's actually a pretty solid observation.

There are a lot of four year programs that teach nothing more than bland repetition of "white cis straight male bad, trans queer POC woman good" these days. And I say that as someone in several of the latter groups!

Crakeon A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

Since it has such a reputation for great STEM programs, I looked into Berkeley when I was trying to find colleges to transfer to after I got my associate's. The cost for an OOS student is something like $50,000/year now, without any hope of institutional grants or scholarships to lessen the cost (they make it pretty clear they're not available for OOS students). I don't have access to even half that amount per year in loans!

Since California clearly didn't want me, I'm going to NY instead now, since they are very friendly to OOS students. (At my public college, tuition is basically free for me after the first year, and even the first year where I have to pay OOS tuition it's roughly the same cost as in state tuition in the crappy flyover state I'm in now.) California should really think about revising their financial aid and tuition policies if they want to be known for being anything other than someplace only the rich can afford. I guess the days of colleges being known and valued for the academic merits of their students are over.

Crakeon Only the Lonely

For some people, depression is terminal.

The world would be a much better place if people understood this. (Incidences of terminal depression might decrease, too.)

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

I read more books before I started college than most of my liberal arts college graduated friends have read in their entire lives.

Some of them still haven't read Orwell.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

Haha, this. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

The problem is that if they didn't fill it with self-aggrandizing gibberish, people would easily understand what they mean, and then go: wait, didn't so-and-so write about this already?

Science still has legitimate frontiers. English, in many instances, does not.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

I have met a LOT of people who thought that their degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like was going to get them a $60,000/year job fresh out of school. Heck, even some of the artists I know expected to be able to pay off their $80,000 in student loans with their art degree.

Now they sit around their parents house whenever they're not at their part time retail job and complain about how "the economy" screwed them over.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

"Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants."

This exactly. This sort of lie about college--that it doesn't matter what the cost is--is perpetuated by meaningless and empty platitudes. Unlike many others of the kind, however, it has the potential to permanently destroy a young person's life. High school guidance counselors whose parents paid for their education still continue to advise kids without any parental support that they should spend as much money as possible to get the "best" education they can afford. It's cruelty of the highest form: apathy towards those from lesser circumstances than you.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

The classes are useless fluff. The topics themselves are interesting, but at least for me, academic rigor is so lacking that I'm bored to tears. It's been suggested to me by someone who knows me that it's not easy for everyone like it is for me, and that's it's just because I'm smart that I'm bored. While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

Interestingly, a lot of the people you'd revere and read and study in an English class are people who had no formal English training whatsoever, or maybe high school level at best. It's only in recent years that colleges have managed to spread the myth that you can't have really learned something if you didn't pay $100,000 to do it. To me, it's just silly.

Crakeon The Decline and Fall of the English Major

"100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar"

They are--which is, luckily, one of many reasons I placed out of them.

"A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between..."

Or they could write a book and you could read it for free at the library, or online. Why limit knowledge to people who have $50,000/year to blow on college? Not everyone is rich and upper class. Can only people from well off families become "properly" educated? I've met a lot of educated people from all walks of life, and all levels of education. To me, at least, intelligence and a drive to learn are far greater indicators of someone's likely degree of sophistication than how much their parents spent on their four year vacation to some over priced campus.

Well taught classes are a nice idea, but most people will never have access to a good teacher, much less a good classroom environment. I've had good teachers but a ruined class experiment by sufficiently unprepared or even just unintelligent classmates.

There's nothing magical about college. You can do just as well with finding informed and (likely more enthused, even) peers at a open access book club, if not the often maligned internet forums dedicated to literature.

I've seen too many english and other writing intensive liberal arts majors graduate without knowing the difference between your and you're, its and it's, to really have any respect for the degree. Oddly, my scientist friends have few problems with attention to detail and understanding basic syntax, despite not spending four years on mastering the subject. I suspect this is because they already mastered it in high school, if not earlier, much like myself.

If you have to go to college to learn, you're doing it wrong. (And these days--also very expensively.)

Crakeon We were wrong

Well, the nice thing about science and nature is that they keep working whether or not you think they're applicable.

Crakeon We were wrong

So, the male computer scientist now feels qualified to tell little girls what is and isn't ok for them to like. I thought you didn't like men telling women what to do?

Crakeon We were wrong

There's a term for people like you, but it's not very flattering.

Crakeon We were wrong

It's not a way to critically evaluate biases, the way you and others use it today. It's a way to insult people for the sexuality, sex, or ethnicity they were born to. Do you really want to behave in the same way the people on Fox News do?

Crakeon We were wrong

Without getting into specifics, as what the SRWs generally consider to be an "underprivileged" person or whatever...I have been feeling the same way as your wife lately QUITE a lot.

It makes it so that actual victims of sexual assault/rape/sexism/homophobia/etc can't talk about their experiences, because there's no way to distinguish between say people with ptsd!triggers and the people with omg-someone-disagreed-with-me!triggers. I hate it so much.

Crakeon We were wrong

I don't really see any of this...although I do see a lot of examples of female privilege going on in the comments.

The type of women in tech we need are normal people who don't social justice blog for 14 hours a day on their tumblr about how oppressed they are. Oddly, the women who end up in tech are more likely to be the women who did their STEM classes/homework for 14 hours a day, so in the end it usually works out.