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Politics: 2020 Dem POTUS candidate catch all discussion thread

rjtide said:
agree completely. and as many others in this thread have said higher education is not for everyone. why cant we have a more robust technical program in this country which could come with job placement guarantees and some sort of tuition subsidy? perhaps in the form of a pell grant, or something similar, where an individual who decided to use that option to help pay for his or her career training would then work for the government for a year for each year of financial support with a minimal basic salary of $35k per year.....or something to that effect
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I said something similar in another thread.

The primary problem with free college for all is that there are a lot of people out there who have no business going to college. Not a knock on them, just a statement of fact.

Now, if you want to roll trade academies into that, you might have something. Some kind of junior college program that combines trade skills with classes on managing small business would be a godsend.

We need to get these proposals away from pie in the sky fluff to things that will address specific needs (see our nation's crumbling infrastructure for a prime example).
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rgw said:
I don't think free college for all is really necessary but it is the only conception of post-secondary professional training most people born in the 1980s or later have due to the decline of secondary and post-secondary technical education academies. We do need to spend more money on education but in service of overhauling the system to become a two-track model. Nobody should be getting a "standard diploma" in this country anymore. You're either getting a high school diploma w/ technical/professional certification or a college preparatory diploma.

There is a lot of fault in the the federal money cash grab created by subsidized loans and GI Bill that spurred on this college-as-professional-training model and it is bad for people going to college just for a professional career therefore employers too.

So you want to be a software engineer? Great, go to college and spend maybe 24 credit hours in computer science classes. When you're done you'll know how to write your own binary tree and how to convert decimal to hexadecimal in your head now but you can't build a useable piece of production software!

If you want to go be a software engineer there ought to be post-secondary academies that certify you as such that are worth as much if not more than a bachelor in computer science to employers. If you spent two years just focusing on what you were going to do in your career, I reckon it would be almost like hiring someone who has 3-5 years experience who came directly out of college with a CS bachelor degree.
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Can we please include a class for coders/engineers that teaches them to work with end users to make the end product efficient and intuitive? ​Asking for a friend.
 
rjtide said:
dual system probably. let me explain: i think 'medicare for all' is eventually going to happen.....and actually would be helpful as a 'bare bones' health insurance offering which would cover the basics like annual wellness exams or 3-4 periodic doctor visits per year for those who are diabetic, hypertensive, have COPD etc. for those that want something over and above it, i'm sure they'll have the option to purchase a policy via blue cross/blue shield, aetna, united healthcare, kaiser permanente etc. sort of like what we in the game now call dual eligible......those patients have medicare and medicaid. except for the 'medicare for all' those individuals would have very basic medicare and would be free to purchase 'supplemental' commercial health insurance. and, certainly, i would favor this option. for those who dont have the means to purchase a supplemental commercial policy they could be shifted over to the current 'dual eligible' medicare-medicaid pathway with the caveat that strict monitoring be instituted so as to cut down on individuals trying to get on this option via fraudulent/dishonest means.
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That sounds very much like the UK's NHS. I think we're providing, sort of, the basic care plan you suggest now. The problem is it's being provided through the emergency medicine system, the most expensive wasteful method possible...
 
Computer science is basically an applied math degree. User experience/User interface is not really a computer science concern. Engineering schools that have CS but not a true SE program tend to produce graduates woefully ill-prepared to implement human user interfaces. This is why companies like Apple and Google have designers and UI/UX specialists that mock up UI down to the pixel and have the engineer implement it. Smaller companies tend to not be able to afford those specialized and expensive soft-skill types and have CS-background engineers mocking up their UI.

That has been my experience where I've worked and I have reputation for being one of the better frontend guys who actually has full stack credentials. Yet my stuff would not pass muster at a major software concern.
 
TIDE-HSV said:
That sounds very much like the UK's NHS. I think we're providing, sort of, the basic care plan you suggest now. The problem is it's being provided through the emergency medicine system, the most expensive wasteful method possible...
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er visits for routine, NON-EMERGENCY, care are one of my most frustrating things to deal with as a primary care physician. completely unnecessary, too damned expensive. i can't tell you the number of times we have to ask our pts to call the office, wait a few hours the same day or wait until the following morning so we can work 'em in. but unfortunately a lot of them go to the ER.
 
rgw said:
Computer science is basically an applied math degree. User experience/User interface is not really a computer science concern. Engineering schools that have CS but not a true SE program tend to produce graduates woefully ill-prepared to implement human user interfaces. This is why companies like Apple and Google have designers and UI/UX specialists that mock up UI down to the pixel and have the engineer implement it. Smaller companies tend to not be able to afford those specialized and expensive soft-skill types and have CS-background engineers mocking up their UI.

That has been my experience where I've worked and I have reputation for being one of the better frontend guys who actually has full stack credentials. Yet my stuff would not pass muster at a major software concern.
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Thanks. It's just that I see TurboTax (and use it) and dream of a program to use at work that functions in a similarly Intuitive manner. I usually don't count the number of clicks it takes to get to a critical point like a former coworker did but on occasion I do and it's ridiculous. There seems to be zero understanding of what or how I do what I do. I've used four or five systems in my career and this has remained true with each one, with some better than others. With billion$$$ at play it shouldn't be this way.
 
rgw said:
Computer science is basically an applied math degree. User experience/User interface is not really a computer science concern. Engineering schools that have CS but not a true SE program tend to produce graduates woefully ill-prepared to implement human user interfaces. This is why companies like Apple and Google have designers and UI/UX specialists that mock up UI down to the pixel and have the engineer implement it. Smaller companies tend to not be able to afford those specialized and expensive soft-skill types and have CS-background engineers mocking up their UI.

That has been my experience where I've worked and I have reputation for being one of the better frontend guys who actually has full stack credentials. Yet my stuff would not pass muster at a major software concern.
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I almost got into fullstack about 4 years ago, after I got laid-off by Big Pharma. I spent the next 2-3 months learnng Ruby on Rails, and getting ready for a 12 week intensive bootcamp.

But I ended up finding another job in my previous/current career: iSeries implementations.

I always wondered what would have happened if I had stayed in that direction. But since I'm nearing retirement, I figure age discrimination would have been in the picture.
 
The 12 week bootcamp where they teach ruby on rails MVC and javascript is indicative of what I'm saying about how ill-suited the academic academy is at producing a productive employee. Academia is about creating thinkers and while that makes a college grad a good generalist and learner it doesn't necessarily provide skills when skills are needed more than capacity to acquire skills.

When you call for a HVAC guy at your house, you don't want somebody to come in and spend a few days or weeks or months figuring out how central heat and air works. This is effectively what employers face with the typical college graduate. They've got somebody who has the F-250 with all the tools and equipment they need to do the job save the practical applied skills to actually do it.

And I've spent most of my life around academia other than a brief stint in the guard in active duty status but I reckon that was just enough to see the blind spot in the academia-as-professional-development model.
 
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rjtide said:
cost of higher education, IMO, should be borne by the individual getting that education.
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Not when the jobs they are training for don’t pay enough to pay off their loan debt.


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Again, I will reiterate:

In 1971, my eldest brother asked me to come work for him in California. He said I could still go to college out there TUITION FREE (for California residents). Any state college.
Well, actually there were “fees” totaling less than $200 per year.
Tuition at South Alabama was around 800 a year and there were also some fees IIRC.
So if y’all want to “Make America Great Again”, let’s go back to when it was at least better than it is now. But don’t act like college was never tuition-free.


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twofbyc said:
So everybody’s gonna be a doctor?
Who’s gonna teach your children?


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Ok, but that is a choice to enter that profession. You chose to do it knowing what the pay scales are. Now, you expect some relief because you chose a low paying profession? Don't get me wrong, my mom was a teacher. Many of my friends are teachers. The wages are scandalous. But it was their choice.
 
I mean I feel like this is tilting at the windmills instead of the real problems. Costs have exploded and wages have stagnated...that is the story of this country ever since the 1970s. Education has been one of the particularly high cost explosions since 1997 too. 1997 seems to be the moment when most in the mainstream were realizing the bad deal given to the middle class by NAFTA as it destroyed entire communities either by the departure of employers or brow-beaten labor taken increasingly untenable bargains with ownership to keep their jobs. Let us not forget that the dream sold to every American was to let the blue collar jobs go because all your kids will be working in the knowledge economy after they go get degrees. Nobody in the mainstream was checking the patented lies of the NAFTA bargain or the desk-job-knowledge-economy farce back then and it isn't like an 18 year-old has the frame of reference to beat BS propaganda that even full grown adults fall for on the regular.
 
rgw said:
The 12 week bootcamp where they teach ruby on rails MVC and javascript is indicative of what I'm saying about how ill-suited the academic academy is at producing a productive employee. Academia is about creating thinkers and while that makes a college grad a good generalist and learner it doesn't necessarily provide skills when skills are needed more than capacity to acquire skills.

When you call for a HVAC guy at your house, you don't want somebody to come in and spend a few days or weeks or months figuring out how central heat and air works. This is effectively what employers face with the typical college graduate. They've got somebody who has the F-250 with all the tools and equipment they need to do the job save the practical applied skills to actually do it.

And I've spent most of my life around academia other than a brief stint in the guard in active duty status but I reckon that was just enough to see the blind spot in the academia-as-professional-development model.
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The ironic thing is that my undergrad degree is in liberal arts.

When I bailed on law school in my early 20s, I had no real marketable skills. So I looked at going to grad school, but then (early 1980s) I learned that computer careers were taking off.

Ended up working as a computer operator on Burroughs systems at a bank, midnight shift, and taking computer programming courses at a community college. Got my break in state govt., where most people got their start. Never looked back.

Oddly enough, having a college degree helped me get jobs. Because many job listings required a college degree, and I knew plenty of very smart people who were held back from many jobs because they didn't finish college.
 
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