BF2S Forums DAST Chat

I assumed you are the oldest person here.

how old?

oh that’s young brooo

Heck no.

e: might have happened at one point, but I wasn't up for raising someone else's kid and getting stuck in the legal quicksand. All due respect to stepdads.

lmao japan just before pearl harbour. what, you mean systematically and officially at war for over a decade?

japan invaded manchuria in china in 1931. the second sino-japanese war officially began in 1937.

pearl harbour wasn't some boiling point or new escalation. japan had been on a militaristic footing since, erm, pretty much at least 1904 when they invaded russia.

if you make wild historical comparisons, at least have the basics down.

i tend to find that if an analogy requires a lot of squinting and shimmying to make it click, it's a very bad analogy.

the circumstances and reasons for japan's imperial expansionism and china's current conflicts are totally different.

comparing everything to WW2 is a sort of tedious pop-historical trope.

yes, soldiers tussling on a mountain ridge in a punch-up is just like the lead-up to pearl harbour.

an analogy is meant to enlighten and explain, dilbert. it is meant to be an access or shortcut to knowledge. otherwise, it has no function.

you twisting everything to fit some 'china and japan are bad here is some WW2 info' is very confusing.

please do better.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m … -episode-1

very good 3 part doc.

literature as a discipline was founded ca. 1900. hardly the age of alchemy, dilbert.

the 'liberal arts' went back to the middle ages, and included rhetoric and logic, music and math, as well as the study of classics/scripture.

as for the 'baristas' comment, it's pretty much beneath ridicule. well done for recycling tropes more commonly found in the comments section of right-wing tabloids, posted by septuagenarian ex-contractors in their golfing argyle. none of it accords with any reality. i can tell you that nobody from my cohort ended up working in a coffee shop.

take a look at the employment statistics and earning statistics. i think you'll find less difference between the humanities and your average STEM subject, particularly by the time the graduates are 30+, than you readily imagine. there are outliers, of course, and engineering is probably one of them, like medicine. but your average physics graduate is not any more employable or making great amounts more than your average history graduate; in fact, many of the 'talked up' subjects like computer science are disastrous for employment prospects. and we are surely living in the age of computer science, aren't we? make u think.

australia's funding decisions is completely up to them. you are a rich enough society to afford free university, if you had the political wherewithal. australia has some top-rate institutions for humanities which are respected worldwide -- sydney, melbourne, macquarie, monash, etc. it's a shame if you give them a bitter political pill to swallow.

in general i wouldn't celebrate the privatization of education and the insidious creeping in of market-based logic. it will not end with the humanities. in fact, in the UK it began with modern languages (french, spanish, german, italian, etc.) and classics, the outliers, and has now pretty much got hold of the entire higher-education establishment. think very hard about what you're celebrating. so a government is going to decide what is 'job-relevant' in any given term and rehaul the university sector accordingly? what happens when the 'in demand' graduate sector is totally overwhelmed with many more graduates than it can handle, after they've all been financially induced to take the govt-led incentives? have fun with that.

it sounds like the next 5-10 years is going to be full of macroeconomic uncertainty and huge change -- enough long-term structural change has already been underway with automation, the rise of competing nations, etc -- so i'm sure the universities are going to really embrace their new role of predicting the 'in demand' jobs and turning out narrowly-educated worker bees for the brave new world of tomorrow!

i have no problem with there being institutions aimed at 'job-relevant' education. these are called polytechnics and i think the majority of people should go to them. one of the changes we have seen here in the UK is, after 10 years of austerity and cut-backs, and now this fatal blow to foreign student money from covid, most 'polytechnics' which upgraded to university-status in the Blair years and started offering (joke) degrees in 'philosophy' and 'literature', are now axing those courses first. i am not sad to see them go. they are the equivalent of jay's book reports at naval college.

Last edited by uziq (2020-06-20 07:37:51)

Human thought down to vagary topics should be a huge part of any college education. A programming language doesn't have that sort of permanence.

If STEM focused on just engineering, code, and how to solder a diode to a resistor, sooner or later we'll have a Megaman situation on our hands.

Even a UAE newspaper weighed in:

In recent months, world leaders have mobilised seemingly every technological resource at their disposal to stem the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic. Evidence and scientific opinion have gained newfound respect; decision makers have arguably become better at listening to scientists and following their directives.

But the virus has also exposed social problems that, by their very nature, go beyond science: deep-rooted health and social inequalities, a fractured political response, mental health challenges associated with home confinement. All this points to systemic issues that are broader than the immediate public health emergency. Here, science still has a role to play, but it is a supporting one to the humanities and social sciences.

To judge by news reports, the humanities are 'nice to have' - think of the entertainment value of balcony music or an online book club - but not essential for helping resolve the crisis. But as the impacts of public health measures ripple through societies, languages, and cultures, thinking critically about our reaction to SARS-CoV-2 is as important as new scientific findings about the virus. The humanities can contribute to a deeper understanding of the entrenched mentalities and social dynamics that have informed society's response to this crisis. And by encouraging us to turn a mirror on our own selves, they prompt us to question whether we are the rational individuals that we aspire to be, and whether we are sufficiently equipped, as a society, to solve our own problems.

2020 and dilbert is still upset about the humanities and trying to have a dig every time he can.

it’s pretty sad to be honest with you. didn’t you leave university three decades ago? let it go.

a person who got a free university education in the UK, then took his graduate skills and expertise to another country, complaining about paying for other’s education. priceless.

also don’t call me ‘son’ you eunuch. you’re going to die alone.