America's Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/reverence-bachelors-degree/408346/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I always wonder if this is a symptom of a bigger problem that we created.

As soon as having a bachelors degree became almost an expectation, not having one became a problem to be avoided. We have people borrowing money to go to school because they think they have to...not because they necessarily even need to. Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO.

I always wonder what the effect would be of transitioning public high schools to a structure closer to Cornell's one-course-at-a-time approach ([http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a- time/](http://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/)). It seems like giving kids the opportunity to deep dive into one thing (actually, learn it instead of memorize stuff) would be more effective. At the same time, scheduling of classes that taught real skills would a lot simpler.

Just imagine a gardening and cooking class where you could teach:

1\. Plant biology and genetics of seeds 2\. Chemistry and Soil Biology, Composting, Decomposition. 3\. Use geometry to design raised bed frames 4\. Learn some vocational carpentry to build raised bed frames 5\. Plant in different environments, track growth, production, measures in a scientific experiment 6\. Learn to cook some different recipes with what you've grown as well as how different temperatures affect what you're cooking (caramelization of onions, etc)

In a single intensive class you can bring together so many subjects and life skills that seem otherwise unrelated on their own.

Heaven forbid you take it to the next level and get into programming a farm bot.

<comment><USER3> >Many of the best programmers I know never even went to college...they are just interested in the subject and taught themselves.

The problem with that is, college teaches a lot of things that are not directly related to core technical competencies. It's very easy to learn programming on your own these days, sure. But it's a lot harder to learn public speaking, finance, management principles, marketing, college-level reading and writing, technical writing, time-management, political science, biology, physics, and all of the other stuff that you're taught in college.

Going to a university or a college, I think, is still a very important thing. It's not worth the money right now, which I hope will change, but I know a lot of smart people who didn't got to college, people working in many different diverse fields, and it's almost always possible to tell who did and who did not go to a university. Do you want to be laser-focused on just being a programmer, or do you want to have marketable skills outside of a pure technology focus?

To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn how the world works and how to make it work for you. For 99% of the corporate/enterprise jobs people will end up working, being the best programmer is the world is far less important than every other skill you learn in college. If we do away with traditional universities, we need to find a way to replicate that other type of learning.

<comment><USER4> > To put it simply: it's easy to learn how how a computer works and how to > program it to work for you. It's much harder and takes much longer to learn > how the world works and how to make it work for you.

I would argue strongly that university DOES NOT teach anyone how the world works. Wet behind the ear college grads are worthless in most "blue collar" professions, for example. If you get a degree in English Lit, what do you know about the "real world" that a peer who has worked construction for 5 years doesn't know???? How much more knowledge about the "real world" does a journalism major know than a military veteran?

The first two years of "learning" at American universities are generally filled with bullshit pre-requisites that serve almost no purpose in the "real world!" The last two years are more specialized but hardly teach shit about the "real world."

<comment><USER3> Wet behind the ear grads are useless in white collar organizations too. College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider world. Being a military vet is an admirable use of your time, but the picture it paints of the world is very different than that of a university education. Likewise, I wouldn't want to debate a construction worker about the proper building code for a multi-occupancy building, but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built like it is.

You make good points about getting a broader picture, but the notion that the military or blue collar jobs are the "real world" is false, IMO. That's one aspect of the real world, it is far from a broader picture of it. University is supposed to present the other side, a far deeper picture of the other side.

And for the record... what I'm talking about is the pre-reqs. I'm specifically saying those pre-reqs are not bullshit and are the most important part of a university education. I just want to be clear on that. Job training is better left to an internship/apprenticeship.

Finance and marketing and math and science and English classes are the real benefits of college that you can't replicate on a construction site.

<comment><USER4> > College doesn't teach you about your job, it teaches you about the wider > world.

Playing devils advocate for a second...

How does college teach you about the wider world? By taking a bunch of tests on subjects being taught by TA's (if you are lucky) or professors that sometimes struggle with English?

Or

Cramming for tests and writing papers you don't want to write is learning about the wider world?

Find me the Engineering major that would rather take 2 semesters of humanities|Literature|etc or graduate sooner!

Find me the doctor students that wish undergrad was a like 2 years shorter! Fuck it, make it 4 years shorter and call it a day! Strait to med school if you have the aptitude.

> but I'm willing to bet one semester of finance would far outweigh the > knowledge that construction worker has about why the building is being built > like it is.

One semester of finance is craptacular, you wouldn't learn much. Better if you had said Accounting... but most students don't pick accounting. You would do far better listening to Dave Ramsey for a month, IMO. Seriously, where in the bulk of College majors outside of Finance can I find the requirement to take a finance/accounting/econ classes? I'll answer, NO WHERE!

The fact that you bring up finance is interesting because fully half of the Colleges today would go bankrupt if their students knew ANYTHING about money! Why would they go into such crazy debt for what they get in return? The subset of college majors that actually have promising career futures ahead of them are miniscule in comparison the "majors" offered at universities.

<comment><USER5> Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.

This isn't to say you are yourself less intelligent but perhaps you lack perspective?

<comment><USER6> > Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as > a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't > actually gone to college.

I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.

<comment><USER7> They also introduce you to a lot of topics you may not have studied on your own, and give you the opportunity and resources to take them as far as you'd like. I spent a _lot_ of years in universities and I never met a teacher who wasn't willing to spend at least some time with an interested student, or point them in the direction of materials for additional self-study.

Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.

Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand American's new-found fascination with vocational training. Why is it they expect education to now provide people with narrowly focused job training over the more traditional broad education?

Yes, college is expensive and I absolutely think something should be done to resolve that. And certainly not everyone needs a BS to be productive citizens. But societies "reverence" for the Bachelors degree was earned. Historically, these programs equip people with the background and education necessary to advance their careers.

Like many people here, I have a BSCS, and if computing became obsolete tomorrow, I feel entirely confident in my ability to transition into many other technical careers. My feeling is that a BS should be designed to open up entire classes of career options for people. But I also feel that people who opt for technical training in lieu of general education shouldn't be upset when they find out they can't transition as easily into other fields that require skills they may have never learned.

I honestly think this article serves as a cautionary tail to reinforce Bachelors "reverence" more than it does to dispel it. A person who spent years learning the depths of Italian cooking shouldn't be surprised when people don't want him managing their businesses. Knowing how to field for truffles and prepare them in a traditional way is nice, but it's not analogous to knowing how to run the logistics of a business.

<comment><USER9> Vocational training is a wash if industries change to meet market demands, which they always are. Your IBM mainframe certificate doesn't mean shit in 2017, neither does the 6 week course you took on Microsoft Access if the job doesn't call for it.

Same thing applies to bootcamps. In 2-4 years, the frameworks and concepts you've learned to implement web apps will have changed. In ten, it will be an entirely different game.

<comment><USER10> This is the biggest issue that rural America is facing right now. There's an incredibly large voting bloc of people that had vocational training in mining, manufacturing, etc, etc. Their training is now worthless and nobody has a great plan to get them either a real education or more useful vocational training.

<comment><USER4> Real education? Like English literature, or Art History, or Communications, or Dance, or Latin?

By real education do you mean STEM, medical or Law? Or something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I only got about a third away through this but the beginning doesn't make me want to believe/empathize with the author at all.

"my nephew was set to graduate from Maryland's Towson University with a degree in political science. After six long years,"

Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.

"Holding up their son's transcript, his adviser pointed out that he had taken the same economics course twice—one year apart. My nephew hadn't noticed."

Really? I've met plenty of people in college who would do things like this. They all had no motivation or interest to graduate. They were there just because their parents made them and could afford it. I think this defends the authors point. However, using two people who clearly have no idea how to pave their own path to a successful life should be used as an example to argue against universities and trade schools.

Maybe the author is trying to say its the high schools fault for not teaching them. I disagree. Everytime I've seen behavior like this it's because the student just doesn't care or their parents have plenty of money and know they'll be fine no matter how bad they do.

<comment><USER12> > Six years for a degree in political science. You have to actively try to > take that long to graduate. Maybe he changed majors.

I disagree. Life circumstances can keep you from graduating as well.

I spent nearly 7 on a CS degree. There were a few hold ups. The biggest being until VERY recently, I was unmedicated with Bipolar Disorder. I would sign up for classes while manic, and barely scrape by or fail when depressed. It has taken me 5 years to get a proper diagnosis and find the right meds. Meanwhile, I still tried to do my best in the classes I was attending.

Another reason it took me so long, I attended community college and got a 2 year degree in programming I was told would directly translate to my BS in CS. This was not the case. I found that my university only took certain credits off of my AS, effectively putting me at about a year of coursework when I was under the impression I had 2.

None of this was me _trying_ to take that long to graduate. I do take some of the responsibility for it, I could have done better to get out of bed and go to class some days. I could have done more research about PBSC's transfer degree. I could have fought harder for the right diagnosis when I was 18 and everything started happening.

<comment><USER11> Those are fair reasons. I assumed if anything like that came up the author would have included them. Your experience with community college was probably frustrating. It can be a good choice to help keep debt low but there's always that "transfer factor"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The stock photo for this article is an interesting choice. The graduate paid zero dollars for his quarter-million dollar education, and was guaranteed a job at graduation. In return, he owes them a full commitment for five years of work, and partial commitment for another three.

The organization that promised to hire him ran the admissions process, set the curriculum, and after training screened him into a particular path for at least the first stage of his new career. He was surrounded for four years by people who will be his professional peers for the entirety of his career. He knows that the likelihood of him reaching the pinnacle of his profession is increased substantially through this network.

Obviously the military is well set up to do this. I am surprised though that other industries haven't attempted to build schools to train their respective employee bases.

<comment><USER14> In part, it's probably because other industries have a limited ability to toss you in the brig if you decide to give your notice after a year.

There are trucking schools, mechanics school, cooking schools (as in the article). But the trades in general tend to be more of an apprentice system.

Finally, some specialized companies do have extended in-house training. But this sort of thing is definitely less common, in part because people skip around jobs a lot more so there's going to be a lot of free-riding on a company offering expensive training.

<comment><USER15> You don't get automatically sent to the brig for not fulfilling your commitment, IIRC, you have to pay the retail cost of your military academy education, and if you don't do that, then you are in trouble

<comment><USER16> There isn't any way to skip out that does not violate the laws of the UCMJ. Getting dishonorably discharged is the result of that process, but it's not like you can just cancel your contract, write a check, and walk out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also, there's this strange belief that getting more people through degree programs will increase the number of people with higher paying jobs. The number of high paying doesn't change simply because we're increasing the number of degrees per capita - it merely devalues the degree - just as printing money devaules currency leading to inflation. Companies don't just decide to hire more candidates just because there's more of job candidates available. Utlimately, they hire to create value based on market demand for their products.

<comment><USER18> > The number of high paying doesn't change simply because we're increasing the > number of degrees per capita

It should. Not necessarily in proportion to the number of degrees, but having more degrees out there should increase the number of high paying jobs. Superior education should make people both more intellectually malleable and capable of creating value in unforeseen ways.

If it doesn't, it would be evidence there's something very wrong with the degrees.

<comment><USER17> What your saying may have been true hundreds of years ago when the number intellectual jobs was much smaller and far less diverse.

But, today, professions are far more specialized than people realize. How much of what you learned in your degree do you still remember? 1%? of that 1%, how much do you actually use on a daily basis? and of that subset, how much of that knowledge is things you couldn't have easily learned on the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't mean to sound insensitive but why is it the institution's fault that it took someone without passion or drive 6 years to graduate and why wouldn't the same problems which persisted during college not continue to persist after graduating?

I know plenty of folks that went to Towson and the only thing that they could do after freshman year was funnel a beer. I know a few that went on to pursue respected middle class careers in tech, legal, education, and health care.

When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?

<comment><USER20> >When will our youth finally start taking responsibility for their own actions or lack there of?

Ha, people have been complaining about the youth for 2,000 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21>
        > After three years in a college-based apprenticeship
        > program and three years of solid work experience, he
        > was still the equivalent of a brand-new high-school
        > graduate in the eyes of higher education.

So much this. I've considered getting a degree countless times over the years, but have been prevented by the fact that my 2 decades+ professional experience in the field counts for nothing in terms of meeting educational requirements. And the more experience I get, the more painful that fact gets...

<comment><USER22> > 2 decades+ professional experience in the field counts for nothing in terms > of meeting educational requirements

Yeah, professors have experience with people like this. They're the students that stop lecture to ask a 5 minute long "question" that somehow hits the high points of their 20+ years of experience and doesn't really go anywhere, that roughly ends up at the same kind of "when will we ever use this in the real world" question that you'd expect from a 19 year old kid, when you're lecturing on rings and fields.

<comment><USER23> FYI there are experienced students who do not do this. Many, in fact. I think I can recall only a few occasions where re-educating professionals did what you're describing.

Most of my gripes with interruptions came from 18-20 year olds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the answer lies somewhere in having 2-3 years of mandatory civil service for high-school grads which rotates them in various industries: Construction, IT, Mechanical works, Tool & Die, Hospital volunteering, Office clerks, building maintenance, etc.

In addition, high school should have 'guest' speaker from different lines of work come in (engineer, scientist, mechanic, doctor, HVAC, florist, baker, etc.) and tell grade 12 students about their job responsibilities, how much money they make and advise students frankly about the job.

Only then the kids can decide with full knowledge what they would like to pursue and their expectations would be realistic.

<comment><USER25> Lets harm all the kids who actually know what they want to do, have construction, IT and hospital work done by uninterested stoners (because what else are young people going to do when they have no options)?

<comment><USER26> Would it really be a much higher percentage than the work done by uninterested stoners now? Lots of people already have jobs they aren't particularly excited about and just fell into. At least this way they'd get a chance to try out a few different things first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the problem is the idea that you spend the beginning of your life learning things, and the rest of it doing things.

The current system does not leave much in the way of learning things (or at least getting credit) later on. This is a problem, because your average 18-22 year old knows nothing about what work they'll find satisfying, or what work will be in demand.

You also don't know what you'll actually be learning. For instance I did management classes at a well know university. Did I expect to learn something about how to manage? Yes. Did I learn anything about how to manage? No, that's not what management class is about. I suspect many people had similar experiences with their classes. To be fair engineering classes are not about how to be an engineer either, so I don't think it's a science/humanities thing.

What you do find out in uni is that pretty much anything academic can be learned if you dedicate some time to it. Read a few books about economics, and you'll know the major ideas of that field, presented in a somewhat coherent fashion.

So what we need is a way for someone who's found an interest to be able to pursue that. You work a bit as a coder, and you realise you should get a CS degree. So you find a course, read, practice, do an exam.

What's important is people who've discovered this need tend to be in a different life situation from ordinary college attendees. They might have work already, family, and so on. So incentives need to align to allow people to learn things without tearing up their whole life.

<comment><USER28> It's one thing to read a book and be able to follow along the central themes and ideas. It's a whole other can of worms to be able to write that book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> TL;DR version of this article:

1\. Author complains her lazy nephew's approach to school (and resulting Political Science degree) did not result in a good paying job.

2\. Author complains her other nephew's lack of a degree and previous chef jobs did not result in a good paying job.

3\. Author advocates for community colleges, blames higher-ed for being "too rigid" for her nephews, and says how much better Germany and other European countries are at training.

<comment><USER30> I don't think you're quite in the spirit of the article there. How about:

1\. Author has a nephew who was forced into a degree program he didn't want because he mostly hates school, but blue collar jobs don't pay enough anymore. Neither do white collar jobs for people who don't enjoy classroom learning.

2\. Author has another nephew who also didn't like classroom learning, got a degree in chef's school and made alot of progress in the field. However, chef's don't get paid well either.

3\. Author thinks maybe the problem is there isn't a path for people who don't like classroom learning and maybe Germany is better at this IDK?

Not to sound like some kind of socialist, but maybe the problem is many jobs don't pay very well anymore?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think there's a case to be made that the decision in Griggs vs Duke Power Co. (employers may not administer IQ tests) is the reason we're in this mess. IQ is really important and correlates with lots of outcomes. Employers therefore want to know it. They're not allowed to ask, but admission to/success at an exclusive college correlates well with IQ, so they ask about that instead. Means everyone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their life to advertise something that could be measured in an hour.

</comment><comment><USER32> The problem boils down to a twofold issue to me: 1) Schooling is getting in the way of education and 2) Schooling is misinterpreted by lazy employers as education.

In this day and age, what we need is some sort of more granular description of education and experience. I don't have a finance degree, but I've gone through the Yale econ lectures online.... how do I reflect that knowledge gained when all an employer wants is where did you graduate?

I see granular descriptions like this all the time on certain forums, down to people listing their audacity courses, tech certs, etc.

We need to find ways to revive intellectual curiosity and a yearning for knowledge in the masses, not stifle it by arbitrarily tying it down with businesses wants, especially in an information age where much of it is freely available online.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think much of the "useful" college experience can be shrunk to two years for most majors. May be not more specialized fields like aerospace, physics, or the like but even those can do just fine with a 3 yr undergraduate degree. But CS, finance, any arts/commerce majors, liberal arts should totally not need four long years.

<comment><USER34> Which is, almost ironically, going back to vocational training instead of standard Liberal Arts degrees. I triple-majored in Math, Physics, and Computer Science because I had to be there for the whole degree, so why not. But all I really needed, and all I use to this day, is the Computer Science portion.

We could probably eventually overhaul the system to that end, but I don't envy those trapped in the transition period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Employers don't really have that much else to go on. In-house tests are a legal minefield, and there are places you can graduate from high school without learning how to read.

<comment><USER36> I think this goes to the heart of the matter.

> In-house tests are a legal minefield

Does it need to be though? What about 3rd parties providing tests and knowledge verification? There's been some developments on that front.

<comment><USER35> It doesn't really matter who administers the tests. The problem is you're opening yourself up to disparate impact lawsuits.

It's easier and safer for employers to use college rankings as a proxy for intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yeah, America already has. The new reverence is for a Master's degree.

<comment><USER38> Masters is the new Bachelors.

<comment><USER39> So, in 10 years, the PhD is gonna be all the rage?

<comment><USER40> Lots of people just get a Ph.D to have a higher starting salary and avoid a possible glass ceiling later on. I'm planning on doing exactly that. It depends on the job market in your location though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> No it doesn't. It needs to up standards for a secondary degree and double down on its investment in post secondary education. We need more literate, culturally aware, mathematically and analytically capable, scientifically knowledgeable humans, not less.

The fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is not proof that we need better alternatives to college. We need better alternatives to intellectual disengagement.

<comment><USER42> The high achievers are going to be well read anyways; if you stuffed everyone accepted into Stanford into a room for four years instead of teaching them, you'd wind up with a bunch of intellectually engaged and well-read individuals.

It's the marginally-engaged folks that barely get into college that post- secondary education makes a difference for. And, uhh, they kind of treat it like a four-year party with less parental involvement.

IMO, the fact that Americans are some of the least intellectually engaged people on the planet is a cultural problem that is basically fixed by the time children have gone through primary education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it really a "reverence" though? When practically everyone and their dog has one, it's the new minimum.

<comment><USER43> I wouldn't say 'practically everyone' has one. Only ~30% of the US population holds one: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds- bac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors- degrees-at-record-level.html). Just most of us on HN run in social circles were that number is 85%+, that we feel like everyone has one.

<comment><USER34> Isn't 30% is more than enough? If 3-4 people apply for a single position and 1-2 of them have a degree, then it's a fairly reasonable decision to ignore the other two.

And the ratios I've seen are far more than 3-4 applications per position.

<comment><USER44> > If 3-4 people apply for a single position and 1-2 of them have a degree, > then it's a fairly reasonable decision to ignore the other two.

Years ago I found a copy of "The Screwing of the Average Man" at a thrift shop. According to Mr. Hapgood, getting preferential consideration for jobs was always the reason wealthy families sent their children to college.

After WWII the proletariat class got congress to subsidize college so they too could access jobs that had traditionally been reserved for the upper class. Thus began the college price spiral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> You could read this as "America needs to get over the infatuation of entering the workforce or college immediately."

Which, I should add, I'm not against.

</comment><comment><USER46> Somewhere in the solution should be encouraging gap year(s) after high school.

<comment><USER47> I took two years off between high school and college (I ended up with 2 Bachelors and a Masters), but I don't think that has helped me in the least in terms of employability.

<comment><USER3> I'm not convinced a gap year is meant to increase your employability, rather to help reset your mind after high school. It helps you find out who you are, what you like and dislike, and helps determine if you really want to get that communications degree or if maybe a finance degree is more what you're looking for.

<comment><USER47> That's funny. Even after two years off, 2 bachelors, and a masters I still didn't know what I wanted to do! I have a bachelors in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, a second bachelors in Linguistics, and a masters in Educational Psychology. But I work as a web developer for the sales team of a large company. I was actually about four years out of college before I started getting a feel for what I might want to do with my life (i.e., about 12 years post high school). I'm very happy with what I do now so it all worked out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> There should be a room for disruption. Start working right after school, continue education at own paste at MOOC. Get company to allocate 10% time to studying.

Technology (streaming) enables everyone to have MIT grade education for free (theory part). Exams could be paid. The only labour intensive part of education is the practical part. This could be paid or community based co- study.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think America needs to get over its reverence for the "free market". Healthcare and education are critical needs. Without education we wouldn't have modern medicine, food supply, clothing, housing, etc - you name it. Without any and all healthcare we'd all be dying somewhere between 20-40, if we're lucky. Yet, both "industries" experience ever increasing costs. Consumers in both offset actualized needs with financial tools. Insurance only works if a large majority of people do not use it. That's if you can obtain and afford insurance. Education only pays off if your tuition expenses match up with your employment options. That's assuming you manage to find work out of college.

If you can't afford insurance then you're stuck paying out of pocket. By the "one price" rule, doctors have to charge an individual the same they charge insurance. An individual cannot strike a deal as easily with a provider as an insurance company can - so they wind up paying 10-100x what an insurance company would. Notice, that's not saying anything about what an insured person would pay.

There's no corollary to that for education. People finance their education (largely) with loans and up front. They're striking a deal based on what they expect their future income to be. That future income, by the way, probably won't be realized for the majority. For those it is, it may not be realized until 5 or even 10 years down the road. By that point, the loan payments have already started and may have already been scheduled to be paid back completely.

America needs a new economic model. It needs an economic model that allocates nails and food differently than it allocates healthcare and education. Right now, it allocates immediate needs the same way it allocates 'possible demands'. Financial companies estimate 'possible demands' on imperfect data across imperfect realities. Because those two things are not the same, they need to be handled differently.

</comment><comment><USER49> And here I was, thinking Germans and Austrians were kind of in love with their academic degrees, but this sounds even worse.

But maybe the vocational training is better institutionalized here, so people can actually earn enough as a craftsman or in the service industry.

</comment><comment><USER50> Trump's victory showed the power of the uneducated. The Bachelors degree is not only a technical degree but especially in America, with a general education requirement, is also important to teach us citizenship, critical thinking, and educate us beyond our own narrow field. Knowledge of basic history (at least on a survey level) of our country and key places around the world, a basic understanding of our political system, and general knowledge is important to be better people and better citizens. Of course extremely smart people might be able to get this on their own but most of us aren't Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think the title "Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree," is inadvertently misleading.

There certainly isn't profound respect or _reverence_ for a bachelor's degree itself, from employers or anyone else. However, there is an expectation of social and to some degree, field specific exposure.

Perhaps the point of the article is there are far more useful ways to gauge someone's career/field specific potential than a bachelor's degree. And if there are more practical assessment tools than not having a bachelor's degree shouldn't be a barrier to entry.

</comment><comment><USER52> Things I learned in college:

\- How to borrow tens of thousands of dollars without any concrete evidence that I would be able to pay it back

\- How to google (arguably a good skill, but not worth a five-figure price tag)

\- How to write small

\- How to misuse big words

\- How to misuse buzzwords

\- How to use Dreamweaver (I later learned that the correct way to use Dreamweaver is to uninstall it from your computer)

\- How websites were made in 2004 (this was in 2011-2013)

Things I was forced to learn after college to be even remotely relevant:

\- Every single aspect of my job as a lead software engineer

</comment><comment><USER53> I think it is telling that the second nephew was a cook. When I think of learning a trade I imagine fitters and turners. And here in Australia we do need more of those skills -- but the chances are that service sector jobs will be more abundant. And some -- like cooking can take the most successful ones a long way.

That said, I would like to see aprentices rather than interns at my big software company.

</comment><comment><USER42> The answer is simple. Make it generally illegal to ask or provide information about your college education as part of interviewing for a job. If there's bona-fide occupational requirement for specialized training, allow certification by exam - the Fundamentals of Engineering exam or what actuaries go through are good examples of this.

</comment><comment><USER54> The Bachelors degree of yesterday is almost the equivalent to the Masters of today in a lot of fields. It's sadly used as a gatekeeper, erroneously in so many cases. Alas eventually, I predict, a new type of degree will emerge and it will be a combination of the Bachelors and Masters, because the two will be sufficiently diluted.

</comment><comment><USER55> The government needs to change education to a protected status, like gender, religion, etc. Make it illegal for employers to ask for candidates educational background and degrees. The core issue here is that companies use degrees and education status as a filter and proxy for perseverance, intelligence, and skill, which forces everyone who wants to be employed to obtain a degree. As more job seekers obtain degrees, companies shift minimum educational requirements higher. Higher requirements cause job seekers to obtain yet more education, and neither companies nor job seekers can break this cycle. This is a market breakdown and vicious cycle which needs intervention by the government. (I fully expect libertarians to complain that the government created this mess as a result of too much easy credit in the form of student loans, and they may be right, but undoing that now is a lost cause and moot point) If the government protects educational status, then degrees can't be used to signal educational virtue, and they will cease to be obtained by everyone. University education will revert back to those who desire education for its merits and not its status.

<comment><USER56> > needs intervention by the government

It already _has_ intervention by the government.. this is called 'student loans' which prop up US treasury bonds..

That the situation of requiring expensive degrees further implies increased dependency on higher paying corporate jobs, in turn further centralizes economic power, increases social pressure to purchase luxury consumer goods, and also strengthens washington lobbying dollars doesn't hurt either..

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Bullshit. We need to make it mandatory and free for everyone just like a high school diploma. Alternative option would be mandatory trade skill training. The USA is currently fucked for the foreseeable future due to not caring about education. Let's make it a priority instead of a gigantic military.

</comment><comment><USER58> Well it does serve as a nice class filter. Lower class people tend to not be able to afford college...

</comment><comment><USER59> Whats that phrase? "Someone has to be a grave digger?

</comment><comment><USER60> Nah. It's a good system. I fear any alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER61> > has been a collection of dismal white-collar jobs—in a call center chasing > down delinquent customers for Baltimore Gas and Electric

That's not a white collar job.

<comment><USER62> Why not? It's administrative work in an office environment. That seems white collar to me. What do you think it is instead? It's not service work (pink collar). It's not manual labour (blue collar).</comment></comment>


6 Tips for Pitching your Project to a Developer - <AUTHOR> http://matchist.com/blog/6-tips-for-pitching-your-project-to-a-developer/

<comment><USER2> Just forwarded this to a few of my business minded friends currently searching for devs.

Don't forget to demonstrate that you have made progress as Devs want to work on projects that are going places, also show excitement!

I keep meeting people at events who are only focused on their needs and have made no progress because they havnt got a dev yet when they could be doing so many other pieces.</comment>


The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails - <AUTHOR> http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/11/the_real_problem_with_the_climate_science_emails.php <comment><USER2>
        ... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide
        indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is
        more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth,
        than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space
        as heat.

As much as I hate to beat a dead horse, I find myself compelled to spell out, for those that may share her confusion, that there is no "indication" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We just know, for sure, that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been in debate, by anybody. Monkeys know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The debate is, and always has been, whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans, which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth (counting water-vapor) is actually significant enough to be the cause of measurable extra warming, above and beyond the warming that would occur anyway, here in the waning years of the latest ice-age. It's never been about whether CO2 was a greenhouse gas or not.

<comment><USER3> > whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans

313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused?

> which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth

It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure?

I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.

<comment><USER2> There is a link between temperature and CO2 concentration, as you know. For the last 18000 years, since the last ice age, pretty much, we've been getting warmer, and CO2 has been climbing. See the Vostok Ice Core Data. Even if there were no men on earth, the CO2 levels would be rising. That explains at least some of your 40 year CO2 climb that you mention.

Anyway, no, the 3.2% I reference is just by mass. 3.2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made.

If you care, only 2.2% of the warming caused by global warming gasses (excluding water vapor) is caused by man-made CO2, since different gasses are better or worse greenhouse gases, and CO2 isn't nearly as efficient as a greenhouse gas as some other gases, just using mass isn't quite accurate, in terms of percentage of greenhouse effect.

Now, again, ignoring water vapor, which is insane to do, but is "customary", your control of the system, if you eliminated all CO2 from every person on earth (perhaps we'll let you breath, but no campfires) is 2.2%. (Again, it's actually 0.28%, but just for the sake of argument, say water vapor is not a green-house gas, even though it is) So, how confident are you, that 2.2% is enough control to effect a reversal of the temperature rise? Now, given that you aren't going to get anywhere near a 100% elimination of man-made CO2, short of killing everybody, how much money are you willing to spend on this exercise, and shouldn't a little bit of number crunching (dollars per degree) be undertaken, before we start down this path?

<comment><USER3> Where do you get your numbers from? I'm curious, since they seem to be at least an order of magnitude off from sources that come up in naive searches. (E.g. the 9-26% figure cited in Wikipedia for the percent of greenhouse effect due to CO2, _including_ water vapour.)

I'm not making any economic recommendations; I'm just someone who doesn't know very much, who is trying to find, say as an impartial Martian might, what the best interpretation of facts are given the available data.

<comment><USER2> As I write today, I'm referencing the following sites that a quick Google search turned up. I'm frustrated that I can't find another one I like, but this one is very good.

<http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html>

For one thing, the wiki article (which, again, is quoting realclimate.org, so is already tainted) is giving you a number of how much total contribution CO2 has on earth's greenhouse effect. It's not telling you how much effect _man- made_ CO2 is having, which is obviously less, as even they would admit that CO2 is not purely made my humans.

<comment><USER4> I would recommend comparing this to [http://www.skepticalscience.com/water- vapor-greenhouse-gas.h...](http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor- greenhouse-gas.htm)

In particular, they give figures of 75 W/m2 for water vapor and 32 W/m2 for CO2. The link to the original paper where those figures came from is broken but here's a fixed one: [http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/spring04/at...](http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/spring04/atmo451b/pdf/RadiationBudget.pdf) Look at Figure 3, they also go into some depth about the assumptions and observations behind those figures.

<comment><USER2> That's very good. You can't have your cake and eat it too, as they try to do. Here, they admit it's by far, the dominant greenhouse driver, and yet, in the next breath, they jump back on the CO2 bandwagon.

<comment><USER4> What about their figures do you disagree with? It's fairly open and fundamental science, I'd be very interested in a half-decent paper knocking holes in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody seems to be mentioning that a major source for climate research has made a shameful mockery of the scientific process. Regardless of whether their conclusions are right or wrong, they are doctoring numbers to fit their desired conclusions and sidelining scientists who raise doubts.

As scientists and engineers this _should_ disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted.

It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.

<comment><USER6> _Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful._

Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Bearing this in mind, I think most people--including me--missed the biggest part of the climate emails story. ...the CRU's main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish...The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings._

The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of- world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.

<comment><USER8> A big difference between "climate science" and other sciences is that other sciences make predictions and perform tests. The duty of the scientist is to bend over backwards telling you all the ways that their results may be flawed.

Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't.

If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent.

Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive.

So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually.

We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect.

If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it.

The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously.

One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties.

With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is.

Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference.

And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.

<comment><USER10> Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming? The scenarios I've heard of are on the scale of 10s-100s of years, plenty of time where we can plan a good response. Plus, there's the question: mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer?

There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.

<comment><USER11> Been paying attention for the last decade? Noticed the record droughts in the Amazon River Basin or hundreds of thousands killed by the worst tsunamis in 700 years?

Whether humans are the primary cause or not, this is climate change, and its nothing like the pleasant Hawaiian vacation you seem to imagine it to be. I don't see the bright side.

<comment><USER12> I understand our best forecast is that the enhanced greenhouse effect will increase global rainfall.

The local effect in the Amazon river basin is just as likely the result of local deforestation as the global carbon dioxide level. As someone else pointed out Tsunamis are known to be caused by earthquakes not weather. So it seems that your examples may not the best ones.

Now the effect of rising sea levels on my pleasant vacation on a pacific island is much less in doubt, some low lying areas will be underwater if the Antarctic or Greenland ice melts, which seems like it will take quite a while.

The greenhouse effect makes the biggest difference at the poles in the coldest time of the night. So people will be able to live and farm further north in Russia and Canada.

The cost of global warming seems to be about the cost of change, and the cost risk, rather than the cost of a definitively less hospitable climate.

Paying attention for the last decade includes a cooling for the recent past associated with short term patterns. Global warming is not about the cost of what we have seen, it is about what we will see if we emit CO2 at various levels in the future, which we don't know. And not knowing is not a reason to do nothing, but it is also not a reason to claim calamity is certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are there any open source-style projects underway yet to fix up the code & data? I keep thinking this is the next obvious thing to do.

The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?

<comment><USER13> There were some stories published recently how difficult it is to gain access to the raw data. CRU and organizations like it have exclusive access to it and as referenced in few of those emails(they refer to people asking for access as "loons trying to disprove") are quite reluctant to give the control away. Why give something so valuable away when by just creating pretty graphs out of it you can secure government funding, place in most reputable science journals and hundreds of citations a year from people having to cite YOUR papers instead of the real data which they can't access?

<comment><USER14> I understand their concern.

It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace.

We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.

<comment><USER15> If I'm the pope and I'm trying to cover up touching little boys in the naughty-place I would use the same reasoning. Imagine the liberal loons (or worse) getting airtime on CNN and huffpo and making it sound like all priests are pedophiles. We don't need those dirty filthy pagans, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.

<comment><USER14> The difference is that there aren't huge corporations willing to dump tons of money on research that shows you molested young boys.

And, in fact, if CNN and huffpo decided to say all priests are pedophiles, they would be spreading a lie.

How would that serve the truth?

<comment><USER14> The comparison above is absurd. Nobody os afraid of CNN. What frightens me is that there is a lot of people willing to do whatever is necessary to preserve their profits. An easy comparison could be with the tobacco industry and their studies that proved no connection between smoking and cancer and how addictive smoking is. Next to big oil, the tobacco industry is a bastion of morality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later."

Quote from article: _Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"_

<comment><USER17> That code's not FORTRAN it's IDL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a good summary of the fundamental science behind the climate change consensus: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/bl...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/blame_it_on_the_satellite)

It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.

There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?

<comment><USER18> _It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change._

It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is _logarithmic_ in carbon dioxide concentration ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect)). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to _linear_ temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.

<comment><USER19> So what's the response in temperature when CO2 increases like this?

[http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c...](http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/chart5a.jpg)

Is that geometric? Or worse?

<comment><USER20> Assuming that graph is an exponential increase in CO2, then there will be a linear (not geometric) increase temperature.

So it's considerably better, not worse.

A little calculus goes a long way.

<comment><USER19> I meant worse as in faster growth than geometric. It's quite possible, particularly with feedback taken into account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pretty amazing none of this info been open to peer review. Shouldn't their conclusions be replicable by others? Do they just write conclusion papers?

<comment><USER22> No scientist of any kind ever publishes his/her source code, as far as I am aware.

<comment><USER23> Why not?

<comment><USER22> I really don't know. I imagine it's because they're poor programmers. Scientists rarely have formal training in good software development practice as far as I can tell. They just seem to pick it up as they go along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the entire debate is moot. even if we are causing global warming and the worst case scenarios are true, the way we're going about curbing it is out of fantasy land, not engineering and economic fact.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think we are all failing to realize this is no longer a scientific discussion. It's politics. It's about allocation of resources, changing industrial bases and more or less changing, or not, a whole planetary economy.

Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?</comment>


In 2020, Words Are 'Violence,' Arson Is Not - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2020/07/03/silence-is-violence-george-floyd-protests-arson-is-not/ <comment><USER2> I'm worried about this 'silence is violence' meme. Its seems a thinly disguised 'if you aren't for us, you're against us' which is fairly infantile thinking.

I know its intended to incite action, which is certainly overdue. But it has its downside too, mainly that it alienates folks.

<comment><USER3> Not really. It's not about being "against" anyone, it's about pretending to not have any responsibility while taking part in a structurally racist system.

A lot of white people claim to be anti-racists but are unwilling to actually act on it, including the most basic step of speaking up when they see it happen, or acknowledging the existence of structural racism. In other words, their claim is more performative and about convincing themselves and others that they are Good People, than actually being interested in challenging a status quo that obviously wrongs a lot of people.

This is also known as being an "enabler" \- that is, allowing others to do wrong by looking the other way.

"Silence is violence" merely calls this out. It reminds us that we are enablers of this violence if we remain silent.

The vast majority of defensiveness I see in response to this pretty much just boils down to worrying about one's own position of being seen as a Good Person (by themselves and by others), instead of worrying about what is actually the right thing to do.

<comment><USER4> If the actual issue is that the system is "structurally" racist, why do we even care about blaming people for their silence, or lack thereof? Isn't it a basic starting point of performing a proper "structural" or "root-cause" based analysis of a problematic system, that one should _avoid_ preemptively assigning blame? You really can't have it both ways, this whole way of thinking makes zero sense.

<comment><USER5> It's a system of people. So obviously the "root-cause analysis" would only happen if the problem wasn't an accepted part of society. Why would anyone seek to solve a problem that no one cares about.

If half of the population (the people with power) directly benefits from an unjust system, but says nothing about it, it will never be addressed.

There is a conflict of interest.

How can you benefit from an injustice, stay silent, and still just passively hope it will get fixed? Hundreds of years in isn't proof enough that sitting around hoping someone else fixes it doesn't work?

<comment><USER6> > half of the population (the people with power) directly benefits from an > unjust system...

Fix what? Slavery (including the enslavement of whites) is not legal, at least not in the US. Everything is de-segregated and we have laws to protect certain classes of minorities. Beyond legalities I see black-promotion constantly in media. Everything looks perfectly fine from my perspective (I could do without the propaganda though). As a reminder our last president was (half) black.

You're imagining that the US is not beneficial historically to everyone. There's a reason people from Europe, Asia, latin america, etc. immigrated to America. They didn't come because "America is only benefits white slave- owners!" The entire point of the "american dream" is that people without power can find a way to prosper. Are we supposed to pretend none of that ever happened?

So what is this injustice du jour that suddenly, over the last few weeks, has become so pressing? Policing? I don't think there's evidence to support that blacks are targetted by cops because they're black. Poor neighborhoods probably do require more policing than non-poor neighborhoods as, naturally, criminal activity is more prevalent amongst the poor. Relative to other minorities my understanding is that blacks are underperforming in various ways. Surely you can't be so easily deluded into believing statements like "our black kids are being killed by cops every minute!" More whites are killed by cops. Blacks are overrepresented in proportion to their population. That blacks are overrepresented in certain figures does not support a radical claim like "systemic racism," contrary to Twitter logic.

Is it some other "injustice" you're so worked up about? Is it some imaginary injustice that is not even possible to resolve? Why don't you be specific about your radical claims; your statements are empty Twitter platitudes as far as I'm concerned.

Frankly, I resent the implication that I, as a white, am somehow benefiting from "injustice."

<comment><USER4> The criminal justice system needs a _lot_ of fixing. The rate of incarceration and criminalization is insane in a Western context, and does _not_ actually help community safety. This is something that there's broad consensus about among social scientists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heckler's Veto[0] in another form but the results are the same, silence differing opinion but now you have an excuse to commit violence against those who hold it or have others act on your behalf; this can include using government or employers.

A very dangerous period we are entering when honest open debate is framed as anything such. We are walking right into it and worse many are find excuses for specific discussion points as warranting this behavior not fully understanding that once that genie is out of the bottle it may take a generation or more to put it back.

The worst of it is that it is happening in newsrooms where groups want stories written specific ways and certain opinions must be silenced at all cost.

This "moral majority" will go far beyond what many fear mongers thought a "religious right" could ever do because they do not inherent limits to the exercise of their authority or violence needed to administer it.

You pretty much are bound for an authoritarian regime because democracy does not survive in silence. Will we have our own Reichstag fire[1], what form would it take?

Pretty sure you can find quite a few examples

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto) [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire)

</comment><comment><USER8> > insisting that both parties honor legally binding contracts is violence;

I'm generally a pretty big believer in upholding the law and contracts but a lot of people have been put out of work through no fault of their own, and rather unwillingly. The government did that and I think it makes sense for the government to enforce at least a temporary moratorium on evictions so that things can be done in an orderly fashion.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it weird the article didn't mention the violence - violence during the protests. I mean several people got killed, I imagine quite a lot got beaten up.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't see how this is on-topic in the slightest, nor how this could lead to any form of useful discussion on this site.

Regardless, if you agree with the article wholeheartedly, maybe stop to consider why you're getting more worked up over destruction of some property than over the decades-long oppression of black, hispanic and other minority communities by the police.

<comment><USER11> I think there's a discussion worth having on the increasing trend towards argument by analogy, where we judge things as good or bad based not on a concrete analysis of their effects but whether we can attach a label like "violence" to them. It's obviously prone to dragging people into political slapfights (which I see you're excited to engage in yourself!), but I don't know if that should be a disqualifier; a lot of important topics have that quality.

<comment><USER10> > which I see you're excited to engage in yourself!

There is nothing in my comment that indicates that I'm looking to engage in a "political slapfight" \- that's entirely your deal.

<comment><USER11> I have no interest in engaging myself, but I encourage you to reread the last line of your comment and consider how it comes across to people who don't agree with your perspective.

<comment><USER10> So you're saying that you think that some property is more important than murders of innocent people by police that have been going on for decades?

If that's not what you're saying, you should make yourself clear. Because you imply that you don't agree with my perspective, which I think is pretty straightforward and clear - people are more important than property.

<comment><USER12> I, for one, both agree with your perspective _and_ see how the last sentence of your original comment could be taken as engaging in a "political slapfight" (a pretty vague term) when viewed from the other side. I think being able to view the world from the eyes of the other is a useful skill, even when the other is a literal fascist -- I'm not even arguing that you should necessarily come across differently, just that you should understand how you may come across to people with different perspectives.

<comment><USER13> Or, put another way, you can't say one side's behavior is historically determined but not the other's.

<comment><USER12> While I don't disagree with my reading of your statement (which may differ greatly from your intent -- I'm not sure), I also don't see it as another way of putting my last comment; I was attempting to make another point entirely.

<comment><USER13> Yikes, that's embarrassing, could you possibly clarify your meaning? My point was that communicative strategy changes significantly depending on whether you account for the other person also having a perspective which is also a product of history

<comment><USER12> No prob, but if mdszy reads this I want to explicitly note that this is not meant as a caricature of their statement, I'm just trying to distill my meaning down into the most simple terms I can muster.

Alice buys a status symbol instead of donating to a charity. Bob says "Alice, stop and think about whether you care more about status symbols than charities!" Even if I agree with Bob's implicit condemnation, I can still see how Alice would feel attacked by the wording. Perhaps Bob wants Alice to feel attacked (this could be an attempt to jar Alice into recognizing her own greed), but it does Bob no good to not understand how he might be perceived by Alice. If Bob understands how he will be perceived then he will be able to craft his message in more useful ways -- ways that I would expect to be significantly friendlier on average, but which may sometimes actually be more combative. Ignorance of the perspectives of others does the message writer no good.

I also feel like I agree with your point, which is significantly more empathetic and less realpolitik than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> wow, it's almost like people are more important than property.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. When I read,

"two main arguments: damaging a person is morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is worse than physically damaging an object."

I couldn't help but think "Yes? That's exactly correct. Who would ever think otherwise?"

<comment><USER15> So giving someone a paper cut is worse than burning down someone's store in which their life savings were invested? Come on, these issues aren't covered by such trivial sound bites.

<comment><USER16> You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express. The article, and the parent post, both do not equate such a contrived minor injury to destroying an entire business, and you absolutely know this.

<comment><USER15> > You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't > expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they > express.

The position, as stated, is literally false which my argument by absurdity demonstrates. So what I expect, is that people attempt to make true statements, and where the truth value is contextual, then their phrasing also ought to reflect that nuance, ie. damaging a person is _typically_ morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is _typically_ worse than physically damaging an object.

There are no qualifiers in the original claim to reflect this nuance, and like it or not, people _absolutely do_ believe unqalified claims until they are challenged on it. Why do you think slogans and propaganda are so effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it stupid to equate a replacing the word "sex" with "gender identity" with being punched in the face? Yes.

Is it stupid to equate police brutality with riots destroying corporate property? Also yes, though maybe arguably less so.

I don't think this is anything new though, I remember being in debates with libertarians 10-15 years ago who argued that tax is violence. If you want to get philosophical about it, anything that carries any intent or threat to harm if there's non-compliance can be violence, but at that point it becomes kind of a useless word.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is this post flagged? The article discusses a very real problem that is creeping into all aspects of our lives, inlcuding software development. Why can't we have a civilized discussion about it?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why are we posting things that come from explicitly biased political websites that have nothing to do with tech? I can understand it if is breaking news, but this is an opinion piece.

I have noticed more political opinion pieces posted here recently. Did the scope of this website change in the past few months?

<comment><USER20> Do you post this under every NYT article too?

If NYT is allowed then so should be this

<comment><USER19> No, but my comment is in reference to those posts. But what makes this one especially egregious is that Reason has not pretenses about being an objective new source.

The first line of their about page is: "Founded in 1968, Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine."

<comment><USER21> OP has a point. The NY Times recently began a process of shedding their ideals of objectivity too. They claim the views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity- black...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black- journalists-coronavirus.html)

<comment><USER19> I agree that NYT has a bias. But they at least _try_ to appear objective (or at least objective with a left leaning slant). The article you linked is an opinion piece by a NYT writer and not the official stance of NYT (as far as I know).

Also, I am not fighting for NYT articles here. I wish that there would be no opinion pieces that are not tech related. This post just seemed particularly egregious because it is an opinion piece from a new outlet that is openly and explicitly biased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Without conceding that this topic should be our main focus right now I feel like we should draw a clear distinction between, say, local businesses on one extreme and police precinct buildings on the other. I see voices on the right, such as this article, invoking the destruction black-owned businesses as their examples of property damage and I can't help but feel like they tactically know this is more likely to draw a reaction than the destruction of buildings that belong to racist government institutions -- the American right wasn't too concerned when the KKK (a precursor to many southern police departments) burned down black businesses, churches, and homes. I can totally agree that the destruction of local businesses is a shame, but I'm not really worried about the big boxerinos and I'm downright ecstatic about police stations going up in flames.

<comment><USER10> I've also never seen a source for the claim of black-owned businesses being destroyed during these riots, I've begun to believe it's just intentional misinformation.

<comment><USER22> Is it that far-fetched to you that with the number of black-owned businesses there are and the number of businesses that were destroyed, that at least one of them would have been destroyed in the riots? I personally know of a black- owned business in Cleveland that had to shut down after being looted. Either you're underestimating the number of black-owned businesses, the number of destroyed businesses, both, or are simply being disingenuous</comment></comment></comment>


What is the Boeing 737 Max Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System? - <AUTHOR> https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing-737-max-maneuvering-characteristics-augmentation-system-mcas/ <comment><USER2> I'm struck by the connection between this and the Air France Airbus 332 which crashed en route from South America to France about a decade ago.

It seems that the 737MAX (at least, the one last year -- we don't know about the latest one yet) crashed because a faulty sensor caused the computer to automatically point the nose down in order to avoid a perceived stall risk and the pilots weren't able (or didn't know how) to disable that.

In contrast, the 332 crashed because a faulty sensor misled the flight crew into pointing the nose up and getting into a stall.

In both cases, crashes resulted from reliance on a faulty sensor -- but in one case it was flight crew and in the other case it was software. Solving this isn't going to be as simple as saying "the flight software should defer to the pilot" or vice versa.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're slightly mischaracterizing the cause in the AF447 flight in that there was a lot more going on than just the airspeed indicator:

 _AF447 crashed because of a cyclical series of erroneous inputs based on unreliable prompts from aircraft systems; a cycle that fed on itself to the extent that control was never regained. The BEA's final report attributes multiple factors to the AF447 mishap: temporary and repeated inconsistencies and loss of airspeed indication; inappropriate control inputs; failure to identify unreliable indicated speed; the approach to stall; the full stall state; and the inability to apply an appropriate response in these flight regimes._

[https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety- messages/saf...](https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety- messages/safetymessage-2012-07-31-lossairfranceflight447.pdf?sfvrsn=e3ae1ef8_4)

Also, in the AF447 case the computer had to defer to the human because it didn't know what the air speed was. In contrast, one thing that's surprising to me in Lion case is that the MCAS seemed to be willing to trust a faulty AoA sensor:

 _The DFDR recorded a difference between left and right Angle of Attack (AoA) of about 20° and continued until the end of recording._

[http://avherald.com/h?article=4bf90724/0009&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=4bf90724/0009&opt=0)

So it's got a pair of AoA sensors that aren't in agreement (split brain, as it were) and it's going to command nose down anyway?

(I'm sure there's a reason there aren't triple redundant sensors where two have to agree or some such. I think the flight computer does require the various different kinds of sensors to agree, but I don't think there's triple redundancy of each sensor.)

(Edit: sorry folks, I edited this a bunch of times so the replies below may not make perfect sense. I should really start typing my replies offline.)

<comment><USER3> > the pilot's action of pulling up the nose was an irrational thing to do

Actually the inexperienced COPILOT did this. The pilot realized that was a problem eventually, but too late. And unfortunately the Airbus takes the average of both pilot inputs.

<comment><USER4> >And unfortunately the Airbus takes the average of both pilot inputs

Really? That's the best way to handle that?

<comment><USER3> Since I read that Popular Mechanics article, I think the exact same thing every time I board an Airbus plane.

<comment><USER5> Airbus has since updated its flight control feedback systems

<comment><USER6> Source for this?

<comment><USER5> I may be mistaken; I had thought I had read that Airbus had acted, but on checking up, I think not in ways which would make my brief implication useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's ironic that it's a Boeing with bad software (or sensors) interfering between yoke and plane. After all, historically, Boeing has had the philosophy of trusting the pilot with direct control of the plane. This is in comparison with Airbus, where controls are by stick instead of yoke, and pilots are taught to trust the flight computer and move the controls less. (Of course, these days both manufacturers build fly-by-wire planes.) [1]

The addition of a 'maneuvering characteristics augmentation system' seems very unlike Boeing. I guess it became necessary after adding too-big engines without otherwise adjusting the airframe... [2]

This "we'll fix it with software later" attitude works well with CPU errata and maybe Teslas, but it doesn't look like we're there yet for airplanes, unfortunately.

[1] [https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/10321-stick-vs-yoke- airbus-v...](https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/10321-stick-vs-yoke-airbus-v..).

[2] [https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the- boeing...](https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/what-is-the-boeing..).

<comment><USER8> _This "we'll fix it with software later" attitude works well with CPU errata and maybe Teslas, but it doesn't look like we're there yet for airplanes, unfortunately._

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm absolutely against the "fix it with software" attitude. I'm working with embedded systems, now, and while we can often make it work by tweaking the software, it always results in a less than optimal solution. Fix the hardware; get it right, preferably before manufacturing a few thousand units.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't work in the current speed of development any more. Time to market is more critical than maturity, sadly. That's why every system can be fixed in software now, and that's also why every system can be pwned now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lots of great technical discussion about MCAS and potential improvements in here.

I think the bigger issue though that needs to be addressed is the certification and training process. What factors, other than the obvious engineering factors, were driving the design process? Why were those factors allowed to also influence the training administered to pilots? After the Lion Air crash the response from US pilots unions seemed to speak volumes. Pilots were not informed of this system on their new aircraft and as such were treating the aircraft the same as all other aircraft falling under the 737NG type rating.

Airlines and Boeing worked together to minimize training costs to help the aircraft sell easier and as a result critical systems knowledge was left out. Knowledge that likely could have saved Lion Air.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's a pilot describing the MCAS system on the 737 Max:

[https://youtu.be/zfQW0upkVus?t=220](https://youtu.be/zfQW0upkVus?t=220)

<comment><USER12> Super interesting, he's really great at explaining things in laymens terms. Thanks for sharing

<comment><USER13> I follow Mentour's channel pretty regularly. For anyone with any flying anxiety, it's great to see how seriously they take their jobs, how regimented they are and how really safe you are flying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The big issue here is how much of the existence of this system, the desire to NOT make OTHER changes to the plane that would inhibit the pitch-up tendencies, and the lack of necessity for another type rating were all driven by simply an attempt to skirt existing regulations and save Boeing and Southwest a ton of money.

The reality is that this was the whole deal with the Max. All of these decisions were made in a context were avoiding the requirement for a new certification or type rating for pilots was a must. We can't avoid the reality that had the necessity to skirt regs not been there, Boeing would have definitely come up with a different solution from an engineering perspective.

<comment><USER15> To add to your hypothesis - making a change to the fly-by-wire system was probably much cheaper than making airframe changes to make the aircraft more neutral in flight (airframe changes which would likely also negatively affect fuel economy).

So Boeing took the cheap rout and decided to have the computer handle the pitch-up tendencies of the aircraft...

This kind of fix is quite common on fighter aircraft which are purposely designed to not be neutral/stable in flight for better handling characteristics (among many other reasons).

I have no idea how common this kind of fix is on a passenger aircraft.

<comment><USER16> It is a violation of the brand expectations pilots have for Boeing.

Boeing introduced fly by wire after Airbus and it did it in such a way to preserve the feel of flying a plane, in particular if you have a fight with the system you could pull harder and win.

Some pilots have strong feelings about this and are loathe to switch from Boeing to Airbus or vice versa.

<comment><USER14> As a pilot (sadly not a Boeing, or anything close to that side), I think this is a non-trivial point. Every second professional airline pilot you will talk to will talk about that philosophy difference between Airbus and Boeing, and 99.999% of them will take Boeing's side.

Sadly, pilots really don't have much of a say in those discussions. They'll fly what's put in front of them, but I can assure you that all feel safer being given a plane not trying to actively fight them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the subject of why Boeing didn't think to tell pilots about the MCAS:

> "Since it operates in situations where the aircraft is under relatively high > g load and near stall, a pilot should never see the operation of MCAS"

This seems to me to indicate a much deeper issue with the aviation industry than the 737 MAX issue. Aren't pilots as part of their simulation time testing the limits of the flight envelope of the aircraft they're flying? If so surely they'd be expected to encounter the MCAS system.

<comment><USER18> I think Boeing claimed that no retraining of existing 737 pilots was necessary for the new model.

This attitude has led to crashes in the past as well.

<comment><USER19> If airlines would need to invest in a lot of training for existing 737-non-MAX pilots, that would probably have made the plane a lot less attractive. Being "a regular 737" is part of the appeal of the 737 MAX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Going back a few generations, the earlier 737s were plagued by crashes as well, relating to rudder issues:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues)

<comment><USER21> From that article: "leading the manufacturer to suspect and insist that the pilot had responded incorrectly"

After a few years of course it was concluded that it wasn't the pilots fault.

I find it appalling that Boeing is always and every time trying its damndest to blame the crew, even before the investigation has concluded. This is a pattern, and imho should be penalized by law. Its disgusting to blame people who are dead and cannot defend themselves against the allegations, when there's no conclusive evidence. I wonder if they apologize to the crews family when they do that and are later found out the be in the wrong. I suspect they couldn't care less though.

<comment><USER22> Yes, their reaction to crashes are terrible. Just look at what happened to Lauda Air Flight 004 that came up in a thread about this yesterday: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauda_Air_Flight_004#Investiga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauda_Air_Flight_004#Investigation)

"Lauda attempted the flight in the simulator 15 times, and in every instance he was unable to recover. He asked Boeing to issue a statement, but the legal department said it could not be issued because it would take three months to adjust the wording. Lauda asked for a press conference the following day, and told Boeing that if it was possible to recover, he would be willing to fly on a 767 with two pilots and have the thrust reverser deploy in air. Boeing told Lauda that it was not possible, so he asked Boeing to issue a statement saying that it would not be survivable, and Boeing issued it. Lauda then added, "this was the first time in eight months that it had been made clear that the manufacturer [Boeing] was at fault and not the operator of the aeroplane [or Pratt and Whitney]."[18]"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I mean just to give an anecdote that is slightly worrying; I was about to land in Grenoble and it was quite rocky the turbulence and incredibly windy, you could tell we were coming in too fast and the pilot decided to back out of the landing and take off again with the wheels nearly on the runway.

Suffice to say the angle of attack was extreme and the power produced by the engines quite impressive/terrifying. I would say anything that decided to change the express wishes of the pilot in that situation would have been _hugely_ dangerous.

Can someone explain why ever overriding the pilot rather than warning them would be a good thing?

<comment> sean-duffy I can't find a source right now but I remember reading that there had been a few cases where there had been an emergency situation and pilots had ignored stall warnings, resulting in the plane stalling and crashing. This was why Boeing had elected to make the system on the 737 Max 8 override the pilots inputs.

I think having an emergency system that overrides the pilot is fine, but it is crucial that the pilot can easily and quickly disable such a system when they know the plane is doing the wrong thing.

<comment><USER24> > a few cases where there had been an emergency situation and pilots had > ignored stall warnings

I remember that being about pilots' becoming over-sensitized to visual (red lights) over audio ("stall warning" audio) warnings during a crisis, often ignoring the audio inadvertently (i.e. not hearing it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Two planes full of passengers destroyed because the pilot couldn't get the nose to point upward and we find a secret computer system that overrides manual controls and automatically points the nose downwards?

Yeah, sounds like a real possibility to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that this website prevents you from copying text

<comment><USER27> You can use the option in your browser to view the page source and grab it from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another few good technical articles on MCAS, and other preexisting automatic stabilizer trim adjustments on the 737:

[http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm](http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm) [http://www.b737.org.uk/flightcontrols.htm#Stab_Trim](http://www.b737.org.uk/flightcontrols.htm#Stab_Trim)

</comment><comment><USER29> To me, the biggest contradiction (as it seems on the design of the system) is that it seems to rely on very fickle measurements to command big movements on the aircraft. So, in the case of Lion Air, you have 2 contradictory inputs and you're basing an automated decision on it?

Also, it seems aviation hasn't caught up with 20th century fluid measuring techniques. Speed of fluids in pipes can be measured non-invasively. With the biggest caveat that doing things inside a pipe on the ground is easier it seems we're still using 19th century techniques to measure fluid speeds and direction. Which didn't matter too much when their noisy/unreliable inputs were simply ignored or compensated by pilots and mechanical devices.

No real world scenario (at least not a surviveable one) can produce the sensor readings that happened in AF447 (sudden drop in airspeed) and in the Lion Air case. But this is being taken at "face value" (there is some filtering) and acted upon it (with no contradictory input from other systems - for example an accelerometers - and yes it's not so obvious how to put everything together).

<comment><USER30> The AoA sensor doesn't measure fluid pressure in a pipe; it measures fluid _direction_ with a small mechanical wing that rotates to align itself with airflow [0]. Thus it has to move, unlike a pitot tube. If it can't rotate for some reason, it gives faulty data.

[0] [https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2317/how- does-a...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2317/how-does-an- alpha-aoa-vane-work)

<comment><USER29> Yes, I'm aware of the differences, but you could measure air speed in two axis then calculate AoA from there, that's what I mean.

<comment><USER31> It's done. Here you go, only a few hundred dollars:

[https://www.dynonavionics.com/aoa-pitot- probes.php](https://www.dynonavionics.com/aoa-pitot-probes.php)

<comment><USER30> Nice! Finds AoA through vector addition. Now I'm curious why Boeing uses a moving sensor. Seems like having two different kinds would be ideal.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clever Functional Design - <AUTHOR> https://ferd.ca/clever-functional-design.html <comment><USER2> > it was the structural constraint of already being in an immutable context > that prompted the cleaner design.

Yes! This is what I think most languages retrofitted to include functional features miss: the constraints of immutability and (customarily) no global variables force you to think about what data you actually need where, and often lead to a cleaner design.

Constraints are incredibly valuable.

<comment><USER3> Constraints are necessary for ingenuity and creativity too.

Also, those constraints create consistency though necessity. For example, you can write immutable code in Javascript/Python/Whatever, but because it doesn't force it on you through constraints of the language, you have no guarantees that other parts of the application follows your immutability rules, so many of the benefits are lost. Being able to make assumptions about a program, because the language enforces them to be true, is very useful.

<comment><USER4> Constraints are not necessary for creativity.

<comment><USER5> What would you point to as the most creative thing done with zero constraints?

<comment><USER6> Speaking personally, I would say I'm most creative when dreaming (where there are no constraints).

<comment><USER3> If we're talking anecdotes, I've always been most creative when I have tight constraints to work within (technical, time, aesthetic etc). For example, some of my most imaginative code was when trying to fit some code into a teeny tiny microcontroller. Some of the most fun too (provided that time wasn't also a constraint, I find that mixing a time constraint with other constraints often turns it from a fun puzzle to a stressful task).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice. Although it's not mentioned, it seems like the insight here is partially about the lingering effects on the API of one model of persistence?

A log is normally considered a stream that's too large to keep in memory and needs to be incrementally persisted to disk on the fly, in timestamp order. (Or at least, the traditional file-based way does that, which affects the API.) But each HTTP request happens in memory and its log could be kept there.

A downside might be if the server crashes in the middle of a request, the request is entirely unlogged? But maybe you could log some values to disk and merge them later.

<comment><USER8> It wouldn't make sense to log most of these events outside the context of the http request -- it makes sense to smash it all into the one log line. Otherwise you have no simple way to tie everything back together; you could make an id for each request and tie everything back to that, but that is inconvenient, slow, and mostly a way to justify a Hadoop cluster you don't actually need.

That's not the key insight though. The key insight is not to try to log the time something took -- instead, log the beginning and the end, and calculate the duration later. This makes the logging apis much simpler and enables measuring times between events in different scopes without coupling the different scopes.</comment></comment>