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Perhaps we need to stop living in the past

Posted by RGA on June 7, 2021 at 20:07:18:

and lamenting what it was like 70 years ago. It's a global market.

I liked this bit in The West Wing - Free Trade stops wars and we'll fix the rest later

The reality is that if you want a change of any sort you have to fight for it. The wrong way, IMO, is to try and beg the government to fix the marketplace. Governments are sledgehammers - whenever they enact something it is like parking an Aircraft carrier in a Walmart parking space. An example is the min wage debacle. One size fits all but doesn't fit anyone properly. It will help some - won't help others.

Some things the government can try to do but there isn't an exact science to these things.

Take housing costs. In Vancouver where the vacancy rate is under 2% people are having trouble finding places to live. This is bad for business because if all the employees move away - your company closes.

Foreign investors are buying and flipping homes like the stock market. So entire streets are being purchased by the Chinese. No one is living in the houses. The corner stores all go out of business. The home price goes from $600,000 to $1,500,000. People who live in Vancouver can't afford the houses.

So the government stepped in and added a bunch of rules. 8% yearly tax on the home if it is not rented for at least 6 months during the year. That forces the Chinese buyer to rent out the house or else pay $80,000 a year on the house valued at $1million.

That's a helluva motivator to rent out the house!

There is also a 20% property transfer tax tax on non-citizens so if you buy the $1m home you are paying $200,000 in tax. There is also a high capital gains tax selling within a short period of time. They have also implemented rental increase limits that landlords can put in place.

It makes sense on the one had but it also stops developers. They will build an apartment building but they want to make money. If the rents have to be kept low and foreign investment is nixed then there is no motivation for them to build a new apartment complex. They only do it to make money of course and if you won't let them make money - they'll build somewhere else.

Bill Maher's recent video on higher education is a kick in the pants as well. The prices are high and the education is watered down.

The diploma/degree is often simply a way for HR managers to not get fired. If he hires someone without a degree and the employee is a total boob the HR manager will get flack for hiring the person. If he hires someone with a degree from Harvard he can say "well look this Harvard guy has the ultimate degree - it's not my fault he turned out to be a total boob."

It's ridiculous that in 2021, some universities have the professors phoning students to remind them of their due dates to hand in the essay.

The good HR manager I had at ESCO noted that anyone working there could get a degree in anything and they would pay for the courses and the books. He said the main attraction for employers was not the degree, they would teach you what they wanted you to know. The degree's attraction was that it showed them that you were willing to work hard and put in the time and jump through the hoops for 4 years.

It showed them that you had a high degree of work ethic. Whether you took courses like Contemporary Moral Problems in Philosophy, the History of Buffalo in Canada, the works of Arthur Miller, or Business Mathematics it all requires a lot of work.

So my HR manager at ESCO was willing to hire a person with a degree in anything. It showed you work hard and are willing to push yourself through adversity.

McDonald's is also great on a resume because that shows you are willing to work hard for shitty pay. So their profit eyes light up - hey we can pay this guy less to do more - suckers!!

One piece of advice to Americans who are scared off from the high cost of University is to look at Europe. Some of those countries will take in Americans - the courses are in English and they are FREE even to Americans. Get your degree there for free and come back to the US without being in gobs of debt.

Debt is a killer - it forces you to stay in a job you hate because you basically NEED the job to survive. If you are debt-free the power shifts away from the boss and to yourself.

When I went to South Korea I was something like $50,000 in debt ($90,000 over time with the prime plus 2% loan). So when they screwed me over and lied to me over and over I had to suck it up and take it.

If I flew there today and they tried that I would have told them to get stuffed and walked out the first day.

If you do go to university with the hopes of better-paying jobs you really have to avoid the fields Bill Maher mentions. University is not a trade school or an engineering/IT kind of school.

China is killing the west in mathematics I suspect due to their high levels of rote learning. The West teaches having high self-esteem and never admitting you are wrong and that my opinion is what matters in the face of science or facts. Math takes a lot of work to practice and fight through and keep attempting the concepts. It also requires some strong teachers who can teach multiple versions of solving a math problem.

And since those expert math teachers get paid shit - there are very few to none of them around. Why teach math when you can make 12 times the salary at Boeing or Nasa or someplace?

So you get the PE teacher who took a few math courses and passed (barely) teaching math.

Or you do find someone who may be good at math but has the monotone personality of a refrigerator.

I finally had a good mathematics teacher when I got to University. He was also an actor in a local theatre group and he made math fun and interesting. If I had him in elementary and high school I am pretty sure I would have been a math major and perhaps in a totally different career.

Bill on education https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x5SeXNabd8