I find this stage is more important for social development than intellectual development. An early adult stage where you go some place away from home in a relatively easy, same aged social experience, with people of diverse backgrounds is a net social good.
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
In my experience, it has the opposite effect. Those who go straight into work are exposed to the real world, people of different ages and life experience. New grads are still children by comparison to a 19/20 year old who has been working for 2-4 years.
My time working in the search field for 13 years, there is always this trend:
Leaders think <buzzy-technique> is a good way to save money, but <buzzy-technique> actually is a thing that requires deeper investment to realize more returns, not a money saver.
That's why you need consultants to tell you that <buzzy-technique> has problems, but <rebadged-buzzy-technique> is really how you save money, and that's why working with a <rebadged-buzzy-technique> expert is how you can overhaul your business and manage operational costs.
Before people freak out about their morning run, I’m very hard pressed to find 25 PM2.5 on this map of the US. (Note these numbers are AQI, you have to zoom into the bad AQI numbers and look at their PM2.5). Albeit it’s a Saturday morning, not rush hour.
Please note that air quality in an area varies dramatically over time. You are looking at a current snapshot with maps like that. The map linked below has his more historical data and I can see several _weeks_ this past year in my area (which currently has very good air quality) where the PM 2.5 weekly average exceeded 25ug/m^3.
Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire, up to the activity of nearby factories and power plants, up to national and global phenomena like wildfires and weather patterns, all have dramatic effects. Looking at an air quality map once and determining that you don’t have to think about air quality because you’re in the US is a mistake.
Exercise outdoors is a wonderful thing, obviously, but there are some days, even in the US, where you might think twice or even consider shifting your exercise to a different (less-polluted) time of the day.
> Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire,
Summer evenings at home in my small Ohio village are often a health hazard, a polluted nightmare driven by the perverse compulsive ignition of so-called 'recreational' yard fires by pyromaniac neighbors.
If it is an Ozone Action day and/or a Heat Advisory day, it is near certain that one or more of the Don't Tread On Me jamokes who live nearby will come out of their houses at sunset, pile a bunch of garbage into a 55-gallon drum or a circle of rocks, sprinkle with accelerant, toss a match and back away. Eyes glazed, they'll watch for a minute, then go back inside, sometimes coming back out every ten minutes or so to refuel the fire, other times letting it blaze until the original pile is down to embers. In any case, there is a new plume of local smoke to add to the day's irritants.
It is a startling phenom to observe, let alone endure. The behavior is made all the more crazy, imho, by the presence of children. These are parents, asserting their rights to burn, and teaching their children to Live Free Or Die. It seems to me to be driven by a rebelliousness, part of the anti-woke wave, country-fried counter-culture, as in "I got your global warming right here, pard".
It's like, listening to country music stations and realizing how many (most!) contemporary and historical Country songs are themed around alcohol-worship.
But I digress.
I apologise. I was triggered by the mention of 'localized phenomena' and the horrified realization that so many of my fellow citizens are self-destructive cray-cray.
I’m not familiar with Ohio village, but I grew up in unincorporated county land in the Texas boonies. My dad had a burn barrel, and would dump oil into the ground “putting it back from where it came”. Even as a kid, nothing about it felt right. Just that experience alone gives no doubt to service members working the burn pits qualifying for disability
To be fair at one point in time people were actually told to dispose of used oil by dumping it into some stony ground. I live in a rural area in the north and most people have burn barrels but 99.9% of people exclusively burn cardboard and paper.
Your local computer store likely has some decent used laptops. IE we have a local store “FruitFixed” that repairs devices and has a rack of used MacBooks.
We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.
On the RHS, post hype, the second movers could work on the boring, unsexy problems in those domains nobody wanted to solve. And solve them extremely well. Then build a moat around that.
There is also a customer adoption curve of technology that lags far behind the technologist adoption curve. For example video on the Web failed a long time, until it didn't, when Youtube began to succeed. The problem became "boring" to technologists in some ways, but consumers gradually caught up.
A lot of software process exists to solve a specific problem IMO:
Devs get married to their first implementation; Stakeholders don’t tolerate rework
If companies and individuals could throw more away, then we wouldn’t need to obsess over planning. The “spec” and “design” would get discovered through doing. I’ve never worked anywhere where a long up front design addressed the important design issues. Those get discovered after you’ve tried to implement a solution a few times and failed.
If we say throwing away as a feature rather than a bug, we’d probably work more efficiently.
Largely because Warner Brothers is a good movie studio buried in a terrible corporation. It’d be sad to see it go away.
WB going away or shrinking likely reduces Hollywoods movie output, consolidates the industry, makes it less competitive and reduces opportunity for talent.
In a different world WB the studio is a successful standalone company not burdened with debt due to Zaslovs idiotic bets.
(And Ellisons overpaying for it is probably the most serious buyer. It’s the only reason it’s a topic. I’m skeptical of other transactions)
There are other ways of getting the same thing. Like if your country has some kind of compulsory service.
But maybe let’s stop pretending college is just about the intellectual stuff and see it as a social good.
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