...personally wish I had just kept that summer job after high school and ran a front end loader for 20 years. I would have already been retired.

Haha. Me too. In 1983, when I was 20 y/o and halfway through my Computer Science degree at a university in Boston, on a lark and as a backup plan I took my Boston suburb's fire fighter civil service exam. I scored quite well and was offered the $8 per hour job. I turned it down because, you know, I was going to be a very successful, well-paid professional. Well, after two masters degrees, a couple of layoffs and blown opportunities, the "Great Recession," H-1B immigration, and crushing competition, my salary today is exactly what it was in 1999. The high school grads that were doing roofing and warehouse work that took that 1983 firefighter exam with me retired in their mid-40s, protected with gold-plated lifetime health benefits, spending their growing high five-figure government pensions on trips, beach houses, boats, new cars, and good times; while I'm still working as a cubicle slave trying to fatten my 401K and hang on to 65 when I become eligible for Medicare.

Replies: @everyday feminist

What I read about the university of phoenix is that a huge proportion of its students are government employees who go there to earn "advanced degrees" so they can be eligible for promotions. The advanced degrees at phoenix are a complete joke but the ITT "education" seems to have been way worse than that. Also, the UofPhoenix degrees are mostly paid by the employers, while ITT and other "colleges" like that are paid for by the students's loans.

Replies: @everyday feminist, @Joe Schmoe

I could not agree more.

Griggs v. Duke Power made it necessary for employers to find some less reasonable but still valid system for filtering job applicants after the courts made objective testing of qualifications a litigious nightmare. Employers soon determined that academic credentialing sort of worked. Persons with a college or university diploma had at least demonstrated some minimum level of useful virtues. It was also hoped they'd graduated with an ability to read, write, compute, and reason at some basic level. This has all too often proved a forlorn hope.

The essentially complete replacement of testing with credentialing meant that ambitious individuals had to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on what was for many nothing more than a credential, a piece of paper with a registrar's seal. Institutions of "higher education" had a lock on this market and used their monopoly position to charge exorbitantly for their services and plow surpluses back into the growth of already bloated administrations.

The nation's colleges and universities now charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to four-year students for diminished services and are raking in billions of dollars. This money in large measure is ultimately being extracted from taxpayers. "Student loans" are actually pass-throughs that go directly from the lender to the colleges and universities. Now that these have the money they could care less what happens to the student debtors. Many of these are locked into horrendously burdensome loans that they can never repay. The taxpayers will end up footing the bill.

Replies: @E. Rekshun, @everyday feminist, @JackOH

Replies: @everyday feminist, @iSteveFan, @Kyle

Trump’s unnecessary grandstanding and idiotic statements will soak up much attention

That isn't the problem since Trump's statements are largely correct. However, the media portrays them as stupid and beyond the pale and the stupid American public isn't interested in the truth.

Case in point, I am sorry to admit, is my Dad. Nothing you can say about Hillary will change his mind. He thinks everything said about Hillary is a lie and he doesn't need to go to any website. He made fun of Trump saying Obama and Hillary founded ISIS and I tried to tell him why it really is true and all he could do was come up with excuses for why it is a lie or why she was not responsible - right down to total stupidity such as the CIA takes its marching orders from Congress and not the executive so the Secretary of State isn't responsible in any way. He actually thought our attempts to interfere in Russian/Ukrainian politics was necessary so "we don't have to fight them here if we fight them there". He will not do anything to see the reality of the situation with our government so how can he ever come to the conclusion that even if you don't like Trump, voting for Hillary guarantees that nothing will change.

My Dad isn't stupid and is probably smarter than 50% of the population - that is the scary part.

Replies: @InheritedItFromDaddy, @Anonymous, @Kaz, @everyday feminist

Supposedly he was killed a block from his home. So he lived in the area.

Replies: @everyday feminist

Here is obviously doped up to the gills Russian swimmer Yulia Efimova. (Also see this drool-worthy gallery.)

And here is absolutely clean American Lilly King.

We know that the Russians are totally wrong when they say that everyone is doing it.

Replies: @everyday feminist, @James Kabala

There was a "machete attack" on two (women) police officers in Belgium today, the attacker - who happened to be holding the machete at the time - shouted allahu akbar during the assault. I wonder if the attacker was suffering from mental illness as a result of being bullied in school. He's very quiet and shy too.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3726916/Two-Belgian-policemen-attacked-machete-wielding-assailant-shouting-Arabic.html#comments

Replies: @everyday feminist

Well, I think it has to do with Lawrence Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations: “ The worse the behavior of minorities and non-Westerners, the more the behavior must be covered up or excused, and the more racist a white is for noticing it and thinking about it.”

The Good Whites, i.e., the Leftists, are always looking for ways to set themselves above the Bad Whites, conservative or even just normal people. Their favorite tactic is by tolerating groups or behavior that Bad Whites show intolerance toward. Now that everyone is getting more tolerant towards gays, for example, the pressure was on for the Good Whites to find a group less easily tolerated and champion their cause. That group was transexuals.

The Good Whites were never so enamored of Muslims before the attacks on 9/11. Sensing that Muslims were about to become less popular among Bad Whites, the Good Whites hugged them to their bosom. And the worse the Muslims behave, the more virtue there is in excusing their actions.

After the truck attack in Nice in which 84 people were killed, a Good White among my facebook contacts posted a picture of an elderly, sad looking Muslim woman who had some egg on her hijab. Some Islamaphobe, angry about the massacre, had thrown an egg at her. To the Good White, this was more genuinely upsetting than the slaughter of innocent French people.

Replies: @everyday feminist

DIVERSE NEIGHBORHOODS PROMOTE UNDERSTANDING AND RESPECT … AND BEST OF ALL, FRIENDSHIP.
Neighborhood diversity promotes a greater sense of engagement, teaches that stereotypes are wrong and better prepares our children for the global community.
 

Replies: @everyday feminist

That's something I'm finding difficult -- "pro-Gulen" -- and ~33% of the Turkish military feels this way?

...what's this guy's draw? It's like he's Kane from the Brotherhood of Nod.

Replies: @everyday feminist

There are pedophilia apologetics in or near the mainstream media, though. Salon published an article by a non-practicing pedophiliac. Something about babysitting a little girl and needing to run off and pleasure himself. But he never touched one. He lives with his affliction, which will evolve into a protected lifestyle, I predict, within my lifetime. Don't forget Lena Dunham!

So many perversions, so little time. Around the bend I see the normalization of polygamy, pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, hacking off limbs, rape fantasy, sado-masochism, and incest.

Replies: @everyday feminist

Serious question: what are the major feminist sites? I'd like to have a better idea of how the enemy thinks.

Replies: @everyday feminist, @BB753

Brits disliking Romanians is one thing. At least they tend to be white and Christian.
 

Replies: @Neoconned, @everyday feminist, @Daniel H