Welcome to this edition of ‘mythbusters’.
No, this is not that popular show on the Discovery channel. This edition is brought to you by the corporate owned media, that occasionally publicly admits that a widely advertised ‘belief’ has been proven to be ‘wrong’!
First up in our in our parade of debunked ‘conventional wisdom’ is the belief that a college education will ‘guarantee’ access to a comfortable, middle class lifestyle.
Why blow all of that cash on a college education if you’re doomed to end up pushing a broom for the bulk of your (brief) productive life?
Which is to point out what we already know, if you haven’t ‘made it’ by 40, you ain’t gonna!
But don’t take my word for it:
Now evidence is emerging that the damage wrought by the sour economy is more widespread than just a few careers led astray or postponed. Even for college graduates — the people who were most protected from the slings and arrows of recession — the outlook is rather bleak.
Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.
How sad is it that if you DON’T put your hard won degree to work ASAP, you will be ‘competeing’ with next year’s graduates who possess the ‘latest and greatest’ (knowledge) in your chosen field of endeavor.
You may be able to ‘underbid’ them when it comes to an open position but the fact that you weren’t hired right out of the box marks you as ‘damaged goods’, diminishing the ‘likelihood of success’.
Bringing us back to the other old truism, it isn’t WHAT you know but WHO that matters when it comes to your ‘career path’.
Once upon a time a ‘useful idiot’ with a college degree (and a generous dose of chutzpah) could ‘break in’ to the lower reaches of the highest stratum of society…but you had to be the ‘real deal’, a modern day Machiavelli if you will.
Today, not so much.
Automation and the trend of ‘renting’ brainpower on an ‘as needed’ basis serves to leave those precious openings at the ‘golden trough’ for the offspring of the ‘deserving’.
But this is not the the time or place to discuss the ‘worthiness’ of our future leaders, whose first best qualification to lead us is being ‘born to greatness’ (by virtue of being born to the
I’ll bet you thought we got rid of that royalty bullshit, didn’t you…
Surprise!
Anyway, the second myth to get busted in today’s paper is one of those ‘what the hell are they smoking’ deals in the first place.
Which is to point out that it didn’t ‘make sense’ in the first place.
The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates. [snip]
“There’s a perception that the private sector is always going to do it more efficiently and less costly,” said Russ Van Vleet, a former co-director of the University of Utah Criminal Justice Center. “But there really isn’t much out there that says that’s correct.”
Such has been the case lately in Arizona. Despite a state law stipulating that private prisons must create “cost savings,” the state’s own data indicate that inmates in private prisons can cost as much as $1,600 more per year, while many cost about the same as they do in state-run prisons.
The first thing to hit the average person in the eye was the idea of doing ‘prison on the cheap’.
How the hell do you ‘reform’ a convict ‘on the cheap’?
Which is to ask how much ‘emphasis’ is being put on ‘reforming convicts’ (which is the actual ‘purpose’ of prison in the first place!)
Why even bother sending felons to prison if they don’t benefit from it?
Getting criminals ‘off the streets’ is a temporary solution at best. I’d posit that if the goal was to remove those unwilling to obey the rules from society that the removal process should have a more permanent methodology employed.
Naturally, those who favor ‘privatizing’ prisons are more interested in milking the public than they are in providing a ‘necessary service’.
Worse, punishment for profit isn’t even remotely ‘humane’. We already know what bloodthirsty employers do to their employees and the employees are ‘free’ to find less onerous employment, inmates are not!
Naturally, this brings us full circle to the central problem facing our civilization, that it is being run by ruthless criminals.
If we can’t keep our own house in order, do we ‘deserve’ what becomes of us?
Because that’s what THEY think!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
No comments:
Post a Comment