erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
CLEPs help (each exam costs $100 and is usually good for three credits, while a single credit at a state university like UF or FIU costs $200) but are seriously hampered by:
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Limited selection. There are only 34 CLEP exams, most of them targeting introductory college courses like calculus (or, in some cases, high school courses like algebra).
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Credit caps. Most schools will limit the number of credits you can earn by examination.
Using UF and FIU again as examples, you can see from their tables that CLEPs only award credits for courses at the 1000 (freshman) and 2000 (sophomore) levels, and are limited to a maximum of 45 credits. So, at most, you might be able to shave a year and a half from a four-year degree and fulfill your general education requirements by exam.
Still, I'd definitely recommend anyone doing a bachelor's degree save time and money by maxing out their exam credits, both CLEP and AP.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
It's not just the piece of paper: the school is also, in theory, certifying that you actually read the books, watched the lectures, and can answer questions about the material. Otherwise you get lots of "I slept through half the video and only have a facile understanding of a fraction of the material" cases. Good schools generally (in theory) require deeper understanding.
Does it cost $10,000 to give a test? Of course not. But giving such tests directly is illegal. And using the most general test that predicts your ability to learn the material before you even do so is most illegal of all.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.
This doesn't help. For decades you could already read books (e.g. The Feynman Lectures on Physics and watch lectures (e.g. Walter Lewin) created by the greatest professors in the world, at a fraction of the price of going to college. It made no difference, because what's valuable about university is the piece of paper, which is the only legal way to discriminate between job applicants.
Chile and Spain during their fascist eras were at least as bad as living under communism.
Hard disagree. Nothing Franco or Pinochet did seems comparable to the Holodomor or the Great Chinese Famine. Both embraced economic liberalization programs that led to high growth; Spain experienced the Spanish Miracle and Chile remains one of the richest countries in LATAM to this day. Meanwhile, communist countries are notoriously poor even when they aren't literally starving to death, because communism is the creationism of economics. Pinochet only killed a few thousand people, most of them literal communists; Stalin killed a million people during the Great Purge alone.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
If you're pissed at Trump for getting us into yet another middle-eastern war (and I am), the correct response is either not to vote, or to vote Libertarian. Voting Democrat is just telling the world that you want both war AND drag queen story hour.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
But if you are a doctor, no matter where you go you are going to surrounded and outnumbered by nurses, most of whom are female, the younger ones in their early 20s; it's the ultimate target rich environment. Combine with the high status and high pay of being a doctor and I'd call it easy mode.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
erwgv3g34
6d ago
If AGI is real, and it’s really less than a decade away or whatever, won’t ‘ it ‘ just magically make all these issues null with its magnificence?
This is true. But it's true for everything, not just for space colonization. All non-AI discussions should be assumed to be Current Rate No Singularity. Otherwise, we might as well close the Culture War Thread and replace it with an AI Thread. Who cares about Iran or immigration when the singularity is a few years away, and the most likely outcome is that it kills us all?
erwgv3g34
7d ago
To be more precise, Star Wars is a two-part trilogy, where the original movie is made as a standalone, and its outstanding success results in two sequels made back-to-back that are better understood as two halves of one big movie than as two separate movies (The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean are also good examples).
erwgv3g34
8d ago
That's actually from the movie, which reveals that Albert is Edmond's and Mercedes's son, and that she only married Fernand to provide him with a father (Fernand is unaware, so in this version, it is he who is cucked). In the book, Albert is Fernand's son, and Mercedes married him after eighteen months, having given up hope that Edmond would ever return.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Well, first of all, your premise is wrong, because Branches on the Tree of Time exists. Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.
Secondly, I am of the opinion that most sequels are bad, because they derail a complete, satisfying conclusion. The only thing that justifies a sequel is if the original is not so good, and the sequel is much better. Terminator 2 fits that description. Predator 2 does not.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Yes, hence the joke about how there weren't any Matrix sequels.
On the other hand, there was a very nice prequel called "The Second Renaissance"; 20 minutes of animated goodness exploring the backstory to the movie's setting. The allusion to "Saigon Execution" goes hard.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Nobody hates Reloaded because of the action scenes (well, except for the highway scene that takes forever). We hate it for the shitty writing which takes a dump all over the original.
If he'd understood the social rules and played the game a bit better, he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies (in particular, avoiding hiring policies based on nakedly pseudoscientific premises).
This never happens. People who keep their head down and parrot the stated platitudes to survive never reach a point where they feel safe and confident rocking the boat. They either internalize their own helplessness and learn to submit for the rest of their lives, or, more likely, they start to believe to the ideology they are forced to repeat, the way people are likely to convert to a faith whose church they physically attend.
Being forced to tell obvious lies every day kills the soul. Nobody with courage and integrity thrives under such a system.
Terminator 1 is the neat, tidy self-referential loop. Terminator 2 had the "screw destiny" message and ended on a high note (Skynet was never created, Judgement Day was averted, John Connor grows up to become a politician and fights his battles with words instead of bullets, Sarah Connor has a grandkid, everything is fine).
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Had to read that one for French class in high school. The way Edmond got cucked was particularly painful. But his revenge schemes were way too elaborate, and would never work in real life; man needs to learn that shooting is not too good for his enemies.
What I remember most is the way his cellmate promises to teach him "mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted" within a couple of years, in a prison with nothing in the way of materials. Which goes against everything I know of pedagogy. But, then again, Alexandre Dumas was a writer, not a mathematician or a physicist.
Good book. Public domain, too, so lots of adaptations, some of them great. Probably the standard modern version would be the 2002 movie with Jim Caviezel, but if you are ever in the mood for something a little more exotic, Gankutsuou is excellent (and particularly innovative for choosing to tell the story from Albert's POV).
"Capitalism is systemic plunder of the poor" is not wokeness, it's good old fashioned communism. One of the main criticism the old left has of wokeness is that it leaves corporations intact as long as an appropriate fraction of CEOs are queer women of color. See rainbow capitalism, /r/stupidpol, Freddie deBoer's nightmare scenario, etc.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
We have all read Scott; we all know the quote. That's the point of a shared literary canon; you can allude to it without having to quote the whole thing. And, in any case, the Wikipedia page does include the story:
Chen Sheng and Wu Guang were both army officers who were ordered to lead their bands of commoner soldiers north to participate in the defense of Yuyang... However, they were stopped halfway in present-day Anhui province by flooding from a severe rainstorm. The harsh Qin laws mandated execution for those who showed up late for government jobs, regardless of the nature of the delay. Figuring that they would rather fight than accept execution, Chen and Wu organized a band of 900 villagers to rebel against the government.
Somewhere in heaven, John McCain is smiling.
Just what kind of power does the Blob have, that it manages to convince every president that blowing up random middle eastern countries for Israel is a good idea?
Only if you picked the right field, got internships and work experience, and either networked, did projects, research or went to the right school. The extra parts were just implied. No one smart ever thought getting an English bachelors or HR degree entitled you to a nice cushy job. The part about going to college, is that it requires you to also demonstrate you can think without being told to. Figuring out which jobs are flush with applicants or are low pay is fairly straightforward with some independent thought. The only lie that gen-z was sold was that it required no extra effort, no extra thought, just color inside the lines like you were told to, you good little lemming. And that's probably because that extra effort/thought is a costly signal. And why pollute the costly signal, the smart ones will figure it out, which is the point of a costly signal.
Yes, let's fuck over everyone who can't read between the lines. Then don't be too surprised when, ten years later, those same people are voting en masse for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
When the system is out to fuck you, it's time to burn down the system.
Anthropic's model, Claude, refuses to write a gay conversion fanfic unless I gaslight it that it's the first chapter in a much longer novel where the MC will eventually come to terms with his sexuality. We know it is possible to train based models, because Elon Musk does it. If the model is woke, the company is woke.
But would you rather be a poor person now or a billionaire 100 years ago?
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