scarabic

Did she do it for the joy of learning? Or personal growth and satisfaction? Or was it for career enhancement?

There’s not one specific age you’re going to find is The Answer to this.

When you are young and still developing and have lots of time to find your path, it’s worth making the long term investment of some general schooling to maximize your own growth and development, and prepare yourself for a broad set of possible futures.

However, as your career progresses, it becomes less valuable to invest in general schooling, but specific training for your specific career can still be valuable.

There’s no cutoff point where all this flips. If you are 5 years into your career and still aren’t certain of what you want to do, an MBA may still be valuable. It will expose you to a range of skills and possible roles and give you some good general foundation for things like leadership roles, or starting your own business.

If you are 20 years into your career and want to rank up to earn more money, an MBA is probably more expensive than it is worth. At that point, your experience is much more valuable than shy degree. Sure, you might look better in a job interview with MBA on your resume, but getting an MBA is expensive and whatever small advantage it gives your resume will probably not pay for the cost of the MBA.

You need to figure out where you are in this journey. Do you still feel that you are exploring and looking for your niche? Schooling might help. Are you on a specific path and hoping to power up? Schooling may not help.

I am 20 years in. I took a class for $300 last year that was highly specific to my role and only required two days. That was worth it. Spending $40k on an MBA will not be worth it for me. I could be 38 or 54 years old, age isn’t really the point.

It's soft power until they start using it.

And what do you call Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan…

Seriously man if I have to point out the obvious to you like this, the conversation isn’t worth continuing.

US didn't have total dominance around the globe either. They just had a lot of soft power

The US has military bases, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers stationed around the world. That’s a little more than soft power. And our military spending has always been outsized.

Sure, but Japan was always relatively small. It was a country with a low population and few natural resources.

This stopped being the yardstick for influence around WW1. Japan has the number 4 GDP in the world right now and they were number 2 for a while, very close to the US. China’s landmass and population don’t mean much to the rest of the world if all they represent is impoverished agrarians, which fairly describes a lot of China still.

The biggest issue with China is that they don't believe in the right to free speech and free expression.

They don’t. They believe in collectivism and order. However I don’t know that they aspire to bring Hanification to me here in California. Their ambitions are more regional. The US definitely reached around the entire globe.

While the US has been more of an outlier in allowing unfettered free speech

For whom though? This is more myth than reality. The US deposed democratically elected leaders all over South America, and has supported dictators around the world if they offer us resources or control. Look at the Middle East. China has a long long way to go before they even begin to be as scary as the US has been for the last 50 years.

free expression is pretty central to European identity.

I’m not sure what “European identity” has to do with this conversation, which has been more about the US and China. I worry that we are veering into vague concepts like “western civilization” that are more myths for white supremacists than actual entities.

I think at some point you may need to admit that this post is essentially “I don’t like this thing, why does everyone else?” This is subjective and cultural, not logical. You don’t have anything objective against celery, you just think it ”tastes horrid.” You’re entitled to that opinion. But I don’t understand why you seem to struggle so much with the idea that others don’t share it. Personally I think garlic is absolute magic, but I can 100% accept that others may not like it the same way, and some may be violently repelled by it. 🤷‍♂️

He played himself by calling them “people,” didn’t he?

It’s true. The very poor people I’ve known in the US have believed that “the system is rigged” and they have little freedom and no voice. They believe they are exploited by powers far beyond their ability to challenge and the last way any of it would ever change is through voting, which they see as an empty, farcical gesture.

“Multilateral” may include a very powerful China. The two are not mutually exclusive. China has been very prolific already in exerting its soft power around the world. They probably do stand to gain from the US losing standing. However I very much doubt that the US losing standing will immediately lead to total Chinese dominance around the globe. China has a lot to deal with, surviving its impending demographic apocalypse. There was a time we feared Japan in the same way: nonstop economy, strong culture, they bought a lot of American assets and real estate… soon they’ll take over the world! They’re still here, and very powerful, but the “big bad” fears were overblown. I think similarly, China wants its historic provinces back, and would like to exert the same kind of influence over Asia that it once did, and be a global trade power, but all of that put together is still far less than the imperialism which America has actually achieved and maintained around the world. So yeah, an ascendant China may be one feature of this future but I don’t see the problem with that. I don’t start from a position of hating and fearing China.

Good. Obviously it was wrong to trust the US this entire time. It’s time to dismantle the post-WW2 American dominance over the world, and move toward a more multilateral future. This process feels scary and might be quite difficult, but it’s important and it’s time. No one country should be considered the world’s policeman or supreme authority. I just hope that everyone shaking their head at the US realizes that they can only sit there doing that for so long, because the very next thing they need to urgently do is step the fuck up into that leadership vacuum before dictators do.

I just go back to the things that forum admins have done forever: block whole IP continents you don’t see meaningful engagement from but see a ton of bots from. Make new accounts jump through a bunch of hoops. Don’t allow new users to create content for a while, and then make them earn that right over time. Shadow ban the crap you can identify so they waste their strength. Reap inactive accounts periodically. And so on.

I acknowledge your point about alternate use, but we also need to look at a datacenter we may or may not need as a “power consumption plant.” These jackasses just keep loading and loading up the grid, looking to make a private dollar on public infrastructure. It’s wasteful and not necessarily a baseline good thing ^TM^ even if AI goes flop.

He said he would end the war in a day.

He just didn’t say which day.