patwork

To use your metaphor, I think the more accurate description is that the food has decreased in quality and they increased the cost. The chef is resting on their laurels, maybe focused on other things. Maybe they spent a lot of money on a fancy renovation (dorms and gyms) with no impact to the actual food (education). Maybe they no longer shell out for the best staff and increasingly use lower priced employees (adjunct professors).

This actually happens all the time. It's hard to stay at the top and many Michelin star restaurants still close and go out of business.

Not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. People may still accept that they need a college degree to get their desired job, but that doesn't mean the education is actually worth it.

Prices are up substantially. Grade inflation is out of control, demonstrating that people are paying for the credential more than the education. Masters degrees have become a way for international students to purchase a visa. No one is learning anything.

By this logic, we should allow e-bikes in the Tour de France.

I strongly disagree with this statement. The careful selection of words that results in elegant prose is one and the same with the thinking. Sure, there are many ideas worth prosing about, but those are just a premise until someone goes through the effort to intentionally shape words around the premise.

The open secret of the H1B program is that the credentials are fake. The system whitewashes candidates to provide the illusion of these credentials, but they are in fact no more qualified than an American candidate.

I used to travel for work. 100ish flight segments a year all over the country, typically carrying two laptops - corporate and client.

In one airport, I had a TSA agent yell at me that I'm not allowed to bring two laptops through precheck in my bag. That they had to go through separately. I complied but asked if that was this airport's policy because no other airport seemed to care. She swore up and down that this was national TSA policy and I should know better if I flew so much.

When I look at the TSA's success rates in audits, I tend to agree with the claim that it is more a government jobs program than a security agency.

A stack is still not a domain. You could have domain expertise in building highly scaled distributed systems and still not call yourself a ____ programmer. The point is that your value lies more in knowing how to build for performance, consistency, reliability at scale and not in knowing where the semicolon goes.

I'm not defending the US here. The Iran War is a good example of my point as well. Iran reminded the world of their bargaining chip - the strait of hormuz - that the world had either forgotten about or undervalued.

I would like to see Europe have influence. I think it is good for the world. But no global power is going to give them that influence for free. They need to identify and exploit their competitive advantages. Cultural power is definitely one of those advantages, but wielding that power has actually lost them some of their influence in the US. Just like the US's use of military power also has consequences.

Europe seems to have forgotten that influence is a function of power. The leaders in the article lament their ability to influence the US on policy, but what do they bring to the table to effect that influence? Military power? Economic power? Technical innovation? The only thing they have is a small amount of cultural power that they have used to shame and criticize while entirely relying on US protection.

That's where this part applies to you:

> NO, YOU CAN'T TALK THEM OUT OF IT

> No, they don’t care about your story

If you are suspected of a crime, your inclination is going to be to explain the situation because it must be a mistake. If you find yourself suspected of a crime, you should talk to a lawyer, not the police.

People unknowingly break laws every day, yourself included. You have a right not to incriminate yourself. It is not fearing the police to recognize that innocent people get swept up in the bureaucratic law enforcement machine all the time. Talking to the police can only hurt you in this situation.

Finally, your examples are all examples where you were the victim of a crime, which is covered in the article.

This is a good point. It does not work to criticize someone's authority to make a "Your life's goal should . . ." statement with a "Your life's goal should . . ." statement of your own.

The parent comment belongs on Reddit, really.