How does having kids the responsibility of the employer?

No, most people do NOT agree with that. Maybe most people in your circle of friends, but not most Americans at least.

The problem IS the loans. You loan 100k to an 18 year old who doesn't have the understanding of the long term ramification. The colleges love it because it is easy money for them. Little Johnny gets a degree in Women's Studies and doesn't understand that he has to pay the loan back, even though he has a job as a waiter. Some kids have it together, most have been so utterly coddled for so long, they've never had a job and simply can't comprehend the numbers they are dealing with.

The solution is to stop government funding of loans, which will lower the price of college (they will hate this), and MORE privately owned education choices, not fewer. Half the kids are getting degrees in crap that will not provide them a career in ANYTHING. The colleges don't care, they get paid regardless.

...still no Edit button. *sigh*

My home internet from Spectrum is out and looking at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fistheservicedown.com%2Fp... it seems Spectrum is having massive outages too. Coordinated attack on cable companies?

The part that weirds me out the most, they read the script out loud?
I mean, they didn't think the webcam was on, and they were asked to read a script which supposedly no one could hear. But they read it out loud? And not even in a mumbling, under-their-breath voice, but a clear enough voice with convicing emotion that could be used in a marketing video? When they thought no one could hear them?

We are talking about high school here, is there anything you would have to actually study? If you were even half-awake during class it is usually trivially easy to ace any high school test.

Failing a class in high school is caused by not spending hours and hours per day grinding out boring, repetitive homework assigments (which often count for 50% of your grade), not failing to learn the trivially easy material.

# is hatch, but I'll take hash as close enough.

I never understood where # equals "pound" and it confused me greatly when computer driven phone menus first came out.

  I read once that sugar supposedly used # to display a per pound price, but I've never seen sugar sold by anything but per box.

This really doesn't jive with my experience. You have a 3600 square foot house? Holy fucking shit! I can't afford a fully detached house of any size. Dispite having a STEM degree and earning about double the national average income, I struggle to stay in a 1000 square foot condo*.

I've compared it to the house I lived in as a teenager. Not vaugely the same based on averagages. The actual same structure. It is way out of my league, not even close to something I could afford. This dispite the fact that the struture is now 30 years older than when I lived there.

Somehow my parents, neither of whom had a college degree, bought a 1500 square foot fully detached house in a nice neighborhood. Far beyond anything I could realistically dream of.

*No I do not live in Silicon Valley. I live in a crappy, somewhat iffy, part of Orange County California. You can't pin this on lack growth/development.

I don't know, the Coast Guard?

Ah, fair point. I forgot about community colleges. But those are generally modeled as the first half of university (at least for university type subjects like engineering). You still can't take engineering courses at a trade school, unless you are calling CCs "trade schools". They do kind of have one foot in both camps.

You should not be at university if your interest is simply engineering, but rather a trade school.

I don't agree with the original poster's opinion on learning about Shakespeare, but that statement is flat out stupid. They don't teach engineering in trade schools, they teach trades there. Engineering is based mostly on differential equations, which are generally only taught at Universities.

I assume all the scary Orwellian stuff is already in use at airports everywhere. The novel part is that they thought of a way to use the terrorist/criminal/scary person facial recognition tracker infrastructure to possibly help people.

Ok, tell me what visa category a house painter applies for. I did research on visas when I was getting ready to marry my fiancee from oversees and I did not see any category that would apply to a would-be painter. Assuming they are not diplomatic staff, not marrying anyone here, have no family here, aren't rich or some kind of model/actor/singer/celebrity, and not coming here as a student, the remaing work-allowing visas are H1B (must require at least a bachelor's degree) or agricultural work.

Did I miss any? That would apply to a house painter?

Ha you think nose picking is safe? You're not looking at the big picture. Robots aren't constrained by the size and shape of human noses, they can be designed with whatever kind of nose is convenient.

In the future, robots will have large noses with perfectly rectangular nostrils that match there robo-fingers exactly. And then robots WILL replace toddlers completely.