Had D-Day not occurred on the scheduled day, the backup was June 20. That was the day of the great Channel storm that was not predicted and wrecked the American Mulberry with heavy damage to the British one. An invasion on that day would have been a shambles.
I live in a university town of about 70k people that is adjacent to rural farming communities. The college town is 80% liberal. The surrounding communities are 60% conservative, and would be a higher percentage of conservative except for the scarcity development policies of the liberal college town with an ever expanding university population that has driven local real estate prices to the roof ($2600/mth for a crappy single bedroom apartment) and thus sent more liberals to live in surrounding communities where the real estate is a bit less expensive.
I own business in the liberal university town and the more conservative towns. I have family that live in the Midwest, and I have lived here in a blue coastal state for nearly 50 years.
I have a foot in each political culture.
Here is what I know.
The left-liberal places are filled with people that are highly educated, can speak and write well... but are more aloof and unwise. The right-conservative places that are less educated, cannot speak nor write well, but are more pragmatic, focused and wise.
My explanation for this goes back to my public school days. There were kids that didn't have the academic genes. They had to scrap and dig to make it through school with their B average. However, much of the reason is their background, DNA, personality and brain wiring was to invent, make, build, grow and fix things. In terms of social status, many of these kids dominated the nerds that participated on drama class and took AP classes to nurture their A average. But these "smarter" and "gifted" kids were insecure around those that could make and fix real things with their psychical selves... including their efforts on the sports fields.
The positive feedback loop of academic success plus the insecurity to compete with the productive-minded kids in a launched career, cause the "smarter" kids to enroll in college where they would get a credential that would be a fake tonic for their insecurity around their lacking productive skills and tendencies. Now armed with a degree and certification, and enhanced rhetorical skills, they could just denigrate those producer-class, non-college-educated people lacking their prestigious credentials and rhetorical skills.
The problem here is that the grade school nerd syndrome was a defect... an emotional, cognitive and physiological disorder that required counseling to overcome. Chronic hypersensitivity, insecurity and risk-aversion are debilitating tendencies. The schools should have been helping these kids build coping skills, resilience, self-awareness and self-confidence. The schools did not do this, and we increased the number of these kids pushed into higher learning. The information economy did open up many career paths for these people... they grew wealthy in these professional laptop class jobs despite the inability to produce anything of real value. Their careers are actually in the looting side... extracting from the productive economy powered by their producer-class status enemies.
When left liberals concentrate into a community the democratic process normalized these disorders. You can track the outcomes with real data. Every community or state dominated by liberal Democrats is a mess and in constant decline.
But there is a constant motivation of these people to control and own the productive class (we saw it explode during the destructive authoritarian power wielding of Democrats during the pandemic). They cannot accept an abundance policy approach, because that favors their human status hierarchy enemy from their grade school days.
Having been a non nerdy civil engineer, I know that you are over generalizing about people who obtain college degrees. I agree, however, that too many get degrees in subjects having little practical value and have insufficient appreciation for people who produce goods and services of real value with or without having college degrees.
Engineers are certainly the exception. Another perspective is the accountable vs unaccountable. Accountable professions are those where work is paid for only on delivery of a final product to specification. Unaccountable jobs are those pushing words and numbers on digital paper and are paid no matter what they deliver.
I have said in previous posts — not entirely in jest — that I foresee a dim future in which most people in “advanced” societies will be living in tiny apartments in high rise buildings, depending on electronic devices for both work and entertainment. I even imagine them evolving into a new species of human that I propose to call “Homo urbanis electrodependicus.” My thinking that up illustrates the value of a college degree (or not).
A trip to developing countries might help you understand that this story is rationalizing a uniquely American sense of entitlement, i.e. “I deserve to have a well-paying job whether I apply myself academically or not, and/or whether I excel early in life or not.”
This is not a belief held amongst people in China or Vietnam or South Korea–in those cultures, people do not claim to be ‘unfairly looked down on' if failures in early education and lack of performance in one’s youth make them fall behind economically. Those failures are, in fact, seen as outcomes to be ashamed of, and thus feared. That is because the people in these countries have only just recently crawled out of poverty and are very much in tune with the basic facts of the postindustrial global economy; or, more specifically, that the late 20th century’s communication technologies, similar to those of the late 19th, has globalized production and the global competition for labor, and re-anchored production in services that exist on top of basic industrial processes–thus placing a natural premium on advanced formal education. (The same happened in the 19th century, when formal training in an industrial setting gained a premium on agricultural knowledge.) That means that formally educated individuals will, on average, be favored in the labor market over those without formal educations. It’s not ‘elitism’; it’s just how the modern economy works.
It is also why, if you look at the numbers for economic output, the largest centers of production are in the urban centers with concentrated populations of these individuals.
Now, that’s not to say those that don’t excel academically early on can’t go on to ultimately be productive and successful, (especially in the relatively wealthy nations of the West) and many do; furthermore, there are indeed many cases of the formally educated not making good use of their education. Neither a lack, nor a surplus of formal educational training 100% guarantees a productive worker, and performance and experience at a job in one's industry are just as crucial, ever more so the older a worker gets. But this theory of the more educated classes being somehow ‘artificially’ valued over the less formally educated and the ‘elite’ status of the formally educated classes being some kind of mirage of psychological trauma at childhood doesn’t stand up to global scrutiny, and is invested in the false notion that you deserve to get ahead even if you make poor choices early in life and do not prepare for the economy of the 21st century. The people from poor countries who (legally) immigrate to the U.S. all tend to do very well in school starting at youth, and wind up being doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals for a reason--because they (or their parents) know firsthand that you aren’t entitled to any such thing.
Your title attributes the story to Ruy, the the China bit is written by Lauren Teixeira. Do I understand that they are not related? Google tags Lauren Teixeria as being many people. Is last name, seemingly Portuguese, common with journalism activists?
Related to that topic of scarcity vs abundance... the conflict of public policy related to this is really stupid as there are many, many lessons of excellent governance methods in place for private business. In my long corporate career I have noted two personality types and I see it represented in left/Democrat and right/Republican people. One is risk-averse and prone to pursuing perfection to the point that it is the enemy of the good. The other can be too quick to pull the trigger without enough analysis and planning.
With respect to planning, please understand that there are no useful plans, only planning.
The problem with public sector planning is that there are too many diverse stakeholders without shared common goals. That is why we have representative governance... we elected people to make the hard decisions. But there is a problem there and it is our media. The media is a fucking tabloid POS that takes each conflict and amplifies it to sell more cheap copy. This makes our politicians all risk-averse and prone to stall and deflect from making a damn decision. If they make a decision there will always be a percentage of the population upset about it. The media will latch onto that to character assassinate the politician instead of publishing thoughtful long-form pieces that inform the public about the pros and cons and why the decision was justified.
That is why people like me love Trump. Regardless if I agree or disagree with this policies, he has given a fat finger to the broken and disgusting media while they continue to amplify everything negative they can find.
Scarcity vs abundance is not a black-vs-white argument. It is a process argument. It is an argument about how to set a target goal and then move forward with an effort that includes breaking up the roadblocks and resistance impeding the goal... while either ignoring or fighting the corrupt, negative and ugly media that always gives power to the resistance. Large corporations do this all the time. Look at Musk's businesses for an example.
It is amusing if you are a Rep, and terrifying if you are a Dem, that Dems seem utterly incapable of describing 60% of the US, in a non insulting fashion. Generally speaking, Dems seem to finally grasp "uneducated" is a slur. Yet somehow, they inexplicably also believe, "less educated" is not.
Like members of the LGBTQ community marching for Palestine, a few Dem field trips would be very useful, addressing the issue. Technology is omnipresent in US industry, and those who may not have graduated college, utilize it daily. The inside of most farm equipment now resembles a spaceship. The machinery often comes with 7 figure price tags, so it stands to reason imbeciles do not operate it. Most farmers are also simultaneously hedging commodities, without the benefit of a Harvard MBA. These people are not uneducated, they are differently educated.
The men and women who bring oil out of ground and refine it to bring us light, heat, AC and transportation, often begin their careers, when they are 18 years old. Much of the work is labor intensive, but it is also complicated, which is why workers can earn well into 6 figures, before they can legally buy a beer.
The examples are endless. How many Americans can fix their own heating system in a blizzard , or revive or install an AC unit? How about repairing your car? Americans take their non washable laundry to the dry cleaner, for a reason. We do not know how to clean it, but someone else knows how to utilize chemicals, to do so. Live without the guys who pick your garbage for the month of July, and tell us again what ill educated rubes they are, and how anyone could do the job.
The crux of the Dem problem with the "less educated" is a superiority and arrogance that was once rare in the US. And like many bad ideas, it feeds on itself. Until someone produces Dems with an appreciation for the broad swath of knowledge required to make the US and the world go round, they can hold all the 6 star resort soirees they wish. It will not fix their inability to connect with young men, or anyone else, who has never set foot on a college campus.
College does not render everyone who attends a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist. For Dems, it does seem to produce an inordinate amount of people with an overly developed sense of self worth and self entitlement. Not to mention, and a near complete lack of appreciation for the skills and knowledge of others, educated in different ways.
"China cracked too many eggs, and America too few" Translated that means China consumes too little and exports too much and America consumes too much and doesn't save enough. If China, Europe and Japan buy fewer U.S. treasuries, Americans will need to buy more.
Speaking of D-Day and the weekend, it's worth marking with a comment here that over the weekend we have inched up to the precipice of normalizing the deployment of military personnel against American citizens. The order authorizing this, unlike all previous such orders, is not localized--i.e., "we are going to deploy the national guard in Los Angeles" a la Bush in 1992--but is meant to apply "at locations where protests against these functions are occurring *or are likely to occur* based on current threat assessments and planned operations," allowing for a totally open-ended deployment where the troops can be sent anywhere as long the Secretary of Defense rubber stamps it, and the number of them can be increased to any number the President pleases.
One hopes that it doesn't escalate any further, but you'd have to completely disregard everything else Trump has done if you think he'd have some sort of natural compunction with invoking the Insurrection Act and staging his own mini-D-Day against American citizens, completing the natural progression we've seen underway since his inauguration, when he began claiming the nation was "under attack by insurrectionists and seditionists" because it has a lot of illegal immigrants living in it. (you'd also have to be completely blind to not take note that similarly aggressive tactics are being deployed in red states) Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point where, so long as he posts "this is necessary to STOP THE INVASION OF OUR NATION BY ILLEGAL WAR CRIMINALS" somewhere on Truth Social, Congressional Republicans and a high percentage of his supporters will believe it and run with it.
What the American soldiers were fighting on D-Day wasn't born in 1939, it was born in 1933, when people were too distracted, too angry at foreigners and squabbling politicians, and too blase about authoritarianism to say "alright, that's too far." We forget at our peril.
Had D-Day not occurred on the scheduled day, the backup was June 20. That was the day of the great Channel storm that was not predicted and wrecked the American Mulberry with heavy damage to the British one. An invasion on that day would have been a shambles.
I live in a university town of about 70k people that is adjacent to rural farming communities. The college town is 80% liberal. The surrounding communities are 60% conservative, and would be a higher percentage of conservative except for the scarcity development policies of the liberal college town with an ever expanding university population that has driven local real estate prices to the roof ($2600/mth for a crappy single bedroom apartment) and thus sent more liberals to live in surrounding communities where the real estate is a bit less expensive.
I own business in the liberal university town and the more conservative towns. I have family that live in the Midwest, and I have lived here in a blue coastal state for nearly 50 years.
I have a foot in each political culture.
Here is what I know.
The left-liberal places are filled with people that are highly educated, can speak and write well... but are more aloof and unwise. The right-conservative places that are less educated, cannot speak nor write well, but are more pragmatic, focused and wise.
My explanation for this goes back to my public school days. There were kids that didn't have the academic genes. They had to scrap and dig to make it through school with their B average. However, much of the reason is their background, DNA, personality and brain wiring was to invent, make, build, grow and fix things. In terms of social status, many of these kids dominated the nerds that participated on drama class and took AP classes to nurture their A average. But these "smarter" and "gifted" kids were insecure around those that could make and fix real things with their psychical selves... including their efforts on the sports fields.
The positive feedback loop of academic success plus the insecurity to compete with the productive-minded kids in a launched career, cause the "smarter" kids to enroll in college where they would get a credential that would be a fake tonic for their insecurity around their lacking productive skills and tendencies. Now armed with a degree and certification, and enhanced rhetorical skills, they could just denigrate those producer-class, non-college-educated people lacking their prestigious credentials and rhetorical skills.
The problem here is that the grade school nerd syndrome was a defect... an emotional, cognitive and physiological disorder that required counseling to overcome. Chronic hypersensitivity, insecurity and risk-aversion are debilitating tendencies. The schools should have been helping these kids build coping skills, resilience, self-awareness and self-confidence. The schools did not do this, and we increased the number of these kids pushed into higher learning. The information economy did open up many career paths for these people... they grew wealthy in these professional laptop class jobs despite the inability to produce anything of real value. Their careers are actually in the looting side... extracting from the productive economy powered by their producer-class status enemies.
When left liberals concentrate into a community the democratic process normalized these disorders. You can track the outcomes with real data. Every community or state dominated by liberal Democrats is a mess and in constant decline.
But there is a constant motivation of these people to control and own the productive class (we saw it explode during the destructive authoritarian power wielding of Democrats during the pandemic). They cannot accept an abundance policy approach, because that favors their human status hierarchy enemy from their grade school days.
Having been a non nerdy civil engineer, I know that you are over generalizing about people who obtain college degrees. I agree, however, that too many get degrees in subjects having little practical value and have insufficient appreciation for people who produce goods and services of real value with or without having college degrees.
Engineers are certainly the exception. Another perspective is the accountable vs unaccountable. Accountable professions are those where work is paid for only on delivery of a final product to specification. Unaccountable jobs are those pushing words and numbers on digital paper and are paid no matter what they deliver.
I have said in previous posts — not entirely in jest — that I foresee a dim future in which most people in “advanced” societies will be living in tiny apartments in high rise buildings, depending on electronic devices for both work and entertainment. I even imagine them evolving into a new species of human that I propose to call “Homo urbanis electrodependicus.” My thinking that up illustrates the value of a college degree (or not).
A trip to developing countries might help you understand that this story is rationalizing a uniquely American sense of entitlement, i.e. “I deserve to have a well-paying job whether I apply myself academically or not, and/or whether I excel early in life or not.”
This is not a belief held amongst people in China or Vietnam or South Korea–in those cultures, people do not claim to be ‘unfairly looked down on' if failures in early education and lack of performance in one’s youth make them fall behind economically. Those failures are, in fact, seen as outcomes to be ashamed of, and thus feared. That is because the people in these countries have only just recently crawled out of poverty and are very much in tune with the basic facts of the postindustrial global economy; or, more specifically, that the late 20th century’s communication technologies, similar to those of the late 19th, has globalized production and the global competition for labor, and re-anchored production in services that exist on top of basic industrial processes–thus placing a natural premium on advanced formal education. (The same happened in the 19th century, when formal training in an industrial setting gained a premium on agricultural knowledge.) That means that formally educated individuals will, on average, be favored in the labor market over those without formal educations. It’s not ‘elitism’; it’s just how the modern economy works.
It is also why, if you look at the numbers for economic output, the largest centers of production are in the urban centers with concentrated populations of these individuals.
Now, that’s not to say those that don’t excel academically early on can’t go on to ultimately be productive and successful, (especially in the relatively wealthy nations of the West) and many do; furthermore, there are indeed many cases of the formally educated not making good use of their education. Neither a lack, nor a surplus of formal educational training 100% guarantees a productive worker, and performance and experience at a job in one's industry are just as crucial, ever more so the older a worker gets. But this theory of the more educated classes being somehow ‘artificially’ valued over the less formally educated and the ‘elite’ status of the formally educated classes being some kind of mirage of psychological trauma at childhood doesn’t stand up to global scrutiny, and is invested in the false notion that you deserve to get ahead even if you make poor choices early in life and do not prepare for the economy of the 21st century. The people from poor countries who (legally) immigrate to the U.S. all tend to do very well in school starting at youth, and wind up being doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals for a reason--because they (or their parents) know firsthand that you aren’t entitled to any such thing.
Your title attributes the story to Ruy, the the China bit is written by Lauren Teixeira. Do I understand that they are not related? Google tags Lauren Teixeria as being many people. Is last name, seemingly Portuguese, common with journalism activists?
Related to that topic of scarcity vs abundance... the conflict of public policy related to this is really stupid as there are many, many lessons of excellent governance methods in place for private business. In my long corporate career I have noted two personality types and I see it represented in left/Democrat and right/Republican people. One is risk-averse and prone to pursuing perfection to the point that it is the enemy of the good. The other can be too quick to pull the trigger without enough analysis and planning.
With respect to planning, please understand that there are no useful plans, only planning.
The problem with public sector planning is that there are too many diverse stakeholders without shared common goals. That is why we have representative governance... we elected people to make the hard decisions. But there is a problem there and it is our media. The media is a fucking tabloid POS that takes each conflict and amplifies it to sell more cheap copy. This makes our politicians all risk-averse and prone to stall and deflect from making a damn decision. If they make a decision there will always be a percentage of the population upset about it. The media will latch onto that to character assassinate the politician instead of publishing thoughtful long-form pieces that inform the public about the pros and cons and why the decision was justified.
That is why people like me love Trump. Regardless if I agree or disagree with this policies, he has given a fat finger to the broken and disgusting media while they continue to amplify everything negative they can find.
Scarcity vs abundance is not a black-vs-white argument. It is a process argument. It is an argument about how to set a target goal and then move forward with an effort that includes breaking up the roadblocks and resistance impeding the goal... while either ignoring or fighting the corrupt, negative and ugly media that always gives power to the resistance. Large corporations do this all the time. Look at Musk's businesses for an example.
It is amusing if you are a Rep, and terrifying if you are a Dem, that Dems seem utterly incapable of describing 60% of the US, in a non insulting fashion. Generally speaking, Dems seem to finally grasp "uneducated" is a slur. Yet somehow, they inexplicably also believe, "less educated" is not.
Like members of the LGBTQ community marching for Palestine, a few Dem field trips would be very useful, addressing the issue. Technology is omnipresent in US industry, and those who may not have graduated college, utilize it daily. The inside of most farm equipment now resembles a spaceship. The machinery often comes with 7 figure price tags, so it stands to reason imbeciles do not operate it. Most farmers are also simultaneously hedging commodities, without the benefit of a Harvard MBA. These people are not uneducated, they are differently educated.
The men and women who bring oil out of ground and refine it to bring us light, heat, AC and transportation, often begin their careers, when they are 18 years old. Much of the work is labor intensive, but it is also complicated, which is why workers can earn well into 6 figures, before they can legally buy a beer.
The examples are endless. How many Americans can fix their own heating system in a blizzard , or revive or install an AC unit? How about repairing your car? Americans take their non washable laundry to the dry cleaner, for a reason. We do not know how to clean it, but someone else knows how to utilize chemicals, to do so. Live without the guys who pick your garbage for the month of July, and tell us again what ill educated rubes they are, and how anyone could do the job.
The crux of the Dem problem with the "less educated" is a superiority and arrogance that was once rare in the US. And like many bad ideas, it feeds on itself. Until someone produces Dems with an appreciation for the broad swath of knowledge required to make the US and the world go round, they can hold all the 6 star resort soirees they wish. It will not fix their inability to connect with young men, or anyone else, who has never set foot on a college campus.
College does not render everyone who attends a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist. For Dems, it does seem to produce an inordinate amount of people with an overly developed sense of self worth and self entitlement. Not to mention, and a near complete lack of appreciation for the skills and knowledge of others, educated in different ways.
"China cracked too many eggs, and America too few" Translated that means China consumes too little and exports too much and America consumes too much and doesn't save enough. If China, Europe and Japan buy fewer U.S. treasuries, Americans will need to buy more.
Speaking of D-Day and the weekend, it's worth marking with a comment here that over the weekend we have inched up to the precipice of normalizing the deployment of military personnel against American citizens. The order authorizing this, unlike all previous such orders, is not localized--i.e., "we are going to deploy the national guard in Los Angeles" a la Bush in 1992--but is meant to apply "at locations where protests against these functions are occurring *or are likely to occur* based on current threat assessments and planned operations," allowing for a totally open-ended deployment where the troops can be sent anywhere as long the Secretary of Defense rubber stamps it, and the number of them can be increased to any number the President pleases.
One hopes that it doesn't escalate any further, but you'd have to completely disregard everything else Trump has done if you think he'd have some sort of natural compunction with invoking the Insurrection Act and staging his own mini-D-Day against American citizens, completing the natural progression we've seen underway since his inauguration, when he began claiming the nation was "under attack by insurrectionists and seditionists" because it has a lot of illegal immigrants living in it. (you'd also have to be completely blind to not take note that similarly aggressive tactics are being deployed in red states) Unfortunately, it has gotten to the point where, so long as he posts "this is necessary to STOP THE INVASION OF OUR NATION BY ILLEGAL WAR CRIMINALS" somewhere on Truth Social, Congressional Republicans and a high percentage of his supporters will believe it and run with it.
What the American soldiers were fighting on D-Day wasn't born in 1939, it was born in 1933, when people were too distracted, too angry at foreigners and squabbling politicians, and too blase about authoritarianism to say "alright, that's too far." We forget at our peril.
Who cares about NOAA? What is "hurricane season?" Let it blow,let it let it blow, let it blow!