I fear what the results form a survey in the US would find…

I think most are designed to create a more compliant employee.

Thus is exactly it. The diploma is proof that you’re willing to play the game and become a debtor and can be squeezed - HARD - because of it.

Or, as a friend found out the reality of the situation… often employers don’t give a shit about the degree if you can do what you say you can.

Have an acquaintance that started clerking in the northeast for a small company that maintained it’s own mail server. One Windows update later, the mail server collapsed and no one could sort it. Acquaintance managed to fix it in a handful of hours and became the company IT guy.

A decade later he moves to California and finds a job running a mail server for a company doing battlefield simulations for the DOD during Desert Storm.

No degree needed, just can you keep the mail servers up and secure? Sure. No problem. Used that experience to eventually land even better jobs in IT.

Its the skill sets that matter most often. The people that focus on degrees are focusing on the leveraged nature of the fresh faced kids coming out of schools - they can be run like tops while they’re still paying off the loans. And they are.

You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.

Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a “field house” built in the 40’s and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.

60+ years later, it’s all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias “dining halls” now… and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.

Thing is, it’s been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.

The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.

This is part of why I’ve been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen’s program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they’re 20.

And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it’s gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.

Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980…

Get pictures when they arrive!

Startpage! No shit. Used to be Ixquick, and I used that for years. Great site - thank you for reminding me it’s still there. :)

http://tenbluelinks.org/.

Will cut the AI results out of your google searches by switching the browser’s default to the web api…

I cannot tell you how much I love it.

Oh wow! Yeah, that’s a gorgeous animal!

Thank you for sharing those beautiful pictures!

If you ever get a chance to see any of his works in a gallery or museum… do it! The colors glow like nothing you’ve seen.

When I was little, I had an aunt that had one of the prints called Ecstasy - from 1929 - in her home.

Faded and of course stained (even though it was under glass) from the chain smoking she did.

It was one of her most cherished things, so I learned everything she knew about Parrish - she had an encyclopedic book on his technique which I read from cover to cover and as I got older, I tried my hand at glazing - a fierce technique of layering transparent and translucent color onto panel or canvas.

Each color separated by a clear coat so you look into the image, like stained glass, layers deep.

Years later, there was a comprehensive show of his pieces that came to the Currier Museum in New Hampshire (early 90’s IIRC) and I got tickets for myself and auntie…

I got to his most famous image - Daybreak - and the colors in it are beyond anything that any online photos show.

Not even the NY Lithographic Society that initially had rights to the image come close.

Pinks and magentas in the trees that frame the image that take your breath away. I stood in front of that painting for a good 15 minutes and have the colors burned into my mind.

At some point, if I can find a good enough high-res copy, I’m going to try my hand at doing a CMYK color separation of the image (with Photoshop or GIMP) and readjust to what it actually looks like. No one’s gotten it right. I’ve always been a bit of a colorist and zoom in on tint, tone and shade, so this challenge is one that hits my artistic monkeybone, big time.

I won’t even get into the landscapes of the New Hampshire winters and the evening light he recreated in those images. You can fall into them.

Definitely, again, if you ever get a chance to see a real Parrish… do it. It’s absolute magic.

Could you post a few? I’d love to see them!

Maxfield Parrish’s use of color theory and it’s application in his glazed paintings made using most often (esp. for commercial works made for print) cyan, magenta, hansa yellow and lamp black pigments in a translucent medium.

I have a cup of coffee (milk, no sugar) two fried eggs and a piece of buttered toast.

I’d say Elon Musk. He threw how many millions at Trump’s presidential run thinking Don would return the favor once he was president…

So how’d that work out for you, Elon?

This place (old.lemmy.zip) is downright chill. Then again, I just came off Reddit (after 14 years there…) and that is in full rage-bait algorithm-driven meltdown. Feels like Reddit in 2010 here. Just lovely…

Ignorance… it’s an apt word here…

YOU! YOU are the one that left the frigging banana in the microwave w/o telling me?

The fucking thing rotted and became a fruit fly farm… When I went to heat my leftovers, last Friday… I released the swarm o’doom!

BASTARD! I curse theeeEeeEe for eternity!

Yup! Pull down a torrent of a current season broadcast TV show and check out how long it isn’t.

52 minutes was the length of shows in the 60s and 70’s. This is why it’s almost impossible to see uncut episodes of the original Star Trek on a cable channel, let alone a broadcast one…

It was already all but impossible to find when I cut the cord in '99.

Looking at the commercial TV cable channels - I have the first 8 seasons of The Walking Dead… they run from 43 to 51 minutes in length (though the longer ones appeared in the 8th season (?) - was that when the channels started overlaying ads during the credit rolls? I know that’s a thing.)

There are many spiderbros… we are legion!

I cut the cable TV cord in 1999. For whatever movies/TV we’ve wanted to watch, we’ve just gone to our public library to get DVDs and later on, streamed stuff.

uBO in all the browsers as well.

If you make a concerted effort, you can de-TV the household and it takes little time to find ways pick up on watching the things you like - w/o commercial interruption… I could not imagine watching an evening of broadcast TV.

Given that the average show is now 40 minutes long - thats an hour of commercials between the 3 primetime hours of 8 and 11 pm.

I’m not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.

Fuck that shit.

This was me with beer. Gave it up over 15 years ago, as what was making me feel shitty about it was putting out the recycling bin filled with beer bottles and cans… and realizing just how much money I was spending on something that was doing nothing good for me. Stopped drinking in 2009 and don’t miss it a bit. Saving a lot more money as well…