Add FedEx and Home Depot to the list of who are trickling down

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: nwtrucker
Yeour right!! It is unfair.

Abou 50% under this tax plan don't pay any taxes..

The tax plan I prefer would have zero corporate taxes, everything would be run through income taxes with zero deductions and follow a simple formula.

Amount you made/Amount entire country made * that years federal budget. If you make 1% of the income in the country, you pay 1% of the budget. If you made 1/1 billion of the income, then you pay 1/1 billion of the budget.

For what it's worth, an interesting twist. There's some tweaks that would have to be made, especially in capital gains area and corporations. Still an outside the envelop idea!

originally posted by: SgtHamsandwich

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: nwtrucker

Is Fed Ex or Home Depot going to reduce prices to the consumer for goods and services? Is the gubmet going to decrease sales tax any, at all?

Which is a better system?

Gubment takes more of my money that I worked for directly and I can't buy goods I need to live.

OR

Gubment lets me have more of my hard earned money and I can buy goods that I need to live and they end up getting their money in sales tax anyway?

I think you are confused on the difference between sales tax and income tax.

They are completely different things and go to completely different entities. unless you are just comparing state income tax and sales tax, but you didn't specify that.

originally posted by: watchitburn
a reply to: nwtrucker

Meanwhile, leftist States that tax the crap out of their citizens already are trying to sue to get the new Tax Bill thrown out.
I'm sure that will go over well with voters.

3 Northeast states to sue feds over GOP's tax overhaul plan

Well my my, suddenly Democrats don't like getting rid of deductions and loopholes... oh that's right, they thought it would only be the rich 1% who would get slammed.

a reply to: nwtrucker

Agreed on the slippery slope argument. The whole point of making people still have to work for what they get seems lost on some, but it is critically important in making any such program succeed. That's why you start with high school GPAs and work up from there. Associates should require at least a 3.5 GPA to continue, Bachelors a 3.25 GPA, and Masters/Doctorate a 3.0 GPA. That's not a declining standard either. I breezed through Bachelors with a 3.9, but Masters is giving me trouble maintaining a 3.25.

The second chance option I mentioned would need to be harder than the main route... something similar to a GED or SAT test, very very difficult, but available to get back into the program.

I can also see a separate certification for universities to be able to participate. No Mickey Mouse stuff... if you aren't turning out Grads who can positively affect the industry, you can't play with the freebies.

In the end, it helps a nation to have the best and brightest producing. I know to most people having the title "Dr." means little more than arrogance, but it is those supposedly arrogant folks who drive the technology. Without them,we would have precious little of the modern conveniences and industry we have today, and the move away from higher degrees is in large part why we are losing ground academically and economically to the rest of the world.

TheRedneck

originally posted by: TheRedneck
Agreed on the slippery slope argument. The whole point of making people still have to work for what they get seems lost on some, but it is critically important in making any such program succeed. That's why you start with high school GPAs and work up from there. Associates should require at least a 3.5 GPA to continue, Bachelors a 3.25 GPA, and Masters/Doctorate a 3.0 GPA. That's not a declining standard either. I breezed through Bachelors with a 3.9, but Masters is giving me trouble maintaining a 3.25.

The problem here is that some schools practice grade inflation, others practice deflation, and GPA is not treated equally between schools, even programs have different standards because some professors are known for easy A's and others make it a practice to only give out two grades, D- and F. GPA is simply not an easily transferable metric. On top of that, I don't see why GPA is all that important when it literally has no bearing on ones ability to get a job. The only jobs that ever ask for GPA are a handful of intern/new grad positions, and beyond that no one even cares... it's not even proper to disclose.

a reply to: TheRedneck


As usual, good points...your muddying my line in the sand...dammit..LOL

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: TheRedneck
Agreed on the slippery slope argument. The whole point of making people still have to work for what they get seems lost on some, but it is critically important in making any such program succeed. That's why you start with high school GPAs and work up from there. Associates should require at least a 3.5 GPA to continue, Bachelors a 3.25 GPA, and Masters/Doctorate a 3.0 GPA. That's not a declining standard either. I breezed through Bachelors with a 3.9, but Masters is giving me trouble maintaining a 3.25.

The problem here is that some schools practice grade inflation, others practice deflation, and GPA is not treated equally between schools, even programs have different standards because some professors are known for easy A's and others make it a practice to only give out two grades, D- and F. GPA is simply not an easily transferable metric. On top of that, I don't see why GPA is all that important when it literally has no bearing on ones ability to get a job. The only jobs that ever ask for GPA are a handful of intern/new grad positions, and beyond that no one even cares... it's not even proper to disclose.

GPA is a measurement, lacking anything better. What other bar would be more useful in evaluating retention ability?

GPA isn't used in the job market due to a 'little' better one is already used. it's called a diploma. Hmmm, that one sucks , too....

this is all bs, these companies all post record profits every year meanwhile none of their employees get a share of the wealth

it's total bs

originally posted by: toysforadults
this is all bs, these companies all post record profits every year meanwhile none of their employees get a share of the wealth

it's total bs

Then don't work for these companies. Start your own.

Your 'BS' is reality.

You want to change the way things are done? Come up with a better one. By evidence, none of the alternatives suggested has had any broad success.

originally posted by: nwtrucker
GPA is a measurement, lacking anything better. What other bar would be more useful in evaluating retention ability?

GPA isn't used in the job market due to a 'little' better one is already used. it's called a diploma. Hmmm, that one sucks , too....

Why measure it at all? Not everyone has to be a superstar, and you can eliminate a lot of administrative work, not to mention regulations, and biased teaching practices by simply not using it as a metric.

The best metrics to use are job placement rates and graduation rates. For example, in the program I'm about to finish we have one instructor, he teaches approximately 9 of the 22 in major classes you take. This professor takes pride in having the lowest pass rate of any instructor at the university. He gives out two grades, D- and F (the actual practice is that everyone fails, and he curves a few people up to D-). As a result, if you graduate you will have at minimum 9 D-'s on your transcript, which out of 120 credit hours means that even if you get an A in every other class your maximum possible GPA is 3.332. Most likely you will not get a perfect score in every class.

In other metrics, our program has about an 8% graduation rate. However, depending on the year we have between a 95% and 100% job placement rate within 6 months of graduation. About 50% obtain actual degree related jobs in their final year before even graduating. We've even been known to have major companies come in and offer the entire graduating class good jobs.

Basically, rather than regulate the student it makes far more sense to use program statistics, and regulate the programs. If you just give people subsidized college for good grades, you aren't actually doing anything to require that useful classes/programs get promoted. Instead you just promote passing students with high marks in order to continue funding.

Free college would be my preferred solution, but another solution that I believe could work is to eliminate federal student loans and instead make the universities themselves responsible for giving students their loan money. By making the university accountable, you could bring back bankruptcy protections and give them skin in the game because they would be financially reliant on graduating people into jobs that could repay the loans. Uncompetitive programs would cost them money. The other advantage to this, is that it would force colleges to compete with each other on loan terms as well as cost.

a reply to: nwtrucker

As an addendum to my previous post I want to share an article I recently read. This article isn't new (it was posted in 2007) but the problem has gotten worse and this gives a small introduction to it, and it's more evidence as to why I don't believe GPA or degree based qualifications are a good metric to determine funding.

blog.codinghorror.com...

Note that these applicants have degrees. Many are from good universities, and it includes those with a masters or doctorate. They cannot perform simple tasks, this is a very common problem for computer science related positions. There's a test mentioned in the article called FizzBuzz which is famous for being a simple question to answer yet 95% of graduates cannot answer it. The question is fairly simple, take a list of numbers from 1 to 100, print out that number, if the number is divisible by 3 print fizz, if by 5 print buzz, if by 3 and 5 print fizzbuzz instead of the number. This question and some other simple ones, weed out so many degreed applicants that companies cannot find the people they need and this is consistent across the entire spectrum of GPA's. People with 4.0 GPA's do not pass this question more often than people with 2.0's, if anything it's actually the opposite.

I'm still new to the whole hiring process, I've only done a few interviews for work but I've seen this first hand. I've interviewed many people that I know can program when guided by an instructor (and I know this because I attended classes with them), but if I give them something to solve on their own they can't do it. For example, one of the technical questions I ask is to give me pseudocode (basically a description of the process, you don't even have to write actual code) to take a sentence and change it to alternating caps LiKe ThIs. So far I am 3/7 on this question.

Relating to the other issue, when I was in community college a problem I saw first hand by a school that had just lost it's subsidies (state budget cutbacks with the 2008 crash) was that everything became a numbers game to them. Gen ed's that had lots of students and could guarantee enrollment were allowed to fail students, but most progams had to maintain numbers to keep the classes going, and were therefore unable to fail students or even give them below a C- and the deeper you went into the program, the more reliant they were on passing you in order to ensure the next class in the sequence would have the numbers to run. That's not a good way to run a university, but that's what happens when you make funding contingent on enrollment. Grade schools have run into a similar issue with No Child Left Behind where grades cease to mean anything because the regulations look at nothing other than the percent of passing grades given, and the rise in grades over the school year.

a reply to: Aazadan

In the day, I had similar responsibilities.

I tend to apply 'KISS' to these things. No matter what the criteria is, such as corporate or merely a mom and pop operation. Your going to qualify them no matter what yardstick is used for initial screening.

So why introduce another system which will develop it's own issues and be subject to creative individuals working around, through or with it?

Fine to pass ideas around, but a lot of bright idea/fixes end up with new issues to deal with.

I'd bet you'd end up with the very same way checking people out as you are now. Just saying.

a reply to: nwtrucker

I'm sure issues would arise with any of my suggestions. I do believe they would work better than the current systems though. In particular I like the college funding idea because it would use the market to secure better terms for students, as well as use the market to push better programs through the schools. I've been a career student for a long time, I've seen all the issues... and I think this could fix a lot of them.

I have some catching up to do... everyone please bear with me.

a reply to: Aazadan

The problem here is that some schools practice grade inflation, others practice deflation, and GPA is not treated equally between schools, even programs have different standards because some professors are known for easy A's and others make it a practice to only give out two grades, D- and F. GPA is simply not an easily transferable metric. On top of that, I don't see why GPA is all that important when it literally has no bearing on ones ability to get a job. The only jobs that ever ask for GPA are a handful of intern/new grad positions, and beyond that no one even cares... it's not even proper to disclose.

Yes, all that is true. That is precisely why I suggested earlier a certification in addition to accreditation... a college or university would still have their accreditation, but in order to get students under the government funding proposal would also have to be certified by the program.

It's not a perfect solution; I don't think a perfect solution exists. There are indeed professors who simply try to pass everyone, and those who rarely if ever give out good grades. I have had both, and I see no way to really solve this discrepancy. But until someone does figure out a way to accurately determine a quantifiable metric for performance, it's the best we can do.

Getting a job is also not the ultimate yardstick. Contributing to the industry is much better, but also harder to quantify.

TheRedneck

a reply to: toysforadults

this is all bs, these companies all post record profits every year meanwhile none of their employees get a share of the wealth

Do you have any proof that employees are not getting paid? Please forward it to the Department of Labor if you do. I know from personal experience that those boys get very troublesome if a company fails to provide the paycheck agreed to.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Aazadan

Basically, rather than regulate the student it makes far more sense to use program statistics, and regulate the programs. If you just give people subsidized college for good grades, you aren't actually doing anything to require that useful classes/programs get promoted. Instead you just promote passing students with high marks in order to continue funding.

I agree with this. The programs must be regulated, and could potentially be targeted to promote industries expected to grow in the future. Again, though, we need some metric to determine if a student is actually working toward a better life and success, or if they are just coasting through to get the government support. I have no problem whatsoever with tax dollars going to benefit those who try to improve themselves, but I have much issue with supporting people who simply prefer getting handouts to trying to make their own way.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Free college would be my preferred solution, but another solution that I believe could work is to eliminate federal student loans and instead make the universities themselves responsible for giving students their loan money. By making the university accountable, you could bring back bankruptcy protections and give them skin in the game because they would be financially reliant on graduating people into jobs that could repay the loans. Uncompetitive programs would cost them money. The other advantage to this, is that it would force colleges to compete with each other on loan terms as well as cost.

I do have issues with this.

Colleges are not banks. Banks specialize in providing loans to individuals and companies based on expectation of repayment, and they are generally very good at it. Colleges and universities specialize in teaching students in various disciplines; indeed, most colleges and universities specialize to some extent in which programs they prefer to teach. UAH, for example, is an engineering school. They specialize in teaching engineering (and to a slightly lesser degree, physics). Fully half of the university is devoted to engineering and physics; the other half is administration, nursing, business, liberal arts, general studies, housing, etc. If you force them to handle banking as well, you reduce their ability to teach. If you then place them at high risk by allowing easy bankruptcy, you degrade their income and place poorer students at a disadvantage.

You also further turn the school into an industrial assembly line for churning out clones of students instead of free thinkers who can make advances in their fields. That is one of the problems with our educational system already, and does not need to be expanded.

TheRedneck

a reply to: Aazadan

Note that these applicants have degrees. Many are from good universities, and it includes those with a masters or doctorate. They cannot perform simple tasks, this is a very common problem for computer science related positions.

That is another issue, and not really the fault of the universities as much as it is the fault of society. I call it a lack of common sense, but that is colloquial; it is really a lack of application experience.

An example from a recent project: the goal was to build a simple demo unit for a video presentation. I needed to flash some LEDs in various patterns, and it was no issue if the flashing was done by an operator off-camera. I could have worked up complete code for a microprocessor and set up a wireless link sending encoded signals... that is what I would do for a final unit... but it wasn't necessary. Instead, I made a small control box with ten switches, each one establishing a different pattern. The operator simply flipped each switch in order, and 1N4148 diodes did the encoding and decoding. Instead of a wireless link or a specialized cable or a fancy data transfer protocol, I did a quick Google search and realized that a common HDMI cable could carry the information unencoded. The cables are also common, inexpensive, and easily available in various lengths as needed. I built the entire unit in a day, used it, and disassembled it to reuse the parts. It would have taken a week or so and cost ten times as much to do the job "by the book."

That's application experience, and something that cannot be taught in a school. It has to be taught through experience. Our society has gotten away from the idea of giving children experience and forced them to try and compete unprepared with adults who have experience. In my day, I had to haul hay and mow yards to make a few dollars; there was no allowance and certainly not a family credit card. After I graduated high school, I moved to construction work until I could find a job in my chosen field. Along the way I learned things that could not have been put into a book... how to analyze a situation and determine the easiest way to resolve the issue.

Today, if a child wants to work on a farm during the summer, there are child labor laws that make it more trouble for a farmer than it's worth. That's not to say those laws are not needed for their original purpose (sweatshops), but rather to say they went too far and caused harm in one area by eliminating harm in another. They stopped the exploitation of children, but in doing so prevented children from learning how to be better adults.

The insurance companies have known for a very long time that people below age 25 were statistically more apt to be involved in preventable accidents than those over age 25... today we know why. The human brain does not complete development until around age 25. The last section to develop is the one that deals with forethought and insight, the two areas primarily concerned with application experience. Yet, we prevent children from learning the lessons they need during that critical, limited development time because instead of doing something real, they are to spend their time studying books. Books are good, but kids need to be kids as well... there are many lessons that are not contained in 12-point Calibri type between cover pages.

TheRedneck

originally posted by: TheRedneck
I agree with this. The programs must be regulated, and could potentially be targeted to promote industries expected to grow in the future. Again, though, we need some metric to determine if a student is actually working toward a better life and success, or if they are just coasting through to get the government support. I have no problem whatsoever with tax dollars going to benefit those who try to improve themselves, but I have much issue with supporting people who simply prefer getting handouts to trying to make their own way.

If you look at job placement statistics of graduates you'll naturally be able to curb programs without additional rules. As a program becomes less viable, placement statistics decline.

originally posted by: TheRedneck
You also further turn the school into an industrial assembly line for churning out clones of students instead of free thinkers who can make advances in their fields. That is one of the problems with our educational system already, and does not need to be expanded.

We've gone over this before, free thinkers who make advances are the best, but the reality is that not everyone is going to do that. If the top 10% can advance a field and the other 90% are able to work in the field, that wouldn't be a bad thing. One thing I'm learning more and more is that making something new often times involves the current work not getting done, in order to spend time developing a new idea. So both are needed.

a reply to: Aazadan

If you look at job placement statistics of graduates you'll naturally be able to curb programs without additional rules. As a program becomes less viable, placement statistics decline.

For purposes of program need, I agree. Some measure should be given to future instead of purely present needs, but overall placement would be a good metric for the aspect of need.

We've gone over this before, free thinkers who make advances are the best, but the reality is that not everyone is going to do that. If the top 10% can advance a field and the other 90% are able to work in the field, that wouldn't be a bad thing. One thing I'm learning more and more is that making something new often times involves the current work not getting done, in order to spend time developing a new idea. So both are needed.

Both are needed, but it is the free thinkers who we need to concentrate on. Simple market economics will adjust the labor field to accommodate economic need changes, albeit slower than optimal. Free thinkers actually spur the market and promote development of new technologies to support the classical workers, and thus are more of a driving force behind industry expansion.

In addition, free thinkers typically do worse in terms of traditional job metrics than classical workers. More job opportunities exist for production and development of existing technologies. That is where government grants and research organizations (such as NASA) come into play. They hire the free thinkers and spend the time, money, and risk to spur new technology. Private industry, as a general rule, does not. There's too little opportunity for immediate profit and too much inherent risk.

I should also mention that, as usual, my mind immediately goes to areas around my chosen field, research and development. There are many, many areas of study that have limited room for such research and would of course be given towards a different set of metrics.

TheRedneck

originally posted by: TheRedneck
Private industry, as a general rule, does not. There's too little opportunity for immediate profit and too much inherent risk.

I should also mention that, as usual, my mind immediately goes to areas around my chosen field, research and development. There are many, many areas of study that have limited room for such research and would of course be given towards a different set of metrics.

I don't know about that. I can only base this off of what I've read, my experiences, and people in industries that I've talked to but there is a lot of private industry investment. For example, my job is VR/AR development. This is an area that has immense corporate interest right now, and these technologies are being marketed all over the place in all sorts of ways. There are thousands of jobs out there right now working in this field because corporations want to invest, innovate, and strike it rich:

Casinos have started using AR technology in slot machines to make more immersive experiences.
Board rooms are using AR glasses to virtualize meetings.
Walmart is moving employee training to VR.
Surgeon training is using VR as a safer alternative.
Games are using both.
AR/VR hardware providers are also rapidly expanding. I see a new device being marketed pretty much every single week.

Everywhere I look I see immense corporate driven demand.

NASA is a little different because they're purely research. Few corporations are purely research, they need a plan to monetize their developments, where as NASA doesn't really monetize, instead it can look into areas that are currently unprofitable, and blaze a trail so that others can profit later. That tends to be the case with scientific endeavors, but that doesn't mean the only way to develop a market is to make something new. Refining a design and improving on it also takes a lot of work, and that's where corporations shine.