#Corporate Learning Management System Market

[aimarketresearch]

Corporate Learning Management System Market Size, Share, Trends, Industry Growth and Competitive Outlook

Global Corporate Learning Management System Market' the new research report adds in Data Bridge Market Research's reports database. This Research Report spread across 329 Page, 53 No of Tables, And 244 No of Figures with summarizing Top companies, with tables and figures. The Corporate Learning Management System market research report presents a comprehensive study on production capacity, consumption, import and export for all the major regions across the world. By keeping in mind the end user's point of view, a team of researchers, forecasters, analysts and industry expert's work in-depth to formulate this Corporate Learning Management System market research report.

Corporate Learning Management System Market research report provides data and information about the scenario of  industry which makes it easy to be ahead of the competition in today's speedily altering business environment. Analytical study of this market report aids in formulating growth strategies to augment sales and build brand image in the market. The report underlines historic data along with future forecast and detailed analysis on a global, local and regional level. The winning Corporate Learning Management System Market report also takes into account an analysis of existing major challenges faced by the business and the probable future challenges that the business may have to face while operating in this market.

Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the corporate learning management system market will exhibit a CAGR of 26.3% for the forecast period of 2022-2029.

Corporate learning management system is that variety of system that is most popular by firms to coach their workers. It provides varied on-line materials so it will simply manage employees' progress also as monitor their performance what is more it will analyse skills gap analysis with providing pre-testing.

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Key points covered in the report: -

The pivotal aspect considered in the global Corporate Learning Management System Market report consists of the major competitors functioning in the global market.

The report includes profiles of companies with prominent positions in the global market.

The sales, corporate strategies and technical capabilities of key manufacturers are also mentioned in the report.

The driving factors for the growth of the global Corporate Learning Management System Market are thoroughly explained along with in-depth descriptions of the industry end users.

The report also elucidates important application segments of the global market to readers/users.

This report performs a SWOT analysis of the market. In the final section, the report recalls the sentiments and perspectives of industry-prepared and trained experts.

The experts also evaluate the export/import policies that might propel the growth of the Global Corporate Learning Management System Market.

The Global Corporate Learning Management System Market report provides valuable information for policymakers, investors, stakeholders, service providers, producers, suppliers, and organizations operating in the industry and looking to purchase this research document.

Table of Content:

Part 01: Executive Summary

Part 02: Scope of the Report

Part 03: Global Corporate Learning Management System Market Landscape

Part 04: Global Corporate Learning Management System Market Sizing

Part 05: Global Corporate Learning Management System Market Segmentation by Product

Part 06: Five Forces Analysis

Part 07: Customer Landscape

Part 08: Geographic Landscape

Part 09: Decision Framework

Part 10: Drivers and Challenges

Part 11: Market Trends

Part 12: Vendor Landscape

Part 13: Vendor Analysis

The investment made in the study would provide you access to information such as:

Corporate Learning Management System Market [Global – Broken-down into regions]

Regional level split [North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, Middle East & Africa]

Country-wise Market Size Split [of important countries with major market share]

Market Share and Revenue/Sales by leading players

Market Trends – Emerging Technologies/products/start-ups, PESTEL Analysis, SWOT Analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, etc.

Market Size

Market Size by application/industry verticals

Market Projections/Forecast

The major players operating in the corporate learning management system market report are Absorb LMS Software Inc., Adobe, Blackboard Inc., Cornerstone, CrossKnowledge, D2L Corporation, Docebo, Epignosis, PeopleONE. Inc., G-Cube, eLearning Industry, Growth Engineering, IBM, Instructure Inc.,  iSpring Solutions Inc., Latitude CG, LearnUpon, Mindflash, Oracle, Saba Software , SAP, Schoology, SumTotal Systems LLC, a Skillsoft Company, Tata Interactive Systems, and Upside Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd among other.

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[marketinsight12]

A Corporate Learning Management System can be termed as software which is used for delivering online courses and other learning content to individuals. The management system provides people for getting onboard new employees, and providing them the knowledge and skills required to perform their roles, and, ultimately advance in their careers.

Corporate Learning Management System (LMS) Market Report 2022 | IMR

[creepyscritches]

I read your post about open enrollment for the ACA and was hoping you might expand on why you believe it would take years to dismantle. I've been terrified that with a Republican house/senate, Trump could just snap his fingers and make it go away within months of taking office. I'd love some reassurance that that's not possible.

Hiya, sure I can share some thoughts on the matter! First, it's very important to understand the ACA is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge system with subject matter experts in dozens of places throughout the process. I'm one of those SMEs, but I am at the end of the process where the revenue is generated, so my insight is limited on the public facing pieces.

What this means is that I am professionally embedded in the ACA in a position that exists purely to show what conditions people are treated for and then generate that data into what's called a "risk score". There's about 6 pages I could write on it, but the takeaway is that the ACA is

1) intricately interwoven with the federal government

2) increasingly profitable, sustainable, and growing (it is STILL a for-profit system if you can believe it)

3) wholeheartedly invested in by the largest insurance companies in the country LARGELY due to the fact that they finally learned the rules of how to make the ACA a thriving center of business

4) since the big issuers are arm+leg invested in the ACA, there is a lot of resistance politically and on an industry level to leave it behind (think of the lobbyists, politicians, corporations that will fight tooth and nail to protect their profit + investment)

The process to calculate a risk score takes roughly 2 years. There is an audit for the concurrent year and then a vigorous retro audit for the prev year - - this is a rolling cycle every year. Medicare has a similar process. These are RVP + RADV audits if you would like the jargon.

Eliminating the ACA abruptly is as internally laughable as us finishing the RADV audit ahead of schedule. If Trump were to blow the ACA into smithereens on day 1, he would be drowning in issuer complaints and an economic health sector that is essentially bleeding out. You cut off the RVP early? We have half of next RADV stuck in the gears now. You cut off the RADV early? No issuer will get their "risk adjusted" payments for services rendered in the prev benefit year (to an extent, again very complex multi-process system).

The ACA is GREAT for the public and should be defended on that basis alone. However, the inner capitalistic nature of the ACA is a powerful armor that has conservatives + liberals defending it on a basis of capital + market growth. It's not sexy, but it makes too much money consistently for the system to be easily dismantled.

Or at least that's what I can tell you from the money center of the ACA. they don't bring us up in political conversation because we are confusing to seasoned professionals, boring to industry outsiders, and consistently we are anathema to the anti-ACA talking points.

I am already preparing for next year's RVP for this window of open enrollment. That RVP process will feed into the RADV in 2026. In 2025, we begin the RADV for 2024. If nothing else, the slow fucking gears of CMS will keep the ACA alive until we finish our work at the end of the process. I highly doubt that will be the only reason the ACA is safeguarded, but it is a powerful type of support to pair with people protecting the ACA for other reasons.

I work every day to show, defend, and educate on how many diagnoses are managed thru my company's ACA plans. My specialty is cancer and I see a lot of it. The revenue drive comes from the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) rule stating only 20% MAX of profit may go to the issuer + the 80% at a minimum must go back to the customer or be invested in expanding benefits. The more people on the plan using it, the higher that 20% becomes for the issuer and the more impactful that 80% becomes for the next year of benefit growth. It is remarkably profitable once issuers stop seeking out "healthy populations". The ACA is a functional method for issuers to tap into a stable customer base (sick/chronic ill customers) that turns a profit, grows, and builds strong consumer bases in each state.

The industry can never walk away from this overnight - - this is the preferred investment for many big players. Changing the direction of those businesses will be a monumental effort that takes years (at least 2 with the audits). In the meantime, you still have benefits, you still have care, and you still have reason to sign up. Let us deal with the bureaucracy bullshit, go get your care and know you have benefits thru 2025 and we will be working to keep it that way for 2026 and forward. This is a wing of the federal government, it is not a jenga tower like Trump wishes.

[licorice-and-rum]

SOC and Neoliberlism

So, as promised, here it is my analysis of Six of Crows and how neoliberalism is amazingly portrayed in Ketterdam, and how the city is an example of what happens in a community that is not provided for.

Before we begin, I wanted to say that English is not my first language, and, considering I read SOC in Brazilian Portuguese, I might translate some names literally or differently from the English version but I think it's manageable to read and understand my point. If not, I'll edit the text.

The first thing we have to understand is how neoliberalism works and the theory behind it, and then we'll talk about how it's portrayed in Ketterdam.

So neoliberalism is a theory born more or less at the end of the 20th century (70s-80s), and it finds its roots in laissez-faire capitalism, meaning that it's a political current that tries to suppress and/or eliminate the State's influence from the market. The neoliberalist view understands that the market can supply by itself the population's needs without help or limitations imposed by the State.

The thing here is that most people listen to this and think neoliberalism is about electronics, cars, and other stuff. The truth is, that neoliberalism aims to suppress the presence of State-run facilities in ALL corners of society, such as health care, housing, water access, electricity, etcetera.

So, we can use the American and Brazillian health systems to understand it better, for example:

In the US, the ones providing health care for the population are great corporations - they decide the price of care, they work together with pharmaceutical companies to define medicine prices, and the laws that bind them are pretty much only offer and demand. There is almost none State intervention to provide the population with accessible health care.

However, this brings problems, of course: not everyone (actually, most people) has real access to health care simply because they can't afford it, or they can't afford it without taking a big financial hit, which threatens their other basic needs, such as food, housing, water, electricity, etcetera. Not everyone can provide for their medical needs, such as diabetic and disabled people.

That leads to:

(a) an increase in poverty;

(b) a decrease in educational levels - if you don't have the means to pay for higher educational levels because of health care debt, or if you're sick and need to go to class and tough through it but you're not really learning anything, and so on, which leads to a major workforce in base level production and a minor class who has access to this education;

(c) an increase in overworking people - meaning that we have a lot of people taking on several jobs to be able to pay for things like health care, which increases the competitiveness between people, making individualism levels go up and breaking up human beings' natural sense of community.

I could also talk here about how this breeds isolation and increases the potential for mental health problems but I think you got what I was saying.

On the other hand, we have the Brazilian health care system (SUS), which is a universal gratuitous medical care service through the whole country. Its purpose is not profit, it's providing health care for the community, so therefore, any SUS unit is bound by State law and run by the State. By law, every SUS unit must provide for anyone who enters its premises in need of medical care. Everyone, Brazillian and foreigners, poor or rich, must be treated if they need to. It's the law.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's all rainbows and flowers, there are definitely many problems in SUS. However, what I'm trying to showcase here is that, when the needs of a population are met, the population itself is more resilient, their life quality goes up and so does their participation in their community.

On the other hand, in neoliberalism, when the State is absent from these areas of community service, the market is, in theory, the one providing for the community. In practice, however, what we observe from neoliberal policies in cities with a great poor population in Latam for example, is that when the State doesn't provide for the community, the market is unable to step up for them because of their obscene prices.

The poor population that doesn't have their needs met by the State or the market sees a great boom in criminal activities within their spaces. That's mainly why criminal organizations are so present in slums and favelas throughout Latin America: criminal organizations are a way for the community to provide for themselves and, as a means to become more powerful, they provide for the community in exchange for their services (not to say they do that for the good of their hearts, of course not).

It's why it's so common, for example, that criminal organizations such as PCC in Brazil pay for kids from favelas to undergo Law school, for example.

And that's is where I wanted to go to start the conversation in SOC: one of the main traits of Ketterdam is the Barrel and, in the Barrel, we have the presence of many criminal organizations, such as the Dregs, the Dime Lions, the Menagerie staff (not the girls, ofc), etcetera.

This, as observed by Kaz himself, is one of the only ways to survive on the Barrel - you filiate yourself to a gang because you need to be able to provide for yourself and, more times than others, for your family as well.

Kaz's story is actually a perfect example of how Ketterdam is the representation of America in the early 20th century in full policies of laissez-faire (neoliberalism): as we can see in Titanic and many other historical fictions, the said American Dream had people believing the US to be this economical paradise where they could all enter the market and become millionaires.

The result of it is the Great Depression, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

When Kaz and Jodi leave Lij for Ketterdam, Jodi believes he'll become a merchant - which is a pretty common belief of those who arrive at Ketterdam, as Pekka Rollins and Kaz himself state in Crooked Kingdom.

The reality of it, though, is much harsher, because the truth is that when you have a market that controls everything, as we see in Ketterdam with the Merchant's Guild (I think that's how it's translated?) and the Stadwatch as a police force, you see perfectly how neoliberal policies really work in real life:

You have a higher class who controls the market and the riches (question: who do you think got the money Shu Han sent to Ketterdam at the beginning of the first book: the people of the city/country or the merchants in the "government"?), and a lower class that, without support from the State or the market to have their needs met will turn to their own means to do so.

So you have the trafficking that brought Inej to the island, the unlimited gambling that Jesper was trapped in, the cons Jodi and Kaz fell for - it's all product of liberal policies.

And so, you have Ketterdam and its neoliberal policies (:

(I really love to make this kind of analysis, please, if you have something you want me to talk about, don't hesitate to ask)

[jgthirlwell]

Top 10 Cats 2024

Top 10 Cats 2024

by Dora Blount

Scratch and Sniff, Brooklyn Scratch and Sniff, world’s best cats, had an exciting year. They moved to new digs for the first time since being adopted. They weren’t too sure about it at first- there were a lot of new noises to get used to. But now they love it, they can spread out more, there are a variety of spaces for hanging out, hiding or sleeping, windows to look out of, and sun beams to catch all day.

Sir Indiana Bones, Skulls Unlimited International, Oklahoma City,OK Sir Indiana Bones is a superstar black cat with 74k followers on Instagram. He lives in the office behind the Museum of Osteology on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. He has a line of merch available in the museum gift shop and his own page on their website. We were lucky that he was receiving visitors when we stopped by and we got to go to the back and meet him. We signed his visitor log and he gave us two buttons! Thank you for your service, Sir Indiana Bones.

Little One (Losash), East Village, Manhattan The kitten formerly known as Losash, now referred to as “little one,” is a Devon Rex who came from Russia with his own passport and a stylish wardrobe, though his true origin may be an unknown dimension or galaxy in another universe. He now lives in the East Village but doesn’t have a proper name yet. According to Wikipedia, the Devon Rex is a “tall-eared, short-haired breed of cat that emerged in England during the late 1950s.” The breed is known for its atypical appearance, with an oddly shaped head, large eyes, and a short, wavy coat with whiskers and eyebrows that are crinkled and twisted. He’s a cool little alien dude.

Flower Market Cats, Marché aux Fleurs, Paris This charming and beautiful flower market has been located on the Ile de la Cité for over 100 years. Among the market’s wrought iron and glass pavilions, and abundance of flowers and plants and good smells, we found two cats in one of the shops.

Alice, Le Petit Prince Store, Paris We happened upon Le Petit Prince store in the Latin Quarter, stopped in to check it out, and were delighted to discover the shop cat Alice on her chair! Even though a fox, not a cat, is a character in the Little Prince, Alice is very good a reminder of the book’s themes of unconditional love and the preciousness of friendship. The velvet chair is appropriately regal for Alice.

Dove, Brooklyn Cat Café, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn The Brooklyn Cat Café is a volunteer-run storefront providing cat interaction, as well as coffee, tea, and snacks. All the cats are available for adoption so the cat distribution system can work efficiently.

Harmonica, Health Food and Vitamin City, Chelsea, Manhattan Harmonica is the Queen of 23rd Street. Enough said.

Zuzu & Winston, Kansas City, KS Zuzu (charming ginger tabby) and Winston (gray beauty) are Kansas City kitties who live in a picturesque Victorian gothic manor high on a hill overlooking Downtown KC.

Smokey, Treasures and Books, Guthrie, OK Smokey manages the Treasures and Books antique store in downtown Guthrie, Oklahoma. Smokey is long-haired chocolate-colored beauty with a lion’s mane who likes to catch sun beams in the storefront window. She came in off the street as a little lonely kitten on a cold day in 2018 and the kind owner of the store took her in and helped her learn to trust people. Now she lives a comfortable life where she is very loved and treasured.

Siete & Nueve, Marvel Design Studio Annex, Tribeca, Manhattan Siete (tabby) and Nueve (black) live in Marvel’s studio annex space in Tribeca. They are two amusing rescue cats who enjoy corporate sabotage and office hijinks. They bring a refreshing element of chaos to otherwise staid professional meetings, of which I approve. Marvel is an architectural and urban design studio based in New York and San Juan that designed the new Animal Care Centers of NYC adoption, clinic, and office facility in the Bronx, currently in construction. So Marvel is doing good work for animals at both the micro and regional scales. Thanks Marvel!

[ettawritesnstudies]

in the tags on a recent post you said your day job is "mind numbingly simple" do you know if that's common of chemical engineering jobs?

(i am currently pursuing a chemical engineering degree and honestly don't know that much about chemical engineering jobs. but i would not mind a simple job that gives me mental capacity left to write at the end of the day)

So it strongly depends on the kind of engineering work you end up going into and any job will vary in complexity on a day to day basis but with a chemical engineering job you have a lot of different options!

Specifically I'm a R&D Applications Engineer/Technical Customer Service in a polymer science role for a big international corporation so I'm working with existing products in a company and figuring out how to make them work for customers who are having issues.

What this looks like on a project to project basis is that we get an email from the customer or the plant outlining the problem and what kind of material they're sending us to test, I design the experiments we need to do to validate all the variables and properties, and then I spend a few weeks in the lab churning out data, then plug it into an Excel spreadsheet, crunch the numbers, throw that in a PowerPoint, and send it off to the relevant personnel.

The mind numbingly simple part is the standing in lab running through tests because it's hands-on labor that requires very little thinking once you've established your parameters. I usually just put on an audiobook or a podcast to kill time. The design of experiment can get somewhat complex and you have to be very good at time management if you have multiple projects with time sensitive lab components going on at once, but the number crunching has never required anything more complicated than 10th grade algebra. I'm not doing much chemical formulation either, just following established recipes and procedures within my company, but I'm learning more specific stuff as I go.

Now I'm only a year out of college and I've never had an internship or anything that WASN'T in a non-lab setting, so I can't speak to how something like a Process Engineer spends their time. I knew I didn't like being out on the plant floor because it's often Loud and Dirty and Sensory Overload so I tried to avoid applying for those roles. You learn a lot more about the production that way though, just not my cup of tea. You also have chemical engineers who design entire chemical plants and control systems (which is very very cool and important but I was bad at those classes lmao). Some also go the biochemical angle and get into pharmaceuticals but medicine scares me.

That's just my personal take but I encourage you to talk to your professors and upperclassman and see what they have to say! Career fairs >>>>>>> linked in for getting anywhere in this hell of a job market if your school has them and I hope you have a better time of it than I did during the COVID times. 🫡

[dailyanarchistposts]

III. The Illusion of Wisdom

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service. —SINCLAIR LEWIS

THE MULTIPLE FAILURES that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial deba cles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools, do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. Responsibility for the collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto, and Paris to the financial and political centers of power.

The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political, and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and also with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions. Those who critique the system itself—people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader—are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.

In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay titled “Education After Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged” and that “the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be uncovered, examined, and critiqued through education. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

“All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again,” he wrote:

This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.[46]

If we do not grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression.

I had lunch in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Giroux was for many years the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. He has long been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education. He was driven, because of his work, to the margins of academia in the United States. He asked the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. Giroux, who wrote The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, left in 2004 for Canada.

“The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared,” Giroux tells me. “Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening, as was made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects, and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance, and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere.”

The moral nihilism embraced by elite universities would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hypermasculinity.

“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,” Adorno wrote. “The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”[47]

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick.

“The political and economic forces fueling such crimes against humanity—whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation, and disease or genocidal acts—are always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux says. “Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place.”

But we do not name them. We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

“Political silence. That’s my summary. There are only flickers of resistance to most here-and-now issues,” says Chris Hebdon, an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. Hebdon went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the historic center of student activity at Berkeley. Groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice known as “tabling.”

“Students table for Darfur, but seldom, if ever, do I see a table on Iraq, Afghanistan, or militarization. Tables on Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented and explicitly pre-professional, the [ethnicity-of-your-choice] -American Pre-Law, Pre-Med, Engineering, or Business Association). There are strict restrictions and permitting processes for tabling. You see few, if any, tables on globalization, corporatization, or, heaven forbid, the commercialization of Berkeley. Too many students and professors are distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the box. You know, U.C. adores the slogan ‘Excellence Through Diversity,’ but it doesn’t mention multiculturalism’s silent partner—the fragmentation of student society into little markets, segmenting the powerful sea of students into diverse but disarmed droplets. Exemplifying this disorientation is Sproul Plaza—the same place Mario Savio once gave his rallying cry for the Free Speech Movement from atop a police car—now composed of tens of tables for sports, entertainment, ethnic associations, résumé-building clubs for corporate careerists, and small causes. Disconnection prevails. In the absence of cohesion, one really wonders how such smart kids could be struck so, in the muting sense of the term, dumb.”

The corporate hierarchy that has corrupted higher education is on public display at Berkeley. The wealthiest of the elite schools, such as Yale and Stanford, assign dormitories by lottery. They treat their students with a careful egalitarianism, expecting all to enter the elite. Berkeley and many other public universities, however, assign rooms depending on how much a student can pay. They fall into a capitalist logic of “choice.”[48] The poorer Berkeley students end up in residences known as “the units” (Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3), while the wealthier students and recruited athletes, sustained by family money or athletic scholarships, receive rooms at Foothill or Clark Kerr, a fancy Stanford-style dorm that was once a private school for deaf and blind children. The food is better at the more expensive dorms. Corporations have cut deals with universities to be sole providers of goods and services and to shut out competitors. Coca-Cola, for example, has monopoly rights at Berkeley, including control of what drinks and food are sold at football games. Corporations such as Cingular and Allstate blanket California Memorial Stadium with their logos and signs.

Berkeley negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for $500 million. BP gets access to the university’s researchers and technological capacity, built by decades of public investment, to investigate biofuels at a new Energy Biosciences Institute. BP can shut down another research center and move into a publicly subsidized one. BP will receive intellectual property rights, which it can use for profit, on scientific breakthroughs expected to come out of the joint project.

“When it comes to football, I go to Tightwad Hill, a no-cost site perched above the stadium where people can bring beers and laugh, rather than just hoot and scream,” says Hebdon. “The crowd on Tightwad represents a Bay Area variety—students, grandparents, alcoholics, sports-families, children—and there is a culture of uncoordinated neighborly fun. The relative freedom at Tightwad contrasts to the neo-Pavlovian crowd training that goes on in the stadium below. In the stadium you are inundated. It begins right at the door. Tickets cost upwards of $25, you must enter with no food, and you must buy high-priced Coke or its underlings, Dasani water or Minute Maid juice.”

The football coach is Berkeley’s highest-paid employee. He makes about $3 million. Tuition has been steadily rising for decades. U.C. undergraduate students pay 100 percent of their educational costs because the state subsidy has effectively disappeared.[49] By the U.C. charter, tuition at the University of California is supposed to be free. Berkeley is a microcosm of the intrusion of corporations into education. Education, at least an education that challenges assumptions and teaches students to be self-critical, has been sacrificed in a Faustian bargain. Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics, drew up a chart that showed that in the last fourteen years, from 1993 to 2007, management staffs increased 259 percent. The total of employees increased 24 percent. Fulltime faculty increased by 1 percent.

When the U.C. Regents, who oversee the university system, announced they wouldn’t accept thousands of qualified freshmen because of a budget shortfall, Schwartz drew up a plan. In the spirit of public service rather than personal enrichment, he proposed that the university take 1 percent from the salary of each employee making more than $100,000. This is not unprecedented. Weeks earlier, Barack Obama had capped his staffs’ salaries at $100,000. “That would net you $29 million,” Schwartz told the Regents. “That is more than enough to cover the full costs for those 2,300 new students that you were planning to turn away next year.” The Regents ignored him.[50]

“Berkeley is trying to brand itself through its athletics, especially football,” Hebdon tells me. “The program is a tremendous investment. Our chancellor, in an act of great misdirection, just announced he plans to raise $1 billion for the athletic endowment by selling off 3,000 front-row seats for thirty to fifty years to private bidders for $225,000 a pop.[51] Piece by piece, Berkeley is becoming a trade school. Students, for instance, mostly agree with the idea of a sports university.”

In December 2006, the university announced plans to cut down more than forty huge oak trees on a 1.5-acre site on campus to build a training facility for athletes. A group of protesters built crude tree houses in the branches and took shifts manning them to thwart the plan. Berkeley municipal law prohibits removing any Coast Live Oak with a trunk larger than six inches within city boundaries, but city boundaries do not include the university. The protest lasted for twenty-one months until September 2008, when the last protesters were coaxed down and the grove was demolished.

“During the well-publicized, two-year tree sits, most students supported the university’s plans to build the sporting complex and railed against ‘the hippies,’” Hebdon says. “One student, a war veteran, was treated as an imminent threat for tree-sitting with a sign that read ‘Democratize the U.C. Regents.’ Few students knew that the Regents, who oversee the whole university system, are appointed rather than elected and representative, even though this is required by law. Few really dug in and thought. My strongest memory is of a person selling rocks to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support. When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once known for conscientious objection, is training an inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven people. The military has a strong presence on campus and is one of the few ways for students to pay their way without accruing large debt.

“We have bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge,” Hebdon goes on. “The competitive efficiency culture—electronic immersion, high-paced everything, career networking as a way of life, prestige, money—it disconnects the so-called best and the brightest from commonsense obligations to society, ecology, and democratic ideals. Somewhere along the way into the free market, Berkeley forgot that learning isn’t about handshaking, résumé fondling, and market rewards.”

“What makes Berkeley a terribly contradictory public institution is its version of the wrought-iron gates that enclose Harvard or Yale: our high-security national laboratories. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, up the hill from campus, is a mystery to most. It is connected to U.C. Berkeley’s historical involvement with nuclear technology, something inherently centralizing, undemocratic, and dangerous to civil rights. The labs have special buses students cannot ride. Buildings are restricted-access, and secrecy abounds. Researcher scientists do not fancy whistle-blowing, as they have no legal right to tenure. Students learn these labs are prestigious. After all, labs pull in copious amounts of taxpayer-funded federal science dollars.”

I sat with a classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of arcane academic jargon. I had no idea, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every academic department and discipline across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist who uses obscure code words as a way to avoid communication. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question. Specialists look down on the rest of us, who do not understand what they are talking and writing about, with thinly veiled contempt.

By any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, as John Ralston Saul points out, these people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are the product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it. “One of the signs of a dying civilization,” Saul writes, “is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible, literate elites is to aid and abet that communication.”[52]

Our elites use a private dialect that is a barrier to communication as well as common sense. The corporate con artists and economists who have rigged our financial system continue to speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists on Wall Street and at elite business schools. They use terms such as securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles, and credit default swaps to shut us out of the debate. This retreat by elites into specialized ghettos spans the range of academic disciplines. English professors, who see novels as divorced from society, speak in the obscure vocabulary of deconstructionism, disempowering and emasculating the very works they study. Writers from Euripides to Russell Banks have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice. Literature is a tool to enlighten societies about its ills. It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honoré de Balzac who, through the volumes of his Human Comedy, ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Sinclair Lewis who took us into the stockyards and shantytowns of Chicago in The Jungle.

In the hands of academics, however, who rarely understand or concern themselves with the reality of the world, works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed. They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data. This disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand and the real on the other is replicated in most academic disciplines. Economists build elaborate theoretical models yet know little of John Law, have never closely examined the tulip crisis, and do not study the railroad bubbles or the deregulation that led to the Great Depression. The foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were bankrupting Athenian citizens. But the study of the classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful in a digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined. Tacitus’ account of the economic meltdown during the reign of Tiberius—a meltdown that also saw widespread bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and financial ruin—is a reminder that we are not unique to history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius’ reign was finally halted by massive government spending and intervention that included interest-free loans to citizens. Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.

The specialized dialect and narrow education of doctors, academics, economists, social scientists, military officers, investment bankers, and government bureaucrats keeps each sector locked in its narrow role. The overarching structure of the corporate state and the idea of the common good are irrelevant to specialists. They exist to make the system work, not to examine it. Our elites replicate, in modern dress, the elaborate mannerisms and archaic forms of speech employed by calcified, corrupt, and dying aristocracies. They cannot grasp that truth is often relative. They base their decisions on established beliefs, such as the primacy of an unregulated market or globalization, which are accepted as unquestioned absolutes. “In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning,” Saul writes, “although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.”[53]

I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of ten. By the time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another eight at Colgate University and Harvard University, I had a pretty good understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. These institutions feed students, no matter how mediocre, the comforting reassurance that they are there because they are not only the best but they are entitled to the best. You saw this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here was a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. Bush, along with Scooter Libby, who attended my pre-prep school, exemplifies the legions of self-centered, spoiled, intellectually limited and wealthy elitists churned out by places like Andover, Yale, and Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. The real purpose of these richly endowed schools is to perpetuate their own. They do this even as they pretend to embrace the ideology of the common man, trumpet diversity on campus, and pose as a meritocracy. The public commitment to egalitarianism alongside the private nurturing of elitism creates a bizarre schizophrenia.

“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: ‘How many famous professors can I collect?’ and so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning. College socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”

These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep school—remember, this is a high school—built a $26 million gym. Not that they didn’t have a gym. They had a fine one, with an Olympic pool. But they needed to upgrade their facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being wooed by other expensive prep schools. Princeton is so overcrowded with glittering new buildings. There is almost always a building project under way. It has devoured its once-rolling expanses of green and become cramped and claustrophobic. While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and diminished, while for-profit universities rise as our newest vocational schools, elite institutions become unaffordable even for the middle class. The privileged retreat further and further behind the walls of their opulent, gated communities. Harvard, like most institutions, has lost money. Its endowment fell $8 billion over four months in 2008, and by 2009 had officially declined by some 30 percent. Harvard’s investments, once they have been disentagled, may have shrunk to half their former value. But Harvard remains very well endowed. It still has at least $20 or $25 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton are not far behind.

At the elite institution, those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it. They see their money and their access to power as a natural extension of their talents and abilities, rather than the result of a system that favors the privileged. They are carefully socialized in chapel, on groomed playing fields, in dormitories, and within the natural, exclusive gatherings they have with the powerful and the rich. They are members of the same clubs and fraternities. George W. Bush and John Kerry, who ran for the presidency in 2004, had each attended Yale and had been inducted as undergraduates into the university’s secret and exclusive Skull and Bones society.

John D. Rockefeller III, an alumnus, was our graduation speaker the year I finished prep school at Loomis-Chaffee. The wealthy and powerful families in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles are molded by these institutions into a tribe. School, family, and entitlement effectively combine. The elites vacation together, ski at the same Swiss resorts, and know the names of the same restaurants in New York and Paris. They lunch at the same clubs and golf on the same greens. And by the time they finish an elite college, they have been conditioned to become part of the inner circle. They speak an intimidating language of privilege, complete with references to minutiae and traditions only the elite understand. They have obtained a confidence those on the outside often struggle to duplicate. And the elite, while they may not say so in public, disdain those who lack their polish and connections. Once they finish their schooling they have the means to barricade themselves in exclusive communities, places like Short Hills, New Jersey, or Greenwich, Connecticut. They know few outside their elite circles. They may have contact with a mechanic in their garage or their doorman or a nanny or gardener or contractor, but these are stilted, insincere relationships between the powerful and the relatively powerless. The elite rarely confront genuine differences of opinion. They are not asked to examine the roles they play in society and the inequities of the structure that sustains them. They are cultural philistines. The sole basis for authority is wealth. And within these self-satisfied cocoons they think of themselves as caring, good people, which they often are, but only to other members of the elite or, at times, the few service workers who support their lifestyles. The gross social injustices that condemn most African Americans to urban poverty and the working class to a subsistence level of existence, the imperial bullying that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, do not touch them. They engage in small, largely meaningless forays of charity, organized by their clubs or social groups, to give their lives a thin patina of goodness. They can live their entire lives in state of total self-delusion and perpetual childhood. “It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-world beyond, and a pseudo-world within themselves as well,” wrote C. Wright Mills.[54]

The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post-office clerks, and mill workers. Most of the men were veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that although I had been blessed with an opportunity that had been denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor, you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you finish high school. You serve in the military because it is one of the few jobs in which you can get health insurance and a decent salary. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between members of the working classes and elites. If you are poor or a member of the working class, you are on your own.

The elite schools speak often of the diversity among their students. But they base diversity on race and ethnicity rather than on class. The admissions process, along with the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working classes. The system is stacked against those who do not have parents with incomes and educations to play the game. When my son got his SAT scores back as a senior in high school, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math but is an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from the Princeton Review—its deluxe SAT preparation package costs $7,000—who taught him the tricks and techniques of standardized testing. The undergraduate test-prep business takes in revenues of $726 million a year, up 25 percent from four years ago. The tutor told my son things like “stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.” His reading score went up 130 points, pushing his test scores into the highest percentile in the country. Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? Had he become more intelligent? Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over them? What about families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do their children have?

Elite universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones and a disproportionate percentage of the rich and well connected. Joseph A. Soares, in The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges, used Yale’s internal data to show that 14 percent of the students attending in 2000 were “legacies,” children of alumni. And at Harvard the most generous donors, those who give more than $1 million, are grouped together in the Committee on University Resources. The 340 committee members who have children at or past college age have 336 children who are, or were previously, enrolled or have studied at Harvard—even though the university admits fewer than one in ten candidates overall, Inside Higher Education reported. According to Daniel Golden, who wrote The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, Harvard has something called the “Z list” (on which the university refuses to comment) of about twenty-five to fifty well-connected but academically borderline applicants. These wealthy applicants are told they can enroll if they defer for a year.[55] The list is a major tool for lining up big prospective donors. Soares and Golden illustrate that you can, if you are rich enough, almost always buy your way into an Ivy League school.

I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions, and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were often a marginalized minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, with opening salaries starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work, and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones. They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded “political” and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule these institutions, did not dare draw the obvious parallels between events in the Conrad novel and the failures and discontents of the Iraq occupation and American empire. They did not use Conrad’s story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. Even in the anemic and marginalized world of the humanities, what is taught exists in a moral void.

The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities. The neglect of the humanities has allowed elites to organize education and society around predetermined answers to predetermined questions. Students are taught structures designed to produce these answers even as these structures have collapsed. But those in charge, because they are educated only in specializations designed to maintain these economic and political structures, have run out of ideas. They have been trained only to find solutions that will maintain the system. This is what the Harvard Business School case method is about, a didactic system in which the logic employed to solve a specific problem always, in the end, sustains market capitalism. These elites are not capable of asking the broad, universal questions, the staples of an education in the humanities, which challenge the deepest assumptions of a culture and examine the harsh realities of political and economic power. They have forgotten, because they have not been taught, that human nature is a mixture of good and evil. They do not have the capacity for critical reflection. They do not understand that for every answer there arises another question—the very basis behind the Socratic academy’s search for wisdom.

For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see their own biases or the causes of their own frustrations. They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structures and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster. They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we cannot speak about,” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned, “we must pass over in silence.”[56]

“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic,” wrote William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, writes that

while this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.[57]

Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the exploitation of the working class by corporations and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions do, then examining and reforming social and political systems is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents, many of whom earn salaries that rival those of corporate executives, must often devote their energies to fund-raising rather than to education. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge-fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are often examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed.

The slavish honoring of the rich by elite schools, despite the lofty rhetoric about public service, is clear to the students. The object is to make money. These institutions have an insatiable appetite for donations and constant fund-raising campaigns to boost multibillion-dollar endowments. This constant need can be met only by producing rich alumni. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer. The student becomes adept, as Richard Hoggart wrote, at

a technique of apparent learning, of acquiring facts. He learns how to receive a purely literate education, one using only a small part of his personality and challenging only a limited area of his being. He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an expert imbiber and doler-out; his competence will vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine enthusiasm. He rarely feels the reality of knowledge, of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, on his own pulses; he rarely discovered an author for himself and on his own. In this half of his life he can respond only if there is a direct connection with the system of training. He has something of the blinkered pony about him; sometimes he is trained by those who have been through the same regimen, who are hardly unblinkered themselves, and who praise him in the degree to which he takes comfortably to their blinders. Though there is a powerful, unidealistic, unwarmed realism about his attitude at bottom, that is his chief form of initiative; of other forms—the freely-ranged mind, the bold flying of mental kites, the courage to reject some ‘lines’ even though they are officially as important as all the rest-of these he probably has little, and his training does not often encourage them.[58]

The products of these institutions, as Hoggart noted, have “difficulty in choosing a direction in a world where there is no longer a master to please, a toffee-apple at the end of each stage, a certificate, a place in the upper half of the assessable world.”[59]

The very qualities and intellectual inquiries that sustain an open society are often crushed by elite institutions. The elite school, as Saul writes,

actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view—all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations—all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts.[60]

One winter night I was returning books to Firestone Library at Princeton University. I glanced at the book the student behind the main desk was reading. It was How to Win at College by Cal Newport. The flap cover promised that it was “the only guide to getting ahead once you’ve gotten in—proven strategies for making the most of your college years, based on winning secrets from the country’s most successful students.”

“What does it take to be a standout student?” the flap read.

How can you make the most of your college years—graduate with honors, choose exciting activities, build a head-turning résumé, and gain access to the best post-college opportunities? Based on interviews with star students at universities nationwide, from Harvard to the University of Arizona, How to Win at College presents seventy-five simple rules that will rocket you to the top of the class. These college-tested—and often surprising—strategies include:

���Proving that success has little to do with being a genius workaholic, and everything to do with playing the game,” it went on. “How to Win at College is the must-have guide for making the most of these four important years—and getting an edge on life after graduation.”[61]

First-year students arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the exclusive eating clubs, fraternities, sororities, or secret societies, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for competitive summer internships. They put in punishing hours, come to office hours to make sure they grasp what their professors want, and challenge all grades under 4.0 in an effort to maintain a high average. They learn to placate and please authority, never to challenge it. By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned for the drudgery of moving large sums of money around electronically or negotiating huge corporate contracts.

“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.”[62]

This soul-crushing experience of education is not new within elite academic institutions, as William Hazlitt noted at the beginning of the nineteenth century:

Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings, and high propensities of the soul are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their future situation in life.[63]

The educational landscape, however, has deteriorated since Hazlitt. There has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature, and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008–2009 from the previous year, the biggest decline in thirty-four years. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid- to late ’60s, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Only 8 percent of college graduates, or about 110,000 students, now receive degrees in the humanities. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s degrees in English have declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent of the whole, as have degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), and social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970–1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduating population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.[64]

Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systemically dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite. They do not know how to interrogate or examine an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates directly into the arms of corporate entities.

Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, written in 1869, was once considered a canonical work on the lofty goals of education. Arnold argued that a broad knowledge of culture, “the best that has been thought and said,” would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life. This belief held sway, at least in the outward manifestations of higher education, for perhaps a century. But Arnold’s eloquent defense of knowledge for its own sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed. Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers. Students seek tangible vocational credentials. At the few institutions where the liberal arts survive, as Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity. U.S. News & World Report has, since its annual America’s Best Colleges issue debuted in 1983, ranked schools that, through their selectiveness, also offer a route into the world of the elite. These schools may still teach the liberal arts, but those arts are marketed as another way to propel students into the vocational specialties offered by graduate schools or into lucrative jobs.

The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewrit ing” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness ... are those who are useful.”[65] The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth-century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes, “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.”[66]

And as small, liberal arts schools have folded—at least 200 since 1990—they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities. There are now some forty-five colleges and universities listed on the NYSE or the NASDAQ. The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school with some 300,000 students, proudly calls itself on its Web site: “Your corporate university.” Ronald Taylor, the chief operator and co-founder of DeVry, the second-largest for-profit, higher-education provider, bluntly stated his organization’s goals: “The colos sally simple notion that drives DeVry’s business is that if you ask employers what they want and then provide what they want, the people you supply to them will be hired.”[67] The only mission undertaken by for-profit universities, and increasingly non-profit universities, is job training. And as universities become glorified vocational schools for the corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve. It may be more cost-effective to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts and whittle down or shutter departments like French or history that do not feed vocational aspirations, but it decimates the possibility of a broad education that permits students to question the assumptions of a decaying culture, reach out beyond our borders, and chart new alternatives and directions.

It is not just the humanities that are in danger, but the professors themselves. Most universities no longer hire the best and most experienced teachers but the cheapest. Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical work force and the number is steadily falling.[68] Professors are becoming itinerant workers, often having to work at two or three schools, denied office space, and unable to make a living wage. The myopic and narrow vision of life as an accumulation of money and power, promoted at the turn-of-the-century by rapacious capitalists such as Carnegie or Crane, has become education’s dominant ideology. We have, as Steven Brint points out, displaced the “social-trustee professional” by the “expert professional.”

The old social-trustee professional came out of the humanities. He or she valued collegial organization, learning, and the volunteerism of public service. The new classes of expert professionals have been trained to focus on narrow, specialized knowledge independent of social ideas or conceptions of the common good. A doctor, lawyer, or engineer may become wealthy, but the real meaning of their work is that they sustain health, justice, good government, or safety. The flight from the humanities has become a flight from conscience. It has created an elite class of experts who seldom look beyond their tasks and disciplines to put what they do in a wider, social context. And by absenting themselves from the moral and social questions raised by the humanities, they have opted to serve a corporate structure that has destroyed the culture around them.

Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools—do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one. They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure. Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement. They lack a moral and intellectual core. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market—which they slavishly serve.

Andrew Lahde, a Santa Monica, California, hedge-fund manager who made an 866 percent gain by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse, abruptly shut down his fund in 2008, citing the risk of trading with faltering banks. In his farewell letter to his investors, he excoriated the elites who run our investment houses, banks, and government.

“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he said of our oligarchic class:

These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy ended up only making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America....

“On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal,” he went on:

First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have [reined] in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith [sic] passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government.[69]

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. As Immanuel Kant wrote, moral autonomy is possible only through reflection, self-determination, and the courage not to cooperate. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its coded attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, have really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb organizational skills yet is unable to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she is exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites wasted mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG.

“He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person,” Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves, and in the halls of Congress—while looting the country. Many of these men appear to be so morally and intellectually stunted that they are incapable of acknowledging their responsibility for our decline.

“It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned Adorno, “because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.”[70]

Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement. The education they have obtained has served to rigidify and perpetuate social stratification. These elite schools prevent, to use Arnold’s words, the “best selves” in the various strata in our culture from communicating across class lines. Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems. It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.

[moose-mousse]

So I made an app for PROTO. Written in Kotlin and runs on Android.

Next, I want to upgrade it with a controller mode. It should work so so I simply plug a wired xbox controller into my phone with a USB OTG adaptor… and bam, the phone does all the complex wireless communication and is a battery. Meaning that besides the controller, you only need the app and… any phone. Which anyone is rather likely to have Done.

Now THAT is convenient!

( Warning, the rest of the post turned into... a few rants. ) Why Android? Well I dislike Android less than IOS

So it is it better to be crawling in front of the alter of "We are making the apocalypse happen" Google than "5 Chinese child workers died while you read this" Apple?

Not much…

I really should which over to a better open source Linux distribution… But I do not have the willpower to research which one... So on Android I stay.

Kotlin is meant to be "Java, but better/more modern/More functional programming style" (Everyone realized a few years back that the 100% Object oriented programming paradigme is stupid as hell. And we already knew that about the functional programming paradigme. The best is a mix of everything, each used when it is the best option.) And for the most part, it succeeds. Java/Kotlin compiles its code down to "bytecode", which is essentially assembler but for the Java virtual machine. The virtual machine then runs the program. Like how javascript have the browser run it instead of compiling it to the specific machine your want it to run on… It makes them easy to port…

Except in the case of Kotlin on Android... there is not a snowflakes chance in hell that you can take your entire codebase and just run it on another linux distribution, Windows or IOS…

So... you do it for the performance right? The upside of compiling directly to the machine is that it does not waste power on middle management layers… This is why C and C++ are so fast!

Except… Android is… Clunky… It relies on design ideas that require EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM AND APP ON YOUR PHONE to behave nicely (Lots of "This system only works if every single app uses it sparingly and do not screw each-other over" paradigms .). And many distributions from Motorola like mine for example comes with software YOUR ARE NOT ALLOWED TO UNINSTALL... meaning that software on your phone is ALWAYS behaving badly. Because not a single person actually owns an Android phone. You own a brick of electronics that is worthless without its OS, and google does not sell that to you or even gift it to you. You are renting it for free, forever. Same with Motorola which added a few extra modifications onto Googles Android and then gave it to me.

That way, google does not have to give any rights to its costumers. So I cannot completely control what my phone does. Because it is not my phone. It is Googles phone.

That I am allowed to use. By the good graces of our corporate god emperors

"Moose stares blankly into space trying to stop being permanently angry at hoe everyone is choosing to run the world"

… Ok that turned dark… Anywho. TLDR There is a better option for 95% of apps (Which is "A GUI that interfaces with a database") "Just write a single HTML document with internal CSS and Javascript" Usually simpler, MUCH easier and smaller… And now your app works on any computer with a browser. Meaning all of them…

I made a GUI for my parents recently that works exactly like that. Soo this post:

It was frankly a mistake of me to learn Kotlin… Even more so since It is a… awful language… Clearly good ideas then ruined by marketing department people yelling "SUPPORT EVERYTHING! AND USE ALL THE BUZZWORD TECHNOLOGY! Like… If your language FORCES you to use exceptions for normal runtime behavior "Stares at CancellationException"... dear god that is horrible...

Made EVEN WORSE by being a really complicated way to re-invent the GOTO expression… You know... The thing every programmer is taught will eat your feet if you ever think about using it because it is SO dangerous, and SO bad form to use it? Yeah. It is that, hidden is a COMPLEATLY WRONG WAY to use exceptions…

goodie… I swear to Christ, every page or two of my Kotlin notes have me ranting how I learned how something works, and that it is terrible... Blaaa. But anyway now that I know it, I try to keep it fresh in my mind and use it from time to time. Might as well. It IS possible to run certain things more effective than a web page, and you can work much more directly with the file system. It is... hard-ish to get a webpage to "load" a file automatically... But believe me, it is good that this is the case.

Anywho. How does the app work and what is the next version going to do?

PROTO is meant to be a platform I test OTHER systems on, so he is optimized for simplicity. So how you control him is sending a HTTP 1.1 message of type Text/Plain… (This is a VERY fancy sounding way of saying "A string" in network speak). The string is 6 comma separated numbers. Linear movement XYZ and angular movement XYZ.

The app is simply 5 buttons that each sends a HTTP PUT request with fixed values. Specifically 0.5/-0.5 meter/second linear (Drive back or forward) 0.2/-0.2 radians/second angular (Turn right or turn left) Or all 0 for stop

(Yes, I just formatted normal text as code to make it more readable... I think I might be more infected by programming so much than I thought...)

Aaaaaanywho. That must be enough ranting. Time to make the app

[rhinozilla]

Detroit: Become Family 2022 - Prompt 1: Alone

@dbh-found-family

Hank remembered one of the big selling points when androids first hit the market was how low maintenance they were. How they had internal self diagnostics and repair programs built into them. How technology had reached a point that it could heal itself from damage or viruses or whatever.

Of course that had its limits, but some of those commercials were burned into Hank’s memory. He found them resurfacing in his mind as those first few weeks after the android revolution unfolded. The memory of the cheery voice of some paid actor—chirping “they’re so durable!” and “they can handle more than the average human and will last longer without getting tired!”—churned through his head against today’s televised imagery of battered and broken android bodies being processed through the recycling centers, of any that hadn’t shutdown limping into the sanctuary of Jericho’s walls, of those that braved the public walking stoically and trying to live their lives while having insults and judgment thrown at them.

Sure, anything could be low maintenance if you didn’t give a shit about it. Hell, humans could be low maintenance, and Hank was learning the hard way what low maintenance—and really, active self sabotage—could do to a body and a spirit. And after those first few weeks, reality was setting in for the population of Detroit, and one aspect of this new reality was that androids were people who needed maintenance just like humans did. And right now, there was a dearth of capable professionals willing to help them.

Cyberlife’s doors had been closed for nearly a month. All their storefronts, warehouses, corporate offices, supply shops, and repair shops had all closed in the aftermath. Anybody with Cyberlife on their resume had by and large fled the city, maybe fearing a violent turn in the android revolution that would have put a target on their backs. There were a few independent businesses that offered android maintenance and repair services, but Cyberlife had kept such an iron grip on their products and services that they had done an effective job in running most independent competitors out of town.

So when Connor finally, quietly, sheepishly admitted to Hank that he was having some system troubles that his self repair program couldn’t fix…Hank knew they were in trouble.

Connor had been shot at least once during that tussle with the other RK800 in Cyberlife’s basement. And between when he left after that and when Hank saw him again the next morning at the Chicken Feed, he’d managed to look worse. So who knew what happened to him in that period of time. He’d been so insistent that his self repair program could take care of all of it, and Hank didn’t know enough about android shit to argue otherwise.

Until here they were a month later, and Connor had admitted that his self repair program had fixed the external damage of getting shot in the shoulder, but it hadn’t been able to repair everything going on under the surface. Something about…synthetic muscle belts being out of calibration and limiting his range of movement…contaminants from the bullet casing penetrating his thirium stream and causing micro-tears in his lines…which gave those contaminants room to dig in…And how his system was working overtime to try and flush them out, causing him to start overheating, especially around the damage point…and that was making the area tender to the touch as thirium flow and delicate manufactured sensors started acting essentially as nerve endings.

Now Hank didn’t know fuck about shit when it came to android stuff, but all of that to him sounded like Connor had an infection at the damage site. His theory had been reinforced when he’d seen how inflamed, for lack of a better word, Connor’s shoulder looked when Connor let him see it. Yep, it looked infected, and it was making him sick.

So…now Hank had a sick android on his hands and no technicians or…android doctors or whatever they were calling themselves now…in sight.

Jericho had gathered a few resources. They had some supplies and certainly the know-how that would help…but Connor wasn’t welcome there. Markus and some of the others had accepted him and forgiven him for his role as the Deviant Hunter, but they were a minority. So Connor was emphatic that going to Jericho wasn’t a good idea.

The surviving independent businesses that were still offering repair services were slammed all day long with androids with all manner of damages and maladies. Again, androids who had cause to hate Connor and who might see his vulnerability as an opportunity for revenge. So Connor was emphatic that it wouldn’t be safe to go there.

A bunch of shady back-alley repairmen had started cropping up too, offering cheaper, low quality repairs to androids who were terrified of being on the radar and were willing to prioritize discretion over professional standards. That was out of the question.

The DPD…or the 7th precinct where Hank worked at least…was in the process of bringing back the law enforcement androids who had worked there prior to the revolution. Hank hadn’t told Connor this, but Hank had been having private conversations with Fowler about bringing Connor back on board. He was a good detective and officer, and those were in short supply at the moment with everything going on. Fowler was still resistant to the idea, but Hank was wearing him down. He had already brought back all the PM700s and PC200s that had wanted to come back, along with some ST300s that used to work the reception and file rooms. Plus some new ones.

All that to say, the 07 had elected to bring on an in-house technician, a guy formerly of Cyberlife but reputable, to take care of when the DPD androids were inevitably targeted or damaged in the line of duty. The station tech was the only option Connor had left, and despite Connor not being employed or registered to the DPD at the time, Fowler had at least pulled a few strings for Hank to let him bring Connor in for an examination and repairs.

Connor had reluctantly agreed, avoiding the bullpen or anywhere that the other androids or officers might spot him, and Hank had felt his heart twisting his chest at how anxious he was about being recognized—or worse—for being where he ‘didn’t belong.’

The station tech had worked wonders, got Connor patched up and on some round of…android antibiotics or whatever…and sent them on their way.

Now they were safely back home afterward, and the poor guy was exhausted and hadn’t moved from the couch since.

Hank kept glancing at him as he folded laundry on the kitchen table, and every time the sight was the same. Connor was lying on the couch, eyes closed, deep in rest mode per the tech’s instructions. The immobilization sling on his arm was keeping his shoulder still, and in a few hours he was supposed to take another dose of that anti-inflammatory powder mixed in with some cold thirium to help flush out that infection.

Sumo would occasionally lumber over and sniff at him before losing interest and coming over to nose at Hank’s leg. Currently, the dog was standing beside the couch, tail swishing slowly with curiosity as he watched the android rest.

“Sumo,” Hank whispered at him, setting down a folded towel. “Leave him be. He’s not feeling well.”

Sumo glanced at Hank, looked at Connor again, and made a tiny whine of protest as his favorite android didn’t immediately get up to play with him.

“Hey,” Hank chided quietly. “C’mere.”

Sumo huffed and then plodded over. Hank set down the laundry and ruffled his hands behind both of the big dog’s ears.

“I know, I’m worried about him too, but he’ll be okay. He’s got us, right?”

Yeah, Hank and Sumo were about the only ones that Connor had nowadays. Christ.

Hank shuddered to think what might have happened, how much worse it could have been, if Connor had been truly alone since the revolution. Cyberlife had done a bang-up job of making sure he was truly ostracized from his own people, and humans like Hank hadn’t wanted anything to do with him before the revolution. Most didn’t want anything to do with him now.

No other friends. No family. Pretty much no support from Jericho. Abandoned by Cyberlife. Cast out of anywhere that had ever made use of him. Alone. Hank couldn’t say he knew what that felt like on an android-level, but…he knew what loneliness was.

Well, he wasn’t alone now. And if Connor could peel a pathetic drunk like Hank off his kitchen floor and manhandle him into becoming a functioning human again, then Hank could sure as Hell make sure Connor had what he needed to get healthy again after this. And he could probably do it without breaking and entering through a kitchen window like a maniac.

Sumo huffed again, then trotted back over to the couch, turned in a circle, and flopped down on the floor beside it protectively.

“There you go,” Hank bobbed his head, picking up another towel to fold. “You keep an eye on him, a’right? And maybe I’ll google some home remedies for, uh, for how to cool down overheating androids, yeah? Yeah…we’ll get him back on his feet in no time.”

After all, they were friends, right? What were friends for?

[darkmaga-returns]

Over the course of my life I have listened to the propaganda that private medicine is superior to socialized medicine.  Perhaps it is, but the United States has not had private medicine for decades. The prices paid for medical services are fixed by Medicare and private insurance companies and amount to far less than the billings.  Moreover, the prices are fixed in a way to eliminate private medical practice and force doctors into an employee relationship with “health maintenance organizations.” Private practice in America is being extinguished, especially at the level of family practitioners. As a matter of policy, health maintenance organizations–corporate medicine–are reimbursed at a higher rate than doctors in private practice.  This causes private practitioners to capitalize what value there is in their practice by selling out to HMOs and becoming employees subject to a manager with a MBA whose job is to maximize the profit from the medical unit.  In other words, profit maximization takes over from health care.

I have had two doctors who were forced out of private practice by the disparity in billing that favors corporate medicine.  In corporate medicine your doctor is not the boss.  He is an employee subject to being fired if he does not follow the treatments ordered by his employer.  This is the reason so many people were murdered and had their health permanently injured by the “Covid vaccine.”  

My doctor, am employee of corporate medicine, understood that the lab-manufactured Covid virus was of little danger to those whose health was not already in question.  He treated those patients whose health made them vulnerable to Covid with Ivermectin and cured their illness.  His corporate employer called him in and informed him that he would be fired if he continued treating with Ivermectin.  He was to send his Covid patients to the hospital where they would be ventilated and treated with Remdesivir and, thus, murdered, because hospitals were paid $39,000 for very Covid death.  Maximizing death, not saving lives, was the result of the profit motive that libertarians and free market economists worship. The reason for maximizing deaths  by withholding effective treatment and by inflating the infection rate with the PCR test was to create panic that would line up millions of  people willing to have the Covid vax, thus maximizing Big Pharma’s profits. 

[anuragaryal]

My blog post

#Business Operations Plan: Preparing for Market Launch

I need efficient planning within the remaining six weeks since market release becomes imminent. I launched a clothing brand before which taught me about the essential aspects of product procurement and supply chain management and launch quality control.

Sourcing and Readiness

I need to connect with trustworthy suppliers because I have to obtain them for this new business venture within the specified time period. As a former member of the clothing industry I learned essential concepts for building strong vendor partnerships and controlling inventory stocks. The prevention of delays becomes possible when I establish close ties with reputable supply sources and keep alternate purchasing options ready for use.

Meeting the Deadline

A structured timeline is essential. The launch goals will guide my task to coordinate both procurement together with marketing and sales activities. My past experience involving brands allows me to anticipate problems and quickly solve them.

Roles and Responsibilities

Teamwork will succeed only when each member receives their specific tasks clearly assigned.

Our company manages product supply through Sourcing & Procurement role.

The marketing team alongside sales staff develops promotional approaches for product advertisement.

Operations & Logistics – Handling inventory and customer service.

Finance – Budgeting and pricing.

Licenses and Permits

I will conduct research to identify the business licenses together with resale permits needed before proceeding with necessary compliance steps.

Vision for Launch

To launch successfully, I need:

A functional e-commerce platform.

Corporate strategies will use my proven experience in product branding.

Payment systems and inventory management tools.

Customer service channels.

My previous clothing business experience combined with a strategic plan makes me certain about carrying out a seamless launch. Stay tuned for updates!

#Entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #StartupJourney #Ecommerce

[heirloomeds]

FAMILY CONNECTIONS 2/4: the irvine’s.

elijah irvine: chief strategy officer for the media empire, zeus international. comes from a very wealthy family with roots in atlanta, georgia. felt systemically kept out of important conversations due to his blackness. promised himself that he’d never be made to feel like an outsider again. temporarily moved to england to attend oxford university, where he met and fell in love with iris diamandis. he was endlessly fascinating by her ambition and knew that he would be able to achieve greatness with and through her. charismatic and warm, with a hidden ruthlessness. fits right into corporate america. ☼ capricorn ☾ aries ↑ libra

iris irvine (formerly diamandis): chief visionary officer at zeus international . hails from a very wealthy greek lineage, with her grandparents relocating to london for a fresh start. zeus international had been in the family for generations, but did pretty traditional marketing. iris saw an opportunity to move the business to hollywood after her parents passed and turned zeus into the powerhouse it currently is. public relations, talent management, crisis management, brand consulting.. you name it, they do it. accustomed to feeling undervalued and ignored by everyone in the room and has learned to nurture a quiet confidence and inner fire. ☼ scorpio ☾ capricorn ↑ virgo

athena electra irvine: the perfect heir to the family empire. head of public relations by the age of 26. not only does she share both of her parent’s ambition, but the social intelligence and social media savvy to bring it to even further in the new generation. has sacrificed personal happiness in favor for career ambitions, and hides her general cynicism for life under layers of charisma and perceived warmth. it is not even remotely interested in settling down with anyone. resents her twin for taking the easy way out, but also envies his freedom. ☼ pisces ☾ scorpio↑ capricorn

adonis leonidas irvine: the reluctant heir apparent who walked away from his inherited roles non-profit founder and philanthropist. does his work for the greater good of society, not for accolades or validation. focuses on community engagement and using his wealth to benefit the quality of life for those who need it. conflicted about his past and trying to embrace it instead of pretending like he’s so far above or far away from it. notoriously secretive, and reclusive. goes on random wellness, retreats and disappears of the face of the planet for months at a time whenever he can. ☼ pisces ☾ scorpio ↑ capricorn

[mariacallous]

Donald Trump is commonly described as transactional. At some level, however, all leaders are transactional. What defines the U.S. president-elect is his unabashed opportunism, often at the expense of values, alliances, and even treaties. For Trump, who co-wrote the 1987 book The Art of the Deal, every transaction is zero-sum, with a clear winner and loser. More than anything else, Trump likes to be seen as a winner, even when he isn’t.

Pundits reflexively see Trump’s nakedly transactional nature as an attribute that might terrify other global stakeholders. The reality is more complicated. States that have come to rely on U.S.-backed alliances will certainly need to recalibrate. Global markets will experience turbulence. But countries and companies will also sniff out opportunities. The ones with the means to do so will look to exploit the president-elect’s tendency to prioritize his self-interest. As Trump begins a second term, world leaders and corporate executives are more prepared than they were in 2016. They have not only learned lessons from his first stint in the White House but also since pored over abundant reporting about Trump’s non-traditional leadership style, his what’s-in-it-for-me mindset, and his reliance on family members for dealmaking.

Trump may retain his ability to shock, but the world is no longer surprised by an opportunistic United States. The post-World War II order that managed the globe for seven decades had already begun to fray before Trump’s first term. Countries that aspired to abide by an equal, rules-based international system have watched as Washington has resisted sharing power in multilateral bodies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. China’s unprecedented rise, along with a growing global disillusionment with free trade and globalization, has turned the United States toward protectionism and made it less likely to privilege norms and professed values when they conflict with interests. This trend was already underway, perhaps most visibly since the start of the Iraq War two decades ago. Trump’s return will only accelerate a move toward a more transactional global system.

The world will navigate Trump’s zero-sum mindset in a variety of ways. For countries that have historically relied on Washington’s friendship, the next years will bring painful disruptions. At a campaign event last February, Trump recounted how he told an unidentified NATO member he would encourage aggressors to “do whatever the hell they want” if that country hadn’t allocated what he deemed to be the right amount of defense spending. “You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills,” Trump concluded. The president-elect’s supporters argue that he is right-sizing U.S. policy and that his maximalist statements are designed to reach desirable outcomes in negotiations. Critics counter that the mere suggestion he won’t abide by a treaty alliance destroys U.S. credibility.

Either way, Europe must respond to a changing relationship with the United States. Beyond encouraging European armies to beef up their militaries, Brussels is already preparing to buy American to make Trump feel as though he’s winning. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde affirmed this plan by suggesting that Europe should employ a “cheque-book strategy,” in which it increases purchases of U.S. exports. Similarly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has proposed giving U.S. firms special access to the country’s rare minerals to appeal to Trump’s quid pro quo mentality.

While countries in Europe are making the best of the circumstances presented to them, there’s little doubt they’d rather deal with a different president in the White House. According to a poll of 30 countries and territories conducted by the Economist in July and August, resounding pluralities in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain preferred a Democratic winner over a Republican one. And it’s not just Europe. Respondents from two other countries that have signed U.S. defense treaties—Japan and South Korea—also marked a preference for a candidate other than Trump.

In contrast, a plurality of respondents from emerging markets such as Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Vietnam expressed a preference for a Republican candidate over a Democratic one. This shouldn’t be surprising. First, none of them have defense agreements that Trump could threaten to abandon. And second, while these countries acknowledge the risks under a Trump presidency, they also see abundant opportunities. Many of these rising economies have grown tired of Western lectures on human rights and democracy and are instead itching to deploy their growing clout to strike the best deals for themselves.

“Republicans place more importance on a convergence of interests than coalescing values,” said Syed Akbaruddin, a former Indian diplomat who served as New Delhi’s ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s first term. “As a neo-realist power, India feels it can deal with a transactional Trump. If it’s a question of give-and-take, we know we can give some and take some.”

The larger the economy, the more touchpoints for give-and-take. One element of Trump’s style that seems to lend itself to transactions is his inclination to pick family members in official roles. Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner played significant roles in domestic and foreign policy in Trump’s first term. Trump has now named Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, as his ambassador to France and Massad Boulos, father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, as his Middle East advisor.

There’s a track record of countries reaching out to family members to draw closer to Trump himself. Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner’s private equity firm received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by the country’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The seed money was approved despite objections from the fund’s due diligence committee, according to documents seen by the New York Times. One way of interpreting the decision is as an investment in a member of the future U.S. president’s inner circle.

India tried a different approach during Trump’s first term as it scrambled to get on an inside track. In November 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rolled out a red carpet to welcome Ivanka Trump to Hyderabad for a business summit focused on empowering women. No expense was spared: Roads were repaired, pavements cleaned up, and curbsides painted as the city put on a charm offensive for the president’s daughter, with adoring TV reports on the country’s government-friendly cable channels. The entire operation was designed to catch the transactional Trump’s eye, a leader known to enjoy not only pomp and circumstance but also favorable media coverage.

If U.S. allies and emerging markets have a relatively clear strategy to appeal to the opportunistic part of Trump world—flattery, deals, buying American, and leveraging family connections—it is less obvious how U.S. adversaries might fare. Rivals such as Russia and China, already sanctioned and sidelined by the United States, are bracing for tougher penalties while simultaneously relishing the prospect of a more unstable global order. Russia sees NATO’s strength—backstopped by the United States, of course—as a mortal, long-term threat. China, meanwhile, has complained of Washington’s desire to create an “Asian NATO” in the form of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a group that also includes Australia, India, and Japan. If Trump denigrates either alliance to reach better deals in one domain, then U.S. adversaries will gain in another. Similarly, if the success of U.S. attempts to curb Chinese development of high-level semiconductors hinges on cooperation with U.S. allies, then Beijing would welcome any disruption in those partnerships.

Tariffs are likely to play an outsized role in Trump’s negotiating tactics; he has already deployed them in the past as a tool to bludgeon China and has more recently described “tariff” as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” What is unclear is how they will serve U.S. interests. In the short term, tariffs function mostly as a sales tax, with immediate inflationary impacts that are likely to affect lower-income families more acutely than richer ones. Economists linked to Trump argue that over time, tariffs could raise immense amounts of revenue, funding tax cuts and encouraging businesses to produce locally, thereby correcting some of the key problems they diagnose in the U.S. economy. Even if those assessments have merit, they are inherently longer- term projects. Yet, in the short term, tariffs are likely to cause two things Trump loathes: inflation, as mentioned, but also panic in the stock market. Paradoxically, Trump’s favorite tactic is likely to be the one he may not have the patience to see through. And by all accounts, Beijing has a sophisticated understanding of this dynamic and is therefore unlikely to react passively to tariffs designed to damage its economy. If China can contribute to a stock market downturn, it likely will, knowing how much Trump will dislike it. And while Beijing has reduced its exports to the United States, it retains significant leverage over key U.S. companies such as Apple and Tesla, which continue to run large manufacturing operations in China.

Spare a thought for a final group of countries that stands to lose the most in the likely scenario where Trump shuns multilateralism and prioritizes bilateral transactions: the more than 100 nations with populations under 10 million. Countries from the Maldives to Mauritania lack the size, strength, or salience to lobby for preferential treatment in the event of blanket global tariffs or the Trump team’s search for favorable deals on the global stage. A majority of these countries are developing economies spread out across the global south, generally flying under the radar of great-power politics.

“Smaller countries—by their very definition—would like a world with more rules. They don’t have the leverage larger countries have,” said Akbaruddin, the former Indian diplomat. And in many ways, smaller and lower-income countries have never needed more leverage. After the peak years of free trade and globalization in the latter part of the 20th century, and the China-led commodities boom at the start of the current century, there is no longer a rising tide lifting all boats. Instead, there’s the existential threat of climate change, which smaller countries do not have the funds to build defenses for; a world that has become more protectionist, prioritizing large-scale industrial policy and domestic production, and in which smaller countries lose out; and growing global conflict, leading to mass migration and instability in the food and commodities markets, which tend to generate the biggest disruptions for the tiniest nations. In each of these cases, a more transactional global order re-creates the scenario Thucydides once described: The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must. If the law of the jungle dominates statecraft, where does that leave the art of diplomacy?

The Biden years now represent a blip in the longer trend line of Trump’s America First. It’s worth noting that President Joe Biden himself frequently struggled to mask the contradictions between his rhetoric and his actions. Two weeks after assuming the presidency in 2021, Biden declared at the State Department that “America is back.” His words were designed to reassure the global community that Trump’s first term was an aberration. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” he said.

Yet while he was fond of promising that his White House would defend freedom and uphold universal rights, Biden found himself in the awkward position of visiting Jeddah in the summer of 2022 and fist-bumping Mohammed bin Salman, whom he once branded a “pariah” for his role in the murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi. Riyadh’s muscle in the oil markets turned out to be more valuable than Biden’s idealism. More recently, Biden’s seemingly blind support for Israel’s war in Gaza—a lonely stance in the very multilateral organizations the United States helped create—furthered a global sentiment that Washington had one set of rules for friends and another for everyone else.

Biden was also not immune from nepotism. After repeatedly denying he would pardon his son Hunter for his three felony convictions, Biden did just that after his final family Thanksgiving dinner as president. Once again, Biden’s lofty words had come back to bite him.

Trump won’t have these kinds of problems. Global expectations of him are lower to begin with. Having won a popular vote while making clear he will put America first—at all costs and unconstrained by concerns about human rights, values, the climate crisis, or migration—Trump will assume he has a free pass to pursue what he sees as being in Washington’s brazen interest. For much of the rest of the world, this won’t feel like a massive course correction. Instead, it’ll confirm a collective instinct that the old world order is no longer fit for purpose. 

The "Biden nepotism" stuff is bullshit here, but otherwise I think this makes some interesting points.

[bachelor-degree-finance-2025]

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Graduates with a Financial Degree are well-prepared for positions in various industries, including real estate, investment banking, financial consultancy, and insurance.

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[xettle-technologies]

How Can Payout Solutions Transform Business Payments in 2024 - 2025?

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Real-Time Processing: With real-time payments, recipients receive their funds instantly, improving cash flow and enhancing customer and vendor satisfaction.

Security and Compliance: Leading payout solutions prioritize data security and ensure compliance with local and international regulations, providing businesses with peace of mind.

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The payout solutions market is undergoing significant innovation, driven by advancements in technology and evolving business needs. Some of the key trends include:

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Custom Solutions Services: Payment solution providers are increasingly offering tailored services to meet the specific needs of industries. Custom solutions address unique challenges, such as handling high transaction volumes for marketplaces or facilitating recurring payments for subscription-based businesses.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: AI-powered analytics help businesses identify patterns, predict payment trends, and detect fraudulent activities, making payout systems smarter and more reliable.

Blockchain for Transparency: Blockchain technology is being incorporated into payout solutions to ensure transparency, reduce fraud, and provide an immutable record of transactions.

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Efficient payment management is critical to the success of any business. Delayed or inaccurate payments can harm relationships with vendors and employees and erode customer trust. By adopting advanced payout solutions, businesses can overcome these challenges while gaining a competitive edge.

For E-Commerce: Payout solutions simplify vendor disbursements, refunds, and affiliate payments, ensuring smooth operations.

For the Gig Economy: Freelancers and gig workers demand timely payments. Payout solutions ensure on-time and accurate disbursements, boosting workforce satisfaction.

For Corporates: Automating payroll processes reduces administrative effort and ensures compliance with labor laws.

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Payment solution providers are the backbone of the payout ecosystem. They offer the tools and services needed to set up and manage efficient payout systems. By partnering with these providers, businesses can access cutting-edge technology and expert guidance to optimize their payment processes.

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Challenges and Opportunities

While payout solutions offer numerous advantages, businesses may face challenges such as:

Integration Complexity: Implementing new payout systems may require reconfiguring existing business software.

Data Privacy: With increasing regulatory scrutiny, ensuring data protection and compliance is critical.

User Adoption: Training teams to use new payout solutions effectively can be a hurdle for organizations.

However, these challenges are outweighed by the opportunities payout solutions provide, including improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer satisfaction, and the ability to scale operations effortlessly.

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As businesses continue to embrace digital transformation, payout solutions will play an increasingly pivotal role. The integration of AI, blockchain, and IoT technologies into payout systems will further enhance their capabilities, making them more intuitive and secure.

In 2024-2025, we expect to see wider adoption of custom payout services, especially among SMEs looking to optimize their operations. Payment solution providers will continue to innovate, offering businesses the tools they need to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Conclusion

Payout solutions are no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses aiming to stay ahead in today’s fast-paced digital economy. By streamlining payment processes, enhancing security, and offering scalability, these solutions transform how businesses manage their financial transactions. With the support of reliable payment solution providers like Xettle Technologies, businesses can unlock new opportunities for growth and efficiency.

Investing in a robust payout solution is an investment in the future of your business. As we step into 2024-2025, the businesses that leverage these transformative technologies will undoubtedly lead the charge in reshaping the global payment landscape.