Re: someone noticed 90 percent indians posting on asktom.oracle.com

"Noons" <wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in message news:<3f38f071$0$10356$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
> "Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote in message
> news:3f38dfb2$0$15033$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net...
>
> > > Unis are not mainstream education for the masses. Not now and even less
> > > the way education is going.
> >
> > Maybe not in your neck of the woods. In the UK we have this daft target to
> > get 50% of the school leaving population through University. Assuming this
> > half assed target doesn't die a quick death (and all political parties seem
> > to support it cos education is good right?) then University education will
> > become exactly mainstream education for the masses, a crying shame in my
> > view.

Gee, maybe we _need_ an uneducated underclass. (That's severe cynicism. Where I live, near the US/Mexican border, the economy couldn't function without cheap labor from abroad, yet there is no efficient legal mechanism to import it.)

>
> Maybe. I'd rather have that, than this quaint notion our
> government has that anyone taking a uni course has to
> fork out 100 grand for it. Which means it is effectively
> out of reach for the vast majority of the population.
> Mind you: no guarantees of quality, suitability, whatever:
> just cough up the moolah and they'll supply the diploma.

Yeah, I spent years as a student scraping by, got a Bsc and some tech certs, then did fine with no student debt. My wife got a doctorate (plus 3000 hours slave labor), married me, so I wound up paying 100 grand... sigh... I make 3 times what she does. It's so expensive to live here, we're barely middle class (and that only by virtue of my investment acumen). I wouldn't want to be coming out of college now.

>
> I don't think so...
>
> Then again, if they hadn't spent the last 20 years selling
> courses to foreign students for that price (plus accomodation)
> and making a motza out of it, maybe we'd have someone sensible
> in charge of education. Unfortunately, we have a bean counter.

I find a great deal of cognitive dissonance in supporting free markets as the Economist does, and the implication that there is something wrong with having a been counter in charge.

The whole idea of regulation arises because many people agree that a particular aspect of a free market doesn't work (perhaps because that aspect violates many of the precepts of a free market). Over time, people forget why the regulation is there, and blame any resulting problems on it. Some may indeed come from the regulation, but the usual reaction these days seems to be to blame it all on the regulation, and deregulate, to sometimes disastrous consequences. What may really be needed is a feedback loop to adjust the regulation, as well as information channels to explain the adjustments. In other words, accounting.

Now, if you don't like the idea of bean counters in charge, you pretty much have to come up with some sort of social and economic regulation.  This may be good or bad, depending on implementation specifics.

The more power you give to those with greater resources (and of course, totally unregulated markets give them the most power), the more likely you are to have a class divide with no middle class. The big flamebait in the US and cdo a few years ago was H1-B. Larry and friends convince the gummint that the US has to reduce protectionism in order to remain more competitive - importing cheap labor when there is a "shortage" of American talent, and exporting jobs to cheap areas.  It hurt me some, but I seem to have outlasted it, mostly because I put my personal economics ahead of just following jobs around. My experience was, if there were just one or a few H1-B's, no problem, they're just like anyone else, if sometimes a bit culture-shocked, and sometimes very paranoid in a dotbomb. But some companies hired them wholesale, obviously abusing the system, treating the H1's like "hey, you step outta line, you go back home," and treating everyone else... the same.

So now we see trolls like the OP - apparently from Europe (from Germany? I couldn't figure out if the bad english was a joke or not).  I love self-referential humor, especially when unintentional. And we see complaints about Oracle support - I hadn't had much problem until recently, when I stepped out of the bounds of my preferred db work. But I don't know if that is because of India, RWC, some internet worm, Oracle's internal RAC, or just 'cause it's summer.

jg

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