Sundancer

Says the white guy. I don't think women outside of some screaming loon you can probably find on Twitter are advocating for men to dumb down or abandon trades. Agreed that there was moment when this was true re "uncool" but it seems that tide has turned. People value their tradespeople more, as they should, these days. Yup. And with that you kind of prove my point from above. Young men are not going to college in big numbers AND not going into trades. But hell if they can't mine a Twitter conspiracy to fulfill a sense of superiority.

Have you spoken with a good contractor lately? If you have (they are hard to find), ask them how easy it is to find those guys you're talking about. Unless your contractor is hiring immigrants, he's going to tell you that it's very hard. Very hard indeed.

What are you talking about? Is dismantling the trades part of your conspiracy mindset? Take a breath brother!

The "useless degrees" comment is funny. I was an engineer and had grad school in it too. So clearly a "practical" degree by many accounts. I pretty much hated the degrees and the work but I did it because I was locked into this practical model of thinking. But this idea that an English or Classics or History or Philosophy degree is useless misses the point that yes, actually, learning to think and write critically is important. No, there are not many philosophy jobs. (WTF would that even look like?) But there are lots of jobs and people who have shown that they can communicate, read, and think critically can get those jobs and move to other jobs. My mom was an English major. She writes government proposals in her field. My cousin was a history major. He is CEO of a business consulting company. My brother is an engineer who works in child care (!). My wife was an economics major who is a social worker. The "useless" degrees are not always making you into what you're studying. Yes to the points others made, if you're studying philosophy, I hope someone in your life is making sure that you understand the economics of paying 70K/year at a private university and your earning potential especially early on, but by all means study what you want. Life is short. Anyone can be happy. And despite all this, men are not going into trades or going to college. It's a problem. Fo sho This place could use a more representative opinion base. The white dude quotient is skewed.

You can’t bemoan that men are not going into trade professions or the service and also note that girls are filling colleges at a 50% higher clip and conclude that men are becoming electricians and doctors. If you don’t see shiftless men sitting at (their parents’) home, diving into Twitter conspiracies, abandoning their kids, playing fortnite, and smoking the now legal pot, you’re not paying much attention. Women are holding things together even more than normal.

Stay on target red leader. People choose to go to college or not and in college choose their fields of study. General numbers how that men are choosing video games. Women, college.

FYI for fans out of state who don’t want to bring their vaccine card with them to games, you can get cleared through the Clear app according to the announcement. I don’t want that card in my pocket at the game and already went through their process. This may be in this thread somewhere already.

Do this thing: Don’t listen to the Bills message board or Twitter. Do what your doctor says on this. We don’t have to regress to the age of listening to communal medicine. That’s the advice for everyone. Just ask your doctor. “Hey Dr Smith, I heard ____. I read ____. What do you advise?”

In the Covid thread, posters advocate not listening to their doctors on healthcare matters. In this thread, posters attack education. In all threads, PPP posters complain about how people in America are acting without sense. Just saying.

Follow the advice of your doctor. The end. For cancer patients and non. It is pretty simple.

That study has a lot of flaws but perhaps the biggest is even if its conclusion on the 13x is correct (dubious given its many problems not the least of which is a small sample size and observations study), the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated is huge and the difference between previous infection+vax vs unvaccinated is bigger than just previous infection. The way to herd immunity is through vaccination, not natural immunity. If you had Covid, follow the advice of your doctor on whether you should get a shot. Seriously. Don’t trust a YouTube video or a Bills message board.

NAFTA is not perfect but it made things better on the average for everyone. People want to ***** on free trade but it's not likely to ever be totally free. Be happy it mostly is.

There's no poverty in America by measures of the word as you might use it. We have elevated everyone. The only people who truly still don't have a meal in front of themselves every day of the week are mentally ill or not asking for help in the right place (and such people 100% exist). Our unemployed have unlimited data plans, Venmo accounts as well as access to emergency rooms, air conditioned sleeping, and heat. I am not saying that the lowest 20% in America have it easy, but easy is relative to time in the US and place in the world. The wealth gap is a fact, not a problem. People who whine about it are just envious, not grateful. Free trade is always a net positive. NAFTA was assuredly so. You're living in a 40s paradigm if you think Americans will fill blue collar factory jobs in 2021.

For the few young men going into the service or a trade, I agree to some extent. But the current batch is playing video games in their rooms of the parents' home and a college degree remains a path to the middle class.

From WSJ so behind a firewall, with apologies, but here's the gist. I'm certain this will turn into a cynical joke thread but this is a terrible trend. In no way do I believe that college is the be-all end-all for the future but it definitely means something and the last quoted portion below on anti-intellectualism rings true, as men turn to Twitter and celebs like Howard Stern and Joe Rogan (sorry to invoke him twice in a day..again I'm a fan Joe!) for intellectual and moral guidance. Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education. ... Men dominate top positions in industry, finance, politics and entertainment. They also hold a majority of tenured faculty positions and run most U.S. college campuses. Yet female college students are running laps around their male counterparts. The University of Vermont is typical. The school president is a man and so are nearly two-thirds of the campus trustees. Women made up about 80% of honors graduates last year in the colleges of arts and sciences. ... Many young men are hobbled by a lack of guidance, a strain of anti-intellectualism and a growing belief that college degrees don’t pay off, said Ed Grocholski, a senior vice president at Junior Achievement USA, which works with about five million students every year to teach about career paths, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. “What I see is there is a kind of hope deficit,” Mr. Grocholski said.

It's what some vaccines do. This is not what the mRNA vaccines do. If you're going to opine on the science pretending you know what you're talking about, know what you're talking about. Here you do not. Unproven but natural immunity is definitely effective. Don't attempt to do science in this thread.

Don't make assumptions. I am against this mandate. I am not against what it is trying to do, i.e., jab the idiots, but I'm against the way it's attempting to be enacted. First, that's playing coy. You know what your doctor is going to recommend. They will recommend that you get the vaccine unless you've got a rare justified reason for not doing so. You don't have to take Dr. Fauci and his evil conspiracy of Wuhan killers at their word...your PCP will tell you to take the vaccine. I'm 100% totally fine if everyone follows the advice of their PCPs and the handful of kooky PCPs can proscribe Ivermectin while the other 99.9999% of patients get vaccinated. There's this funny thing happening where people believe they know better than doctors what they should do. We've gone full circle on believing in science and instead go off Twitter MDs and Joe Rogan (I am a fan BTW) guests for serious health care advice. Every time I ask a vax skeptic or anti-vaxxer what their doc says, they say, "Whose doctor would take their call" or "I know better what to put into my body than my doctor." Both are lame excuses to avoid what we all know is true: your doctor wants you to get the vaccine.

I am not trying to be confrontational but ask out of curiosity. Did you ever mind the vaccine mandates before the potential covid vaccine mandates? I understand the differences, that Covid is less dangerous than polio, mumps, etc., but it's also way more contagious. I never gave the other vaccines a second thought for me or my kid. Just followed doctor's advice and took them. It's interesting that so many people now decide they know better than their doctors. Why is that?

Derp. My wife and most of her co-workers are in healthcare and worked with the sickest of the sick through Covid. 2 of about 20 got Covid. The rest did not and of course got vaccinated (because they listen to their doctors), the moment they could. My brother and his girlfriend worked on the Buffalo Covid ward set aside at [forget hospital he was assigned to for that duty] and neither got Covid. Just because you're working around sick people doesn't mean that you will get sick.

Go near it, to what effect? You and I likely agree 99% on border issues and solutions. I pretty much agreed with Trump (minus his numerous wall lies) and Republicans on border control. But the border is not the big issue on Covid; it's getting vaccinated that is the issue. You're just eating red meat if you want to inject the border into this. I'm not worried about the border's effect on Covid any more than I was worried at the Bills game last weekend. Get people vaccinated.

How about not canceling all elective procedures and not being over maximum normal capacity? Natural immunity does but how is this so hard to understand: natural immunity puts morepeople in the hospital and morgue and people developing natural immunity spread more and for longer than those who are vaccinated. Today we get to do Germany for our trip to the Vaccines Work classroom.

The border is not the issue with why our covid cases remain high. WTF are you on? A high vaccination rate and this pretty much all comes under control. And no, Israel is not a good example. They have the 24th-ish highest vaccination rate in the world AND have a high ration of children to adults, meaning there are a lot of kids not getting vaxxed and spreading. Oh, and Israel has a pretty big anti-vax idiotic crowd.

You're way out here talking about illegal immigration. This is a Covid thread about getting vaccinated. I understand that many people on this board can't adopt opinions that are out-of-line with their party uniform but it's possible to be pro-vaccine and pro-tight border. But as a reminder, here we were talking about Covid vaccines. I'm sure I can make some link to Obamacare, Trump's active repeal of same, medicare benefits, the war on drugs, school science curriculums, etc to Covid as well but it would be a carnival sideshow. Vaccines work. People need to get vaccinated. Punto final.

Vaccines are one issue. Border is another issue. The overlap between them is minimal. You inserted the border into this thread, not me. Get vaccinated, save lives, get healthcare back to relatively normal operations. It's not that complicated.

Is this what people mean by “hot take?”