Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:

>
This is the truth! You are a philosopher king! In sweden, they stopped
scoring goals in football for children. When I was a child, and you were
bad at foot ball, you sat on the bench. Then you found another sport that
you actually had some aptitude for. Much better system if you ask me, and
also an experience that teaches valuable life lessons early!

>
Fail to learn that the real world is an unforgiving mistress, and you
will be constantly at odds with reality forever.  The "no score,
everybody wins" method just breeds an enormous amount of snowflakes
that expect everything handled to them on a silver platter.  Sadly,
life hands you nothing unless you work to get it.

This is the truth! I try to impart this lesson to my students, but sadly I don't
see them often enough or long enough to make the lesson stick. They are also a
bit too old, 20-40 (it's a vocational school so in quality probably similar to a
US community college or something) so that makes it difficult to impart those
important life lessons and make sure they are deeply engrained.

Amen! I started to study engineering, and I could not stand the heat. I
discovered that physics and math was extremely boring. I could push
through by sheer force of will, but after 1 years I realized... why?
Wouldn't it be better to study something I actually enjoyed?

>
I enjoyed Engineering, so most of the classes were /easy/ (relative
measure, University Physics was significantly harder than high school
Physics -- we covered all year from HS in the first month, then set off
into uncharted territory) from my perspective.  Calculus classes were
terrible, largely due to awful professors (Indian, thick accents, spoke
250wpm, wrote on board at 400wpm, skipped writing the 13 critically important
intermediate steps in between each line that did get written on the
board because they were trivially obvious *to the professor*).
Electromagnetic Theory was the other one that was 'ugh', but a lot of
that was that it was almost "calculus 4" in disguise.

I still get nightmares when I think about electromagnetic theory! Some people
who refused to give up, found a way to game the system. They took an exchange
year abroad in the US and took the equivalent class there. The good thing was
that you could pass that course in the US by doing multiple-choice exams, so
given enough attempts eventually they would pass it.
In sweden, at the time, there were no multiple choice exams. You got a problem,
did your calculations and then handed in the result + your calculations. If you
took too big steps, so the teacher could not follow your logic, they could fail
you on the question even if you arrived at the right answer.

In our other programs, 100% graudate. But only 50% work in IT, and they
have very low salaries.
>
I cannot understand how they could not see cause an effect.

>
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.
>
Their (the admin's) performance measure was "number passed out", not
"percent earning above average salary in job related to degree".

Amen!

Haha...  yes, reminds me of one of my teachers at a school, and on
the first day they had an open question session.  One arabian
gentleman asked...
>
"Hey you... what's the salary? Will I be rich when I'm done?"
>
The teacher: I'm X, you can call me X, that's perfectly fine."
>
He: "What ever... what's the money?"
>
The teacker: Sigh....  "if you are good, you earn well, if you are
bad, find another program."
>
The student looked dissatisfied with the answer. ;)

>
Likely a royal prince or duke or some other such 'secondary royal
family member' who's been pampered and such his entire life, and so has
no basis for understanding how the world really works.

Nah... more likely the son of the local al qaida terrorist. Sweden doesn't
import educated arabians. Only extremist moslems are allowed to immigrate.