The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

I've come to realize that poker can't be played through math alone unless you're already rich enough to weather every storm of variance. Generalizing to upwards mobility, every true success story is a story of playing people, not odds. But social capital consolidates upwards too.

What we really need is for there to be a way for the poor to profit from other people's expectations of their failure. War and exploration used to afford opportunities along these lines, simply because being expendable made you a nuisance at home, so gambling with you made sense

The death of credible higher education has destroyed what might have been another, limited solution in the modern world. What might work are institutions that are trustworthy enough that companies will enter into contractual arrangements to hire a certain number of graduates

I wonder to what extent the bad driving out the good in terms of college graduates is a result of the bad driving out the good in currency: colleges are direct beneficiaries of state tax dollars, but only in proportion to number of students matriculated.

The result is bad currency in proportion to bad students. But of course, strictly speaking, this makes educational institutions one of the primary "beneficiaries", at least short term, of the devaluation of currency.

Fundamentally, other people's money is being used to support increasingly marginal educational outcomes. This would be ok if marginal outcomes had even marginal improvements in SES, but they don't. Whenever it appears otherwise, success was usually assured even with no degree