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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#291

Post by cjrp »

WalterBright wrote: post #281
onion2k wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to…

Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.

Coming through successfully, or arriving at the border?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#292

Post by vimacs2 »

agent008t wrote: post #270
thorin wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the stuff you mention, the drinking/clubbing is just true of teenagers / young people in the UK and you probably missed out the drugs and sex. When I went to a "top tier" uni in the 90s after watching the young ones and reading adrian mole I expected students to be going to rallies and being "intellectual". I spent more time reading about other subjects than my own and underperformed in my degree. Students w…

I can't help but think that for every student more into drugs/sex/drinking/clubbing, there is a kid out there who was genuinely interested in studying from the top academics that probably didn't even bother applying because they thought they wouldn't be able to get in (or won't be able to afford it). I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it…

They literally promote "Freshers week" in every Uni I've ever been to so good luck on ever seeing that change. There's too much money in swindling young people so I doubt it's going away.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#293

Post by sokoloff »

pjc50 wrote: post #258
agent008t wrote: post #191

I expected Oxford undergraduates to be the best from all over the world, intensely passionate about their subjects. What I found were kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying. There seemed to be some weird hierarchy about who sits where in the dining hall that was completely bizarre. 'Default' social activities organized by the various committees all involved brain-dead clubbing an…

(MA Cantab matriculated 1997) > kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying ... not like the world of Turing or Feynman at all. I think you may have underestimated how much Feynman was a prankster, womaniser and bongo-player who occasionally did some physics as well :) > you see them in the lectures, then you go back to your college There's kind of a hidden initiative test here; it do…

> The mental health and motivational/pedagogical thinking is also stuck in the 19th century. Some of this does need to adapt to today's students.

If it adapts to pedagogic techniques now known to be more effective, that’s a good thing. If it instead adapts to changes in the students themselves, I think that’s more likely to be bad than good, or is at a minimum not obviously good.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#294

Post by teachingassist »

ceejayoz wrote: post #262
teachingassist wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider. > Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. "The medi…

> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider. Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli... > A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000…

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.

Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#295

Post by vimacs2 »

WalterBright wrote: post #238
crispyambulance wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China turning away from communism... If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO". China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in…

China even has a stock market. Isn't that the opposite of communism?

Can you give us your definition of communism?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#296

Post by iso1631 »

iratic0 wrote: post #48
nicoburns wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has it ever been cool to be posh?

In the UK after the Conservatives came to power in 2010 electing an Old Etonian, I felt culturally there was a shift towards "posh" is good as a signifier of status and social power. I feel like in the last 5 years or so it has turned to posh is "uncool". In the US, I feel like they had something similar. Obama was elected in 2008, but some people did have concerns of electing someone unestablished. To assuage these…

Looking at PMs over the last 50 years

Heath, son of carpenter/builder, Scholarship to Oxford

Wilson, father was an industrial chemist, scholarship to go to school, bursary to go to university

Callaghan, father enlisted man in the Navy, then the coastgard, and died young leaving family relying on charity. Got a place at uni but couldn't afford to go

Thatcher, father was a grocer. Got to Oxford on a scholarship, studied Chemistry

Major, Parents were in theatre, then ran a garden shop, lived in a rented flat, left school at 16, did a banking correspondence course while failing to get a job as a bus conductor

Blair, Father was a university lecturer, went to boarding school at Fettes, took a gap year then did Law at Oxford

Blair brought in the posh = good, Champagne Socialists era. It's also what powered Labour - the alliance of the metropolitan left and the working class left (the latter having gone to the tories now)

Brown and May had normal backgrounds, but Blair, Cameron and Johnson are very different to Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Brown and May.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#297

Post by Majestic121 »

Hasnep wrote: post #245
t-writescode wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want life to be more fair, though? I think, across the board, people actually want mercy and grace. They’re not interested in fairness, they’re interested in help. When they make mistakes, they want to be lifted up and forgiven. When they fall on hardship, even if their own making, they hope for help to recover.

Isn't that a type of fairness?

Not necessarily, no.

It's typically the story of the prodigal son in the bible : it's unfair that the son that squandered away his inheritance gets back and is celebrated, while the son that was wise and helped his father does not get anything special.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#298

Post by WalterBright »

etripe wrote: post #261
WalterBright wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it makes us beholden to an employer Oh phooey. I've been an employer and employee many times. At no time was I "beholden" to my employer, and at no time were my employees "beholden" to me. It was a simple transaction - trading labor for money. Either party could (and sometimes did) walk away at any time for any reason they pleased. I've even been fired more than once. Didn't matter, I just got another job. No emplo…

> No employee ever genuflected to me You're arguing in bad faith by making a caricature out of my argument. Please don't. I meant there is a clear dependency, like in software. Your app isn't free of dependencies if it imports other packages. It needs them to function. There's vendor lock-in. > Either party could walk away This might have been true for you, but doesn't generalise well. Yes, in theory people can walk…

> Yes, in theory people can walk away.

In practice, they do, all the time, in every place I've ever worked, including min wage jobs.

> they're dependent on their employer for healthcare coverage

That's because of stupid government laws. Besides, if you leave you get COBRA for 18 months or something like that.

> survival,

Not in the US. Don't exaggerate.

> general life stability...

??

> a majority of Americans cannot afford a $500 dollar surprise expense out of pocket (0).

That doesn't mean they're poor. It's easy to have a quarter million dollar salary and spend 110% of it.

> in an area without a lot of jobs

Hop on the Bus, Gus. Go where the jobs are. My extended family moved all over the US for better jobs. Heck, I wound up in Seattle to get a better job. Cost me a couple hundred clams worth of gas driving my bucket of bolts there from Kansas. Heck, somehow the penniless migrants manage to travel all over the US to get work.

> So are the legal advantages, political influence, legal accountability, etc when comparing companies to individuals.

The courts are heavily biased in favor of the worker in legal disputes. And have you ever seen the press take the side of Amazon in any dispute with labor? Or any company?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#299

Post by jdmichal »

vletal wrote: post #4

My life goal was to attend one of these elite universities. I desired to work at companies such as Google or Apple. After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that 1. I am much less special then I thought 2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same 3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bu…

I had a teacher in high school that liked to dole out life advice. Even looking back decades later, most of it was actually pretty good. One of them was:

You can be smart -or- hard-working and do fine anywhere. But you will always be bested by those who are smart -and- hard working.

> The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action.

Talk is easy but action is hard. There's a chance they never actually had to "put up or shut up" before in their life. And if that's true, there's going to be a strong aversion to actually taking action because that's when they might actually fail -- potentially for the first time in their life.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#300

Post by bobthechef »

Hasnep wrote: post #245
t-writescode wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want life to be more fair, though? I think, across the board, people actually want mercy and grace. They’re not interested in fairness, they’re interested in help. When they make mistakes, they want to be lifted up and forgiven. When they fall on hardship, even if their own making, they hope for help to recover.

Isn't that a type of fairness?

No. You're not entitled to these things. They are superfluous in that they go beyond mere justice and are like a gift.
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