The people that are the most useless, least productive, are getting all the benefits for something we can do without very easily. I am talking about entertainers, sport figures, all the useless activities, like gambling, spending huge amount of money to attend events and see some of the most useless characters that ever existed. Some people say that they create jobs while that is true it is only superficial and there are only very few people that actually benefit from it. We could pack them all in few boats and send them all to China and we would all be better off here.
What do you do for entertainment?
You've actually been slowly getting your wish over the last 20 years. There are far many sources of entertainment and information than there used to be before the Internet. YouTube is putting the squeeze on traditional cable TV because now we literally have millions of on-demand channels. While "This Old House" may have been able to teach me how to fix/improve one thing in the past, now I can learn how to fix the thing that broke in my house today from several different people and I can take the best of all their techniques and learn from them, today, and fix something.
Or, I can watch Mark Rober build and use a trampoline designed to bounce a car:
There are so many sources of entertainment that it's diluted those that existed before. I rarely watch traditional TV any more.
There are also far more sources of information and things that can be done. The stuff that can be done with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and all the toys and toolsl that can interface with them is astounding, and is going to help create our next generation of engineers.
We have our future generation getting loans, that they do not want to pay back, to go to the schools where the best parties are, to learn how to drink and have fun and come out useless members of society. We are now looking at being behind just about every other civilized country in the World when it comes to practical knowledge and ability to solve problems.
The useless ones aren't sticking around long enough for their loans to get that high. They fail out after a semester or two for the most part. Those who finish have much more in loans, and they're spending all their money repaying loans instead of having and raising kids who aren't "useless".
Silver lining would be to have people come back to reality and their senses and assess what is important in life. Become a productive member of society, work your way through school, if you cannot afford it learn a trade, find a job you can do without college degree, stop spending money that you do not have on frivolous things like sport events paying for some idiot’s million dollars salary, entertainment, expensive gadgets they cannot afford..
Sadly, it is no longer really possible to "work your way through school". Tuition has outpaced inflation by a mile, and minimum wage by far more. Now, you either have rich parents or you take out loans, or you take your brain and waste it on being a "sanitation engineer" (garbage man) instead of an electrical or mechanical engineer. I had to go work as a truck driver for several years to be able to finish school, and one of my trainees actually was a self-taught engineer and had a patent!
It'd be nice if we could enable people to do their best work for society rather than leaving so much to chance.
It is my hope that this experience may weed out some of the useless businesses that we can easily do without.
Sadly, it is likely to have the opposite effect. Lots of people are gonna be watching lots of TV and such in the coming days... And those large entertainment conglomerates have plenty of money behind them to weather the storm. It's the small businesses and content creators that are going to have trouble in this crisis.
