Quote from pitz:
There's plenty of smart people in America. But just no jobs for them.
Guys with MSEE's have to *grovel* for $60k/year jobs, and then kiss the ground every day they're allowed to keep their job. Ph.D's are perpetually kept 'employed' in our universities as postdoctoral fellows, at pay of $30-$40k/year, if even. University degrees and higher education in science have essentially become oaths of perpetual poverty, *not* paths to prestige. Meanwhile those frat boys who whored it up their entire time in college graduate to cushy investment banking jobs where they do very little of value and get paid very handsomely.
Its all broken. I graduated just a few years ago in engineering, not a kind of engineering that's related to the energy sector, and I can count on two hands (and my feet) the number of my fellow classmates that are unemployed or underemployed. R&D spending essentially was cut to zero after the collapse of the high tech sector in 2000, and the same thing happened in pharmaceutical research.
In the 90s, it was neat waking up, loading up slashdot, and seeing that some researcher had invented something new. I just loaded up the page right now, and here are the stories:
"City Sues To Prevent Linking To Its Website"
"Citizens Demand To See Secret ACTA Treaty"
"Study Finds Video Games Are Not Bad for Kids "
"Royal Society "Creationist" Resigns "
"Copyright Board Lawyer Responds On Pandora's End "
"Congress May Kill NIH Open Access Research Rules "
"Mozilla Admits Firefox EULA Is Flawed"
"Scott Adams's Political Survey of Economists "
Over half of the stories on there relate to political or legal trivialities. No headlines of new inventions, or exciting new things coming out of research. Its quite pathetic really what we've become.
