Notes From The Hall Table

[nemorathwald]

Kids adore the capsule toy vending machine, but none of them have money. And yet I've got a lot of t-shirts in small size. A little girl was trying to turn the handle, so I gave her fifty cents. She won a t-shirt.

Several Chicagoans have won t-shirts. These people do not attend, but maybe they will. Fans, out of state, will be wearing Penguicon 3.0 and 4.0 t-shirts, out of state, and then other fans, out of state, will be reading the shirts and thinking, "hey, there exists such a thing as Penguicon!" Guess where they will do this reading and thinking.

Futurist and SF author Tom Trumpinksi stopped by to trade contact info. At one point he noted that a Singularity is already in progress. That brief comment turned into an hour-long conversation about the economic crash, a pending crash of the higher education system, Bruce Sterling's recent Seed article about pending panics, Kevin Kelly's eight generatives better than free and my mnemonic device for it, and how to mearn a living in a world where things change faster than you can get used to them.

Comments

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

One of the important points is that employers are increasingly realizing how pre-obsolete a higher education is. Students are realizing that it does not make them as competitive as it used to, and that it makes them fall behind their non-college-educated peers almost for life due to debt.

[metalfatigue]

I would be fascinated to see evidence (surveys?) supporting your (ETA: or is it Trumpinski's?) contention re: employer attitudes.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

He mentioned something about a lot of companies giving six months of training for new hires in certain careers, by default.

[metalfatigue]

That says nothing about whether said companies are willing to hire non-college-graduates. It makes perfect sense, within the corporate HR worldview, to require a college degree even if degree-holders will still need to be trained from the ground up, purely as a way of winnowing the number of job applicants down to a reasonable level. That has been the case in the IT field for a decade, and is extremely unlikely to change in a tightening job market. In fact, I would expect it to become more common in all fields as the number of white-collar job-seekers increases.

If there's a bust for that bubble, it's years away.