It's nuts but 'shared' is still shorthand for 'worthless'

You get 10% of the return on someone else's money.

Not just one "someone else" either - as many as think you are good at your job.

That could be a 10% return on much more money than you can risk personally...

Individualism is BS that divides society, and leaves individuals exposed to corporate exploitation.

Social mobility is BS, and education as a means to it, doubly so.

All that "free thinking" is going to be really useful when even your job as an uber driver has been replaced buy robotics, and there are NO jobs.

Hope you're good at fighting or marksmenship, because I will be taking all your tinned food and ammunition come the revolution.

>giving kids the tools to think for themselves, to actually rely on their own skillsets is [c]ertainly more valid than what you are writing above.

+1

There is a vast difference between co-operatively working towards a better solution, and blindly accepting whatever the interwebs think is best at the moment.

Outside of America (which seems to be obsessed with multiple choice), schools teach skills, not just facts. We teach children how to think and how to teach themselves.

As for the Mad Max scenario, what would happen if Spain and Portugal followed Greece into economic collapse? The UK has more debt than all of them. Australia has been very smug about its isolation from the GFC, but the value of its currency has plummeted and in our interconnected, always relying on someone-else world, that makes you poor.

We should share and share far more than we currently do, but it is not a substitute for hard work and deep thought. Contribute, don't just take.

I'm always amazed that large organisations like banks don't club together on things like open-source. With all the money they pour into things like security software, why would you not put a few million aside to ask the open source chaps to implement features you want? Yes, other people will gain without paying their "fair" share, but how many millions are you going to spend every year in order to keep things "fair?"

Re: @AC

No, I have a good degree from a good university, and a good enough job.

The problem is my peers seem to be under the delusion that they're middle class, and their kids (if/when they have them) will follow the same path, and also be middle class.

However there is no middle class. Wealth disparity has reached the point where we're divided into elites and everyone else. You may be caught up in consumerism, and congratulating yourself that you have a slightly better car than you're neighbor, but I'm looking at the big picture.

Re: All well and good

I think that the basis of this article's comment on education is that school is a place where things are learned by rote. From my experience, I do not think that we are doing nearly enough to teach children to think for themselves. What we are doing is cramming a large pile of data concerning various domains down student's throats and hoping that all that data will sift through the brains and somehow result in intelligent people.

There are times when it is good to test knowledge in isolation. If everyone just becomes a terminal for a Google search, we're just moving the issue to another slot.

I do believe we need to modify the scholarship curriculum to make our young, upcoming adults have a better grasp on the realities of life in general, and business in particular. One thing I strongly believe we should put some emphasis on is the notion of patience. It takes time to get good at anything, and when I look at people around me, at all ages I see people wanting results immediately and, if none are forthcoming, they just drop it and move to something else. That is not an attitude that brings results, it is an attitude that brings frustration and worse when people are stuck in a situation they cannot escape.

The first thing that needs to be done is re-educate our youth to understand that Dancing With The Stars, The Voice and other shenanigans are not a path to success. It takes years to become proficient in any domain, anything that makes you think otherwise is a lie. Once we have re-established that basic truth, we can get them back on grinding their intelligence because they will understand that they have no other choice if they wish to succeed.

Then we can start working on accepting difference, and the right to disagree. Hammering that home will inescapably create people who are able to exchange and thus learn from one another in a much more efficient manner and that will benefit all of us in the long term.

Finally, we need to instil the notion of the right to fail. Nobody succeeds on their first try, therefor one should not make fun of someone who fails. Failure is the best learning process, because the result is unavoidable. Teaching children to not be ashamed of failure will help them concentrate on why they failed instead of just brooding over the fact that they didn't succeed, which will speed up solving the problem and turning failure into success.

Learning how to Google search is something students pick up on their own, no problem there. Learning how to interact with people better than a caveman is something some people never learn. Let's start there and work our way up.

Re: Cheating

Yup. if I'm in need of medical attention, I;d rather like the medics that treat me to know their stuff rather than Google it! likewise engineers building infrastructure. Which isnt to say that making good use of available sources of information isn't a good skill to have, but it should be part of ones toolkit, not the complete set. And teaching children about critical thinking and how to apply same when searching the net wouldn't go amiss either (as in checking sources for reliability, veracity, and considering the plausability of what's been found on the net, due to the unfortunate number of folks who (gasp!) publish porkies, whether for humourous intent or otherwise.)

Re: Cheating

It is also very difficult to assess. Did they find out something useful and apply it, or pay for a "mechanical Turk" to do the work they just submitted?

And as others have pointed out, without a basic grasp of roughly what to expect the solution to be, how can you filter the 99.9% of crap found by Google and sanity-check the data in/out the produced it?

Re: The difference with this company is the *sharer* gets a piece of the profit

"But sharing (or as it's know in business teamwork) is not really taught very well at most level to the extent people really practice it and get comfortable with it."

Because the business world is increasingly becoming zero-sum. You know all the work adages: everyone gets the blame, but only the top man gets the credit. In a "it's you or him for the raise/promotion/whatever" kind of world, teaming up is just as likely to get you a knife in the back as praise from the higher-ups.

Re: "Shared ownership is hell"

"Gifts, favors, BSD-style licenses -- that's the way to do it: no-strings-attached sharing."

Betrayals, backstabs, behind-the-back fingers-crossed double-crosses. That's why they're not considered prudent in most of today's society.