Reply to post: Re: The per captia figures may be better but that's not the point.

Re: The per captia figures may be better but that's not the point.

@ Matt Byrant - do fuck off, you're a blight on this forum and the personification of the need for killfiles.

@ Lurelout, Just to get this out of the way, I started from fuck all and, I don't in point of fact hold a degree, I do run a business, and I'm doing very well ta very much, so less of the class warrior guff thanks, I don't really need to give you the full flannel nor do I intend to get into who had a more difficult start, it's beneath me and beneath you.

I'm very glad that you managed to make a difference to your circumstances, as did I, I still think it's harder now and I don't fancy my chances if I was doing it now, hence my original post.

Just to clarify a point, "difficult" doesn't mean "impossible", which seems to be the general theme of your post, the clue is in the different spelling.

(1) I got an education thanks to a scheme which was shut down in 1997 by the incoming New Labor government, nothing has since replaced it to my knowledge (happy to be corrected) In essence, it paid for smart kids from poor backgrounds to go to private schools, hence I got access to the likes of the Acorn Archimedes and a decent grounding in maths and science.

So, the early start in computing which formed the bedrock of my career wouldn't have been available to me had I been born some twenty years later.

(2) I choose not to do a degree as I was already working in industry by the time I was eighteen, had I chosen to do a degree, it would have cost me the princely sum of zero pounds on a grant.

Today that degree would be both less likely to be as rigorous and would involve acquiring a debt of at least twenty-seven thousand pounds (9k per year, three years for undergrad) http://www.city.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/computer-science

These two things alone make educating oneself more "difficult", not "impossible" but more "difficult", and if being nearly 30k in the hole before you start doesn't give you pause, your benchmark for being poor is out of kilter.

(3) The internet (I think you mean the web), and you're right, no-one trusts a degree now, as they've been watered down to homeopathic levels, hence coding tests and basic complexity questions in interviews for senior staff. A deluge of data, and very little information, without a guide, who will steer you away from schild thttp://www.seebs.net/c/c_tcn4e.html and towards K&R ? YouTube videos, really, had you name checked MIT's open courseware, I'd have given you a pass but YouTube by his noodly fucking appendages.

(4) Just to follow up, so you're poor right, your access to the net is likely on a prepay dongle, which is charging you some 15 quid a Gig http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/dongles-and-mobile-wi-fi/, and you want to learn by watching videos, how about reading, in a library if you can find one, is that too "last gen" for you.

(5) Libraries were a feature of my childhood, adolescence and early career, they are a hollow fucking joke now.

So to recap, education more expensive, more data of indeterminate quality until you are clued up enough to filter the bull for yourself, "learn to code" http://decoded.com/uk/code-in-a-day/ seriously, learn to be a proper programmer, in one short lifetime.

"Not true. I commute more than 16 hours a week and have time to prepare home cooked nutritious food for my family. Laziness may explain it, but time or distance travelled for work does not."

(6) woopdy fucking doo da, try working three jobs in every fast food shithole known to man as they don't pay a living wage, and they won't let you work enough hours to turn a poverty wage into provision for oneself, see how much you feel like cooking once you've had your three showers to rinse the stench of grease from your skin - then lecture people on proper food preparation.

I commuted from the UK to main land Europe, it's a piece of piss, taxi to the airport, breakfast in the sky, taxi to my desk, taxi to the airport, dinner in the sky, taxi home, much more than sixteen hours a week, not the same hours, not by a country mile, my son.

(7) To earn enough to make a significant change to one's life is out of reach for most "poor" people.

This is fairly simple, most people derive their income from work, if their work never pays them enough money to allow them to "upskill" (fucking americanisms, it's however apropos), they'll at best stay where they are or more realistically go down (inflation rearing its ugly head). Hat's off to McDonalds here as being the only employer paying poverty wages willing to let someone work a twenty-three hour shift, no sarcasm here, if they pay you fuck all an hour, the least someone can do is allow you the *option* of working until you drop.

(8) You say your not "clever, pretty, talented", neither am I, but I grafted my arse off, I worked and studied and worked, the effort required to change my life, was *non-trivial* most people can't work like that and frankly neither could I now days, I was lucky to be young and stubborn, scratch that I was lucky full stop, don't turn your back on the lady, she's a fickle mistress.

(9) The s/internet/web/ provides a way for porn to become free, programmers to bitch to one another, and for the great unwashed, a way to see what bulletin boards would have been like with more pictures of cats.

It's a network and an application layer protocol, not the second fucking coming, with extra cherries.

The web is a library without the benefit of indexing or peer review, where the "wisdom of crowds" prevail, not to say there nothing of value online, there about the same amount of useful information as was always there, just many orders of magnitude more dross, still without curated content, it's not really that useful for the uninitiated, hence the booming success of IRC as a service ( twitter), Html with css as a service (facebook).

(10) It's educational value is great if you understand what you are looking for and looking at, if you are starting to teach yourself a subject you know nothing about, not so much. Don't believe me, find a functional recipe for black powder online, report back with all your fingers.

(11) In summary, get off your high horse, and off my lawn.