Life, death, the failure of the education system
I'm laying in bed thinking about death, (I guess its part of the grieving process) and I start to wonder about the legal issues of my death. If they do hundreds of thousands of ddollars worth of treatment trying to stop it, like if I get cancer or something and I still die, will that become a huge pile of debt that my wife is responsible for? If not, how does the health care system stay in business with all the people that die on a daily basis not able to pay their bills? Even if I do survive, what the hell would I do with that kind of debt? The little bit of debt I have now make my life a whole lot less enjoyable as it is... With the price of health care what it is, it would take more than a lifetime of income (at my current rate) to pay off anything major, especially since I probably would not be able to work at the same time as whatever illness/injury is causing the bills....
All of that, as important as it is, is not the main point of this post however. The main point of this post is this: Why the hell don't I know the answer to these questions?!?! Why wasn't I taught it as part of my education? Why did I get all sorts of abstract cultural crap like literature and history shoved down my throat but I was never taught how to file my damn taxes! I'm not saying to take out english and history from the schools, I'm asking why is school limited to the acedemic? Why aren't the technical aspects of life explained in a strait forward way? We all did the how to balance a checkbook thing in elementary school, thats fairly easy... but how do we get the money to put in the checkbook? What about loans? Why weren't we taught how to own a house? Fill out a job application? How to pick out a mortuary to creamate your mom that won't ream your checkbook a new one? Seriously. I know that the stereotypical family involves parents that know all this stuff and long talks between father and son while fishing about how to shake hands and between mother and daughter while sewing about how to wrap boys around their little fingers, but seriously, who the hell has a family like that? Not only that, but just because they've done it before doesn't make a parent and expert at anything. There are tons of details about income tax for instance, that a very small percentage of people know about. All this information should be centrally distributed, from the authoritative source, not from scattered people on a wiki who have just figured it out from doing it not from parents who "did it when I was your age" (i.e. 20-30 years ago, when things were probably rather different) The designers of a system should be the ones explaining how the system works, or at least professional documentation writers who work within the system of designing. I shouldn't have to be taught how to use my computer by someone who has spent more time reverse engineering the system than the people who built it spent designing it. That is a ton of wasted energy that I, as the user, have to pay for if I want to learn this stuff. Life needs an instruction manual because maybe some people think they'll learn it themselves from the "school of hard knocks" but some of us not only know that is the worst way of learning something, but we can see past those people's pride to see that they still aren't learning anything, just hurting themselves. Why are we making the same damn mistakes we made 1000 years ago? Ok... I think I've gotten that out of my system enough to sleep... I'll go through and clean up the spelling at work in the morning asuming nothing blew up in the office over the weekend... :)
All of that, as important as it is, is not the main point of this post however. The main point of this post is this: Why the hell don't I know the answer to these questions?!?! Why wasn't I taught it as part of my education? Why did I get all sorts of abstract cultural crap like literature and history shoved down my throat but I was never taught how to file my damn taxes! I'm not saying to take out english and history from the schools, I'm asking why is school limited to the acedemic? Why aren't the technical aspects of life explained in a strait forward way? We all did the how to balance a checkbook thing in elementary school, thats fairly easy... but how do we get the money to put in the checkbook? What about loans? Why weren't we taught how to own a house? Fill out a job application? How to pick out a mortuary to creamate your mom that won't ream your checkbook a new one? Seriously. I know that the stereotypical family involves parents that know all this stuff and long talks between father and son while fishing about how to shake hands and between mother and daughter while sewing about how to wrap boys around their little fingers, but seriously, who the hell has a family like that? Not only that, but just because they've done it before doesn't make a parent and expert at anything. There are tons of details about income tax for instance, that a very small percentage of people know about. All this information should be centrally distributed, from the authoritative source, not from scattered people on a wiki who have just figured it out from doing it not from parents who "did it when I was your age" (i.e. 20-30 years ago, when things were probably rather different) The designers of a system should be the ones explaining how the system works, or at least professional documentation writers who work within the system of designing. I shouldn't have to be taught how to use my computer by someone who has spent more time reverse engineering the system than the people who built it spent designing it. That is a ton of wasted energy that I, as the user, have to pay for if I want to learn this stuff. Life needs an instruction manual because maybe some people think they'll learn it themselves from the "school of hard knocks" but some of us not only know that is the worst way of learning something, but we can see past those people's pride to see that they still aren't learning anything, just hurting themselves. Why are we making the same damn mistakes we made 1000 years ago? Ok... I think I've gotten that out of my system enough to sleep... I'll go through and clean up the spelling at work in the morning asuming nothing blew up in the office over the weekend... :)