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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

I believe capitalism works, however, "bad" actions are not properly punished. Case and point is the Equifax hacking which should have a company ending punishment, not a slap on the wrist. Once people and governments start punishing bad actions commensurate to both the scale of the action and the size of the organization everything will correct itself.

I feel like a broken record for saying this, but the solution to this problem along with most social problems is education. A well educated population will know when they're being taken advantage of and punish the actors accordingly. It's no surprise that the most effective way to control people is to prevent them from being well educated.

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If you ever find yourself advocating "education is a solution", you likely need to re-assess your position.

Education is never a solution, because its practically unsolvable. Here a list of factors that affect education outcomes.

Child/Student fetal health, maternal health, child nutrition, stimulation, General health, adult/child stress levels, prolonged illness, availability of food, water, electricity and security.

Family poverty levels, need to work, familial stability,

Study habits, study training, parental guidance, word use in family conversation, familiarity with language of education, ability to learn, availability of time to learn, which builds into whether you picked up the initial building blocks of the subject and therefore future success. Propensity to learn, interest in subject.

The list goes on. This is one of the weaker lists I've made, but the essence of it, is that there are a huge number of variables that can easily break the ability of a student to finish a subject.

Remember that completion rates for MOOCs are about 7%. That's the result when you have voluntary, motivated students, choosing the classes they want to study.

Solving "education", is a proxy for having already solved whatever societal problem required people to be educated in the first place.

People would love to have the time to take a class on philosophy to enrich their lives, or a class on logic, on media manipulation.

But if you remember conversations on HN, people constantly look down on the arts and humanities, such classes are "pointless", you wont get a job.

A non-controversial opinion at time your education system is being valued more as a treadmill for college, in itself a tread mill so people can get jobs.

The rule of thumb is that any time you find yourself saying "education will solve it", work backwards, because Education is currently unsolvable.

(and we may not want to solve it - if you could get people trained on a "good" subject in shorter times than ever before, then you can also train them on "bad" subjects in shorter times than ever before.)

I essentially agree with you that "education" isn't really education, but I don't follow that it's impossible. Practically speaking, I think it's very unlikely we'll solve education, or solve harmful flaws to the human condition for that matter, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they're unsolvable. Actual education has been sufficiently tried in this country. There's definitely a clear limit to the stupid ape we call the human, but even if we could improve the average autodidactic or philosophic ability, or even increase the mean IQ by 5 points, there could be a significant improvement to the health of our society.

I wish you were right, but having worked at Intel during their early battles with AMD, "bad" action is how you survive in a cut throat hyper competitive global market. The reason Intel survives today and AMD lost out big time, is the shenanigans they pulled (for years) to retain customers despite having worse tech.

Every mindlessly ambitious corporate exec knows the simplest way to get ahead is to do something the other guy isn't ready to do. You can't compete if you don't have these kind of characters on your bench to do the dirty work. And every company has them and many are lead by them.

The incentives for bad action will change only when the global consumption mega-machine hits some sort of breaking point. Otherwise there are too many good lawyers and congressmen already in place to keep you out of jail.

This is exactly why punishment is so important.

I wish the USA could handle things like South Korea does.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/17/515753599/...

Top ranking company brass actually go to prison for crimes, versus the USA, where they get a tiny fine at the very worst. Or a large severance payout.

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