As someone who tasted both education models, the US model of babysitting students for the first few years after high school is superior. Students coming in with relatively weak preparation are able to catch up to their better prepared peers within a couple years. At the junior (3rd year) level you can hardly tell the difference between the graduates of elite high schools and run of the mill public schools. I think the entry bar is much higher, and in many cases insurmountable, in Europe. It persists through the years so someone perfectly capable of developing the required discipline and chops has no chance if they didn't come from the right high school or high school track.
You'll be surprised to learn that the opposite is true today (as of 2015 when I last worked in a licensed engineer capacity). CAD has near eliminated draftsmen, similar to how automated testing has eliminated QA. Engineers are performing all of analysis, design and drafting today. Similar to how programmers are responsible for testing.
Frontier labs are not the first to socialize externalities and privatize the gains. Not even the first to shift the responsibility on to some non-entity (agents, corporations). I think you have a very reductionist view of software. Software is used to design the buildings you inhabit, bridges you cross, vehicles you drive, medical devices you wear...
Is the Hugging Face incident from July really a problem? Or Australian healthcare portal breach? Who let their guard down unable to detect or roll back the change for days on end?
My workflow as well. If I had to gauge the direction of the wind, this produces the work of somewhere between 1-2 pre-AI engineers. My own code quality probably went down, along with my focus and the depth of understanding. Bug rates have increased. I don't have any stats to prove this.
How is a $25 life saving medication "too cheap"? That's 1/10 of the out-of-pocket maximum per year in Norway or Sweden. Which by the way covers all of medical visits, hospital stays, prescriptions.
This would be discussed in an introduction to soil mechanics and foundation design (Braja Das's textbooks used to be the standard reference in the US when I was a student 15+ years ago) but I'm afraid they're too dry for anyone outside the profession. I'm not aware of an author who can animate civ eng subjects for the adult with the talent of David Macaulay. But I can point you to a few "engineering gems" that might pique your interest if you like this sort of stuff: prestressed and post-tensioned concrete (the work of Freyssinet, see Billington's books), readings from John Ochsendorf's class on historic structures in https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/4-448-analysis-of-historic-struc..., bicycle wheel as prestressed structure (the same principle used in some tension-compression stadium roof structures): http://www-civ.eng.cam.ac.uk/cjb/papers/p20.pdf
The ability of a dry stack retaining wall to shift and breathe is a feature, not a bug. For stone walls that require added reinforcement against lateral loads, look into tiebacks or geogrid reinforcement.
+1 to no labor shortage in the construction industry. Good luck getting trained as a tradesman outside the unions. Joining a union is a practical impossibility if you're a white male. You'll be subsidizing your non-union employers with your own savings as an apprentice well into your journeyman career. You'll be sitting idle unpaid in between jobs, when it's raining or snowing, when your car doesn't start... Even when employed, you'll have no benefits, no health insurance, no paid vacation. You'll be competing for the scarce work with people who're in this country without a work permit. Guess what the going wage is for your services.
I can trace some drastic changes in my own life's trajectory to this book. Baxandall treats a familiar subject in starkly unfamiliar terms. Putting it in context but not making it any more relatable as it would be in a work of fiction or scholarly microhistory. Rather he works out some fundamental relations, social networks, kin structures, schooling and tribal knowledge, higher cortical functions etc. from the basic principles. The canonical works of art (lesser known but no less striking when presented through this lens in his Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany) served me as a vehicle to self discovery.
I'm not familiar with Stuyvesant, TJHSST and the like. The best Russian schools follow the Konstantinov [1] tradition of "listki" (handouts), where each student is essentially guided to re-invent the math curriculum by solving problems. There're no textbooks or lectures. You solve problems from the handouts at your own pace and discuss them with a TA when ready (typically volunteers from among former graduates of the same school).