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As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of s

As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement: There is no room for mistakes. Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc… And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health. They see this never ending cycle of turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money. Many are going to bed after midnight every night. Something has to give. This is really disturbing to me. How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.

holoduke 4y ago
I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and you need to win everything. Individual development is very important. Hope it will remain like that.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Individual development is very important. Not sure if you’ve misread the thread - the whole problem is too much importance on individual development and the pressure this brings.
  - toxik 4y ago
    This is a funny reply because “individual development” isn’t something you schedule in European eyes. You just hang around with friends and learn to be a good person, and specifically not a tight wound asshole.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Nobody does anything like learn an instrument or play a sport in Europe? That's what we're talking about.
      - vladvasiliu 4y ago
        They do, but the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else at it to get into university. You just do it for yourself. I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe.
        chrisseaton 4y ago
        > the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else The person I was replying to was saying how they're 'very important' in Europe though.
        vladvasiliu 4y ago
        I think it's a question of "important for what" and how society goes about teaching kids those things. As in: In Europe, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we let them do it. And they do it by hanging out with friends, learning an instrument, etc. They're not pushed to do those things because colleges don't take these into account for admissions. In the US, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we have them learn an instrument, or participate in sports. They are pushed to do those things because colleges take those into account for admissions.
        blahyawnblah 4y ago
        > I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe. That's really only a thing for the private universities and those don't make up a large percentage
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nynx 4y ago
I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true. I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless. Something will eventually give.
- ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago
  There are homeless shelters and food stamps.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    you know those two are mostly incompatible? snap won't get you ready to eat food and homeless shelters won't give you access to a kitchen. just as like, a small minor indicator of how poorly you understand these systems and how cruel suggesting this is in that context.
  - JaimeThompson 4y ago
    You haven't every been poor in the US have you? If you had then you would know that those services aren't the best and border on the useless.
- Animats 4y ago
  Flunking out today doesn't mean being drafted into the Army. That may come back, especially in Europe. It's shaping up to be a long war.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    Flunking out wouldn't mean getting drafted into the army in the US anyway, the waiting list to join has been setting records for a few years now[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list-record-levels-high-unemployment/story?id=12495054 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list-record-...
jseliger 4y ago
Many are going to bed after midnight every night. Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never-fix-education/ https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day. That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-sheep-the-miseducation-of-the-american-elite-and-the-way-to-a-meaningful-life-william-deresiewicz/—but https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."
- hettygreen 4y ago
  It's like you're completely ignoring the fact that phones and apps are designed to be addictive. Growing up in a world where tech companies have been given free reign to psychologically manipulate users to increase screen time is yet another pressure facing that generation, it shouldn't be thrown in their face.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_w 4y ago
  Second link is broken. School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would not even remotely surprising during the pandemic — what else are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 was the actual school day. Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 — memories of downloading and printing pictures from an artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 — but again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200. Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest in the tasks we had to do. Of course, now I’m a “responsible adult” or something. Screen Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week: • Normal office job • 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic • 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German) • Daily practice in at least one other German language app • A complete audiobook • A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, YouTube vids, WWDC, etc. • 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org • I cook almost all the meals in our household
prepend 4y ago
> Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc… As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80. When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.
- alphakilo 4y ago
  not my experience... is this a board/school policy or a specific teacher? never seen teaches let exams be retaken
  - prepend 4y ago
    It seems the district or at least the school because it’s every class and was similar in middle school.
  - after_care 4y ago
    I think it's more common than you would expect. It's a configurable option in many online learning solutions (Canvas, BlackBoard). InQuisitive allows you to keep answering questions until you reach 100% grade, and often represent 10%-30% of a course's entire grade.
  - karmanyaahm 4y ago
    Most of my school's core subjects allow retakes for a limited grade (not in AP classes though). Just one data point fwiw
- HollywoodZero 4y ago
  +1. My oldest is in high school now and even in her honors classes there's the ability to turn on some things late and even some re-takes are allowed. I don't know where these ZERO mistakes-type of mentality is coming from.
  - prepend 4y ago
ryandrake 4y ago
I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get B’s or C’s and have a good job after high school. Now you’re competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, you’re way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of stress!
- lordloki 4y ago
  globalization doing it's thing, equalizing to the mean.
- nradov 4y ago
  Skilled labor jobs or military service are a great option for people who didn't get excellent grades in high school but are willing to work hard to get a ticket out of poverty. Unfortunately, many educators and parents don't promote those career paths as much as they should. https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/ https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/
nvarsj 4y ago
It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a rapid pace over the last 10-20 years. Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.
notacoward 4y ago
> adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years. > Many are going to bed after midnight every night. Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Don't forget affirmative action (sorry, reverse racism). If you are Asian (or for some schools, male), the standards are substantially higher than if you are black or Latino.
Animats 4y ago
That's the super high achieving group. I saw that some decades back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high schools.[1] Notes from then: - Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5". - Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down." - One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college. This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
vonwoodson 4y ago
“Something has to give.” The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand! As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.
999900000999 4y ago
I know if I ever have kids, I'm probably going to tell them it's okay to even drop out of high school. None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you. You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of. Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you. Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA. The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I mean it really does matter. You got lucky. Compare yourself with the millions of people working at restaurants with no health insurance and nothing they own worth any value. That's the norm, not your experience. The problem is there is a huge income gap between the people with degrees and good jobs and people with just high school educations. Much of that is due to offshoring / NAFTA / etc. "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." -Ross Perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound BTW, that dollar amount is double in todays dollars vs 1992 when that debate happened. Imagine if we had millions of jobs for people without college degrees paying $28 an hour with health care. That's a stark contrast with the $15 minimum wage people are clawing to get with massive resistance. Something as simple as NAFTA causing so much destruction 30 years after the fact is amazing. Imagine kids where both parents didn't have to work to make ends meet. Imagine kids where their parent's weren't exhausted from working all the time and could spend more quality time with them. Imagine kids who could have a future where they didn't have to attend college and the pressure that comes with it. imagine kids who can get regular health checkups without breaking the bank. The cascade effects are immense. But hey, look on the bright side, PROFITS!

holoduke 4y ago

I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and you need to win everything. Individual development is very important. Hope it will remain like that.

chrisseaton 4y ago
> Individual development is very important. Not sure if you’ve misread the thread - the whole problem is too much importance on individual development and the pressure this brings.
- toxik 4y ago
  This is a funny reply because “individual development” isn’t something you schedule in European eyes. You just hang around with friends and learn to be a good person, and specifically not a tight wound asshole.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Nobody does anything like learn an instrument or play a sport in Europe? That's what we're talking about.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      They do, but the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else at it to get into university. You just do it for yourself. I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else The person I was replying to was saying how they're 'very important' in Europe though.
        vladvasiliu 4y ago
        I think it's a question of "important for what" and how society goes about teaching kids those things. As in: In Europe, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we let them do it. And they do it by hanging out with friends, learning an instrument, etc. They're not pushed to do those things because colleges don't take these into account for admissions. In the US, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we have them learn an instrument, or participate in sports. They are pushed to do those things because colleges take those into account for admissions.
      - blahyawnblah 4y ago
        > I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe. That's really only a thing for the private universities and those don't make up a large percentage
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nynx 4y ago

I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true. I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless. Something will eventually give.

ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago
There are homeless shelters and food stamps.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  you know those two are mostly incompatible? snap won't get you ready to eat food and homeless shelters won't give you access to a kitchen. just as like, a small minor indicator of how poorly you understand these systems and how cruel suggesting this is in that context.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  You haven't every been poor in the US have you? If you had then you would know that those services aren't the best and border on the useless.
Animats 4y ago
Flunking out today doesn't mean being drafted into the Army. That may come back, especially in Europe. It's shaping up to be a long war.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  Flunking out wouldn't mean getting drafted into the army in the US anyway, the waiting list to join has been setting records for a few years now[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list-record-levels-high-unemployment/story?id=12495054 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list-record-...

jseliger 4y ago

Many are going to bed after midnight every night. Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never-fix-education/ https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day. That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-sheep-the-miseducation-of-the-american-elite-and-the-way-to-a-meaningful-life-william-deresiewicz/—but https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

hettygreen 4y ago
It's like you're completely ignoring the fact that phones and apps are designed to be addictive. Growing up in a world where tech companies have been given free reign to psychologically manipulate users to increase screen time is yet another pressure facing that generation, it shouldn't be thrown in their face.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ben_w 4y ago
Second link is broken. School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would not even remotely surprising during the pandemic — what else are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 was the actual school day. Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 — memories of downloading and printing pictures from an artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 — but again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200. Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest in the tasks we had to do. Of course, now I’m a “responsible adult” or something. Screen Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week: • Normal office job • 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic • 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German) • Daily practice in at least one other German language app • A complete audiobook • A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, YouTube vids, WWDC, etc. • 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org • I cook almost all the meals in our household

prepend 4y ago

> Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc… As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80. When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.

alphakilo 4y ago
not my experience... is this a board/school policy or a specific teacher? never seen teaches let exams be retaken
- prepend 4y ago
  It seems the district or at least the school because it’s every class and was similar in middle school.
- after_care 4y ago
  I think it's more common than you would expect. It's a configurable option in many online learning solutions (Canvas, BlackBoard). InQuisitive allows you to keep answering questions until you reach 100% grade, and often represent 10%-30% of a course's entire grade.
- karmanyaahm 4y ago
  Most of my school's core subjects allow retakes for a limited grade (not in AP classes though). Just one data point fwiw
HollywoodZero 4y ago
+1. My oldest is in high school now and even in her honors classes there's the ability to turn on some things late and even some re-takes are allowed. I don't know where these ZERO mistakes-type of mentality is coming from.
- prepend 4y ago

ryandrake 4y ago

I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get B’s or C’s and have a good job after high school. Now you’re competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, you’re way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of stress!

lordloki 4y ago
globalization doing it's thing, equalizing to the mean.
nradov 4y ago
Skilled labor jobs or military service are a great option for people who didn't get excellent grades in high school but are willing to work hard to get a ticket out of poverty. Unfortunately, many educators and parents don't promote those career paths as much as they should. https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/ https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/

nvarsj 4y ago

It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a rapid pace over the last 10-20 years. Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.

notacoward 4y ago

> adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years. > Many are going to bed after midnight every night. Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.

ceeplusplus 4y ago
Don't forget affirmative action (sorry, reverse racism). If you are Asian (or for some schools, male), the standards are substantially higher than if you are black or Latino.

Animats 4y ago

That's the super high achieving group. I saw that some decades back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high schools.[1] Notes from then: - Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5". - Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down." - One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college. This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

vonwoodson 4y ago

“Something has to give.” The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand! As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.

999900000999 4y ago

I know if I ever have kids, I'm probably going to tell them it's okay to even drop out of high school. None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you. You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of. Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you. Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA. The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.

Clubber 4y ago
I mean it really does matter. You got lucky. Compare yourself with the millions of people working at restaurants with no health insurance and nothing they own worth any value. That's the norm, not your experience. The problem is there is a huge income gap between the people with degrees and good jobs and people with just high school educations. Much of that is due to offshoring / NAFTA / etc. "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." -Ross Perot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound BTW, that dollar amount is double in todays dollars vs 1992 when that debate happened. Imagine if we had millions of jobs for people without college degrees paying $28 an hour with health care. That's a stark contrast with the $15 minimum wage people are clawing to get with massive resistance. Something as simple as NAFTA causing so much destruction 30 years after the fact is amazing. Imagine kids where both parents didn't have to work to make ends meet. Imagine kids where their parent's weren't exhausted from working all the time and could spend more quality time with them. Imagine kids who could have a future where they didn't have to attend college and the pressure that comes with it. imagine kids who can get regular health checkups without breaking the bank. The cascade effects are immense. But hey, look on the bright side, PROFITS!