Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

I never really understood the idea of the popular kids in high school. I wasn’t popular but wasn’t unpopular, just sorta a regular dude.

I remember thinking how odd it was that people liked people simply because a lot of people liked that person. Or that those people felt like they were better than others because a lot of people liked them.

Then I graduated and got into the real world and there were celebrities but beyond that there were no popular kids anymore. And celebrities were generally well known for some actual thing they could do exceptionally well, acting, singing, sports, etc.

Then social media gave us influencers which are just popular kids for adults. People follow them because lots of people follow them and some of them are genuinely talented but a lot of them are just flexing with wealth (or pretending to) or just attractive.

I remember being relieved that the “popular kids” was a thing people grew out of, and kinda appalled that we somehow engineered it back into adulthood.

It’s extremely interesting to watch them give trump leeway here. I saw polling recently that many of the trump faithful believe that the tariffs will bring short term pain but it will be worth it for the long term benefits.

What’s going to turbo suck is that they will take the exact wrong lesson from this. It will enforce their short term thinking because they will remember this time that they experienced short term pain for long term gain and the gain never materialized.

I just wish we had the ability as a society to have a more nuanced conversation than sound bites. Ok we disagree about tariffs, one side thinks they are real fucking dumb and the other thinks they are great and will have long term benefits. It would be amazing if we could have an adult conversation about this, how it’s expected to work, how likely that is, what issues might be in the way, etc.

Perhaps it’s decades of being an engineer, but I propose designs that are meant to achieve goals and other engineers check my work, ask questions about things I might not have considered, help play out scenarios that aren’t accounted for and at the end of that we have a better design. As a nation we now seem so incapable of having an honest dialogue between the two major parties that not only are we advancing ideas that obviously won’t work but it’s clear we have no feedback mechanisms to correct course. So now we will just blow up the economy because a group of people think it might, somehow, using mechanisms no one can identify, lead to a future that is “better” where no one can meaningfully define “better.”

And that’s the state of discourse.