OT - Any Bearing Experts (Thrust Problem)

--snip-- George,
I think your largest obstacle here lies in the last four words of your last sentence. Saving, getting an education, investing and managing your investments, raising children to become successfully independent individuals capable of raising their own children... all of these require a belief in the long-term consequences, both good and bad, of our own actions and the actions of others.
Please feel free to contradict me, but I don't think that this is an innate skill. I see it as something that, when it _is_ learned, has to be learned by each individual. Parents, teachers, and bosses can, if they choose, offer warnings and recommendations, but we humans are a stubbornly conservative lot when it comes to deferring our gratification; we are capable of change, but generally only if we come to believe in some horrible and completely unavoidable penalty if we continue along the same path.
Agreed. And a while back, the High School Diploma was considered a sign of achievement, but somewhere along the road to Universal Education it seems to have lost its luster. I don't know to what extent this was the result of an emphasis on having teens graduate from high school over ensuring that they acquired a high school education, but the "social promotion" problem lends some credence to this view.
When I hear President Obama saying that the taxpayers should assist everyone in Getting A College Degree, I wish I could believe that this wouldn't simply wind up being an Economic Stimulus For Diploma Mills.
Find a way to do both and you'll have solved the funding problem for undergraduate higher education.
> ... ==>Most people do not have making their boss rich at the > top of their list of life goals.

--------- What's to contradict? The problem comes in when there is very little perceived reward and lots of effort when you follow other peoples warnings and recommendations. E.g. "I worked hard, invested in a 401k, and now I'm screwed." Indeed!!!!!
Most of this seems to arise because of serious confusion about what an "education" is or means. There also seems to be considerable confusion between identifier/predictor and causal factors.
*ALL* of the research in this area indicates that the single best predictor of a persons adult socio-economic status remains the socio-economic status of their same gender parent (or other adult roll model/mentor). In fact, this correlation is so strong that it is frequently omitted from statistical analysis in the studies because it explains "all" the observed variation, leaving nothing left to be explained by the latest "wonder" program under study.
This being the case, the fact that parents that can afford to send their children to college are "well off," may have more to do with the apparent benefits of college education than the instruction itself.
To sum up, most college students are "pre-selected" for success because their parent can afford to send the to college, i.e. the more expensive the college, the higher the socio-economic status of the parent, and the greater statistical likelihood of economic success of the student.
However there are significant indications that there are other "non-educational" factors in the apparent success of college education in increasing income, for example the opportunities for "social networking" and the potential to marry a higher income/status spouse [boss's daughter?].
In one sense, an education [in the traditional liberal arts tradition, not the trade school version] is a revamping and expansion of the students mind to include a variety of possibilities, options, techniques, methodologies, alternative explications, etc., rather than a simple accumulation of trivial pursuit "factoids." In point of fact, this frequently leads to considerable family dissension before the student learns to keep their mouth shut, and overtly starts questioning many of their family's tacit/subliminal assumptions and meta-narratives [the scripts that people keep playing in their head to make sense of the world], and even worse starts pointing out the inconsistencies and contradictions.
In the cases where the student is attending college/university on scholarship, the opportunities for networking, and the expansion of their perceptions to include alternative explications and opportunities appear to be a major factor in their later economic success, rather than any specific educational "nuggets," such as "in 1066?"
This by the way, IMNSHO, is the fatal flaw of NCLB, standardized testing, and outcomes/competency based education, as it is easy to teach/test the factoids/nuggets and difficult to either teach or verify the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy such as analyses, synthesizes, and appreciates, as opposed to names, lists and identifies. Sticking to "names, lists and identifies" also results in much less parental friction, from el-hi through university.
Unka' George [George McDuffee] ------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

JN: I worked with a pair of very experienced helicopter mechanics on the balancing and tracking of a Bell Jet Ranger Helicopter. They were using the wrong polar chart. They were so used to using the polar chart in a rote way that they wasted 2hrs getting confused and screwing up the helicopter. They were only capable when they got the right chart. I own an experimental helicopter that came without a chart. I had to learn the physics of the tracking and balancing game and now find it relatively easy to balance my rotor system. My understanding is useful on other helicopters that have no charts already made up. Your first boss was dead right. It always pays to understand what you are doing and not just act like a robot. Stu

I skipped the meeting, but the Memos showed that Gunner Asch wrote on Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:42:53 -0800 And by taking around 8 million men out of the job market. -- pyotr filipivich We will drink no whiskey before its nine. It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!

I skipped the meeting, but the Memos showed that Gunner Asch wrote on Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:01:46 -0800 in rec.crafts.metalworking : How can they afford the booze, if the money is tight?
Oh, that's right "Shut up and drink your beer, kid, we're too poor to buy milk."
I just wish I had some bad habits I could quit and save the money.
pyotr -- pyotr filipivich We will drink no whiskey before its nine. It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!