they never learn.

Frankly I think the "Yes We Can" video is dippy.

That's cause it IS dippy. Like Obama, it only appeals to starry-eyed idealogues who are too starry-eyed out to ever face the fact it turns off everyone else.

Intelligence is an inherent asset, it may be slightly amenable to some manipulation but it is essentially a fixed quantity. Education is only useful if you have sufficient inherent intelligence to utilize it. No matter how hard you teach, you are not going to make a planaria into a PhD.. (argumentum ad absurdum)

Well, thank you, Ash, for conclusively solving a long raging debate on whether intelligence is genetic or environmentally obtained. You've conclusively solved this problem and exposed scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Rose, Jared Diamond who argue persuasively the latter as complete bumbling idiots!

I'm speaking of people who simply cannot be taught skills which are marketable in the coming economy. What do we do with them?

There are always people who will fit that category for one reason or another. The problem is there are more people than there are resources, even basic resources.

Solutions? No politically fashionable ones, and I admit I'm firmly against encouraging them all to become prostitutes (and or users) and waiting for them to die off. But in the sense it seems to be working in some parts of Africa and Asia I guess you have inadvertently made a point.

I know and have met people with far more formal schooling than myself (I barely graduated from HS) who strike me as being remarkably ill informed and not really all that intelligent.

Convenient. My ex-spouse made the same argument but I always though it was out of insecurity for not having the discipline to finish college.

My wife's sister's husband is an MD and I routinely trounce him in argument on anything but medicine. He just spent so much time studying medicine that he has surprisingly little knowledge outside of his field.

Whereas a bum like me, a mere one generation from what some would call "poor white trash", has somehow managed to obtain impressive educational credentials in three disciplines. (In my case the moral is good role models and perserverence forgives many flaws)

Not to mention he is basically a neo-con lite.. I love talking politics with him and reducing him to sputtering apoplexy..

the same way, presumably, as you have done with your sparring partners here...

OK, then how do you go about greatly increasing the intelligence of a given individual?

If it so easy to do then I'm sure you have the techniques well in hand and can rapidly edify me.

How ignorant ARE you? The entire point IS that it still hasn't been scientifically determinable if iq is influenced more by environment or by genes. The world's best scientists are still unable to figure it out.

My suggestion is you spend a little LESS time worrying about my typos/spelling errors and posting windy sacrosanctimonious nonsense and instead spend little MORE time at other places. Like Wikipedia for instance.

Also, I wouldn't talk about manners if I were you. Regardless of what your position on the matter, your droning on endlessly about the virtues of prostitution (for what about a WEEK now?) wasn't exactly making you look like a class act.

But suggesting it as a solution to global poverty is just over the top. Words fail me in fact.

And you dig yourself deeper with each new message too.