China money finally reaching the exchanges, or Gyft is giving us a gift?

You decide.

Total volume (incoming + outgoing transactions) of bitbattle.me is just a few hundred short of hitting 100,000 bitcoins

ITT everyone acts like thousands of people weren't just burned by a massive bubble that still hasn't fully corrected, and the "new" Asian investors aren't able to see this and act with extreme caution (or take no action at all).

I believe this is our disconnect.  You're under the impression that most knowledge can only be attained through school; there seems to be no in-between for you.  You believe that, unless someone tells you, you can never know.  The man who discovered electricity had to have been told by God, I guess, before he could ever know about electricity, and how it could power certain things.  He wasn't born brilliant; he was born exactly like you, a drooling baby who had to learn literally everything from the ground up, per usual for all human beings.  Why, then, did he become such a "brilliant" inventor, and Joe Schmoe was just a farmer?  It's very easy to fall into the trap of, "He must've been born a genius!"  In reality, people are not.  All people are born with very like minds (excluding actual physical disabilities,) and it is through their experiences that they reach a level no other people have ever reached before.  There is no such thing as a genius; this is a subjective impression.  The smart man can only be smart when everyone else isn't.

Now the question becomes: How does someone become brilliant?  And the answer is simple: they stop assuming everything Ms. Smith says is God-given fact, and pursue an unbiased, objective understanding of the world around them, which is achieved first through observation, otherwise known as an intake of information, then interpretation, which can be related to processing that information--then repeat.  You take info in, you put info out, until you form an understanding; I believe we can call this the thought process.  Put food in, chew, swallow.  Of course, there are many advanced subjects which this process does not work, where you'd either have to be the guy to discover said subject, or read about the findings of others (again, take info in, put info out.)  Unless you're making the point that only a school can supply the flow of quality information into a person, I believe it's clear that calling someone brilliant is just another way of calling someone an autodidact; they understand that schools aren't the only method to acquire information, and seek to educate themselves, even, in the case of Einstein, when schools have nothing more to teach.  Why, then, do you insist that only "normal" people can become educated through college?  I promise you, I've come a long way since the dark ages (a.k.a high school), but I owe very little of my general competence to my brief adventure as a now sophomore in college.  I can't legitimately claim myself to be brilliant, for I don't believe any "official" can define what makes someone brilliant or not, but I promise, college is in no way the sole method to achieve an education; rather, it can help, but in the end, you, the individual, are doing the heavy lifting, with or without college.

And lets not forget the dangers of trusting an institution with every bit of information you receive.  I've repeatedly caught my professors making blatantly opinionated statements passed along as fact, and sometimes unintentional lies on matters I happen to know more about, but I digress.  I wonder how many other people notice these things...  They're not exactly bad, but, a student is more easily shaped when he believes everything his professor says, even taking the biases into account for his own method of thinking.


I will admit, colleges do a good job at teaching people how to learn, but they shouldn't have to.  When a legal adult still does not know how to think on their own, following 13-14 years of supposed education, can we agree that we're facing an epidemic of stupidity?  On one end, I want to blame the individual, but when I consider the fact that all individuals in this country are forced into attending a school which refuses to teach people how to think for themselves, it's hard to set the blame on society, unless we can assume that society is in true control of their government, which I tend to believe they aren't.

I would argue that forced schooling contributes to a nationally lower average IQ, simply because people who do not want to go to school have to go, and make life a living hell for anyone who does want to go to school.  This sets a blanket over all students in public school systems who generally hate their experience (either because they didn't want to go or because they had to put up with the people who didn't want to go), which gets mistaken as a hatred for learning in general.  I recall clearly, in my high school days, that, if college was any experience like I had in high school, I did not want to go.  So I didn't, for a year or two, but got pressured into it by an ex-girlfriend who didn't want to date a dumb guy without an education   I generally liked my experience, but after a while, I felt I really was back in high school, learning the same subjects I didn't learn back then, the same subjects I didn't care about but was required of me.  I think most people have, by this point, given up on their individuality and simply go for the associates like good students, because, as they've been taught for 13-14 years, thinking for themselves couldn't fit into the public school's agenda of being thought for by their grade school teachers so they can pass state-defined scores, else the school faces a risk of being shut down.

So now we have a nation full of people ready to go to college who are failing accuplacers on material they freshly "learned", staring with blank faces at their professors, writing down anything said to study it later, afraid to answer when any professor asks a question, lest they get called on, where they'll refer to their notes, but very willing to talk to their neighbor about what was on TV last night, or that girl, remember her?  You remember that girl who used to always...  The problem cannot be colleges, then, who only operate as businesses (except for Phoenix and all the other highway colleges, whose owners are welcome to rot for their crimes against the American populace); the real problem of education is primary.  It's the difference between voluntary education and involuntary education, and I believe our American experiment has shown the results of one side of it: we cannot force someone to learn and expect the outcome to be a thinking individual.  Once this is changed, I believe we'll see colleges following suit, once, finally, people are no longer satisfied with being treated as children, and will, in turn, themselves, no longer act like adults, but be adults, thinking adults, the kinds that go to college because they really wanna know more, because they wanna create and work to supplement their desire for creation, and then we'll see a real shift in the world.