Posts by Jeffrey Johnson2

Just tape it up and take it to your local Chase branch—if you’ve got a foreign currency account there. If they think it's too beat up, they'll send it off for verification (you'll pay a fee), then they just credit your account once it clears. Honestly, they might even just cut you a check right then and there.

If the bill is physically whole—like, not a single scrap missing—they might skip the formal verification process entirely. But if even a tiny piece is gone? Yeah, it’s going straight to processing.

Bottom line though—as long as the bill is legit, it’s really not a huge deal.

Look, sorry, but back when I was at my business school, we did a ton of Case Studies, all kinds of problems and term papers that forced us to actually dig into market trends and run deep dives on how specific companies operated.

The only real headache was how disconnected those firms were from the university—it made grabbing hard data nearly impossible—but the top-tier students always found a way to scrape something together and turn out some seriously interesting work. Besides, you can't just teach everything that way; take Law, for example. Like, who's to blame if you studied from some garbage study guide and ended up not knowing what a promissory note even looks like?

I don't know, maybe it depends on the major, but at least don't generalize like that.

brightlynx11 said:I honestly don't get you people. 😁

I'm halfway through my PhD in Economics, and during breaks from reading textbooks on dynamic optimization, I play Jedi Academy. What's the big deal? The games aren't even that bad—it's just how I blow off steam. 😛

yeah, but I think most people would agree the real issue is when kids are reading books during their breaks from gaming.

Aaron Cruz said:I’d argue that information is more accessible today than at any other point in history, which means young people generally have access to more knowledge than previous generations (and I’m not suggesting everyone is suddenly a genius, just that the average person is arguably less clueless than they used to be😁). However, you aren't going to see those results if you try to measure them using criteria from fifty years ago, demanding they recite characters from The Glempays or The Brothers Karamazov—honestly, that kind of stuff just doesn't resonate with today's generation.
Let's face it, nowadays knowing the history of the Klingons carries more weight than knowing about the Spartans (unless we're talking about some cinematic version🤣).

With the sheer volume of today's music, film, video games, and so on, who else would actually bother wrestling with the moral dilemmas found in Anna Karenina besides perhaps a few literature students? Yet, we expect kids raised on South Park and Gotham City to ace some outdated intelligence exam.

Of course, the fact that there are students in the Economy department who don't know who Sarkozy is is an entirely different matter. There have always been people like that, and it has nothing to do with the internet or TV supposedly making the youth more mindless.

I can laughingly agree😍—this is probably my 10th post here, but man, I still can't quite put what I want to say into words properly--👍👍👍

George Wilson4 said:Don't get upset; I misspoke. Of course, I'm not talking about everyone. And naturally, you probably run in circles with people who are well-read or intellectuals—birds of a feather, right? But there are significantly more of them now compared to an older generation (like my mother's) who wouldn't have a clue.

There's a global trend where, thanks to these modern distractions like the internet and whatnot (even I find myself reading far fewer books lately, partly due to work and partly because of the web), people are reading less and less... and their general cultural knowledge is dwindling accordingly.

That kind of trend has been happening in the US for a long time, and it's finally starting to show up here too.

Look, I'm reading less too since I started pulling 10-hour shifts, but honestly? I don't even have time for the gym five times a week, dance twice a week, hitting the theater a few times a month, going out three times a week, or classes... plus all the other stuff I managed when I was a student. It's not about the internet or whatever—it's just called growing up. Period.

I've got nothing against the internet—actually, for people who actually have focus and good interests, it makes finding info easier and opens up a massive amount of education.

As for the kids—I've already been flamed for saying it, but it's on the parents. They won't drop cash on a new $167 game, but they'll pay for a book from $40. Their priorities shifted. Instead of holding onto those "good old ways" and pushing kids toward something more constructive than gaming or wasting time on forums, Facebook, or Skype, they should be guiding them toward things that actually matter—even if the kids think they're boring or don't know they exist yet. That's where the responsibility lies.

I don't mind forums, but these kids just argue with emojis. Some forums have more smiley faces than actual letters. This place is a bit more serious, though—mostly an older crowd, which keeps the subforums a bit more grounded.

Same goes for Facebook. I have some younger friends on there, and man, there's a new status every 15 minutes, hundreds of photos uploaded, everyone commenting on every single dot and comma... and at the end of the day, it's just a massive waste of time.

sorry man, but even as a twenty-something I feel personally attacked here—I’ve actually read Dostoevsky and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and honestly? I barely know anyone who *hasn't* read stuff like that.

sorry, but don't generalize based on what those academics did with their so-called "research."

Jacob Wood9 said:In my view, we are actually poorly educated on a broad scale, given that there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't even finished middle school, and for a significant portion of those with college degrees—as this "unfortunate" study seems to suggest—one might feel the exact same way.

Furthermore, I don't quite agree with the notion that parents are to blame for the shortage of elite specialists. Most high-level experts tend to acquire that drive and passion for excellence during their university years, primarily because they find genuine role models among the scientists they interact with.

Unfortunately, here, certain professors (and there are quite a few) are nothing more than grumpy bureaucrats who use their positions not to advance science, but to line their own pockets—whether it's through small bribes, extra fees, royalties, or similar little side hustles. Their textbooks are often just mere compilations or translations, and then they go a step further by demanding that students purchase these books as a prerequisite just to get a signature or to sit for an exam.

Parents dropping $400 on some brand new DVD full of games and cartoons—absolute madness.$167They just let kids rot in front of computers all day—surfing the web and playing games—while pushing them into soccer, tennis, or whatever other fancy sports you can think of. Not once do they try to get them to pick up a book, watch a decent documentary, or even grab a modern encyclopedia or a Guinness World Records book. Please... give me a break. And then people act like it’s not their fault, blaming the education system instead (and yeah, I’m not saying our schools are perfect, but still).

Robin Rodriguez5 said:You know, I had two Deans from the MIT Business School teaching me social sciences during my junior year, and one of them is actually the current Dean. Honestly? I wouldn't trust them to watch a single sheep in a pasture. 😁No results coming out of there could ever surprise me.

I'm guessing you mean Tipurić and Lovrinović's,
well, look—I sat through their lectures and passed their exams, both of them. You can call them spineless (which I'd agree with regarding one of them) or say they don't know what they're talking about or aren't experts in their fields, but sorry—you just can't. You were right there in the room for their lectures, saw the roles they held, their bank accounts, their published papers... you know the deal.

@Susan James42

I’m with you on that point, but seriously—where do you people even find these Idiots? I’m starting to feel like I’m hanging out with some kind of intellectual elite—which, let’s be real, I am definitely not.

We need to have the conversation about our knowledge-based society on a completely different level. My take? As a nation, we're probably decent on average, but we lack top-tier experts—we just don't have enough of them. Part of the blame lies with the education system, part with society at large... but honestly, parents take the biggest hit here, though what can you do when they're just like that too? Where do you even start to fix this mess?

The media here has zero clue about their social responsibility. They should basically be taxed on all their trash content to fund the entire education system—just to offset some of the damage they do to society. I can't even watch the World Handball Championship because half the anchors over at CBS can barely pronounce basic words—it's pathetic. Instead, they spend all their time talking about the players' wives or attractive fans screaming for the goalie (who, by the way, needs a serious scrubbing first), while Dominiković is busy hawking potato chips on his jersey... not to mention how every single nightly news broadcast is just a bloodbath of "who killed who." It's disgusting. There isn't a single segment with actual informative value to be found. It's all just pure sensation. The only useful info you get all night is the weather forecast.

So basically, they didn't tell people there aren't any jobs... even worse than I thought...
I mean, this feels illegal—since participation in these surveys is supposed to be voluntary, right? They could actually take them to court for screwing them over.
Finished my degree at Harvard Business School 😍

Jamie Lee said:It makes me absolutely livid when people start talking trash about how students come out of university "stupid" and then turn around and blame the students themselves...

I’m studying economics at a university in Florida, and I walked into a campus full of energy... through the end of my first semester, everything seemed clear enough... but then I hit a wall. I realized the entire educational system is a complete failure, and quite frankly, students simply cannot walk away from these halls with any practical knowledge whatsoever...

The curriculum is ancient history. You’ve got professors who make your life a living hell just to feed their own massive egos, and nobody—literally nobody—can hold them accountable. And it is ALL JUST GODDAMN THEORY. Right now, I’m a graduate whose absolute peak in accounting was learning how to balance T-accounts and ledgers... which means someone with three years of high school and two weeks of experience using basic bookkeeping software can completely wipe me out of the job market. Is that normal? I don't think so. And when I say "three years of high school," I’m not trying to insult anyone; it’s just a baseline for comparison...

I am one of those people just counting down the days until graduation just to get the piece of paper. I won't be getting any actual knowledge—not because I lack interest, but because I'm being forced to memorize garbage that you can only actually use if you become a teaching assistant at this very same university. In the real world, this stuff is useless. I know this firsthand because I work at a major financial institution, and I can't apply a single thing I've "learned"...

I can maybe justify wasting five years of my life listening to nonsense and drowning in theory without a shred of practice if I have a degree to show for it. It’s totally senseless. At least the degree might help with career advancement or job hunting. The last thing on my mind is that having a Bachelor's in Economics means I possess applicable skills. What’s even worse? Not only should I have practical skills, I should be an expert in my field. For Christ's sake, it’s a UNIVERSITY... but it clearly isn't working like that...

So, back to my opening point... it isn't the fault of the students, nor is it just the professors. The entire damn educational system is broken. It is unbelievable to me that at the end of the day, everyone decides that something is wrong with the students. Now, students are being shamed because they are expected to deliver results they never even received during their education...

Who here is actually crazy...

And what kind of knowledge are you even planning to use if you're approaching college with the mindset that you're only there for the degree?
Do you have some innate genius skills or something?
Man, University is supposed to teach you how to think and research—so when you run into a problem at work (and I don't mean office gossip), you actually know how to process things and find quality info to reach the best solution. Who in the hell needs a degree to book accounts? If you need to learn that, you'll pick it up in a week. Why would you learn that in college unless you're an accounting major? It’s enough to know what a balance sheet looks like, why certain items are where they are, and what they mean. You learn to read financial statements and then you pretty much forget it from freshman year until graduation, but you can always brush up if you didn't fail your accounting classes... I don't see a problem with your University, just your attitude. Sure, you'll pass some exams just to check a box, but you should be leveling up the stuff you actually care about—putting in the work yourself instead of waiting for some professor to hand you a script to memorize.

It’s honestly wild that nobody’s calling this out yet—leaking data from a single test like that is straight-up unethical. It says everything you need to know about how "professional" the lady handling recruitment actually is. :-S

I bet one of those hundred idiots didn't even know who Bush was—and another probably thought some landmark in NYC was just as important as this lady up there. These "ethical journalists" are real pros, huh? Writing a total trash piece just to bash young people. If they were actually the standard for morality, then all of us with a degree from Harvard Business School should be embarrassed—not to mention those poor souls who actually sat through that testing.

Look, I finished at Harvard Business School and met a ton of people there—honestly, I can't wrap my head around how any of them wouldn't know the answers to the stuff in these articles. It’s basic general knowledge, let alone those "expert" questions about accounts.

And besides—the text doesn't even specify which business schools we're talking about here. Are these those fancy Ivy League management programs or just standard state universities?

Honestly, no University actually teaches you how to be a well-rounded person—they should be pushing students to go out and educate themselves, but that’s the real flaw in our education system. It lets you pass exams just by memorizing a few definitions, and frankly, some professors actually encourage that kind of rote learning. I'm speaking from experience here—I caught a ton of lower grades because I wouldn't just recite a textbook definition word-for-word. Instead, I actually tried to understand the material—always looking for real-world examples and extra context. I could write pages of analysis for an exam and still walk away with a C because the professor thought I was "overthinking" instead of giving the exact answer they wanted. Look, I never gave a damn about the GPA anyway. I left school with a massive amount of theoretical knowledge—some useful, some not—for the job I do now, and honestly? I’ve never found anything I learned to be useless. You can never have too much knowledge.

Look, I didn't hit up University thinking I'd walk out with a plug-and-play job manual—that's not how this works. A University is supposed to teach you how to actually think, not just act like some trade school. So yeah, I finished my degree with pretty much everything I wanted to get out of it. In the real world, I’ve never seen a gap in my skills because of my education—if anything, the "gap" is caused *by* the education. Honestly, I can't tell you how many times at school I'd drop something in conversation like, "Oh, I read about that in a study" or "I saw this in a book." I wasn't some genius or anything—just your average student who spent just as much time hitting the social scene as I did sitting in lectures—so I don't get why everyone's whining about "unprepared graduates."

I went through like 5 or 6 serious job assessments—always getting called back for interviews, too—but I never saw a single damn result until my last one. That was the one where I finally landed a role in my field. After grinding through a year of internship stuff, they actually showed me the scores and offered me a full-time position... honestly, they shouldn't be ashamed of those results—if anything, they should brag about them.

I was throwing my resume at companies I actually cared about—even when they didn't have openings posted—and guess what? It worked. Ended up landing a job where there wasn't even an official listing; they just pulled me straight from their "talent pool."

I’ve sent my resume over to Ernst & Young—specifically where this lady works—maybe two or three times now. Every single time, I hit every single qualification they asked for, yet nothing. Not even a "thanks but no thanks" canned email—just total radio silence. Their hiring criteria are a joke if they're letting people pass tests with results like that. Definitely adding them to my blacklist of places I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Look, just tell her you've got an appointment at the salon, or maybe a hair thing—or even better, say you're on a date... if the Wi-Fi is acting up and you can't exactly open a window to talk, just claim you're heading in for an MRI or something. Say you're busy all afternoon or whatever—it's not like you're lying, right?

I don't even know what you do for a living, but I know everyone loves to hype up "teamwork" & crap like that—which is really just a fancy way of describing what you're talking about, where people act on behalf of others. Look, I work in a team that runs smooth as hell, but there's always an outlier. In our small circle of maybe ten people, we have one who—in my opinion—has the most put-together life ever. She’s got the husband, the kid, the smallest mortgage, tightest deadlines, and a decent inheritance... yet she spends every single day whining, moaning, groaning, and screaming about how her paycheck is too small, or how she had to deal with some idiot at the bank, or how it's too hot or too cold—blah, blah, blah. Seriously, you won't find drama like this even in the worst soap operas. Every day I just tune it out. I'm busy doing my own thing while she's venting about nonsense; I give her the "I'm not listening" eyes, but I don't say a word to her constant bitching, and she just keeps going. I honestly can't tell if she wants me to offer to take over her job—maybe she thinks I can because I don't have the whole marriage & kids & stuff situation—but I couldn't care less about her self-inflicted problems. The only real issue I see with her is the extra weight she's carrying, and trust me, I can't burn those calories off for her.

So yeah, just keep doing your thing. Ignore her and she'll eventually get the hint—if she doesn't, maybe open a window and suggest she jump out (hope she listens), then close the window and get back to work.

I clicked on this thread because I actually had to go through a cardiac catheterization about 10 years ago... nothing directly related to what you're rambling about, but I could probably get more specific if I wanted to.

No malice intended—just saying that "catheterization" is a pretty broad term.😘