Scudding past

Do only clouds scud? Another breezy day, although nowhere near as blustery as yesterday or last night. Still windy enough for the clouds to scurry by across a largely clear blue sky though. Socrates Cafe this morning - we discussed 'Is competition ever fair?' and 'What is the function of humour?' Is it the case that trying to mitigate the effects of transparent competition in, for example, education we have actually meant things have gone backwards. If 50% of the population have a degree, if you are looking to give jobs to the top 10% do you have to resort to other, less visible and objective attributes to find them? Is unfettered competition really bad, or is supposedly regulated competition even worse? Like the banking crisis - shouldn't the banks have been allowed to fail in a free market, having made their money in a free market? Once again the privatisation of profit and the public underwriting of losses. Presumably the newly educated middle classes that benefited from wider access to education can't accept that their offspring aren't all good enough to merit the places in higher education that they won on their own abilities, and so the standards have been allowed to fall lower and lower. And we touched on the artificial competition of sport and games, where rules attempt to level the playing field. But sport and games is about finding the best, so there has to be a point where some differences are accepted, otherwise you'd end up with everyone being equal, or else it becomes random. I feel we barely scratched the philosophical surface of it.
A thoughtful weekend, what with my musings on yesterdays photocall blip as well.