This Is Very Familiar!

A modest proposal for the student loan crisis.  With a workable solution.

Of course that means we'll never try it. 

More To Say Than A Comment Will Bear

Joe Huffman posted.

At issue is:

Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.

It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.

A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:

Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”

Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.

Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.

Both walk away frustrated.

Both have wasted each others time.

Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_
Posted on X May 25, 2026

I have frequently been the person who's 20 to 30 points behind the person I've been talking to.  Marv's 152, for example.  The physics students who played in my Traveller campaign definitely had higher IQ's.  I dunno what FuzzyGeff or Technomad score, but I know it's higher than me.

I routinely tested around IQ 139, despite that being below the threshold for Mensa, I still passed their silly test.  I declined the membership because...  Have you been to a meeting?  It'd be faster to tattoo your score on your forehead so everyone can segregate properly and look down their noses appropriately.

I have noticed that I'm making connections that others do not see when figuring out something abstract and complex.

Because a draftsman is a translator between engineers and tradesmen, I learned to speak both languages.

And it's more of a dialect problem than a language problem.  Terminology not words.

But being smart doesn't give one the magic ability to suppress instant gratification.

Most of the smart people I know have poor savings skills.  But the ones who do have good skills in this regard have exceptionally good skills.

Many of us have extremely awkward social skills that have hampered conventional success.

Vocabulary is more a function of education than ability!  Those tradesmen include some VERY intelligent people who don't speak with a college vocabulary, but can understand and visualize what they're about to build and what they need to build it faster than I can.

I Am Now A Psychologist

Once upon a time, no shit there I was...

I embarked on being a psychologist.

In my senior year, I did an (unpaid) internship with a practicing psychologist and discovered that, not only, did I not have the temperament for the job; I didn't have any interest in the work.

I loved the science and the research part, but not what 99.5% of psychologists do.

While my grades were OK, they weren't near good enough to get a position at the university or to continue on to a masters with the money available to me.  So I quit with six credits of English untaken to complete the degree.

So I fell back on my mechanical design degree to keep the lights on and motored away.

About ten years later, I got a bachelor's in business administration.

The situation with The Boy prevented me from ever working with my BA, and I have been a, relatively, happy house husband ever since.

But a friend kept harping at me to put in the English credits from my BA into my first degree...

And here we are!  I am now a graduate of Iowa State University with a bachelor's degree of science in Psychology!  Class of 2026!

Hurray me...  It only took 30 years to complete.

I plan on doing the same thing with the degree I did without.

It's been a while since I looked into working in the field and I don't have any licenses or professional memberships cultivated so getting a job looks like a bigger pain than it'd be worth anyway.

Ackshullally

 

My college degree didn't mess it up.

It was the stuff I learned auto-didactically between getting my high school diploma and my college degree.

Just sayin'.

I would also like to point out to any poor maintenance technician who worked on my designs that I always made sure of tool clearance and that there was space for the fastener to be removed.

It never made sense to me to make a wear item hard to access either.

Challenger

40 Years Ago some engineers put on their manager hats and seven Astronauts died.

I was in the lunch line at school buying my breakfast.

They announced it over the PA.

Not more than 10 seconds later someone made the "what's this button do?" joke.

Just after I'd finished eating I joked that the student liberation organization claimed credit for the bombing and no teacher would be safe until our demands were met.

Just after that I was waiting for my mom to come pick me up for my three day out of school suspension.

Apparently a teacher was right behind me when I made my joke.

Zero appreciation, or tolerance, for gallows humor at Ames High School.

I've long supported manned spaceflight.

I've long been critical of the shuttle program.

I've loved planes as long as I can remember and from reading about military programs I gleaned that the time to start the replacement is during the first flight.

If NASA had used that rule of thumb then Challenger wouldn't have been on the pad that morning 40 years ago.  She would have been in a museum.

But I remember what the original plan for the orbiters was and we never even once flew them that way.  Hauling modules for the ISS is as close as we got.

So a replacement never got made, we killed 14 astronauts with it, and the jobs program it had become finally died.

The replacement for the replacement would probably have been flying before Columbia's accident too...  But we were never serious about it.

We made a jobs program and science research toy out of a cargo truck and were surprised it was expensive.  So we cut funding for follow-on programs. 

Unpossible!

Once again:

The possession, use, or storage of Weapons or Firearms is strictly prohibited on all [Brown] University Property and at [Brown] University-sponsored events, except as authorized under this policy.

There cannot have been a mass shooting at Brown University because firearm possession, use and storage has been prohibited.

Do not repeat the lies of the mass media.

Or, maybe, just MAYBE, gun free victim zones are the problem and not the guns.

I don't recall any mass shootings since Texas legalized campus carry.

Gifted

A long, long time ago, my local school did IQ tests on everyone.

If you scored really well, you got put into the "gifted" program, which was a "work at your own pace" kind of deal and I started it in 4th grade.

Except for math, I was doing 7th grade level stuff by the end of 5th grade.  I was still at 4th grade for math.

Then my parents divorced.

The school in my mom's parents hometown, where we relocated, didn't have a gifted program, so I was put into classes with my age group.

6th grade.

I complained bitterly that I'd already absorbed this material and I was bored out of my fucking mind.

But I KNEW the material and it was easy to get A's without doing any work.  So I stopped doing work.

I was fine until we moved again and I started 7th grade.

I'd forgotten how to do the work.

My grades plummeted, though I did finally manage to "get" math.

By the time I'd relearned how to learn, I got dumped onto my father and into a school that was two years of being bullied for being the outsider.

But now I knew how to learn again, but I didn't learn the classes.  I learned how the school itself worked.  That makes it a lot easier to get over on the teacher.

At the very end of living with my dad, I also learned how to deal with bullies.

Just in time to move back to Mom's and teach the bullies who'd forgotten me while I was away...

The Iowa schools were so much easier to game than the Minnesota schools too.

Simple things like spotting that the detention teacher doesn't know you're supposed to be there unless you take the slip from the office to them.  And the office trusted me to do so.  As long as the teacher that put you into detention didn't spot you and remember you...  It was a period of doing anything I wanted.

It should be noted that none of my clever machinations did a thing to help my grades.

I was a C average student leaving High School, and I didn't care because I was going into the Army and not college.

And, having blown the curve on the ASVAB, I selected combat arms.

If I ever get a time machine I am taking young McThag out behind the woodshed and beating some sense into him and forcing him to change his MOS to something useful outside the military.  And erasing my existence, I am sure. 

$36 A Month!

The teachers in my county are discovering how the rest of us live.

Their new health plan will result in them paying up to $36 a month to pay for their health insurance!

AND They will have co-pays for emergency room visits.

AND They will have more limited choices about whom they go to see and under what circumstances.

Oh?  You mean just like the rest of us since Obamacare?

Harvey plunks down nearly $500 a month for healthcare, has co-pays and gets to pick from a short list of places she can see.

So, sorry, Teach, if I don't have a lot of sympathy for your plight.

We've been trying to explain to the teachers we know that benefits are part of "pay" and they make a lot more than they think they do.  I won't even begin to talk about their no-contribution-instantly-vested-retirement-plan's value.

Their real problem (for them) is Florida made it possible, simple and not very difficult to get our kids out of public schools and into smaller education venues that actually teach the Three-R's.  Public schools lose the money when a parent does that.

So lots of school districts are seeing a funding problem and rather than reduce admin overhead, they're hitting the teachers up for healthcare.

Of course, they're not blaming their unions for going along with it or the administrators for sucking up 3/4 of the funding...  Nope!  It's us cheapskate taxpayers and the Rethuglicans in Tallahassee!

Well, a lot of us watched how you behaved during COVID and we remember.  You didn't deserve what you were getting then and you haven't done anything to redeem yourselves.

So suck it! 

Barriers To Entry Take Five (We're On Five Right?)

Just like everyone experiences the upgrade differently, not every person on the "good" side of the barrier gets all the benefits because there's additional barriers and sub-categories.

But something that happens with EVERY case of barrier to entry is a steep reduction in the number of people who can cross the barrier.

Citing that there's a shortage of people who have the requisite license is proof of a barrier in action, not a refutation.

FFS it's right in the name Barrier to Entry.

It keeps people from entering the profession by its very nature. 

Another common thing is for the people who've crossed the barrier to be absolutely unable to perceive that they have and that it was there.  "But I don't make more money than, example in same profession, therefore there must not be a barrier," is the form it often takes.

That's experience and specialization in the field, not the barrier itself.

I really do have a degree in this.

You know, credentials. 

This Parallels What I Was Trying To Say

If there are any flying monkeys left reading:

Redneck Rising

Credentials and training that aren't actually needed to do the job at hand are barriers to entry designed to inflate salaries for those on the other side of the barrier.

My example of needing to be an RN to do work that most anyone with a very basic amount of medical training can perform looms large here.

Can You Show Me A Timestamp?

Student loan forgiveness is back on Facebook!

"Not paying back a loan made with someone else's money isn't forgiveness, it's THEFT!"

The implication that the person who's in default is the thief.

However, that's not true.

Making a loan with someone else's money is theft.

The borrower didn't steal from you, the loaner did!

So, what I want to see, since this matters so much to you:  Where are your objections to federally guaranteed student loans.  Make sure it has a date stamp that precedes the "student loan crisis."

Because if you were fine with them as long as they were being paid back, you're fine with the stealing of your money.

If you were fine with the loans and them being paid back, then you also have to get OK with the idea that there will be defaults.  There will be circumstances where there will be massive defaults (happens with housing too).  There will be defaults massive enough that the best financial decision for the lender is to erase the loan balances. 

"Wait!  No!  That's different!"

No.  It really isn't.  What's different is a degree isn't repossessed or foreclosed.

You've been led astray and you're blaming the wrong people for the problem.

It's the universities still stuck in the paradigm where having a four year degree, ANY four year degree, led to a decent, white-collar, job.

If the content of your education didn't matter then students were free to pursue anything that interested them and universities were incentivized to provide degrees in those subjects.

I remember when a degree in black lesbian studies led to employment in an office.

A job, by the way, that used to require a high school education.

But that's a topic for a different post. 

Close To Home

Scammers Using AI Bots to Steal Financial Aid

The Lovely Harvey is on the front lines stopping this!

Her little college is getting very good at spotting them before they get any money and they've been approached by the Dept. of Ed. about their processes.

Got a promotion for it, actually. 

Tentative

If we can believe the statements of the Secretary of Education, the dismantling of her department is not supposed to get in the way of student loans.

That's a sigh of relief for small colleges all across the nation.

A big fear of these places is that the only source of higher education would be the state run land-grant universities and the states choosing a path that eliminated competition.

Eyes crossed most selfishly because Harvey works at such a small college.

What About Higher Ed?

All the news talk about shutting down the Department of Education is talking about concerns K-12.

Nary a peep about what higher ed programs are affected or what's to become of them and how this will affect colleges, big and small.

Our secretary of education keeps repeating that she wants services to continue to the people who need them, but the details are scanty.

The Wrong People Are Worried

The Lovely Harvey works for a small college.

She's worried about DOGE and her job.

The more I look at what DOGE could find the less worried I get about her career.

Small colleges have a higher bar to clear to get and retain Department of Education funding from grants and student loans than the much larger land-grant state universities.

Small colleges are also more focused on classes that teach skills that are applied to a job and degrees that lead to employment.  They have to be, proving they are is part of them keeping that funding!

I think that when DOGE starts going through the books that little schools are going to have the, "this is how much we got, this is where we spent it," answer ready and none of the money will have been appropriated or spent in a questionable manner.

State universities with huge social justice positions?  Not so much. 

Further proof that the small colleges are safer than they think stems from Obama, essentially, forcing most of them to become not-for-profit schools.  Not-for-profit has a higher standard of record keeping than for profit.

Small schools have their ducks in a row already.  Big schools are accustomed to being unaccountable.

Quote Of The Day

 

Department Of Higher Education

The Department of Education was broken out of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare by congress under The Department of Education Organization Act.

Ostensibly to improve K-12 scores?

HEW was around since 1953.

It sprang from the Federal Security Agency from 1939.

All you have to do to see that K-12 education in America was not aided by these agencies is to compare today's reading levels to just about any private's letter in Civil War Diaries.

Or grab a grade school grammar primer from when one room school houses were prevalent.

It's in America's interest to have an educated populace.

A populace that knows how to read, write, do math and understand civics.

It would appear that we did that better before the Federal government got involved.

There's always a but.

Something that the DoE actually does well is provide access to money that many people otherwise would not get so that they can get an education beyond high school.

Primarily through grants and student loans to trade schools.

This turns minimum wage (best case) workers into people who will pay significantly more in taxes (actually pay and not get more back than they put in).  People who can afford to buy stuff and keep other parts of the economy running.

So I think we should change the DoE into an agency that processes those loans and get them out of the credential and syllabus business.

The only thing that should matter is if the borrower graduates, gets a job and repays the loans.

If Auntie Pearl's School of Underwater Latinx Naval Gazing produces graduates who can do that, then they, and their students, are eligible to receive funding.

I would also demand that all schools meet this standard.

If a state wants to pour their own money into something that doesn't lead to a paying job most of the time, they're free to do so, but the federal money is tied to programs that lead to productive citizens.

The model is already running.  How do you think college football is funded?

Get the alumni to fork over the cash!

Speaking Of De Oppressah

Trump, apparently, is the harbinger of LGBT genocide.

I keep hearing it repeated uncritically and something stands out:

If there was much, if any, violence against LGBT people the press would be all over it.

We know this because they were all over the fake violence against them.

It's like when they drop reporting of a mass shooting because the perpetrator wasn't a straight white dude.

I have also noticed that there's a massive misunderstanding about why people are upset about children being introduced to sexualization at young ages.

It's being ignored that these parents are objecting to teaching kids about straight sex so young as well.

I've done something that I don't think some of the LGBT side has done.  Looked at some of the so-called banned books.

Aside: If they were banned why were they so easy to find and read?  Being able to make a display in your book store with rainbow colored lettering saying "BANNED BOOKS" means they are not actually banned.

Age restricted is the phrase you're looking for here.

Several of the banned books I've looked through are porn.  Some as low level as a tawdry romance novel.  Some with graphic, but cartoon, illustrations.

Some are simply inserting same sex relationships.

But the LGBT side went to the mat to keep the porn.  Demanded that they be made available to children who aren't going to understand what they're looking at and didn't bat an eye about equivalent straight-sex materials being banned from school libraries.

They don't even try to advocate that ALL positions be taught, just theirs.

That alone raises my generally pro-LGBT ire.

It is often forgotten that knowledge is built from small parts eventually assembled into a whole.

I've tackled the task of explaining history to fairly young people in the course of gaming because I often do alternate histories.  The first presentation of history must be simplified, and sanitized.  More detail (and nuance) gets added later as they can begin to understand it.

And some things they just aren't going to grasp no matter how simple, because they don't know what they don't know.

Sex is even worse than history.

And the same because if you start their education with bias and lies, they end up being biased.

And THAT is why the parents are up in arms.

And we don't believe the innocence of the teachers because we watched them lie to our kids during the Wu Ping Cough lock-downs.

Perverse Incentives

The main problem with H1B visas with regards to domestic workers is that it disincentivizes Americans from getting the skills, credentials and degrees needed to get the jobs.

To fix the problem and incentivize Americans to become talented and creative engineers and programmers, the playing field needs to be level.

A programmer from India isn't bringing the mountain of debt with them that an American will have amassed; thus they can work for much lower wages.

That programmer from India is NEVER going to have that mountain of debt so why would an American ever get the skills to compete with them?

There's two solutions.

One is to stop H1B or severely restrict it.  Restrict it in a,"you have to take a barely qualified American over a well qualified foreigner," way.

If these folks coming over here are such wonderful additions to America, then why don't they come over as genuine immigrants and become Americans?  The answer is they dont' want to.  They want to remain nationals of their home country and suck up the much better wages and conditions here.

I am against any sizeable number of foreigners remaining so while they live here.  Don't want to be an American, fuck off right back home.

The second solution is to wipe those debts away for anyone with an "essential" STEM degree and that will allow our fresh faced grads the ability to accept lower pay for the same quality of life.

By the way, it's not racism to want to limit the number of foreigners living here.

It's NATIONALISM.

Get it right.

Scared Them Off

The people I was exchanging emails with from Operation Blazing Sword have gone silent.

This has happened before.

I sometimes suspect that once they learn that I am not actually gay they decide they'd rather not learn about guns.

I've fired off a, "hey, you still interested?" message.  If I don't get a reply...