Different Words Is A Clue

I don't think many politicians understand what "affordable" means.

It means that I have enough money to afford it.

It can mean that it costs less or that I have more money.

Too often, having more money has come with the cost climbing to meet the raise, or surpassing it.

Affordable doesn't mean that I want someone else to pay for it.

Affordable doesn't mean that I don't want the person selling it to not make a profit.

But I keep seeing a strong correlation between how tightly something is regulated and how expensive it is, along with a strong correlation between whether most people pay for it out of pocket or if an insurance company typically pays.  There is also a strong relationship between government supplying the money for a good and the prices spiraling out of control.

Combine any or all of these things and it's logarithmic and/or exponentially more expensive.

Sprinkle in some union influence for the maximum price increases for minimum increase in value.

Just as macroeconomics can be summed up as, "Supply and demand, that's it!":  Eliminating the middle man is one of the surest ways to make the price of something go down. 

Permanent Daylight Savings Time

Making daylight savings time permanent is not a great idea.

It was tried in 1974 and it didn't work out well come winter.

Children ended up dying trying to get to school in the dark.

People have been mentioning their kids are heading to school at 0600 already and that it's dark even in standard time. 

But why are children up so damned early?

In a word: busses.

The schools have staggered start times because there aren't enough busses to transport all of the students at the same time.

Thanks to decisions stemming from the Civil Rights Act, many students are not attending the school that's nearest their home.  Bussing is mandatory.

So you end up with three start times for the students and one group has to be first to go and you have to make sure the last group dismissed is home by supper.

That means you can only start classes earlier to create the stagger.

Which means one, bleary-eyed, group is going to school in the dark regardless of it's standard or daylight savings time.

The solution isn't moving the clock around.  It's to stop moving the kids around so much.

Return to the model where it's "The School" and not "the elementary school, the middle school and the high school."

If they're all going the same place, you can shove them onto one bus at the same time.

Returning to a model where you go to the school that's closest to your house also means fewer busses are needed.

Yes, I am aware of why we moved away from this model, but I think much of this is now obsolete. 

Worth Your 31 Minutes

He echoes some things I've said.

 Why am I not shocked that two of his cited examples originate with white women?  He doesn't say liberal, but I suspect.

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!