Tag: education

Revisit Your Assumptions

College attendance and university degrees have long been defended on the basis of higher earnings prospects. But what was a great deal in the 1950s and 1960s, and still made some degree of sense in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But for the average college student in the United States, a university degree can no longer be justified on economic grounds.

When it comes to wages, fortunes flipped last year for college and high-school graduates.

In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.

Meanwhile, wages accelerated 6% in real terms to $34,320 for those with only a high-school diploma — the biggest gain in more than two decades.

While secondary-degree holders are still paid more, those who didn’t attend college are catching up. Americans with only a high school diploma made 93% of what recent graduates with a bachelor’s degree in the bottom quarter of wages made.

While average degree-holder wages are still higher, the wage comparisons are meaningless when they fail to take into account a) the cost of college debt and debt service as well as b) the opportunity cost of not working for five years.

The cost of college debt service is the real killer. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only “37% of all borrowers saw their student loan balance shrink” as a result of making their payments in 2022.

So with an average student loan debt of $39,351, plus an estimated average $7,870 in lifetime debt service costs, plus an average $205,920 in lost wages, the college student pursuing a university degree in 2023 is $253,141 in the hole versus the high-school diploma holder from the start of his professional career.

Which means, if he is one of the fortunate 59 percent that manages to finish his degree in six years, it will take him 14 years just to reach economic parity with the less-educated members of his high school graduating class, just in time for their 20th high school reunion. And that is the positive outcome; don’t forget there is a forty-percent chance that all of that time and expense will be wasted by a failure to obtain a degree.

The fact is that college in the United States only made sense as a means of elevating members of the lower and working classes for a few decades. Now, it has become something more akin to what it historically was, which is a means of establishing class norms for the administers of empire. This is not to say that no young American should waste his time and money on university, only that he should sit down with his parents, and if necessary, a trusted friend who understands mathematics and statistics, and seriously consider the question of whether going to college is likely to prove advantageous to him or not.

Because it can no longer be reasonably assumed that, on average, it is.

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When Rhetoric Becomes Reality

Homeschool or die was supposed to be rhetoric, not dialectic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated its schedule of recommended immunizations to include COVID-19 shots and boosters for children, adolescents and adults.

The schedule was recommended by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, then approved by the CDC and other health care organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The CDC can issue guidance, but does not have the authority to mandate vaccines for schools or work settings. Such mandates can only be put in place by the states.

Fortunately, most states will not mandate the vaxx for schoolchildren. But those that do will see depopulation.

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We’re Not Obsessed

The younger generations don’t understand why most Generation X Americans know precisely how smart they are in terms of IQ because of another aspect of society that has been lost. Further to yesterday’s discussion of IQ on SG, allow me to explain the reason.

GenX was repeatedly intelligence-tested with the IOWA Assessment tests in elementary school, but neither we nor our parents were given the results. However, the results were utilized by the public school systems to put those who tested at the highest levels in various accelerated “gifted” programs. Six years later, most of us were tested again with the PSAT in 11th grade and the SAT in 12th grade. All of these examinations were IQ tests, but we were only privy to the results of the PSAT and SAT.

The US educational establishment stopped IQ testing schoolchildren in the 1993-1994 timeframe. That’s why the post-May 1993 PSAT scores and the post-1994 SAT scores no longer suffice to provide qualification for MENSA membership. Both tests are now exercises in memorization akin to the “achievement” testing of the ACT or the IOWA Basic Skills tests.

This is why most GenX know how smart they are, and why most Millennials and Zoomers don’t.

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Mailvox: Intellectual Stimulation

I have a number of friends who struggle to find some kind of intellectual fulfillment outside of their work. They were raised loving school, pursuing growing their mind, etc., and are stuck in this lie that the only way to continue that stimulation and that growth is by having a job. Do you have any advice for those (women especially) who have this deep drive to keep learning, but want to be moms and are worried that their intellectual side won’t be stimulated in the home?

Yes. Read a fucking book. Then, once you’ve finished it, read another one. If you’re intellectually fulfilled by sitting in an office or a classroom, you’re literally retarded.

It’s probably not an accident that no one ever asked me to write an advice column.

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What The Actual…

I’m not sure this explanation of the consequences is correct, but regardless, the latest action by the CDC is a ghastly one in light of the fact that the Covid 19 vaccines are a) extremely unsafe, b) highly ineffective, and c) worse than worthless for children.

The CDC just now voted 15-0 to add the Covid 19 Vaxx to the childhood vax schedule. This means they are mandated the Covid 19 vaccine in order to attend public schools. This is the event that could spark an all-out civil war.

On the bright side, people who insist on sending their children to public school despite knowing better now have considerable motivation to contemplate the superior alternatives. And between the children fleeing the public schools and the inevitable cases of Suddenly, this should significantly reduce class sizes.

Silver linings aside, it should be entirely obvious now that the wicked governments of the West are attempting to depopulate the nations over which they so insidiously rule.

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Very Correct Indeed

At least one commenter on Gab gets it regarding the student loan situation.

The thing is, Vox is very correct. Forgiving student debt is deflationary. Erasing a debt is literally removing money from the system (despite the money being fake and gay). This means that there is less to go around, and thus services and products require less of it to buy.

Its just like if we got a trillion dollars in cash and burnt it all. The relative ‘strength’ of the remaining notes is now stronger as there is less of it in the economy. Its very simple stuff really (of course in this economy, money does not work like that. It is literally made up numbers on a spreadsheet and doesn’t exist in the same way cash does, but it makes a useful analogy).

The real issue here is the battle between your logical understanding, and your emotional reflex to hate the idea of it. I will freely admit that it sucks. It feels very unfair, because it is unfair that people are getting their debts forgiven at the (theoretical) expense of the tax payer. Especially when more sensible people either didn’t get in debt, or paid it off by living very frugally. Add to that the fact that we know the vast majority of these students are going to be blue haired human detritus, who wish us all dead if they could have their way. Again, I admit that this fact does suck.

But ultimately, you’re going to have to step out of that mindset and look at the big picture, and understand that you just got to rip off the band aid. This whole situation was brought about my the government, and the greed of the college industry. Many many decades of passed since Universities became a place of learning for the good of society. Now is just a multi-billion dollar racket. This situation should never have been allowed to happen. After the debt is forgiven, it is very important that the entire University cabal be taken down. There should no loans given by the government. All further education loans should be completely private, so that banks have to know they will get their money back, which will ensure people won’t be getting into debt with garbage degrees. IT also means universities will have to be competitive with their pricing. I am also in theory not against a government giving grants for in-demand industries if it helps the economy overall (although I wouldn’t trust the current government to determine this given their agenda).

Stop being over-emotional retards and see the big picture. Just accept that it needs to happen. A society cannot grow and thrive when entire generations of young people start their lives with 6 figure debts which they will not be able to pay off. It crushes their soul, stops them having families and in the long run will hurt you more than the short term “its not fair”-ism of having to bite the bullet. Yes most students are retards, but put the blame where it belongs.

I go considerably further with regards to education policy. All student loan debt should be banned. It is not only usury, it is a particularly wicked form of usury because it is unnecessary. The entire edifice of education credentials needs to be toppled – it is already in the process of collapsing – because it is totally useless and accomplishes nothing except to give the SJWs in corporate HR an excuse to prevent the hiring of productive people of whom they disapprove for one reason or another.

Remember, once converged, an institution loses its ability to perform its primary function. Therefore, every converged institution should be eliminated – not fixed, eliminated – for being no longer fit for cause.

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The Washington Post Defends Grooming

It’s fascinating that the media is so shook by the right’s opposition to child-molesting that they’re retreating right to the “no scientific evidence” about something to which science, even in its retarded narrative-defending form, cannot possibly apply.

Last year, when the state board of education proposed new sex-education standards for teaching about issues such as sexual orientation, gender identity and consent, a retired pediatrician in this central Nebraska town reached out to Gov. Pete Ricketts and state lawmakers.

“This is NOT Sex Ed as anyone knows it,” Sue Greenwald wrote in a July 16, 2021, email obtained by The Washington Post. Lessons that met these standards, she wrote, would be “ ‘grooming’ children to be sexual victims.”

It was a shocking claim, and it was catching on — repeated by Greenwald, by members of the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, a group she co-founded to oppose the standards, and embraced by Ricketts (R) himself. The message also spread through screenings at libraries and churches of “The Mind Polluters,” billed as an “investigative documentary” that “shows how the vast majority of America’s public schools are prematurely sexualizing children.”

Grooming erupted as a national issue earlier this year, but this state in America’s heartland has been roiled by that attack on comprehensive sex education since last spring, providing a unique window into a newly inflamed debate. The unsubstantiated claim helped activate an army of self-described Nebraska patriots who rose up against the standards, took over the local Republican Party and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school boards, a Post examination found. Earlier this month, these activists were part of a broader, anti-establishment insurgency that toppled leaders of the state Republican Party.

The term “groomer” has become a catchall epithet hurled by the right wing against the left, particularly against advocates for LGBT people, who have become the target of a recent surge in violent threats and attacks. The Post’s examination focused on the specific claim that modern sex education — including lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity — makes children more vulnerable to pedophiles.

Greenwald and others who have endorsed that claim acknowledged to The Post that there is no scientific body of research that shows such lessons make children more likely to be victimized.

They’re leaving out the reason the “grooming” rhetoric was so effective – parents were appalled to find out exactly what the “sex ed” their young schoolchildren were receiving. The usual bait-and-switch was exposed, as parents discovered that what they believed was nothing but the basics of the birds and the bees was actually a pedo-tranny strip show.

Remember, there is no depth to which the wicked will not sink. Because millstones don’t float.

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Unreliable Conclusions

The Global Times explores why Western predictions about China are reliably wrong:

Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute of Fudan University, told the Global Times that Western political scientists or scholars have made a lot of efforts to predict events in the world, but most of time, they failed. “They failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in the past, and they also failed to predict the rise of China, they couldn’t even predict the rise of Trumpism, and most Western economists failed to predict the financial crisis in 2008.”

There are two main problems with the failure of the West to make correct predictions about China, Zhang said. “First is that they have ideological bias, as they believe China or any other non-Western country will eventually be Westernized as long as it wants to be modernized. Another problem is that Western political science is based on the experience of Western history, so when Western scholars used such ‘science’ to analyze China, a country with an entirely different civilization, they will come to unreliable conclusions most of the time.”

I’d add two more reasons. Third, they rely upon explanatory models rather than predictive models, so their ability to predict anything correctly is minimal. Fourth, they know absolutely nothing about Chinese history, Chinese culture, and Chinese philosophy. Literally nothing. Most of them haven’t read so much as one single Chinese classic or seen a single Chinese movie that doesn’t star Bruce Lee.

This is why I never pay any attention to what any self-appointed China critic says about China. The idea that “China will fail because the Chi-Coms are brutal and mean” is considerably amusing to anyone who has ever read The Outlaws of the Marsh, just to give one example.

China has been around for a long, long time. It will continue to be around for a long, long time to come, which is considerably more than one can reasonably say for most of the invaded and adulterated nations of the West.

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Everything is Racist

I tried Owen Benjamin’s test to see if everything is officially racist. He suggested choosing a word at random, then seeing if Google can connect it to racism. I chose SPACE. It’s a vaccuum, a material near-nothingness. It can’t possibly be connected to racism, right?

Wrong.

Do Black Lives Matter in Outer Space? – Sapiens.orghttps://www.sapiens.org › space-colonization-racism
30 Sept 2020 — Space colonization racism – Elon Musk is ramping up efforts to inhabit Mars, raising questions about who gets left out of fantasies of …

NASA to stop using racist nicknames for cosmic objects | Spacehttps://www.space.com › nasa-stops-racist-nicknames-c…
12 Aug 2020 — NASA will discontinue the use of certain nicknames for astronomical objects that are considered to be racist, the space agency said Aug. 5.

“Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures”: Civil Rights at Nasa in …https://www.history.nasa.gov › sp4801-chapter22PDF
exclusions of women and racial minorities from key portions of america’s civilian space effort have had major effects on the political credibility of …

NASA Says It Will Stop Using Racist Names for Space Objects https://futurism.com › the-byte › nasa-stop-racist-names…
NASA is finally taking stock and getting rid of the various racist nicknames the space agency has granted objects in space over the years.

Space Is Not Black | The Nationhttps://www.thenation.com › Article
Days before the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, The Nation lamented a government that spent freely on white astronauts, engineers, and contractors, but could not …

The racist language of space exploration | The Outlinehttps://theoutline.com › post › the-racist-language-of-sp…
14 Aug 2018 — The language of colonialism is infecting outer space, thanks to dominance by rich white businessmen and politicians.

Racism has really come a long way since a US general coined the term to justify the destruction of the American Indian, his languages, and his cultures.

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We Made It Happen

So why can’t you, Zoomer? Why can’t you?

I am not responsible for your student debt. I grew up in poverty in the mountians of NC. Ate from a garden, name was on community Angel tree for Christmas, bought clothes from yard sales & if I was lucky, on a rare occasion Sky City.

I joined the Air Force then went to college. I made it happen.

What a great response to the student debt crisis that is engulfing three generations of Americans! I agreed so much that I added my two cents.

I am not responsible for your student debt. I grew up in wealth, with large family homes in Minnesota and Florida. Ate Sunday brunches at the country club, name was on the donor list at the private academy, bought designer clothes, drove a Porsche in the summer and an Audi in the winter.

I was offered full scholarships from dozens of universities that I didn’t need because my parents were rich enough to pay full tuition to an elite liberal arts college with a beautiful campus and pretty sorority girls.

I made it happen without lifting a finger.

See, I didn’t need any student loans, so obviously neither does anyone else. And who cares if the younger generation can’t afford to buy homes or start families, we’ll just import more Colombians or Kenyans with the gumption and grit to do what those lazy, indebted, good-for-nothing Americans won’t.

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