This is a French Army Knife. More of this humor at Stuff of Awesome . It’s like Imgur but has its own comments. The level of content is high enough to discourage the Reddit masses, so take a look.
Folks, folks, this blog is to get you thinking, not to supply anyone with ready-made opinions. The college bubble is nothing new, if you read back far enough you will see I was on to that swindle after my first visit to Broward Community back in 2001. That outfit that tried to insult me up into a $16,000 program when I responded to a $39 ad for a digital camera course. It goes nowhere for you to agree or disagree with me.I’m not a research scientist. My stand on excessive student loans and the decline of academic standards is a fact. It may be the only fact I can support though I largely claim the jobs I’ve had required a college degree to get hired. Those days are gone though that hiring policy remains. Those who are interested may note that yes, in a half a career, I did earn a half-million more than the dropouts.
Gone, all of it, the time, the career, and the money. I suggest the majority of those who think they are doing okay because they handled their affairs better than I did, or were smarter than I was, are living in some form of dream land. Adults report feeling like geezers in a room of computer brainiacs when they returned to college. I didn’t get that, in many cases I was appalled by the educational backwardness of my classmates. It was as if the high school courses all stayed outdated while the exam questions got easier.
“Connections”. That was the name of the club I used to stop in on the way home from work. It was smarter and cheaper to pop in for a beer than drive rush hour in that insane place. The establishment had a policy that the winner of the trivia game got a drink on the house. The locals were so damn stupid, I drank there free for five years.
An interesting perspective is that Wallace was there to see me win. Not some games; every game that I played. Yet, he seems to have forgotten how easily I would regularly trounce entire teams and banks of his countrymen (including him and his wife). He doesn’t remember how I would win by eight and ten thousand points, year after year. He never learned that consistent good performance never happens by accident. Tonight I found a local place that does trivia on Wednesdays. I got five bucks says Wallace won’t be there.
If you want something to chew on, check the National Inflation Association. That’s where I linked for the college video last day because I found it interesting. Well, NIA is the prophet of doom for hyperinflation. They take the extreme position on the economy, they predict riots where I predict the loss of privacy has made riots too risky for most people. There may be disturbances, but for riots to succeed, you need anonymity. And that no longer exists like it did in the 60s. (Read NIA to see how middle-of-the-road I am, and also because they do get the facts right, if not the interpretation.)
Ray-B called, he’s got a break until past the weekend. He reports buying a used truck, careful don’t tell anybody who might want to borrow it. Charge them $50 a day plus mileage. We talked about gold and how the less than intellectually fortunate have trouble understanding how one makes money with it. You don’t, you hold value while the dollar drops, which is takes time. Gold hit $850 per ounce in 1985 which, adjusted for creeping inflation, is around $5,000 today. I remember that.
Next, I rode the ebike to the beach. I met up with Johnny D playing at Riptide. We had a most interesting conversation concerning the music situation in Florida. It’s agreed, the main problem is that everybody wants to be the star. I saw the Hippie up to his old tricks at Jake’s (formerly HWB). He’s still got that backward custom of not playing when there’s no customers. He can’t figure out maybe there’s no customers because there’s no music.
Here’s a side effect I missed, but should have foreseen. Some cities are cracking down on yard sales and blog publishing in the sense of demanding a license. Tax revenues are down, so the cities are desperate for new sources of money. It’s natural they would turn to the easiest form of abuse—records collected over the past thirty years on idiots who had nothing to hide. Thanks to that bunch, the authorities have complete systems in place that can be used to monitor private activities down to the penny.
What’s scary is the bill that requires a 1099 where a buyer pays more than $600 in cash. That would record the sale of every ounce of gold. The law is already in effect, it just isn’t enforced. These ridiculous laws criminalize ordinary people and always have the opposite effect of their intentions. So you know, the information and photos would be collected and stored by the police, not the tax department.
I see the big picture, how the system is deliberately sealing up all the avenues that new retirees might use to supplement their income. That huge middle class with their worthless savings bonds and shrinking home equity is still the last juicy target and the strategy to milk them is good old inflation. Remember Germany in 1922? When the government pulls a fast one, it takes several years for prices to go up, far beyond the attention or memory span of Joe Househusband farting around on his zero-turn Lawn-Boy.
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