Category Archives: Education

Wage Stagnation is a stupid myth that makes people fat and crazy

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According to some dipshits, American wages — adjusted for inflation — topped out in 1972. I call bullshit.

The median wage in the US was $7134 in 1974. According to inflation adjustment app www.dollartimes.com, that’s equivalent to $48,394 in year 2021. According to http://www.policyadvice.net, the median wage in the US for year 2021 is $51,480. So where the fuck do they get the idea that wages topped out in 1972, or at least haven’t risen much, if any, since then?

Wages have gone up by 700% since 1972, while housing and “all items” have gone up by 600% in same period. So wages buy more in 2022 except for medical care and college education, which have gone up by 1900%.

Part of it is that medical care and education costs have gone way up — 1900%, significantly outpacing inflation — that’s why people are freaking out. Part of it is because so many more Americans now have useless college degrees plus school debt, which significantly reduces their purchasing power and job mobility. Most of it is because most American journalists and politicians are ideologically driven dumbfucks.

Despite record high gasoline prices, driving is still cheaper today than it was in 1972 because autos today are twice as fuel efficient. Clothes and everyday technology (eg. laptops, tvs) — are much cheaper and in the case of technology, significantly better. Porn is free as long as you have access to the Internet. Foreign language lessons, academic tutoring, documentaries, all free as long as you have Internet. From personal experience, airfare seems a bit cheaper when you adjust for inflation, but data shows it has outpaced inflation by a bit (8% more). Domestic long distance is free if you have a phone plan. The price basic grocery items haven’t gone up when you adjust for inflation, and egg costs the same today as it did in 1972. I bet the street whore that just walked by isn’t any more expensive today, after we adjust for inflation, than she would’ve been in 1972.

Housing costs have spiked over the past year and a half, and it’s a concern, but they’re coming down and may well settle closer to where it should be, which is seven times more than it was in 1972. We’ll see.

Solution to high school costs

That leaves medical care and post-secondary school costs as significantly outpacing wage inflation, around three times more. But college is as useful and dangerous as cocaine, especially since you can usually find better and free instructors on Youtube nowadays. And according to behavioral economist, Bryan Kaplan, education after 8th grade has no effect on personal income outcomes. The kid who gets into Harvard on merit will make the same whether he graduates or gets kicked out for forcing a drunk coed to brush her teeth with his penis. Another economist, Thomas Sowell, has shown that affirmative action has no effect on income outcomes for those excluded by affirmative action, and a negative effect on income outcomes for recipients of affirmative action. Which suggests that it’s not where one goes to school that makes a person, it’s the person that makes the person, okay?

Solution to higher school costs? Stay away from that shit, you don’t need it, just as you don’t need to wear Valentino and drive a Tesla.

Solution to high medical costs

Medical tourism. Americans have raved about the quality of healthcare in Mexico, for instance. Root canal in Mexico is 80% cheaper than it is in the US, partially because Mexican dentists get free education in exchange for serving poor areas for a few years. While you’re there, enjoy the restaurants, a basic one will cost $10 for two people, two drinks included. Or $50 if you want a fancy one. $100 if you want high end that’s comparable to high end Micheline star restaurants in the US. And learn a new language, it’ll prevent Alzheimer’s.

Don’t want to travel? Fine, then figure out a way to stay healthy. Stop eating anything with added sugar. Exercise 7 days a week. Try acupuncture. It’s those with underlying conditions who are paying themselves broke for medical attention.

We could get medical costs down by reducing the number of people — about 50% according to the NIH (and I think that’s an undercount because it doesn’t include the batshit crazy on meds) — who suffer from underlying chronic illness like obesity. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Or get the government out of the business of student loans, which inflates the price of school. How about getting rid of the American Medical Association, a union that drives up the price of medical care. Or get rid of the college degree requirement to get into medical school? If someone can ace the MCAT without college — everyone who does can — that person should be able to apply to medical school. Less student debt and more competition might mean lower medical costs.

I anticipate medical care costs to come down once more medical procedures are automated.

Solution to high housing costs

And if foreign buyers and hedge funds keep buying property, inflating its value? If housing inventory remains low because dumbfuck school counselors told students to get a bullshit degree from a bullshit college instead of learning a trade? Keep in mind that in most parts of the world — from Hong Kong to New York City, Mexico City to Paris, it’s common for many families to fit 4 people in 600sf of living space. In fact, that was closer to the norm in the US until recently. For instance, the average size of an American house was 983 sf in 1950, and 2657 sf in 2014, even though the size of a typical American household declined from 3.37 per in 1950 to 3.13 in 2014. Americans are acting spoiled when they demand a 600 sf one bedroom apartment, no roomate.

If you want prices to come down, tell the government to replace property taxes with land-value taxes, liberalize zoning, and make it easier to obtain building permits. If you want prices to go way up, implement rent control, which significantly reduces inventory.

Random review and comparison of prices

  • Cost of a dozen eggs in 1972 was $.52, which is $3.17 in today’s dollars
  • Typical landline phone service — mobile service didn’t exist — was $30/month (includes phone rental, you couldn’t buy your own), only local calls are free. Long distance was typically $.10 per minute. That’s $203/month in today’s cost, just for local calls. Meanwhile, in 2022, you can get basic mobile service that includes long distance and internet for $15/month. A new smart phone starts at $100.
  • Personal computer in 1972 cost $750, which is $5008 today.
  • Basic laptop significantly more powerful than the $3500 Wang 2200 personal computer (1973) costs $200 today. $3500 in 1973 is worth $23,000 today.
  • Penthouse magazine from 1972 cost $.75, which is ~$5 today. Photos of naked women are free if you have internet in 2022.
  • Use of phone booth in 1972 was $.10/call, two minute limit? That’s $.68 for a two minute call today.
  • Pleated shirtdress in 1972 was $15, or $102 today. Shirtdress from H and M costs $30 today.

Life has gotten a lot better, but people are as ungrateful as ever

Would you prefer to make a $100,000/year — you’d be in the top 1 percent — in 1972, or $50,000 a year today, 2022? Who is wealthier, the average person today, or the top 1 percent in 1972?

Some of the pandemic related price spikes are temporary, they’re due to provisional supply chain problems. Some of the price spikes will get worse if we implement dumbfucking polices like rent control. A lot of prices, like medical care and food prices, will go way down if we stop whining about stupid shit and start thinking about how we can build and implement better technology. The world isn’t falling apart, it’s individual people who project their personal batshit crazy onto the world who are.

What if They Spend the Money on Heroin?

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So what if people spend their $1000/month guaranteed income — Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” — on heroin? We already spend money on stupid shit like schools. Teacher John Taylor Gatto:

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know. (from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)

Which use of money nets a better return on investment, funding schools or giving a heroin addict $1000/month? It’s not clear to me.

To begin with, how many heroin addicts steal to pay for their habit? How many car windows do they break? How many FEWER car windows will they break if we give them $1000/month? Let’s say ten fewer per month per junkie. That’s ~$3000 worth of damage avoided. Add the cost of police work, the cost of inconvenience, the value of items stolen, and the $1000 given to the heroin addict is an awesome deal for society.

Meanwhile, there’s considerable evidence that most of school is at best a waste of time and resources, and at worst a breeding ground of drug addicts (how many kids take Ritalin — legal meth — for school induced ADHD because they won’t pay attention to lousy lectures and complete lame assignments?) and incompetent, incomplete narcissists who learn to never ask questions except for perfunctory ones like “how are you,” to which they only want to hear perfunctory responses such as “I’m fine, thank you.” With conversations so scripted and unimaginative, it’s no wonder so many people are lonely and turn to drug abuse. Watch 3-5 year olds, they’re constantly asking questions and exploring. After even a few years of schooling, most of them will be addicted to affirmation and only know how to beg, brag, complain, and compliment when conversing.

This guy is a behavioral economist. Meaning, he’s a lot less biased than educators when evaluating the merits of education.

What if They Won’t Work?
That’s fine too, why should everyone work? The “dignity of work” is bullshit. There’s no dignity in working a job you hate and don’t see the point to other than to make money. Seventy percent of Americans say they hate their jobs. As they should: most people hate selling things they don’t believe in; following procedures that don’t require creativity; doing tasks that don’t accomplish anything; working for bosses who don’t care about them. Why force people to endure abuse? Would we force someone to play in the NFL because we think doing so builds character? Do retirees lack dignity? Or do most people find meaning outside of work — as stay at home parents, as volunteers, gardeners, grandparents, and so forth?

Universal Basic Income versus Welfare
Welfare requires a bureaucracy of administrators and social workers and god knows who else to enforce rules and regulations. Bureaucracies aren’t cheap, and their primary goal is to keep themselves alive — a lot of jobs at stake here — rather than fix the problems they’re supposed to fix. That may be why the rapid expansion of welfare programs — LBJ’s War on Poverty — starting in 1965 haven’t reduced poverty.

Note that poverty rate was declining rapidly until…the War on Poverty began. Coincidence?

The above chart claims that poverty rate would be LOWER today without the War on Poverty programs, just as some think that the literacy rate — which was increasing before the popularization of public schools — would be higher today without compulsory education. Let’s look at the cost of failed programs:

Yikes, what if we’d spent that on updating our infrastructure? How many fewer manufacturing and heavy industry jobs would we have outsourced if we’d had a modern transportation infrastructure?

Universal basic income, on the other hand, is *universal*, meaning, it’s given to all citizens above the age of 18 regardless of individual financial circumstance. It treats citizens as shareholders of a company (ie USA) who deserve a dividend, a small share of the company’s profits. Put differently, it gives taxes to the people instead of government bureaucrats who’ve proven over and over again that they mostly waste the resources they’re given and will subconsciously sabotage poor people’s lives to keep their jobs. Programs that tell the poor that they have poor diets and shitty lives because they’re poor is an example of sabotage — how can one have hope when life is so simply and easily determined and salvation is possible not from that struggle within but only from government aid?

What if They Spend the Money on Heroin?
Who knows, and at this point, why care? We don’t have enough data about the consequences of each spending habit and I showed above how spending on heroin might be better — against popular opinion — than spending on school. But we do have lots of data that suggests American government bureaucrats are, as a whole, incompetent narcissists who create stupid lobby influenced guidelines like the Food Pyramid that some think contributed to the obesity crises. Let’s suspend judgment for now and see what happens when the government stops telling people how to live their lives and we let people figure out how to live the life they want to live.

How many more like Steve Jobs would we have if we didn’t have compulsory schooling?

Jobs for All = Dumbfuckingest Idea EVER

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Dumber than the second dumbest idea — “free college for all” — because I can at least imagine that program helping a few people (and hurting most) while jobs for all fucks everything up for everyone.

To begin with, most people are unemployable *in the present economy*. Just because someone has a job doesn’t mean that that person is employable — “suitable for paid work” — most who work are just live bodies filling in space that needs to be filled, like the kid stuck in right field because he can’t catch a pillow thrown at him. And then there are those who are unemployable because they consistently produce negative value: give them a dish to wash and they’ll break it; a car to transport things and they’ll run over people; a bank to run and they’ll start a nation-wide recession.  There are plenty of those and the goal should be to keep most people from working, not to give people jobs they’re sure to fuck up.

The Pareto Principle: the 80/20 Rule
Once upon a time, an Italian renaissance man named Vilfredo Pareto noticed that ~80 percent of the peas in his garden came from ~20 percent of the pods.  He looked around some more and saw that ~80 percent of land in Italy was owned by ~ 20 percent of Italian citizens.  And 80 percent of the food was grown on 20 percent of agricultural land.  This 80/20 is everywhere.

For instance, 80 percent of wealth is owned by 20 percent of population, and that’s typically true across all nations (aberrations are eventually self-corrected).  Eighty percent of Microsoft Word users use 20 percent of its features, while 20 percent of users use 80 percent of its features.  Twenty percent of employees generate 80 percent of revenue and vice versa.  Twenty percent of people commit 80 percent of crimes and vice versa.  You get the idea, the Pareto Principle is a law of nature and when you go against the law, you get something like the Killing Fields — disaster.

Pol Pot was a Social Justice Warrior. He executed 1.5 million of his countrypeople in the name of social justice.

It’s always been this way, most people have been un or barely employable, regardless of era and regime, and that’s never going to change. Men sitting in basements jerking off and playing video games isn’t a unique symptom of our post-industrial society, it’s a variation of what men have been doing for centuries, except ours is less violent because the routine acts of violence are virtual rather than real thanks to Nintendo and Playstation.

Examples

Customer who is a Boeing engineer told me that she mostly goofs off at work (and she was concerned about what that was doing to her work ethic and mental health).  The reason she goofs off is because her manager isn’t an engineer, he has an MBA and has no idea how long it should take an engineer to solve an engineering problem.  He gives her, for instance, two weeks to complete an assignment she finishes in four hours.

So who hired the barely competent, hardly qualified project manager who is too lazy to ask his staff how long it takes them to finish a task?  Incompetent human resources executives who hire incompetent human resource administrators who hire people based on degrees of questionable value (e.g. MBA) instead of their competencies. Beginning to see how 80 percent of employees in a business can contribute so little to a project yet keep their jobs, including executive ones?  An aside: you can’t study business the way you can Math, Physics and Logic.  Running a business is more of an art than a science — the context (e.g. regulations, taxes, weather, culture) is constantly changing and no two businesses are alike. It’s not like Math, where 2+2=4 no matter the weather, the tax laws, and who is president of the United States. In Math and Physics, a consensus is possible.  In business, it isn’t and when someone insists it is, it leads to disaster, like nosediving demon planes. Now let’s get back to the question about the prevalence of incompetence in the  workplace. From the New Republic’s investigative news article Crash Course: How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution led to the 737 Max Disaster, “the

Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.

Oops, Boeing 737 goes splat!

How about high school counselors, how many of them are good at advising students on coursework, college and career options, and life in general? Or do most regurgitate basic basic info that’s easily found online? Here’s a test you can give to a high school counselor, see how many can answer these questions off the top of their heads:

Identify the following schools, which state each is located and what each is known for:

a) Williams College
b) Bryn Mawr College
c) CalTech University
d) Harvey Mudd College

What percentage of counselors have an informed opinion about any of the schools listed?  Now these aren’t some fringe schools that don’t matter, these are some of the most prestigious schools in the US that every competent high school counselor needs to know about to serve their students well

  • Williams College — located in rural Massachusetts, considered one of the top liberal arts colleges in the US, ranked number one liberal arts college several times by US News World Report’s annual college rankings
  • Bryn Mawr College — located in suburban Philadelphia, a “Seven Sister School,” one  of the top ranked women’s colleges in the US
  • Cal Tech University — located in Pasadena CA, considered by some as the top engineering research school in the world.
  • Harvey Mudd College — located in Southern California, the top science and engineering liberal arts college in the US.

What’s the point of having a high school counselor who doesn’t spend two weeks a year to learn about schools most aren’t familiar with so he can properly advise students on college options so that each individual’s personality matches well with the spirit of a particular school? If he’s too lazy to do his work properly — hey fucktards, read at least the annual US News college rankings so you know what is and isn’t a safety school or a good match for each college bound student — should he be advising students on career and lifestyle choices? Are these the same fucktards who tell every student to go to college regardless of personal interest and test scores so a bunch of kids grow up to be broke and confused adults who wasted their most productive years getting bullshit degrees from bullshit colleges?  Is bad advice that ruin people’s lives what taxpayers are paying for?

Let’s look at teachers: how many of them have you had who were good, who made a positive difference in your life?  How many didn’t make a difference at all?  How many wasted your time?  How many fucked you up, beat the curiosity out of you with asinine rules and demented pedagogy? Count them up. What percentage made a positive difference, is it closer to 20 percent or 80 percent?  Or did they overall teach you to act, talk, and think more like a Trader Joe’s cashier than the CEO you dreamed of becoming?  Are you even capable of asking a question — any question — other than perfunctory ones like “how was your day?” when you’re on a date, or do you mostly talk about yourself and repeat cliches because you spent a sizable chunk of your childhood in a:

dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful, where everybody is playing a kind of role, as in a charade where the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the students than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his. It is a rare child who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence or his sense of his own dignity, competence and worth. (John Holt, published in Saturday Evening Post, 1969)

Which sounds a lot like the Boeing work environment — sub “teacher” with “manager” and “students” with “staff” — the above cited New Republic article describes.  Should we be surprised that our work environments aren’t much different from our school environments? Should we spend more money on to replicate dysfunction and incompetence?

What Sort of Jobs?
Let’s play along, what sort of jobs would the Federal government provide?  Bernie says:

  • As part of the Green New Deal, we need millions of workers to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure—roads, bridges, drinking water systems, wastewater plants, rail, schools, affordable housing—and build our 100% sustainable energy system. This infrastructure is critical to a thriving, green economy.
  • At a time when our early childhood education system is totally inadequate, we need hundreds of thousands of workers to provide quality care to the young children of our country.
  • As the nation ages, we will need many more workers to provide supportive services for seniors to help them age in their homes and communities, which is where they want to be.

So does Robbie the Rapist teach four-year-olds the pledge of allegiance? Should Fat Freddie be anywhere near a shovel?  What happens when Sad Sally takes care of grandma? Mickey the Methhead promises to  never jerk off again while at work. The US government already provides jobs to anyone of “working age” who wants one — that’s what the US military does and it’s still not meeting its enlistment goals — unless he or she:

  • is a psychopath
  • has an iq below 82
  • is obese
  • is mentally or physically ill

National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC showed that 39.6% of US adults age 20 and older were obese as of 2015-2016 (37.9% for men and 41.1% for women). According to Mental Health First Aid, “in the United States, almost half of adults (46.4 percent) will experience a mental illness during their lifetime,” with “half of all mental disorders [beginning] by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24.”  Ten percent of the population have IQs lower than 82. Let’s not even bother to look up the percentage of people who are psychopaths, which I’m sure is waaaay underestimated. So are these minimum requirements for employment reasonable? Go imagine yourself having a threesome with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren if you think not.  If they are, then what percentage of the US population is unemployable?  Are we really going to let someone who is obese build a bridge? Or someone with an IQ lower than 82 to engineer a bridge? A chronically depressed caretaker to take care of the elderly?

Freddy wants a job. He especially likes to babysit kids.

The private and public sectors already employ many who don’t meet minimum US military requirements for employment.  Meaning, most of the unemployed are probably the worst of the unemployable —  they can’t wake up on time, they never brush their teeth, they can’t remember anything that doesn’t have to do with themselves, they’re pathological liars, etc. And some feckless politicians still want to guarantee them jobs?  It takes a highly skilled and disciplined workforce to build and repair roads and bridges — work already done by the Army Corp of Engineers by the way — you can’t just let anyone have at it.

But Work Makes People Dignified
How so?  According to a 2017 Gallup poll, 85% of workers in the world hate their jobs. A 2013 Forbes magazine reported that “work is more often a source of frustration than fulfillment for nearly 90% of the world’s workers.” The good news is that in the US, only 70% say they hate their jobs, comparable to the percentage of American kids who say they hate mandatory education. Am I missing something, is there something dignified about hating your job? Or are the government jobs going to be so gosh darn awesome that *everyone* is going to love them and turn into the model workers champagne socialists fantasize about?

It’s not a politician’s job to tell people what is or isn’t a dignified life, that’s playing God and will lead to tyranny. And we don’t force Puki the Pomeranian Princess to pull a sled in the snow to be a dignified dog. People can decide for themselves what sort of life they want to live, and for some, it’s going to be a life without work.  You can still have a sense of purpose in life without going to work — think of all the retired grandparents who hang out with their grandkids and tend gardens.

Puki says: “Kiya the crazy Husky can pull sleds. Me, I just want to look pretty and pampered.”

Universal Basic Income
There are a lot of people who want to work but are unemployable.  Like the journalist who is too lazy to fact check and too unimaginative to sense the implausibility of someone’s account; doctors who don’t wash their hands between patient visits; personal trainers who only talk about themselves during the entire session; Sociology professors who teach books they’ve never read; lawyers who don’t read contracts they’re paid to read.

The good news is that the next phase of automation will result in more of the unemployable employed to become unemployed. That’s a good thing because it’ll lead to a significant increase in productivity and — if we do it right — quality of life. Leaving a lot of people out of work, however, is a bad thing because they’re likely to riot as the Luddites did in the early 19th century when their jobs were replaced by industrialization.  To reduce the likelihood of widespread social disturbance and to offset the economic effects of automation, we should aim to pay everyone — yes, EVERYone in the world — a living allowance.  Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend — $1000/month to every American citizen age 18-64 — is a step in that direction.

What Happens Next?
Technologically, we’re so close to providing universal healthcare without reduction of quality and rising costs. The automation of most healthcare work will significantly reduce healthcare costs and make it and many other services accessible to everyone.  This will happen sooner than later if we stop using resources to fund policies that create disasters we have to clean up and start preparing people for a future without work as we define it today. A new world is around the corner, we should see what it looks like instead of turning around and running back to 20th century solutions — guaranteed jobs and free college — to 21st century problems.

Stop Trying to Fix Education System, Let Kids Choose

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Presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted:

Many of our high school students check out because they don’t feel they are learning things that will actually be relevant to them.  We should be teaching them financial literacy, positive psychology, communication and healthy use of technology in high schools.

No we shouldn’t.  Not just because there are as many ideas of what education ought to be as there are individuals — the incessant debates about curriculum aren’t worth it, save it for another battle.  It’s because the second line of the above tweet reeks of tyranny. “Financial literacy” for whom? Each individual, after all, has their own tolerance for risk and life goals, one size fits all doesn’t work here unless you want everyone to be equally risk averse.  “Positive psychology” — all the rage in Middle Class America — hasn’t worked because it turns out overthinking and denying certain emotions isn’t healthy.  “Communication,” which they already try and fail to teach in most English classes, sounds like an invite to Orwellian language police. And finally, what’s  “healthy” and what the fuck does “technology” mean? What’s more problematic, the toilet or the phone when I take a shit while texting?

Yang’s right, many if not most high school students check out. As they should because most people learn from working, not from lecture and whatever they’re learning at 98 percent of schools is garbage anyway and they know it. They’re not learning algebra or trigonometry, they’re learning how to pass those classes to get a virtue signalling degree. What makes people think a “financial literacy” class would be treated any differently at the high school level? People learn financial literacy and anything else when they want to, not when someone tells them to learn it.

Kids, be like Donnie.  He’s a good boy because he tells teachers to fuck off when forced to learn touchy-feely bullshit.  

Why We Shouldn’t Fix the Problem
Because it’s like teaching a dog to climb a tree, it’s a waste of time.  Just because a few dogs have climbed trees doesn’t mean we should try to teach all dogs to do the same.  To satisfy your curiosity, here’s a clip of a dog climbing a tree:

Would you be disappointed in your dog for not climbing a tree like the one in the video?  Then why are we trying to fix schools, which are just dogs trying to teach dogs to climb trees? Most dogs don’t want to climb a tree and most people don’t learn in a classroom setting. Stop lying to yourself, what the fuck did you learn in school other than how to pass courses without learning anything?  Can you even do basic algebra and geometry, can you manipulate a binomial equation and finish a geometric proof and explain the point of doing so?

Again, most people learn by DOING what they want to do, not by being told what to do. Leonardo Da Vinci never had a formal education, he informally learned Latin, Geometry, and Mathematics before beginning his apprenticeship at a leading workshop at age 14, where he “was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills,including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and wood-work, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling” (wiki). Bill Gates taught himself to code when he was in 8th grade, not from any class at Lakeside and Harvard, and used this skill to create mischief that later became Microsoft.  Same with Mark Zuckerberg, except he read “C++ for Dummies” his dad got him when he was 11 years old so he could create fun games for himself and his sisters. If the geniuses of past and present lived a life of technical pursuits supported by theoretical training, then why are we forcing kids to learn abstractions they won’t understand without proper technical experience? You can’t use the clerical approach to education — schools were originally created to train clergymen — if you’re trying to provide technical training. And if all the geniuses in history learned primarily by doing, then why are we living life ass backwards?   

Telling kids what schoolwork is relevant to their lives instead of letting them figure it out for themselves is an even worse idea, that’s how people lose their individuality, when they’re taught to think and act like everyone else.  (And they’ll make up for their lost individuality with shallow expressions of individuality in dress, hairstyle, etc.).

Let Kids Choose
Let schools do whatever they want to do, it’s nobody else’s business. But what we can do is let people, after they graduate from 8th grade, choose their own coursework, if they want to take any at all.  This is similar to how Andrew Yang wants tech tax dollars to go to the people instead of the government — trickle up economy — so the people can choose individually how that money should be spent.  Put simply, end mandatory education at 8th grade, and let people decide what’s relevant to their lives, whether it be coursework or work, and without stigma. That’s how it was — most people started to work after 8th grade, just as Da Vinci did — when the US grew into the superpower that’s now strangling itself because of its eroding freedoms, including the freedom from having to attend Education Camps. Let’s get back to what worked for the people, not the education-industrial complex that’s more concerned about legitimizing its existence than educating people.

Why School is Bad For You
And not just because it’s inefficient and mostly ineffective at educating people. The most insidious part of school is that turns students into mental cripples dependent on being spoon-fed by teachers in order to learn anything. It turns people into slaves, really.  At the same time — and this is what’s really sick and twisted about schools — they convince their students that they’re actually getting smarter and more educated solely because they’re in school, even though they’re not learning much there and would learn a lot more by making, fixing, and experimenting with things, as Steve Jobs had.

So you end up with graduates who think they’re smart just because they have a diploma. And that they’ll be even smarter if they spend more time in school and collect more diplomas. For some, school becomes a fetish except it costs a lot more than the schoolgirl panties that some Japanese guys sniff to sleep.

How to Go to School Like an Asian
Asians do well in school because they DON’T follow the pace set by teacher and they learn most of the material AT HOME (during the Summer), not at school.  That’s why they go to churches that provide free tutoring.  That’s why they borrow from library extra math books, so they can drill, drill, and drill through the summer and every weekend during the school year. That’s why they start studying for the SATs in 7th grade instead of never. That’s why they save enough to go to summer robotics camp, so they can figure out how to have fun with Math and Physics.  They think of schools as the place to test knowledge and skills in a competitive setting, not as a place of learning.

Chart suggests that how good or bad a school is is irrelevant, so it’s not worth trying to change a school. It’s the mindset of the student that matters the most.

 

It was the same way for Da Vinci, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln…all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg, who got his start at age 11 with a “C++ for Dummies” book.  For them, learning primarily takes place at home, in the community, and at work — as it had been for hundreds if not thousands of years — not at an Education Camp.  They became who they are because they understood that if you can’t learn something on your own, you won’t learn it at school.  The difference between top students and average students is mindset, nothing else.

Apprenticeships
Most people learn by doing, not by listening. Which means people should begin work the moment they can, not at some arbitrary age decided by bureaucrats who think of people as data rather than as individuals. Work, not school, is where one becomes educated, school is just a supplement when needed.  By living life ass backwards, we are, in former teacher and anti-school activist John Taylor Gatto’s words, “drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete” because “life, according to school, is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.” And you still want to send people to school against their will, you still want to try to fix it?

The film Breakfast Club is about Education Camps in the USA.

Or we can make school optional and return to the apprenticeship model of learning that has reliably produced the greatest minds in history.

 

 

 

Notes on 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang Part I

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I. Candidate Yang’s Universal Basic Income platform: unconditionally give $1000/month to everyone (citizens only?) between ages 18-64, no strings attached and untaxed.

II. Rooting for Yang. His Universal Basic Income platform needs to be debated on national stage, but not endorsing him.  Disagree with many of his policies.

III. Don’t agree that automation will significantly shrink workforce.  Automation has been happening for awhile now — ATMs, self-checkout, etc. — yet there’s a severe labor *shortage* as I write this.  I support Universal Basic Income, just not for the same reasons as Yang’s.

IV. Yang cites labor participation rate of 62.7 percent as evidence of automation shrinking workforce.  So that’s down from 67 percent in 1996.  Is that supposed to be a big deal?  Context: labor participation rate has decreased since economic recovery;  labor participation rate has decreased as unemployment rate has decreased.  Yet Yang envisions doomsday.  I see people choosing to be stay-at-home moms and dads because they can finally afford to do so and a bunch of people who are either unemployable or employed in the black and grey markets (eg. sex work, etsy, ebay).

V.  Automation doesn’t destroy jobs, it only makes people more productive.  Just because Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do the job of a corporate lawyer better and faster doesn’t mean we don’t need most corporate lawyers anymore.  There’s a bottomless backlog of shit that needs to get done.  Once done, there’ll be unimaginable new frontiers to explore. So AI doesn’t mean fewer radiologists or police officers or lawyers.  It just means more of what needs to get done gets done, and at a lower cost to consumers because shit gets done faster and more efficiently.

VI. Next stage automation — Artificial Intelligence Economy — won’t happen as quickly as Yang predicts (10-15 years).  Technological change is as much a social and political issue as it is an economic one.  People will eventually get used to driver-less cars and trucks, just as people got used to using elevators. But it’ll take longer than Yang thinks and the changes will be gradual rather than radical.  Americans don’t like radical change.

VII. Universal Basic Income will help keep unemployable people out of the work-force.  That’s a good thing because there are a lot of people who produce negative value.  Meaning, their screw ups cost a lot of money to fix.  Then there are those — most of the workforce — who produce little value above what they’re paid. Best to not let them work too much.

VIII. Critics say that work is how one builds good character.  Let’s assume that’s true. But why does everyone need to have good character?  We keep useless, lazy pets around and aren’t concerned about their moral health and lack of grit.  So why should we be bothered and concerned if someone doesn’t want to work, especially if we don’t need that person to work?  Let them be and give them enough money to stay off the streets.

IX. Yang mentions Alaska as a test case.  Alaskans get a dividend each month and that hasn’t resulted in societal breakdown and rise in slothful behavior.  Same with other UBI pilot projects around the world.  Link here to pilot outcomes

In fact, have shown improvements in physical and mental health, increase of IQ scores, higher graduation rates (ugh, that’s not necessarily a positive outcome) and reduction of crime. A UBI experiment in Canada saw hospitalization rates go down 8.5%.

X. That makes sense because the lack of economic security is a source of poor mental health, which often leads to poor physical health and nutrition.

XI. Nutrition in US will improve if UBI improves mental health.  Inability to cope with anxiety and depression, not lack of financial resources and access to nutritionally dense ingredients, is why people have poor diets.

XII.  UBI won’t help the poorest of the poor — doesn’t matter how much money you give them, they’ll figure out a way to fuck it up.  But it’ll help the working poor and up.  It’ll especially help the upper-middle class to become more entrepreneurial instead of playing it safe.

XIII. Use UBI to pay off student loan debt.  Then get government out of business of subsidizing student loans.

XIV. Welfare requires a complicated bureaucracy of social workers, administrators, and fraud prevention officers.  So much money intended for the poor is wasted.

XV. Welfare is psychologically crippling, UBI is emotionally uplifting.  Welfare stigmatizes, UBI exculpates.  Welfare racializes poverty, UBI humanizes poverty.  Welfare disincentivizes work, UBI encourages work.  Welfare is invasive, UBI is unconditional.  Welfare invites fraud, UBI is fraud proof.  Welfare requires bureaucracy, UBI is automated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Schools Produce Fuck Ups

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Imagine two approaches to teaching students: either impart centuries old time tested wisdom and approaches to learning disciplines, as taught by Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Da Vinci, Sun-Tzu,  Al-Khwarizmi, and so forth. Or rely on poorly tested pedagogical theories produced by academics from relatively new disciplines (eg. Education) that are based on problematic methodologies.

Most schools choose the latter. The best schools the former.  Here’s what students learn at each (latter = New; former = Classical):

New Philosophy: Be happy. Happiness is ultimate goal of life.
Classical Philosophy: You’re a dumbass, you don’t know jack shit.  Those who don’t realize they’re dumbasses who don’t know jack shit are dangerous, will never grow, and will be miserable (summary of Plato’s Republic and Socratic dialogues, which are foundations of Western philosophy).

New History: Bad people do terrible things to good people.  Good people are victims.  Be good and help these victims.
Classical History: People do some fucked up shit to each other.  Figure out ways to protect yourself from other people.  (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars).

New Science: Nature is beautiful and thus should be left alone, protected from human intrusions.
Classical Science: Nature is fascinating and unpredictable and thus will do some fucked up shit to people.  Figure out a way to work with nature, to protect yourself from its whims. (Francis Bacon).

New Math: Math is for boring people who are not creative.
Classical Math: Use of numbers is the most precise way to map and describe the world. It’s a language and critical to understanding many fields, including music and art.  (Leonardo Da Vinci).

New Literature: It’s wrong to feel hate, rage, and anger.  Such emotions must be repressed.
Classical Literature: Life is cruel, lonely, and painful.  Deal with it by embracing full spectrum of emotions, including hate, rage, and anger. Use such emotions to motivate oneself, to fight against failure.   (Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night).

New Writing: Good writing uses lots of big words, many adverbs, and strings of long sentences.  Good writing is an expression of one’s feelings.
Classical Writing: Good writing is succinct, concise, and precise.  Good writing is simple and focused on effective communication.  (Common Fucking Sense)

New Social Studies: Make the world a better place by protecting people, especially children, from stress, so they can maximize their potential and create a fair world.
Classical Social Studies: People, especially children, must be exposed to frustration and pain, and learn to embrace a wide range of experiences and emotions in order to prepare them for reality that’s often cruel and unfair. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile).

The reason so many schools choose new, untested, theories is because they promise dramatic improvement with less work.  Figuring out what the best schools do right and emulating them is too much work and likely too offensive to too many parents. The best schools are run by leaders who understand the value of and the extraordinary effort it takes to improve on time-tested wisdom.  It takes a lot more than simply being “nice” — easy to do — to a kid to make him capable of learning how to learn, to be sentient, compassionate, and passionate.  That’s why the best schools — public and private — expose their students to pressure packed environments that test their resolve, both in the classroom and on the field. The rest instead complain that students are too overworked, too stressed from this, that, and whatever.

Consider the above distinctions carefully, how they produce different results.  For instance, the kid who thinks nature is merely beautiful is NOT going to become a scientist working to solve problems that arise from climate change because she will NOT have the same sense of urgency as that kid who thinks nature is fascinating and sometimes cruel.  She will more likely become a self-righteous activist. That’s because the “nature is beautiful” narrative feeds one’s narcissism —  “so nature is meant for my enjoyment, my pleasure, and I must defend that which is made for my pleasure.” Nature as “fascinating and cruel” motivates because it understands science as the race against disaster.  Starting to see how a public school like Stuyvesant, full of working class students, can consistently produce world changing scientists from each one of its classes, while ours mostly produce activists?

Alright, so I’m exaggerating — I was trying to get your attention — our schools don’t produce mostly fuck ups.  The point is, they’re mostly producing mediocrities and we have to figure out why that’s the case.  Unless we’re fine with mediocre, which in this rapidly globalizing and competitive world can quickly become the new Fail.  Now that’s fucked up.