Tag: Regrettable Acts

SOLD!

Funny Stuff, Mocking Furriners

Talk about welcome news:

Danish campaigners are proposing to buy California from the United States and turn it into a territory of Denmark in response to Donald Trump‘s bid to acquire Greenland.

The ‘Denmarkification’ campaign says it seeks to crowdfund $1trillion to purchase the US state, after which it plans to instill it with Danish values and make the most of its sunny weather and resources.

Good luck with instilling any values — let alone Danish ones — into that cauldron of assholes, guys.  Hell, if you could clean up L.A. and San Francisco alone, you’d be doing the world a favor.

At least the new Danish “settlers” would be used to over-priced real estate, and the current crop of Californians would welcome your free healthcare and rampant socialism.  And don’t forget to include the cost of a wall around the place — we’ve had more than enough Californians infest the rest of the country, thank you.

And you Danes might as well forget speaking that throat-clearing stuff you call a language and learn to speak Spanish. Although that need may disappear soon, if you get your way:

Denmark’s immigration approach has been influenced by Right-wing parties for more than 20 years, with Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister and leader of the centre-Left Social Democrats, pursuing a “zero refugee” policy since coming to power in 2019.

The country of around six million people received 2,300 asylum requests last year.

“Last year, authorities granted the smallest number of residency permits to asylum seekers that we have seen in recent years,” Kaare Dybvad Bek, the immigration minister, said, calling the figure “historic”.

If you can do that in California… see the title of this post.

Bad Pennies

Economics

I don’t like this latest thing by the POTUS:

President Donald Trump announced he had instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to have the Treasury Department stop making new pennies, explaining that it costs more than two cents to make them.

Yes, it makes sense on a facile cost : benefit basis, but what it does is surrender to the trope that inflation (created by government in the first place) has rendered the penny valueless.

Why not work to rein in inflation and lower prices so that a penny becomes worth something again?

Oh wait;  that would be more difficult than just quitting on the penny.

Let Africa

Africa

…do without U.S. aid dollars?  The very thought!

In all fairness, it should be said that the “former Kenyan president” has more money than Bill Gates, earned quite honestly, promise.

Nevertheless, his point is valid;  I recall someone saying something quite similar about, oh, twenty years ago.

Comment Of The Day

Economics, Taxes and Theft

From Longtime Reader GT3Ted:

“The Lottery is a Tax on the people were not paying attention in math class.”

Absolutely, except for one small quibble.

It’s only a tax when you are compelled by government to pay it, at gunpoint.  Last time I looked, buying a lottery ticket was voluntary.

It’s also therapeutic.  In my case, it prevents me from using my AK-47 outside the shooting range every day (if you get my drift).

Cheap at the price.

Maybe A Good Reason

Education

This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:

Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.

Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.

As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test.  But here’s an interesting observation:

Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.”  Everybody’s “phoning it in.”

But here’s the really salient point:

The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.

Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate?  Just a thought.

Then:

The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.

Hmm.  Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.

Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).

The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem:  engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.

My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time.  (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)

Here’s the thing.  As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions:  fear and love.

  • Fear:  if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
  • Love:  this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.

We don’t have to worry about the “love” part:  as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.

What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.