Tag: Regrettable Acts

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.

Head Above Water

Law and Order, Lifestyle

Reader Mike L. sent me this rather sad story:

A Colorado sheriff’s deputy resigned this week after officials learned she’d appeared in pornographic videos — a second career she took to “out of desperation” over mounting bills.

Oh no, how could she? OMG she’s supposed to be a role model, etc. etc. etc.

Right:

In part, that came from a June 2023 storm that left her home with $500,000 in hail and water damage that insurance wouldn’t cover; sky-high interest rates that tripled her adjustable-rate mortgage and led to foreclosure; and increasing utility, gas and food costs. She’d drained her savings, borrowed money from her family and cut spending, she told CBS. But the debt collectors kept calling.

You know what?  I cannot find it in me to judge or condemn her.  We’ve all been there, and she’s just lucky she had the errrr proper attributes to generate her alternative income stream.

That said:

Yowzer.

I just hope she can find another “regular” job, although it’s probably unlikely.

This may not end well, but it wasn’t going to end well anyway.  If I were in a position to offer her a job, I would.

Let’s just hope someone else feels that way.