Tag: Stupid people

Half-Right

Bad News, Grammar Nazism

This appeared at Insty’s place yesterday:

I understand the sentiment, and anything that helps drain the fucking swamp that is China is a Good Thing.

However, I would have felt SO much better had the headline read:

Six Apple production lines moving from China to Mississippi*.

Instead of helping the Asian Third World, how about first helping our own local Third World (using Mississippi as an example)?  I mean, in Mississippi they vote and everything, plus BONUS!!! the principal beneficiaries of such production relocation would mostly be Black because manufacturing jobs.

Getting out of China:  good
Getting into Mississippi:  doubleplusgood

Those woke assholes at Apple probably prefer to help the Pore & Starvin in other countries because it makes them feel virtuous;  helping the rubes in flyover country?  eeeeeew.

*Yes, in English we say “from… to…” e.g. “from left to right” and “from A to Z”, and not “to right from left” or “to Z from A”.  We even read from left to right, in English.

Irrelevant Institution

Business, Seen On Campus

Over at the awful Forbes magazine, writer Stephen McBride opines thus:

Here’s some great news: one of America’s most broken industries is finally being exposed as a sham.  And make no mistake, the end of college as we know it is a great thing.
It’s great for families, who’ll save money and take on less debt putting kids through school.  It’s great for kids, who’ll no longer be lured into the socialist indoctrination centers that many American campuses have become.

He goes on to talk about the savings to be made and the investment opportunities (in companies which will rush to fill the void), but that’s not central to the theme of this post, other than to note that as college costs have ballooned, the return on investment has decreased while its concomitant debt has increased.  Simply put:  for a huge number of kids, college tuition is not only a gamble, but a bad one.

While I don’t quibble at all with the writer’s perspective on universities as propaganda outfits rather than places of learning, I have a somewhat different take on the whole thing.

I’ve written before on the wisdom of young people learning a trade prior to (or even instead of) going off to college, so I’m not going to repeat that thought.  Rather (and this is my difference with the above Forbes article), I think that colleges and universities have become less relevant to people’s education.  Other than careers which require intensive knowledge (engineering, medicine, bio-mechanics etc.), there’s very little a college degree can teach you that could not be equally imparted through a lengthy apprenticeship in that field.

And if any good has come of the Chinkvirus pandemic and its related effect on our lives, it’s that realization of how little a truly motivated person needs classroom instruction.  (As an aside, if the would-be student isn’t motivated to learn, college is absolutely the worst place for them to be, not only for the cost but also for the array of distractions extant.)

I can hear it now:  “Oh,” stupid parents will moan, “my little Jimmy / Susie / Jamaal / Shaniqua won’t learn anything from an online course because they’ll just play their online games instead.”

I’ve got news for you, O Stupid Parents:  your undisciplined and ineducable kids are already doing that, only they’re doing it in the lecture room.

The late, great and much-missed columnist Mike Royko once said (and I paraphrase because I’m speaking from memory) something like:  most people shouldn’t go to college;  they should become butchers or janitors.  Worse yet, he added, the problem with giving butchers and janitors college degrees is that they then go into business with the same intelligence level, only now they’ll be woefully under-qualified to be managers, because they should have been butchers or janitors.

Or, as Daughter so eloquently put it after her first semester at college:  “Most of these idiots belong in the grease pit at Jiffylube.”   After two years, she expanded that thought to include the professors.  (Lest we forget, this was a girl who taught herself Japanese at home while being homeschooled.)

And this is the problem with most college graduates these days:  they had no business going to college in the first place because they were either stupid or ineducable.  Now they can be found in the outside world suitably “qualified” by their degrees:  at best, they’re busy screwing up some enterprise in a middle-management position;  at worst, they can be found among the ranks of the rioters in Portland and Seattle.

So yes, I agree with McBride that most colleges will disappear, and good riddance.  The ones that survive should get a wake-up call, and realize that in business, nothing is truly irreplaceable — and yes, their beloved ivory towers are indeed just a business.

All I can hope for is that parents will point their kids at careers and activities that will not only be valuable as income streams, but that the kids will actually enjoy doing because they’ve discovered the psychological value of a job well done.

For the rest, there’s the grease pit at Jiffylube.  Good luck to them as they compete with hungry Third-World immigrants.

“Demands”

BaconLettuceMayo, Terrorism

Apparently some group of hard-done-by African-Americans (hard to tell which group, you need a scorecard nowadays) presented the list below to businesses in Louisville:

The proper response should be:

I think the Coalition Of White Players’ Armed Teams (COWPAT) should present the same demands for racial proportionality to the NBA and NFL.

Oh, and an FYI to the Angry Black Assholes in Louisville:  it’s not the local businesses who are destroying your community;  you and your little BLM-Pantifas are doing a great job of that all by yourselves.  And by the way:  fuck you and your “reparations” a.k.a “shakedowns”.

You’re not the only ones with guns.

Calling Bollocks

Drive Time, Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an example of “studies” that just set my hair on fire:

The LEAST reliable used cars revealed
Warrantywise has published data from its Reliability Index for older cars
A minimum of 100 examples of each car is needed to provide a reliability score

…but here’s where the turd hits the punchbowl:

It measures reliability based on the volume and cost of repairs to vehicles

Including cost of repairs means that.. wait for it… cars like Bentley and Audi are going to fall to the bottom of the list, regardless.

Here’s the scenario:

  • one of their “reliable” cars (e.g. the Dacia Sendero, a complete POS) may have ten problems after its warranty expires, but because the average cost of repair is $100 (Dacias being made of plastic and scrap metal), its score comes to 1000
  • an Audi A7 breaks down only twice, but its average cost of repair is $1,500 (because when quality stuff does break, it’s expensive to fix), giving it a score of 3000 — so the Audi is three times less “reliable” than the Dacia, according to the study.

But in terms of actual (instead of cost-weighted) reliability, your Dacia was in the shop ten times, compared to the Audi’s twice.

I’m not saying that’s what happened in the study (I don’t have access to the raw data), but that’s the problem when you add irrelevant factors to an equation.

The real problem lies with the title.  If Warrantywise had called their study “Total Cost Of Post-Warranty Ownership”, it would have given the output a better foundation.

Or if they were going to stick with reliability, they should have ignored cost and instead stressed weighting factors of “frequency of breakdown” and “magnitude of failure” (brake lights fail, no big deal;  transmission dies, much more serious).  That, at least, would have given prospective buyers a clue.

All that said, I’d still get one of these (with only 12,000 miles usage)

…over a poxy Mitsubishi anything.

(See what I did there?  About the same thing as Warrantywise did.  It’s called “bias”.)

Anyway:  if you can afford to buy it, you should be able to afford to maintain it.

And can ignore silly studies.

Portent

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Righteous Shootings

As the Left ramps up its little reindeer games, expect more of this kind of thing:

“As we’re walking down passing Fourth Street, a blue car just come swerving out into the middle of the street almost runs over a bunch of protesters and everybody around starts like smacking the car trying to get him to slow down,” the witness said.  “He pulls down his window and he fires three shots into the guy.  From point-blank.  No words no nothing.  And then rolls up his window and zooms off.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing — despite my Yosemite Sam online persona, I dread having to shoot someone again — but at some point, the “kill everybody” switch is going to be thrown by ordinary people, especially when these rioting thugs start blocking roads, stopping cars and trying to assault the drivers and passengers.

Used to be that peaceful protests were confined (by the police) to sidewalks, with lots of chanting, signs and so on.  Peaceful stuff.  But that police action seems to have gone by the board — whether by negligence or design I can’t say — and inevitably, as police presence diminishes, the thugs will become bolder and more violent as they get the impression that “We own the streets!”

So I blame city management for this — muzzling police has long been a hallmark of Leftist government — and if the winds have been sown, both rioters and their government backers can expect whirlwinds;  which will invite rioters to start carrying guns to these “peaceful protests”, and off we go on the hurricane of violence.

Which, by the way, is exactly what the Leftist nomenklatura wants to happen.

5 Worst People In The News

Friday Feature, The Worst

…or, add this to the list of people I don’t want to see in the media, ever again, unless in an obituary.  The list isn’t ranked, for once, because I can’t decide which is actually the worst.

  • Mitt Romney, whose current disloyalty to his party makes me almost glad he lost to Obama
  • big-city Democrat mayors — no point in trying to rank them, they’re all equally dreadful
  • big-mouth Hollywood types (Alec Baldwin, Bette Midler, Alyssa Milano etc.)
  • Hillary Clinton;  you lost, you’re irrelevant and most people want you either dead or in prison orange
  • Johnny Depp and Amber Heard — you’re both as crazy as a sackful of cats tossed in a swimming pool, and if it were possible for both of you to lose, that’s how I’d vote.  Or I’d put the two of you in a weighted sack together and toss you into a swimming pool, come to think of it.