Which college degrees are worth the most?

I saw this over at ZeroHedge

 

These two entries caught my eye

Net Present Worth assumes a few things. For one thing, it assumes some level of income change over time, generally with pay increasing. Sometimes that is a bad assumption if the degree is trendy and the jobs are over-subscribed.

Another major issue that can get lost in the weeds is that many people who get a degree don't get a job in their field...or don't get ANY job. How do you handle those people? Most surveys ignore them.

The two areas-of-study that I circled are likely to suffer from both of those issues. "Professional journalists" are nearly extinct and AECGGS is such a recent invention that it is foolhardy to assume there is any organic demand for the graduates.

Haitians ==> Quebec seems like a no-brainer

They both speak something that resembles "French".

Surely Canadian politicians crave enrichment.

Wouldn't it be far more cost-effective to import people who almost speak the language rather than to import people from Nepal and Burma or speak a hundred different African tribal languages?

Haitians landing in Saguenay, Quebec (for instance) is a more natural fit than flooding a small town in Pennsylvania with them. Easier on the Haitians. Easier on the town in Pennsylvania. Less strain on the infrastructure in both places.

Win some, lose some

The chainsaw is back together with a new side-plate and air filter. I am VERY happy about that.

I am salvaging some lumber from the deck I tore out. Some of the floor joists were 2-by-10s. I found an old "bench saw" that somehow came into my possession. To the best of my remembering, I had never run it and it was missing the fence.

I remedied the lack of a fence with a length of 2-by-4 and some clamps and peeled  2-1/2" off of the edge of the planks that were most rotted. That left me with 2-by-7 inch planks. Looking at the wood, it almost looks like they were ordinary dimension lumber and not treated.

A lady came by while I was shaving off the rotted sides of the planks and patiently waited for me to turn around to notice her. I was clearly wearing hearing protection. She was handing out election propaganda and was intelligent enough to realize that tapping somebody on the shoulder while they are using power-saws was not likely to endear her to me. We were already going to vote for "her guy" anyway so it was easy to be agreeable.

From that perspective, it was a pretty good day. Two tools brought back into use.

Oven

And then...the oven stopped working. One important clue is that we can hear gas hissing, which is not normal.

In the past, I replaced the igniter (a pressed, carbon or graphite squiggle) at least once and I remember the access as being difficult. One option would be to disconnect the gas and yank the unit out of its location and tip it on its back.

Trouble-shooting gas ovens is a little bit hit-and-miss. Some of the elements are wired in series so a marginal igniter will have a large voltage drop and not be able to energize the safety valve. So even though the igniter LOOKS fine (bright, even glow), the lottery ticket is to install the $30 part with the high failure rate rather than jump to the $200 part that is rarely the problem.

This will be one of those times when next-day part delivery is a very good thing.

What kind of person joins a cult?

Jeffery in Alabama at The Feral Irishman posted on the Tsuchinshan Comet and then Irish added HERE. 

That triggered some thoughts.

Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate was a cult that believed that the Hailey-Bopp Hale-Bopp comet was an Uber to Paradise. 

The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human".  Wikipedia

Their leaders convinced them that they had to leave behind their flawed, mortal bodies to get to the comet and that they would get new-and-improved bodies in Paradise. 39 members committed suicide.

Jonestown

Same but different.

Charismatic leader who claims that God talks to him.

More than 900 people died by suicide and murder.

Jim Jones was a Communist and was a political player in San Francisco...something the Progressives don't like to talk about.

End of the Mayan Calendar

Long article on Wikipedia.

The phenomenon spread widely after coming to public notice, particularly on the Internet, and hundreds of thousands of websites made reference to it. "Ask an Astrobiologist", a NASA public outreach website, received over 5,000 questions from the public on the subject from 2007, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets...

Order of the Solar Temple

Given the scale of the issues facing the group leaders, it was decided they would "transit" to Sirius. The Order termed the acts a "transit", which they described as "in no way a suicide in the human sense of the term". In their view, traitors would be simply murdered, while "weaker" members would be "helped" to transit, and the remaining members considered strong enough would kill themselves. Members believed that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" in a faraway location in space (typically given as the star Sirius, but alternatively Jupiter or Venus)

Commonalities?

They all were able to find "seekers" who attached themselves to The Cause. "Seekers" is a nice way to say "aimless drifters".

Many probably suffered from anxiety and were inherently neurotic personalities.

Many desperately WANTED to believe that life is "fair" and that they should never experience suffering.

My gut-feel is that many of them lacked mental toughness. We all grow up being somebody's special snow-flake. Part of growing up is realizing that...well...we are not all that special*. And that someday Granny is going to die and someday we will have to pay our own way and find our own ways to cope with the buffeting and chaos and river of life.

One scary part of cults is that those damaged people were very willing to inject poison into their own children and pets and then themselves.

Some of the people join a cult because they want to be sophisticated and cool and a trend-setter. They want attention and recognition for their special uniqueness! Once inside the cult, they cannot get out and they are brain-washed.

Today

Today we have people who have been convinced it is righteous to not reproduce.

We have people who think a 90% die-off in humans would be a good outcome.

Assisted suicide is available in many countries and it is marketed as a human right.

---that is evidence of the aimless drifting part---

We have vast legions of people who are sure the universe is supposed to revolve around them and they have been groomed to be "tools" of the elites.

There is no shortage of neurotic people. The current system seems to manufacture them on an industrial scale.

If Trump wins, it will be a trigger for some of those people to lose their bananas.

*...not all that special...except to Jesus. Christianity has a pretty good track-record of not being a death-cult. Of course, having a 2000 year history and a billion+ followers, it is possible to find "situations", but on the whole, I still think it is the "best game in town".

Bat-house #1 is installed

 

If you look to the right at the bottom of the pole, you can see the 2-by-6, 8' long diagonal brace to help stabilize the pole.

The wire running across the image to the right of the bat-house is the feed from the barn to the electric fence.

You can click to embiggen if you want to expand the picture. The roof is 24" square, ribbed steel roofing and extends 8" past the house on the southwest and northeast and 2" on the southeast and northwest.

Bonus image

A jar of pear preserves with sunlight shining through it. It looks a little bit runny. I hope it "sets" with a bit of refrigeration.

Hat-tip to Handsome Hombre who is in one of the construction trades and spotted for me.

High Specific-gravity!

Six pounds of sliced, Kieffer pears and five pounds of sugar made enough pear preserves to fit into 7 pint jars. I was figuring that I would get ten pints but I was wrong.

The recipes on the internet were all volume based, 2-parts thinly sliced pears to 1-part sugar. I did that by eye-ball and those are the weights I ended up with.

The Kieffer pears are very easy to peel. If I get good reviews from my customers, then I will do this again next year. Mostly, I am trying to match memories from when folks my age were kids. The difficultly is that nobody gets as hungry as a kid and no food ever tastes as good. Another joker-in-the-deck is that our taste-buds change. We can tolerate more sour and bitter and they are not as acute.

3 shots, 3 seconds, 3 feet

It has been a while since I heard this self-defense trope: "The typical gun-fight involves three shots fired at three feet and is over in three seconds."

Chris Baker over at Lucky Gunner posted an excellent essay in 2021 on this topic.

It is challenging to draw conclusions that will not generate criticism but he does his best. One of the things that makes the data "dirty" is that Law Enforcement shootings and Law Enforcement Officer shooting victims and armed citizens deterring crime are three very, very different things and you get very different numbers from each source.

Law Enforcement is trained to engage at whatever distance the target is as soon as they are legitimate threats. That can be over a hundred feet if the target is shooting from a building. They also are wearing body-cams which aren't great for estimating distance but can be used to verify whether the event started at inches, feet or yards.

Law Enforcement Officers who are gunned down are often "executed" as they sit in their vehicle. The perp walks up behind them and shoots them in the back of the head.

Data of citizens deterring crime using firearms (almost universally handguns) is much more scarce.

Three-to-five yards is 9 feet-to-15 feet. Basically the length of a standard 2-by-4 stud and the length of two studs laid end-to-end.

Tom Givens of Rangemaster Firearms Training is one of the few credible sources of that data. The graph of his data is shown above.

Chris Baker writes the following about that data

Tom’s explanation for these numbers is that most civilian incidents involve armed robbery or sexual assault. Violent criminals typically attempt to threaten and scare victims into compliance when they’re still a safe distance away. That’s outside of what most of us consider our personal space. Once it’s clear the victim is going to do what they say, the attacker will move in closer.

Keep in mind, these are all former students of Tom Givens, so by definition, they’ve all had at least one or two days of really solid training. If we had a data sample from the more typical untrained masses, the numbers might look a little different. I suspect, with an untrained population, people might be a bit slower to react and we’d probably see a greater share of encounters in that 0 to 2 yard range.

Personally, I think the last sentence is optimistic. I think most untrained people will not even have cleared their holster.

Since we might be entering a period of "spicy times", re-read the underlined sentences. Then read them again.

Your first solid "vibes" of violent intent is when you should be moving away which buys you time-and-distance and you should be starting to clearing leather...even if all that you are carrying is pepper-spray.

When sh!t goes down, it goes down fast.

---Disclaimers---

I am not a certified defensive handgun trainer.

I am counting on my readers to set the record straight if I screwed-the-pooch on this one.

Bonus Image

 Pear preserves in the kettle this morning. My IR thermometer tells me that we are up 173F.