Sword-fighting with Apple Trees and Autumn Olive .AND. Value of college degrees revisited

 

Growing Degree Days b50, Charlotte, Michigan Oct 20. It looks like a bimodal distribution with one cluster around 2800GDDb50 and another cluster around 3200GDDb50

The beautiful but very-dry weather continues.

I picked up the yard. Then I drove out to The Property and spent two hours cutting-and-dragging brush and pruning apple trees.

In the last few years, my skin lost much of its elasticity and became markedly more fragile. Pruning the trees was like a sword-fight with worthy opponents. I prevailed in delimbing my opponents but they also drew their fair share of blood. My daily 40mg of aspirin meant that I ended up looking like a Halloween decoration by the time I get home.

Value of college degrees revisited

 

Frequent commenter Dan wrote "The impending economic collapse is going to make most of this moot. Even for degrees that most people would consider "useful"."

It isn't hard to imagine those kinds of scenarios.

I recently listened to a woman explain her "plan" to create a super-low maintenance, self-sustaining food production space. The woman has a Master's degree in Biology.

Looking at her plan, I had a few observations.

"You have a lot of open spaces between the young, food-producing trees*. Have you considered planting white-clover and turnips to scavenge nutrients, fix nitrogen and add organic matter to the soil?" I asked.

Her response was that white-clover was a HORRIBLE plant! She had talked to an "expert" and was told that it was almost impossible to get rid of.

How does beat-up, dumb, old-Joe explain to that mindset that white-clover is persistent because it makes its own fertilizer and if you mow it, it shares the nitrogen with its neighbors? How do you explain that SOMETHING will fill that niche and you can fill it with "positives" like clover and turnips or something negative will jump into that space and rip it away from your control?

I did mention the weed issue and she informed me that she had already spent over $1000 on dyed mulch "...because it looks nice...".

Well, alrighty. She spent +$1000 on mulch when $15 of seeds could have done the same thing. The mulch is dyed and will be a recurring expense. It is an outside input which is not "self-sustaining" and that cost will be incurred into perpetuity. The clover and the turnips can be managed at zero cost to regenerate until they get shaded out with the clover fixing nitrogen and the turnips producing edible greens, roots and potentially even oil from the seeds.

She has a Master's degree in Biology and is oblivious to the implications of managing nutrient cycling to create "...self-sustaining food production systems...".

I am not slagging the woman. I am skewering the system that generates such narrowly defined credentials.

If you look at society as a house-of-cards then those credentials have value near the top of the house. Those jobs can only exist in very-low entropy, very-low chaos environments. 

Emergency Room type jobs increase in high entropy environments. More people get stabbed and have accidents. ER people never know what the next patient will require and they have to be very flexible and sometimes have to adjust behaviors instantaneously. Those kinds of land-on-your-feet "gigs" abound in high entropy environments.

Jobs for people who can run machines that sort SSR biomarkers become extinct in high entropy environments**. Those skills don't transfer to a lot of other environments. I have a neighbor who works in a lab that creates genetic footprints for Holstein cows to minimize in-breeding depression. That is a real-deal with AI. BUT, she had never "handled" cows in her life***. That is, she had never moved them from one paddock to another or filled a cow's food bunker or water tank.

I hate to get political, but Trump seems to thrive in high-chaos environments where he must think-on-his-feet. Harris does not exhibit that same weeble-wobble resilience and her events are much more highly choreographed.

* 40 foot spacing between some of the trees! That is a lot of sunlight falling on the ground and not making food.

** The entire concept of "job" is historically recent and is linked to the need to prove future income-flow when applying for credit. Before the Ford Model T, working side-gigs to supplement farm life was the norm. Virtually the only "jobs" were on the railroad. Even steel mills and the people building railroads were day-labor gigs.

*** I was able to remedy that shortcoming.