Sometimes the dragon wins

One-in-a-row!

The new igniter seems to have helped.

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.

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.