Around The Blogs 2014-02-15

I've had a very busy week preparing the print edition of my latest book (of which more in the next post), so I haven't been cruising around the blogosphere as much as usual.  Nevertheless, several articles caught my eye.

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Karl Denninger takes an irascible, cynical, jaded look at the tertiary education nightmare in the USA in three blog articles:

It's That Time Of Year Again

So About That College Degree . . .

College:  Probability, Investment Odds And Outcomes

If you have kids about to enter the college or university system, you really need to read all three articles.  More to the point, make them read the articles, and see the trouble the system is storing up for them.  Karl's conclusion:

Debt-funded post-secondary education, on the numbers, especially when the quoted figures are intentionally understated by as much as 50% for the typical case, is simply not a supportable decision.

To support his contention, I refer you to three articles that appeared in mainstream media over the past couple of weeks:

The First Person in My Family NOT to Go to College

Captive Consumers: How Colleges Prepare Students For a Life of Debt

Finally, a Law That Would Protect People From Student Loan Hell

All three articles are also worth reading.  Bottom line:  college is a financial risk so great that its utility is questionable - so question it for all you're worth!  (Pun intended.)

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Max Velocity brings us a very funny video on 'How To Be Tacticool'.  Not safe for work!

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Commander Zero loses his cool (you should pardon the expression) at the driving habits of Southerners when it comes to snow and ice.  A sample:

Apparently the only thing that caused more destruction in the south than the Civil War War Of Southern Overconfidence is a couple inches of snow.

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Despite what television commercials tell you, four-wheel drive (or All-wheel drive) does not make you an automotive Superman. All it does is let you get overconfident and get stuck in really bad ways that folks with two-wheel drive vehicles could only dream of. It is amazing the number of ‘soccer moms’ who bought SUV’s because ‘they're safer’ and now think that they have had some sort of magic ability conferred upon them that allows them to defy physics and ignore frictional coefficients. Bonus points for her if she’s yapping on her cellphone as the blows down the interstate at 75 mph and cuts in front of the plow.

(Miss D., being from Alaska, wholeheartedly agrees with him!)

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Monday made Odysseus laugh.  Go to his blog to find out why.  (Yes, I laughed too!)

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American Mercenary has a series of articles describing how he, his wife and their two young children fared when they decided to test a 30-day survival food pack from Augason Farms to see whether it would actually feed and satisfy them.  In sequence, his articles are:

Survival Food

Survival food, day 5

Survival food, day 10

Valentines Day

Interesting reading with many lessons to be learned, particularly for those of us who store emergency supplies.

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The Adaptive Curmudgeon's word for the day is 'Negative Knowledge'.  He has plenty of examples, including:

• I do not know what “twerking” is. I think it’s associated with someone formerly called Hanna Montana and now known as Miley Cyrus? A 3 second Internet search indicates a young lady(?) who apparently divides her time between looking like a teenage boy and acting like fembot who drank too much Red Bull. I don’t care to know more.
• I do not care that hotels at the Olympics are funky. It’s Russia! Three quarters of a century as a socialist paradise followed by Putin’s iron fist led to the crap you see. If you want clean roomy hotels stay in Cincinnati.
• If you’re from Cincinnati and don’t like my analogy, I don’t want to know that either.

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Finally, Blue tells us what's really wrong with society.  Reading the headlines, I find it hard to disagree with him . . .

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That's all for this week.  More soon.

Peter