Curing Our Common Cold

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m too lazy to go look for the book to give you the exact quote, but I know somewhere Heinlein says something about how rich men go bankrupt without missing a single meal, while poor men fall a little short on cash and go hungry.

(Update: All praise to Wayne Blackburn who found the quote:  “People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.” — Robert A. Heinlein.)

I don’t know if the sentiment is original to him.  Somehow I doubt it, since it has that feeling of received wisdom.

It was new to me when I first read it, and counterintuitive.  Years later I found this was true.  Which is where we, to begin with, have to adjust our definition of “rich.”

I’ve never (yet, give me elbow room) been rich, but even so, when we found ourselves without income, with a brand new baby who cost us 20k (because we were on COBRA and he was an emergency caesarean), and with a mortgage and rent to pay (we had to move an hour and a half away to find work.  I didn’t drive at the time and we only had one working car, anyway.  So, you see, I couldn’t stay home all day with an infant and no transport.  And besides, Dan was working sixteen to eighteen hour days, which meant the three hours driving were really dangerous.) we came close to missing a meal, and our eating standards became rather low (rice.  Also, more rice.  Also, seasonal vegetables) but we never missed a meal.

That is because rice and vegetables (and beans. We ate a lot of beans) are rather cheap.  They are cheap because our lifestyle is high enough – i.e. we’re rich enough – that things like that are cheap.  (Partly this is the revolutions in agriculture, but it is also the sheer wealth in society.)  Yeah, being broke meant we paid a heck of a lot bigger percentage of our income for food, and the food was mostly starches.  But we weren’t hungry.

I’m not saying there is no hunger in America, though I can tell you there isn’t as much hunger as they claim, since most of those surveys ask things like “Did you eat all you wanted to eat.”  To that even my kids would answer “no.”  Mostly because they can’t or they’d balloon.

What I’m saying is that there is no famine in America.  Kids might miss a meal now and then, but unless some adult is willfully misspending money, they don’t go hungry as such.

Not compared to the rest of the world.

(Which brings up a related subject.  Guys we need to stop putting this kind of bs out there.  The international press picks it up and people believe it.  If I had a dime for each foreign poster in a blog who “knows” people are starving on the streets all over America, I could buy and sell the city I live in.  Because they hear all the p*ssing and moaning from over here and translate it to their own terms.  This includes “how badly off would we have to be before we admit it before foreigners?” These people aren’t – most of them – agents provocateurs.  They really believe we must be like the worst parts of Biafra during the famine.  And then we wonder why they buy the siren song of socialism.  Well, if the free market has people dying of starvation in the streets, do you wonder?)

Or to put it another way – I once heard my late paternal aunt, on being asked if she was going to come back to Portugal now Venezuela was getting bad (this was before Chavez, just some minor upheaval.)  She said “I’d rather have the bad over there than the good here.”

I also didn’t understand that, until I came here.  Even now in the economic mess we’re in, we have more consumer choice and (relative to what we make) lower prices than in Portugal when it’s doing well.

Beyond that, when I got married, my parents had clawed their way up to an upper middle class lifestyle there.  As a broke newlywed here, I had luxuries they didn’t have.  Stuff like, hot water is cheap in comparison (and so is electricity) and there were cheap diners that would serve me breakfast at midnight if I dang well pleased to eat at that time.  And we had a dishwasher and a microwave.

Someone once said that there is a 2 level difference between lifestyle here and in Europe.  I.e. if you’re living a lower middle class life here, you’re upper middle class in Europe.  This is probably true, at least for some parts of Europe (which in itself has huge variations) and parts of the US (I’m fairly sure it’s different if you live in the middle of nowhere West Virginia or in Washington DC.)

But leaving aside all that hair splitting – I’ve only had a cup of tea so far, so getting lost in the weeds is a way of life – the saying holds true.  It’s much easier to go through a collapse if you’re rich than if you’re poor.

This was brought on by a visit to the zoo this weekend and by remembering an article about how the zoo in Shangai has put orange dogs with manes in the cage, instead of lions.  Apparently the clever deception was discovered when the “lion” barked.

I mentioned it as a joke to my son and he said “But China isn’t as broke as we are, and we still have lions.”

Let’s leave aside whether the command economy that reports on itself can give us an accurate idea of their “brokenness” or not.  (It can’t.)  My answer was that saying about the rich man and the poor man and explaining it works for nations too.

This is why I tell you guys not to be getting ready to go hunt squirrels with your teeth, or even sharpening flint knives.  It would take a major – major – series of nuclear hits to reduce SOME parts of the country to that level.  Or even to the level of Victorian technology.

We are the rich man.  We have a lot of accumulated wealth.  For instance, I enjoy dressmaking, and bought a series of patterns this weekend.  (Shut up.  It might even happen.) BUT I bought them for special dresses (I have a great hankering to dress retro) that are hard to find or expensive.  For my normal jeans and t-shirts, I just buy them at the thrift store.  If I am careful, I actually buy them new, but I think the most I ever paid for a pair of jeans is $7.  Because the society has so much surplus, I can buy it that cheap.  The surplus won’t disappear over night.

And there will always, barring a huge, huge, implosion caused by a larger attack than we can imagine, be money for zoos and museum and symphonies.  Oh, there might not be money for me and mine to go (though because we’re bookish and stodgy sorts and tend to visit the same places a lot, we’ve found yearly memberships a good entertainment buy.  Look at it this way, the zoo membership is the equivalent of the whole family going to a movie twice.  And that’s before popcorn and drinks.  So we go to movies once every two years, but we do have three memberships to places we go often.  Except the aquarium because it’s frankly extremely expensive. So we haven’t gone in five years.)  But there will be enough people to keep the places going, if not expanding.

China might not be falling as hard or as fast as we are (maybe it’s not falling at all.  Maybe I’m just suspicious.)   BUT a much smaller upheaval can lead to their curtailing their (as a society) high end entertainments, because they simply don’t have the capital that we have built up over almost a century.

In the same way, in countries that are certainly failing and have been failing much longer, the shocks will be much stronger.  I noticed the last time I went to Portugal that the facades in downtown Porto had nets strung beneath them to catch falling tile and masonry.  These are mostly privately-owned buildings, the owners can’t pay maintenance (we could talk here of the fact they’re mostly rental buildings and the place is rent controlled, because all the bad ideas of America go to Europe and STAY) and the city is trying to prevent tourists being brained.  There are flourishing public works, at the same time, but we won’t go into that either.  I lived through various forms of recession there, and I’d never seen those nets or the need for them.  So, it’s clearly not boom times, and it’s not something we can imagine, even though we’re in deep economic trouble.

But even Portugal is “rich” in the same sense that my family and I were reach while broke and paying two sets of living space.  We were broke, but we were buoyed by a richer milieu and years of accumulated patrimony.  (In our case, Dan’s education, which allowed him to find a job, and my willingness to cook from scratch and run up baby clothes on the machine from fabric bought in thrift stores.)

Portugal has ways of surviving.  It has people who know how to survive hard times.  And it can – though I don’t think it does much – default to producing most of what it needs at a level (not the level they live at now, but that’s something else.  However, we were talking about the stupidity of the question “did you visit farmland” when we come back from Portugal.  No.  And Yes would be the answer.  Because you’d need to be in the heart of Lisbon and nightclubbing day and night not to wander off into someone’s market garden in the backyard.  And even then you might not be safe.  Some of the highrises (not in Lisbon) people use the garage space to keep goats.)

No, the people who go to unimaginable poverty at the slightest shake of the world economy are countries like Egypt who have specialized to live ONLY off a luxury industry – tourism – which gets cut when other countries tighten their belts.  And where people are so poor that bread is a major expense, so that when Western Eco Winnies want to appease the great goddess Gaia by burning food in their car tank, and the international price of bread goes up, places like Egypt starve.

The funny – if you have a bitter kind of sense of humor – thing about that is that our Marxists, who are “for the poor” here and abroad (in abstract, of course.  In reality the poor tend to be bitter clingers, holding on to their guns and their religion and the bien pensant would rather die a thousand deaths than break bread with such) are the ones bringing untold misery to the world poor.

They’ve been very badly taught and they think by making themselves poor the rest of the world will be rich.  So they’re setting fire to the richest economy (and largest consumer economy) in the world, and think that somehow, magically, the wealth will show up in the poor countries.  This is a superstition on the level of believing that if you sacrifice your baby, the gods will send you a lot more and healthier.  In other words, it’s nonsense.  But no one educated into primitive beliefs can see their lack of logic, even when it bites them in the nose (or the pocket.)

And let’s face it, our elites are very insular.  They don’t even know working people HERE, much less abroad.  Part of the reason they think France is so wonderful is that they visit it on vacation, and see the nicest parts of it, and believe the rest is exactly the same, because they need to believe some place is the land of perpetual vacation – or in other words, the isles of the blessed and Summer Land.

They’ve never examined the truth of the saying that when America sneezes the world catches pneumonia, nor figured out how our “wealth” is actually the engine of innovation and wealth for the world.  (And it is.  Trust me.  I experienced the crisis of the 70s abroad.)

In the same way, they’ve been told that global warming is a horrible danger to the poor of the world, and they can’t think through and realize that burning food to propitiate Gaia is much, much worse for the poor.  Because “poor” for our elites is living out in the country and spinning your own goats.  They imagine “poor” as Marie Antoinette imagined farm life.  They have this little trianon of poverty abroad in their heads (which is why they also believe that the poor have some special wisdom, but only, of course, if they’re far away and quaintly tanned.  They know the poor here live in trailer parks and go to church, and they find both equally déclassé.  Poor abroad are for our elites, kind of like animals in the play farm of the queen.  They never get old or do anything unsightly.)

So, while trying to improve the lot of the poor abroad – those quaint, tanned poor with the wisdom – they are actually bringing the four horsemen of the apocalypse to bear on vast regions, because war and famine and pestilence and death follow even the slightest fluctuation of food prices.

But here?  Here we won’t miss a meal.  Not most places in the US.  We might eat rather lower on the tree.  (Given our nutritional requirements, I’ve been stockpiling dried eggs) but we won’t see food riots.  Other countries…

The time to get scared is if famine – real famine, not rioting because you want a wide screen tv – hits Europe.  Then it’s the time to sharpen your squirrel hunting skills.

Can it get there?  Sure it can.  I think it would take massive war, though.

BUT until then, learn stuff.  We’re likely to fall a wrung or two in our security and wealth and comfort.  The stuff you should be learning is how to repair things.  How to keep things going.  (Great Courses now offers courses in this stuff.)  Think Cuba and how all the people who can keep old automobiles going aren’t missing any meals. Learn to do house repairs yourself, as much as possible (I already have, because finding a handyman is an exercise in futility.)  Even learning to cut and fit clothing won’t kill you.  I mean, thrift stores will also run bare, if we get in real trouble.

But most of all study how to build under, how to take technology to the next level and bypass the clueless elites.

Because we must right this ship.  We must do it as quickly and painlessly as possible.  We owe it to the starving multitudes of the world.

The US needs to take some cough syrup – so that the poor countries of the world don’t die of pneumonia.

369 thoughts on “Curing Our Common Cold”

  1. You’re asking people to give up their envy, greed, and sloth. If they can’t imagine they are poor, they will have to give up at least one. It might even occur to them that being fat proves they’re rich.

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  2. “The US needs to take some cough syrup – so that the poor countries of the world don’t die of pneumonia.”

    Hell, so the poor countries don’t die laughing.

    This brings up something I’ve want to scream from the rooftops for a while now.

    Before we get all panic stricken about an Obesity epidemic, could we spent a little time celebrating that the primary dietary problem of our ‘poor’ is that they are too fat?

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    1. Amen. Dinesh D’Suza has a great quote about the time he asked his cousin why he was so determined to come to the US (cousin had lost the Green Card lottery something like eight times). The cousin declared, “Because I want to live where the poor people are fat!”

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      1. I know an Indian doctor who moved to the UK to becoem a GP and had a similar reaction: “You mean in Britain malnutition really isn’t a polite word for starving!?”

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            1. I remember reading about someone else who, after watching “Supersize Me”, decided to make a point that you could eat a somewhat-healthy diet (not great, but at least passable) even by eating only at McDonald’s for a month. He picked his menu carefully, ordered a lot of salads and so on, and came out the other side not too badly malnourished. But he was deliberate about it, not just doing burger, fries & soda every meal.

              The biggest nutrition problem that the poor face in the U.S. is that the food that’s really convenient & cheap is low on good nutrients, and so it takes effort (and some knowledge) to eat healthily on the cheap. If you’ve never learned about good nutrition, or if you’re not willing to put in the work needed, you can end up in trouble. E.g., soda is about 50% cheaper than the same quantity of milk (gallon of milk, $3.50, while 2 liters of soda can often be found on sale for 99 cents, which means $2.25 or so per gallon), so people replace milk with soda and then end up suffering from osteoporosis because they don’t get enough calcium.

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              2. The other problem is that the reason it’s what’s cheap and convenient is that that is what they will buy. As Dalrymple observed, the groceries where the Indian immigrants lived were convenient and conveniently stocked with healthy fresh ingredients.

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              3. soda is about 50% cheaper than the same quantity of milk (gallon of milk, $3.50, while 2 liters of soda can often be found on sale for 99 cents, which means $2.25 or so per gallon

                The underlying point is probably sound, but the comparison is BS.

                Milk, on sale– according to my latest market flyer– less than two bucks. Buying the normally priced Safeway brand, it’s 2.59.
                A liter of not-on-sale soda is at very least $1.50, or three bucks. On sale, still over a buck. Generic stuff gets under a buck on sale.

                The soda “keeps” a LOT better, though.

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                  1. If I were expecting that, I’d get the dried milk that is even cheaper- if I weren’t so lazy that I’d rather use my daughter’s drinking milk when it’s available.

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                2. Since I’m not currently living in America, I couldn’t get down to the local grocery store to do an eyeball comparison, so I had to get my numbers online. Thanks for correcting them for me.

                  A correction to your correction, though: I assume that when you said “A liter of not-on-sale soda” you meant “A 2-liter bottle”, since otherwise it would be six bucks a gallon.

                  Also, I used to be able to get milk for two bucks a gallon in Dallas, but it went up to $2.50 a gallon about three years ago. I got the $3.50 per gallon figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, which lists the July 2013 average price as $3.45 per gallon. Where do you live that you can still get milk at $2 per gallon? Cow country, I would assume, where transportation costs aren’t a major factor in the price.

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                  1. That’s strange,from the BLS site. I’m going to guess that’s the cost of Brand Name milk, not generic. The Krogers in my area all have milk fro approximately $2.59 per gallon, but it’s the Kroger generic brand, not Trauth (the local Big Name brand).

                    But the Kroger brand soft drinks are always under $1 for a 2-liter, and on sale might get down to $0.69.

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                    1. FYI note to the peanut gallery: Krogers is the same company as Safeway. In my area, they have both store generic and store brand name. (I only know that because I mentioned the “store brand name” to my mom and she mentioned that we’d used a lot of it growing up… which means it was a really good price, since the nearest was a grandma’s, an hour away)

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                    3. Nani?

                      My safeway card of Washignton worked at the Krogers of San Diego, giving me gas points and gas discounts… a more complicated something or other?

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                    6. Oooh! Oooh! (hooting monkey)

                      I think Kroger’s does QFC (quality food choice) and/or Fred Meyer’s which RARELY allies with Safeway/Vons if they don’t have anything in the area.

                      Was just thinking of the last time I got Kroger’s that wasn’t in San Diego.

                      Not sure if it’s QFC, Fred Meyer or both that are Kroger’s, though.

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                    7. I have bad memories of a screen print job done for Food Lion many years ago. The name makes me see little squares containing that Lion drawing and then shudder.

                      OK, since I know I can’t leave a story like that here: We printed several thousand sheets of flexible magnet material (either 25 up or 36 up) for them to give away fridge magnets, but the die cutters screwed them up, and, in order to save as much money as possible on the job, we had to examine over 100,000 of the individual magnets to keep the ones that were cut close enough to correctly to keep. We salvaged 20,000 – 25,000 that way. Then, I was charged with cutting another couple thousand sheets of the magnet material as nearly perfectly square as we could manage, using the old manual cutter we had, so we could reprint and send those out to be cut again.

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                    8. My dad managed a textile factory. Avis gave them a huge printing order for t-shirts … well, some genius at the factory had “corrected” the English. They said “Avis, we is driven.” Entire order turned back. My dad got like 100 of the rejects and I lived in them for years. Brought some of them to the states, as an exchange student, to wear.
                      The factory couldn’t understand why Avis was so upset about a “little” thing. :-P

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                    9. One of the screen print shops I worked in loved having me as a printer, because I would frequently catch typos and send them back. Once in a while, it would turn out to be an unusual word I hadn’t seen before, but usually I was right.

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                  2. It depends a lot on what you’re buying– Safeway is a mid-range grocery store, and their generic stuff is 2.59 a gallon as of last week, but can go up to 2.79 a gallon and the namebrand but not fancy stuff is 2.89-3.29, while the NICE stuff is 3.50— and you’re right, I don’t buy enough soda to know a liter from two liters. Although last time I checked, the “something one person could drink” big bottle cost about fifty cents more than the “something you buy to put on the table at the party” bottle. (Of course, likewise, the cartons of milk were nearly as expensive as the gallon bottles.)

                    I’m in the Tacoma area. I think if you use the Safeway.com site, you’ll get the prices on their sale stuff. (I’ve used the trick when researching stories.)

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                  3. Got all Elephant Child and went to look–
                    http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000709112
                    I actually remember milk in ’08 and earlier, because I was having an online argument with someone that claimed it was “$5 a gallon.” SNAP challenge, IIRC.
                    It was $1.59 at the gas station that served as the quick stop grocery. (roughly the same price at the real grocery places, too– I think Albertson’s had it for 1.49, but I didn’t like their store because it smelled like mold, even if the clerks were sweethearts.)

                    I’d guess they use the same sort of numbers that base uses to calculate their gas price– they average the “ten closest locations.” Up until a rez gas station opened right outside the gate, that somehow meant they had the most expensive gas in the area.

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                    1. For years, the price of milk where we bought it (Sam’s Club and Aldi) was about the same price as gas. When gas started going up a few years back, the prices split, and now gas tends to run a dollar more.

                      On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 9:50 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

                      > ** > Foxfier commented: “Got all Elephant Child and went to look– > http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000709112 I actually remember milk in > ’08 and earlier, because I was having an online argument with someone that > claimed it was “$5 a gallon.” SNAP challenge, IIRC. It was ” >

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                    2. It has been a while since I looked at it, but as I recall milk prices in the USA are artificially high because of a milk cartel. For that matter, soda prices are higher than a free market would deliver if the USA wasn’t protecting the sugar industry, Big Sweetie.

                      Put “milk cartel united states” in your search engine and choose your source.

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                    3. I actually did know about the milk thing, but only because my mom was in Cow Belles– the CAttlemen’s lady’s auxillary. (amusingly, dad wasn’t involved)

                      Anyways: I think it’s a rather bad idea, at least at the level we have the price fixing and barring ALL the bought stuff being used as food aid.

                      (I’d actually consider “price inflation via buying stuff that’s below a set price” as a national strategy, over the “give other countries money” theory; and yes, I know that SOME food is treated thus)

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                    4. Yeah, that’s the data set I was looking at when I wrote the $3.50 per gallon figure. I’m now making notes to self to mistrust all data coming out of the BLS, because falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. If they can get the price of milk wrong by a factor of 100% in July ’08 (real price less than $2 when they claim close to $4), what else did they get wrong? Unemployment numbers, perchance?

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                3. Where in the seven ghods are you buying your soda? I can go to Kroger, Albertson’s,, Wal-Mart, etc. in Plano TX and Portland OR and the two-liter bottles are ALWAYS between $.79 and $1.25 cents each. Portland tacks on .10 cents a bottle for recycling.

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                  2. Safeway in the Seattle blob– it horrifies me, too. Started about five years ago, you can’t get anything but generic for those kind of prices.

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    2. One of my great aunts cried with joy when she found out my aunt and her kids were moving to America, because then the kids would be fat.

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      1. one of the amusing things in my family as a kid was the way granny got so excited about a fat baby. Really it was one of her chef complements about new grandbaby’s. it was less funny when you remembered that her and granddaddy were (and came form) rural poor. they have three of there children (still birth, 3 day’s and 7 years respectively) buried beside ’em.
        so ya to many kid’s are to fat but the alternative an’t automatically “healthy”.

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        1. I have fat babies.

          A running joke is that the less than a year old is crying because he’s down to “just three chins.”

          It really is horrific how many supposed adults project their own body image on a tiny little person who NEEDS fat to get their brain growing.

          If I could magically change the world, I’d “fix” the ladies like those in the “mommy and baby” group I tried to join last year. If any of the just-gave-birth were over 150 pounds, I’ll eat my hat– and they were ALL inside of three inches of six foot.

          Frumpy little me, over that at closer to 5 foot, couldn’t help noticing how their kids were passive, thin and pretty ill looking.

          I’m really prone to assuming that I am not just wrong but HOMICIDALLY MISTAKEN AND SHOULD HAVE MY KIDS TAKEN AWAY!!!! in general, but… even I had to conclude my girls were better off.

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          1. Yikes. It’s one thing to try to keep yourself slender and attractive when not pregnant… but if you’re not gaining weight when pregnant, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. Even I know that much, and as a single man, I’ve never had the need to research pregnancy in any detail.

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    3. The weird part is that you’ll get some of the same people horrified about the “obesity epidemic” among the poor believing that those very same poor are “starving in the streets.” Hello? Contradiction, maybe, a bit?

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      1. Well, I’ve been fat and malnourished at the same time. I don’t recommend it. (Vitamins are your friends, and if you stop eating carbs that have them in enriched flour, you need to eat them in other things. Also, middle-aged women don’t use and produce vitamins as efficiently anymore, yet often need more of ’em. So I thought I was eating more than well enough, but I was a quart low on everything.)

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  3. For reference, here, I believe, is the quote:

    “People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.”

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      1. Just as a hint, I keep a searchable text file on my desktop of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long. It’s come in handy more than once. For longer essays of his works I still have to dig a bit, say his response to “violence never solved anything” in Starship Troopers, or his wondermous lecture to the Naval Academy on how to be a writer. I have them, just not at my fingertips like old Laz’s observations.

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    1. Where do you find lawn darts, decades after they were deemed Too Dangerous?

      I swear, I want a set of lawn darts to go along with my buckeyballs. Maybe I’ll head over to Canada and sneak in some of those chocolate eggs with toys inside them.

      I’ll play with the darts and buckeyballs, eat the chocolate and wash it down with raw milk, just to send the nanny state into a fit.

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      1. Whenever I fly into the US from France I make sure to bring in “Lait Cru” cheese and usually some foie gras – which I sell to my boss for $1 so we can really break the law

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      2. Metal shop?

        I’m sure my future nephew-in-law could fabricate a set if I asked nice. Might be a little heavier than the originals due to the fins being sheet steel, though.

        Mew

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          1. I took one shop class in my life — summer school before 7th grade. My “partner” came from way up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Our term project was “make something useful around the house”.

            Three words: “Lawn-Dart Crossbow”…. >:)

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      3. A handy sort could craft workable sets from those ten inch spikes you can buy in a hardware store. Or I suspect something could be done with a few crossbow quarrels and a bit of added weight.

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        1. A length of rebar, a grinding wheel, a hacksaw, a pair of aviation snips, a broken trash bin (or port-a-potty), an iron (if the trash bin is round, not rectangular), and a tube of epoxy.

          Mew

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      4. KinderEggs! My daughter adores KinderEggs! With all the fiddly little toys inside them! She is quite heartless about the danger they pose to “the children! 111!!!” by the way. She says if you’re stupid enough to choke on one of those toys or parts, you’re too dumb to live. We’ll buy some KinderEggs from you so you can really feel quite the daring criminal!

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      1. Which means you can still find them at garage and estate sales.

        Not on eBay, though, although there are plenty of “Lawn darts” related t-shirts… which tells me college kids are ignoring the ban.

        Mew

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        1. We used to refer to the F-16 as the Air Force Lawn Dart, because it took a lot of training to get to where you were used to flying one of them. We had three crashes in the eight months I worked next to them in South Carolina.

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  6. Wow. Yes and yes. I moved to Portugal shortly after the Revolution. My husband had moved there in 1976. Lisbon was in shambles, relatively speaking. No water for days on end. Forget regular electricity. We got married and I went back with him in 1979. Once when we were visiting in the states, he was talking to a church group and said, “A lot of Portuguese would love to come to the US.” He explained the situation there at the time (which were the good old days according to my Portuguese friends).

    After his talk, a 17 year old came up and blurted out, “What’s so great about the United States that the Portuguese want to come here.” I walked away from that conversation and let my husband talk to that ignorant child. There was no way for me to engage in that conversation without someone getting hurt.

    We’ve lost a lot of the coping skills. When I was in junior and senior high school, we had a class called “Home Ec.” We learned to sew, cook, be economical and keep the house clean enough to be healthy. Now the kids learn how to take the mandated standardized assessment.

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    1. The profs and administration at my under grad college were horrified out of their Birkenstocks when they asked us what new courses should be added and the highest write-in vote, out doing most of the official choices, was household management/cooking/basic sewing. The scandal of young women demanding to be taught how to cook! I think the wymyn’s study prof had to retire to her fainting couch.

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      2. I would probably have had a swearing fit. The idea that young people are allowed to leave their parents house without knowing how to cook at least a basic nutricious meal, wash clothes and do basic cleaning is obscene, almost child negelct.

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        1. Heh. You think that’s bad, ask yourself how many 16-year-old newly licensed drivers know how to change a flat tire.

          Mew

          p.s. I made Junior Cat show me he could change a tire before he started Drivers Ed, and encourage other parents to do the same.

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          1. My dad made me change the oil in his car for a year before he agreed to let me get my license. He also made sure I was there when he talked to the mechanic if anything went wrong so I could hear what was a legitimate problem and what was made up. That has saved me so much money and sent me into screaming fits when I saw bills my husband paid without so much as a question. (“family friend” who owned a garage had the car for a week and charged $1000 to replace a leaky hose for the radiator, which was what I told him was the problem in the first place).

            There are some basic life skills a lot of young people are lacking these days but I’ve seen a lot of people going out of their way to learn them and that makes me hopeful.

            Like

          2. Back when I was learning my father taught me on a cantankerous old toyota and said if I was bad I had to learn the even older double-clutch monstrosity that was just used for hay. All the young ‘uns, sis included, had to:

            Change a tire, patch a tire, change oil and filter, boost a car *the right way* with the neg on the block of the dead car, roll start, swap plugs and clean contacts, flush a radiator, and drive in the snow or mud. Dad said always call if there’s a problem. But if we called and *hadn’t* done as he taught us and taken care of everything we could (was okay if we were still working when we called), then he’d be upset as he raised us to stand on our own two feet. Of course, dad was a catch-all guy in the Army and grandad was a mechanic, so we might not have been “normal” that way. *grin*

            Godson and goddaughter may not get *quite* the comprehensive education I got, but they will get the basics for sure, and all the learning I can teach and more if they want to know.

            Like

          3. My daughter took Auto Shop in High School, and had one of the highest grades in the class. Not only how to change a tire, but how to clean a carburetor, change brakes (disk and drum), and a lot more.

            I learned to cook from my grandmother. She said I was too stubborn and hard-headed to find anybody that would marry me, so I needed to be able to take care of myself. I can also use a sewing machine, do hand-sewing, clean house (not to my wife’s standards, but … ), and a bunch of other things. I can also plant a garden, although in Colorado, that’s not been worthwhile the last few years. Also, my soil is rated poor to
            “‘you’ve got to be kidding me”. Maybe next year… I’ve also juiced Jerseys, slopped hogs, raised chickens and rabbits, and done my share of slaughtering. I may not be much good about doing in any future crash, but I’ll be darned good at teaching others, and handy to have around.

            Like

        2. Once upon a time a young man arrived at MIT and during rush week wanted to join a house where they cooked for themselves. He explained his plight: his grandmother ruled the kitchen in their house, and her rule was that boys don’t cook, girls cook, so he was completely incapable. They took pity on him and taught him to cook when his group was up.

          He went home at Thanksgiving and told them about how he was learning to cook, and what he was learning to cook.

          Next thing he knew he was in the kitchen, and Grandmother was teaching him how to cook proper food.

          Like

          1. My mom never taught me to cook because I was in college. I was going to have SERVANTS. Then I got married to an American. When I went back in summer, I got a crash course. Of course by then I’d acquired a (old, good) Joy of Cooking, and was having fun.

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            1. at 11 my grandmother said “Your mother works all day, and frequently drinks too much when she gets home. Effective today, you learn to fix dinner. Get the younger boys to help you.”

              Mom was a functional drunk, always sober at work, almost always drunk at home. By 11 and a half I had mastered about 25% of Grandma Etta’s recipe card box, which I copied by hand on the family typewriter.

              My children both were “better than functional cooks” by the time they were 12… (for a completly different reason.)

              Like

          2. Heh, had a thought– that “rule” may have been because of the way that boys are, um, often less than biddable for the hour or two that cooking requires, and fiddly jobs are more suited to girls, too. (Imagining asking my younger brother to chop celery. It’d be a sword fight before long.)

            Young men, though, especially studious ones? Not nearly as bad.

            Like

            1. You can cook a lot of things in under an hour. Substantially under. And the boys managed in home ec classes when I was in my teens.

              (I was perfectly capable of cooking a meal by the age of nine, so even with some allowances for faster maturity, not until college age is a bit much.)

              Like

              1. I’ve been teaching my little girls to help– it made a ten minute cookie recipe take over an hour, not counting baking.

                Figure that grandma makes the rule for the youngest– and by the time the boys are old enough to be fine with the quicker stuff, it’s just the way it is. (Heaven knows I howled often enough if my three years older cousin got to do something I didn’t, and my siblings got EVERYTHING the same year I did.)

                Like

        1. To be fair, shop class didn’t prepare me for gainful employment. It DID give me a hearty respect for power tools, though. Home Ec would have been more useful, but eventually, well, Alton Brown.

          Think about it — this generation of kids won’t get the jokes about shop teachers missing fingers…

          Like

          1. Half the battle is respect for the tools…

            Keep in mind that a side effect (intended, IMO) is an understanding of how to misapply those tools to destructive ends.

            Not teaching shop also ensures union-provided training and indoctrination is the only “shop” available, and keeps the union rolls strong-ish… and in the family.

            Mew

            Like

            1. Include inordinate fear of guns among the problems of not understanding respect for tools. Because they lack comprehension of the category “tools” they are susceptible to overreaction to the subcategory “guns”.

              It has been asserted that the period when most injuries from chain saws occur is when the owner has been using it for 3 – 5 years. The first two years the owner is hyper cautious, the next few the owner is over-confident of their ability to control the tool.

              Like

              1. Some STEM people with master’s degrees are obnoxiously arrogant. They know just enough to believe they know it everything, but not enough to understand how difficult it was to generate each bit of premasticated knowledge they were spoon-fed.

                Like

                2. There are worse things. Like
                  Suzie COBOL — A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English.

                  Note that this does not involve a degree. The person went through a training course. Once upon a time doing this to secretaries was IBM’s biggest source of female computer programmers, hence the name.

                  Like

              2. The last time I looked at the numbers, pilots are at the greatest risk between 100 and 500 flight hours. If they get through that, the rate of unplanned landings drops considerably. For the same reasons as chainsaw owners.

                Like

                  1. “They may tell you ‘you’re on a nonstop flight’. …I insist my flight *stop* somewhere — preferably at an airport. It’s those unscheduled corn-field and housing-development stops which seem to interrupt the flow of my day.” [G. Carlin]

                    Like

      2. The Florida school system doesn’t even let kids have recess. Forget about any non-academic studies. Teachers have to keep trying to teach to the test.

        Like

          1. This came up a while ago here, shortly after I had bugged several teacher friends on what that meant. The skinny (after many frustrating answers that weren’t really answers that meant anything to me) was that they are having to teach answers to test questions, and not teach the subject matter in a way that gave the students a grounding in the subject itself. And apparently, they are being required to teach this way, because lame-brain administrators believe this is the way to get test scores that show them to be “good schools”.

            If you look up “brain dumps” for things like Computer technology (For example, MCSE), you can find the same thing. Information that teaches you how to pass a standardized test, but doesn’t teach anything about how computers work. This is the main reason that certifications aren’t worth anything any more.

            Someone kept claiming that this should be good enough, because if you learn to pass the test, you’ll learn the subject. He didn’t grasp that giving the answer does not explain why the answer is right.

            Like

            1. This is accurate. Being the son of a teacher and doing some teaching and tutoring myself, this irritates the living crap outta me. Sure, it’s teaching, but the lesson being taught is horse squeeze- the world outside of school pulls no punches like that.

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              1. Yep, and I can’t help but think that if the teachers were *really* teaching, they wouldn’t have to “teach to the test”. Perhaps their administrations knew that the teachers were *really* teaching. [Sad Smile]

                Note, my mother was a school teacher.

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                1. I tried asking about that, and what I’ve been told is that, in lieu of “real” teaching, they are being told to force-feed test answers to the students. I haven’t been able to determine if the damage to the student is incidental, or planned.

                  Like

                2. I recollect when my daughter was in an old-fashioned Catholic girls’ high school, the curriculum was so thorough and old-fashioned that the teachers hardly wasted a drop of sweat over whether the girls would pass the required state test – which they did have to pass, in order to graduate. I don’t think my daughter wasted a drop of sweat over it either – I suspect that she breezed straight through. She graduated, anyway. “Teach to the test” is a lame excuse for not having taught very much at all, IMHO.

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                3. Consider the kids they have to work with.

                  Heather’s got two mommies. Johnny’s mom has *several* boyfriends on an evening. Jane’s dad has a restraining order against him. Butch is about to be arrested for his second felony–dealing, in this case to Susan who doesn’t know it yet, but she’s preggers. Again. Got a frequent flyer card at Planned Parenthood.

                  And this was my school just about 30 years ago. I’d hate to see what the inner cities look like today.

                  Yeah, teaching to the test at least gets *most* of the kids up and out.

                  Like

                  2. Expulsion would do it more briskly. But not, alas, the important thing, feeding the leftists’ egos with unmerited moral superiority.

                    Like

                    1. Also, I’ve seen teachers screw up classes that really were “best and brightest” by indoctrinating them with a sense of “forbidden thoughts” which ultimately became a prohibition of thinking. It would have happened to my kids, if I hadn’t had school-after-school.

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            2. Teaching to the test works. If you have a good test. The problem is that it’s really hard to make a good test multiple choice, and it’s really expensive to grade a long-answer test.

              The Navy nuclear program has the opposite problem. Since any test that too many people pass is deemed “too easy” the exams have been getting harder and harder. It’s now to the point that the only way to pass is to cheat. The first test I took outside of training had a question about unisolating a loop. As a mechanic my part was easy: equalize pressure. That’s not what they wanted. They wanted the entire procedure, down to “verify SOME_LIGHT is out.” Needless to say, nobody did well on that question. Which made it a “weak area” that had to be asked on the next test.

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            3. yep, That’s part of why I quit teaching…

              and for a comparable, I can teach -anyone- to pass the Ham Radio tech license in 3 to 5 hours and the general class license in a second 4 hour session on another day.

              If they had high school physics and trig, (even incompetent 30 years ago physics and trig, but were exposed to the terms) you can cut those numbers in half.

              Note that passing on the FCC exam is 26 out of 35 questions. Part of the trick above is ignoring certain entire test areas and telling the student to guess.

              Like

          2. I was talking to a retired teacher the other day. Testing has always been about asking a set of questions about random (hopefully) parts of the course expecting that that will give a good idea of how much of the coursework the students learned. Teaching to the test means that the teachers get told what parts of the course there will be questions on in the standardized test and teach those parts of the course intensively and the other parts lightly if at all. The point is not to give the students the skills and knowledge that the course is supposed to provide, but to get them to pass the test by any means necessary. I understand (from news reports) that in some states the teachers got the actual questions in advance and had their students memorize the answers. Of course the students had no idea how to derrive the answers, but by God they passed the test.

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            1. Which is why the test bank should consist of ~10^6 questions. Go ahead and try and effectively memorize all of those.

              It wouldn’t be too hard to generate either. Any state already employs tens of thousands of people who have an intimate knowledge of what is expected of high school graduates. They’re called professors.

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          3. I can’t speak for all teachers, but I assure you that having been on the front lines for a number of years that rote memorization is the least effective form of teaching. If all that children needed was the facts, that would work well. Good teachers may begin there, but if they do not (or are unable to) inspire students, they have not really taught. Great literature can never be taught by rote. You can memorize the facts of history, but you won’t really know much about the people. Science should not be a list, but something that makes students think and go “wow.”

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            1. I think it depends on the subject. Yes, rote memorization is useless in literature, but if you try and explain why 6×7=42 you’ll never get past arithmetic. You’ll also miss the joke in the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, so there is some applicability to literature.

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                1. I don’t want my students inspired. I want them to be able to do the mathematics they’re supposed to know how to do, before I try to teach the mathematics I’m supposed to teach them. Getting classes full of College Algebra students who cannot solve a simple linear equation starts to make you mad after a few years. If you can inspire them to learn what they need to learn, that’s great, you should inspire all you want. If you inspire them to feel the warm fuzzies while wasting away their lives playing on their iPhone all day, I have no use for you.

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                  1. “I don’t want my students inspired. I want them to be able to do the mathematics they’re supposed to know how to do, before I try to teach the mathematics I’m supposed to teach them.”

                    I once taught at a trade school, and had a student that was totally lost when it came to doing the lab work. Turned out that this High School graduate had no mental concept of what a fraction meant. He had heard the term “fraction” but since he had no clue what that meant, he could not understand why 0.5 was different from 1/5. He knew both were fractions, and both contained the number 5, so how could they be different?

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                  2. I wasn’t talking about warm fuzzies, and I wasn’t talking about getting rid of rote learning. I didn’t really make myself clear as I look back at my first comment. Some things need to be taught by rote, yes. I agree with that. However. If there is only rote teaching, students will not learn to think well. I have some good friends who are still teaching in the public schools and I take my hat off to them. But their biggest hurdle with teaching kids is that they don’t think.

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                    1. Most of the public school TEACHING seems designed not to make them think. I’m not blaming your friends. My younger son had some great teachers his last two years, but I’ve seen “parrot the teacher” rewarded over and over again, coupled with not giving the students the rote basis to be able to evaluate things.
                      The system — it stinks.

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                    2. Yes, it does. My daughter teaches at a charter school, and it’s better than the Florida public schools. A lot of their students have been invited by the public schools to go elsewhere. These are the kids with autism, ADHD and other learning disorders. The system has failed.

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                2. If somebody takes a lift to a mountaintop and enjoys the view, that’s good. Nolo contendere.

                  But it’s not the same as climbing. It could inspire someone to start climbing, but it’s not at all the same.

                  A guide in the cable car who inspires his clients to get interested in climbing is doing them a service. A guide who makes them think they’ve, for lack of a better word, completed the mountain is doing the opposite.

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                3. I would be frankly amazed.

                  I love mathematics, and aspired to enter a field were it is used extensively, at a very high level. Yet I have never been inspired by mathematics. I view it as a tool, and a very useful one, but not inspiring.

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                  2. The fraction of the population that can perceive mathematics esthetically is minute. The fraction that can create it (at a high level) is minuter. The fraction that can earn a living by creating it is even more minute.

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                    1. Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
                      Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
                      And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
                      To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
                      At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
                      In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
                      Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
                      From dusty bondage into luminous air.
                      O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
                      When first the shaft into his vision shone
                      Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
                      Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
                      Who, though once only and then but far away,
                      Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

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                  3. Wayne, that’s –odd–

                    I recall watching my physics prof derive ohms law over three blackboards without saying a word. About 10% of us were frantically copying, and when he wrote “V=I * R q.e.d.” at the end, about eight of us cried. I had eyes full of tears for the last 10 steps or so, once I saw how it was going to end.

                    Every now and then, when I’m working on a database structure simplification, I see the math and the way everything hooks together and it’s as though God shined a light onto my desk.

                    Oh well. It inspires _me_.

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                    1. People are often affected by different fields of mathematics. Some love theorems, some like prime numbers, some go wild for derivatives and others get very excited about ratios. I personally know a number of guys whose eyes positively glaze over at a ratio such as 38:24:36.

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                    2. Sorry– I just never got past the numbers thing. Now words, even single words, contain poetry to me. My hubby though has this thing for numbers and equations, especially anything to do with electronics. He goes to a different place… maybe the same place I go when I write.

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                    3. It’s perfectly normal to understand different things. I’m deaf to math, I understand some elegant things about music structure and not others (though I’m good at making up melodies). I’m constantly trying to get other people to understand language stuff that amuses or inspires me, but when I read Language Log there’s often a whole other level. And then there’s poetry, which many people have been deafened to, but which is full of power that I can sometimes make other people hear and understand.

                      But yes, there’s no feeling like feeling it all come together, the universe comprehensible and beautiful, the workmanship visible.

                      Like

                    4. and the way everything hooks together and it’s as though God shined a light onto my desk.

                      I think that’s the “ooh, oh, I see it” moment more than just Math itself. If Math is how you reach it, awesome on you– but I think I know what you’re pushing at, and I’ve met it in different areas.

                      Makes me understand why Wisdom is personified.

                      Like

            2. Sorry, but I taught and — clearly — I learned. That is cant, and not true. Rote memorization IS needed for some things. I not only learned seven languages, but I watched the kids struggle to learn verbs and grammar thought “fun fun ways” like French magazines. It didn’t work for me, it didn’t work for them. for centuries kids learned Latin and Greek by the end of what we consider elementary school: rote memorization and singing in group. Same with multiplication tables, etc. “Fun fun motivation” works for DEEPENING the knowledge, but for the stone cold basics we need “boring, boring memorization.” I’m not putting down motivation. if the kid wants to learn EVERYTHING is easier. But there are things you can’t make fun and attempts at doing so, like “total immersion” language (Yes, the US army uses it BUT NOT AN HOUR A DAY IN A CLASSROOM!) result in ignorant children. I’m sorry, I’m trained as a teacher, and of course I went through school. And I’ve taught. I know what works and what doesn’t. I can’t imagine why the “it must be fun and enriching” myth persists, but I imagine it’s because we WANT to believe.

              Like

              1. My dad went to Monterey. They used teachers who were native speakers, textbooks, military vocab textbooks, audio files (then records, once tapes, now computer files), movies, songs, Russian choir if you were a good singer, and studying pretty much all the time you weren’t in class. For a year. So we can have total immersion if that’s all you study, or if every other subject is also taught in the language.

                The problem is that just seeing or hearing English sets you back during a total immersion study, because your brain resets to default. :)

                However, the absolute fastest way to learn a language is the polyglot way, which pretty much leans on grammar and structure plus an excellent memory for learning new words.

                What helps a lot is to have an organized memory. A lot of kids have no idea why they’re learning what they learn, where it fits into the world, how history runs, where they are in the world, the US, the state, etc. If you don’t have a framework to stick stuff, you are lost. Rote memorization plus structure allows you to add new info with relative ease.

                But I think it would also help a lot if we taught kids the old “Art of Memory” when young. We don’t all need memory palaces, but using spatial memory to remember important lists is a very good trick, and it allows kids to organize important topics in their heads like they’d organize topical files on their computer.

                Like

                1. Yes, but I was talking of “total immersion” as done in our schools. Throw some music and magazines at the kids, chatter away at them for an hour. NEVER TRANSLATE. Never make them memorize anything — ??????– fluency. What surprises me is that now and then one in a thousand kids emerges fluent. BUT those are language geniuses. They’d have learned by watching movies with subtitles. (My brother is like that. I’m not.)

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                  1. Oh dear – I suspect sometime later this year or next when I take ‘a language’ as required, they will have me doing this method (in college). Any recommendations for tackling it myself that don’t cost an arm and a leg? I can’t do classic immersion for obvious reasons, and I will likely be taking Spanish, as most useful to my future goals.

                    Like

                    2. Cedar, you asked:
                      What I found useful were 101 or 501 Spanish Verbs (these are just dictionaries of verbs conjugated in all ways possible – you can find them in used bookstores near colleges or online. Warning, they are short on plot)
                      I have a desk Cassell’s Spanish-English dictionary which I use a lot, though I would hate to carry it further than across the room. Look at any dictionary you find – I’d suggest a used one- to determine if you like the feel and format.
                      I would suggest a standard school Spanish Dictionary (Spanish only, not a Spanish/English) as well if you can find one- there are good ones online too, that makes you stretch and make you build your own mental scaffolding in Spanish once you start finding your feet, but it is not as essential,
                      I read South American newspapers – I’ve read Paraguayan (ABC Color) and Colombian (El Espectador and El Tiempo) papers online since they are conservative language-wise (Argentines and Mexicans say odd things in odd ways, and they use a certain amount of loan-words unique to the country) but you can look at the Spanish news agency http://www.efe.com also.
                      You can listen to online radio too. Talk radio is not common in S. America but they can be found, “Radio ñanduti” is a good one if you can tolerate the Paraguayan accent. The ads are the clearest.
                      It is always good to find stuff that is interesting to read so you stay on it. I liked reading Asterix in Spanish, and I liked the Mortadelo and Filemon comics. But I’ve found those are hard to find in the US. There are lots of Spanish songs on the Youtube, and lectures and news reports and such. There is even a Spanish Wikipedia. Speaking helps a lot, it makes you organize words to ideas on the fly.
                      My preference with reference books is to get them in hardcopy. I have had trouble marking pages in a Kindle or my Sony reader so I can find it again – but that is me and my love of putting slips of papers between pages in thick books.

                      Like

                    3. Oh, yeah, as soon as you have rudiments, pick something in Spanish to read even if you have to look up every third word. In my first year of English I read Farenheit 451. Shut up. TOOK ME FOREVER, but you internalize the constructions. Robert’s French became miles better after reading Dumas in French.

                      Like

                    5. I’m all thumbs in language.

                      After three freaking wasted years, I’m not sure how I passed Spanish each year. (their requirements. I didn’t want it, any more than I wanted the sex ed classes, but I couldn’t get permission to haunt the library for Spanish class.)

                      I have very few words I remember, and one is from a translated Peanuts strip.

                      Charley brown in the first two panels, holding a snowball and whining “listo? Listo?” (ready?)
                      Finally, a shot of Snoopy, surrounded by snowballs: “Listo.”

                      Like

                  1. I’m sure it does. But my dad went a loooooong time ago. Long time.

                    (And the previously unrevealed benefit of being in Russian choir was that the teacher took the choir to perform at a Russian expatriate banquet in San Francisco, after which they got fed and stuffed with vodka. Tables were danced upon.)

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                    1. I thought Russian would sound harsh in singing, till my best friend during my exchange student year dragged me to her Easter services (Russian Orthodox. She was British of Ukranian origin) and I heard it sung by children. Beautiful.

                      Like

                  1. My daughter LOVED Asterix and Oblilix – that was what I first read to her as the bed-time thing. Later, she was so terribly disappointed to see it in various places and want a copy, “Ummm, sugar, that is NOT a language that Mommy can read to you, OK?”

                    Like

              3. Back when I was teaching and tutoring, one of *my* old teachers taught me a trick that has always worked. Memory is the basis of all learning, therefore memorization is where you start. Remember it, then work on understanding. Get those two down, work on applying. Once you can apply the lesson, you can work on synthesis (combining lessons, creating, etc).

                Some people are naturals at this, in some areas. I had a friend in college who could reproduce nearly any piece of music on the piano, just by listening to it- once. That’s a one in a million talent. Most people get there by hard work and practice.

                You can overemphasize rote memorization. Some foreign students I taught had amazing memories for facts and dates, but getting them to adapt to new ideas was *hard.* They knew what they knew, and what did they need to learn new stuff for? They already knew it! Unlearning things in order to teach something new is tough. At least it is for *me,* but I’m not too terribly bright. *grin*

                As for teachers, for some the goal is really not to teach a child, but to comply with a certain standard the state has set. Look at the penalties for NCLB,for example- if the students don’t “show improvement” in the correct areas, they (the school) gets put in noncompliance, and penalties for that can costs jobs. Make the state happy, keep your paycheck. The evidence the state wants doesn’t easily show true learning going on (because that’s tough and expensive), but it does give good data points for elections…

                Like

                1. There are days when I wonder if Ted Kennedy’s group designed NCLB specifically as a way to sabotage Bush. And there are hardly any days when I wonder what in the blazes Bush was thinking when he asked Kennedy to do it.

                  Like

                  1. Yeah, that’s crazy. Several school districts in our area scored best in the state on the test, but didn’t “show improvement” enough, because most of the kids had started well, and only improved one grade level’s worth by the end of the year. Even worse, if kids start in the 99th percentile (or equivalent) and end in the 99th percentile, they count it as no improvement at all.

                    So they’re getting some kind of ding for being perfect.

                    Like

              4. “The children themselves eventually come to know that something is wrong, even if they are not able to articulate their knowledge. Of the generations of children who grew up with these pedagogical methods, it is striking how many of the more intelligent among them sense by their early twenties that something is missing from their lives. They don’t know what it is, and they ask me what it could be. I quote them Francis Bacon: ‘It is a poore Center of a Mans Actions, Himselfe.’ They ask me what I mean, and I reply that they have no interests outside themselves, that their world is as small as the day they entered it, and that their horizons have not expanded in the least.

                “‘But how do we get interested in something?’ they ask.

                “This is where the baleful effect of education as mere entertainment makes itself felt. For to develop an interest requires powers of concentration and an ability to tolerate a degree of boredom while the elements of a skill are learned for the sake of a worthwhile end. Few people are attracted naturally by the vagaries of English spelling or by the rules of simple arithmetic, yet they must be mastered if everyday life in an increasingly complex world is to be negotiated successfully. And it is the plain duty of adults, from the standpoint of their superior knowledge and experience of the world, to impart to children what they need to know so that later they may exercise genuine choice. The demagogic equation of all authority, even over the smallest child, with unjustifiable political authoritarianism leads only to personal and social chaos.”

                Context here:
                http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_1_oh_to_be.html

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            3. To expand on what Mr. Gauch says:

              “Bullshit”.

              Some things can *only* be learned by rote. Handwriting and arithmetic (basic +,-,*,/) are the two biggest. Spelling is best by drill as well.

              But drilling is BORING, especially for the teachers.

              Like

              1. Spelling is best [learned] by drill as well.

                I learned spelling by reading everything I could get my hands on. Which was effectively learning by drill, but it was interesting “drill”.

                Like

                2. Many, if not most, do not learn spelling that way. *I* do, but I know I’m unusual in that regard. Lots of people don’t pay attention to the spelling of the words they read, and need to do it outside a reading context.

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                  1. As i recall, dimly, I used to copy the spelling list and write each word a dozen times or so. After that I never had to think about spelling them.
                    So learning by wrote is effective, yes.

                    snicker

                    Like

                3. Yes, but if you have even mild dyslexia, you need something more. The only way to get younger kid to write comprehensibly was to do to him what dad did to me: make him copy texts till his fingers bled. See, we’re kinetic learners. If we COPY it we learn. If we read, not so much.

                  Like

                    3. Speaking of bowderdized– oh. My. Lord.

                      Starfall.com has mangled even fables to the point of Dear Husband banning them when he’s home.

                      I don’t want to think of what they did to the myths…..

                      Like

                  2. Sarah, this is why I have been copying out by hand the collected speeches of Lincoln. One is to improve my handwriting, and the other is to try to internalize the flow of his writing — the man had an incredible writing voice, I swear it is what Twain and Piper are trying to reach when they are at their very best.

                    Like

                  3. Yeah, learning style plays a major role. I’m a visual learner, so reading everything I could get my hands on worked for me. If there’s a word I haven’t used in a while and I’m unsure how to spell it, I just have to close my eyes, think of the word, and read it off the back of my eyelids. But for niketic* learners, I can see how copying would be the best way, bar none, to learn spelling. For auditory learners, spelling-bee drills?

                    You know, now that I think about it, this might be one reason (one of the many reasons) why homeschooled kids usually do better than kids taught in large classrooms: even the best of teachers doesn’t have time to tailor the lesson to the individual learning styles of each student. But a parent teaching one-on-one, or even one-on-seven or one-on-eight (I know some large homeschooling families) has a lot more ability to tailor the lessons to each child.

                    * I typo’ed “kinetic” and liked the results so much I left it in.

                    Like

              2. The actual letters need to be memorized. The inspiration comes in when students take pride in making those letters beautiful. And there aren’t many of them around. Public schools in Florida don’t even teach cursive writing. My grandfather, who wrote with the most beautiful copperplate cursive, is turning over in his grave. A lot of kids can’t even write legible hand printing.

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                1. I wasn’t required to use cursive past Jr. High, so I got through a degree writing in block letters. About six years ago I started teaching myself cursive agin, and I have started copying out stuff from books by hand to practice. My block letters were nice, I took pride in it, but what really got me pushing on cursive was the number of women that seem to have handwriting like 12 year old boys.

                  Like

              3. “Spelling is best by drill, as well.”

                Hmmm… The best thing that happened to my spelling was my grandmother’s tutoring in Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots along with how they apply to words in English (and how to tell which words came from which roots). Those roots cover the vast majority of words you need to use, understand, spell, etc. The remaining words are the oddballs for which memorization is necessary.

                Of course that same grandmother was was an education researcher who did things like teaching Algebra and Calculus to grade school children who were failing Mathematics.

                You won’t be surprised to hear that the education establishment of the ’40s – ’60s considered her work to be “brilliant, but sadly misguided.”

                Like

              4. starfall.com is awesome for this– I worked my tail off for MONTHS trying to drill the ABCs into my daughter’s head, and letting her just screw around with a machine that would say “A” every time she hit the “A” button, she’s got all but a few of the letters down pat and every number but 9. (She calls it: “not a six….”)

                Funny thing is, I initially started her on it for fine motor function– learning to use a mouse.

                Like

                1. I’m a fan of magic schoolbus, even if glorifies teachers. Robert learned all his science through middle school by age 4 because he thought the only computer games were edutainment.

                  Like

                2. I’m curious. Here you’re praising starfall.com, but upthread you’re complaining about their mangling the fables. Would you recommend it to other parents, or not? And if it’s a mixed recommendation, which parts of their stuff are worth using and which parts are to be avoided at all costs?

                  Like

                  1. They teach you the stuff you need to know– 123, ABC.

                    The mangled myths are only identifable if you know the original myths– they present them as “old stories” or some such.

                    Example: I can’t remember the gal that was a runner, who would only marry someone who could outrace her.
                    Her story was the most recent I saw mangled.
                    They never told it as “the story of so-and-so,” it was “an old greek story” about “a girl.”

                    The guy got three golden apples from the goddess, but she won the race anyways, and said “I’ll think about it” to marrying the hero– rather than a h*ll no.

                    I’m actually still internally debating if this is more of a bowderization than the “swallowed whole” my childhood greek myths did with Chronos, vs, the statue of the Ancient god holding the lower half of one of his kids, dripping blood and with ick hanging from his mouth.

                    If you can stand Schoohouse Rock, you can stand Starfall.

                    The “were able to teach my daughter the letters and numbers” aspect outweighs the “their myths are insanely mangled” aspect for me, but I try to be honest about either.

                    Like

                    1. I’d never heard that myth before. A bit of searching gives the name of the woman runner as Atalanta, and the man who beat her by trickery as Hippomenes. (Yes, the “she won anyway because gurlz r bettr then boyz” version* that Starfall has is a PC change from the original.)

                      * My apologies for the pain I just caused the grammarian in you with the deliberate mistakes in all five of those words.

                      Like

                    2. My daughter adores the Chinese Fables stuff– think along the lines of the Star Trek “Cantrememberthename, when the walls fell” episode– and I am kinda scared what may’ve changed THERE.

                      On the other hand, I’m a confirmed Saiyuki fan, especially because of Hakkai, and I KNOW That mangled “Journey to the West” five ways from Friday.

                      Like

                    3. It should be noted that the revision of the tale does girls a great disservice by mitigating the warning against trusting males to play fair when what they really want to do is occupy you.

                      In exchange for a tale of minor, momentary triumph they eliminate the far stronger warning about males’ desire to subjugate the feminine to their brutish need to possess and dominate.

                      Like

                    4. Apparently, the less mangled version was more mangled than I knew:
                      http://voices.yahoo.com/the-myth-atalanta-golden-apples-686387.html

                      Her dad put her out to die (as Mrs Hoyt has pointed out, girls thus disposed of were a major source of Christian vitality) but she didn’t die.
                      And THEN the whole “I’ll only marry if he can beat me” thing happened.

                      Oddly, our girls are already familiar with Hephaestus. He’s part of Wonder Woman’s history, and is our favorite greek/roman god besides. (Which may or may not be like “favorite natural disaster.”)

                      Like

                  3. Digression: similar “rewritings” resulted in many of the better conversations on the nature of man with my folks, although at the time I would’ve called it something like
                    “how people are sometimes.”

                    Like

            4. There are things that the children have to memorize. There are things that they have to understand. And there’s no money in working out how to balance them.

              (My mother would assign her chemistry students a list of ions to memorize, and the kids would gape like fish out of water. They had no idea how to memorize anything.)

              Like

          4. This is one of my pet peeves. I teach as an community college adjunct and what I see come out of the K12 schools is abysmal. “Teaching to the test” is better than not teaching at all.

            I’m afraid I’ve seen too many teachers who complain about teaching to the test when they can’t teach at all. When the students are passing the tests, then they can complain to me that they haven’t been able to get beyond that because of the testing.

            Like

            1. Teaching to the test is certainly not ideal and it’s understandable that a good teacher would complain about having to do that. One also wonders how many teachers complain because, in fact, they could not pass the test themselves.

              Like

              1. If you look at each new “education” fad, you’ll notice a trend. Each popular fad requires less work from the teacher than the status quo.

                Like

      3. Here in Texas (which might be our promised land were it not for the vile progs infesting it), my 13-year-old, who attends the public indoctrination center because mommy and daddy need the break from his MPD* tendencies, has to take home ec and learn to sew and cook. Last year, he got a C on a project when his sock-monkey ended up looking like a deformed rabbit head. The others are learning better from their mother.

        *Miserable Person Disorder

        Like

        1. When I was 13, I had to make a stupid pillow in home ec. I didn’t mind much, but three years earlier, my sister had to make it too. She was very annoyed. She had offered, as an alternative, that she could make a much more complicated doll without any need for the teacher to help, but nope, she had to make the stupid simple pillow.

          Like

      4. My son went to hte science & technology magnet school, and he took what the kids called “AP Shop”. They made things, but als olearned about strength of materials, and real material science. But he did bend tin and form plastics.

        Like

    3. There was no way for me to engage in that conversation without someone getting hurt.

      Pain is a great assistant to learning.

      Like

  7. So, there’s a phrase that’s been used a couple times, and I saw it again.
    “Build under”.
    I think I know what you’re talking about, but I’m not sure. Is it a reference to something?

    Like

          1. You bet I’m merry. 4000 words and the end of the novella draft! Whee! Now on to footnotes and proofreading the bibliography one more time and the please-G-d-may-it-be-the-last-literature-search before I send the monster back to the press for yet another outside review. But not until after New Year. ;)

            Like

  8. In re the elites and quaint french peasant villages – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23586037

    I don’t beleive that even with the idiocies of the common agricultrual policy and the glowball worming BS Eruope will starve. Or even run out of wine.

    In fact, while I am well aware that not all parts of Europe are the same, in my recent experience this summer it is not notably more expensive to feed oneself if one cooks from scratch with meat/veggies from the store in France or the UK than it is in California. You get different options sometimes (hey American Supermarkets can I buy some lamb? KTHXBAI, hey French supermarkets there are wines made in places other than France) but it’s pretty easy to eat healthy and enjoyably either way for about the same amount of $$$.

    One thing that might (quiet literally) cause severe hunger would be regulation of payday lenders which our ruling classes have apparently decided is the next scourge. If you are poor and don’t realy have savings then if you need to sudenly do something costly like repair your car you may quite easily be short the $50 you need for groceries this week until you get paid next Monday. A payday lender who promises you $50 now for $60 next Tuesday could quite literally stop you and your family from doing without food for a week and that’s worth the $10 interest payment. So if you regulate those loans out of profitability and close down the lenders you’ll either cause the people who need those loans to go hungry or you’ll open the door for the mob and other similar completely unregulated lenders to step in. And while $10 is steep interest it’s a lot better than a broken leg…

    Like

    1. Of course sitting in a pool of quicksand is just a nice refreshing dip on a hot summer’s day, until you slide in under your head.
      Yes, ideally those payday loans are a short term bridge to carry one over a bit of trouble, but for far too many what starts out that way becomes an abyss they never seem to claw their way back out of.
      In the same fashion, credit cards are a wonderful convenience, useful as all get out, until you treat yourself to luxuries beyond your means to pay off and find yourself a permanent revenue source for the lender as they collect what in any fair assessment is usurious levels of interest each and every month for what can seem like forever.
      And yes I know you can lead a fool to solvency but you can’t make them think. The fairly predictable crash and burn stories of most lottery winners makes a perfect case in point.

      Like

      2. We have the laws in place for people who really can’t manage their own affairs. We really should enforce them rather than lump everyone together as unable to manage their affairs.

        Like

    2. You know that if you receive government benefits, like food stamps, you’re not allowed to have enough savings for a car repair? So the government is ensuring the payday loan companies’ customers continue to need their service.
      Payday lenders, well, it’s real easy to get trapped in the never-ending rollover, where the fifty bucks that went to the interest means you have to take another to pay your rent, and the fifty bucks that went to that interest means you have to take another to pay your electric, but the solution isn’t more government intervention, it’s less: so people can form neighborhood associations where everyone chips in $ to make a general fund, they can borrow from as needed and pay back without interest without having a great credit score–because payday loans are for those who can’t get a real loan from a bank or even a credit card.

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      1. I saw yesterday a link (probably at Instapundit) about the recent efforts to “fix” our financial system with such bureaucratic cluster ****s as the Consumer Financial Protection Board has caused an uptick in patronage of pawn shops. I expect an upsurge in use of Ebay and Craig’s List for second hand goods as well, which reminds me that the local neighborhood association sent out an email warning of “theft by appointment”.

        It seems people of a certain … attitude have taken to using such classifieds to arrange a transaction at a neutral place, such as a school parking lot on a Saturday, then taken advantage of the mark to steal the item offered for sale/cash brought to pay for it and drive off. Lucky victims are only maced or beaten over the head; unlucky ones are shot or stabbed. Basic advice from police included doing the transaction in the parking lot at a local police station, not showing up without someone riding shotgun, not arranging the transaction solely by email/twitter (when you talk to them on the phone an absence of questions about the actual product is usually a hint.)

        Like water always finds a way in, people will always find ways to make ends meet. Regulations can only increase the transaction costs and should be an attempt to advantage neither borrowers nor lenders.

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        1. Pick a parking lot with security cameras and traffic. WalMart or Safeway or McFoodstuffs, not a (closed) school.

          Mew

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        2. I’ve gotten to be a valued customer at my local chosen pawn shop. I have a set of jewelry that I have pawned and redeemed about fifteen times over the last twelve years, mostly when pay for various projects came in AFTER the deadline for various bills.
          My erratic, writing-based source of income is generous … but it is erratic. There is always enough, eventually – I just don’t know when it will come in.
          And my daughter had crappy credit for a while – the local payday lender held her over with a pre-paid credit card when she couldn’t even begin to get a bank account.

          Like

          1. This is why my family gives kids around 5k or so of gold (mostly sterling pounds) at birth. I mean, if you give a baby gift “say it with gold” — even my broke-*ss uncles went in together to get me a pound, and when I went to Portugal first time after Marshall was born (he was three) people solemnly handed me the gold for him. Why? So you can pawn it and redeem it. Not to redeem it is a great shame, but the gold is basically “your emergency funds.” I’ve never pawned mine, because I was terrified of not being able to redeem it. Now that I am fifty, every six months I remind the kids about the security deposit box, and that mine is in there too and is to be evenly divided between them if I die. (Yes my mom reminds me of this everytime I go over too. Only mom is nuts and doesn’t trust banks, so she has these caches we’re GARANTEED never to find. Eh.)

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            1. Always pawn at a much lower price than what it is worth. You are more able to redeem it, and the shop is happier because they know it too.
              Grandpa had 7 bank accounts when he died. He lost everything when FDR closed the banks and his did not re-open. I only have 4, but my finances are simpler.

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            2. One of Mom’s partners has relatives in France. Whenever an elderly family member dies, as soon as the funeral notice goes out, the kids, grandkids, and siblings show up and dig up the yard. Every time, they find a pot or box with gold, jewelry, or old stock certificates and other valuables.

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            3. My husband’s grandparents bought property. We inherited 1/6th of about 8 rental properties. Their intention was to have the properties sold and the money divided but, for now, it seems having the steady income and a place for one of the cousins to live is more important than a chunk of cash.

              My maternal grandparent’s bought collectible coins and my parents have no idea what to do with them. My paternal grandparents hid envelopes of money in all of their furniture. I inherited a dresser and found about two grand when I was in third grade. Supposedly it got put into my college fund (which was subsequently raided to pay legal expenses for my brother.)

              I think having ways to generate money, rather than just money, is probably the best gift you can give if there’s a question about how stable the future is going to be and you’re not independently wealthy yourself.

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                1. Ours is off Colfax, just down the street from Pete’s Kitchen. The fact that we’re able to get what we’re asking for it in rent is a freaking miracle. Rent control is a pestilence.

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                2. We bought 300 acres of defensible terrain way off the beaten path, put it in tree growth (tax break) and moved the whole clan onto it.

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                3. My dad’s parents did the same — in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine. Lost a few buildings in the 60’s race riots, then the city bought the properties at a discount. Now the neighborhood is being “gentrified” and their buildings are selling for 7 figures.

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              2. “My maternal grandparent’s bought collectible coins and my parents have no idea what to do with them.”

                Eyeball e-bay to appraise them. Be forewarned that anything sold as “collectible” isn’t. Collectible stuff is stuff no one knew was going to be valuable.

                Like

                1. The last time I saw the collection, he was focusing on silver coins from the 20’s and 30’s. He didn’t do “collectible” unless it was something that interested him. I think that’s how he got the collection of Voyager mission medallions. Mostly, though, he did old and rare currency.

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                  1. Then the eyeball appraisal by googling for sales would give you some notion where to start.

                    Though if you run across a catalog, remember that if you sell to a dealer, he has to pay for all his overhead and get his profit on top of what he pays for the coins.

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            4. (Only mom is nuts and doesn’t trust banks, so she has these caches we’re GARANTEED never to find.)

              That would probably explain what happened to some friends of my parents’ in France. They (the friends) live in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (the town that became famous for saving Jewish children during WW2 — fascinating reading if you’re into history), and for several years they lived in a house that was divided into two apartments. They lived on the second floor, and the first floor was occupied by an older man who had lived there for decades. I think when my parents’ friends bought the house, the condition of the sale was that he could continue to rent that first-floor apartment until he died. When he eventually died, they went through the apartment and cleaned it up at the request of his next-of-kin, who were quite far out of town. In his apartment, they found a secret space under some floorboards, large enough that a person could hide in there. This was not surprising given the town’s history, but what was surprising was that it was filled with bags of cash, coming to something like a couple million dollars’ worth of French francs. (This was pre-euro.) They said they were tempted to keep quiet about it, but not too seriously tempted as they were generally quite honest. So they gave the money to the next of kin, who said “Thank you for being honest; we had no idea that money even existed,” and gave them back 10% of it as a thank-you for their honesty. Which was less than the 100% they could have gotten away with… except that that would have come at the “small” cost of not being able to sleep at night.

              For the longest time, I wondered why the old man had kept all that money in cash, rather than (say) in the bank. But now that I think about it, he had lived through WW2 and may have had good reason to distrust banks. (I don’t know anything about whether French banks were nationalized by the Vichy government, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Unfortunately, a Google search for “ww2” and “banks” turned up a lot of thinly-disguised anti-Semitism, and I gave up trying to educate myself on the subject via Google.)

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            5. Eleven years in Portugal and I never learned that part. My children have Portuguese godparents who gave them gold but I never knew it was their emergency funds. Well. You are never safe from surprise until you are dead said someone.

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              1. >You are never safe from surprise until you are dead said someone.

                And maybe not even then . . .

                On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:29 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

                > ** > Susan P commented: “Eleven years in Portugal and I never learned that > part. My children have Portuguese godparents who gave them gold but I never > knew it was their emergency funds. Well. You are never safe from surprise > until you are dead said someone.” >

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        3. Basic advice from police included doing the transaction in the parking lot at a local police station, not showing up without someone riding shotgun,

          If anyone in the Denver Area needs help w/this, I don’t have a shotgun, but I’m more than happy to ride carbine.

          Like

    3. Not having grocery money because of a car emergency is something that has happened to me a couple of times. Except both times I did have big enough an emergency supply to survive the couple of weeks until next payday. Rice, beans and canned pea soup (one of the most cheap alternatives here, those cans), back then, now I would usually also have low lactose whey and some sort of nuts.

      So far I have never actually tried trapping those half tame hares we have around, but I’ve been somewhat tempted at times, especially since there seem to be a lot of them and they are not particularly wary of humans. I do remember eating meals made of at least one hare and one pheasant which father had hit with a car and which weren’t too badly mangled as a kid – mother had lived through some rather scarce times and was loath to waste good meat – but maybe due to that I have some tendency towards thinking in terms of ‘potential food’ when I see them. :)

      But yep, you live hand to mouth and it’s quite possibly to get into temporary emergencies of that kind. My jobs have usually required the use of a car so gas and car repair money tends to be top priority.

      Like

      1. I got tired of living hand-to mouth, so I started doing things like buying bulk, tucking cash away, turning out my pockets every night and taking out all the change besides a dollar in quarters….in a while you can build up a stake for a savings. Once you have your emergency funds, your emergencies are less important.

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        1. During about the last 20 years I have managed to accumulate some emergency funds at times, but they have sooner or later then been depleted because of an emergency. This country can be somewhat expensive to live in, especially keeping a car costs. And since all of mine have been more or less old a lot of those emergencies have involved car repair, as in ‘if I don’t get this fixed I can’t do my work/get to work’.

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            1. I’m sure there’s a sweet spot where the car is old enough that most of the depreciation has already occurred but new enough that there aren’t a lot of repair costs.

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              1. Depends on the make/model (and in some cases, year) of car. The superior ability of Hondas and Toyotas to hold value is a major part of their market strategy.

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                1. I’m on my (counts claws .. ) 5th and 6th Toyotas, precisely because they just keep on going. Haven’t bought a brand-spanking-new one yet, and of the first four, I know two are still on the road.

                  (one of the others I know went under a guard rail .. engine was fine but the front end was so messed up the insurance folks didn’t want to pay to fix it)

                  The optimal appears, to me, to be between 4 and 6 years old, and between 70,000 and 130,000 miles… just be religious about changing the oil!

                  Mew

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                  1. Sorry .. optimal time *to buy*.

                    Toyotas routinely go over 200,000 if you keep the oil changed, so .. at the 4-6 year old point, the first owner wants something new and is “motivated”… and anything that’s done 130,000 over 6 years has to be mostly highway so is fine. Anything under 70,000 may be a city car, and those tend to have more issues.

                    In any event, get and review the service records, looking for how often the oil was changed.

                    Mew

                    Like

              2. As I see it, the problem lies in trying to keep the car too long past the time when it’s no longer in that sweet spot. Been there, done that, and got really tired of throwing $100 bills at the lousy thing all the time.

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                1. So far I have been able to get only two cars which were in the used but not really old category, the two Ladas I’ve owned, and the last one I could not trade until well past the time it started to fail due to ending on an extended sick leave and living mostly on government assistance for two years, and that was barely enough for rent and other unavoidable bills (internet connection, one can not live without an internet connection! :)) plus food. I’m only now starting to recover from that period financially.

                  Everything else has been past any sweet spots they may have had. Either I got them from my father for practically free when he traded for something newer – and being a mechanic he always kept them _long_ (he also usually fixed them for free, provided the car was in good enough a shape I could drive it to him and had the time to go there, but unfortunately he lives about 200 kilometers from me) – or when I have needed to buy I have always only had the money to buy something in the very cheap category, usually at least somewhat past their best before dates, or at best hovering right around it.

                  Right now it seems I got lucky with my latest, that well past 20 years old Toyota Corolla. It has ran quite well for a year now. It will need a new clutch sooner or later and probably sooner (I think that’s the English term) but I will get that done if nothing else comes up before it, and then just hope for the best, meaning that maybe I’ll get at least a couple more years afterwards with no new major repairs becoming necessary. If it keeps running reasonably well I may even keep that car quite long – one thing I like about it is that it’s old enough I may even be able to do some minor upkeep myself, I recognize most of the parts in its engine for one thing, and it has no computer in it :D (if absolutely necessary, I don’t completely trust my own skills there so if I can pay to get something done I’ll pay.). And there are only very minor rust spots. Perhaps not so good, even I would probably be able to get inside and start it without the keys, so one hopes no self-respecting wanna-be-daring-by-doing-something-illegal teen-ish individual around here will care to touch something that is both very common and quite old… We’ll see.

                  Like

                  2. “Perhaps not so good, even I would probably be able to get inside and start it without the keys, so one hopes no self-respecting wanna-be-daring-by-doing-something-illegal teen-ish individual around here will care to touch something that is both very common and quite old… We’ll see.”

                    Kill switch!

                    Like

                    2. So simple like the boogaloo! put in two or three
                      cut out switchin the starter relay or the coil or the neutral safety

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                    3. When we lived in bahston I used to put a panel of them on the dash.
                      one up, two down, two up, one down or whatever.
                      Then while they are flipping switches sneak up and bash them on the head with your…………sneaker? Don’t forget, it’s bahston. no weapons allowed. oh yeah, cobblestones. That’s what they got

                      Like

          2. And that is exactly what the emergency fund is for: so you can use it instead of the credit card and have to not only pay off the loan, and the interest. Borrowing money in a panic puts you in debt that can be hard to get out of, and people (well I) tend to think that if you owe $1000, hey $200 more is no biggie – and so on to serious debt.
            And it helps protect any savings you do manage to scrape together for other purposes like trips or new computers or a replacement car.

            Like

    4. The attitudes from the different heads of the German states affected by the horrendous floods this spring and summer were fascinating. The Bavarian president said, in essence, we’ll fix what we can, draw on our emergency reserves, and then ask for federal aid. The Saxons and others in the Old East pleaded first for federal aid and more spending by Berlin and the rest of Germany to save them. That may not end well, because the Westerners are still grumbling about the recovery tax on their pensions that was supposed to help the Old East catch up. That tax was supposed to end in 1997 or 1998, IIRC. They’re still paying it.

      Global warming isn’t going to hurt European crops and food budgets, but the floods and cooling sure as heck will. That’s how it has been in the past – not drought but flood that led to starvation. With the large cold-related losses in both hemispheres this year (N and S), watch for food prices to hike again.

      Like

      1. Germany’s flood problems in the East are the result of 50 years of poor maintenance under the Russians and GDR Government. One of the principle responsibilities of my intelligence unit in Germany was to watch the East — mainly East Germany. The floods were an annual thing there.

        I spent a total of ten years in Wiesbaden, Germany between 1971 and 1989. During that time, the Rhine flooded five times. Three of those were during my last tour. When the Rhine floods, it starts in Switzerland and doesn’t end until the river empties into the North Sea at Rotterdam. The Germans I spoke to said it was due to heavier than usual rains, more runoff, and full reservoirs. Colorado empties its reservoirs down in the late fall, and hope they’re replenished in the spring. The Germans used to do the same, but after being caught without enough water several times, they stopped. Now they have floods instead.

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        1. I am told that even more funny is that the Greens had declared a drought ememrgency just prior to the rains, and then when various Green party headquarters were under water, they declared that they would have to find funds to move the drought-emergency action administration to alternate sites.

          Like

                    3. Meanwhile here in CO it is illegal to collect the rainwater that runs off your roof. That water belongs to the State.

                      Like

                  2. Probably someone told the powers that water/irrigation -empires are the most stable type of empire in history, and they are desperate to stay on top. In Oregon you can go to jail for impounding water in anything larger than a rainbarrel. In Oregon. Where it rains?

                    http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130416/NEWS/304160331

                    I mean, they probably got the idea out of Niven’s A World out of Time so kudos there, but somehow they forget that water is a renewable resource, and only scarce in the face of lack of technology.

                    Like

                  3. Gee, Sarah, are you in luck! A new book about Colorado water law just came out. Only 600 pages, I think. *stops, listens* Did someone just yell “incoming?”

                    Um, yeah, some day if you have a few hours or horrible insomnia, ask me about the history of water laws in the US.

                    Like

                  4. How many years of real drought have we had prior? Understand that I just moved here, and really never followed it before. It can take more than one rainy season to fill the reservoir.

                    OTOH, given the political leadership here in CO the could just be stuck on stupid.

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                    2. All Colorado water is spoken for. Some of the watersheds’ water goes west to Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Utah. Some of the watersheds’ water goes east to Nebraska, Kansas etc. And some of the water that ought to go west, gets pumped under the Continental Divide to go east … But its all spoken for in complex accounting. The reservoirs fill from snow pack melt each Spring / Summer.

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  9. One thing. The realization that we’re not that bad-off also comes into play when you’re trying to warn of the dangers of leftist public policy prescriptions. They say, “Hey! We still have (zoos/museums/symphonies/whatever), so things can’t be THAT bad. Stop with the panic-mongering.”

    Never mind that they had symphony orchestras in the camps.

    M

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    1. A lot of entertainment/culture/education stuff suffered bad cuts during the Depression, but (even without counting the New Deal arts programs) there were still zoos and art museums and such. In fact, since museums are free or cheap and often had air-conditioning, they often have booms during bad economic times.

      Most states have a list of all their historical sites, and most of them are free to visit. It’s very educational and pleasant to go on a Sunday drive to visit signs saying that X happened here. You can bring a picnic lunch. You can let the kids run all over battlefields and pioneer sites.

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      1. Curious synchronicity, perhaps, but … it’s interesting to look at this and then at Spielberg’s recent bloviation-quake about how there will be fewer theaters and more people will watch Hollywood’s bulk product at home while an “elite” pays more to watch “more exclusive fare” in theaters….

        In the event of a major breakdown, though, this gets flipped on its’ head.

        Given the minimalist manufacturing techniques and disposable designs in consumer electronics, the folks lucky enough to have their “media room” systems keep running 10 years in will be hosting parties to watch stuff .. meanwhile, actual-theaters will enjoy a renaissance of sorts because they’ll be able to pay for repairs out of profits… and even in the depths of the depression, people paid to be amused* for a while.

        Mew

        * using “amuse” literally here, “suppression of the imagination” ..

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          1. “Hollywood” is .. an interesting concept. An almost feudal structure – very *small* number of people at the top eating very *very* well, a huge number of serfs waiting tables (or worse) hoping for a chance to move up the food chain, and next to no “middle class”.

            At a *guess*, as has happened several times, a group of serfs who have the idea and the skills will capture lightning in a bottle and end up in the upper tiers by accident. (see also how Spielberg and Lucas got their seats at the table.. and note the trash Hollywood was foisting back in the depths of the Carter era when Star Wars debuted, eh?)

            Mew

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            1. Hollywood itself is tanking — most of its production being done elsewhere, in part because of high costs in California.

              The industry itself shares with the lottery a low-cost/high-reward fundamental structure. Changes in technology are increasing this aspect, just as players plopping down wads of moolah to play in an effort to game to play (how much of promotion of a film is based on the exorbitant production costs of the project, as if that translated to on-screen value?) tends to obscure the virtues of making small, carefully calculated investments in pursuit of modest (200 – 300%) profits? It is quite easy to triple your investment on a film costing $5M, rather harder to do so on a $200M film.

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            2. They call it a glamor occupation. You get the same thing with colleges: a handful of tenured professors chewing through ill-paid grad students to do the work.

              Any industry that can pay in hope and peanuts will be structured like that.

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          1. I wouldn’t bet against it….

            Those who shelled out a bit more for a big-screen LED-driven LCD – they last a lot longer than either the incandescent-driven LCD or plasma – will be the last to go dark…

            I also suspect we’re gonna regret doing manufacturing piecemeal in various spots around the globe….

            Mew

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          1. Greek/Latin: I had a ten minute discussion with a co-workers on whether the name Melinda was rooted in the latinate base of “honey” or the greek base for “dark”, while Ms. Melinda was looking at us while we argued as if we had gone insane and were going to start capering around like monkeys. Good days, good days.

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          2. I accept your superior knowledge of French.

            I’ve heard the Greek translation most often, especially where the idiot’s lantern is concerned…

            Mew

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            1. Well, that’s where it gets interesting. You’re thinking ‘amusia,’ which is the no-inspiration thing.

              ‘Amuse’ and ‘amusia’ are “false friends,” things that look like exact cognates but aren’t. I’m very good at discovering these things by accident. Right after I realize that a translation is making no sense. :)

              However, “false friends” are great for puns, just-so stories, and the like.

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  10. This is why I tell you guys not to be getting ready to go hunt squirrels with your teeth, or even sharpening flint knives.

    Now, now. I have two pellet guns, for which a huge supply of ammo is cheap, and which will bring down rabbits, squirrels, and small birds (I’m going to try one on a turkey some time, but i don’t know how successful that will be). I also have a box full of cheap-assed knives, that I bought several years ago with the intention to sell them at the local Flea Market, only to find that at least two other people had the same idea. So I don’t need knives, either.

    So there. :-P

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    2. Save your old bicycle tires and make slingshots. They don’t “wear out”, they don’t break very often, and they’re easy to repair. Perfecting the skill to use one well enough to kill takes time, but you can pick up rabbits, squirrels, and most birds with them, chase off foxes (or nosy neighbors), and ring bells with them. I’ve probably made a dozen of them. They’re also a lot quieter than guns, and rocks are usually plentiful. If you’re out to stop your neighbor from stealing your cabbages, I recommend 3/8″ ball bearings. Warning! Slingshots CAN, if used very skillfully, kill people. Don’t use it unless you know exactly what you’re doing. They can be a toy, but they can also be deadly. I speak from first-hand knowledge. One of my neighbors had watermelons that kept ‘disappearing’. He staked out his patch one night, and hit two 10-year-old boys with rocks. One of them died from a brain clot (circa 1960, lot less capable medical treatment than today).

      Growing up in the rural South in the 1950s and early ’60s as a boy was “interesting” — at least, I found it so. I was the only cadet that actually gained weight during our E&E training… 8^)

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    3. I am very disappointed at the thought that the grey squirrel costume I have been preparing in order to lure squirrels into my yard for their slaughter will be unnecessary. I should probably cancel that order for squirrel language lessons?

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        1. Oh yeah — I have spent years developing and have almost perfected my little squirrely dance. You see, first you set out the traps, then you go out in costume and start the dance (it is derived from the hokey-pokey, so you understand why it is important to speak squirrel) and the little dickens can’t resist joining in.

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          2. I was going to post the 22 second video clip of “dancing the rumba with the squirrel mascot”, but I can’t. I just…can’t

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    1. The guys peddling the snake oil rarely consume their own product. There is a parallel to be drawn between “green” investing and salting mines, but I am too lazy to pursue it.

      Put “Terry McAuliffe” and “Greentech” or “Global Crossing” into a search engine and ask yourself how much of Terry’s own money got put in.

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  12. A couple years ago I saw something change. For the first time my tenants started little garden plots in the backyard of my fourplex. And one family started canning the pears that fell from the tree in the back yard (instead of leaving them to rot on the ground). I tend to rent to twenty-somethings saving for their down payment on their first house, but since the economy has crashed they stay longer and i have fewer vacancies.

    And then there’s the “maker movement” where folks band together to share skills. Make magazine is on the shelves of the best bookstores and even towns as small as Grand Rapids, MI have maker spaces. It is not unusual for members to collaborate on mending broken autos or creating some amazing art project.

    i think we’re seeing society–at least in my end of the woods–making adjustments like you described here. Mind you, a lot of these kids seem like Obama voters, but I try not to judge.

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    1. Between the bite the AHCA will take from their wallets, plus an unpopular war that will be entirely under the watch of the current POTUS, plus the NSA mess (if Bush started it, why didn’t Obama finish it, hmmm?), I wager there will be a number of formerly dedicated Dem voters pretty soon.

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  13. But here? Here we won’t miss a meal. Not most places in the US. We might eat rather lower on the tree. (Given our nutritional requirements, I’ve been stockpiling dried eggs) but we won’t see food riots.

    Over at Ricochet, someone mentioned the “SNAP challenge,” and folks started trading methods to eat on “just” $620 for a family of four.

    Some folks pointed out that a lot of the problem is folks can’t cook “from scratch.” (Scare quotes because by my lights, I don’t do much cooking from scratch– from whole, fresh produce, flour, minimal machines, no prepackaged stuff; by their use, making spaghetti with canned sauce is ‘from scratch.’ Even before I add a can of green beans to the sauce, let alone frying up ground beef and adding the sauce to that.)

    A lot of folks are induced helpless.

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    1. I have good results with Alton Brown’s spaghetti sauce. It takes an afternoon, but I make up a double batch and it lasts me a month or so.

      Of course, it still uses canned tomatoes and tomato paste, so it might not qualify as “from scratch” for the purist. But then again, in most places on most days a canned tomato is the highest-quality berry you can get your hands on.

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      2. The Pioneer Woman’s marinara sauce is pretty good, as well. I can’t find the link on her site, but we found it when we were making her calzones. That was the sauce she made to go with it. It’s excellent – there’s three or four small containers in our freezer this minute.
        And there’s a case of canned tomatoes from Sam’s Club in the pantry, too. It’s just about the only canned thing we buy by the case. Endlessly useful.

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      3. Given that canned tomatoes are often better than “fresh” — because they’re picked ripe instead of under-ripe — canned tomatoes are recommended for sauce.

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    2. I JUST recently passed $10 for the family per day for food. I HAD to. Prices have gone up. I could bring it down again, by having 2 days of vegetable soup, but in summer the guys complain.

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      1. My goto for end of the month is onion, bouillion, any available veggies, and cubed stale bread. It is grey, but it cooks up well in the pressure cooker and is filling. Some sausage livens it up too.

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  14. I know people who are already missing meals due to combinations of age, ill health and catastrophic familial job losses, both locally and online. I don’t have the details but I would assume some grasshopper-like choices figure in there somewhere. I’m thinking there are massive amounts of Americans who don’t have a clue how to do anything for themselves and will be in deep kimshee if their customer service type job goes south.
    Think of those folks that believe you should only buy your meat at the grocery store so no animals will be killed.

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      1. Only on the fringes yet, I think, but it will grow. I worry about this because I’m a soft touch. The lifeboat scenario again. I just keep reminding myself that I have three little faces and a half dozen adult ones, depending on me to take the hard line should it come to that. There is no one else willing or able.

        One of my greatest fears really. Bad guys are easy in comparison.

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        1. Sorry — I meant the people who think store-bought food is magically conjured from thin air. I know there are people on the edge, and there always will be.

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          1. I once caused a college acquaintance, friend of my flatmate, to burst out into tears. She’d never before realized that beef “came from moo-cows.”

            Now that I’m older, I regret I wasn’t more gentle with her.

            I can, however, look back on my history of roommates, and know that I not only fed a lot of people through finances thick, thin, and nonexistent, but I also taught several people to cook from scratch just by hanging out in the kitchen and watching me cook. (Some, I learned this by accident, years later.)

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              1. Yeah, I guess I’m not that soft a touch. LOL
                We do have people over for dinner for reasons other than company.

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                    2. You realize Greebo is our outdoor not-our-cat, right? Last night, while we were eating dinner, he treated us to a show, in which he pursued, beat and ate the largest moth I’ve ever seen, just outside the kitchen window. It was… somehow …. very Roman.

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            2. Wait, you’re kidding — she was in college and she hadn’t figured out where beef came from?

              (actually, it more often comes from castrated bulls than actual cows, but still …)

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              1. You butcher cows when they don’t produce any more. It is called recycling, and by definition it is a good thing.

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        2. I worry about it too, Mobius, but it’s not a matter of POVERTY — it’s that we’ve been so rich that we have people who are DRAWERS at surviving. I’ve been worried about people on the SF fringes. You know them. I know them. Loveliest people in the world, but drawers. Sigh.

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          1. I try to keep that in mind. DW always says, “It’s all about choices.”
            sigh
            mooters and louchers, we got ’em

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      2. I would like to disbelieve those people exist, but I fear it would be a mistake.

        WordPress won’t let me embed an image in a post, so you’ll have to click on the following link. This is what mobiuswolf was referring to re: the folks who “believe you should only buy your meat at the grocery store so no animals will be killed.”

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        1. When I was a kid, my mom was a leader in “cowbelles”– the Cattlemen’s Association Ladies’ group.

          Even in the countryside, kids would insist that milk magically generated at the store.

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  15. When I was a little lad during the first part of WW II, I don’t remember much except that my mother and a neighbor would spend days in our little kitchen canning peaches and whatever else was cheap enough for them to afford and get locally. Then later on after my dad enlisted in the Navy and we went to live with my mother’s parents on a farm and there were eggs because they had chickens and ducks, and even pork when they butchered a hog. My mother didn’t want me to watch that but I was maybe three and curious as anything and went down to watch the men butcher the hog. It never fails to amaze me when people from big cities have no idea where food comes from or how to obtain it without the local supermarket. Not just youngsters either, but adults who are old enough to know better.

    I used to hunt until my knees gave out on me, but I’ve been told by people who are confirmed meat eaters that hunting is wicked and evil because it involves killing. Yet they go to the store and buy chicken, turkey, beef, pork, lamb, and whatever else without a qualm. I’ve pointed out to some of these people that the difference between them and me is that they’re the mafia boss who orders the hit, and I’m the hit man. Both guilty as sin, but they’re horribly offended.

    Too many people in this country are too spoiled and too lazy, and either truly believe or don’t care that there’s no real starvation in this country, unless someone completely avoids food by their own choice or children with deranged parents who starve the children. If someone is starving in the USA it’s because they’re too lazy to go get public assistance which the Dept of Agriculture and others encourage them to do on a daily basis.

    Rant done, now I feel all better and will go rile up the wee dog who needs some attention.

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    1. This is the reason that I believe if/when there is a long-term disruption (more than 5 days) in food deliveries, there will be riots like we’ve never seen before.

      A lot of people point to the blackouts in New York a few years ago, and how well people handled that, but most people were without power for just a comparatively short time. AND it was just one city. Once the deliveries have stopped for a few days, and there’s no indication that it’s going to get better soon, because it’s happening all over, people will lose their s***.

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      1. A lot of that is going to depend on whether there is an end in sight. With Katrina for example, there was aid moving pretty quickly into the effected area, if not New Orleans, so the “rioting” was limited to stealing shit. The US is big enough that we can shift tons of goods out of the way of a (predictable) natural disaster and then back in. I’d be willing to bet that in the days right before Katrina landed Walmart and Target stopped shipping stuff to stores in the affected areas, and then picked up shipping more needed stuff as soon as the roads were open.

        If our Hostess is right–a moderate and gradual decline–we will still be able to do that.

        If she’s wrong and it goes bang, well, that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

        Her prediction is about the rosiest realistic one.

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        1. IIRC, they didn’t stop shipping stuff, they switched it to “survival stuff”– all those things that folks buy a lot of when a storm is coming, and that you’ll need if it actually hits.

          And when the crud actually hit, they set up aid centers.

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      2. Seems fairly obvious to me too. Not too many folks with goats in the garage and market gardens in the back yard, though the number is growing, a little.

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        1. I’m getting kind of scared because when we moved here, there was Goodwill, St. V d’P, and this place run owned by an old couple that uses it as an excuse to drive around everywhere buying tons of stuff at yardsales.

          Now there are a half-dozen permanent “yard sales” in folks’ lawns, several “second hand stores” in empty buildings, and a lot more “I like to visit yardsales” places.

          And yardsales happen all week long.

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      3. Quibble:
        It’s less “people will lose it” than “some groups with a disposition to violent fit-throwing and lack of forethought will lose it.” Yes, they’re people, but a specific sub-group. Most folks at least have SOMESORT of a pantry.

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    2. Some friends of my parents own a buffalo farm. We went to visit when I was 4 or 5 and one of the buffaloes bit my mom. A few months later, my dad came home with a cooler full of steaks and a note for my mom telling her to enjoy her bite of the buffalo that bit her. Everything suddenly clicked and I *understood* where food came from.

      Now, I’ve managed to get our food budget really, really low. I can feed 3 adults on $60 a week, $40 if we stick to soups. I’ve walked friends through using a crock pot and making chicken stock. I have a friend who was going through a tough time financially call me crying because she’d manage to feed herself and her fiance on a whole chicken and some vegetables for a week and she had been sure they were going to starve. She was exaggerating a bit but I don’t think it ever would have occurred to her that she could make food at home if she started from the basics.

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    4. They might be grasping towards the intuition that a clean slaughter is more humane than the less controlled killing in a hunt.

      Folks frequently have some sort of a point, but can’t quite put into words what they think or why it is so.

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  16. Enter the Cynic.

    Why? Why should we lift a finger to head off this “disaster” when every possible outcome is a positive boon to society? The Unproductive Masses either become productive, or die; the Productive Masses will have power beyond their greatest fantasies. (Ever wanted to own slaves? See above re “the Unproductive becoming productive”.) And if the rest of the world crashes out, so what? We saved their sorry asses twice in twenty years; then when we asked for them to put out their share of the ensuing brushfire wars, what do we get? A shitpot of excuses, and “we’re right behind you” (yeah — 15,000 miles behind).

    When I lived in Omaha, there were a group of us (note past tense); when someone needed a ride, or needed to move from one dump to another, they asked for me and my pickup, and I responded. The *one* time I had to move, guess how many of them showed up? Uh-huh — Zilch. Zero. Zip. None, Nil. Nada. So now, someone wants my help — “pay off, or sod off”. Same principle applies to this — freeloaders is freeloaders; only the scale changes.

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    2. “The Unproductive Masses either become productive, or die”

      You’re missing an option for them here: “Become rampaging mobs that take what they need. And then what they want.”

      If people are starving and you have food, they will try and take it from you. If there are more than a couple of dozen of them they will succeed. It is better for all involved if it never gets to that point.

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      1. “Become rampaging mobs that take what they need. And then what they want.”

        Rampaging, fat, starving and stupid mobs. Sounds worse than zombies.
        At least they can’t turn you.

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  17. You might get a kick out of this; it’s the first paragraph of a coast to coast AM recap email I got this morning:
    The Psychology of Evil & Heroism:

    In the middle two hours, renowned social psychologist and creator of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo, discussed this landmark study which saw ordinary college students transformed into either sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. He explained that the goal of the experiment was to understand how “social situational context” plays a profound and underestimated role in influencing behavior. To that end, he noted that the students who played guards in the study were largely anti-war activists that, at first, didn’t even want to adopt the authoritarian role. However, he observed, upon donning their uniform and being surrounded by fellow ‘guards,’ they quickly began demonstrating their power in “creatively evil ways,” which led him to end the study early.

    Interesting assumption baked into that.

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    1. Not a large enough sample, 99 of 100 are drones IMO.
      I’d love to see what happened if he got one human being in that study.

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      2. The guy sounded very nice, but not the sort to realize that “college anti-war activist” isn’t the sort of “gentle and nice” stereotype he had in his head.

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        1. I’m not convinced the results would be different with any other group.
          Except one like this. Boy, couldn’t we have some fun with him?

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          1. Hard to convince without study, but my point was mostly that those folks are not the ones I’d pick to show how it could happen to everybody.

            Possibly because I’m familiar with the sort of damage they’ll brag about doing when the feel justified, all the while insisting that such a thing is always and everywhere wrong.

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            2. Shedding more light. Zimbardo is NOT A NICE GUY AND NOT NAIVE.
              Also he completely rigged this. When the guards failed to go “evil” as he’d predicted, he THREATENED them so they’d play their “proper” roles.
              The experiment is COMPLETELY invalid. And yes, this is known now, because it was in my kid’s book in college.

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  18. Humidity was no longer stifling today but still uncomfortable. Why not skip today and increase the distance tomorrow? asked my brain. Retro me Satanas, I replied and did my minimalist forest mile.

    Started hacking at components of the next big calculation related to my quixotic idea. They’re intended to isolate, in succession, the difficulties the big calculation will involve.

    Toward the end of my walk, I realized I should rehearse my business pitch to a point at which I can deliver it conversationally without looking at the slides. Started pricing PC microphones & checking out recording software.

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