On the Topic of Free College

I read a piece today from Yahoo Finance....over "free university" deals in Europe.  It was kinda comical....they came to some point and suggested that America ought to offer the same deal....free college.  They noted....Germany was already doing it.

I sat there....mostly laughing.  There's some differences between the US and Germany on college.

First, NO German university has any NCAA-related action. No football...no million-dollar coaches...no massive sports complex....no alumni program...no volleyball team for ladies sports...no softball program.

Second, if you screwed around and played drinking games all the way through your first semester...they’d invite you to leave, and you would not find much sympathy with a second chance. Party schools in Germany?  None.  Forget about that angle.

Third, German university programs don’t have a bunch of support staffs with imaginary job descriptions and ample incomes. A German university likely functions with half the staffs that most US colleges have.

Fourth, towns around the university programs in Germany have a high value on the students...mostly because they go to recruit them to sign up as residents of the town....getting to the 100k, 200k, or 300k level....which means more handouts from the national government. This relationship to the town, makes the university a pull partner of the local city and of value. Most cities run more transit buses through a university district...subways are added...and they are part of the local community. 

Fifth. Cops who protect the German university...are city cops or state cops. There are no hired thugs or wannabe cops patrolling a German university, nor is the cost dumped onto the college. Nor are the legal proceedings separate. If you do something stupid on a German campus...you get a city judge, and the DA after you....so you don’t have to worry about getting expelled....you get actual real jail-time, with no campus lawyer helping you.

Sixth and final, all these instructors and professors are part of a national level of pensions and benefits. Some guy is watching the whole trend, and ensuring that stupid individual university administrators aren’t lining up some guy for a $300k a year pension deal. If some German governor woke up tomorrow and got wind that some professor in his state is about to retire and get more monthly income than his job....someone would be dragged to the state capital and be asked some pretty difficult questions, and it wouldn’t be a pleasing situation.

They can offer free tuition...the question is....would US university programs be willing to offer the same deal? My guess is...NO. I should point it....it generally takes 4.5 to 5 years to get a bachelor’s degree in Germany. And it’s around seven years if you count in the master’s degree.

I should also note....they also don’t run up bogus ethnic studies degrees, how-to-feel-good physic 116 classes, or Bigfoot studies courses. Got a professor who gets into trouble with some student for relationship woes? They turn the evidence to a state prosecutor and let him handle the mess from that point on...no worries for the university in terms of legal issues.

The Club

In twenty-two years of traveling around with the Air Force....I probably entered at least fifteen Enlisted/NCO Clubs along the way.  It was the social side of the Air Force....sometimes being a bit humorous, and sometimes being a one-star marginal place where you just wanted to sit and sip a beer for twenty minutes.

I came to a number of conclusions about these clubs.

1.  Until the early 1990s....no one ever cared if they made a profit or not.  Suddenly, almost overnight.....a club had to be profitable, and you started to see managers go fairly frequently.  The ones that stayed.....invented all kinds of gimmicks....and they cut zero profit situations entirely.  It was like day and night, in just a year or two.

2.  Every single club throughout the 70s and 80s....had a room in the back where the senior NCOs would gather and play poker.  It was their home, away from home.  They drank while they played, and I imagine that a quarter of them needed alcohol rehab.  At some point in the 1990s....these rooms rapidly started to disappear.  Maybe it was the type of entertainment that looked bad, or just a whole generation of NCOs retired.

3.  For some reason, almost every single club could hustle up and lay out a fabulous Sunday buffet dinner which attracted just about everyone on base.  But from Monday to Friday....this was the last place on Earth that you wanted to go for noon lunches.  It was like an entirely different crew running the place on Sundays.

4.  I can remember twenty-five-cent pitchers of beer in 1979.  That basically all disappeared in the early 1990s as the anti-alcohol agenda came into play.  The cop patrols in the parking lot?  Yeah, that started about the same time in 1990.  The problem with profits?  Well....yeah, that started about the same time too.

5.  For years and years....the Ramstein club had live entertainment at least five nights a week.  You could walk in on a Thursday evening and there would be four-hundred folks sitting around.  Live entertainment today?  If lucky....they  might run something up once a week.

6.  I spoke to a NCO a couple of years ago and asked them what the chief draw of the local NCO Club was, and he admitted that they were running a mystery dating game agenda, and that would usually draw around a hundred folks on a Friday night. No band?  No.  No DJ?  No.   It was reality dating as entertainment.  I questioned this guy.....how could this draw any crowd?  And he simply admitted that it was fairly lame, but this was "safe" and would pass the base morals agenda easily.

7.  In all the time I ever spent in an Air Force Enlisted/NCO club.....I've only witnessed two fights.  The first one was in 1977, and between three drunk guys over one gal.  The SPs arrived....totted the three off to the jailhouse, and the gal just walked out the front door with some fourth guy.  The second fight was between two drunk housewives....arguing over something of a nature involving a spilled drink.  The truth is....Air Force guys just weren't the type to fight much over anything....even when drunk.

8.  Bingo was a gimmick to draw in Asian wives of Air Force guys.  I worked with a guy who was hired by the club to run their bingo operation.  In a normal one-night operation.....my associated hinted that over $10,000 would easily run through the bingo operation.  I asked about the profit take, and he said it was almost zero.  The club's whole game was to make it last two hours and ensure they drank and ate a fair amount.....which was where they made profit.

9.  The worst club I ever went into....was an annex of the main club.  I actually showed up on opening night....shocked at bright colors, bright lights, pool tables in the open, and a modern-style bar.  The burger bar was four-star and I was amazed at the offerings of the club.  Six months go by, and I show up at the same club on the second occasion....finding it a dark, shadowy place....no pool tables, just open floor.....and weird music in the background.  Everyone was dressed weird, acted weird, and you felt like you were at some San Francisco bar.  I quickly sipped through one brew, and left.  Four months later....they busted the place one night for immoral activity in the bathroom, and some hint of drug activity.

Clubs aren't like clubs of the 1970s, or for that matter....of the 1980s....or for that matter.....of the 1990s.  Most clubs have been modernized over the last decade....offer up commercial style food, and have a small pub/bar for the marginal crowd that might show up for one single drink.  The fear of drinking on base?  I think it weighs heavily upon folks today.  In 1979.....you might have three-hundred folks fairly drunk on a Friday night at the Rhein Main Air Base NCO club.  A typical club today on a Friday night?  There might be one guy drunk, and you can put a 50-50 bet on him not avoiding the cops and some arrest.

A different world.

My Lego Story

I was walking down the street the other day, in the shopping district, and came to the one-and-only Lego stores in town.  That's all they deal in.....Lego stuff.

I browsed at the window for several minutes and then came to the high-end choices.....a Simpsons house, for the equivalent of roughly $240.

It's an awful lot.  Course, it's time-consuming as well.  I'd take a guess that it'd take pretty much an entire Sunday afternoon to put the whole thing together.

And then?  What?  How exactly will you display your Simpson's house?  Will your wife allow it on the coffee table?  Is there any place that it'll fit in the cubicle of your office?  Will you even display it?

A toy for a kid?  I kinda doubt it.  I'd suspect that you'd have to be at least eight or nine....to read through the instructions and assemble it.  But how many kids would want to sit there for four hours and assemble such a thing?

I'd almost like to stop and ask how many they sell in a year, but I suspect it's more for looks than actual sales.  At best.....I'd guess that a dozen get sold.....mostly bought by girlfriends for their geeky boyfriend.

In the 1970s.....nothing like this would have ever been sold in any town or at any major store.  The minute you spoke of a $50 Lego deal.....it was a no-go.  Today?  Ample funds, wild ideas, and a natural tendency to do crazy things.

On the adjoining shelf was a pirate ship, which ran into the $400 range.  It was double the number of parts and man-hours.

Yeah, for me....it just begs a lot of questions on common sense.  But apparently, we've lost that quality of life.

The Problem With Cultural Evolution

There's an interesting case coming up in Colorado.  I doubt if the national media will pick up on it or discuss it much.

The case relates to the state's new laws over medical marijuana, and a private company's rules on employment.  Company X (a satellite TV service) has an employee.  The employee is a quadriplegic who has been advised by a Colorado doctor to utilize medical marijuana, which is legally sold in the state.  The company has a drug-testing program, which marijuana is one of those drugs that is listed on the forbidden list.

The chief reason that the company will say is that they are fearful that employees might show up at the work-place, with lingering affects of the drug in their system, and cause safety issues (for themselves or the public).

The guy in this episode, had been with the company for three years, and the original drug test occurred in 2010, with dismissal as the result.  The original court episode resulted in the company being proven innocent...the dismissal was allowed.  The appeal?  Again went for the company.  So we are at the level of the state supreme court listening to the case.  Personally, I expect them to render for the company again, and the case will move to the national level for one last chance.

The medical experts tend to side mostly with the guy in this case.  His health has improved with the use of marijuana.  Safety experts will generally side with the company.

If you go to the Fortune 500 companies.....almost all of them have some type of drug testing requirement.  You could work for them for over forty years and never get tested.  You could be tested yearly.  What generally happens within the Fortune 500 companies is that an event occurs which makes a division chief question the individual in question.  The HR office will send a note to this guy and require him within X-number of hours to report to a nearby lab and give a sample.  Failure to do so.....results in automatic dismissal.  It's usually written into your contract.

The problem here....is that we have an evolution going on with medical marijuana where one part of the nation has progressed on, and the standards of the remaining nation remain with certain rules.  There is more than ample proof that serious usage of marijuana disrupts your thinking process and could potentially cause an accident.  Hence.....even for buying medical marijuana.....they generally instruct or require you to leave the premises of the "store" and go home.  They don't even want you smoking this in their parking lot.

All of this leaves a regular user with limited options for employment.  A Piggly Wiggly shelf stocker, a gas station clerk, a french-fry guy at Burger King, or a pizza delivery guy.  At some point a decade down the line....some journalist is going to write up some big long story about the woeful problem with medical marijuana users and the unfairness of laws and forced drug-testing.  Some political party is going to promise a safe conversion for the nation, and we will all wonder a year or two later why accident rates have jumped a couple of percent.  

Battlestar III?

I sat this weekend....reading up on entertainment news and came to this odd story.  Someone has picked up Battlestar Galactica, and decided that there might be a third series out there.

I thought.....hmmm....so this story would tell the rest of the story of version two on Earth?  No.

What the writer of the article suggested was that they'd just rebuild the entire general script and tell the story fresh....yet again.

How different was version one versus versus version two?  It was an entirely different story, with different angles that you just couldn't do in 1978.  In 2004, you had real graphics....so you could build up six minutes of every show with some dynamic battle in space.

About a year after the 2004-version started up.....I happened to catch an episode and was amazed at the storyline, and characters.  It was crisp.  It was leading you onto various mystery elements, and motivating you to come back for the next show.

How to build version three?  I'm not sure that it can be done in a different way, and lay out a totally different outcome.  It's amazing.....so much creativity around, and the best that folks can suggest.....is to just redo it once again.  Thankfully, we haven't had idiots come to do this with Gilligan's Island or Gunsmoke.

White House Stuff

After this recent ex-Army nutcase climbed the fence and got onto the White House grounds.....the Secret Service is having another round of discussions on improving the safety of the President.

Having been to DC, and walked the entire circle around the White House....I can say that I have a better prospective about this now.  The structure itself.....is one of the most protected sites in America....yet one of the most viewed sites in America.
I'd take a guess that well over forty-thousand people will walk around the front or back on an average week-day.  In August, on a Saturday....there's probably 200,000 people who will come by tour bus or just walk by the front or back.

In essence, it just isn't an easy site to offer protection.  There's the fence, and there's roughly three-hundred feet of open ground that you have to make your way through....to find a dozen-odd guards standing there with machine-guns ready to greet you.

What I expect to eventually to occur....some Jihad group will figure some innovative way to get into the place before they are stopped.   At that point, the Secret Service will stand up and admit the location is not working.  Yeah....we might actually see them suggest moving the President to a new White House....some secluded mountain valley in central Virginia....with triple the number of security personnel and moats as part of the design.

It might be a decade away.....maybe two decades away.  But this open-access environment that exists there......will eventually prove to be a bigger problem than they are willing to accept.

What Could Have Happened

As a kid sitting around in my last year of high school.....I had an associate who would engage me into this "job of a lifetime"....forest ranger.  We probably spent at least an hour a week discussing the idea.

All of this came from some Lassie episodes, some Sunday afternoon forest fire documentaries, and write-ups in the news of this really 'great' profession.

Even after I'd signed up with the Air Force recruiter, these sessions over the forest ranger job idea would come up.  The excitement, I came to realize....was a job where you mostly drove around in an old Ford pick-up with "US Forestry" on the side, standing in some shack 200 feet above the ground, and wearing a uniform.  Sadly, after a while, I questioned where exactly this would lead onto.

Years later, I came to realize that this was one of the lowest paid jobs in the US government, and getting that cabin on the forestry reservation was the only plus-up when you added up the salary and benefits.

I came across an article this week....a rookie US forest ranger....makes $20,908 a year.  Figure thirty-percent taken for state/fed taxes, social security.  Then figure at least $250 a month for health insurance.  You might make $1,000 a month....roughly what a kid would make if he'd gone to the Marines or Army.

The free cabin?  Well, that helps.  Course, you probably still have a 1974 Ford pick-up, and the uniform might be issued out so you don't have to pay for it.

Moving up?  If you actually had a degree, and put in a year or two....you might get up around $30,000 a year.  Course, you'd have to ask yourself....after spending four lousy years in college....is this forestry deal worth all the hassle?

For some reason, I'm kinda glad the Air Force recruiter got to me....beating out the logic of my associate in high school.  I might be sitting in Montana today....wearing some green forestry suit, driving a beat-up forestry truck, and climbing 288 steps to reach my shack above the trees.  My daily priority?  Mostly checking picnic sites, watching for bears, and calling the cops when I noticed marijuana planted in my section of the forest.  Maybe once a year, I'd notice a fire, and get a pat on the back for reacting to the emergency.

Life has a funny way of making sure you don't do something stupid.