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1/31/2020

So, this study just got released before the holidays.
Taking this with a huge grain of salt (like any study), this is still an interesting look just for it's rarity.
Short version of the story: an Obama era program called Gainful Employment tracked university programs that qualified for federal student aid, federal loans in particular. The big data points were the institution, degree program, debt taken on to achieve that program, and first year earnings after graduation.
There's only two years worth of data, for the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 academic years. The Trump administration got rid of Gainful Employment regulations. Why depends on who you ask, but it looks like the penalties targeted for-profit institutions while giving public and non-profit institutions a pass.
But even if the regulations are gone, the data remains. We now have a snapshot in the recent past of about 40K different college programs, the mean and median debts taken on to graduate in those programs, and the median annual earnings of someone who graduated in it.
From there, the program extracted two more points.
One, Debt to Earnings ratio. Effectively, debt as a percentage of annual income. (A lower number here is better)
Two, Gainful Employment Status. The old regulations that this data was set for put programs in three categories, based on whether or not the debt incurred was a reasonable percentage of earnings. The categories were pass, fail, and zone (a kind of probationary in-between segment). The math on how this was calculated, along with ways to adjust on your own if you wish, is included in the data table.
This data doesn't answer a question like, "is a degree worth it?"
This data calculates odds on institutions, degree programs, debt levels, and known earnings to let individuals decide.
And to my knowledge, this is the only dataset of it's kind that actually held university programs accountable to the future earnings of its pupils.
It's not comprehensive. It's not easy, or simple, or definitive.
But it's better than anything else I've ever seen.
(Check it out)

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One age of maturity for everything

1/1/2020

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As I was just saying. We don't have an overcultural rite of passage (OroP), just arbitrary rulings. Might as well make it one across the board and declare one age the age for all adult privileges.

I've heard the argument of it being 25 to account for brain development. Unfortunately, brain development is not maturity (at least, not given the number of fortysomethings I don't trust not to blow their own brains out with a nerf gun).

17-18 is for all intents and purposes the age of divergence in this country, where we move from high school to something else. Graduation is the closest thing we have to an OroP mentioned above.

Shit, although my teacher friends will probably blow fuses at the thought, I'd even be down for lowering the age of it all to 17 or 16. Let the early fuckups happen when they're still at least part-time in a nationally structured environment.

Ideally, we'd have parents guiding their progeny through this in stages.

The problem with relying on parents is that, for it to work, you need parents that are There, Willing, and Able. And nowhere near as many kids as you think have the complete set.

And governments make shitty parental substitutes.

And while adulthood isn't a binary concept socially, it absolutely is a binary concept legally.

But where it becomes chickenshit is where we're more than willing to consider 18 year olds adults when it suits our needs (no longer educated on the public dime, a draftable military force) but balk when the concept of them using adult vices comes into play.

And even then, as a society we're not above takes backsies when we feel like it. A fifteen year old commits a heinous enough crime and "try them as an adult" comes in. As if the horse hasn't already left the barn there. It's societally selfish bullshit.

I've led memorial services for people I couldn't buy a beer for. That's bullshit.

I absolutely get everything about the idea of graded responsibility.

But there's a huge fucking gap between "good idea," and "needs to be a law."

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Girls, here's what it's like to be a guy.

1/1/2020

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Several thousand years ago, both my ancestors and yours made a decision: women stay in the cave, guys go out to fight lions, other tribes, and what have you.

Cavepeople who made the opposite decision, or who didn't differentiate sexually, were all killed off.

And every subsequent society that so much as dipped its toe in the waters of sending women into battle were wiped out. So much that we're not even sure how many they were, and to what extent.

Amazons? (who were really Scythians or Dacians) Wiped out.

Boudicca's Celts? Wiped out.

Vikings? Wiped out, then the people who wiped them out were wiped out a few weeks later. (Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings, respectively).

Why?

Battlefield attrition. Male losses are linear, female losses are exponential. Losing a man means we lose a man. Losing a woman means losing her and every possible descendant she could have had. As individuals it's not apparent. But when it happens on a tribal level, or on a national level? It's extremely noticeable.

On top of that, pre-1st world medicine childbirth was every bit as potentially lethal as tangling with a mastodon or going to war. So not only did societies who didn't have that separation take exponential losses, they kept the same losses that affected societies that left women home. How well you swing a sword doesn't mean shit if you have complications, even with your midwife pulling out all the stops.

This is why "women and children first" is a thing.

It's also why, when you do see women in positions of power throughout history, it's almost always the case to see them become so ~after~ they've become mothers.

So right away, men are and always have been an expendable gender. That is why the "hero" has a place in our culture. He's the one who survives what kill others, living long enough to actually breed.

Those who die before they can become lost. That's why rejection is such a big thing for guys. It means they vanish from history.

Guiding and manipulating that has determined vast courses of our history.

Has it conspired to keep men in power? Yes and no.

It's conspired to keep ~some~ men on top. Those who win competitions. Those who come back successful from quests and so on. Slay a dragon, win the hand of the princess. Become crispy dragon nibblings? Some other putz with a lance is on the way. Princess isn't going to worry about her hand, someone will win it.

And yes, women have colluded in some ways with this, usually on a "lesser of two evils" scale. Surviving tales of courtly love are chock-full of near suicidal risks being taken for the sake of a smile, a kiss if he's lucky. Not ideal, but encouraging these hotheaded guys with swords to show some manners and compassion beats the hell out of letting them plunder until they get bored.

Think that doesn't apply today?

Look at any American high school and ask yourself which boys, individual and group, are probably getting laid the most. If the words "football team" and "captain of" were your answers, congratulations, you've been paying attention. Risking lifelong injury to include brain-damaging concussions is just the latest in a long line of risking injury for pussy that young men have been doing for ages. Today's quarterback is the latest incarnation of the knight in shining armor. Because possible gruesome death is always worth guaranteed ass.

And that, in very broad strokes, is how a woman's superpower became a man's commodity. And our entire social structure throughout time was centered around that. Religions, laws, nations, wars, all of it came down to that.

Then in the last 200 years, we as a society started tearing it all down.

The technological change (rubber condoms in the mid-1800's, the pill in 1960)

The political change (the 18th Amendment, Title IX)

The social change (The {partial} destigmization of women's inclusion in all-male institutions, outside the home careers, divorce, sexual activity of all kinds out of wedlock)

I say "partial," because we all know the shaming and stigma never really went away. It just lost official status in a lot of places. Because when we tore it apart, as a society we never thought to replace them with anything. We were so intent on tearing down the walls, we never stopped to check if any of them were load-bearing.

Oops.

This is NOT necessarily a bad thing. Walls needed to come fucking down. But we also need to have some hard hats and first aid kits, because the debris from above will be falling for a while. Millennia of social evolution is being turned on it's head in 200 years.

Which it could be worse. Take a look at the middle east. A century ago, all of it was sending tribute to the Ottoman sultan. Saudi Arabia didn't abolish slavery until the Beverly Hillbillies was on the air. And women only gained the right to vote last year. They're packing into a few decades what the west has been slowly chugging along to since the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, a lot of the west looks down their nose at the Middle east. But they're moving harder and faster than we ever did.

Growing pains.

Speaking of which, what's that last 200 years done to the guys?

Well, for one, the force of "heroism" left the physical realm. The way to wealth and power wasn't to be the big guy on a horse with a sword anymore. It was to buy and sell and therefore get rich (social realm) or make a great idea and get rich (the mental realm). This really kicked off post-WWII with the rise of the suburbs. Climbing the corporate ladder became the new quest. Then blazing one's own career path became the new quest.

And in the mix, four things happen:

One, as women increasingly work and live outside the home, guidelines of etiquette and protocol are glued together ad hoc. What took centuries of refinement is now being slapped together with duct tape. Nobody knows how to behave anymore, or why. And lawsuits, anger, and career disarray all around is the result. Bear in mind, this is NOT the fault of women moving into the workplace. It is the result of making up social rules as you go along. This occurs for inside and outside the workplace.

Two, the new quest is something we can train for. It's a video game. If one way doesn't work, try another, and another, and another. It's not like a normal competition, where you play once and win or lose until the next challenge. You start up your quest again whenever you want to. "Your princess is in another castle." Onward to the next!

Three, We currently stand at an apex of sex in advertising and media. The old timeline of porn led from national geographic and catalogs out to mainstream pornography (if you could get it without your neighbors finding out). If you were lucky,

Then the internet arrived. Now, not only could you find pornography, you could order it like a Chinese takeout menu. Any attribute, any action, any quantity. The power of choice was in your hands.

The next step was personalization. There's a scene in "The Social Network," when Zuckerberg points out that a site he created didn't crash the Harvard computer network because it was full of pretty girls. It was full of pretty girls that people on that campus ~knew~.

Ten years after that scene happened in real life, and we have Facebook and we have the technology to see anyone you know dressed in anything they've allowed someone to post a picture of. Meanwhile our schools are completely lost in the sauce because there's a sexting epidemic among high and even middle schoolers as the new commodity in porn is personalization of acquaintances. What's a porn celebrity compared to the classmate who sits across from you during math?

Four, America's collective stance on sexual assault is a Gordian knot. Don't believe me? Define rape. No matter what definition you give me, I can give you fifty more legal definitions in the U.S. alone. That's one for every state, plus the UCMJ. And that's just the legal ones. The FBI already has two definitions. That's not including differing definitions used by researchers and pundits, which can go all the way from "penetration or mounting against one's will" to "any and all manner of PIV."

There's a number of problems with the phrase, "try teaching boys not to rape," but right at the top has to be, "how the fuck can we pull that off with no consensus as to what it actually is?"

Guys are lost in the sauce because our culture has failed them. But sad to say, ladies, they've failed you as well.

So, how to navigate this clusterfuck?

Well, ladies, there's a few ways.

One: Intel is king on the battlefield. And in the social realm, you almost always have more than any given guy. The question is how you act on it. This is especially with regards to dealing with Schodiger's rapist. In the first few seconds of seeing him, you've already determined if he's worth your time. Your next interactions have the end game of seeing him on his merry way with minimal interaction. You've probably figured all of this out before he's said his first line. Use the fact that you're three moves ahead to your own advantage.

Two: Hand in hand with remembering your advantage is how to communicate that. He's coming from an arena where someone tells him to fuck off by swinging an axe at his head. You're coming from a battlefield where someone tells you to fuck off over tea by blessing your heart. If he can't hear you from over there, and you’re the one trying to get the idea across, then it's up to you to meet him halfway, or even beyond.

Three: If Schrodiger's rapist is a thing, then again, use the intel you've got. You've already scanned the guy for his worthy of your time, scan a little more. Any bulges in his clothes that could be weapons? Any knife clips on the pockets? How drunk is he? What kind of drunk is he? Does he have friends? Do they look like they'd stop him from being stupid or egg him on? Where are the exits? How far away? What can you grab, throw, break, or spill if the shit hits the fan? You’re already thinking three-dimensionally in the social arena, don't start to think in black and white just because you might have to get physical. Spilling someone's drink on yourself and running to the girl's room before losing him in the crowd is just as effective way of ditching SR as bullshitting him, telling him to fuck off, or macing him, as needs be. Princess, rescue thyself. While I'm on the subject...

Four: Being a self-rescuing princess isn't just a catchphrase. It's the price you pay for walking out of that tower. Insist that you "shouldn't have to" watch your six, read cues, deescalate, or use force is insisting the ceiling not hit you while refusing to use a hard hat, after knocking down all those walls. You can call for it all you like. In 60 years, if we don't have resistance, it might even work. In the meantime, rescue yourself like you mean it.

Five: All your even remotely hetero male coworkers/friends/colleagues have thought about you naked. Yes, him too. They've probably thought about fucking you. What they haven't done is let it affect whatever they do from day to day. Most will probably not admit it. Especially if confronted. That's what sets off that nice guy vibe. It's the fact that their own bodies are calling them liars. And it will continue until we make it socially acceptable to admit so and move on.

Let’s explore this new world together, shall we?

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Wow

One age of maturity for everything

Girls, here's what it's like to be a guy.

Jay Peterson

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Wow

One age of maturity for everything

Girls, here's what it's like to be a guy.

﻿Jay Peterson﻿

Archives

Categories

Certa Bonum Certamen

Jay Peterson