How much education can you afford?

I don’t usually discuss education, though I feel strongly about the subject, but as a college student who isn’t exactly rolling in cash, this topic had to be written about.

ThinkProgress (a “news” site that always leaves me wondering exactly how many “glaucoma” patients they have on staff*) has apparently taken issue with something that Romney said recently (surprise, surprise…not). Specifically they had a problem with this part of his speech on the 27th in Virginia.

I think this is a land of opportunity for every single person, every single citizen of this great nation. And I want to make sure that we keep America a place of opportunity, where everyone has a fair shot. They get as much education as they can afford and with their time they’re able to get and if they have a willingness to work hard and the right values, they ought to be able to provide for their family and have a shot of realizing their dreams.

Oh I get what they think they are upset about, but honestly they are just looking for a reason to dislike Romney. If they were paying any attention to his record they would know they were being ridiculous, but really…if a website posts an article named “Four Reasons Why The Court’s Decision To Uphold Obamacare Is Good News For The Economy” they aren’t really trying to be taken seriously anymore.

But I digress.

People are trying to make this statement look like Romney doesn’t care about the poor and don’t want them to get an education, but that’s just ridiculous!

This is the comparison they are making. God, I hope I’m never this stupid.

See the key word here is “afford” and that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.**

The definition of afford:

1. To be able to do, manage, or bear without serious consequence or adverse effect.

2. To be able to meet the expense of; have or be able to spare the price of.

- Dictionary.com

When you bring this term into a conversation of “can I afford this 60″ flat screen TV” it actually means “Do I have this money in my bank account right now?” Or “Will I be able to pay this off with the job I have?”

When you are talking about something such as a smart investment opportunity or education, the question becomes “can I spare the money right now for the pay off later?”

When I went back to school I weighed the cost very carefully. I was very aware of the amount I would have to take out in federal and private loans and I considered whether I could afford the cost and then decided that I couldn’t afford to not return to school.

Then, of course, you run into people *cough99%’scough* who complain that they spent SO much money that they couldn’t afford on their education and now they can’t find jobs and they can’t pay back all those loans they took out while getting degrees in Underwater Basket-weaving and Canadian Studies and Music Therapy. (Those last two are actual degrees…I sincerely hope that the first one is not.) Or perhaps one of these other, equally pointless and wasteful, degrees.

Can these people afford to get these degrees? (Well clearly they couldn’t, or they wouldn’t have been camping out in New York City, protesting other people’s better college choices). The only people who could afford that sort of degree would be someone like Paris Hilton, with outrageous amounts of family money (and even Paris isn’t that stupid, she, to my knowledge, never went to college. Instead she just started her own companies and became successful…without college, imagine that.) Instead maybe they should have gone to get a degree in something that could help them get a good career. Instead of dicking around in Women’s Studies majors, maybe they should have gone to nursing school. Instead of majoring in Religion (sorry Dylan***) maybe they should have gone to Business school or at the very least gotten a teaching degree.

Yes, I’m aware that the cost of college is outrageous, but you can only blame the government for that. You can’t blame them for your stupid choice of major, but youcanblame the government for subsidizing every stupid degree that colleges make available.

Wait, you say, I had to get a college degree to get a good job.

Bullshit. I’ve had good paying, full time jobs, that never once cared about whether I had a degree or not. You either haven’t looked in the right place, or you are looking for a job you will “enjoy”. I will admit, those full time jobs were boring as hell and I hate them, but I was also independent and made plenty of money to do whatever I wanted after paying my rent and saving a little.

But, you say, I want a job I will enjoy. I want a career, so I have to get a degree because those jobs won’t hire me without a degree.

Once again, blame the government and the subsidization of colleges. 50 years ago, people got college degrees for jobs that needed serious training. Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, (some) Scientists. General jobs didn’t all come with a “those without college degree need not apply” disclaimer. The government subsidized and then degrees, the likes of which wouldneverget you a job, began popping up all over the place just to reel in the students.

So even if your broke can you ‘afford’ college? Well that depends on whether you have a plan and whether you know what degree to get to carry out that plan and whether you are willing to do the work to become successful. If you have those three things anyone can afford to go to college, that’s what Romney meant.

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*No offense to those people I know who have LEGITIMATE pain management issues that are helped by a little mary-jane, but I think it’s clear this stuff (or whatever they are taking) is not helping the writer’s at ThinkProgress to ‘progress’ anywhere but the snack food aisle.

**Sort of like how the word “fair” and “equal” have somehow gained new, interesting, twisted definitions for liberals.

***That is what my brother majored in…

Honestly can’t figure out if this #OccupyWallstreet supporter on twitter is serious or satire.

I’m hoping it’s satire of the #OccupyWallstreet movement, since if it’s not…this person is quite honestly one of the most stupid and a bit, in his stupidy, evil.

I’ll let his time line speak for him.

Just take a few minutes to peruse these tweets. Get pissed off, rip out some hair, scream, or just laugh…that’s what I did.

Here are a few of my responses to him.

Now, keep in mind. This could be a parody so good that it could create and corollary to Poe’s Law. That it’s difficult to distinguish between parodies of extreme left socialists and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane.

I certainly can’t tell. Unless the owner of the twitter account admits to being a parody of socialists, then I doubt anyone will be able to tell.

I also know that this person’s complete and utter stupidity (which can’t be cured) and ignorance (which could be cured…if they weren’t stupid) are not indicative of the entire movement. Unlike liberals I understand that one person in a group can be a racist/idiot/homophobe/religious fundamentalist/etc. without that meaning the entire group suffers from those shortcomings.

In fact I had a, slightly, more intelligent exchange on the Occupy Arkansas facebook page. More intelligent in that the main contributor seemed to at least understand math and had the ability to research to some degree, not more intelligent in any way that I would consider grand. After all, this is still a person that is “organizing” a protest against other people making money and creating jobs.

Then again, the person I was talking to still didn’t have much respect for freedom of speech, as he deleted all of my comments and blocked me from commenting on the page later that day. That’s why I can’t show you that exchange.

When it comes right down to it, I’ve conversed with enough of these people by this point and seen enough video and posters from the protest, that I can make an educated opinion of the movement as a whole.

And believe me, that opinion is very, very unflattering.

And that’s pretty much where my coverage of the Occupy Wallstreet protests will end, unless something big happens with it.

My Response to Peter Singer’s Solution for World Poverty: Part II

I’m back!

Let’s jump right back into Singer’s essay shall we. (Part I here)

In his 1996 book, Living High and Letting Die, the New York University philosopher Peter Unger presented an ingenious series of imaginary examples designed to probe our intuitions about whether it is wrong to live well without giving substantial amounts of money to help people who are hungry, malnourished or dying from easily treatable illnesses like diarrhea. Here’s my paraphrase of one of these examples:

Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can’t stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed —but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security it represents.

Bob’s conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. Unger agrees. But then he reminds us that we, too, have opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give to organizations like UNICEF or Oxfam America. How much would we have to give one of these organizations to have a high probability of saving the life of a child threatened by easily preventable diseases? (I do not believe that children are more worth saving than adults, but since no one can argue that children have brought their poverty on themselves, focusing on them simplifies the issues.) Unger called up some experts and used the information they provided to offer some plausible estimates that include the cost of raising money, administrative expenses and the cost of delivering aid where it is most needed. By his calculation, $200 in donations would help a sickly 2-year-old transform into a healthy 6-year-old —offering safe passage through childhood’s most dangerous years. To show how practical philosophical argument can be, Unger even tells his readers that they can easily donate funds by using their credit card and calling one of these toll-free numbers: (800) 367-5437 for Unicef; (800) 693-2687 for Oxfam America.

Now you, too, have the information you need to save a child’s life. How should you judge yourself if you don’t do it? Think again about Bob and his Bugatti. Unlike Dora, Bob did not have to look into the eyes of the child he was sacrificing for his own material comfort. The child was a complete stranger to him and too far away to relate to in an intimate, personal way. Unlike Dora, too, he did not mislead the child or initiate the chain of events imperiling him. In all these respects, Bob’s situation resembles that of people able but unwilling to donate to overseas aid and differs from Dora’s situation.

If you still think that it was very wrong of Bob not to throw the switch that would have diverted the train and saved the child’s life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also very wrong not to send money to one of the organizations listed above. Unless, that is, there is some morally important difference between the two situations that I have overlooked.

I don’t think that anyone would claim that Bob’s action were right, but that has a lot more to with why he chose to let the child die. He did it to save his car.

Now I have not read Unger’s book and Singer admits that he paraphrased the argument, so I am going to put the blame for this strange little combination of a Strawman fallacy and the fallacy of Poisoning the Well directly on Singer. Why these two? Because Singer is both corrupting the actual arguments of the people that oppose him, by assuming that their arguments are all about keeping their money for themselves and not helping others, and making them look like monsters who would rather let a child die than sacrifice their material possessions.

First lets address the fact that the hypothetical situation that Unger/Singer puts to us is extraordinarily unlikely to ever happen. Any man who loved his car that much would never park it on an active railroad siding, in fact, as the car was an investment, he likely wouldn’t have driven it much at all. Never mind the fact that if the child was too far away to hear a runaway train coming at him down the track and too far away to hear Bob shouting at him, he is likely to far away for Bob to see him the first place.

Now let’s address, without considering Bob’s action of saving his car instead of the child, whether switching a runaway train to another railway track would have been a smart thing to do.

I am not a railroad engineer, I doubt many of you reading this are. I don’t know what sort of damage I could do to a train by switching a runaway train onto a separate track could do. By saying it’s a runaway train I’m going to assume they mean the brakes are out, so it’s going very fast. So will it tip over if I switch the tracks and cause it to jerk to side suddenly? Is it a passenger train? If it is, then tipping it over could kill or injure hundreds of passengers. What if it’s a train that is carrying hazardous chemicals or waste? If it tips over in that case, the waste or chemicals could explode or seep into the surrounding environment. Depending on how close we are to a city, that could also kill or injure hundreds or thousands of people.

So Singer has simplified things down, but ended up not giving us enough information to actually make an ethical decision. In either of the situations I just laid out, the death of that child, though regrettable and awful, would be the better option. Especially if there is a possibility that the train can be stopped safely further down the track.

Now you might say “Well how does that apply to solving world hunger? Maybe you tore up that comparison, but giving to UNICEF or some other charity to help feed children would still be a good thing right? There couldn’t possibly be a bad outcome from that.”

Well that depends on what you see as a bad outcome I suppose. What do these charities actually do? As far as I know, they feed people, bring them aid. There is nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, except that it’s merely a stopgap measure. The people are still poor and uneducated, the countries are still overpopulated and, in all likelihood, the next generation will be just as large and just as poor and just as hungry. And guess who gets to take care of that generation? That’s right, you’re kids. They get to be shamed and bullied by people like Singer and told they are as bad as murderers if they don’t give up all their money to charity…until all the world’s troubles have been solved.

Ayn Rand saw that too.

Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? to work – and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work – with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work – with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work – on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question – just to work and work and work – and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This – a moral ideal?

One of the other issues I see with these charities is that you often have no idea where your money is going or how it is being spent. To be fair, Singer addresses that…though not very well.

Is it the practical uncertainties about whether aid will really reach the people who need it? Nobody who knows the world of overseas aid can doubt that such uncertainties exist. But Unger’s figure of $200 to save a child’s life was reached after he had made conservative assumptions about the proportion of the money donated that will actually reach its target.

So, let me get this straight. It shouldn’t matter where the rest of that $200 goes, just that someone has done the figures and knows that if I donate $200 enough of it will eventually get to a child to save his or her life?

Let me tell you a story about where money has a tendency to go when you give it to charities. This story is true, but, of course not indicative if ALL charities. Only a warning to look closely how your money is being spent when you donate it.

Several years ago my mother and father ran a small business in Arkansas. The police in that state had a program that ran on charity, where they gave Teddy bears to children who were in car accidents. A good program and one that is copied in states all throughout this country in some fashion.

The police hired out to an organization that collected money for the charity and they called up my parent’s business asking for a donation. My father said ‘sure, sounds great. If I donate $100, how much will go towards buying Teddy bears?’ my dad is paranoid about these things, and rightly so. Yes, he passed that paranoia on to me.

He requested a breakdown of how donations were spent. Which, in case you didn’t know, is your right to do per federal law. You can request this report from any charitable organization asking for donations. If they refuse, something fishy is going on and you should not donate and should, in fact, report them to your local Better Business Bureau.

My father found out that about 18% of each donation was spent on Teddy bears and 65% was spent on ‘administrative costs’. In other words, the organization kept $.65 of every dollar you donated as payment for collecting donations.
Of course 65% and 18% only add up to 83% and he called back to find out where the other 17% was going.

He was told it went to the police officer’s pension fund. He was then asked if he wanted to donate. He, of course, said no.

My response would have been: ‘sure, where do you buy the Teddy bears? I’ll buy $100 worth and have them shipped to the police station.’

Why? Because if I want to give money to give Teddy bears to traumatized children that is what I want to do, I don’t want to pay into a pension fund, which my taxes are supposed to be paying for in the first place, and I CERTAINLY don’t want to pay for the administrative costs of a glorified call center.

This is what Singer forgets to mention. That you really don’t know where your money is going when it goes to many charities and that, frankly, worries me a lot.

When we are talking about pension plans and administrative costs it pisses me off, but when the money is vanishing into third world nations that are controlled by warlords and drug lords and terrorists as much as, or more than, by their own governments… Do we really know where most of that money is going? Do you know who has to be paid off to get food and aid to the poor? Do you know what you may be, unintentionally, funding?

Of course, another thing Singer forgets to mention is that most of the “choir” he is preaching to aren’t really donating to help others. They are donating because it makes them feel better, because money is evil and they feel Oh So Guilty about being Born Into Privilege because they live in the United States.

I don’t know about you, but being born in a certain country doesn’t equate to privilege to me. I mean, this is a great country and all, but I work hard to get what I want and I intend to keep it…and when I give it away it’s on my terms…not Singer’s.

>Is it possible to hate humanity anymore than I do at this moment?

>This is certainly shower lecture worthy…to bad I am at work, sitting in an 8×10 metal box with an unnecessarily ancient and loud heater rattling in the background.

I’ll write it anyway.

My job makes me doubt the intelligence of human beings everywhere. Let me give you an example.

*Car pulls up about halfway to where my window is and stops…and sits there…not moving. I open the window and stick my head out of the, relatively, warm confines of my workspace so that I can see what the problem is. The car finally pulls up level with the window.*

Vehicle Occupant: Oh, I’m sorry. I couldn’t see anyone in there, so I wasn’t sure where I should go.

My thoughts: No duh, I had the window closed so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia and I have a time clock, 5 clip boards, and a 3 pieces of paper with instructions for the employees who haven’t been working here for over 9 months taped up. Of course you couldn’t see me. If you had pulled forward like an intelligent person you would have seen me through the side window.

My actual words: Well *nervous laugh* It’s pretty cold out. Gotta keep the window shut to keep warm air in.

*They respond by looking at me like my need to not get hypothermia is a great inconvenience to them. I take their parking validation.*

My words: Well have a nice day! *cheery smile*

My thoughts: ….dickhead…hope your car crashes. *My job makes me a mean person.*

Of course a specific person made me write this post.

*Woman pulls up and begins searching high and low for her parking stub while babbling in spanish to her child in the back seat and completely pretending I don’t exist*

My thoughts: Why do people who can, apparently, pass a driver’s test find it so hard to keep up with a piece of paper?

My words: …..*because I’m still apparently invisible.*

*She hunts for about 6 minutes for this paper. Looks at me sheepishly.*

My words: A lost ticket is $10. I can’t let you out without paying.

Driver: $10?

My words: Yes, sorry. Company policy *I point to a sign*

Driver: Oh…*looks around in the car and hands me the ticket*

My words: Oh, look. That was lucky! That’s $2.

My thoughts: Right, you couldn’t find it while searching for it for over 5 minutes, but one glance finds it when you find out I’m going to charge you either way and you won’t get out free if you “lost your ticket”. Bitch…

My words: Have a nice day! *only a vaguely murderous cheerful grin*

You see what my job does? It makes me believe that people are all either, completely stupid and self-absorbed or self-absorbed and complete liars and scammers.

I’m going to go postal one of these days…

The hunt for a new job continues.