#1! #1! #1!

In this list of every state, ranked by how miserable its winters are, guess who the winner is!

Although I’m suspicious that we beat both Dakotas. I think I’d rather live in Minnesota than either of those places.

I came up with a balancing idea, though: if you suffer through winter in your state, you get to reward yourself by retiring to the complementary state on the list — just look at (51 – your state ranking). That’s the karmic redress you must someday pay. I’m looking forward to my twilight years in Hawaii; Hawaiians might not be as thrilled with the deal they’re getting.

Aspire to a good education…which isn’t always a four-year degree

You know, I’m a professor at four-year liberal arts college, and I think Mike Rowe is on to something here. The kind of education we deliver is not for every one.

Now, eight years later, unemployment is down, interest rates are under control, and inflation is in check. But the overall labor participation rate is very low, and the skills gap is wider than ever. In fact, the latest numbers are out, and they are astonishing. According to the Department of Labor, America now has 5.6 million job openings.

Forget your politics for a moment, and consider the enormity of what’s happening here. Millions of people who have stopped looking for work, are ignoring 5.6 million genuine opportunities. That’s not a polemic, or a judgment, or an opinion. It’s a fact. And so is this: most of those 5.6 million opportunities don’t require a diploma – they require require a skill.

Unfortunately, the skilled trades are no longer aspirational in these United States. In a society that’s convinced a four-year degree is the best path for the most people, a whole category of good jobs have been relegated to some sort of “vocational consolation prize.” Is it any wonder we have 1.3 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans? Is it really a surprise that vocational education has pretty much evaporated from high schools? Obviously, the number of available jobs and the number of unemployed people are not nearly as correlated as most people assume.

I’m no economist, but the skills gap doesn’t seem all that mysterious – it seems like a reflection of what we value. Five and half million unfilled jobs is clearly a terrible drag on the economy and a sad commentary of what many people consider to be a “good job,” but it also represents a tremendous opportunity for anyone willing to learn a trade and apply themselves.

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It’s raining in February!

I was awakened this morning by the heavy patter of raindrops on my house. This cannot be. This is against the natural order. January and February are our coldest months, we simply do not get liquid water falling out of the sky in midwinter. I looked, and it’s +1°C out there! Unthinkable! Inconceivable!

Now I’m wondering, if we melt all the icecaps and glaciers, will we get enough sea water rise to refill the great inland sea of North America? If so, I could pretend I’ve moved back to Seattle.

Stephen Hull must work for free

He’s an editor for the Huffington Post, and was asked why the HuffPo doesn’t pay its writers.

I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.

See, you’re inauthentic if you get paid fairly for your work. You can trust someone if they did the work for free, which implies that you ought to be deeply suspicious of people who expect to get paid.

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Australians, you’re doing it wrong

An Australian town is being overrun with tumbleweeds. They’re complaining.

This is exactly wrong. You treat tumbleweeds laconically. You gaze at them all flinty-eyed, and at most you might shift your toothpick from one side of your mouth to the other. Bonus points if you do that while listening to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

There. Problem solved.

Oh, look

The “About FtB” link at the top left corner of every FtB page now actually says something about Freethoughtblogs, and also includes the instructions for how to apply for a blog here, so you don’t have to remember where my post about that is.

I can tell this may be my weekend for fussing with administrative stuff, in addition to the usual grading and prep work for classes.

How to join freethoughtblogs

FtBRedHand

We’ve been shaking things up a bit behind the scenes here at FtB. One of our enduring annoyances has been recruiting new bloggers — the way we set it up here (again, behind the scenes) was to appoint a committee and tell them to do all the work. Then, every once in a while, someone would write to me or someone else and ask how to be considered for FtB, and I’d blithely pass their name along to the committee.

That didn’t work. We don’t have a staff. No one signed up here to do administrative work, we were here to write, so passing a name to the committee was more like casting it away into the eternal void.

So we’re trying something different. No committee. Instead, we have an email link, and you’ll write to us with your qualifications. It then gets passed into a private application channel, and we all have an opportunity to look you over and vote yay or nay.

So if you want to blog here, here’s what you do: send an email to ftbapplications@googlegroups.com, in which you give us this information:

Name

Contact email

Do you want your email public?

Twitter account, if any

Link for donations, if any

Links to your current blog, any biographical material, or best examples of your writing in comments or forums or other media

Why do you want to write for us?

It’s that easy. This is a private communication to the bloggers here; none of this information will be made public without your permission. So if you’re interested in trolling us, it won’t be very rewarding, since your application will vanish into our application channel, never to emerge into the public, and we’ll snigger at it before deleting it.

Serious applications will be examined for their suitability. Our requirements are simple: we want godless Social Justice Warriors. If that’s you, why aren’t you writing for us already? (Oh, because applicants vanished into the darkness of the eternal void of the committee).

We really want to encourage diversity, too, and we also want to see some sort of track record of your writing. Anything will do; if you don’t have a blog of your own, give us links to your substantive comments, or your participation in an online forum, anything to show that you’re actually able to write coherently, and that your views align with our intent. If you don’t have a history of regular blog-like writing, that’s OK — we’re creating a guest blog, and will give you keys to that so you can try it for a few months and see if you take to it.

Group blogs are fine. You can be pseudonymous, too, we’ll just need to have a way to contact you.

What are the rewards, you ask?

  • You get space for a blog of your very own!

  • You get to join a group of supportive people!

  • You get paid! OK, not much. We take the profits from each months advertising and divide it among all bloggers by their proportion of traffic. So you get a free cup of coffee every month!

  • Fame and glory!

  • You’ll be able to shape the future membership of FtB! Review the next set of applicants, if you want!

  • Trolls galore! We’ve got a crop of dedicated assholes who will plague you until you block them. We’ll show you how!

If this sounds fun, send us an application. We’re also planning on quarterly review of new applications, so we’re going to possibly invite new bloggers to join us in mid-March. If anyone applies. If anyone makes the cut. Remember, godless SJWs only, please.

If you think later that you’d like to join, these instructions will be available at the “About FtB” link in the top left corner of this window, at some time in the next few days.

We’re all bunnies now

The president of Mount St Mary’s University was in the news a short while back because of his cavalier attitude towards students: his grand plan for improving student retention scores was to drive away students earlier, before they counted in the statistics, with the comment that This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads.

The faculty who criticized President Simon Newman, and who supported the students who reported the Glock comment, have been abruptly fired. One of them was tenured. Newman’s explanation?

As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty of loyalty to this university and to act in a manner consistent with that duty. However, your recent actions, in my opinion and that of others, have violated that duty and clearly justify your termination, said the letter.

Further, the letter said that Naberhaus’s actions have caused considerable damage to the university and that the university might sue him. In addition, the letter told Naberhaus he was designated persona non grata and banned from the campus.

Wow. Not only does Newman hold a Glock to everyone’s heads, he’s willing to pull the trigger.

Does R.K. Milholland spy on me with secret cameras?

I saw this latest comic and started feeling paranoid and checking the ceiling for lenses. It’s been a depressing couple of weeks, and…we’re hosting more cats. My son’s house got flooded by a water main break, he’s sleeping on couches at friends’ places, his gear is stored in various places, including our car, and we had to take in his two cats, temporarily.

It does not ease the situation. Our existing cat is a minion of the devil who hates strangers and strange cats, so we’ve had to wall off the two groups in separate rooms. I still come home to find our satanic beast snarling and hissing at a closed door. We are the only two other creatures on the planet she trusts at all, so far, and it’s a little uncomfortable to be the patrons of the bestial anti-christ.

So don’t do it, PeeJee! Not unless, of course, we can figure out how to translate real creatures into a two-dimensional cartoon world, and you really want a cat that will attack all your patrons on sight.