*As has been widely reported, Russian computer geeks under the control of dictator Putin are playing games with all kinds of (mis)information to screw with peoples’ minds and perceptions of the world. According to a deeply troubling analysis of QAnon (“Pastels and Pedophiles,” by Mia Bloom and Sopia Moskalenko) Americans are nine times more likely to fall for Russian nonsense pertinent to QAnon  than their counterparts elsewhere in the world (15.3% versus 1.7%). “One cause … is that U.S. education lags behind Europe in teaching critical thinking and social media literacy.”

“Need a doctor but don’t want to miss the Rutgers game? Call Telemed.” Let’s see, if you suddenly need a doctor, that would imply something – uh, like important. Do you think a quickie before kick-off suffices. Or is it that maybe the pending game is not expected to excite you enough and you want doc to write a scrip for some enhancement.

*If you had a class of 100 minority future engineers, you could reasonably hold out the prospect of something close to 100 really good jobs, such is the shortage in this country. If you had 100 minority high schoolers majoring in football, basketball, or soccer, holding out the prospect of more than one of them earning a living from their sport does a disservice to the data. The advertising and messaging comparison is just the reverse, of course, as all the glamor accrues to the sport, not the engineer.

Perhaps this is another trick by which white America gets to be entertained without fearing that the people on the stage will become serious competitors for jobs, money, power, recognition.

*Not to be a doomsayer, but can any amount of communication, workshops, public chest beating, and mea culpas rectify the historical chasm between what the country said it was/is in its wonderful Declaration of Independence and what it was/is. If I am worth ten-to-twenty times what you are in part because of our historical hypocrisy, and there is no difference in our weekly paychecks or prospects (which in reality are skewed against the lower net worth individual), the chances of our net worths becoming equal are equivalent to the odds of winning the lottery. Reparations anyone?

*Once upon a time, it was assumed that college students had limited financial means, excluding of course those members of the lucky sperm club, equipped with fat wallets from birth. Dorm rooms or nearby apartments, rented out by not the most avaricious landlords, were closer to being described as “spartan” than they were to “fancy.” The affordability of college remained an issue, as it always will, but a reasonably remunerative job (and absence of silly spending) in the Summer could take a student or their family a long way toward paying tuition and room and board.

In the ensuing years from the above baseline, taxpayers – through various federal financial aid programs — were happy to provide modest grants and immodestly-sized loans to aspiring collegians. Whether the students were net ahead on the college cost equation is unfortunately not clear. It seems that tuition increases soaked up the availability of incremental student funds.

What was clear is that students were willing, persuaded, cajoled into being oblivious to the mounting discrepancy between the historical punch line – “a Bachelor’s means a million dollars more of income in your lifetime” and what that means in terms of after-tax, after-debt, after-stress happiness.

Now, flat screen televisions, spacious suites, and other amenities are part of the sales pitch of universities attempting to survive in what has become a market share battle for the declining number of students in the college pool. None of this basically non-academic stuff comes free of course, producing the oddity at some state schools that room and board can exceed tuition (alert notice: keep this in mind when people start talking about free tuition). In all cases, the high cost of college housing enables off-campus landlords to lift their rents. 

The economics of owning said housing have not been lost on Wall Street or corporate America, both of whom have increased their portfolios of barely off-campus student housing.

If you do a flyover of this story, you see that students are borrowing from taxpayers to pay investors (who typically know every legal and tax advantage in the books) for the ability to pursue a degree which no longer has the catchet of former days. In fact, a diploma is increasingly simply a means to the end of a job, the irony being that a lengthening list of employers do not even require it from an applicant.

Is it any wonder that a thorough examination of the business known as higher education is inevitable in the real world, not simply in barely read treatises from think tanks. A flattening of high school graduating seniors, changing demographics, and increased reflection on this thing called “the meaning of life” all contribute to the angst felt by small private liberal arts colleges with light endowments.

*It appears that at my apartment complex, there is an unwritten rule: every person who takes a leisurely walk must be blabbing into a cell phone, pushing a stroller with a munchkin in it, or hanging on tight to a leash that a rambunctious dog is trying to stretch past his owner’s patience. Breaking the code is an old guy with a basketball tucked under his arm, apparently focused on getting past this traffic in order to simply shoot some hoops.

*White America’s in-grained, not necessarily articulated, life narrative is no longer operative – all the thrashing about is centered on that uncomfortable truth. Add the power of social media and the physical isolation of the pandemic and you have QAnon able to stay alive even as its various conspiratorial predictions come to naught. (Forgot to mention that clever people have monetized aspects of QAnon.)

*Note: obviously these observations are random; otherwise, seemingly related thoughts would be logically grouped, perhaps with bullets to emphasize whatever verbiage ensued. Not happening.

*If “track is black,” as is sometime said, then suburban cross-country meets on a Sunday morning are a predominantly white activity. Twenty towns with tents and lawn chairs and little diversity, Volvos and Subarus and Beemers in the parking lot, wine undoubtedly being chilled at home (not allowed in the park) for Mom and beer for Dad when he drops into his NFL chair for eight hours of watching football.

*Is there a course somewhere that pounds into a respondent’s head that the first words out of their mouth must be, “that’s a great question.” I mean at least there could be some distinctions made: some questions are totally inane, some suck for other reasons, some are incredibly brilliant – especially those which include “why” in the query. Enough with the default response.

*”She is serving really well.” “He is the high scorer.” “The Lions are doing a great job on defense.” Inevitably these statements by sports broadcasters are followed by “so far.” Uh, they have to be so far unless there is a tricky way of inserting the future into what has already happened.

*I have always fantasized that Clint Eastwood would regard Facebook with total disdain, shooing its presence off his lawn and out of his daily life. Now the “Wall Street Journal” has published a four-part series that is summed up thusly by the authors: “Facebook’s own research lays out in detail how its rules favor elites; its platforms (especially Instagram) have negative effects on teen mental health, its algorithm fosters discord; and that drug cartels and human traffickers use its services openly.” The most charitable description comes from a Facebook executive: “We created the machine and we can’t control the machine.” (Aren’t there great sci fi movies and futuristic novels about good ideas run amuck. Wait, that frequently describes politics as well; there might be more dead bodies from implementers of seductive philosophies than there are from outright criminals.)

*For a long time, I have noticed that in small towns or mid-sized cities, the two biggest buildings belonged to a college and a hospital. But only recently did a bright observation occur to me, namely that the two institutions had several characteristics in common: the service they provide is terribly overpriced, the outcomes they deliver are disappointing by any reasonable metric, and structurally their entire systems – higher education and healthcare—need to be taken apart and put back together in a more customer-friendly manner.

*Speaking of commonality, what is shared by shared by discussions of abortion, charter schools, and immigration?  One can win the debate on merit and not change a single person’s mind. Maybe vaccines belong with the above trio of topics. And QAnon.

*Once in a while, it’s useful to look up from the daily negativity – you know the long list of American transgressions, both home and abroad – and mention a handful of rather unique characteristics:

a nation of multiple minorities is evolving in front of the world’s eyes, the same nation is one which consistently heads the list when people from elsewhere are seeking jobs, it is quite possible in that place for people to call the President or the cop on the block an idiot and suffer no real repercussions.

P.S. Even those in the United States who delight in the trashing their country are not exactly rushing to airports to cling to airplane wings in an attempt to go live elsewhere.

*Any grant-seeker knows that mentioning the word “community” evokes nothing but positivity. Ditto for any reference to “collaborations.” Maybe “bonding” should be on that short list of – ‘whatever the non-profit leader is saying must be good; let’s give them some money.” Does anybody think of the relationship between a drug dealer and an addict as bonding or a collaborative effort or involving a community, even though the descriptors fit. The point? No word should be accorded a characteristic without some thought.

*The stock market soars, regardless of how many financial historians claim that our nation’s printing press economics makes no sense or that we are incurring debt payable by future generations or that we are increasingly beholden to trading “partners” like China. P.S. If debt is meaningless, do I still have to pay my mortgage?

Anyway, we’re not smiling. In “We Weren’t happy before the Pandemic” (New York Times, 8-22-21), author Esau McCaulley suggests we were previously reluctant to recognize what we were giving up in the pursuit of whatever. Now, “the pandemic has disabused us of the illusion of time as a limitless resource and of the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers are worth it.”

Meanwhile, as supporting evidence (or confirmation bias) Anna Lembke (Wall Street Journal, 8-14-21, “Digital addictions are Drowning us in Dopamine’) notes that new cases of depression worldwide were up 50% from 1990 to 2017 (the biggest increases in areas with the highest incomes) and Americans self-reported as being less happy in 2018 than in 2008. Again, pre-pandemic.

*If you draw a line to show the techno/social media penetration of American life, let’s say at a 45-degree angle, and then draw a line to show happiness or educational accomplishment or median income, you would see no such lines in the vicinity of that of techno/social media. In fact, all three lines of possible outcome metrics are flat. If you knew nothing, you might say that the techno/social media boom has been a waste (except to a relative handful of incredibly enriched venture capitalists and investors). Or you might say this is a case of meaningless non-correlation. From a high-level standpoint, it is hard to make the case for its benefits, which is a totally crazy statement given the ease with which we can find out …. stuff. So pick your metric. If I can build a house faster in a factory than on-site, does not the house still need a satisfied occupant to give the thumbs-up to the revised process.

*I was thinking the other day that reacting to the pain in my infected finger was analogous to coping with a weird noise in my car.  You walk into the fix-it place and you immediately owe the proprietor a fee for simply having crossed the threshold of his or her enterprise and asking for some degree of analysis. In the case of my finger, it was a mere $315. Not to worry, taxpayers en masse provided $210.56 through a Medicare adjustment, and that same payor sent $83.79 to the insurance company. Don’t cry for the latter; they make it up elsewhere. I was on the hook for only $20.65.

The procedure itself, a somewhat painful lancing of an infection, was less expensive than walking in, specifically $245. Of this, the Medicare adjustment took care of $90.78 and the Medicare payment to a Big Insurance Entity was $123.73 I had to cough up $30.49. (Hope all these numbers add!).

Do you wonder why everybody from a neophyte financial analyst to a public health policy wonk to an aging frequent user of medical services regards this convoluted billing approach as, uh, rather strange. What is the actual cost of what took place! With my car repair, I know what the hourly labor rate is for the mechanic who fixes everything and I have a fairly good idea as how much of that rate finds its way into his or her paycheck. Impossible with the purchase of healthcare services.

*Let’s see – alcohol, cigarettes, gambling; marijuana – the latter two on their way to full, “controlled” availability.  What is the underlying message? “Please don’t engage in these terrible sinful pleasures, but if you do, be careful not to overdo it – call an 800 number if you have a sudden understanding that your excess is about to cost you — let’s see, your health, your family, your house, whatever.”

What nonsense buried in a truth, like the saying in a Chinese fortune cookie that is otherwise edible. Each of these purveyors of the above quartet relies in their economic model on people overdoing it, and government is quite happy to collect its taxes without doing any accounting for the remedial costs involved; those show up in somebody else’s budget. Will prostitution eventually be legalized and join this happy collection of no-nos.

*To be continued on another day of high wattage inspiration!