Parts is Parts

Today we replace components rather than parts.

Decades ago, I went to the bicycle shop to buy a new wheel bearing for my bike.   The guy at the parts counter laughed at me.   They sold wheels, and maybe hubs, but not bearings.   If you wanted a bearing, you had to buy at least the hub assembly and then re-spoke the wheel, or remove the bearings from it and put them in your old hub.

I was pissed off back then that they didn't sell parts at the granularity level I was accustomed to with car parts.  Perhaps a more high-end bike shop might have sold mere bearings, but not the consumer-grade shops.

Since then, we have moved more and more to a component model of parts replacement.   And to some extent, this is an improvement from the past.  In other ways, it isn't.

Back in the day, if you broke a tail-light lens on your car, you unscrewed the broken parts, which were usually held in with four Phillips-head screws.  You went to the car dealer - or even your local NAPA store - and bought a new lens, took it home and screwed it in.

Today, you buy the assembly.   A friend of mine backed into a tree and broke their taillight lens.  I found a generic replacement online for about $30.   When it arrived, I was amazed that not only did it include the lens, but also the reflector (which was glued to the lens) the housing, the wiring harness, and even the bulbs (all three, including backup light).   The entire assembly was held in with one clip and a screw, which was accessed from inside the car.  Unplug the old assembly, remove the one screw, and remove, and then replace with the new one and plug in.    Everything brand-spanking new, and now he has three replacement bulbs (which I put in his glove box in a ziplock bag).

Part of the reason for this component-level view of things is how we assemble cars today.   Back in the day, someone might have to assemble this taillight fixture to the car - installing the reflector and then putting in the bulbs and then screwing in four screws for the lens.  And each bulb would have a separate socket and wire to attach.   This was time-consuming.  Better off to have a one-screw installation with one plug - it can be installed in seconds on the assembly line.

The other reason why we have moved to component-level replacement is that parts are much cheaper today and it is easier to just throw away things than to repair them.   Mark asked me to find replacement rubber seals for this canister set that he bought years ago.  The seals have yellowed and moreover fall off the lids when you open the canister. 

Note:  After looking at these online for an hour, I realize that the set Mark bought was made by Oggi, and probably from Williams-Sonoma.  The latch mechanism on the Oggi has a round indent on it, as opposed to the rectangular or oval indents on the knock-offs.  Oggi has quite an impressive catalog of stuff - and they even sell at Mart.  I sent them a nice e-mail asking if they sold gaskets.  Maybe they will send me some as a customer goodwill gesture.  Likely not, as I suspect they import these already assembled, from you-know-where.

The problem is, no one makes or sells just the seals.   They sell a similar canister set at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, (as well as similar ones sold on Amazon) and the only way to get just the seal, from what I can see, would be to go there and shoplift the seals off a set, if they have one on display.  What with their 50% off coupons or whatever, you probably could just buy a whole new set for about $15 or less.   Even a wholesale rubber seal company wants $2.50 to $4.50 for each seal (and they don't have the correct size) plus shipping.   You'd spend about as much on seals as the set.

Oddly enough, you can buy a set of seals for Italian Storage Jars, which Mark also has a set of.  But the openings on these jars are tiny and it is hard to scoop out things like flour from such a narrow opening.  But they are available online only, and not in stock until "late February".

This is frustrating for folks who hate to throw things away.  But without a source of repair parts, you can't repair a lot of things - or it becomes uneconomical to do so.  Yea, I supposed I could buy a sheet of neoprene rubber and cut out new gaskets.  But the cost would be more than a new set of canisters and the labor involved would not be worthwhile.

So much of what have have today is unrepairable.   And the granularity of repair has decreased over time.   I was at GM when we made the switch from wheel bearings to "hub assemblies".   To some extent it is an improvement.   No longer do you have to re-pack and adjust wheel bearings and get your hands all greasy.  You just unbolt the hub from the suspension and replace it.   Four bolts and you're done, pretty much.  On the assembly line, this makes it a lot easier to put the car together.  In the car dealer, it means you no longer have to train someone on how to set the bearing pre-load.

Or take CV joint boots.  You can remove the half-shaft assembly from your car and carefully clean and re-lubricate the CV joints and then install a new rubber boot.   Or, for a few dollars more, you can just replace the entire axle half-shaft assembly which involves only a few bolts (including one huge 32mm one on the hub) and not nearly as much grease on your hands.

The list goes on and on.  With electronics, the issue is even moreso.  There are fewer and fewer things you can repair on a computer, television, or smart phone these days.   Failure usually means tossing something out.   I read online about one hardy soul who took the back off his flat-screen television and found that the reason it went bad was a ribbon cable that came unglued from a circuit board.   Most folks don't have the time and inclination to do such a relatively simple repair as that - and a new television with better features can be had for a few hundred dollars.

In a way, it is sad that we can no longer fix things.  The "mending man" is going out of business as he can no longer get parts to mend things with.   We have to get used to throwing things away that seem "nearly perfect" except for that one broken part that makes the whole thing work.

On the other hand, we have such an endless supply of cheap crap to buy, the effort in repairing a set of canisters that retail for $24.95 and can be had for under $20 simply isn't worthwhile.

It isn't, in fact, even worth typing a blog entry about!

UPDATE:  I emailed the people at Oggi and they responded to me a few days later and said they would send me a new set of gaskets. It never hurts to ask!

Yield Rates

The cost of an electronic device is often related to yield rates.  What are yield rates and how do they relate to your personal life?

(Note:  If you thought this was going to be about bond yield rates, sorry!)

Mark is back in the studio, making chickens.   His tenure with ceramic birdhouses may be about up - everyone else is making those, now, and the market is saturated.   Of course, this might not have happened if he hadn't put on workshops on how to make ceramic birdhouses - talk about giving away your trade secrets!   But he's that kind of guy - giving.  And besides, you can't just make the same thing forever.  So now it's chickens - they've come home to roost.

Making things from clay is a multi-step process.  And at each step along the way, there is a chance the entire thing could go bust.   You sculpt or form or throw something from clay.   You may decide that what you made is ugly, and you smash it and throw it in a bucket, to be later recycled using a pugging machine, into fresh clay for something else.  Odds are, you will crush at least one in ten of your creations as not being up to snuff - particularly as you get better at it and have higher standards for your work.  The work at this point may be called leatherware.

But assuming you like what you created, you have to let it dry out before the initial firing.  And the drying process is complex.  If it dries too fast, it may crack - a problem in particular for larger pieces.  And once it cracks, you have to toss it - it won't heal itself in the firing process.   So at the drying stage you may lose one in ten of the objects d'art that you created.  The dried pieces may be called greenware.

Next, to the kiln, for a lower-temperature bisque firing.  Granted, in some cases, you might go directly to glaze firing, but that's a whole different story.  Bisquing the clay causes it to harden - fusing the silica in the clays to form a hardened terra-cotta like form known as bisqueware.   At this stage, a lot can happen.  If there are any air bubbles in the clay, the item can blow up in the kiln, destroying itself, as well as adjacent pieces (which will make you lots of friends in the pottery guild!).   Or it just may crack, and cracked pots are not deemed to be worthwhile to show or sell - many a potter has a yard full of such rejects.   Again, you might lost one in ten at this stage as well.

Now to glazing.   Glazing can get tricky - and it can be heartbreaking.   You make this great thing, you fire, it, and it looks great.  Then you glaze it, put it in the kiln, and high-fire it, and it comes out cracked, broken, melted, or just looking like baby-shit brown.   High temperature (Cone 6 and higher) glazes get tricky - they often are designed to "break" and form multiple layers of colors as the glaze runs down the side of the piece.  Put the glaze on too thick, and it runs down onto the kiln furniture (which pisses off the kiln master).  Again, such pieces are generally not deemed worthy of show or sale, if they have drips of glaze coming off them.   Put the glaze on too thin, and the bisque shows through.   It takes a lot of trial-and-error to get it just right.

And then the color can come out bad.  It is supposed to be green, but comes out a burnt brown.  The kiln-master used his own crazy ideas about cool-down times and caused the glaze to burn.  Or maybe a student dunked a pot in the glaze bucket and contaminated it with another color glaze.  Or maybe the glaze was not stirred up sufficiently.   There are so many ways to screw this up, many of which are not your fault.  You put something in a kiln and cross your fingers.   A lot of amazing pieces come out more to luck than to skill.

But if you find a glaze that works well for you - and you get used to using it - you tend to stick with it.  Using different glazes requires you re-learn the process (with the corresponding high scrap rate) - which is why when you visit a potter's studio, you tend to notice they use one or two colors of glaze almost exclusively.   You go with what works and what you know.

So at the glazing step you might lose another 10-20% of your work, although once in a great while, you might be able to re-glaze and re-fire a piece and salvage something.

If you add up all the losses at each step of the game, you can see that as much as 50% of what you make ends up as scrap.  And that can be very discouraging, particularly for beginners (where the scrap rate is much higher).  Mark thinks he manages to yield about 70% of what he starts with, which is a pretty high number, all things considered.  There is a pile of broken and cracked and rejected pieces out back of his studio, though.  Most studios have them.

In the semiconductor business, we call this yield rate.   When you make a mico-chip or a flat-screen television with thousands if not millions of transistors on it, there is a finite probability that one or more of these millions of microstructures may have flaws in them.  As a result, particularly early on in the business, you end up with phenomenal scrap rates - as high as 90% - with a corresponding yield rate of 10% or so.  Sometimes it is even worse.

When flat-screen televisions first came out, the yield rates were pathetic.  For every 10 television panels they would make, maybe only one would be worthy of sale.  The rest were scrapped, which is why flat-screen televisions cost so much back then - in the thousands of dollars.    Prices came down once production techniques improved and the yield rate increased.  But even today, in the semiconductor business, a lot of chips get culled from production if only a few of those millions of transistors on the chip are defective.  Yield rates are never 100% or even close, in most cases.

For microprocessors, the problem is even more complex.   Did you ever wonder why they sell the same microprocessor with different clock speeds?   It is not that they designed the processor to run at different speeds, but rather they build them all the same, and after they are done, they test them to see how fast they can run without undue errors.  Each chip is then tested to see what speed it can reliably run at and is sold as being rated for that speed.   Computer buffs and gamers know about this, and often try to save money by purchasing the slower processor and "overclocking it" to make it run faster.  The trade-off, of course, is that it may crash more often.

In other chips, if parts are defective, they simply change the designation of the chip.   I used to work with Intel's 8032 processor, which came in a number of flavors and was used for industrial controls.   In one version, it had 8K of onboard memory.  Another version had no onboard memory.  The difference was only that the non-memory version had a flaw in the memory from production, so they just sold it as a non-memory version, and you provided your own, off-chip memory.  So even if something fails, it can succeed.  You just say, "I meant to do that!" and no one is the wiser.

Yield rate is an interesting phenomenon.  Can you imagine if other products were made in the same genre?   Suppose GM had to scrap every 10th car that came off the line because there was one tiny defect in it?   It would certainly drive up the cost of cars!   Or imagine that every car was tested and rated for how fast it would go - and each car would achieve a different speed?  They used to do that, with Duesenbergs  - not one of them leaving the factory unless it could do at least 100 mph.

With regard to the latter, this does - or used to - occur to some extent with car engines.   If you got a car with a well-balanced engine (the pistons all weighed the same, the crank was balanced, etc.) and the valves were well-seated and the valve-timing spot on, it might generate more horsepower than it was rated for, and run smoothly.  On the other hand, if you got a Friday engine - built by someone in a hurry who cut corners - it might run rough and never achieve its rated horsepower.   Today, standards are a little higher, and variations in engine output are far less.   But there still is a bell-curve distribution of performance, nevertheless.

In your personal life, yield rates are also important.  As I have noted before, my estimation as to the "efficiency" of the human being is on the order of a few percentage points, if that.   Think about it, we waste hours every day eating, sleeping, defecating, and watching television (some people do little more than that!).  The few hours we actually "work" are mostly wasted with social grooming, taking coffee breaks, and doing online shopping (or reading this blog - shame on you!  Get back to work!).

Not only are we horribly inefficient, but most of what we do ends up on the scrap heap - or at least a substantial portion of it.   Failure is the norm, but that doesn't mean your efforts are fruitless.   In the early days of flat-screen televisions, nearly every one made was a failure.   But the few that did work would command hefty prices in the marketplace.   You could look at the pile of junked televisions on the scrap dock and be depressed, or look at the shiny products that did make it to the showroom and be elated.   The choice is yours.

Baseball is often seen as a good metaphor for life.  Unlike football, where players are exhorted to "give 110%" (which is physically impossible) or told that "losing is not an option" (when in fact it is a predictable outcome), in baseball, failure is part and parcel of the game.   Even the best of hitters would struggle to bat .500 - hitting 50% of the balls thrown to them.   And teams can lose game after game - against the same team - and still make it to the playoffs and even win the world series.  Whoever invented baseball knew more about real life than whoever invented football.   Baseball is all about coming back after defeat.   In football, it seems, there are no second chapters, for the most part.

In your life, you will make a colossal number of errors.  You can dwell on them and be depressed, or learn from them and move on.  And if you realize that the one or two things you did do right have paid off, well, your attitude toward life may improve considerably.  Even if you fail 90% of the time, that 10% success rate can blow those failures out of the water.

Not every investment you make will produce results.  In fact, many will fail utterly.  You will buy stock in a company that goes bankrupt - I have, more than once.   But other times, you will invest in something and it will do well.   It might just be a mutual fund that doubles your money after a decade or so.   And while that is not rags-to-riches success, it is something pretty damn good.

Predicating success on being successful all the time is one sure way to fail, however.  When I started investing early on, I had naive ideas that everything I would invest in would always make money and moreover, have fantastic rates of return.   I was going to be the smart guy who latched onto "the next big thing!" and made millions - or so I thought.   I mean, after all, such people do exist, don't they?    Why can't I be one of them?

Then I realized that the folks who make the mega-bucks are either really, really lucky, or have mega-bucks to begin with, and can manipulate markets - often by selling crappy investments to wanna-bes like me.  The harder I tried to "win every time" the more I ended up losing, ironically - or was it predictably?

Your yield rate in life is never going to be 100% or even very close to it.   We are all human and make mistakes and do dumb things.  You can obsess about this or just learn to live with it.  Put away thinking about what could have been or what went wrong, and look to the successes you have had.

Because odds are, they are pretty damn good successes!

Actives and Passives

The concept of broadcasting is evil because it encourages passivity.

I rant a lot against television in this blog because it is a huge time-waster and also encourages people to spend money on things they don't really need. It also encourages passive behavior - to sit on your couch in your snuggly (which you bought after seeing an infomercial) and to consume bad food (which was advertised, guess where?).   It also encourages externalization - blaming unseen others for your woes, rather than taking action in your own life.

Before television, there was radio, and before radio, there was the telephone and the telegraph. The telephone and the telegraph were point-to-point communication systems, where messages were sent from one person to another person.  And initially, radio was the same way.  In fact, they called it "the wireless" because it was viewed as a wireless form of telegraphy.  Today, "wireless" has an entirely different meaning, of course.

And in those early days, that's exactly what radio was.  People used the wireless communication system to send individual messages from one person to another.  Of course, anyone could listen into these communications.  And it was handy if you were on the ship that was sinking to send an ICQ or later on, an SOS and hope someone would hear it (although that didn't quite work out for the Titanic, did it?).

All that changed when a guy named David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant, invented the concept of "broad-casting" - along with others, such as Edwin Armstrong, who was broad-casting music and voice from his home, in an era of dot-and-dash Morse code.  It took Sarnoff to capitalize on the idea of having a central transmitter broadcast one signal to hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of people.  He developed what eventually became the network broadcasting system for radio, which later on morphed into the television broadcasting system we have today.

The problem with broadcasting is that it generates an awful lot of money for very few people and crates a lot of passivity in the listeners or viewers.   Before radio and even before phonograph records, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to listen to whoever locally had a modicum of musical talent who could play an instrument or sing.  As a result, more people performed back then than they do today.  The piano was a fixture in the parlor of nearly every home around the turn of the century.  Today, fewer and fewer people have pianos, and fewer can play an instrument or even sing.

Instead, today we have superstars who earn millions, or tens of millions of dollars performing for us. Few of us are performers anymore, most of us are really just passive consumers of electronic entertainment whether it is movies, music, sports, or even the news.

Yes, even the news has fallen victim to broadcasting, with newspapers in steady decline since the advent of television, accelerating with the advent of the internet.  The local paper - if you even have one - often just barfs up content from USA Today, and if there is any local news, it is just press releases, reported verbatim, often with no investigation or journalism involved.

Many of us thought the effects of broadcasting would change with the advent of the internet, but as the example of the news illustrates, the internet has, if anything, accelerated this trend toward passivity by the masses.  The internet, at least initially, was thought of as a point-to-point communication system, like the telephone or the telegraph.  In the early days, it allowed anybody to create things and put them on the web.  People created their own websites, their own YouTube channels, and yes, even their own blogs.

But increasingly, this is becoming more and more like the broadcast model.  A few people have emerged as superstars on the internet and the rest of us merely consume their content.  We, as humans, gravitate toward the flashy and slick.   Someone's opinion is considered irrelevant, unless they have a monetized site or channel, with lots of flashy graphics and high production values.  This is human nature - the same aspect of which drives us to the slick-looking restaurant chain that serves crappy food, instead of the Mom-and-Pop diner which might serve excellent cuisine.

For example, you may be no doubt be aware of a young man - only 7 years old - who has made $22 million dollars by unwrapping boxes of toys on the internet and playing with them.  It's one of those things that makes you scratch your head in wonder, why can't I do that?  And the answer is, of course, that once someone like this kid reaches a certain critical mass of viewers, they sort of dominate the space.  No doubt, there are other parents out there trying to coax their children into being the next internet superstar, but failing miserably at it, because this one kid has already sucked the oxygen out of the room.

Another group of YouTube superstars are gamers - who do videos showing how they play various video games or revealing secret tricks to use during these games.  Video games themselves are another example of how we have become a passive nation.  People spend hours a day playing video games and will never get as good at them as the superstars of these games already are.  Others will actually spend enormous sums of money to advance to the next level of a game or enhance their appearances or accessories.

Very few actually create these games, however.  And increasingly, the people who create these games are more interested in how to line their own pockets than anything else.  One recent video game received a lot of fallout when they basically monetized the whole thing - you could advance to the next level either by playing the game for weeks on end, or by whipping out your credit card and paying.   Their problem wasn't in the monetization itself, but how aggressive they were at it.  In other words, you can get away with screwing the masses, so long as you are not too obvious about it.

One can argue that this is merely harmless entertainment for the masses, and to some extent that is correct. People are always trying to distract themselves with some sort of amusement, but in the past, usually these forms of amusement more active than passive.  Long before we had the internet, or television, or radio, or even phonograph records, we had books.  And granted, books have very few authors compared to the number of readers - or at least one hopes they would if you want to be a successful author.

But the act of reading a book is more of an active thing than a passive one.  You actually have to sit down and look at the words and form them into sentences in your mind and then use your imagination to fill in the blanks and visualize what's going on in the story.  This takes effort on the part of the reader.  It's no wonder that reading is falling from favor these days, as people would rather watch a movie than read the book that the movie was based upon.

We talk a lot about wealth inequality in this country and how unfair it is, and yet much of this occurs because of what we do to ourselves rather than what the rich people are doing to us.  It is almost obscene to watch so-called fans go to a rock concert or an athletic event in a crowded stadium with thousands or even tens of thousands of people - all paying outrageous ticket prices in the hundreds sometimes even thousands of dollars.  They sit there, passively, and cheer for a few people up on stage or in the playing field who are being paid millions of dollars apiece to perform for us.

Yet most of these fans are unable to play a musical instrument or even carry a tune.  Or if it's a sports fan, they're likely unable to actually play the sport that they are watching.  Fandom is now seen as an activity in and of itself.

So what's the point of this?  Only that if you spend all your time as a fan you will never have an active life or accomplish much.  We read a lot today about 30-something men living in their parents' basement and playing video games all day.  The video game industry argues that this is harmless fun and spending hours a day learning how to shoot people doesn't lead to mass shootings.

That would seem to go against studies about imprinting.  But even assuming that they are correct and there is no harm in playing violent video games all day, there is a cost in spending hours upon hours essentially doing nothing other than passively consuming other people's content.

Similarly, spending hours a day watching situation comedies isn't really going to enhance your life in any regard.  These sort of activities will lead to learned helplessness and depression as the result of passivity.  When you actually stop doing things in your life and relying 100% on others to do them for you, you don't end up happier you end up much, much sadder.

The next time you think about wealth inequality, think about all the people that you're handing your wealth to.  The cable television company, the television star whose raking in millions a year, the rock star who's making tens of millions, or the athlete who just signed a contract for $25 million.  Of course, that's not counting all the various corporations and team owners and other institutions which manufacturer and package this entertainment for you.

Each one of them collects a few dollars a month from millions of people and makes millions of dollars for themselves. Meanwhile, the viewers are a few dollars poorer, and cumulatively hundreds of dollars poor every month, particularly with things like cable television.

It takes time and energy to create, which is why so few people actually do it.  It doesn't have to be a song or an athletic skill or a musical performance. You can create all sorts of things in your life simply by doing rather than watching.

But for most people, that simply smacks of effort.

Will Downloading Replace Streaming?

Streaming was touted as the next big thing that would replace cable television. But maybe downloading will be the next big thing that replaces streaming.

We've been streaming video for almost a decade now.  We started out, as I chronicled long ago, using a old laptop to stream videos from YouTube and Netflix and then display them on a flat screen television using a VGA cable to connect the laptop to the TV.  It worked OK, for the time.

We then progressed to a smart TV that had a built-in Netflix and YouTube interface.  The television plugged into a router through a CAT-5 cable and we streamed directly from U-verse.  This worked OK, too, although there were sometimes glitches in the video and sometimes the audio and video would go out of sync.

Lately we've slimmed it down even further.  We started by using our cell phones to play the video and then screen mirror to the television using something called Miracast or screen mirroring depending on what brand of phone or television you have.  Then, I figured out that it was easier to use the phone as a "hot spot" and then link the television to the phone wirelessly (I didn't know it had that feature!).  This worked even better, as screen mirroring uses a lot of battery power on the phone (draining it faster than it will charge) and the phone gets hot as a result.  Screen mirroring also results in a more artifacts in the picture.

Funny thing, you can get two different levels of service on GoPhone (AT&T Prepaid).  One, for $55 a month (with prepay) gives "unlimited" data, but says using your phone as a mobile hotspot is not allowed.   To get hot spot activation, they claim you need to go to a $75 a month plan.   For some odd reason, the $55-a-month plan allows for hotspot usage (indeed, how can they tell what the data is being used for?).  But we plan to shop this plan around - aggressively - as well.

For the most part streaming works pretty well, though there can be some glitches depending on how good an internet connection you have.  In order to seamlessly stream video you need a robust connection, which often means you have to pay extra for higher streaming rates.

I've noted in the past, and some readers have confirmed, that you can adequately stream at lower resolutions, taking advantage of the cheaper rates for basic internet plans.  However, sometimes the data stream is interrupted and there are glitches in the video.

Both Netflix and YouTube now offer you the option of downloading videos. You can download the videos to your device and play them for a limited time.  It takes a few minutes to download each video, but when they play back it's usually pretty seamless.  When streaming on a limited bandwidth Channel you may see artifacts in the picture.  But with a downloaded video usually the picture is very crisp and clear without digital artifacts.

Of course, this is really nothing new.  The original TiVo and other video storage devices could be programmed to record specific programs at specific times for later playback.  But of course, these were not really downloading programs but rather recording them off the air from cable television  Nevertheless, I'm sure whoever owns the TiVo patents will allege that Netflix's downloading is infringing their patents, assuming the TiVo patents are still in force.  Such is the nature of the patent system.

Will downloading replace streaming?  I think at least in part for a number of reasons.  First of all, it seems that downloading may, ironically, take less bandwidth than streaming.  Downloading a file doesn't require a consistent and constant stream of data that is uninterrupted.  You can download a file and it can pause halfway through the download and it doesn't affect the integrity of the video image.  Low-bandwidth connections that aren't capable of streaming still can download.

Moreover, as data rates increase, downloading entire video files will take less and less time.  It will make more sense to download a video in a few minutes rather than try to stream it and hope to maintain a robust data connection for an hour or more.

For people like myself on a data diet, downloading offers a number of intriguing possibilities.  For example, during the day you could, during your lunch break, download videos onto your pad device or phone using your Wi-Fi connection at work or some other place providing free Wi-Fi.  You could then play back such videos in the evening without having to use your existing data plan and worry about a poor data connection.

Downloading may be the wave of the future - and streaming may already be obsolete!

Into the Wild

She's Baaaaack!  Small liberal arts colleges are struggling today and many may go bankrupt.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a blog entry opining that the next wave of bankruptcies might encompass some Colleges and Universities.  At the time, we were living near Aurora, New York - not the one near Buffalo - and a small College there - Wells College - was struggling.  Fewer and fewer students were willing to go to an all-girls institution to get a liberal arts degree, it seemed.

So far, the school has managed to stay in business.  One of the more famous alumni, Pleasant Rowland, who sold the "American Girl" line of dolls to Mattel for nearly a billion dollars, has donated large sums of money to keep the school afloat.  The school also went co-ed in order to attract more students - a decision that was met with some controversy.  As you may recall, Sweet Briar went through a similar problem, as their endowment stipulated that the school remain all-women.

Wells also partnered with nearby Cornell to allow students to take classes at that institution.  Small colleges are like small prep schools in that they can only offer limited numbers of courses and oftentimes this results in a more meager education or fewer educational opportunities for the students.

In a recent piece in the New York Times by Jon Krakauer, documents how the small and unorthodox Hampshire College in New England is facing bankruptcy - along with a number of other small liberal arts colleges.  Krakauer is famous for writing a book called "Into the Wild," which has  been somewhat controversial.

The book was supposed to be a nonfiction tome which described how a crazy guy went to Alaska totally unprepared for the wilderness and then marched off into the middle of nowhere, found an abandoned bus, lived in it, and then died from exposure and starvation - The End.  He left behind a journal with some quizzical entries in it, and from those few words, Mr Krakauer crafted an entire book.  It was later made into a trendy movie.  But many critics have accused Mr Krakauer of elaborately embroidering what little source material there was,  to make this crazy guy, who went out into the woods and died, seem like some sort of folk hero.

Hampshire college is one of these crazy new schools that was founded in the 1970s, with no classes, no grades, and no real courses. The students are expected to pick their own course of study and propose their own exams that they must pass in order to graduate.  I would have enjoyed that school as a young man, majoring in bong studies 101, with a minor in beer.

Mr. Krakauer, as his senior project, spent five weeks going to Alaska and attempting to climb Mount Denali. It sounds like my summer vacation, which was an interesting educational experience, although I didn't get a grade for it.

Such "alternative" educational institutions were very trendy back in the 70s, but in today's job market, it's not quite clear whether a degree from such a school would be worthwhile.  The article goes on to profile one student whose senior project was to build and live in a tiny house.  I'm not sure that living in a small trailer is really an educational opportunity, or that much could be gleaned from it.  Indeed, many people are doing this today, or living in park models, trailer homes or RVs and not getting college credit for doing this, because they're doing it out of necessity.

If I was a hiring manager, I'm not sure I would want to hire that person, unless I was in the business of making tiny homes or RVs or trailers of some sort.  But I imagine the person doing that as her senior thesis was probably looking for a more high-minded career than that.

As I noted in my earlier posting, the colleges and universities today are sort of like General Motors back in the 1970s.  GM started making more and more irrelevant products and then wondered why their customers were flocking to cheap, well-made Japanese Imports.  Toyota was selling Corollas and Coronas and Honda was producing the Civic and Accord.  Meanwhile General Motors brings out the Monte Carlo with padded landau roofs and opera windows, with an engine that sounded like a bucket of bolts when you stepped on the gas.  What's not to love?

It took years - decades - for people to figure out that those cars were overpriced and underbuilt.  And once they realized there were cheaper and more effective alternatives, they flocked to them.   There were other choices besides putting up with crap, or going bankrupt buying a Mercedes.   Economical Japanese imports were laughed at, initially.   Today, they dominate the market.   Could a similar thing happen to Colleges and Universities?   Yes, if they continue to sell overpriced and under-performing educations.

Conservatives love to harp on how schools are now teaching things like "sensitivity studies" or "queer studies" or "African-American studies" or whatnot - things which may be interesting in the abstract, but really not leading to any sort of useful education in the long run.  Moreover, the grading of these sorts of courses is somewhat ambiguous and it's not clear that students are really learning anything from these courses, other than what they could learn by reading the newspaper.

One such teacher is Melissa Click.  Remember her?  She was the one who, during the Ferguson protest, tried to expel a student journalist by asking for "more muscle" to physically eject him.  Every time I look at her picture, I am reminded why I am indeed a homosexual.   Ugh.

And yes, she's back in business and teaching young students all sorts of useful information.  And if you read her review on Rate My Professor it's rather scary.  Apparently everybody in the course receives a "B" no matter what they do - communism at it's finest.  And most of the course seems to comprise students sitting around listening to her opinions on the world.  Maybe she should just start a Blog.

It seems that our colleges and universities are turning more into institutes of indoctrination than education.  A lot of majors these days are little more than basic bullshit and teaching students about political theories and values.   And if you don't agree with the professor, you're likely to get a failing grade.

I think a lot of these touchy-feely courses offered at many of the liberal arts schools today are not really preparing young people for the real world.  As a result, when they graduate, they are shocked to discover that their sensitivities are not respected by their employers or indeed, any other people.  As I noted in another posting, degrees from such institutions could even be considered toxic.  Do you really want to take on a student from a far-left university who has a diploma in labor agitation?  You might as well take a viper to your breast.

Mr. Crackers Krakauer's article does bring up a number of good points.  Colleges and Universities in America are chasing a smaller and smaller pool of high school graduates.  And with the staggering cost of a college education today, more and more high school graduates are having to make informed decisions as student consumers as to which college education will give the most bang for the buck.  That's a tough decision for an 18-year-old to make - a potentially life-changing decision as well!   The fallout from $100,000 party degrees paid for by student loan debt is well-documented.

Granted, there will always be those students who want to go to the Party University and will look for the school that looks like it'll be the most fun.  But a host of other students don't have that kind of money to throw around, as evidenced by a proposal to allow homeless students to sleep in their cars at  one California school.  Not everyone is signing up for luxury student housing.

Like anything else, it's taken a decade or more for the chickens to come home to roost.  But I think my prediction of almost a decade ago was prescient.  A lot of these smaller schools really can't compete in this day and age, unless the number of college-age children increases dramatically.

Foreign students have always been a good source of warm butts to put in the lecture hall seats. However, most foreign students are very astute student-consumers, and want the most bang for their dollar.  They tend to pick more hard courses of study, and are not interested in touchy-feely majors. That, and recent restrictions on immigration and student visas would appear to dampen enthusiasm for American Colleges and Universities.

The real problems are yet to be realized, however.  I think with a coming recession and the eventual realization that a college education is worth an awful lot less these days may force a lot of the remaining few students to reconsider whether college is worthwhile at all.  Angry young millennials who majored in foolish studies and are paying back tens of thousands of dollars of student loans are setting an example for young high school students today.  Maybe 18-year-olds aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but some of them will eventually catch on to what's going down.  And they may decide that a vocational education is a more cost-effective use of their money then going to some party school for four years.

Or maybe something else entirely.   Like I said, college was the best 14 years of my life - working your way through college and experiencing life at the same time has its advantages.   And one of those advantages is, I learned a helluva lot more than some kid writing papers and studying for exams for four short years.

College needs to re-invent itself.  It needs to be more relevant to the world outside of campus.  It needs to be more affordable.  It needs to expose students to what a real working life will be like.  It needs to be more about academics and less about NCAA sports.  And it needs to be less about indoctrination to any political view - right or left.   In short, it needs to teach life.

And that is the ultimate irony of Mr. Krakauer's article.  Hampshire College was a re-invention of college when it was founded in 1970.   Yet it seems locked in a form of stasis, unable to reinvent itself again for a new Millennium.   And a host of other colleges and universities seemed caught into the same trap.

Sort of like Sears, I guess.....