Trump threatens to lay his cards on the table

Oh I bet they were wild on the bus.  As long as you could keep them under your teacher tyranny in the classroom they weren't so bad, but once they got into even the hallway on the way to the bathroom and they inhaled the sweet fumes of sweet liberty, they went wild.  I'll bet they were better in the morning when they had just left their parents' house with their parents telling them now you be good, and they were half asleep anyway, than on the way home where they were fully awake and had nothing ahead but playtime.  My classes were always much better behaved before lunch than afterwards.  Sometimes coming to the lunchroom to pick them up, and seeing their gleeful faces, i just wanted to slip out the side door and never be seen again.

I had the experience too where the first kid to come into the classroom was very nice and helpful, but as soon as the other kids arrived he turned out to be the worst kid.  I think they just want to show off in front of their peers.

Speaking of bartending, the worst thing to get was a bunch of drunk guys.  Guys and girls by themselves generally behave.  A group of drunk girls could be more obnoxious.  It's the screeching, cuts through me like a knife.  But they never did any damage or got into fights, and it didn't happen that often.  A mixed group was okay.  If there was just one girl with the guys they would behave better, but if it was just guys they would egg each other on like a bunch of fourth graders. 

Sometimes I envy believers their afterlife.  It must be nice when a loved one dies to think that they have gone to a better place, and that you yourself will be going to one.  I have a little bit of fear that right after being run over by a truck I will be facing St Peter with that long list.  "Well how was I supposed to know?" I will be wailing as I am riding the down escalator. 

What do you read when you are drinking your morning coffee and smoking your morning cig?  I live for the morning newspaper.  Speaking of dying, I think it would be alright if every morning some angel I guess, would slip a newspaper into my coffin and I could read it and return to my slumber.  I can't imagine not knowing what is going on, even when I am not around.

Last night's republican debate finally got around to the point where Trump was bragging about the size of his dick. I guess that was inevitable the way these things have been going.  You know I root for Trump because I see him as the ruination of the GOP, but with all his bleating and sneering and bellowing, he gets a little hard to take.  Rubio and Cruz double teamed him, and it was like bear baiting or that thing where they stick the spear into the bull.  It looked to me like they got the best of him, but then I am not a Trump fan so I really don't know what those guys are thinking.

There are still a lot of delegates but likely things will continue to go the way they have been.  Normally a convention is like a commercial for the party, everything is all scripted and nicey-nice, but if the republican convention is contested it will look like world wide wrestling.  At the end of the debate the others pledged to back Trump if he won the nomination, and he pledged to back them, but there is nothing binding about that.

I think I heard the paper hit the door.  Time to get the pundits' comments on the debate.

No Comparison

There is no comparison between kids' behavior on a school bus and in a classroom. It's nothing like a CTA bus either, or like anything I've ever seen before. The only thing that kept me in that job for almost ten years was the challenge of trying to figure out what was wrong with those kids. Actually, most of them were alright, 10% of the kids caused 90% of the problems. There were some individuals who could disrupt a whole bus load all by themselves, on the days that they didn't ride it was a whole different environment. When I say "all by themselves" I don't mean it like it sounds, I mean that you take that one kid and put him in with 50 other kids, and there's trouble. One of my worst subjects was the first kid on the bus in the morning, and he was perfectly fine until more kids got on. The more kids that got on, the worse he became, and the worse he became, the worse the other kids became. I figured early on that it had something to do with mass hysteria, that it was contagious like a disease.

I talked to a lady bar tender one time who had studied psychology in college, and she told me that she learned a lot more about human nature tending bar than she ever did in school. Bar tenders generally interact with individuals or small groups, while a school bus driver deals with 50 kids at a time, and he is usually the only adult on the bus. The special ed busses had an aide who took care of the kids and all the driver had to do was drive, which was way easier. I found out later that some of my usual suspects were also special ed, but not special enough to qualify for the special bus, and they were some of the worst. We got no special training about how to deal with special kids, until I requested it once at our annual driver training refresher course, and we got some the next year. It was somewhat helpful, at least now I had a clue about what their problems were, but there wasn't much I could actually do about it. As near as I could tell, the state mandated programs were designed to maintain those kids in their present condition, not to cure or improve them.

What you said about death has plagued humanity since forever, which is probably why they developed religion. Well, the earliest religions probably were more focused on affecting things in this life but, as time went on, the focus was shifted to the afterlife. To you who do not believe in an afterlife, this life must indeed seem like "such a waste". I'm not sure if I believe in an afterlife or not, there is no way to prove it until you get there, and then it might be too late. I try not to worry about it too much, just keep putting one foot in front of the other for as long as I can. I doubt that my believing or not believing is going to change anything.

I first heard the phrase "post industrial economy" when I was working at the paper mill. This young lady manager was all enthused about it, claiming that the industrial age was being phased out and replaced by the information age, which she believed to be a good thing. I asked her what all the information was going to be about when we were no longer making anything. Would the computers gather around the water cooler and gossip about other computers?  She said that she didn't understand the question, and she was a college graduate. Years later, I heard a guy on PBS radio refer to our "post industrial welfare state", which pretty well sums it up.

I don't watch the news first thing in the morning, and not very much later in the day either. We have discussed this before, the only TV news I pick up is when I'm waiting for the weather and stock market reports. We don't get a newspaper anymore, and I hardly miss it. If it wasn't for the Institute and Wikipedia I wouldn't have a clue about what's going on in the world beyond the borders of Beaglesonia. Speaking of which, I looked up the delegate counts for the Republican candidates, and it's not exactly a runaway yet. Less than half the states have voted yet, and nobody has a clear majority. If it develops into a three or four way race at the convention they will have to take more than one ballot and, after the first ballot, all bets are off.

the grim reaper knocks

I didn't notice that much difference in the behavior of my grade school kids and the behavior of my class back in the day.  Did you notice any difference in the kids on the bus? 

When I first bought mutual funds I had a sheet of paper that listed what was good or bad about each of them and I pored over it and frankly one looked pretty much like the other so I picked three pretty much at random.  Later on when I bought more I bought something conservative and something based on the S and P, and that has been my chief moneymaker, though not lately.

Like you, I don't quite live within my means of social security and modest state pension and I dip into my savings to get by.  Sometimes I do the most rudimentary of calculations and am pleased that I will be dead long before the money is gone, but then I am sad that I will be dead so I don't dwell there long.

I had a recent medical scare that turned out alright, but got me to thinking that I am no spring chicken.  I was a little pleased that I held up well enough facing the grim reaper, but now that it's over I don't think about it much.  I hope it takes me in my sleep like a thief in the night so that I don't have to think about it too much.  Seems like such a waste, we gain all this knowledge and then poof, it's like we were never born.

Maybe They just want you to think that They forced a post industrial economy on you.  What does post industrial mean anyway, that we don't build as much stuff here anymore?

You don't look at the news first thing when you wake up?  When I go to bed at night one thing that puts a smile on my face is knowing that as I sojourn in slumberland shit will be happening all over the globe and I can sit down in the morning to a whole fresh contingent of news.  I have to get it off the computer because my newspapers don't thunk at my door in the hallway until I am up for an hour, and even though their news is old compared to the stuff I scroll on the computer screen it feels somehow more substantial.  It is a volume in the annals of mankind, unlike that computer screen which is more like a whiteboard that is written on and erased.

Another debate tonight.  Unfortunately I have scheduled an art club for tonight, and since I run it I can't ditch it.  Well maybe nobody will show up.

The Carrot and the Stick

In addition to teaching kids thrift, I was also trying to improve their behavior. It's pretty hard to control somebody who feels that he has nothing to lose so, first we give him something, then we take it away if he misbehaves. My criticism of today's schools is more about behavior than it is about academics, although the two are frequently intertwined. I don't remember seeing many behavior problems at Sawyer Elementary, but we certainly had our share of them at Gage Park. That improved substantially after the first year when the bad kids turned 16 and were starting to be culled out. Michigan now requires kids to attend school until they are 18, but even before that, they were trying to keep kids in school as long as possible no matter what. They keep preaching to the kids that actions have consequences, but they don't enforce it, so the kids become immune to such admonitions. This provides job security to the counselors, but it doesn't do much to prepare the kids for the real world, where actions do indeed have consequences.

I saved a little money when I was a kid but, by the 1970s, money was depreciating so fast that there was little point in saving it. Conventional wisdom was that you should carry as much debt as possible because you would be repaying it with devalued dollars. Of course interest rates were high enough to cancel out that benefit, but that didn't stop the experts from giving such poor advice, or stop people like me from following it. The only reason I have investments to live on today is that the paper mill closed down and turned our retirement accounts over to us. We were advised to roll that money over into a personal IRA to avoid paying a big tax on it, so I had to learn about investment options or pay somebody else to do it for me.

The amount I received was not nearly enough for me to retire at age 45, so I had to make it grow for at least the next ten years, which necessitated taking some risk. I took a risk tolerance test, which told me that I could tolerate just enough risk to conservatively invest in the stock market, which offered a better chance of sufficiently growing my money than stashing it in the bank. By the time my mother died in 2002 and left me some more money, I knew exactly what to do with it. I could have survived without my mother's money, but it would have been a close call when the market took a tumble like it did around that time, and again in 2009. Mom's money provided a cushion that enabled me to ride out the ups and downs without becoming a nervous wreck about it. I now have about 20% more money than I had after adding Mom' money to the pot, even though I am down about 10% from my last high point a few months ago. The original IRA has a little less than I started with in 1990, but I have been mostly living off of it since then. By the way, I forgot to answer one of your questions  yesterday. You asked me if the money I withdrew was replaced by dividends or something. Most of the gains in a stock market investment come from capital appreciation, which means the increase in the market value of the stock over time, although the dividends also help.

As far as what They want us to do with our money, well They should have thought about that before they forced this post industrial economy upon us.

I haven't checked the numbers yet from Super Tuesday but, judging from the sound of your gloating, Trump must have carried the day. The fat lady isn't singing yet, but I thought I heard her practicing her scales backstage.

marshmallows

It seems to me that what you want to teach the kiddies is saving and frugality, and I couldn't agree more with you.  But it's a pretty simple message don't you think?  I mean don't you think that everybody knows that if they spend less they will be better off?  But they spend anyway because they want whatever they want right now.

Seems to me that we have discussed the marshmallow experiment before, but I don't remember what we said and it's pretty short, so I'll tell it again.  Kids are handed one marshmallow and if they can hold onto it the kindly experimenter will come back in five minutes with another marshmallow and then they will have two, unless they have eaten the first one in which case they get nothing.  About half the kids can wait and about half can't.  They tracked these kids over a number of years and the ones who didn't eat the first marshmallow did better in life.  These are pretty little kids so I expect a lot of it is genetic.

So my thesis is that you can teach kids thrift but you can't make them practice it.  And anyway our economy depends on it.  Aren't They, and I think I mean They here, always telling us that the problem is that consumer spending is down and that's a problem.  Well not always, sometimes They are telling us that we are not saving enough.  And as Beagles has pointed out on numerous occasions, what They are really always doing is trying to make us do something and it behooves us to figure that out and do the opposite, so maybe it's best to leave Them out of it.

But you know that money skinflints like the two of us save to buy our investments, if we are going to make more of it we depend on people buying the crap our companies make, and the more they spend the better we do, so that if everybody was a skinflint we wouldn't be getting much return on our investments.

I will take issue with your reference to your: the way the schools are run now

I think back to the way schools were back in the day, almost everybody learned how to read.  Actually I don't remember anybody not being able to read, but i guess they were shuffled off early.  And most of us learned arithmetic, and a smattering of where France is and who was our first president.  I didn't like high school because of its authoritative nature, but I guess I learned enough stuff there.  In short I would say I learned enough to start out in life at 18.

I can't speak to the current day high school, but my experience with kids in elementary school who were on a little lower level of the economic scale than we were in our day, was pretty good.  Almost all of them learned to read, probably the same amount as us learned arithmetic and they knew were France was and who Washington was. 

I never understand where this whole theory of our schools are going to hell comes from, it's just assumed to be common knowledge but I haven't seen any evidence of it.  One thing different in our day was, as we learned from that book, that not much effort was made to educate black kids, and if they didn't learn much, none of us white folk minded that much.  Now we are trying to educate everybody and the poor kids drag the average down.   

I did stay up late, it was almost ten when I retired with a smile on my face over the triumph of Trump and the downfall of the GOP.

My Point Exactly

That's the whole point of my pay-for-school idea, to teach kids the value of money and the relationship of money to work. Okay, money isn't what it used to be and neither is work, but it's still true that you can get money by doing something that somebody else wants you to do. We have talked before about how some poor people stay poor by making poor choices, and even rich people have been known to squander their money by making poor choices of their own. My program might help some kids to grow up knowing better than that. Of course not every kid will get the point, but not every kid turns out okay with the way the schools are run now. What you said about Talman was true, and we might get a similar effect by each school having its own student credit union.

I have not seen any of those bronze dollars and neither has my hypothetical wife, but we both remember the Susan B. Anthony dollars, which were worse because they weren't even a different color than the quarters. I once read on Wiki that the government puts out real silver and gold coins on occasion. They are legal tender, but they never get into circulation because collectors and dealers immediately buy them up for more than their face value.

There are several different ways to "play" the stock market. People who try to buy low and sell high are called "traders" or "speculators", while the more conservative "buy and hold" people are called "investors". Mutual funds are a better choice than buying individual stocks for relatively small investors like me who want to minimize their effort and risk exposure. There are lots of different kinds of mutual funds with varying degrees of risk associated with them. Generally, the more risk you take, the greater the potential profit or loss. Less risk means you won't make as much money as some people, but you won't lose as much either. My IRA is in a conservative stock index fund, and I also have another identical fund that is not part of my IRA. My money market fund is also a mutual fund, but they don't invest in stocks, they make short term high quality loans to big corporations and the U.S. government. The primary goal of a money market fund is to never lose principal, so their profits are generally much smaller than stock funds, although they have been known to do well in times of high interest rates like we haven't seen in decades.

I can write checks on my money market fund, but not for less than $250, so we use that to pay our larger bills. We also have a checking account at our local credit union, which we use for anything less than $250. Both of our Social Security checks are direct deposited into our credit union checking account. It doesn't pay interest, so we keep enough in there to cover anticipated expenses and periodically transfer the excess into our savings account at the same credit union. We have about 30% or our money in the money market and the credit union and about 70% in our stock mutual funds. These percentages vary with the ups and downs of the stock market, but not as much as one might think, maybe 5% either way. Conventional wisdom says that you are supposed to rebalance your portfolio every year to keep the percentages the way you want them, but we have never felt the need to do that. I follow the ups and down of the stock market because I am interested in it like you are interested in politics, but I don't make decisions based on what I see on TV every day. Actually, I haven't made any decisions about my portfolio in a long time, figuring "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Speaking of politics, I'm sure you're aware that today was Super Tuesday, and plan to sit up all night watching the results come in. I am interested in it too, but am content to wait till tomorrow and read about it on Wiki. Michigan votes next Tuesday, and I don't plan on sitting up all night for that one either. I will be so sick of this crap by November that I won't even care if Hillary wins, just so they get it over with.

money money money money

I can't remember exactly when, but I think I was like maybe eight years old, because a quarter sounded like pretty good money, but one day the word "Allowance" rang through the Schadt household.  I figure my older sister picked it up somewhere.  It was kind of nice having an older sibling sort of blazing the trail and telling me and my younger sister what laid ahead.

Anyway it was a weekly thing.  I think my parents negotiated it in terms of payment for chores done around the house.  There were always chores that they were trying to get us to do and we were always trying to dodge them, so nothing really changed on that point.

Maybe this is where I get my liberal tendencies.  It just seemed like allowance was some kind of law, and my parents had to give it to me.  It did seem a little unfair to me at the time, but it was unfair for me, so I didn't mind.

I know you had to work in the store, and I think you got paid something for it, but you seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy doing chores, and even if you didn't enjoy them you would be happy to do them just because you are such a damned boy scout.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

As we got older the allowance got bigger, though it never amounted to a lot.  I did mow lawns and shovel snow in the neighborhood and then I would get money from semi distant relatives on my birthday and Christmas.  Of course, being a Bohunk, most of that went right to Talmans. 

Speaking of which, if you want to teach kids how to handle their money, I think you need something like Talmans, like the Talmans of our youth, where when you brought in your little pittance you brought in your little bankbook with it, and the kindly clerk would not only write in the new amount, but he would add whatever interest you had accrued.  Interest!  Free money!!  The way to a Bohunk's heart!!!  Others pay interest, we receive it.  I had to go into debt to get my mortgage and my student loans and it just killed me to pay interest on either one of them.

See, back in the day we had bankbooks, and clunky coins and wrinkled bills that would smell nice if they came out of some lady's purse, real money.  All the youth of today has is those cards, and worse yet, that thing where they hold out their sooper dooper phone and somebody swishes something across it.   I don't think they will ever learn the value of money if they never even see any.

I don't think a buck a day is going to motivate any kid.  Maybe if it was a silver dollar.  One of my grandfathers used to give me a silver dollar from time to time and that impressed me.  Of course we don't have silver dollars anymore, we have these goofy looking coins that they color bronze so that you can tell them from quarters which they are the same size of.  You get them if you do any transaction with the US Government that requires change, like buying stamps at the post office, because the government thinks somehow if they give them we will come to get used to using them.

When you buy something with one of them you always want to tell the clerk so that they won't think it is a quarter.  I find myself saying that it is a silver dollar even though it isn't hardly, because those are just the words that come out of my mouth.

And what about half dollars, those big half dollars with Ben on one side and the liberty bell on the other?  Cool or what?  They just don't make money like they used to.

I don't understand your IRA.  Is it actual stocks, or some kind of mutual fund?  If you are taking out a thousand a month is that replenished by dividends or something?    The way to invest seems like to me, is to buy low and sell high, which it seems like you could tell when stocks are way too high and sell, and buy back again when they appear to be in a valley.  Not that I have ever tried anything like that.  I couldn't live like that, watching the stock ticker every day.  But then you say you are always watching it, so why do you do that if you are not into  buying or selling?

Trump is a personality type that I am sure you know well because they are all over, and I refer here to the big fucking asshole.  It's as simple as that.  He thinks he is the smartest guy in the world, and he probably doesn't even notice anybody else, and is certainly too unreliable to use in any plot.  There is some talk of republicans putting up a third party candidate if he wins.  If they somehow manage to avoid nominating him he will think they have treated him unfairly and will certainly run on a third party. 

Either way the big girl wins big, and likely we take back the Senate and there is some talk about even the house, and if we want to put Bern on the supreme court there is nothing you can do about it and you might as well get measured for the tux for your wedding to your gay dog. 

Or maybe something else might happen.