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In my blag post titled, "The Economic Recovery Plan," I talked briefly about property tax and education reform and promised that there would be a post dedicated to this topic in the near future. Well today's you're lucky day folks! I realize that my opinions on education may upset educators and progressive liberals of all sorts. However, I believe that, in order to right the US economy, we need to have some changes to our primary and secondary education system.

First of all, allow me to say that I do not advocate much in the way of cuts to the education system across the country. However, I do believe that there are some decisive changes that need to be made in order to make the system more efficient and get more value for the tax dollars spent.

Part of the cause of the housing crisis in the United States is that school districts funding is based largely on the value of the homes in the area. Higher home values means higher property taxes, which means more funding for local schools. Thus, educators and everyone close to the education system have been trying to push property values up. This, combined with I-bankers' casino-like gambling in the housing market, lead to a huge housing boom. Sadly, this sort of boom is always followed by a bust, which meant a sudden and dramatic drop in housing values and the associated property tax revenue.

Coming up with a solution to the property tax problem alone is a conundrum. Is there really any other parameter under which property taxes can be calculated and collected, or would property taxes have to be abandoned and their revenue replaced by hikes in other taxes? The best alternate system that I can think of is basing property taxes on the number of people inhabiting each acre of land with respect to the population density of the surrounding area with separate rates for areas deemed rural, suburban, and urban. However, in the end, I'm not sure that this would be better than just throwing out property taxes and raising income and sales taxes to compensate. I just couldn't tell you for sure.

Regardless of what method of taxation was used, the proportion of wealth taken in by the states cannot continue to increase with respect to income. For years, states have taken in billions more dollars to try to help fund public eduction while the nation's infrastructure rots to nothingness (said the civil engineer). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it doesn't matter how well kids know their multiplication tables when they're dying of Giardia or Cholera because the state chose more money for education over a drinking water treatment plant. While it's working out alright for now, the track we're on is just not sustainable.

So, without further ado, allow me to unveil my ideas for trimming the fat off education so that (maybe) we could have drinking water, sanitary sewer, and transportation systems that don't suck:

1. Eliminate Bilingual Education Programs. Since I would have already deported the illegal immigrants, this wouldn't be as big of an issue as it might seem. Any child holding citizenship status and not speaking fluent English would be put into a rigorous English immersion program.
2. Reduce the power of teachers' unions and certification boards. The goal of this change would not be to reduce the pay of teachers, who already take in the shorts monetarily. The goal would be to take down the institutions that keep bad teachers in the classroom. In order to create better value for taxpayers, we need to have the most capable teachers, and not just the oldest and most social powerful, in the classroom. Unions and cert. boards are made up, largely, of current teachers, who have their own interests in mind. A set of bad teachers can stay right where they are if they're also on the cert. board by keeping better teachers from becoming certified.
   
3. Change the cert. requirements for teachers. To the chagrin of elementary education majors across the nation, I would remove the requirement of having a bachelor's degree in order to teach elementary and middle school. Before you tell me that that would only reduce the quality of teachers, let me present to you the brilliant, but impossible alternative. I've met a few people, among whom there were plenty of education majors, who graduated from reasonably good colleges still being dumber than a bag of hammers and not knowing the functional differences between there, their, and they're, nor being able to find the People's Republic of China on a map. What the American education system really needs is consistent testing of intelligence and communication skills for teachers. Now, we go on a detour as to why this little slice of reason will never happen. In the case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a group of black workers sued the power company for which they worked, for using intelligence tests to discriminate against minority workers. The supreme court ruled that, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, companies could not institute any selection criteria, including intelligence testing, that would cause minorities to be less likely to win jobs. (If you don't find this a little ridiculous, you're part of the "Don't confuse me with the facts," problem we have in this country.) This ruling made it functionally illegal for any organization to use intelligence testing as a selection criteria for employment, including certification of teachers. Now just to be clear, I'm not trying to recruit the best and brightest to be teachers. This would be absurd, based on the current salaries of teachers. After all, those who can't do teach. I'm just trying to make sure that we don't keep morons as teachers just because they were the best we had 12 years ago.
4. Remove competitive athletics from government budgets. I like sports as much as the next guy, but much like the Bowl Championship Series of Division I-A football, competitive sports are a large burden on our government-funded education system. All funding for competitive athletics would have to come from approved boosters. Left to its own devices, this system would unduly favor the children of rich parents, who are already over-privileged as it is. However, with this reform, I would also require that all booster contributions be pooled by the state and redistributed based on enrollment. This way, East High School (Denver) would get a similar athletic budget to Cherry Creek High and all other schools of similar size. If a rich family is going to buy new equipment for their son's football team, they're going to also have to buy new equipment for every other school in the state. Also, any program found not properly reporting its booster contributions to the state would have those contributions seized and would not be allowed to play for one full athletic season.
   
5. Open up a can of whoop-@$$ on textbook publishers. Any undergraduate can tell you, "The price of textbooks is too D@mn high!" This would take the form of not only taking measures to reduce prices outright, but also to prevent publishers from coming out with frivolous new editions. Restrictions would be placed on how often publishers could come out with new books, and if there wasn't enough new, groundbreaking material in a new edition, publishers would be required to continue printing the old edition and selling it at the same price.
6. Open up a slightly less intense can of whoop-@$$ on technology companies. In exchange for not having their taxes raised, makers of computers and software would have to supply a certain number of desktops, printers, tablets, etc. to states for use in public schools. Any proceeds collected from the potential tax hike on tech companies would be redistributed to the states for the purpose of funding education.
   
7. Construct schools with a contractual design life. Many school districts are not held accountable for how they use their school buildings and when they replace them. Districts would have to commit to how long they would use a school building. The longer the design life of the building, the more money the district would get from the state in order to build it. The only way that a district could sell a school building short of its legal design life is if the costs of repairing the building, in absolute terms, would be greater than the cost of a new building.

The purpose of these changes would not be to restrict or cut the public education system. My main purpose would be to stabilize the costs to taxpayers in order to help create an environment conducive to economic growth. With the increased tax revenue that would (hopefully) come from economic growth, money could be allocated to other projects, like the infrastructure that's vital to anything remotely resembling our quality of life in the United States. In the long term, I would hope that both the funding for education and other government-funded programs could continue so that we, in the United States, can continue to have the quality of life we enjoy.

Unfortunately, the reforms I list in this post are almost as unrealistic as the one that I suggested in the last post, most of them for similar reasons. I can only hope that the feds and states of United States of America can make some priorities that actually contribute to the welfare of its citizens, especially the middle class. Though, I'm pretty sure I'm going to start learning Chinese, just in case.

Brethren, Our Prayers Have Been Answered

I knew a guy at the Colorado School of Mimes who was a member of the church and attended the institute. He told me a story that I found very entertaining, that I'm going to tell you now. To put this in context, Mines is a school wholly dedicated to engineering, and as such has gender ratios similar to the engineering building on any campus. The recruiters were actually being congratulated because they were up to 24% women. Well, as you could image, the student ward in town was one in a series of unfortunate dudefests. Basically, it was a bunch of single engineers, a couple people from Metropolitan State College of Denver who lived in the area, and a few married engineers with their wives. Single women were a scarce resource. So, this guy's story was that, one Sunday, he was attending the area family ward instead of the student ward. While he was in that ward, the BYU women's basketball team walked in and sat down among the congregation. And in his own words, "If this had been in the [student] ward, the bishop would have stood up and said, 'Brethren, our prayers have been answered.'"

That's kind of how I feel today, but not about women, about money. This morning, I emailed Kathy Westberg at Oregon State to confirm that she had received a written confirmation of my acceptance of the graduate laurels scholarship. She responded that she had received it and that everything was set. Literally 5 hours later, I received another email from Kathy saying that I had also been selected to receive a graduate teaching assistantship. Needless to say, I was very flattered at that point that the school of civil and construction engineering thought that high of me. I have asked the Lord repeatedly to help me find graduate funding and he has clearly softened the hearts of those at Oregon State University such that money has been flowing in my direction therefrom.

So, this assistantship involves basically the same thing as the scholarship plus a job. So, I still get three quarters of tuition remission, but along with it, I get $1738.03 a month in exchange for 20 hours of work a week as a teaching assistant. Is the equivalent of about $20 an hour more than I've ever made? Why yes... yes it is. By about double. I like this.

The only caveat to this assistantship is that I have to have health insurance. Thanks to our good friend Barack Obama, I am still covered under my parents' health insurance, though Oregon State really wants you to buy theirs. In order to waive the university's insurance, you have to provide proof that yours provides at least as good or better coverage than theirs. I called my parents' insurance company today and requested a copy of our insurance coverage that will be here in 7 to 10 business days that I can then send to the university along with an insurance waiver form. I'm going to submit the paperwork, even though it's hardly even worth it at this point. The university's health insurance only costs $43 a month, which is deducted from the stipend tax free. Put simply, I'm going to turn in the insurance waiver, but if it gets rejected, it won't hurt my feelings too much.

On a somewhat separate note, I found out from the Corvallis institute website that you can submit requests for roommates by sending an email to the institute. This will make finding a roommate with morals significantly easier. I like this as well.

Brothers and sisters, my prayers have been answered.

The Moratorium

Ever since about April of last year, I've had the sneaking suspicion that there's a federal moratorium on giving me money. Much like the moratorium on gulf-coast drilling, all donations or compensations of cash flowing toward me have been banned. This moratorium extends to trade as well as wages. Let's examine the evidence, shall we:

• My last "permanent" employment was in April of 2010 with the civil engineering department at Brigham Young University. Though the moratorium may have actually taken effect before this, I was the only one who was willing to TA environmental engineering with Dr. Williams during winter semester, so they had to keep for at least a few additional months.
• Even though I was employed with tαr3eI for a couple of weeks during this winter, the compensation that I received was negligible and they dismissed me well before the January 10th deadline to retain holiday employees.
• I filled out over 300 job applications and got 3 interviews, all of which were within 50 miles of the campus of my Alma Mater. And out of these 3 interviews, zero offers were extended.
• I've tried to sell both my dirt bike and my engagement ring from fiancée #2. The price of both of these was probably under what they're actually worth, but I got about 4 calls between the two of them. (And on a side note, Craigslist is nothing but crime!)
• It's too early to call 'game over,' but universities and civil engineering departments seem hesitant to offer me any sort of funding other than loans. And btw, only getting money that someone expects you to repay isn't sustainable, just try paying off a credit card with another credit card every month, it doesn't work.

This is all granted that my mom has given me money in the recent past, but that's nothing unusual. I wouldn't expect her to stop giving me money now, even if there is a moratorium.

I'm looking at you Obama... What should I do?

[New Grad School Odds: CU Boulder - 2:1, Oregon State - 5:1, BYU - 5:1, Washington - 20:1, Virginia Tech - 30:1, UCLA - 60:1]

sqrt(Evil)

Holy crap, I forgot how much is actually costs to be a perpetual student. I made a spreadsheet of how much it would actually cost to go to grad school for a semester. I actually counted monthly expenses and then multiplied by 4, but that's a technicality. The moral of the story is that I can't afford this S#1+. Also the difference in tuition between BYU and CU Boulder is only about $3500. The difference between $42,000 in total debt and $30,000 in total debt is mostly negligible. I ask all 3 people who read my blag to pray that I get funding... I could really, really use it.

Yeah, seriously...

Edit: [New odds effective 12p EST 03/11/2011, CU Boulder - 5:2, Oregon State - 4:1, BYU - 5:1, Virginia Tech - 15:1, Washington - 20:1, and UCLA - 30:1.]

Beyond Criminally Stupid

Today is the day that Auburn University and their Heisman trophy winning quarterback, Cameron Newton meet the University of Oregon in Glendale, Arizona to play for a crystal football in the Bowl Championship Series "championship" game. I hesitate to call this game the National Championship, or even a championship at all, because the way that it selects its "champion." Throughout history, the United States and the world have seen cases of greed, corruption, and just plain evil, but aside of the choke hold that DeBeers has on the diamond industry and *MAYBE* OPEC's control of petroleum, this country has never seen a cartel quite like the cartel that burdens college football's postseason.

In case you're not familiar with the current scheme of college football's "championship," it goes something like this. All 120 Division 1-A (the division for the largest schools) football teams play 12 games during the regular season. After that season, a few groups of pollsters (from the coach's and Harris polls) and an undisclosed computer ranking system rank the top 25 teams in the nation. The number 1 and 2 teams in the country play each other in the BCS "championship" game and others go to various bowl games. The 4 oldest and most prestigious bowls are the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange bowls. These bowls combined with the BCS "championship" actually have contractual obligations to the six oldest and richest college football conferences to invite the conference champion to one of these bowl games. There are eleven conferences in Division 1-A college football. The six "Automatic Qualifying" (AQ) conferences are the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big Ten Conference, the Big XII Conference, the Pacific 10 Conference (Pac 10), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), and the Big East Conference. The five non-automatic qualifying (non-AQ) conferences are the Mountain West Conference, the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), Conference USA (C-USA), the Mid-American Conference (MAC), and the Sun Belt Conference. The AQ conferences send their champions to the most prestigious and well-paying bowls, while the non-AQ schools get sent to the likes of the papajohns.com bowl.

If you haven't discerned it yet, the Bowl Championship Series, and by default the entire Division 1-A college football postseason is governed by who has the stranglehold on the power that there is, and not who legitimately has the most competitive college football team. In recent years, teams like Boise State, Texas Christian, Utah, Brigham Young, Houston, and others have demonstrated that they can beat just about any other team in college football and should have the opportunity to play for a national championship. However, they have been denied because they do have a long and storied football program and don't come from one of the richest conferences in the system. In the 13 years of BCS postseason football from 1998 to 2010, only 12 teams in the country had the opportunity to play for the "championship." Keep in mind that two teams meet every year for the game, and thus there would be a maximum of 26 teams that would have been able to play in that game. Only the most storied football programs from the richest conferences actually make it to the "championship" game. Even the teams in the "Big Six" conferences that are a little lower on the totem pole haven't gotten a chance to play for the title.

I'll admit 2 things: 1) The BCS is slightly better than the previous system. 2) The trend that I just mentioned did change a little this year. The previous system for college football's Division 1-A championship was to have the bowls select whoever they wanted, then have pollsters choose who they thought was best after the bowl season. This system was terrible because the top-ranked teams in the country wouldn't necessarily have to play each other. However, I feel pretty confident in saying that matching the two highest-ranked teams at the end of the season is not sufficient in crowning a true champion. Saying the BCS is better that the previous system is like saying that the frying pan is better than the fire: It may be a little bit cooler, but it still sucks.

This year Oregon and Auburn face each other in the BCS "championship" game. These two teams have never been to the BCS championship and have usually been considered second-tier in their conferences. However, this only goes to the incriminate the BCS further because it exemplifies the parity that exists in Division 1-A college football. No longer do USC, Texas, and Florida dominate every team they play and walk to an easy national "championship." Now, every team has to fight for its conference because players have easy access to information and aren't willing to sit for years at a historic program when they could play at a less historic one. Now teams like Auburn and Oregon can contend for their conference championships and teams like Boise State, TCU and Utah can contend that they deserve a shot at the national championship.

Part of the reason that I feel this way toward the BCS is that I have recently read the book Death to the BCS by Yahoo! Sports writers Dan Wetzel, Jeff Passan, and Josh Peter. The subtitle to this book is "The Definitive Case Against the BCS," and I don't think that this could be any more true. The authors of this book went into painstaking detail, investigating the financial reports of universities and incorporated bowl games to discover the truth about the BCS and to develop probably the best alternative that anyone has conceived so far. This book has changed that way that I see college football and I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the sport.


The alternative that Death to the BCS suggests is a 16-team playoff in which the highest-ranked teams get home field advantage. Under this scenario, the 11 conference champions would all get a seed in the playoff bracket and the 5 remaining seeds would be chosen at large by a selection committee, similar to NCAA basketball tournament. Most of the bowls would continue to exist, but would not be quite as obscenely profitable as they are now. Bowls like the GoDaddy.com Bowl and the Insight Bowl would probably perish, and I say "good riddance," to them. However, the large bowls would survive and the fans and schools would get to have an actual championship instead of the imitation that the BCS is putting on.

Now, I've saved the most incriminating evidence against the BCS for last; and trust me, it's incriminating. Anyone who pays taxes in the United States ends up subsidizing the college and universities in their state of residence. I currently live in Colorado, so my tax dollars go to the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and others. The bowl games in the current system claim that they pay out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollar to participants in their bowl games, however this comes with a catch. Teams that play in these bowl games have to pay (usually in the form of a decreased payout) for tickets for that bowl. The teams have to pay full price for these tickets, and usually one sell a fraction of them for less than face value. Even though I'm a die-hard fan of my alma-mater, I'm not going to pay $155 dollars for a Fiesta Bowl ticket when they're going to $30 on StubHub. Universities also have to pay for travel and accommodations for their team as well as for cheerleaders and band, if they choose to bring them, with no help from the bowl. Bowl games end up paying their participants almost nothing, and in many cases end up costing the university money. This deficit in the athletic budget has to be made up somewhere; usually from the university coffers, and at least in part by the tax dollars of the people. If you pay state taxes, you are subsidizing the Bowl Championship Series.

Lest you go preaching that college football is a waste of money, let me assure that the alternative playoff system would be much more profitable for universities. First of all, schools would be able to sell their own tickets, and make their own revenue instead of paying someone else to host a bowl game at a random neutral site. This money could be shared with traveling schools so that no one has to lose money on college football. Secondly, television ratings and conversely, commercial revenue for playoff games would skyrocket, leading to manifold more money that is had in the Bowl Championship Series, and much more money for the schools. With a playoff system, college football could subsidize your tax dollar instead of the other way around.

The book Death to the BCS is currently selling on Amazon for $13.50, which is a ridiculously low price considering the valuable information that's available therein. If you enjoy college football, let me urge to read this book and to know what I and many others know about the cartel that is the BCS. Boo payoffs, hooray playoffs!

Storytime

As some may know and others are about to find out, my maternal grandfather, Orville Weldon Schaffer, Jr. died just a few weeks ago, and I went to Houston for his funeral. In a strange twist of events, he died on Thanksgiving day, just like his first wife, my grandmother, but that's not why I'm writing this post. I'm writing this post to tell you probably the most important lesson(s) my grandfather taught me about the gospel.

My grandfather was not a religious man, nor was he a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or other any church. He was an atheist before being an atheist was cool. However, through the latter years of his life and in his death, he was able to teach me how the Lord preserves and provides for his children and those who diligently serve him.

For those of you who know me well, you know that my mother managed to spend 135% of my college fund by the time I was ready to start college. Without an outside source of cash, I would have found a job in construction (or at Target) in 2006 when I graduated from high school. Luckily, my grandfather, Orville, was a depression-era child and spent most of his life working multiple jobs at a time as a machinist, surveyor, and wastewater treatment specialist. Over the years, he had spent as little of his money as possible and saved everything that he could. By the time I was ready to start college in 2006, he had amassed multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars merely by working and saving. My mother called my grandfather months before I was ready to start college and asked (more like demanded) that he help out with cash. In total he gave me $8000-$9000 a year for all four years that I was in college, coming out to about $34,000 total. I am genuinely grateful that my grandfather was able to come through and help me to such a large sum. I really couldn't have done it without him.

Now this is where the story really begins. My grandfather was born in February of 1925, making him 81 years old when I started college. Just for reference, the current life expectancy at birth for males in the US is 75.6 years old. My grandfather had already exceeded this by over 5 years when I graduated from high school. By the time I graduated from college, he was closer to ten years above average. After he made his final contribution to my college fund, in August of 2009, his health began to deteriorate. Around that time, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that shortly afterward metastasized and spread throughout his entire body. He began losing weight rapidly and was largely unable to stand or walk. He refused to take treatment figuring that his time had come and that he was ready to pass on. Finally, on Thanksgiving day, November 25th 2010, around noon, he did just that.

There are a few lessons that I take away from this story. One of these is that the Lord will bless the righteous with blessings that they cannot even comprehend if they do his will and seek those things which are according to his will. In this case, I thoroughly believe that the Lord preserved my grandfather almost entirely for my own blessing. My grandfather was in almost pristine health (considering that he was in his 80s) as long as he was contributing to the righteous endeavors of his grandson. My grandfather was never the most righteous of men. He was incredibly honorable like I mentioned earlier in his work and in his military service, when he served in the US Navy during World War II. However, he never brought his life completely into accord with the principles of the restored gospel, and could hardly be called righteous in many aspects. Despite his lack of righteousness, he was preserved and prospered for a wise purpose in aiding his grandson in his righteous goals.

Another lesson that I learned is that, while the trials we endure now may not make sense, they probably will in the long term. At age 19, I was very disappointed that I was not able to serve a mission for medical reasons. However, if I had gone and my grandfather had died in 2010, I most likely would have been hopelessly unable to finish my bachelor's degree anytime soon. While I still would have loved to have gone, I can understand, at least in part why the Lord did not send me. Like my grandfather, the Lord had, and still has, a wise purpose for me.

The final lesson that I learned is that the Lord is merciful, even to those who do not believe him. Though my grandfather was on the verge of death, and was no longer being fully preserved by the Lord, he was still able to see and comprehend the day that I graduated from college. And while he didn't show it much, it was clear that he appreciated seeing the fruits of his contributions in the life of his grandson.

I know that the Lord Jesus Christ lives and that the restored gospel is the way back to him in the next life. It is stories like this that help me to know that this is true and that I am doing what is right. I may not understand all that the Lord has in store for me, but things like this help to see a little more clearly.

Thanks Grandpa.

Comparison Shopping

Disclaimer: This post is a joke, and if you take it seriously, you're stupid.

Recently, I've realized that dating women is a lot like gambling at casinos. Not having much experience with either women or gambling, I came up with some characteristics of both. Let's examine the evidence, in both scenarios:

• You can't win if you don't play.
• You're more likely to get struck by lightening 35 times than you are to win the jackpot.
• They'll dump you shortly after you run out of money.
• If you lose too big, too often, they'll take your house.
• Your odds of getting arrested skyrocket.
• They seem like a better idea when you're inebriated.
• They're pure consumption. Every dollar that you devote to them is gone forever, and you'll never see it again.
• Along the same lines, you'll never be richer than the day before you started playing.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that women should be illegal in every state except Nevada... ironically where prostitution is legal in some areas. XD