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There aren’t too many things from one’s college days that still ring in your ears after a few years go by. Except perhaps for your college fight song. Go Yellow Jackets, Blue Devils, or Bulldogs or Trojans. Go, Go, Go. Fight, Fight, Fight.

College spirit seems to come before a solid education at some of our institutions. At least for the athletically and sports fan inclined.

However, that may actually be a plus as I’ve thought for some time that the real value of a college education are the social, teamwork, and friendship building skills that the astute student will develop rather than the course material that is crammed into the brain for exams only to be immediately forgotten about an hour or two and a few beers later.

I’m thinking about the usual fluffed up college courses in the arts and humanities and social sciences, not specialized technical courses that may well teach skills that will be put to good use right away, like finding work in the same field that you studied in. An education in computer science is a prime example.

However, it is well to remember that the value of any education, whether formal or self taught, is contained in a just a few ideas and concepts that become building blocks for developing a successful productive life. It’s a lot like speed reading a good book. Most of the book may be pure fluff and can be quickly scanned and the information discarded. You only need to extract a few choice bits of information or insights to give the read value. Sometimes tremendous value. 

So if you spend $100,000 or more for a four year college education and only get two or three truly meaningful insights out of the countless items of facts and statistics that you are forced to learn, however temporarily most of them are retained, the entire process may with a little luck be worth many times your investment of capital and time.

Or if your really lucky your parents investment. And your good time.

One concept from my college days that has stuck with me over the years is the fact that over time deviations from the mean tend to regress to the mean. That means in simple terms that if things get really absurdly out of whack they will one of these fine days return to the mean; the long term averages. And that usually happens just when everyone under the sun thinks that the present trend will last forever. That a new age has dawned, old rules don’t apply, it’s a new era, a new world order, the type of straight line projection mentality that leads to a bad end. Like neo-con thinking.

When we survey the investment, political , and lifestyle landscape of the modern world it isn’t too difficult to think that things indeed have gotten absurdly out of whack. Then with global warming kicking in we can expect one key important area of all of our lives, the weather, to swing absurdly and violently away from the mean of the past ten thousand years or so while all of the other items listed above are regressing to the mean.

Confusing? Probably. And probably terrorizing too before all of the regressing and deviating has taken place. 

I’ll save the clarifying and supporting details of the above statements for future blogs as I could spend days writing about  just the above items. And probably will over the next month or two.

Let’s just say for now that the concept of man made deviations returning to the mean after getting such long tail deviations to the extreme will be for the unprepared a bone jarring, gut wrenching, life changing process.

And for the climatic changes that we can now expect due to our stupidity at not taking steps to head off disaster sooner, well God help us all.     

To end this blog on a more positive note humans are if nothing else resilient creatures and I’m sure will survive and muddle through the coming adjustments. Some will even prosper beyond their wildest dreams as they seize upon new opportunities that periods of rapid change always bring forth.

However, to prosper one must be aware. And that is what we shall try to be as we continue to blog.     

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