News

Young Texan earns $140,000 a year, with a two-year degree and hard work

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I love this story from the Wall Street Journal. I’m linking to the free version on Yahoo News, though!

Excerpt:

Justin Friend ’s parents have doctoral degrees and have worked as university lecturers and researchers. So Mr. Friend might have been expected to head for a university after graduating from high school in Bryan, Texas, five years ago.

Instead, he attended Texas State Technical College in Waco, and received a two-year degree in welding. In 2013, his first full year as a welder, his income was about $130,000, more than triple the average annual wages for welders in the U.S. In 2014, Mr. Friend’s income rose to about $140,000.

[…]The risks of a mismatch between costly university degrees and job opportunities have become clearer in recent years. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, said nearly a third of people aged 22 through 26 with a Bachelor of Arts degree either don’t have a job or are working at one that doesn’t require a university degree. The numbers are similar for young people with vocational degrees, but those lower-cost degrees don’t typically lead to heavy debts.

Student loan debt outstanding in the U.S. totaled $1.13 trillion as of Sept. 30, up by $100 billion from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Mr. Friend has no debts.)

[…]Mr. Friend, who is single, typically works 72 hours a week, usually including at least one day of the weekend, often on an overnight shift. His base pay is more than $25 an hour, up from about $22 when he started in 2012. He gets overtime after 40 hours a week. Pay is doubled on Sundays and tripled on holidays. He receives health insurance, a 401k retirement plan and paid vacation.

With little free time, expenses are low. He rents a one-bedroom apartment for $1,080 a month in a building with a pool and gym. To stay in shape for mountain-climbing trips, he sometimes runs up and down steps wearing a weighted backpack.

He showed an early inclination to make things. “At three years old, he was using a screwdriver and a hacksaw skillfully,” said Dr. Vaughan, his mother. Later, dyslexia made writing and math a struggle for him.

In junior high school, he took a course in welding. Within a few years, he was earning money repairing fences and doing other welding jobs for neighbors.

A documentary on World War II stirred Mr. Friend’s interest in pulse jet engines, which were used by Germany to propel bombs. He and his father, Ted Friend, a professor of animal science at Texas A&M, together built such an engine. “We used a leaf blower to start it,” pumping in air needed to ignite the engine, the younger Mr. Friend said. “It ran on propane.” When he attached the engine to a golf cart, he said, the vehicle proved difficult to steer after reaching 30 miles an hour.

“Mom didn’t like it,” he said. “She thought I was going to blow myself up.” One of his goals is to put a jet engine on a motorcycle, he says, adding: “I’d try to make it as safe as I could.”

On a recent day, while country music played on a colleague’s radio, Mr. Friend used gas tungsten arc welding techniques to attach two steel parts destined for an oil apparatus. Wearing a T-shirt and Wrangler jeans, he hunched over work requiring the precision of a jewelry maker. After welding, he buffed the part with a wire brush. Colleagues would later X-ray the part to make sure the weld was flawless.

The long hours mean “it’s hard to have a life,” Mr. Friend said. Eventually, he said he may pursue an advanced degree in metallurgy and research welding materials and techniques. For now, he’s building up his savings.

He’s debt-free, and probably didn’t even need student loans for this program. You couldn’t say that about most college students these days – and the ones in non-STEM fields will never be able to pay their loans back. What causes people to go into programs that don’t produce a return on investment? I think I know why. I think that many Americans have the idea that life should be about personal fulfillment, and not about doing things that don’t feel right to them. Hard work doesn’t “feel” right to many young Americans. They want work to make them famous, and to make them happy. Well, work isn’t supposed to be like that. Work is about making money, and very often the most difficult degrees and jobs are the least fame-making, and the least happiness-inducing. This guy is a welder! It’s not glamorous.

I would advise my younger readers, especially my male readers, to take a page out of this welder’s handbook. Make a plan to avoid debt, and stick to it.

Polemics

Has MIT physicist Jeremy England solved the origin of life problem?

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Casey Luskin assesses a sensational article that was originally published in the radically leftist Salon.

He writes:

In the law there’s a saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts aren’t on your side, pound the table.” Some popular science writers have apparently embraced that maxim while declaring that Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Jeremy England may have solved the origin of life.

At Salon, Paul Rosenberg recently asserted that England’s work shows “God is on the ropes” and threatens “to undo everything the wacky right holds dear.” Claiming England “has creationists and the Christian right terrified,” Rosenberg must be borrowing rhetorical excesses from Chris Mooney, who likewise wrongly alleged last year in Mother Jones that science “has creationists terrified.”

So what exactly are England’s momentous ideas? Business Insider reviewed his theories last month, explaining they are based upon thermodynamic principles that cause matter to “gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.”

The problem of the origin of life is essentially the problem of sequencing amino acids into proteins. Can you sequence amino acids into proteins by shining sunlight on them?

No:

The fundamental problem with England’s theories, and Rosenberg’s polemics, is that sunlight and other forms of energy do not generate new genetic information, nor do they produce new types of biological machines.

It’s one thing to observe that energy keeps a machine running; it’s quite another to claim energy produced the machine in the first place. You could shine light on random Scrabble tiles or disassembled computer components for billions of years, and you’ll never produce a Shakespearean Sonnet or a functional computer. No wonder Harvard biophysicist Eugene Shakhnovich called England’s proposals “extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena.”

[…]Dr. England’s work, interesting though it may be, does not provide that insight. Sunlight—or any known form of energy—does not produce the genetic information life needs to build its complex machinery. In our experience, only one cause generates new language-based information or machine-like structures: intelligence.

Dr. England shouldn’t be faulted if materialists are co-opting his work into an overstated crusade against God and conservative politics. But naturalistic accounts of life’s origins remain as elusive as they have ever been.

Somebody posted this Salon article on my Facebook page and I deleted it because I thought it must be a hoax or something. After all, it was Salon. I mean, not even atheists are stupid enough to think that you can sequence amino acids into protein by shining light on them, are they? Do they think that you can shine sunlight on a keyboard and get a computer program? I didn’t even think this article needed an answer, it’s so ridiculous.

Seriously – when you are talking about creating the first living cell, you are talking about getting a whole bunch of sequences of amino acids right in one shot. It’s an information problem, not a thermodynamics problem. Why would anyone believe that changes in energy levels could explain the creation of information in the first living cell?

News

Should young people vote for Democrats?

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Jennifer Kabbany describes what young people got from their vote for Democrats over at the College Fix.

She writes:

Young America’s Foundation released its annual “Youth Misery Index” findings today, and the news is not good for young people – the index has hit an all-time record high.

The foundation calculates the index by adding youth unemployment, student loan debt, and national debt (per capita) figures, and it found “young people are experiencing hardships like never before under the Obama administration, and this generation is especially suffering the consequences of this administration’s leftist policies.”

For 2014, youth unemployment sat at 18.1 percent, student loan debt came in at $30,000, and national debt per capita was the highest ever at $58,437. The foundation tallied that all up for a Youth Misery Index of 106.5. That’s far above the 2013 figure of 98.6, when the foundation added 16.3, which represented youth unemployment, with 29.4 – the average 4-year college loan debt – and 52.9, each person’s national debt burden.

“The government is largely responsible for all three problems, and we’ve found a statistically significant relationship between government expenditures and the Youth Misery Index,” the foundation states. “Each indicator can be tied to government actions.”

While the index has steadily grown over the decades, under Obama the figure has shot up dramatically.

In 2012 it was 95.1, and the year before that 90.6. When Obama first took office in 2009, it was 83.5. When President George Bush left office in 2008 – the index was 69.3. When the figure debuted in 1993, it came in at 53.1.

“Young people will be stuck paying for government debt they had no part in creating, and they’ll have to do it with less discretionary income than ever before because of record high levels of student loan debt,” the foundation stated.

If interest rates go up, it will get even worse. Interest on loans will make it harder for them to buy houses and cars. Their students loans will cost more. And the government will have to dedicate a lot more money to making payments on the national debt – leaving less money for other expenditures. Taxes might have to go up to pay for the payments on the debt. Whether they raised income, sales or property taxes, it’s bad news for young people trying to get on with their lives.