Debt Forgiveness: Inflationary or Deflationary?

For the moment, potentially inflationary. On the whole, deflationary. Just The News: Penn Wharton says Biden student loan plan could exceed $1 trillion

Researchers found that students may be incentivized to borrow more money because the Biden administration is capping loan repayments at 5% of borrowers' income

The largest potential cost-driver Penn Wharton identified is the Biden administration's new income-driven repayment plan, which includes capping monthly student loan payments at 5% of a borrower's discretionary income and reforming the repayment guidelines to guarantee that no borrower who makes "about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage" will have to make monthly loan payments.

Debt cancellation alone will cost the United States up to $519 billion, Wharton found in an analysis published Friday. Loan forbearance, which allows borrowers to temporarily stop paying, will cost an estimated $16 billion. The income-driven repayment plan will initially cost $70 billion, however, specific details have yet to be released and the price may be significantly higher.

The income-based portion of Biden's plan needs further analysis, but it may cost $450 billion or more, bringing the total cost of student loan forgiveness to more than $1 trillion, economist Junlei Chen wrote in the Budget Model.

One possible problem researchers found with the income-driven repayment plan is that students may be incentivized to borrow more money because the Biden administration's plan caps loan repayments at 5% of the borrowers' income.

My hunch is debt levels will not increase because there will be losses borne by lenders. Even if the amount of outstanding debt increases, the value of that debt will decline because repayment is less certain. When a bond goes from AAA to B, it deflates. The money supply declines because lower quality bonds do not function as money. If the Biden admin makes enough rules that favor borrowers, at some point the value of student debt will decline faster than new lending increases.

WTF is Going On: School Shooter Edition

Update: The latest report says the teacher closed a door that was propped open. Teacher Closed Propped-Open Door Before Uvalde School Shooting: Police. The subheader from the story: "State police initially said a teacher had propped the door open shortly before the gunman entered the school"

Best case scenario this shooting was a total failure of government, from schools to police. It invalidates the gun control argument from the start, but also any argument for making schools safer. How is that possible when it looks like teachers and police, worst case, colluded to help the killer and best case their incompetence was akin to it?

DailyMail: Uvalde school district was part of AI program that rooted out potential mass killers and monitored social media for threats and potential shooters

Texas school officials had been monitoring students' social media prior to the deadly shooting in Uvalde Tuesday, it has been revealed - but still failed to pick up on concerning posts from the teenage gunman in the days leading up to the tragedy.

As an 18th birthday present to himself earlier this month, now-deceased suspect Salvador Ramos bought two AR-style rifles and paraded them on social media - including in ominous messages sent hours before the killing started.

The rifle used by the shooter starts at around $2,000 MSRP and he bought two of them. These are not cheap rifles that someone without much money would buy, though I suppose it is possible he spent his life savings on it if he planned to die. Otherwise, the high cost of the rifles make me suspicious of him acting alone.

CannCon: What Really Happened in Uvalde?

But before we start the timeline, we must first ask an extremely important question: How did an 18 year old man, with no known employment, whom was living with his grandmother because of an addict mother, afford:

-Two expensive firearms made by Daniel Defense ($2,000 each)

-an EOTech optic ($400-$700)

-1,657 rounds of .223 ammo ($800-1000 depending on how they were purchased)

-body armor ($500-1000)

-and over 60 magazines ($10-20 each)

for a total of approximately $6300 to $8,000? Most established adult Americans, especially after the last two years and the current economy, can’t afford a fraction of that. But this young 18 year old was able to do so with no known job and all on a debit (not credit!) card? In a border town reportedly overrun by the worst of the worst from the US Border…I’ll let you make your own assumptions.

This is the most damning part of the timeline of events. Important to know that this school, being on the border, is subject to repeated lockdowns because of border patrol events. Any time there is an active shooter or even a potential threat in the area, schools will lockdown. This school did the exact opposite, which either means they stopped following protocol (possible if lockdowns were a weekly event ands never amounted to anything) or something more nefarious at work:

1. Why did a *teacher* prop open a secure entry exactly one minute before the shooter arrived on scene?

2. Why did that teacher not close the door and ensure it was locked when they reportedly saw the accident, the shots fired, retrieved their phone, and called 911 to report it?

3. Col. McCraw said the teacher “apparently” called 911…has DPS confirmed the teacher called 911? Have they confirmed it was a teacher who propped open the door?

4. Why did the timeline shrink by seven minutes from yesterday to today when yesterday’s press conference was given based on video evidence as stated by Escalon in the presser? It was not as if Escalon responded to a question, off the cuff, with the times. It was part of his deliberate and detailed statement to the press. Are you telling me something as important as time, which he reiterates the time twice, was inaccurate on the video? Or did he just make up “11:40” when he was writing the press conference without bothering to confirm the time?

5. Where was the school’s police officer and why was he not on school property? Where was he that he was able to respond in under three minutes time but unable to find the wrecked truck and correlate the closest entry to the school to the wreck? How did he not hear the gun shots going off in his immediate vicinity when he, or other officers, were reportedly at the funeral home?

6. Why were seven officers not able to breach a room with two doors and windows to eliminate the suspect?

7. Why could they STILL not breach the room with 19 officers?

8. Why did it take a BORTAC unit and ballistic shields to breach the room?

9. Why was BORTAC even there? A federal law enforcement agency tasked with border protection is somehow on scene in a school shooting?

10. Why were US Marshalls out front of the school in adequate PPE (personal protective equipment) holding back parents and waving tasers at them, but not helping with the situation inside the school?

11. Col. McCraw reported that BORTAC used keys from the janitor to “breach” the room. Let’s be real: it’s simply called unlocking…breaching is defined as “to make a gap in by battering” according to Merriam Webster Save the “heroic” sounding words for the investigations. But I digress: If BORTAC was able to “breach” with the keys after an hour outside the room, would Ramos have been able to “breach” the classroom if the doors were locked? Were they locked and if not, why?

We now have testimony from law enforcement that a teacher propped open the entry door one minute before the accident, according to Col. McCraw. We have the teacher who propped open the door calling 911 but NEVER secured the door again. The suspects walks through said door at either 11:33 or 11:40, depending on which press conference you watched, and walks down a hall and into a room that may or may not have been locked. When it was locked by Ramos when he entered, it took BORTAC locating a set of keys to “breach”. Would it have taken Ramos the same set of keys to enter? Would it have delayed him enough that the three officers who reportedly entered moments after Ramos would have been able to then confront him in the hallway prior to entering the classroom?

When you pair all of this with the fact that an 18 year old dropout with no known job, an addict mother he left to live in a small home with his grandma, somehow scrapes up at least $6,000 to buy weapons and gear and then proceeds to shoot that grandmother that took him in...well, it’s bizarre.

The article also covers how he talked about buying guns on social media and his contacts asked him if he would shoot up a school:

Why is it that these major social media conglomerates will flag our posts, suspend us, ban us, label us “misinformation” in a moments time when we talk about COVID vaccines, the 2020 election, or Hunter’s laptop, but when an 18 year old mentions “being a school shooter”, crickets.

Many people become overly conspiratorial and thing this is all a coordinated attempt at eliminating the one thing keeping Americans free: the 2nd Amendment. It's the only amendment that still functions as intended so I can see that position being a natural outgrowth of anyone assuming there is a conspiracy against the American people. I lean more towards the fact that a subset of the gun-control movement, the gun-grabbing ghouls, spin up to full blast whenever there is a shooting, details be damned. Same thing anytime a white cop shoots a black suspect, there are the people out there screaming murder and white supremacy before a single detail emerges. The media amplifies this because it fits their narrative, giving it the appearance of some coordinated act, when it's exploitation by the usual suspects. 

Contrary to media coverage, the event is very strongly anti-gun control. One, the police are useless. Abusive policing is a problem and society abuses police. Being a cop is a no win job these days. A "hero type" isn't going to join the police force anymore. Instead, it's more paper pushers and box checkers. No surprise we keep seeing officers waiting outside while shootings take place.

Cops are no longer "peace officers" who "protect & serve", but "law enforcement officers" who are more likely to act like a traffic cop...including at a school shooting. If your plan is to dial 911 in a life and death situation, you could well die. If those parents trying to get in brandished firearms and dared the cops to shoot them, either they would have gotten in or the cops would have been shamed and gone in themselves. Nobody would have blamed the parents if they had to shoot the cops to get into the school either. The cops behaved as if they were working with the killer.

Second, if cops won't go into a school to stop a single shooter murdering innocent children, how many police are going to enter homes where they will be the target of the gunfire? BLM and other groups already talk about killing police and some nutters seems to be acting on their suggestions in some cities. Think cops with cushy jobs in low crime suburbs and rural areas are going to want to put their life at stake 24/7 to strip Americans of constitutional rights? No way, it isn't happening. There are already many sheriffs who have already said they won't comply with stricter federal gun laws. The gun control movement is dead as a door nail after this shooting. Maybe some cosmetic laws will pass, but that's it.

Third, American society is breaking down in every way you can think of, including the ruling class. Why are there such emotional explosions when these events occur, before any details come out? Government always use fear and terror to push bad laws, but why are they leaning so heavily upon emotion? It's become almost axiomatic that if you see an emotional story that seems to line up with the mainstream/ruling class narrative, wait about a week and you'll see it fall apart. Not always, but enough that people who pay attention assume government and media lie 100 percent of the time. 

My answer for why is they are losing power. The facts are so against them that hyper-emotional pleas are all they have left. As I've said, I think a logical reaction to the events in Uvalde, even if you don't care about gun ownership and the 2nd amendment, even if you are for more gun control, is to go out and buy a gun and get trained on using it because every single system that you would be forced to rely on with no alternative if you are unarmed, failed. And then after if failed, it stood by and did nothing, failing again. 

Who wants to give this system more power, more control over their life by disarming themselves? A person's status as a victim or survivor may come down to whether they can protect themselves and their family with firearms or whether they rely on public institutions. Institutions that produce teachers who prop open doors that let school shooters in while there's gunfire ripping outside and cops who stand outside while children are being shot. 

If anything, the shooting in Uvalde makes a good case for abolishing public education. Having large, centralized public schools is a magnet for shooters. Privatization would create far more smaller schools and they would have more power to arm teachers and use security measures.

WEF Stooge or Real Deal

Tulsi was selected to the Young Global Leaders in 2015. Whether that means she's a Manchurian candidate or not, I cannot say. Either way, she's running an intelligent campaign for the 2024 presidency. She steals DeSantis' thunder in a single post by asking why the new anti-grooming law in Florida only protects children up to 3rd grade.

China Has the Momentum to Surpass the USA

It takes time for advantages to pile up, but the graduates from Chinese universities today will likely surpass their American counterparts in 20 years. Or if they don't surpass them, there will be so much more cutting-edge research and technology going on in China, that many American children interested in STEM today should become fluent in Mandarin.

Hanania: The Future of Humanity Is IVF Babies and Chinese Domination

You can see a whole Chinese analysis of, ok, how well did these transformer units, modules, work in this particular AI image processing, implementation, et cetera, et cetera? And you can see the Chinese discussion of it and you can see the English discussion of it. And I’m reminded of when I first started in physics, there was still a hangover from the Cold War, and a lot of people were still learning German and Russian, because there was lots of stuff published in Russian journals that you couldn’t get access to, unless you could read Russian. My father had to learn German and I think, I don’t know if he studied Russian, but he definitely had to learn German as part of his PhD at the University of Minnesota.

So there is that dual kind of reservoir structure evolving now where there’s a separate technological reservoir of information in China. And it’s still in the early phase now, but in some particular areas like AI and software, it’s advancing very fast. Maybe some areas like hypersonics and things like that too.

American Universities Are Retarded

Marginal Revolution: You people are crazy

So, I decided to attempt a measurement to quantify this phenomenon. On Wednesday, September 22nd, in the 1:00 pm hour, I observed 400 Stanford cyclists on Lasuen Mall, a popular campus street for bicycles. I simply noted whether each cyclist wore a mask, a helmet, neither, or both. Here are the final tallies:

Total cyclists: 400 – (100%)

No mask, no helmet: 195 – (49%)

Mask, no helmet: 134 – (34%)

Helmet, no mask: 42 – (10%)

Mask and helmet: 29 – (7%)

That works out to a masking rate of 41% and helmet-wearing rate of 17%. So, Stanford students are about twice as likely to wear a mask on a bicycle as a helmet. To be certain, there’s a margin of error here — I can only count so many cyclists at a time, and I’m sure I missed some. But the point stands that at one of America’s leading research universities, students wear masks on bicycles at a higher rate than they wear helmets.

Original source: Stanford students are more likely to wear masks on bicycles than helmets (Archive link)

I think this anecdote is instructive in understanding the social dynamics that have emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly intelligent and well-rounded people (Stanford students, for example) have adopted bizarre, pointless habits to comport with new expectations about how to "stay safe" -- like wearing masks outdoors -- all while continuing in much more risky behaviors. This is not to say that riding a bicycle without a helmet is *especially* risky, or that I believe helmets should be mandated (they shouldn’t). But it’s absolutely a bigger risk than COVID-19 for a vaccinated twenty-something.

It's a bigger risk than for a healthy unvaccinated 20-something too.

If Stanford produces stupid lemmings, what do you think is coming out of other universities? Do you really think these people are going to be in the ruling class in 20 years? I think a revolution is coming because the elites retarded their children. The ruling class is going be removed from power by a foreign or domestic adversary, or by mobs of angry starving citizens.

The Age of Illusion

WSJ: How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller

“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

Many people will read this as an article about climate change, but I think it gets to a much deeper problem in society: people cannot discern fact from fiction, reality from narrative, truth from lies. I grew up with the Internet so I can't say if anything has changed with respect to older people. Maybe they were always this gullible about everything. Many people didn't know the truth, but for the most part I'd chalk that up to being uninformed. Today, many people are still uninformed, but it turns out most information is spread by peer groups on the Internet. It's not that people will believe what the official sources tell them, it's that they'll believe whatever their peers think. One group believes regime sources, be it government or mainstream media. Another group thinks everything from those sources is fake. Some people investigate further, but most people do not.

The most delusional about reality are the more educated, aka credentialed. They "trust the science" even when the science is observably wrong or strongly refuted by well-sourced skeptics or challenged by credible theories. Evolution, dark matter, string theory, and now coronavirus/vaccines, the official story has holes punched in it, but to question the truth is to question what in their minds is reality. Police shootings, system racism, whihte privilege, the list goes on. Is it not surprising that people who get emotional about scientific theories such as evolution would also have trouble when it comes to crime statistics?

The ruling class lost their minds over Trump for a few reasons, but two of his biggest sins were centerd on the regime's concept of truth. First, most of what people perceive as real in politics is fake. Russiagate was fake from the start, only fools or ignorant (in the most neutral sense of not knowing) people believed it. Anyone who was awake during the Cold War knows how absurd it sounded from the get go, particularly when there was also a Presidential candidate in 2016, Bernie Sanders, who had literal ties to Soviet Russia. Two, people will believe anything. The panic over "conspiracy theories" and Trump's "lies" (mostly exaggerations) wasn't because the ruling class and media care about the truth. Rather, lies beat lies. If we let the old "World Weekly News" take over NBC and run Batboy stories at 6pm, half the country would believe in Batboy.

It goes deeper though. Older investors sohuld have noticed by now how younger investors have a total detachment from reality. The exclamation point on this for me was the GameStop (GME) short squeeze. I saw there were $1000 price targets and considered them crazy, but not impossible. A short-squeeze takes on a life of its own in the final phase. After investigating a little, however, I found there were investors who thought $1000 was a sustainable target, as in GME could go that high and stay there. Circling back into cryptocurrency, one starts to see an unhinged herd that is rolling through the markets driving prices without any concept for underlying value. This always happens during speculative periods, but my sense is younger investors have no concept of fundamental value. Back during the dotcom era there were absurd forecasts used as justifications for current valuations. Today, there are no justifications. If an investment has a cool meme, the price has no ceiling.

This gets back to more fundamental questions about the ruling class and core concepts such as science. One comparison I've made since 2008 is that climate models are similar to Wall Street's housing models that predicted home prices wouldn't decline nationwide. Neither was based on reality. Climate models are a shadow of the actual climate. Many models cannot hope to be accurate because they lack inputs. Last month, I posted an article by someone who is not a climate skeptic, but is someone who thinks warming isn't being driven by CO2. The Earth itself is a likely source of warming oceans, which explains why the oceans are warming faster than the rest of the climate. Last month, I also posted a study that eliminates dark matter.

In a prior age, busting holes in old theories would be celebrated. Science was celebrated precisely because it was constantly falsifying things as untrue. Today however, people become unnerved by learning. Scientists behave like authioritarian political commisars who attack honest skepticism and dissident theories. The truth creates a crisis. In politics and now science, independent voices that challenge or make their own truth claims incite panic. Censorship intensifies. Why? My hunch is because people have abandoned religion. As Chesterton put it: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." For myself, I've become an advocate for having the Bible taught as an educational standard. Not necessarily because I believe it is true, though I do, but because if people are going to believe in something, might as well make it something with a provable track record of success. More importantly, and here's where I'll slip in a theological argument, is that the Bible teaches that there is objective Truth. Christian societies like the ones that existed before this modern world made incredible advancements in science. What's more, Jesus Christ claimed to be the Truth. A weak argument would be that believing in any objective truth, real or not, creates a soceity that believes in truth. The strong argument is that if Christ was lying, Christian societies would be untruthful. That they were not is a strong argument in favor of the divinity of Christ. Finally, while less educated Christians can be fooled by lies, in my experience, they are among the least likely to believe lies. If they do believe lies, they tend to be less serious ones like foolish conspiracy theories that don't impact daily life. For example, Creationists who believe God made the world literally six days, at least come up with scientifically-based theories when then scientific record disagrees with their theory. They can still be biologists and physicists, despite being literalist Creationists. Climate change believers have as much faith in climate models as Creationists have in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but the Creationists deal better with the holes in their theories because they can retreat to Faith. A hole in their theory doesn't dent their Faith. Climate model believers and others who worship science have no fallback. Holes in scientific theories shake their faith and destroy the core of their belief system. Pushing further, many people treat science as a religion. And even as a religion, it has become a superstition, an inferior religion as compared to the world's major ones. Most people cannot live under a philosophy of science that is constantly disproving reality. Religion provides a sound footing. Those who worship science instead develop faith in unproven theories such as evolution. They listen to scientists on topics such as coronavirus in the same exact way religious observers listen to priests on questions of theology.

In conclusion, I believe we may already be in a "new" Dark Ages. New in quotes because the Dark Ages has been debunked. Most of the West lives in an illusion because it cannot discern truth from fiction. Ideas such as systemic racism are provably false. If you dig into data and have an ojective concept of justice, you can make the case that whites and Asians are the most oppressed people in the United States. Yet society is falling apart because no one can refute this lie. The markets are unhinged because value is dead. Value investors have no currency in a world where people cannot estimate the value of company. The West was crippled by the coronavirus and spread lies about the virus itself, despite the fact that almost everything known about it in January is still true. The only thing is, you'd have to read Chinese news sources to get the truth, or stick with anonymous Twitter accounts that retweet dissident science from banned sources.

The most important thing to teach a child, along with teaching them how to learn, is to teach them that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That the Bible is the Word of God, not literal, but as spoken through the prophets in the Old Testament, and by Jesus Christ in the New. Whether they choose to have faith is up to them, but they should be taught this alongside the classical philosophers because this is the best way to build a solid foundation. The world is adrift in a sea lies and even though rocks of truth are all around them, they cannot discern the rocks from the water. Those who know to stand on firm ground will have an absolute advantage on the competition. They will also be the only hope for preserving Western Civilization.

How Do We De-woke America?

Time to study how Poland and Hungary decommunized in recent years, because that is going to be the only way forward soon. The institutions have to be repopulated by new people.

Company Offers Wuhan School Children Free Homework

Poor kids!

China Press: ◤武汉肺炎◢-企业送武汉小学生-免费寒假作业

US Visa Approval For Engineering Students Taking Longer

Visa applications that used to take 4 to 6 weeks are now stretching beyond 3 months.

财新: 特稿|被延误的赴美留学

This is similar to the feedback most students get. In the waiting period, almost all of the other students interviewed turned to the embassy, ​​the US Senate, and the school, but the results of the review were still unsound. According to Caixin reporters, a large number of students who have not passed the examination for a long time are almost all from engineering majors. Zhu Quan told Caixin reporters that several of them were considered to be "sensitive".

　　Since 2018, there has been a harbinger of a high refusal rate for “sensitive professionals”. In May 2018, the Associated Press quoted the US State Department as saying that from June 11th, Chinese graduate students or doctoral students studying in the fields of robotics, aviation and high-end manufacturing will only be able to obtain a student visa valid for one year at most. . At that time, the US Senate held a special hearing on the issue of Chinese student visas. Edward Ramotowski, deputy assistant director of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, confirmed for the first time that it had issued very Specific instructions require them to conduct additional reviews for Chinese students studying in “sensitive areas”.

The Michigan Daily: Visa delays force Chinese international students to defer acceptances

The University’s International Center is aware of approximently 30 students who could not begin classes in Ann Arbor because of delays in processing and approving visas from the State Department, Broekhuizen wrote in an email to The Daily. She noted the majority of the students affected were enrolled in graduate programs at the University.

...John came to his visa interview ready to tell his interviewer about the program he planned to attend in the University’s College of Engineering, but he was only asked about its geographical location and prior leadership experience. Three months later, after what he felt was an unusually short interview, he remains on administrative processing — or a “check,” as he and other Chinese students commonly refer to the heightened background check.

“I feel confused,” he said. “I heard about administrative processing. In China, we call it a ‘check’ because it’s a process for checking your background.”

Boston Globe: UMass Boston targeted in Chinese visa fraud scheme

WSJ: Chinese Official Charged in Alleged Visa Scheme to Recruit U.S. Science Talent

A Chinese government official and his allies allegedly tried to convince at least seven U.S. universities to sponsor visas for purported Chinese research scholars who in reality aimed to recruit American science talent, according to a recently unsealed criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department. They succeeded at least once, the complaint says.

The Wall Street Journal has identified two of the targeted institutions as the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Leiyang Back in News After School Relocation Protest Turns Violent

Leiyang made new this summer when it delayed paying municipal workers and then had its credit rating cut. Now it's in trouble again. The city is clearly out of money. It wants to send some public school students to private schools, with parents footing the bill.

Caixin Global: Protest Turns Violent Over Plan to Relocate Students

Hundreds of parents gathered Saturday in front of local schools and government buildings in the city of Leiyang in Central China’s Hunan province to protest the city’s order to relocate some students from public schools to a private boarding school.

The protests turned violent, leading to dozens of arrests. Some protestors threw water and beer bottles, bricks and firecrackers at police officers and local officials, and more than 30 police were wounded in the clash, police said (link in Chinese).

Parents complained of sharply higher school fees and protested that unsafe levels of formaldehyde had been detected in the private school’s classrooms and dormitories after incomplete renovations. Pictures and videos posted on social media showed protestors holding banners saying things like: “No private schools and give me back nine-year compulsory education” and “We will not live in toxic dormitories, and we will not enter toxic classrooms.”

Chinese School Rejects Gamers

A school in Wuhan for students who failed their first gaokao refuses to accept students who play video games. Students have to sign a document that says they will not play games. It says 985 students have already been rejected. The main game targeted is Arena of Valor. State media has blasted the game in the past for causing addiction.

iFeng: 武汉复读学校设招生门槛：不收玩“农药”“吃鸡”学生

According to the Changjiang Daily, in 2018, the enrollment of colleges and universities in Hubei has begun. Many students with unsatisfactory results in the college entrance examination intend to repeat and prepare to fight again in the coming year. However, the repeat school is not a return. A re-reading school in Wuhan introduced a new regulation this year: all students enrolled in the school need to sign an “addiction online game agreement that rejects the glory of the king and eat chicken”, and even refused to apply for a re-reading of a 985 college student.

..."The glory of the king is too powerful. Those parents call it the king's 'pesticide', and the 'eat chicken' game is very violent. If the prevention is not timely, the child will be ruined." President Liu said that as a school, the school’s reputation is highly valued. More emphasis on those who are determined to repeat the scores in this year can improve, but also develop good study habits, good habits. Therefore, the school decided from this year to sign a “rejection of online game agreement” with each student.

The reporter saw that the agreement was made in two copies, and the school, the students and the parents all signed, and the school and the parents each held one. Parents have more support for this new regulation.

Private Vocational Education in China: A Trillion Yuan Market

China is already moving in a direction many in the United States have called for: more vocational training.

21st Century: A股公司职业教育布局图景：如何挖掘新兴万亿市场？

On May 29th, China’s 21st Century Education Group (“21st Century Education”) became the second mainland private education unit on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's IPO. According to reports, the core asset that carries more than half of its income is a private vocational college Shijiazhuang Polytechnic Vocational College.

Recently, Zhonggong Education announced that it will replace 100% equity of Yaxia Auto (002607.SZ) for RMB 18.5 billion. After the transaction is completed, Zhonggong Education will become the first share of the A share employment training. As of May 31, the resumption of the Asia-Pacific auto limit for 7 consecutive daily limit.

In recent years, due to favorable policy and rigid demand for industrial upgrading, vocational education and training have become increasingly popular with capital and markets. At present, there are dozens of listed companies in the A-share market involved in vocational education.

21st Century Business Herald combed and found out that in addition to the traditional vocational training institutions such as Zhonggong Education and Oriental Fashion, there are also a number of A-share companies whose main business is not education. They are involved in vocational education through “cross-border” related to M&A vocational education. Training business, they are either in transition to education companies, or through professional education to provide the upgrading of the main industry.

From the perspective of the breakdown of vocational education products, professional skills training has shown a stronger momentum than the qualification examination training.

A-share company accelerates the development of vocational education
The 21st Century Business Herald’s combing of 24 A-share listed companies involved in vocational education found that, on the one hand, traditional vocational education companies accelerated their business expansion, and on the other hand, they showed more and more cross-border development in the vocational education market. Mergers and acquisitions.

The main businesses for education include New Nanyang (600661.SH), Oriental Fashion (603377.SH), and China Hi-Tech (600730.SH). Dongfang Fashion, known as "the first unit of driving school", can be said to be a purely vocational education institution. The proportion of vocational education in New Nanyang and China Hi-Tech is not high. The newly released Nanyang 2017 annual report shows that vocational education The business realized operating income of 237 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.33%, an increase slower than that of the K12 business.

Hongtao (002325.SZ), Kaiyuan (300089.SZ) and Culture Great Wall (300089.SZ) are cross-border companies that have entered the field of vocational education and have promoted it as one of the main industries.

Taking the Cultural Great Wall as an example, the company is a leading enterprise in the domestic art ceramics industry. In 2018, the Cultural Great Wall acquired 100% equity in Jade Education through major asset restructuring. Jade Education is mainly engaged in IT vocational education and training. At present, the training outlets cover approximately 29 cities across the country, and there are more than 60 schools. In 2017, they achieved a net profit of 103.05 million yuan, exceeding the promised net profit of 11.05 million yuan.

The 2017 annual report shows that the education sector has occupied half of the revenue of the Great Wall of Culture. According to reports, currently half of its business executives are served by jade education executives. In addition, the Great Wall of Culture has also passed control and equity participation, and has involved various business areas such as education informatization, vocational training institutions, vocational training institutions, and corporate training platforms.

Hong Tao shares its professional education as a major business outside the building decoration business. Since 2014, Hong Tao has successively acquired Zhongxin Xinwang, cross-examination education and Xueersen. Zhongxinxin.com and Xueanden.com belong to the professional education platform for the architectural decoration industry. Cross-examination education is a platform for education for vocational education.

In this regard, Southwest Securities Education Researcher Hang Ai believes that in recent years, listed companies have looked at the vocational education sector from numerous targets in order to improve their performance. There are two reasons for this. First, the education industry is in a state of supply less than demand in terms of supply and demand. Generally speaking, the income is relatively stable and the cash flow is very good. Second, from the perspective of valuation, these years M&A in the education industry can provide companies with a relatively high valuation premium.

"At the same time, the vocational education sector is in the policy dividend period. Whether it is from the country's future development trend or from the industry's own needs, vocational education is the A-share market is relatively optimistic about the plate." Hang Ai said.

For a listed company whose professional education has not become a main business, its vocational education products are often placed on the hope of transforming and upgrading its main business.

For example, Liu Taoxin, chairman of Hong Tao, once said that “the company is expected to build the new service network to serve the training platform for designers, engineering construction and technical personnel, establish labor skill standards (vocational qualification certification), and popularize industry knowledge.”

Another example is the predecessor of the Blue Shield Vocational Training Institute in Guangdong Province, Blue Dun stock training center, according to reports, China's current network security talent gap has reached 1 million, Blue Dun shares have been developed with a number of vocational institutions in China to develop cooperation in the training of security personnel Cooperation.

According to a review of 21st Century Business Herald reporters, listed companies also showed positive performance in holding independent private colleges or vocational schools. For example, HKUST's wholly-owned subsidiary of Science and Technology University of Technology (002230.SZ) is wholly-owned by the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of Anhui Engineering University, Broadcom (600455.SH) holds 70% of the shares of City College of Xi'an Jiaotong University, and *ST Van Gu (002194.SZ) establishes wholly-owned Wuhan Van Valley. Electronic vocational and technical schools.

Analysts told reporters that well-run private colleges and universities can not only deliver qualified personnel to enterprises, but also provide stable and reliable cash flow and investment income, such as Shaanxi Jinye (000812.SZ) Holdings Xi’an University of Technology Mingde College. The operating revenue in 2016 was 153 million yuan and net profit was 35.224 million yuan.

However, according to Zeng Jun, partner and vice president of the Wisdom Group, from the perspective of vocational education companies, the current capital has not been sought after.

“At least so far, no listed company is willing to invest in the vocational education section because the development model of vocational education and training under the pure line is more stable, like the professional qualification examination mainly for individuals, and will not Because the policy is good, there will be a lot of demand and it will not attract capital to be sought after." Zeng said.

America's New Target: China

A funny thing happened when Trump targeted China on trade. There was widespread opposition at first, with lots of political enemies joining with free trade economists. Then came grudging acceptance that Trump had finally done something, even if it wasn't the best thing. He shifted the Overton Window and opened new areas of debate. Russia collusion is fading fast and in its place is the China threat.

Foreign Policy: The Chinese Communist Party Is Setting Up Cells at Universities Across America

One Chinese exchange student who studied at UIUC in the fall of 2017 says that before embarking on the study tour in Illinois, the students had to attend a lecture on the dangers of the Falun Gong, a strongly anti-party spiritual group banned in mainland China but active in the United States.

After the students’ arrival in Illinois, their home university asked the group to set up a temporary party branch and requested that the students hold a viewing party to watch the 19th party plenum in October, the major party planning conference held every five years. (The plenum was the subject of a major global propaganda push, with Chinese embassies and consulates reaching out to Chinese community organizations around the world, asking them to organize events for their members.)

The exchange students at UIUC were also asked to report on any potentially subversive opinions their classmates may have evinced while abroad, according to the student.

“After we went back to China, we had one-on-one meetings with our teachers. We talked about ourselves and others performance abroad,” the student says. “We had to talk about whether other students had some anti-party thought.”

The irony missed by the globalists is how this is pure globalism. The Chinese government doesn't respect borders, it respects the people. All Chinese people in the world will eventually be considered part of Greater China if they aren't today. In contrast, the idea that America is a political entity because of geographic borders is a throwback to a pre-nationalist era of monarchs who ruled over territory and all the different nations within them.

The party isn’t shy about the purpose of these new branches. “The rising number of overseas party branches is a new phenomenon, showing the growing influence of the [Chinese Communist Party] and China,” according to a November 2017 report in the party-aligned Global Times newspaper. “Overseas party cells are also responsible for promoting party and government policies.”

How is this different from other nations pushing their agenda in the United States? The only difference with China is its a bit more overt. It's not taking place through a network of NGOs, charities and cultural exchanges. It's not hiding behind the academic language, it's not peppered with buzzwords like diversity and inclusion. But what China is doing is very much in line with how America operates in 2018.

“We take the safety and security of all of our students seriously and work extremely hard to ensure that they have the opportunity to freely pursue the full educational experience we promised them when they chose to come to Illinois,” the university said in a statement to FP.

They are every bit as concerned with ideological conformity as the Chinese government. The pot is calling the kettle a container of color.

Grouping students into party cells while abroad sounds like a “downward extension” of a policy that has long been applied to high-ranking Chinese officials who travel overseas, says Andrew Chubb, a fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World program. “This is important information that should be carefully considered by universities hosting exchanges. Host institutions need to make sure they are familiar with the kinds of situations their exchange students may be in,” he says.

The party cells popping up on campuses across the United States aren’t the Communist Party’s only expansion abroad. The U.S.-based party branches are part of a growing network of cells located on campuses in Canada, Mexico, Chile, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, South Korea, Thailand, and elsewhere.

The cells aren’t always used for ideological purposes. In March 2011, as the Arab Spring protests devolved into a civil war in Libya, Beijing sent a warship to the region to evacuate all 35,000 Chinese nationals there. A small group of Chinese students on Crete, members of a party cell at the University of Athens, participated in the evacuation effort, according to an article in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper.

Helping to evacuate compatriots from a war zone is the type of humanitarian work many university groups would want to promote, but the students’ mobilization demonstrates Beijing’s growing capacity to establish functional party cells in Western countries that can be activated if needed.

Most people reading the FP article see nothing wrong with flooding the West with millions upon millions of Muslims, or the United States with millions of Mexicans, or take issue with various minority populations pushing foreign agendas in Washington, D.C., but a few hundred party cells at universities are a threat.

For Chinese students abroad, there’s a clear message, according to Hoffman of the Mercator Institute.

“You know that the party’s there,” she says. “It’s integrated directly into your study abroad experience.”

If they're going to return to China, why wouldn't it?

Two takeaways. One, China is going to become the new target for American jingoists. Russia collusion was a joke, China's ascent is not.

More broadly, nationalism is rising. Even the globalists are falling victim to it and advancing nationalist agendas. They should be celebrating the diversity of viewpoints brought by CCP members. They should speak of inclusion, bringing the CCP's ideas on various issues to students. After all, it is such a large force in the world, you can't really understand a globalized world without understanding the Chinese Communist Party's view on things.

The Decline of the University

From the Socionomics Institute:


Overgrown Ivory Towers

There’s a sense of growing unease in academia: University infrastructure is taking a hit.

“U.S. universities have been putting precious money toward financial aid, academic programs and gleaming buildings that might attract new students—neglecting aging electrical systems and leaky roofs. As a result, schools are staring down a deferred maintenance backlog that has topped $40 billion.” (WSJ)

To add insult to injury, many schools are beginning to miss annual enrollment goals, which have declined each school year since 2011. Meanwhile the annual earnings differential between a high-school graduate vs. a college graduate has been shrinking since 2000. In other words, the cost of college attendance ($1.3 trillion in collective student loan debt) is rising as the financial benefits of a degree are falling.

In his prescient study — published long before the recent spate of coverage regarding higher education’s potential demise — socionomist Alan Hall forecast a massive shift in society’s positive attitude toward higher education and the eventual collapse of the credit-fueled, government-supported education bubble. Hall’s analysis goes beyond linear economics to reveal what’s really behind the problems in universities today.

Learn more

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This article is syndicated by The Socionomist, a publication of the Socionomics Institute. The Socionomist is designed to help readers understand and anticipate waves of social mood. Copyright © 2017 Socionomics Institute.

Tiger Crunch: More Students Than Seats Caps Home Prices in Beijing

Parents will pay through the nose for housing in a good school district, but even these home prices are stabilizing.

In order to not let the children lose at the starting line, many parents do not hesitate to spend money to buy the school district room. Recently, the annual "kindergarten into primary school" has entered the end, most parents find it, let the children on the ideal target correction. But by the students adjust, adjust the school district and other factors, there are also some parents even bought a school district, did not let the children into the elite door. For these reasons, coupled with the rise since March this year, too, and some of the traditional school district housing prices have stopped rising, even a slight decline.

...Homelink Real Estate Financial Street Area Xiaoge also said that now the school district housing prices rose no more.

Only a couple of weeks ago I [posted Why Some Beijing Home Prices Soar:

In Beijing, 160,000 students want to enter schools with a quota of 5,000, and requirements to qualify for Beijing schools are being tightened.

The demand for schooling drives up home prices near good schools, but now its at the point where the inability to get into good schools has capped the demand for housing in some of these areas.

The article out today discusses a Mrs. Sun whose child was denied entry to the school she thought he could attend. He was enrolled in a regular school instead. She sacrificed to buy a house in the school district and purchased three years ahead of her son's enrollment in primary school. This is happening all over Beijing as parents drove up prices in good school districts in anticipation of enrolling their children in better schools.

As an aside, some Chinese will time their births in order to land in an auspicious year, such as Dragon. There was a study I posted some years ago in Dragon Baby Boom, which found children born in the Year of the Dragon in the U.S. have slightly higher educational attainment. The effect was likely due to parental selection: the types of parents who would follow through on a plan to have a baby in a specific year also likely have slightly higher educational attainment than the general population. In China, however, where there's only one child and many parents may be doing something similar, a good strategy is to pick the worst animals so as to reduce the competition. The children coming into primary school in 2016, if they are age 6, would be Tigers.

iFeng: 北京买房上“牛小”计划落空 传统学区房价格停涨

Homeschool or Die: Toxic Chinese Schools

Baiyun Elementary school in Beijing has a toxic track.

Caixin: Toxin Fears Trigger School Running Track Furor

ublic outrage over schools that expose children to hazardous chemicals is flaring again after playground running tracks were blamed for nose bleeds and rashes among primary school students in Beijing.

Parental protests outside a primary school in Beijing's Xicheng District in late May and a subsequent state television investigation focused national attention on the rubber-like outdoor tracks across the country.

Concerns on potentially toxic running tracks first surfaced after dozens of students at the Yuanhe Primary School in Suzhou of eastern Jiangsu Province came down with symptoms such as nose bleeds, dizziness and skin rashes three days into their new semester last September. Their parents blamed "the toxic running track" built in the school a month earlier.

Similar incidents were reported in at least 15 cities and provinces as of May, including Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Caixin: 【封面报道】“毒跑道”恐慌

June 22, 2016, a final inspection report to the Beijing Second Experimental Primary Baiyun Branch (hereinafter referred to Baiyun Road Elementary School) many anxious parents a definitive answer. More than a month, Baiyun primary school plastic track whether "toxic", the school became the parents of heart disease. Under questioning, the efforts of parents, eventually, under the more stringent than the national standard of "Shenzhen standard" to detect a done decision overturned a "qualified" conclusion, the test results show that the school playground indeed several pollutants exceeded. In addition to the plastic track final number of detected hazardous substances are not included in the national standard, air sampling Baiyun Elementary dozen classrooms also measured levels of formaldehyde, although the concentration will not cause acute poisoning, but the long-term effects can not be ignored.

"Poison Track" event occurred in China in recent years and more. In many cases, eager son some parents of children who show symptoms, and unexplained odor linked to the track. They are almost convinced that the child's nosebleeds, vomiting, rashes or other symptoms associated with the newly built plastic tracks. From Jiangsu, Guangdong, Zhejiang to Beijing, one similar case of intense urges parents gradually let the odor problems plastic track to get public attention

There is an info graphic at Caixin as well, some snips of it below.

Why Some Beijing Home Prices Soar

In Beijing, 160,000 students want to enter schools with a quota of 5,000, and requirements to qualify for Beijing schools are being tightened.

A set of data, "China Education Daily" has been released in 2015, Beijing has about 160,000 children in primary school enrollment information collection. Among them, Beijing registered students about 100,000, about 60,000 non-Beijing. But Dongcheng, Xicheng and Haidian District's 25 best primary schools only receive about 5,000 students.

Potential demand is 160,000, while supply is 5000 places, this is the main reason for surging prices in Beijing high school district housing market.

Moreover, with the release the two child policy, school demand will be further amplified. Several scholars from Beijing Normal University in a paper predicted that by 2015 -2025 Beijing primary school enrollments will increase year by year on the basis of the existing 170,000, and ultimately stabilize at 250,000-300,000 students.

Another big change this year, Beijing school district policy, the non-Beijing students enrolled membership of more and more strict. For example, Shijingshan District regulations, holders of "Beijing residence permit to work" (commonly known as "Beijing green card") of non-nationals in Beijing this year, Beijing will no longer enjoy the benefits of membership enrollment. As another example, the provisions of Fengtai District, Beijing Ji later for non-working parents of students and renters, the dynamic audit every year.

Location. Location. Location.
iFeng: 学区房暴涨之谜：16万人抢5000个入学名额

Pictures of China's Gaokao

中国高考照片，把美国网友都吓晕了！

Chinese Protest Uni Admissions Change

FT: China university rule change sparks protests in 4 provinces

Like their state-run counterparts in the US, Chinese universities reserve a certain percentage of places for students from their home province, which are allocated through a gruelling annual exam known as the gaokao. In an effort to increase access for non-local students, the education ministry ordered universities in many of China’s most populous provinces to reduce such quotas.

The changes sparked an immediate backlash from parents whose children would be disadvantaged by the reform.

Reflecting the sensitivity of the issue, internet censors have taken down social media postings and online discussions about the reforms and ensuing protests. But some appeals are slipping through their net. One posting on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, called on parents in southern Hunan province to join a protest scheduled for Tuesday.

In an open letter to the State Council, parents in Henan also complained about alleged discrimination for places at the country’s most sought-after universities, such as prestigious Peking University in Beijing. According to the letter, first reported by the South China Morning Post, Peking University accepted only one out of every 8,900 Henan applicants in 2013, compared with one out of every 325 applicants from Beijing.

Culture and Currency: Hold Gold to Avoid Collapse

Many (most?) American universities exist to hand out pieces of paper which are supposed to be tickets to lucrative careers. Many students find otherwise, with a massive debt that in no way matches the earning power of their degree. Universities do not work to increase the value of the degree, instead they churn out more paper at a higher rate. The price of any fiat currency, in this case the currency of credentialism, eventually returns to the intrinsic value of the paper itself. If you are a business selling rapidly depreciating paper and in competition with other businesses selling the same product, you have two optimal strategies. One is to defect and begin selling a high quality product that cannot be replicated. The other is to sell as much paper as possible, no matter how much it debases the value, for as much money as possible before the whole thing collapses.

Reuters: As SAT was hit by security breaches, College Board went ahead with tests that had leaked

Thanks to the booklet, Ding said he already knew the answers to about half of the critical reading section of the SAT when he took the test in Hong Kong in December 2013.

“I felt really lucky,” Ding said.

His score on that section? A perfect 800, he said.

Ding’s advance look at material from the test he took was no fluke. His cram school is part of a vibrant Asian industry that systematically exploits security shortcomings in the SAT. Chief among them is a vulnerability created by the owner of the exam: the routine practice of reusing material from tests that already have been given.

There was a cartoon in my Chinese econ textbook back in the day. A restaurant customer is buying a bottle of XO Cognac with cash. Both customer and waiter are laughing because the money is counterfeit and the cognac is fake. Both were also happy because they only cared about the superficial value of the good. In this case, American universities are taking real cash from wealthy students able to pay the full tuition, and won't let a pesky thing like an entrance exam (and later academic standards for handing out degrees) get in the way.

A confidential PowerPoint presentation reveals that College Board officials had documented widespread security problems in June 2013, shortly after canceling a sitting of the SAT in South Korea. The PowerPoint, reviewed by Reuters, shows that half of the SATs in inventory at the time had been “compromised” – the College Board’s term to describe exams whose contents have leaked, in whole or in part, outside the organization. Four of the exams had been compromised by an unnamed “Chinese website.”

Uh oh. Sounds like the SAT might cut off the universities' gravy train.

The new exam leaves in place a fundamental weakness plaguing the old one: the recycling of test material. The practice will continue with the new SAT, the College Board told Reuters. And that reuse of test material has proved to be a major security hole.

Crisis averted.

Security breaches abroad are increasingly significant for U.S. higher education because schools are allocating more seats than ever to foreign students. About a third of the 761,000 degree-seeking foreign students in America come from China, according to the Institute of International Education. Overseas students are especially attractive because most don’t qualify for financial aid and thus pay full price. Chinese students spent almost $10 billion on tuition and other goods and services in America in 2014, Department of Commerce statistics show.

That paragraph needs a small edit:

Security breaches abroad are increasingly significant lucrative for U.S. higher education because schools are allocating more seats than ever to foreign students. About a third of the 761,000 degree-seeking foreign students in America come from China, according to the Institute of International Education. Overseas students are especially attractive because most don’t qualify for financial aid and thus pay full price. Chinese students spent almost $10 billion on tuition and other goods and services in America in 2014, Department of Commerce statistics show.

Fake degrees are a major U.S. export. If 250,000 Chinese students are paying $10 billion a year, American can close its trade gap by bringing in 9 million Chinese students each year.

Evidence that some foreign applicants are displacing Americans because of an unfair advantage on the SAT could add to a backlash against standardized testing in college admissions.

Sort of like the backlash currently taking place in the Democrat and Republican presidential campaign.

The above is a small slice of an in-depth report from Reuters. Well worth reading the whole thing.

In Germany, the leaders threw out German concepts of equality without batting an eye, opting instead for Shariah law compliant trains. German train operator begins women only carriages over fears of migrant attacks

A German train company will start operating women-only carriages, a move which has been met with controversy.

Several reports suggest that the new carriages, for women and women travelling with children, are a response to the sex-attacks in Cologne on New Years Eve, which was largely blamed on migrants.

Regiobahn line announced this week that the women-only carriages will be available for passengers travelling between Leipzig and Chemnitz.

If the Germans will not defend their value of equality, will they defend the value of their euro? If the Americans will not defend the integrity of their education system, will they defend the integrity of the U.S. dollar?

The money in everyone's bank account has value only because people believe it has value. Most money isn't even printed anymore, it lacks basic intrinsic value as toilet paper, firewood or building blocks for children. If the public lose trust in the leadership, in the values of society, in the key institutions, the currency will not be far behind.