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Feb. 23, 2024 - Clif High
43:07
College vs Trade school?
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Hello humans!
Hello humans!
It's likely to be a bit noisy here.
It's still the 22nd of February.
It's a little after 1 and we're heading outbound.
Doggo did good.
She got her shot and we got her all checked out.
She's healthy and stuff.
A little on the pudgy side, but other than that, doing good.
Anyway, I wanted to talk for a minute about money, economics, and stuff like that, but also colleges, right?
So a lot of people have, you know, we're sort of coming back out of the whole pandemic, you know, lock you down, fuck with your brains, that kind of shit.
We got a lot of people that are waking up and talking about all of the crap that's been pulled these last few years.
But in any event, some of these, some kids are starting to get kids, I mean, you know, college age, they're starting to think about going to college.
And I've had some people ask me questions about it, right?
And this one smart guy was saying, well, you know, does it work economically?
And, you know, college, I mean.
And if so, what kind of college and so on.
And this is a guy I know here out on the coast.
And he's a young fellow.
He's trying to decide what to do with his life, right?
Well, one of the things not to do, apparently, economically is go to college.
I looked at it and so if you went to college for an advanced degree, all right, so if you if you were smart about it, you can maybe get enough money from the education, so to speak, the certification really is what it is.
You can maybe get enough extra money from the certification of having a degree in some professions to pay you back for the amount of debt and interest you're going to take on.
Okay, but it's very, very, very few.
It's very selective.
And so if we look at some of these professions like college, right?
Or like doctors and college professors and just examine them, we come up with a metric that shows us that if you were to go and take out loans to get a degree for even an advanced degree,
like, you know, PhD kind of thing in teaching, so you're a doctorate in teaching, but it doesn't matter anywhere along the line for teaching, it will never, ever, ever pay you back for the amount of debt and interest you'll pay on that education over the length of that education.
If on the other, and you can go and check me on this, right?
You can go and figure this math out yourself.
I don't use AI on this kind of stuff because it can't add.
And so I was just sitting there doing additions on, you know, how much money you'd make and, you know, multiplication over the number of years, the raises you'd get, et cetera, et cetera.
And doing this examination of a teaching degree, right?
That's one of the, okay, so the reason the teaching degree was chosen here as an example, it's one of the easiest degrees to get.
You know, very, very, very, very few people crap out of teaching schools, whereas lots of people crap out on medical school where they just don't, you know, they go into medical school and there's a fairly high attrition rate.
Anyway, so if you were to do that, you'll never get paid back.
If you were alternatively to take that same amount of money that you put into the school and do virtually anything else with it, you'd make your money back on it.
So if you took out all of that debt and, you know, invested in crypto and did the right cryptos, you could make money or buy gold and just hold it as real value.
So if you were to go and take a fraction of that time and go to like trade schools, so some of these trade schools to get started to get an apprenticeship are as little as eight weeks of actual schooling and then you do some level of an apprenticeship.
And so there are apprenticeship programs in plumbing, all of the building trades, right?
I actually, when I was a kid and we were living on the East Coast, I had too many credits for high school, right?
So I didn't even, I only had to go to, when we were in Virginia, I only had to go to high school two hours a day to stay even with the credits I would need to graduate because I had had calculus and had all this advanced stuff in Germany at younger ages and did very well with it.
So I joined an apprenticeship program to fill up the time in the rest of the day and I learned to be what they called a hogman, an apprentice to a bricklayer.
And so I was into bricks, into ceramics, you know, so I was a high school kid.
I'd go to school for a few hours and then I'd go in and basically carry shit for people.
Finally learned to do some level of bricklaying after a while, but you got to do it for a couple of years before they let you mess with anything that can cause them problems, right?
So in any event though, you can get a plumber's apprenticeship or an electrician apprenticeship and get done with all of the schooling and everything that single year and go on out and then make start making money.
And if you plot the amount of money you will make as an apprentice electrician or as an apprentice plumber, you will make more money there than a doctor will make working in his residency.
Not kidding you, right?
I'm not kidding you.
Plumbers out earn doctors until doctors are 52, until doctors are 52 years of age and have had that much experience and that much of a build up a practice and all of that.
So it takes them a long time.
You know, they get out of school at mid-20s and then they work for 25 years before they'll make more in that year than the plumber, than if they'd done it as a plumber.
And all those previous 25 years, the plumber is going to out-earn them in a significant way.
Plus, that plumber won't have the debt.
And so a lot of the earning capacity of that doctor is eaten up by the debt and the interest.
Not a good scenario for doctors.
So that's pretty much it for all of the professions, right?
Where you have to be basically certified to get in and do the work from it.
Now, you have to be certified to be a plumber, you have to be certified to be an electrician, etc., but you earn that and get through it in a much shorter period of time, and it doesn't take a lot of debt.
So, you know, there's even if, so this one kid had a couple of scholarships for some kind, for sports.
And even looking at that, even looking with the heavy cost of schooling defrayed by some level of scholarships, you're still screwed.
You still don't make as much money as if you'd gone into a construction trade.
If you go into some of these other kinds of trades, so, you know, we've got mechanics out here that are specialists in these heavy-duty equipment things they used in logging operations, right?
And even when logging operations are, even when logs are not the hot commodity, even when logs are not selling as fast as they should because there isn't as much demand for wood product, they always keep the mechanics employed because it's almost impossible to find them when you need them otherwise.
They're that much in demand.
So anyway, relative to college, unless you're going to go in and stick it out and be a doctor, and even then you're going to be under the base level here of a plumber for your first 25 years as a doctor.
But unless you go out as a doctor or some other highly specialized skill, especially those relative to medical, right?
So that's really the only ones that hold up and can out-produce the plumber or the electrician or the, you know, that kind of thing.
And, you know, if you get into the building trades and you make a career out of it, you know, a lot of people that are now full-on contractors started off as plumbers or started off as electricians.
So, you know, there is a career path out and you end up being your own boss.
You have your own business.
You get equity.
And so if you figure in those people that end up owning their own business as a result of having gotten into the some level of a trade, and we, you know, we're talking surveyors, all these kind of people, they will out-produce the professions economically now and into the foreseeable future.
Just the way it is.
So really, there's not much in the way of an economic incentive to go to college.
Now, it used to be that women started going to college to find men to marry them, right?
To get husbands.
And that was a common pathway was to use college for, that was one of the benefits of the college program.
But now, colleges are more and are increasingly predominantly female in terms of the customers, the students, as more and more males have opted out.
They've just decided, you know, they don't want to screw with any of this, right?
And they're going other approaches.
And so there's something of an issue developing at a sociological level as far as meeting eligible men and all of this.
And so we were just at the vets.
And what brought this whole subject up here was one of the women was talking about her boyfriend, the reception women there, the two people working as receptionists and taking money and stuff.
And the other one was saying that, you know, boy, she wishes that she could meet a plumber.
So it's like, okay, all right.
So I'll talk about this here.
And, you know, and there is that sociological problem there of since the men are not going to these collective areas where they could be dated, what, you know, what's a female to do.
I don't have any advice on that.
You know, I'm not the person to be answering those type of questions.
Boy, broken down shit everywhere on the road.
Vehicles having breakdowns all over.
So anyway, so there is that aspect of it, right?
So you need to really look at your potential for gain relative to the continual drain of the debt because the debt's going to get a lot worse.
And a lot of these college loan program things are on a slight, or not slighting, a variable interest rate.
And so they're going to respond to the interest rates.
And the Fed is going to have to raise interest rates to support the dollar against the Euro.
This is really what it's come down to is there's going to be a war between the European Central Bank trying to save the Euro, which it won't.
It can't happen because of the political underpinning of the Euro is breaking apart and the Federal Reserve.
And so it's going to be the one who will support their currency the longest by raising their rates the highest that Will survive, sort of.
You know, because you, as you raise the rates, you cause all the problems for the banks, you cause all the problems for the debt-dependent industries like real estate and this kind of thing.
And we're already in a giant commercial real estate fiasco.
Never, never been this bad before.
But those, but the major banks that did commercial real estate lending are now underwater.
They will not ever be able to, in this current market conditions, so that's basically for the foreseeable future, they will not be able to have enough in the way of loss reserves to cover the losses they're taking on commercial real estate as all these commercial real estate properties are going bankrupt, basically, going underwater.
They don't have enough activity to support the debt level on them.
And so a lot of the people that are nominally the debt holders, you know, supposedly the owners of some of these big commercial properties, they're just walking away.
They're just, you know, going and handing the keys to the building over to the bank and saying, you know, hope you guys can do better with it than I did.
That kind of thing, right?
Because they can't afford to make the payments on it anymore.
And, you know, and as far as commercial real estate, COVID really trashed that with everybody staying home and all the offices emptying.
So there was a, there's, I know a lot of people that are in larger aspects of the commercial real estate markets all the way around.
I mean, like all around the planet in Europe, UK, Japan even.
People that deal in commercial real estate and so on as principals.
You know, they take on the debt and buy the buildings and stuff.
And they're not doing well.
In fact, none of them that I know of are even holding their position relative to these past few years.
So they've been losing money for years and they can't continue.
They're going to have to make some kind of a decision and do some stuff.
One guy I know is he and his partners, and maybe there's like six or eight or nine or something.
He's in like this little group.
Oddly enough, a couple of the guys in the group are doctors that made some money only really as a result of owning their own clinics.
But anyway, so these doctors and this guy I know, they're wrestling with the issue of what do they do with one of their properties.
I think it's like in Boston or somewhere.
It's a big commercial office complex that had retail in it.
And they were doing okay while the retail held up.
And now they've shut down a lot of the retail.
So they're basically, these guys are sitting on, I don't know, thousands, thousands of square feet, you know, 20,000, 30,000 square feet or more in this little four or five story, I think it's five story, building that's got some apartments and then some retail attached.
And they're just losing it because they've got no renters in these buildings.
And so they're trying to get the bank to accommodate them to not make payments on the debt because they don't have the income.
And it's kind of like, you know, I think maybe they've got three or four stores still hanging on and maybe one renter in the whole building.
And so as I was told here, every single month, their light on their income is about 90% less than what they need to cover the debt for that month.
So every month they've got a 90%, they've got to cover up that mortgage on their own.
And the doctors are bitching, all the partners are pitching.
You know, nobody signed up for this.
Commercial real estate was supposed to be a good deal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they're all going broke.
And they're not alone.
Okay, so I actually know a guy.
He found a, he was looking, he's like me.
He had to have a, he had to move.
They moved out of Maine and he bought an old restaurant in, and we're talking old.
I mean, it had been empty for over a decade before he bought it.
And it was like a three-story restaurant.
It's over on the coast in North Carolina.
And he's converting it to a house.
The upper floor where you're going in, the main floor of the restaurant, he's keeping, but he's basically demolishing the other two floors and repurposing this structure for a house.
And he got it so cheap.
It had been empty for over 10 years.
And 10 years ago, when it had been listed, it was listed for like a year plus, and then they stopped even trying to sell it because they got no offers or for whatever their motivation, they stopped trying to sell it.
It had just been sitting there.
He came across it and decided he'd go and see if they were interested.
And they fell all over themselves to take basically a dollar on the 100.
So they got like 1% of what they'd initially started to get, tried to get back in 2014.
So, you know, quite the shock, but they can take some kind of a write-off, I'm sure.
And, you know, there's that kind of stuff relative to the property.
And he ends up with a nice place.
Even on that main floor, he's got 10,000 square feet, which is a little bit more than he needed for a house.
But he didn't need the other two floors, which are actually underneath the main floor.
And he's having them demolished and taken down.
It's a weird little place.
Each of the floors were sort of hung off of these cement pylons.
Anyway, so commercial real estate, not good, right?
Some commercial real estate has done fairly decently for people in being repurposed.
For a while, I was sort of looking to buy some commercial real estate for myself for a project.
And you know, I think we've passed on that.
I won't be buying the property I went and looked at the other day.
It's really weird.
I found also found a house up here, and it's like, oh, the house would solve a lot of our problems.
It's not where we want it, but it meets most of the criteria.
But the thing's got more than one HOA on it.
You know, I don't know why you would need more than one, but anyway, it does.
And so that's it's not a good deal.
Another house I'd looked at that was closer to us is part of an HOA.
And I hate HOAs just because I don't fit into them anyway, but for the reason of the lawsuits.
And this house I looked at at this development south of us, brand new construction, really bizarre design, but nonetheless, could have been made to work.
And then I get into it, and it's a member of an HOA that's got a lawsuit against it.
And get this: there's like three or four people within the HOA who are suing the HOA, so they're paying an attorney to sue the HOA.
And then, as members of the HOA, they've got to pony up money to support the lawyers that are defending the HOA against their lawsuit.
So they're paying lawyers on both sides of the contention here because of the HOA.
You know, you just can't make this shit up, right?
So anyway, that's it.
That's it about going to school.
You're better off doing any other kind of schooling than college.
I know a couple of guys that are real smart.
They're fairly young.
They used to work at a distribution center in or for UPS.
Okay, there's just these big places that go 24 hours a day just sorting shit for UPS, mainly Amazon packages, that kind of thing.
Anyway, these two kids can't, you know, they're not making enough money to have housing, right?
So they're living in a homeless encampment while they're working full-time.
You know, just really a hell of a situation.
But they came up with a very interesting and very unique, or not unique, but very, very creative solution to both problems.
And so what they've done is they've signed up to be to go to Merchant Marine School.
And they basically have, I think, six months that when they signed up, they got six months free schooling in the school and they get a job at the school during their schooling.
And then once they graduate and get go through the testing, they can go to work.
And most of the work they would be doing is on vessels where they would be getting room and board as well as their salary.
So, you know, good deal for them.
Free school, and then they get, you know, basically guaranteed work.
There are so many positions open for qualified merchant marine now, even with shipping down, that there's no problem.
And it's because of the these current generations, you know, people were sort of wimps and didn't want to do this kind of hard, dangerous work.
I know another guy who's down in the Gulf, and he's working on an oil rig.
And I think he's like, it was like something weird.
It was like two weeks on, two weeks off, like two weeks.
No, it was something like that.
This is some time back that he told me this.
But nonetheless, he's on the oil rig.
He's got room and board there.
They shove the food in you.
You need the calories.
They're working your ass off.
You work for a couple of weeks.
Maybe it was three weeks on and two weeks off, something like that.
And so, and they're making seriously good money.
So this guy is like, maybe he's 26.
Trying to think how old he is.
So like maybe he's 26 now and making over $100,000 a year.
As a wild, or as they call him, chain master or something.
They do deal with all of the stuff in terms of getting the piping down through the for drilling, etc.
And, you know, fix it when it breaks, that kind of thing.
But he's also, he's been doing it now for over a year, but he's decided what he wants to do, what he's fascinated with, and what would pay him more for less physical labor is being a technician for all the tools.
You know, keeping everything basically being the mechanic for an oil rig.
Fixing machineries and that kind of thing.
So, you know, technical, skilled, make more money than he's making now.
Not just a roused about kind of guy, but, you know, a skilled mechanic for him.
So, you know, he's got a good career path and we're going to need oil.
And when Trump gets back, we're going to drill, drill, drill.
So we'll need a lot of people to do that drilling.
And so it was a good choice for him.
And, you know, he's making serious money.
He's going to buy a house over here in Louisiana this summer.
And I think he's going to take a month or two months off.
He's got a girl that he's thinking about marrying, all of this kind of stuff.
So, you know, life is good for him, right?
But he doesn't have any college debt either.
And so he's very atypical to all of the other people, all of his cohort of people he went to high school with, all of whom, most of whom I think, went to college.
I mean, his males, right?
And all of those guys that went to college have debt.
So, you know, he says he's the only one that he knows that has no student loans.
So pretty good there.
And hang on a second.
I'm going to do a bit of tricky driving.
Road hazards here.
They're working on this state route.
And I got to get over before this big large truck smooshes me.
There we go.
Anyway, so some other things that have come up.
Somebody had asked via email about the Elohim and sleep, right?
Which is a curious thing.
You know, they were thinking, oh, well, when they're asleep, we can, you know, sneak up on them, that kind of thing, right?
And what's really interesting is that there are reports in Sanskrit that we get most of our what we can say is hard data or factual stuff about the Elohim is going to be found.
Most of that's going to be found being in Avistan, which is this precursor to Sanskrit.
Or is going to be in this ancient Iranian language, ancient Persian language that predates even Avistan.
Or it's going to be in ancient Chinese because you find a lot of these descriptions of what's going on in these other languages.
As I say, not so much in the Hebrew.
Anyway, though, in one of the Avistan descriptions, we've got a description of These Elohim that were doing shit, right?
They were at war with somebody.
They were out doing stuff.
There's this group of them.
They go to a bar, you know, a roadhouse, a Hindu kind of a roadhouse on the border up in the north, up near the area of China where India smacks into all of Afghanistan and all of that.
And they go out and do battle or whatever, and then they go to this bar.
And we have a description of these guys going to the bar and drinking lots and lots, flagons, you know, beer just by the fucking barrel.
And there were a bunch of these guys.
They drank all this beer.
They'd been drinking the beer in zinc-lined beer mugs, flagons, and that were lined with zinc.
This was not that uncommon because zinc in one form is malleable.
You can smoosh it around and hammer it, and it does really well.
It also handles interacting with alcohol pretty well.
And although I'm told it makes things, quote, sweet, alcohol is sweet if you put it into these.
In any event, though, so they end up getting poisoned and they die.
Then there's just all hell breaks loose because the Elohim find out about all these poisoned other Elohim, all these warriors that were out doing this shit.
And so the main base finds out that all these guys have been poisoned.
And it rains absolute hell down on this particular part of the area up there and converts it all into a desert.
And so this was the origin story for this one particular desert area.
As I say, up in the north, up near the northern part of India, but sort of off over towards Iran and sort of over towards Pakistan and into Nepal, this particular little valley up there.
And they just come on in and obliterate everything because these Elohim were poisoned.
I don't think it was a deliberate poisoning, but who knew that they were susceptible to poisoning from something relatively common.
Now, it was usual to use lead, okay, to line glasses and stuff with lead because lead is very, very, very soft.
You can form it easy, easy to find, not a lot at low temperature to refine it, and so on.
So it may have been that what was called zinc was just this particular kind of lead that has enough zinc in it that it turns it into a very slightly bluish color.
So we're not, you know, we're not certain.
We don't know the composition of this.
We're not really sure what it was that killed these guys.
But we have descriptions of these guys dying of it.
And what's really interesting in that description, to me anyway, relative to this conversation, or relative to the question, is that within that description, we have it being said that at first, the management of the bar, the people running the bar, thought that these guys had just simply drunk enough to pass out, right?
And what's interesting in there is the descriptions include a couple of statements about people had seen the Elohim drink so much that they were basically insensate and would sort of pass out.
Not like a human where when you drink too much, you just pass out and that's it, right?
You're just boom, you're out.
You're flat.
You're totally soft and you know, you're like, your frame is dead.
There's no muscle tension.
You know, you are that drunk and out you go.
No one had ever seen the Elohim get that drunk.
They can drink and drink and drink and drink and they get really inebriated, but we've never seen, it's not recorded that they, you know, that these Elohim came in and they drank all of our, and they, of course, drink for free, right?
So they drink all your liquor and stuff because if you give them any shit, they'll just kill you until the next human over there, go get me this liquor, right?
Unless you want the same fate as this fucker.
So anyway, it wasn't recorded that the Elohim drank so much they passed out.
But in this particular instance, it was notable because they said, unlike other Elohim, these fuckers drank so much that they passed out around the table and were dropping around on the floor on the way out the door.
And no one had ever seen this before.
Just as no one's ever seen them sleep.
Okay, so we don't see them getting sleepy.
There's no reports of them having a sleep cycle.
There are the exact opposite of that.
So those reports that we have from humans that had some level of interaction with the Elohim when they were in the Gons, when they had their force field bubbles up, these people would say that, you know, within the bubble, it was like perpetual daylight.
And there was, you know, it has an incredible air, great smells.
You feel super energetic.
You feel like a newborn deer.
You know, you're just out there just testing everything.
Your body feels new and excited and so on, very energized.
So it may be that these guys don't sleep as we know it.
They may have some kind of a rest period, but insofar as we're able to determine, there isn't sleep there.
We also have the descriptions of some of the guys that threw hymns and shit.
So it gets really weird, right?
Because people over time think this shit is religious, and so they convert it to a hymn.
But also maybe at the time that was really how things were written down because you'd come from a more oral tradition and you only wrote shit down under certain circumstances.
Nonetheless, though, we have descriptions of people that were in the Vaimana that were soldiers and stuff that were being transported and they would go on long flights and there would be Elohim on board and the Elohim were awake constantly.
It didn't matter how long.
I mean, you know, they would, if it's a 36-hour flight or whatever, the Elohim were awake the whole fucking time.
And it's, you know, the humans would record, well, that, you know, we were told to go over here.
We got into this area.
There were, you know, fundamentally like four companies of us, you know, four groups of 40 men.
And, you know, we were doing our shifts and stuff.
And you'd go and sleep and you'd wake up and there was so-and-so, you know, still awake, still standing there.
And these guys, the Elohim, were reported to be able to like, and so maybe this is a rest cycle.
I don't know, but they would go into a particular stance and it's like they sort of weren't there, right?
Like they were off meditating and putting their mind somewhere else.
And their body is just standing there, arms crossed, you know, legs sort of splayed out, slight pressure taken off the body by letting the knees bend.
And they just stand there, hour after hour after hour kind of a deal.
And so maybe they're asleep that way.
We don't know.
There's no sign of sleep.
We don't see sleep being described or ascribed to them.
And as I say, maybe they don't sleep.
We just don't know.
We do know that there's reports that they have copper blood, right?
That they have blue-green blood.
And if you get them agitated, angry, and inflamed, they can have blue and shading over towards green skin.
So, you know, quite the colorful guys.
And it sort of comes up on them as they get angry or whatever, you know.
So you're like, you know, you get their copper blood flowing, get their copper up.
And their skin changes color.
And you can see that, you know, if they're agitated or whatever, they would have splotchy skin.
You'd see the anger and stuff coming out in them.
So they're really weird beings relative to what we might think of as our normality of being human.
Gotta fumble for a second.
And we're gonna go through it.
There we go.
No.
There we go.
Anyway, so that's about the sleep.
We don't know.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
But it was apparently very unusual to see them, you know, falling over and passing out from drinking too much.
And so now we know it probably was not overconsumption of alcohol so much as it was the introduction of either zinc or lead or something else within this with the alcohol.
Hang on, I've got to take some pills here.
Good girl, sweetie.
We'll be home soon.
The Elohim were, by the way, we have descriptions of them, you know, hugely, hugely exaggerated kind of activity relative to humans.
So.
So when the Elohim feasted, you know, they might eat a whole cow themselves, this kind of a deal.
They were really sensation addicts, you know, they really got into physical sensation and all of this.
And they're hugely into drugs and alcohol of all kinds.
They have a fondness for high alcohol content brandies.
And they also, by the way, they think of humans as stinking and they are also extremely paranoid about their physical physical bodies.
At least one category of the Elohim is.
So the Elohim that we get descriptions of mainly are not the warriors and not the stomping around kind of guys.
So if you'll note, even in the Bible, most of the language is not about the angels who and the archangels who are basically the enforcers and the people that do the work, right?
Yeah, sweetie.
We'll stop up here and get some fuel.
Anyway, and so you get descriptions of the Elohim are really of the management crowd type of Elohim.
The El Elion and Yahweh, who are, and, you know, Azrel, Lucifer, all of these kind of guys.
And these guys are all management Elohim.
They don't go out and do the fighting and stuff.
They don't go and do the work.
So we don't know the physical difference.
We know some of the physical differences between them, but not the physiological differences between them.
But it may be that the Elohim that went on out and did the work and so on didn't have the same kind of concerns or conditions that affect the Elohim who are managers.
So anyway, the management kind are the ones more discussed.
And they can't stand the thought of dying.
And they can't stand the thought of being exposed to the bacteria that humans have, bacteria and fungus.
They were just very, very, very afraid of these.
That's why they had the whole anointing thing where they would insist that any human coming into their presence have, you know, vast, literally gallons of oil.
These particular antibacterial and anti-microbic oils like frankincense oil and this kind of stuff smushed all over them.
And they would also end up with having the stuff shoved on their mouth and in any opening possible.
Anyway, I got to get some fuel here and then I've got to head on out.
We've got to get this stuff done.
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