This is from a long, far-ranging discussion of economics and politics a former friend and I had on Facebook, and this post was originally written in 2013. I think this still stands up well, but this is not a new post.
My friend has a BA in Business Administration, hence the reference at least once to his business degree, and presumed cluefulness about how businesses operate and how business owners think. This jumps into the middle, and I’d rather just post this as-is, so I’ll paraphrase his points leading up to this. We wandered over to minimum wage via government regulation (which in turn stemmed from a discussion of the incestuous relationship between business and government); I’d said that most regulations are obsolete and hurt business, he pointed out that yes, some are obsolete, but others are there to protect people, and voila, minimum wage is an example of protecting workers.
My response:
You and I are coming from the minimum wage question from 2 completely different angles. You believe in (federal) government protection of workers. I believe in the (federal) government sticking to the Constitution… and minimum wage isn’t in the Constitution, even under the commerce clause (what Joe Shmoe is paid in Wichita, KS, has nothing to do with a different franchise in Kenosha, WI, selling their burgers). If it was a state minimum wage, it’d be a different thing… although I’d still be against it, the “it’s not a role of government” argument wouldn’t apply.
However, setting that argument aside, I’m still coming at it from the side of “personal responsibility”. You have 3 options as a burger flipper: either find an employer who will pay you what you think a burger flipper is worth at whatever quality of burger flipper you are (I’d assume shoddy, since you feel you need some kind of protectionism to get paid a ‘decent’ wage, but I may be wrong and you may just be ignorant and unaware that you can switch jobs without your world shattering), be the best damn burger flipper you can be and justify that raise you’re asking for (what everyone making over minimum wage does when they want/need to make more money), or learn a skilled trade or get a higher education in something and stop being a burger flipper and start being something like a carpenter or architect.
Again, I’m not talking out my ass, or in theoretical terms about things I only vaguely observe from some mystical ivory tower somewhere… I have the t-shirt. In high school and through college (and after college for a couple years, because of the recession) I worked really crappy jobs. Food Lion and Walmart didn’t pay minimum wage (even McDonald’s doesn’t), but it was bloody close. After I moved out, I didn’t make enough most of the time to cover my gas and such (I was in college by the time I moved out)… so I did the best job I could do and got raises every year. When I could, I got promotions. And when I found a job that paid me well and needed my skill set, I changed jobs and came to work at my current job. I didn’t ask the government to make anyone pay me more, or wish minimum wage was $12/hr… I made myself a better employee and justified the money I was getting, and went above and beyond so raises and promotions would be justified as well.
And since you have a BA, I assume you know as well as I do that businesses aren’t charities– they aren’t there to give workers the money they ‘want’, or deserve for being a special snowflake human being. Businesses exist to make money, and as a side effect pay people to make money for the business… and that pay is in proportion to a person’s value as an employee. If Mother Teresa sucks at flipping burgers, then dang it, Mother Teresa deserves minimum wage… or to be fired. It doesn’t matter to Burger King that she’s Mother flippin’ Teresa, man. She’s a terrible employee, and her pay reflects that.
Also worth noting is the point he’d made earlier about employees being replaced by automation if they get too expensive to employ. This is a very valid point that most minimum wage workers and people who advocate for them don’t seem to understand. Again, people own businesses to make themselves money. If they can’t make enough money, something’s got to give. And when there’s no more non-employee overhead to cut, they need to start cutting people. As a general rule of thumb, it costs about twice an employee’s gross pay to employ them (given employer shares of FICA, certain states’ income tax, worker’s comp, benefits, etc.)… so that $10k/yr employee actually costs the business owner around $20k. I’d imagine Obamacare penalties and/or post-obamacare insurance premiums have upped that 2:1 ratio. So if it costs less than $20k/yr to set up an automated ordering kiosk and a burger flipping robot, guess what a business owner is going to do?
And then there’s the economic effects of raising the minimum wage. Less than 10% of workers make minimum wage, so this would have very little direct positive effect on people. However, in short order, it would have great negative effects on a large number of people. Artificially raising the wages of one segment of the population increases cost for certain businesses, they raise their prices, which raises costs for other businesses, and so on down the line until prices have increased across the board, and we’re right back where we were. This is how raising the minimum wage is a driver of inflation.
In this country, like most countries in the world, we have a fiat currency; that is, a currency whose value is not linked to a commodity (like gold, silver, or salt), but is based on the trust that the country issuing the currency can pay its bills. By its nature, fiat currencies are subject to almost constant inflation through devaluation of the currency. Especially when the country in question is engaging in… let’s say non-optimal monetary and economic practices. In our case, budget deficits, a high national debt, and things like quantitative easing. It’s part of the reason everyone’s parents have stories of “I remember when gas was $0.35!” (for my generation’s parents) or “I remember when gas was $0.98!” (the story I get to tell if/when I have kids and they’re old enough to be regaled with tales of ‘the good old days’). Another factor in inflation is artificially raising wages– you’ve arbitrarily decided that the dollar is worth less than it is, so people need more of them. And by deciding that one segment of the population needs more, less valuable dollars, everyone else needs to have and spend more, less valuable dollars to keep up with the sudden devaluation of a dollar for a certain segment of the population.
So, with a rough idea of how inflation works in mind, it makes sense that raising the minimum wage (or even having one, I would argue) is detrimental to the economy as a whole, and you end up chasing your own tail. What happens when inflation catches right back up to you again? The cycle of artificial inflation begins again, and the minimum wage is raised, devaluing the currency and forcing business costs to go up, rippling down the supply chain, raising costs of end-consumer goods, etc. We aren’t going to rein in fiat-based inflation any time soon, but we can stop wage-induced inflation by not raising the minimum wage.
*Okay, no one said that. But this is the story of my getting into the pot business (sorry, no Mexicans and only tangential references to ass sex) and commentary on regulatory issues from a libertarian perspective.
My career has been in IT, Operations, and Finance for Food & Beverage manufacturing. I’ve got a bunch of certifications that prove I can manage a project and make improvements and create models. But the winter of 2016 was one of discontent. I realized that if I continued working in a cubicle / office at a large corporation, I was going to splatter someone’s brains all over the beige fabric cube walls. And since I am too ornery for suicide and too pretty for prison, I decided to get out of Cubeville. My performance had suffered, and I wasn’t fitting culturally at work anyway, so when they offered me a chance to leave, I took it.
My business partner is a friend from the kink community. His career has mostly been IT startups. And two years ago he started doing research into becoming a canna-business owner. When I lost my last job, he invited me over to hang out, showed me the operation, and then talked to me about my plans. At that point I wanted to simply take a month off; period. I haven’t had a vacation except for family visits, in over 5 years.
I started helping with his small med grow just to have something to do and get out of the house. The month elapsed and we started discussing it in earnest. What it would take to get involved money wise, plans, the pot market itself, the various options and strategies. I started thinking about it more and doing some of my own research. I had, by that time, decided I wanted to start my own business and this seemed like a good opportunity.
I’m not a pot user. In 42 years old and I’ve used pot maybe 10 times, all within the last few months. But that’s okay. I see its uses for both recreation and medicine as valid. One needs pleasures in one’s life, and while I think pursuing them in some moderation is better, others may have different priorities. I think that whatever risks come with using marijuana are small enough and manageable enough that I am satisfied morally about selling it as a legal product. Were, say, heroin to be legalized, I wouldn’t feel the same way as there does not seem to be a way for one to use that drug and stay productive. That was critical for my personal decision making – can people use pot and still function or even improve their functioning? I think so.
I also realized I was enjoying myself when I was helping out my friend (and now business partner). We were building things, figuring out how to get things working, digging in the dirt. I’d come home tired and dirty and happy. I spent 20 years trying to get away from anything agricultural because I grew up in a rural area and thought success was wearing a 3 piece suit. But success is enjoying your life and the people in it.
On a business level, cannabis is at an interesting place. I worked in the craft beer industry for a few years and investigated the craft distilling industry as a potential business and I found the history informative. Those families that acquired distributor licenses when the 22nd Amendment was repealed have businesses now that that are worth 100s of millions of dollars. They got in early and they are still reaping the rewards generations later. It’s also interesting to look at wine in the late 70s – early 80s, craft beer in the 80s and early 90s, and craft distilling since the early 2000s. The early movers into those markets are doing well and have strong businesses. Now’s the time for getting into the legal cannabis market.
Growing Cannabis; Clone to Flower (Startup Life, Entrepreneurship)
I didn’t chose the startup life, the startup life choose me. I use that quip sometimes when I have a play partner ask when I can tie her up again and I have to beg off due to running the business. It’s true that running your own business can suck; your boss is usually a dick that rarely wants to give you any time off, and sometimes the sonovabitch doesn’t even pay you, you have to pay him.
My wife and I have always been white collar folks, making excellent money. Further, we lived well within our means and don’t have kids. Which translated to us rarely having to worry about money. We made way more than we spent, even after savings, so we had a huge cushion. Part of being an entrepreneur is that I’ve had to give that up a little bit. My wife still has her white collar job and makes enough to support us easily. But that carries its own struggles with it.
First and foremost I was brought up to, at the least, do my fair share for my family, to be the breadwinner. Yes, yes, I’m a cis-het shitlord. Whatever. So there’s some ego issues with being dependent on the wife’s income for the bills. Also, since she is fascinated by arcane Jewish rules despite not being a Jewess, she claims that since I am technically unemployed, I owe her sex twice a day. I do my best to fulfill that obligation despite not being Jewish, so that keeps her happy with the arrangement. Be that as it may, it’s also a calculated risk, that if this hits as well as it could, in a few years the business will support us in a way that would mean a lifestyle of wealth and time to enjoy that wealth. In the meantime, we are budgeting and making sure we continue to live within our means and it is well worth it.
And that calculated risk I mention does have a huge potential payoff. This is something an entrepreneur has to learn to deal with; risk calculation. Which sounds kind of scary, but is fairly simple if you understand a little math. What’s the potential worst case scenario? What’s the best case? What are the odds of each? Apply dollar amounts to the first two and multiply them by the answer to the last question. If there are things you can do to improve the odds adjust for that, then compare your values and that should help make the decision.
I don’t want to get into specifics of how much I’ve invested, but I’ll walk through the math. I’ll also talk a little about where the investment money came from. We moved to Portland 4 years ago and bought a house at a relative low in the market. A couple of years later we moved out to the suburbs but kept the original house. Due to the house’s location, when we sold it this spring, we made a substantial sum of money. The profit was about 5x of what we expected to make in that period of time. Even after paying off some remaining grad school loans, tucking some away to fatten up the retirement account, the amount needed to invest was less than the remainder. It’s essentially a large windfall, or as I refer to it, we’re playing with house money.
So even if we lose that money it doesn’t damage us long term. There’s an opportunity cost, of course. We could have put that money into paying down our existing house, or invested it in some other enterprise. But anything we do with it would have some risk. The other potential cost is the salary I’m forgoing for the next two years while I try to launch this. That’s my downside number. Let’s call it $100k just to use a round number.
The upside, of course, is if the operation is successful. Since the partnership is 50/50, I simply need to calculate what the expected revenue will be over the next two years and what the profit is going to be. Right now, even the really poorly run ops are making about a margin that is about twice what a well-run food manufacturer makes, and about 25% more than a well-run alcohol producer. For the sake of discussion we’ll put the amount of money I can expect from the profits at $1.5mm. Again, not a real number, but it is proportional to the real number. This also ignores the longer term, and options for integrating the vertical by spinning up a processor and our own retail outlets, as well as some other strategies we have for expansion.
Alright, the risk is losing $100k versus winning $1.5mm. So what are the odds of each happening? That’s the real important part of the decision. Let’s assume the failure rate is 90%. In reality about 67% of cannabis businesses in Oregon have failed. The vast majority were due to failure to comply with either reporting requirements or basic shit like tracking your employees’ hours and properly paying them, which even some fresh off the boat immigrant can manage when starting a restaurant. So that failure rate is low, but for determining expected value, I think it’s a good number.
Multiply $100k times .9 and that’s $90k. Multiple $1.5mm times .10 and you get $150k. Subtract the $90k from the $150k and my expected value is $60k more than if I don’t take the gamble. That makes it a risk worth taking. That ignores that it is difficult to value the experience of trying to start my own business and the freedom and flexibility it provides me.
Any entrepreneur needs to think in those terms, and unless you are starting a lifestyle business, you also need to think of terms of longer term potential. My guess, taking in the past closest benchmark industries (alcohol, primarily), looking at the current demand, and at the future possibilities is that this can be huge.
The market for legal recreational and medical marijuana is massive. In Oregon at least, the demand is higher than the current level of supply. That gap is closing, but it’s going to take a few years for several reasons. Most of the early entrants were black market or med growers who had been growing enough to make a house payment. They are good growers and make some excellent weed. But their business sense is limited. They’d get hooked up with an outside investor that had the money, but no knowledge of growing or interest in being intimately involved. They could smell the opportunity, but didn’t want to be heavy lifting investors. So they wrote a check for $1mm or $2mm. And in a year, they are out of business because the grower burned through the cash. Or they can’t comply with the regulations.
We think our competitive advantage is that my partner and I have grown the product and developed our basic process along with an experienced grower. We believe that we can bring an analytic, process based approach to growing that few others can. Which will allow us to get big enough so that when the market hits saturation and prices start falling down to commodity levels, we have higher margins than average and are able to weather those changes while also scooping up smaller grows. The margins decreasing will only help us as it puts pressure on less well-run organizations.
We also plan to invest heavily in vertical integration. Once the first Tier 1 is fully operational, we’ll open a processor. Then we’ll start the franchise part of the business. There are lots of good growers that either don’t have the cash to get the land, or don’t have much business sense and know it. While we can’t own more than one license of the same type, we can lease the land and provide services to other growers and/or investors. We’re working on the details of that, but it lets us expand legally. Within five years we expect to have our Tier 1 grow, a piece of 3-5 more Tier 1 grows, a processor, and some retail outlets and a testing lab all under our umbrella. We have specific landmarks and decision points along the way. But we are building an enterprise.
Which brings us to exit strategy. Which is venture-speak for ‘how are you going to really get paid off for this investment?’ Are you going to sell it to someone else? Keep running and growing it? Own it but let someone else run it? The answer is; we have plans for each eventuality. I’ll talk more about this in the last section.
A little spindly, innit?
Medium and Nutrition (Specifics about Weed growing)
Cannabis is a weed. So it should be easy to grow. And that’s true. You really only need some dirt, some water, and some light and you can grow a marijuana plant. But there is a difference between growing a single plant and running a farm, both in terms of quantity and quality. It takes skill, art, and science to grow large quantities of high quality product in a given space. Like any other similar enterprise, it’s all about yield. And keeping costs down for each pound you produce.
So every ounce of marijuana starts as either a seed or a cutting. Either way, once the seed or the cutting has roots, it’s placed in a growth medium. That can be soil or hydroponic. We grow in a soil like medium called Tupur. It’s made primarily from shredded coconut shells. It provides a medium for the roots of the plant, but no nutritional value like various other types of soil. The advantage of that is that we can feed more often than if it were in soil and at lower PPM of the nutrients.
That helps in the next stage which is vegetation. The objective in this stage is to grow the plant and strengthen it to prepare it to go into flower. Flowering is determined by the number of hours of darkness the plant experiences each day. The plant will stay in veg as long as it has more than about 13 hours of sunlight. There are some differences between strains and the easy way is to just keep them under the right kind of lights 18-24 hours a day. The longer in veg the bigger the individual plants become and the more they’ll yield when they go into flower. It also allows for different styles of growing; trees (tall), pineapple (bushy), or various types of trellising. There is a trade-off; the longer spent in veg, the longer until you get your final flower. So there’s some balancing we’re still figuring out on that.
Once it is time to go into flower, the grower needs to see that the plants are in total darkness for a certain amount of time. Usually 12-13 hours. This is the natural state of things in the fall when the plants normally flower on their own. But it can be induced artificially outdoors by having green houses with systems for blacking out the green house, or indoors by simply turning off the lights. Flower usually lasts for about 8-9 weeks. Though for some pure sativa strains that time can as much as double.
In flower is where the bud begins to form and grow. The signs one is looking for are solid, dense buds, for the trichs or sugar on the leaves close to the buds and the buds themselves, and looking for other signs on the buds related to the color and density in the buds. There is some art to this and if you harvest too soon it can impact the levels of THC and CBDs, as well as the taste and the quality of the smoke. Harvest too soon and the smoke can be not as smooth or be “speedy” meaning you get amped up instead of relaxed.
When the bud is ready, it is time to harvest. This involves cutting down the plants so that the buds can be dried and cut away from the branches and remove the unwanted stems and leaves. The bud also needs to cure a little while to make it the smoke smooth and maximize flavor. Each bud has to be trimmed and the old school way is to hand trim it so you leave just the right amount. For large harvests though, machines are used. Slightly lower quality, but much more efficient even than orphans. Once the cure is finished, it is time to sell.
Selling for a producers is wholesale. You’re usually selling pounds at a time to dispensaries. There’s some sales effort involved, but much of that is simply taking samples to the buyer at a dispensary, smoking it with them, and then arranging the order and delivery. The three biggest factors are the amount of THC and CBDs, the way it looks when displayed (bag appeal), and lastly how it actually smokes.
Insect & Pest Prevention (Taxes, Regulation, and Weed)
When you wait too long to harvest…
Regulations surrounding weed are interesting. They fall broadly into three types in the state I’m in. First are the types of license, second are zoning related for getting your license, and the rest are operational regulations for keeping your license and being able to sell your product legally. The industry is over regulated, but then, virtually every industry is. And in some ways, pot is less regulated than beer, wine, and liquor if you put aside Federal laws. It’s also less regulated than the food manufacturing industry. The regs are cumbersome and immoral because FYTW and god forbid people actually /enjoy/ themselves, but that’s true for many products. In this section I’ll try to review the basic regulations and how they interfere liberty and some of the unintended consequences I think they bring about.
License Types – One can have either a med license or a recreational license. With med you pay an extra fee on your med card and designate a grower. Depending on where you are, you are allowed a certain number of plants in flower at any given time. There is no real limit on the number not in flower or on the amount produced. You can stack cards, meaning get someone with a card to designate you as a grower, but there are limits on the maximum number of cards you can stack. Other than that, there is not much regulation or reporting required. And if someone reports you, the cops have to call and schedule an inspection when it is convenient for you.
Recreational is a different game. It is more complex and brings with it more reporting and regulatory oversight. But that plant limit goes away and is replaced with square footage limits. In Oregon, there are no limits on the number of people who can have a recreational cannabis license for any of five categories; Producer, Processor, Wholesaler, Retailer, or Research. The same person or group can have all five if they like. And there are different types of sub-businesses. For example, a seed bank is considered a producer. A lab is considered a processor. A home delivery service is a retailer. The exact same ownership group can’t own more than one license of the same type, but there are ways to burn that bridge.
Zoning – The way zoning plays into is that each county is able to have its own zoning regulations related to the various types of licenses. So they can designate various zoning types as allowing only producers and whether it is only indoor or outdoor producers. Any interesting side thing is that the difference between indoor and outdoor is whether the structure has lights. So if you have a greenhouse with no lights, it is an outdoor grow. If you add lights, you are an indoor grow. The reason that matters is both zoning and that a Tier 1 license (the current largest) allows for 40k sq ft of canopy in flower outdoors. Indoors each sq ft of canopy counts for 4 of those sq ft. So effectively it is 10k sq ft. of indoor space allowed. Or you can do a mix of say 5k indoor and 20k outdoor.
There are also zoning laws related to minimum property size, how close to the property line the grow can be, what kind of odor remediation has to be done, visibility of lights, and the kind of fencing and access control that are required. Those all vary for the different kinds of rec licenses. There are other oddities such as you can have a Producer license for land that is considered Agriculture only and it will satisfy that requirement, but you can’t count the income from that toward your tax status. This is one area where the zoning is slightly more complicated than other agri businesses.
Operational – The real regulations come in as part of applying for the license and keeping it. The biggest are all around reporting. The weed has to be tracked individually by plant, including the state of life it is in, and any changes made to it. So, for example, plant 001 has to be trimmed. You have to account for the weight of how much of that is disposed, and if any clones are made from it, you have to track that as well. Once harvested the weight of the flower and any waste or other byproducts have to be tracked. All those numbers have to be reported to the agency monitoring compliance, the OLCC. When you sell any product to another rec license holder, you have to track that as well, so that there is ‘seed to sale’ visibility and prevent weed going into the black market. This is actually common in the food, beverage, and alcohol industries, at least the tracking if not the reporting.
To add to that, the entire grow operation has to be covered by cameras that run 24/7. Again, this is to make sure you aren’t slipping stuff out the back door into the black market. The recordings have to be made available to the OLCC at their request for spot checks. It’s also security for the rec operation as it helps with dealing with any thefts. Slipping stuff out the back door is really dumb. As we all know, the back door is for going in. *ahem* When people do this, they are risking 100s of thousands of dollars of revenue for a couple of extra grand by selling to the black market.
The last of the big three are testing requirements. For every 15 pounds of product, you have to take random samples and send them to a lab for testing. The testing provides proof that you haven’t used any banned pesticides and that your weed is ostensibly safe to consume (compared to literal Mexican ditch weed, most of the stuff on the banned list could be safely used). It also provides information on THC and CBD content that has to be placed on labels for packaging.
There are some other minor things related; you can’t have barb wire on your fencing, you can only have so many visitors per year to a grow operation, and a few other things. But the other three are the big ones. Compared to other industries, they are a little intrusive, but not as complicated.
From a libertarian perspective, the zoning, the size limits and the like are all ridiculous. Those are things which can be worked out by individuals. The monitoring to prevent the black market is, of course, ridiculous. Any adult who wants to buy should be able to buy however much they want from anyone willing to sell it. And the testing reqs are things the free market would demand anyway. So they simply add cost to the entire enterprise without much real value.
Harvest, Trim, Cure and Sell (Where I think this is leading)
From a macro perspective, I think full legalization of marijuana / cannabis is on the horizon. While Sessions has a hard-on about it, I am not particularly worried that he’ll go after legal producers in states where it recreational is legal. Oregon makes far too much tax money from weed to cooperate if the feds go after their legal producers. But the state does have incentive to cooperate in going after black market producers. Which allows Sessions to beat off about stopping the demon weed and the states to force more of the black market producers toward getting legal so they can get that sweet, sweet lucre. Extortion 101.
Beyond that, the real question is when it will be removed from Schedule 1. My estimate is sometime in the next 8-12 years. We’re down to only 2 states where marijuana possession is fully criminalized. All the rest range from being fully legal for both medical and recreational (8 states) to simple decriminalization. The holdouts are really the Midwest and the south east. My guess is that once Texas and/or Florida allows rec or one of the south east states (NC, SC, VA, TN, AL, GA) allows med and/or rec that’ll be the final nail in the coffin.
There’s also growing pressure from various corporate interests. Monsanto is huge in the space at providing lights and nutrients and the rest of the infrastructure and equipment. There is interest from the tobacco companies as well, but they can’t get involved until it is legal nationally. Pharma is opposed at the moment, but I think if you ever see Merck or Bayer get onboard that could help speed up the change.
As I mentioned earlier, cannabis wholesale prices are going to fall as more competitors enter the market. As that happens, you’ll see the standard consolidation. The enterprises that are well run and forward looking will start opening operations in new states that open up their laws. They won’t be able to transfer between states, but they’ll be well positioned to gobble up the smaller operations that have good growers, but poor business practices. And the ones that survive that sorting out and are large enough to be operating profitably once national legalization happens will be acquisition targets for the Monsantos and Mercks and RJRs.
I don’t think the regulations will ever be less than they are now. Unfortunately, I simply don’t see a libertarian moment occurring that will bring the overall level of regulation down. The best the cannabis industry can hope for is a similar level of regulation to the alcohol industry, unfortunately. Which proves we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but it would be an improvement over the current situation.
I’ve just finished The Campus Rape Frenzy, by K. C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The subtitle – The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities – should dash any false hopes that this book is a STEVE SMITH adventure. It’s about how the federal government forced – or probably the right word is egged on – colleges to provide inadequate hearings for male students accused of sexual misconduct.
The usual scenario is that Bob
and Betty
Drive safely, indeed
two hypothetical students at Hypothetical U, both drink a lot of booze, then get together and have sex.
Here’s a picture of the booze
Later, sometimes much later, Betty decides that she was raped and, after failing to persuade the real-world judicial system of the reality of the crime (or neglecting to report the alleged crime to the real-world judicial system at all), takes the case to the campus “justice” system.
In the name of being Tough on Rapists, the federal government – invoking the anti-sex-discrimination statute, Title IX – has encouraged the campus SJWs who were already pressing for making campus “courts” accuser-friendly. The campus “judges” are students, administrators and faculty who have been trained to view accusers sympathetically and to be on the lookout for those predatory rapists responsible for 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 coeds getting sexually assaulted. These “judges” are warned that the idea of large numbers of false accusations is a myth, and “only” 2%-8% of accused men are actually innocent. These statistics are phony, as the authors show.
Never mind, though – combined with the “judges’” training is their ability to ignore many traditional due-process restraints on their power, restraints which might allow the accused man to throw a wrench or two in the accusation. The “courts” can put the defendant on trial on really short notice, they can limit his right to cross-examine the accuser, invoke the assistance of a lawyer, or present evidence in his own favor (there’s a lot of cases where the texts the “victim” sent at the time of the “rape” are not consistent with the behavior of the victim of such a crime, but the “judges” aren’t always interested in seeing these texts).
Sometimes the trial is conducted by one person hired by the college to conduct and investigation and reach a verdict, without holding a full-dress hearing in front of both parties as in traditional Anglo-American trials. The judge/investigator just interviews the witnesses, gives the accused a (perhaps incomplete) summary of what the witnesses said, and then reaches a verdict.
It almost gets to be like the old joke of the judge who didn’t want to hear the other side because hearing both sides tended to confuse him.
All rise for His Honor
The bottom line is Bob is branded a rapist and suspended or expelled. It’s kind of hard for him to get another college to accept him, and many employers, seeing that the guy was branded a rapist, will be like “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
So if Bob or his family has enough money he can sue, and maybe win or maybe lose. But any victory, while it benefits Bob, doesn’t necessarily benefit the next guy who comes along accused of rape in the Kampus Kangaroo Kourt.
And if there actually was a rape? In that case only the real-world justice system can impose the prison sentence needed to keep the rapist away from the public for term of years. Throwing an actual rapist out of college and out onto the streets seems a tad lenient, and not entirely safe.
You want to teach rapists not to rape? Send them to one of these educational institutions.
Johnson and Taylor have all sorts of perfectly sensible ideas for reform, but I want to focus on one idea they reject.
Johnson and Taylor indicate that it might be desirable to discourage students from getting drunk and screwing. This might annoy Jimmy Buffett (NSFW), as well as the “don’t blame the victim – teach rapists not to rape” crowd. But such discouragement is a good idea as far as it goes. Rape accusations flourish, as a practical matter, in vaguely-remembered encounters which may be regretted once sober, adding to which is how easy it is (according to university regulations) for alcohol to make consent to sex irrelevant. And current dogma means that if both Bob and Betty are drunk when they have sex, Bob is raping Betty but not vice versa. How colleges reconcile this doctrine with Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination is unclear, but that’s how the system operates.
But Johnson and Taylor don’t go all the way (so to speak). They frown on drunken sex, but they scoff at the idea of discouraging student sex in general. They acknowledge that, given the kind of cases which lead to these “he said/she said” controversies, a good survival strategy might be “celibacy,” but the authors dismiss this as a “nonstarter[]” which “few will find appealing.” College students in the past – often from necessity – often managed not to rut like bunnies while pursuing their studies, but I suppose the idea is that we’re a more sophisticated, liberated, non-taboo-having, healthier people today.
“I hate going to these orgies – so many thank-you notes to write afterwards.” /old joke
What if colleges simply stopped encouraging student sex? That could make moot the question of how to handle drunken hookups by their students.
Don’t mistake my meaning – I am speaking of the separation of college and sex, not the abolition of sex itself, although of course as you know abolishing sex is the ultimate objective of the Catholic conspiracy.
Colleges can only do so much, and training the horniness out of its students is something which is beyond their capacity. But that doesn’t mean a college should provide boinking facilities for its students. No using dorms as sleepover facilities, fraternity would-be orgies, etc.
When I worked as a student dormitory assistant, checking students into and out of their rooms, I felt like the clerk at a sleazy hotel. My job wasn’t to keep the guys out of the girls’ rooms or vice versa, but to make sure they left their student IDs at my office before going upstairs for their…whatever it was they did (probably not canasta).
I was also the piano player
Did colleges put up with this sort of thing in the past? No – although students weren’t any less horny than today. College education wasn’t as near-universal as now, you needed some money or enough talent to get a scholarship, but if you had one of these qualifications there were plenty of institutions to choose from. But generally, the colleges at least made an effort to keep the students on the straight and narrow.
Mandatory chapel. Curfews. If the college admitted women (not a given), then there was separation between the sexes, and social events needed chaperones.
“Don’t mind me, you kids just have fun.”
Most students wouldn’t put up with that today. But that’s all right, most students don’t need to be at a modern residential college.
We’re in a situation where colleges and universities ought to downsize anyway. A four-year sojourn at a residential college (often involving indebtedness and fairly sketchy post-college plans for promptly paying off that indebtedness) is not an essential part of every young person’s life, if it ever was.
There are some career paths which may require studying at a residential college, some career paths which may call for online education (dropping by the local public library for proctored exams), and some career paths which may call for a good high school education (where it can be found) and/or an apprenticeship.
And there are some people who may still go in for a liberal arts education as defined by Cardinal Newman – learning for its own sake, including the things associated with being a learned person, including theology, the “queen of the sciences.”
Blessed John Henry Newman
In each of these situations, the college can separate itself from enabling its students’ sex lives.
If a student is working on his or her online degree while holding down a job, then their college life and social life will run on separate tracks, for the most part, or if they get together with other students it will be off campus and they’ll have signed all sorts of forms that the college won’t be liable for broken hearts, broken bones, disease, death, etc., resulting from independently developing relationships with other students.
Or if students are taking one of those intensive courses of study which requires a residential program, they should be warned to do their foolishness (if any) while they’re off campus.
And at least in theory, nontraditional-age students supplementing their education, often online or through occasional visits to campus for class purposes, will have homes of their own and any kinkiness they do will be in those homes (and they should ask their spouses first, if any).
And for those few liberal-arts residential colleges which survive the coming shakeup of higher education – those colleges should be unashamedly elitist, recruiting students who are actually committed to a course of study, with socializing with the other sex limited to chaperoned activities like in earlier times.
(If a young man and woman meet at a residential college (or before going) and decide to get married, then of course after their marriage the college should put them in married-student housing.)
I guess the one downside to my scheme would be that it would force the SJW “student life” bureaucrats to get other work.
Look carefully, and you might be able to see the violin on which I am playing “My Heart Bleeds for You”
Last Sunday morning, I went with my wife to brunch at the local churrascaria in belated celebration (due to a case of the flu) of our 12th wedding anniversary.
I mention this only because events like a wedding anniversary cause one to muse on cycles. Due to its proximity to the Sinosphere, 12th (24th, 36th, etc.) anniversaries, be they of birth or marriage, carry a certain significance in Thai culture as part of the duodecennial cycle of the East Asian zodiac and the larger sexagenary cycle of year reckoning. While a full discussion of the relationship between the linear and teleological view of Whig history and an older social cycle view of history is beyond the ambit of this article, it is worth noting that, perhaps, the truth lies in the middle as history might resemble a gyre or corkscrew.
One of the advantages of studying history, philosophy, and literature is that it provides a corrective lens to the intellectual myopia individuals possess due to the limitations of living memory as a result of the ephemeral nature of human life. Case in point, without the knowledge that comes from these disciplines, one might be forgiven for thinking that the contemporary culture war battleground of free speech on campus is somehow a new phenomenon that originates from the nefarious machinations of a shadowy cabal of Globalist-Zionist-Freemason Lizard People. In fact, free speech, higher education, and society have had a contentious relationship ever since Socrates drank that cup of hemlock. (Although, it is quite possible that the Anunnaki forebears of the Illuminati may have had something to do with that incident.)
Indeed, in examining the similarities between the situation on campuses today with those of yesteryear, it is instructive to look at an incident that occurred on the campus of Indiana University during the Spring of 1890. Much like The Onion, which was founded by two students at the University of Wisconsin in 1988, during the 19th and early 20th century, college students would publish their own satirical newspapers and broadsides. These clandestine and anonymous publications were known in the contemporary vernacular as boguses. With one particular bogus, on April 19th, 1890, the frat bros of Beta Theta Pi pulled off an epic trolling of the good people of Bloomington, Indiana that has few rivals even almost 130 years later. On that Saturday morning, the town residents awoke to find a bogus attacking certain students and faculty members of Indiana University plastered to the doors of their homes and businesses. The content of the bogus was so scandalous that several individuals complained to the university. From our perception of those more genteel times, the modern reader might be forgiven in thinking the shocking satire was along the lines of “Prof. Higgsboson is a scoundrel and a rogue who deigns to whistle the tune of “Maggie Murphy’s Home” while peddling his velocipede through the park!” Please allow me to disabuse you of that notion as I have taken the liberty of transcribing the first paragraph of the Beta Theta Pi bogus for your elucidation:
TURDS!!
In the Ass-Hole of America!
Although there are many turds in this dirtiest asshole of creation, we propose to shovel out only those that have been shit from the effects of the first dose of physic. In so much as there has been a long continued stopping of the bowels, it will be necessary to follow this dose by others at intervals of three days, until the entire gut is purged. The giant turd, the plug as it were, and the hardest to pass is a pale-faced, red-headed-son-of-a-bitch from Indianapolis. This low-lifed terrier has played with his pecker until his brains have ran out at the head of his cock. By reason of this this long continued self abuse, he became so enervated that he was not able to walk to the privy, and it was his custom to shit in the “Saline“[?] , and throw it in the stove. The next TURD, although softer in consistency, makes up what he lacks in substance by the loud tone of his stink. Saunderson, a half-assed lawyer who made an ignominious failure in that profession, thinks he is competent to teach oratory and Rhetoric, we want to inform the trustees that if his name isn’t Damnis next year, I. U, will be hissed out of state oratorical.
All right, there’s a bad hombre in that dorm who said there are only two genders. Get your shit in one bag and ROLL OUT!
It goes on for several more paragraphs, which you can read in its entirety here. The reaction of Indiana University when presented with this bogus was to hire the infamous Pinkerton National Detective Agency to track down the authors of the broadside, which would be akin to a university today hiring BlackwaterAcademi mercenaries to track down violators of its speech code. According to the archives of Indiana University, the result of the investigation was that the bogus was written and distributed by seven members of Beta Theta Pi and that one of them was a son of a university trustee. All of them were expelled from the university; however, within two years, all seven were eventually reinstated as students in good standing and five were awarded their degrees.
The language used by the Pinkerton agent in his report of the incident is evocative of the language used today by modern speech police in that he first appeals to the injurious effect the bogus had upon the greater social order:
This circular attacked some of the faculty and the most popular students of the college at this place, known at the Indiana College, and was couched in language so filthy that, if such a thing were possible, it must have shamed even the depraved author. It seems that several hundred of these circulars were distributed, and in all probability every child in the village has read them.
Second, the agent cast aspersions as to the character of the perpetrators, “To be able to join most of these Fraternities, it is necessary to possess a certain amount of intellectual ability, good standing in college and society and moral worth, but to join the Beta one must have a certain number of good suits of clothes, must dissipate and in short, must be a hail fellow well met.” It is a mindset in which readers of my last article will be familiar with, in which speech that challenges the cherished nostrums of the day is cited as evidence of moral and ethical defect.
From action to reaction, the parallels with past eras loom large. Be it the Trial of Socrates or the Beta Theta Pi bogus, speech that is considered to have the potential to upset the standing social order produces a reaction to suppress it. Those lacking a synoptic view of the human story, might read contemporary accounts of the climate surrounding freedom of speech in academia and think it to be a novel situation. Furthermore, this opinion might be strengthened through the scribblings of venal journalists attempting to fatten their paychecks through fomenting moral panic with use of hyperbolic language like ‘unprecedented crisis.’ Yet, even a cursory glance at history shows that this is actually the status quo. Indeed, it is a sign of a healthy civil institution, for as the fount from which new knowledge and ideas spring, it is to be expected that those ideas which have the potential to radically alter society will be met with such perturbation. While one should support efforts to protect the right of individuals to speak freely on campus and be concerned about efforts to suppress that right, one should not also indulge in the hyperbole that any reaction to speech is evidence that the descendants of those Beta Theta Pi brothers are cowering in the attic of 1100 North Jordan Avenue in hiding from the administrative gestapo of IU’s Academic Affairs. For as history shows, there has never been a time when there isn’t a group of students or scholars who aren’t upset about something; this is a natural side-effect of the dynamism inherent in the institution. Indeed, to point to any sign of discontent on campus, as if any state other than complete harmony is unnatural, is often the tool of tyrants.
In 221 BC, after Qin Shi Huangdi brought all of China under his control to become its first emperor, his prime minister, Li Si, began a campaign to suppress dissent known in Chinese as 焚書坑儒 (fénshū kēngrú), which is rendered into English as “Burning books and burying the [Confucianist] scholars.” Historian Sima Qian recorded in the Annals of Qin Shi Huang that:
Li Si Said: “I, your servant, propose that all historians’ records other than those of Qin’s be burned. With the exception of the academics whose duty includes possessing books, if anyone under heaven has copies of the Shi Jing [Classic of Poetry], the Shujing [Classic of History], or the writings of the hundred schools of philosophy, they shall deliver them (the books) to the governor or the commandant for burning. Anyone who dares to discuss the Shi Jing or the Classic of History shall be publicly executed. Anyone who uses history to criticize the present shall have his family executed. Any official who sees the violations but fails to report them is equally guilty. Anyone who has failed to burn the books after thirty days of this announcement shall be subjected to tattooing and be sent to build the Great Wall. The books that have exemption are those on medicine, divination, agriculture, and forestry. Those who have interest in laws shall instead study from officials.”
Dean Edger Head – Gotham University (Source: http://batman.wikia.com)
When considering the constant squabbling between the campus Lilliputians and Blefuscudians over which end of a soft-boiled egghead is best, until there is the burning of books and the burial of scholars, the proper reaction is to merely shake one’s head, be it egged or not, over the folly of youth. For it is the inherent stupidity of the 18 through 30 year-old that ensures history has its cycles as well as purging the turds in the asshole of America.
Also worth noting is the point he’d made earlier about employees being replaced by automation if they get too expensive to employ. This is a very valid point that most minimum wage workers and people who advocate for them don’t seem to understand. Again, people own businesses to make themselves money. If they can’t make enough money, something’s got to give. And when there’s no more non-employee overhead to cut, they need to start cutting people. As a general rule of thumb, it costs about twice an employee’s gross pay to employ them (given employer shares of FICA, certain states’ income tax, worker’s comp, benefits, etc.)… so that $10k/yr employee actually costs the business owner around $20k. I’d imagine Obamacare penalties and/or post-obamacare insurance premiums have upped that 2:1 ratio. So if it costs less than $20k/yr to set up an automated ordering kiosk and a burger flipping robot, guess what a business owner is going to do?
In this country, like most countries in the world, we have a fiat currency; that is, a currency whose value is not linked to a commodity (like gold, silver, or salt), but is based on the trust that the country issuing the currency can pay its bills. By its nature, fiat currencies are subject to almost constant inflation through devaluation of the currency. Especially when the country in question is engaging in… let’s say non-optimal monetary and economic practices. In our case, budget deficits, a high national debt, and things like quantitative easing. It’s part of the reason everyone’s parents have stories of “I remember when gas was $0.35!” (for my generation’s parents) or “I remember when gas was $0.98!” (the story I get to tell if/when I have kids and they’re old enough to be regaled with tales of ‘the good old days’). Another factor in inflation is artificially raising wages– you’ve arbitrarily decided that the dollar is worth less than it is, so people need more of them. And by deciding that one segment of the population needs more, less valuable dollars, everyone else needs to have and spend more, less valuable dollars to keep up with the sudden devaluation of a dollar for a certain segment of the population.
First and foremost I was brought up to, at the least, do my fair share for my family, to be the breadwinner. Yes, yes, I’m a cis-het shitlord. Whatever. So there’s some ego issues with being dependent on the wife’s income for the bills. Also, since she is fascinated by arcane Jewish rules despite not being a Jewess, she claims that since I am technically unemployed, I owe her sex twice a day. I do my best to fulfill that obligation despite not being Jewish, so that keeps her happy with the arrangement. Be that as it may, it’s also a calculated risk, that if this hits as well as it could, in a few years the business will support us in a way that would mean a lifestyle of wealth and time to enjoy that wealth. In the meantime, we are budgeting and making sure we continue to live within our means and it is well worth it.
Harvest, Trim, Cure and Sell (Where I think this is leading)
.jpg "It looks like the inmates in this cell block only got a C in not-raping.")
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