There's an interesting article in The Atlantic that contains a graph you should pay attention to:

This is the number of hours you must work at minimum wage to pay for a credit hour at Michigan State University.

In 1979 it was about 10.  Now it's about 60.

Note that a "full load" is generally considered over 12 credit hours per semester; let's take the minimum (you usually need 120 hours to graduate, so this would be a "five year" plan); this means you would need to work 120 hours (or about 10 hours a week) to pay for school while in school.  That can be done along with the academic load.  It also can be done during the summer. Note too that tuition is nowhere near the entire cost; the usual "all in" price is about double tuition expense, so you would need to work 20 hours a week to cover it.  Again, that's doable -- two 8 hour shifts on the weekend and an hour four nights a week, and you're good.

Today, at six times that cost, it cannot.

The conclusion, however, is backward:

Is it any surprise that so many students today are suckered into taking out non-dischargeable loans, in growing chunks, to pay for their bachelor's degrees?

Wrong answer.

The reason the price went up 600% is the availability of those loans.

That is, it was the financialization of education that made this possible, because it is through financialization that entities sit down and figure out exactly how much they can extract from others in a transaction, causing the price to rise right to that limit.  At the same time they lobby vigorously for "ever-easier-appearing" (but more-onerous in fact) terms that increasingly transfer the fruits of the result of whatever has been financialized from the buyer to the seller through that increased price!

The result of this paradigm and the unholy alliance between banks, Wall Street, Washington DC and the colleges themselves is that the marginal utility of college degrees for many, perhaps even the majority of students, is now negative.

Remember that the school, the lender, Wall Street and Washington DC do not care about individual outcomes.  They could give a damn about whether college is a good deal for you.

That is what happens when anything becomes financialized; the only metric that matters is the aggregate outcome for the financial chef; that is, his goal is to strip all but one penny of the benefit on average from the participants and keep it. 

The closer he gets to that goal the more money he makes.  He does not care about your outcome, only that in aggregate the pool of "buyers" keep just enough that the next group will come in the door.

In other words so long as they can point to a few rocket scientists that make $100,000 a year right out of school that you can only make $30,000 and leave school with $150,000 in non-dischargeable debt,  thereby virtually guaranteeing financial hardship if not outright bankruptcy, does not matter to them at all!

The colleges are not only aware of this they are willing participants in that they have their own finance offices that will help you arrange for your own fiscal destruction and, if they (or you) can talk your parents into it, theirs as well.

This must be stopped -- but until the financialization of education is reversed it won't be.  Until that day comes the best you can do is to take a long, hard look at the numbers and figure out how to get the education you want without taking any debt at all.  If that cannot be done given your specific set of circumstances then in most cases what you're proposing to do is objectively a bad deal.

Judge Napolitano has penned an interesting essay on the Ukraine situation:

Enter Vladimir Putin. He is the popularly elected president of Russia who has designs on reconstituting the old Soviet Union. Putin is also an ex-KGB agent; he is a torturer, a murderer, a tyrant and a monster. He often has lamented the demise of the former Soviet Union.

All true.  Let's not forget that Bush and Obama have both tortured (by the definition commonly used), both have murdered (including knowingly shooting un-involved civilians with follow-up shots after alleged terrorists were hit) and more.  Putin hardly has a monopoly on this sort of behavior.  As for being a tyrant turning the IRS on political opponents was part and parcel of Nixon's impeachment.  

Of course Nixon was a Republican....

Ukraine was a part of that union until the evil empire dissolved in 1991. It was the most economically productive part of that union. Today it enjoys a mostly free market and is highly entrepreneurial, though partly a welfare state. Roughly two-thirds of Ukraine identifies with Europe and one-third with Russia.

True as well, but let us not forget what faction wants which outcome.  The two-thirds are primarily the welfare state element.  Our good Judge conveniently omits that from his dissertation, and one has to wonder why given that the data is available in pictorial form.

Putin’s invasion is profoundly unlawful, as it constitutes the introduction of military troops into a sovereign territory without governmental invitation or consent, and the absence of identifying insignia puts this invasion outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war. Hence the Russian troops are legally fair game for Ukrainian troops and civilian militias.

True that as well, particularly that being outside of the rules of war means that being summarily shot-on-sight is within the correct means of response for either Ukrainian troops or, for that matter, ordinary civilians.  But, as the Judge notes...

As well, don’t expect the Russians to leave. Most residents of Crimea are Russian speaking and actually welcome their invaders (again, you cannot make this up). 

Are you an invader if you're invited, insignia or no?  Hmmmmm.  That might decrease the number of people who want to shoot (legally permitted under the rules of war) materially.... in fact, it might reduce that number to zero.  Perhaps that's why there hasn't been any shooting -- other than a group of snipers in the original uprising, and there's plenty of open questions as to exactly who those people were.

Then of course there's the backdrop.  As the Judge notes we've got quite a history here, and so does Ukraine.  I specifically note that they were "invited" to give up their nukes.  They did so, and, well, how's that working out for their government now?  I suspect they'd really like to have a few of those 5,000 they used to possess back as it would provide quite the deterrent value for them, eh?

There might be some people in Iran paying attention to that little chain of events too, I suspect....

Along side this, of course, the Judge also notes our little "adventures" in both Iraq and Egypt where we openly fomented revolution and our President called for "regime change" as a public matter.  What many seem to forget is that both had governments that we had almost single-handedly installed years previous.  Did we have the right to do that in the first place -- or to foment the later actions?

Neither of those little adventures have worked out so well for us, and they certainly put the United States in a rather awkward position trying to lecture the Russians about intervention in other lands.

There's another problem too that's not being discussed much -- what actually set off this little mess.

Were we involved and did we agitate for it?  Probably.  There seems to be at least some reasonably-solid evidence for that.  But I suspect that much of the problem in Ukraine was really about corruption, "Robin-Hood" style theft and similar outrageous acts by their government.  You have seen the ridiculous palatial spread that Yanukovich had all to himself, yes?  How'd that happen, might I ask?  

And no, that doesn't tend to support Pootie's point of view in this matter, does it?

But take a close look at the industrious people in some parts of the country and those who are welfare basket cases in others.  Look at the distribution of same.  Now contemplate why one should pay for the other and whether one was being effectively forced to do so.  At what point does stealing for both the "elites" and the leaches reach the point where a group of producing people coalesce and say "No!"

More to the point are they not fully within their rights to do exactly that?

Is that the underlying problem?

Maybe.  It certainly can't be dismissed quite as easily as claiming that "western" interests were responsible, can it?  Take those two last points together and you have quite the mess, and most of it looks rather home-grown to me.

Let's ask this inconvenient question: How do you incite a people to revolution if they like their government?

Now look at our history right here in the US.  Have we ever done something like that here at home?

Why yes we did.

What did you learn about the Civil War in school?  Did it include the fact that slavery was already on its way out economically due to mechanization (specifically, the invention of the mechanical tractor and its attachments) and within a decade or so would have disappeared all on its own purely for economic reasons?  Did your education include the fact that there were tariff and impost changes passed in the years leading up to the Civil War, championed by the north's Representatives and Senators, that effectively forced the agricultural southern states to grossly subsidize the northern ones?

Specifically there was a tariff aimed directly at foreign manufactured goods in Europe that were made from southern agricultural products, effectively boosting the price of everything the southern states imported by 50%!  The northern states didn't import those things at all and thus didn't care.  South Carolina responded by passing a state law declaring that tariff null and void -- President Jackson, with Congress clucking away, responded to that law by sending warships into Charleston harbor.  That was 30 years prior to the Civil War so perhaps I should forgive you if you nodded off in that part of your education on US History.

These situations are never as simple as they seem, are they?

Of course here, now and today we appear to be creating a whole class of people (cough-Pelosi-cough-Boehner-cough-Reid-cough-Obama-cough!) ourselves that believe stealing from one person to give to another is just fine, and, if some of it gets siphoned off for themselves or their "friends and family" that's all to the good too.  Yes, it's far less extreme than what we've seen over in the Ukraine, but isn't that really just a matter of degree rather than the offense itself?  Oh, and just out of curiosity, what does our Congressional approval rating look like again?

Speaking of such degrees, the alleged Crimean Parliament that "voted" to "affiliate" with Russia..... that wouldn't be the same Parliament that was stormed by troops in black masks with no insignia, yes? Gee, is that vote rather akin to those held in fabulously free nations like North Korea?

So yeah, if you ask me, Putin is a jackass and Crimea looks an invasion.  But in a land of 545 jackasses in Washington DC, never mind what we have seen thus far with Yanukovich, exactly how hypocritical are we willing to be when we have steadfastly done exactly what we're complaining about for decades, never mind our own internal Robin Hood games right here at home that continue to this day.

It would be fabulous if we had the moral high ground here, as if we did we could easily make a clean argument and stand tall.

But we don't -- and that's our fault.

Finally, there's this to consider:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Did we have the right to lay forth those words and then enforce them 235 years ago?  Our so-called "Constitutional Lawyer cum President" seems to think not if his little speech yesterday is any indication.  But if not then he's illegitimate as a President as unless our exercise of that right was and remains valid we have no right to be an independent nation and thus he has no right to be a President.

If so then please explain why any subset of the Ukrainian people do not likewise have the very same right that forms the basis of Obama's claim on the Presidency -- assuming, of course, that they really are asserting that right on their own, independently.

I'll be waiting for your explanation; this ought to be fun to watch.

After all, we did declare that right to be unalienable.  And that, my friends means you can't sign it away in a treaty or Constitution nor can it be taken from you.  It can be respected or disrespected (and of course there may be severe consequences if you try to assert it in the face of disrespect) but an unalienable right remains yours irrespective of the passage of time or pretty pieces of paper, whether agreed to voluntarily or not.

Did we mean what we said or were those mere words?

How, in short, can we defend our Constitution and the means by which it came about, along with the legitimacy of our own government while at the same time claiming that others do not have similar or even identical rights to form or reform their government by the very process we used?

Now there's something to think about.

In March of 2007 I began writing The Market Ticker.  Some of you have heard the saga of how and why, but it bears repeating here in 2014, now 7 years later.

I was blessed in the 1990s with being in the right place at the right time.  Oh sure, it didn't start that way; there was a lot of hard work dragging myself out of a sewer that I was headed into at high velocity, beginning with a speculative trip to Chicago undertaken with what was literally my last $100 and an offer to crash on a guy's couch I had never met in person; I only knew him as someone who ran software I had written for the TRS-80 operating an online bulletin board. That Sunday upon arrival I found an ad in the Chicago Tribune for a job in Schaumberg "programming the pins off the Z-80" at a little store-front business called NSI. Russ Berube, the guy who owned the joint, gave this at-the-time young man clawing himself away from a vortex of personal and financial disaster a programming position that he sorely needed -- and the income to rent an apartment.  I still remember the workbenches and old-time PDP-11 running TSX-Plus, the cross-compiler and the EPROM burner; indeed, I spent so much time there that I could probably still walk from the little room where I worked to the can -- or to the PROM machine -- while sleeping.  I remember well Mary, Denise, Don and several others.  At night I slaved over my TRS-80 with a cobbled-together set of add-ons, some standard, some not-so-much, writing my own code for myself.

That was the opportunity that got me on my feet.  It began my ventures as an entrepreneur, led to selling PCs along with doing network and computer integration for various firms in partnership with the guy who lent me his couch that first night.  D&D Software morphed over time into both of us programming in his basement while I rented a room from him and his wife as it was closer than my first apartment (and cheaper), an expansion of the business to a small back warehouse in Mundelein where we built partitions out of wood and covered them with a remnant of carpet, a further expansion to a location in Wheeling and then, when the winds of change blew drying up business we amicably closed the firm and split up the assets as he was offered a technology position with an association and I was offered a network operations job at a project development office of a Fortune 50 company in Bannockburn.  That ultimately led to me being hired by a spun-off subsidiary of another firm (VideOcart) that itself went public in Chicago proper.

When VideOcart got in trouble and it was apparent the firm was going to fail I prepared to start MCSNet -- in the bedroom closet of my apartment.  That little place was the second level of an old brownstone rented out by a professional landlord who owned a few of them across the city, complete with out-of-true floors but somehow "safe enough" to pass a code inspection.  It began with six modems, a 56kbps leased circuit and a hand-built PC running Unix, sporting a $20 box fan blowing extra air over the open case and collection of modems to keep them from melting down.  That was the genesis of MCSNet; I built it with my bare hands and I retained majority ownership of the company throughout the firm's life.

MCSNet moved to 1300 W Belmont and expanded to fill two "micro office spaces" in a shared office building, where the photo that I've posted before was taken, and when we ran out of room there I moved the company to 180 N Stetson, otherwise known as 2 Prudential Plaza, leasing 8300' of the 26th floor.  The company ultimately employed a couple of dozen people, served over 10,000 users in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, turned several million in gross receipts a year and was acquired in 1998 by Winstar Communications -- all with not one nickel of debt being taken on, ever, and not one item on lease other than the building space and office copy machine.

Why do I bring all of this history up?

Because there were many times during those years that I wondered if any of what I working toward was worth it, and there were plenty of times that it was a royal bitch too.  It wasn't just the 4AM pages to go fix something, which as the boss was my job above everyone else -- that's not a big deal.  No, it was the bare-knuckle aspect of business and the utter necessity of being willing to go to the mat when threatened, whether that came from competitive forces or other, less-orthodox events. That's a key part of being a successful enterpreneur that most people don't talk about; you either have the willingness to do that and are good at it, including remaining within the bright line tests but giving no quarter, or not. What's not required is that you like it; indeed, if you do enjoy it there's probably something wrong with you.

Then, just over 18 months after the sale closed I watched the Nasdaq come apart from the Sandestin Hilton in the Florida Panhandle.

I had much emotion over that event.  My kid was a toddler and we were house-hunting, having decided that Chicago was not where I was going to raise her.  I had been out of the market for roughly a year at the time because I saw it coming, but of course didn't know exactly when it would happen.  I was angry.  I remember telling Juanita and Jerry, the two Realtors that were showing us houses, that this was just the start of what was going to prove to be a monstrous crash, warning them that if they had investments in the market to pay very close attention.

That crash came from massive, outrageous fraud.  It was founded in hubris, not so much in the people offering the stock in worthless companies and pipe dreams -- after all, if you're an entrepreneur you either believe in yourself and are both willing to and are good at being a bare-knuckled bastard when you need to be or you may as well quit before you start.

No, it was Wall Street, the bankers, and the puerile change in our society that had already begun to engulf us all.  The media had lost its desire to look into stories and instead had become a lapdog for anyone with an ad budget.  The Internet had become a monster, both enabling things nobody had ever thought of before which was good but at the same time either amplifying or at least exposing some really ugly realities about our human condition, which was bad.

The sharp drop in Asia in early 2007 woke me up from what had been a nice dream.  I had spent the previous six years fishing, diving and raising my kid, and for four years had been a reasonably-active but long-only investor.

I looked into what was going on and saw the same old crap that had polluted the landscape in 1999 and 2000.  It wasn't all that hard to figure out; after all I did have Realtors knocking on my door at 6:30 AM Saturdays claiming to have a couple in their car wanting to buy my house -- sight unseen, and no, it was not listed for sale.

I decided to try to make a difference.

So I began to write, and ultimately set up the forum as well as a place for people to congregate, trade ideas, and hopefully get something of value -- and perhaps, just perhaps, coalesce into something worthwhile that might put a stop to this sort of garbage in the future.

That appears to have been a foolish dream.

It wasn't my first foolish dream; I've been a fool many times before -- and I'm sure it won't be the last time either.

You see, nobody wants to do anything about the real issues facing our nation and that we have as a people -- at least not in a productive way.  It's far more important and easier to take cheap shots, to play "gotcha" and to parade around bullshit than it is to face the facts about what our society has become, and when we play those games all we're doing is adding to the puerile and derelict nature of what our society has devolved into.

We're more-interested in whether Alec Baldwin said a bad thing on a NY Street than whether colleges are ripping off young adults.  We're more interested in going after people predicated on half-truths and outright lies than the bald-faced rip-offs and outrages that are served upon us daily by those who claim to be acting in our "best interest" -- and our own culpability for same, in that virtually every one of these people holds office and power only because we consent with votes cast at either the polls or the store.  It doesn't matter that the media intentionally placed their logo in a strategic fashion when George Zimmerman got out of a cop car to hide the back of his head so you couldn't see the gash that Trayvon Martin put there, and that was just one of the first half-truths and outright distortions presented in that case; we buy the products advertised on those "news" shows and watch those networks to this day.

Harry Reid struts around the Senate pontificating on evil Republicans even though his office and he personally knows that Medicare and Medicaid will bankrupt the country -- but he'll be dead first, so he doesn't give a damn nor will he put a stop to it.  Boehner and McConnell, for their part, are happy to make all sorts of noises about deficit spending, but then when the time comes to actually stop it they fold for the same reason -- they don't give a damn either as they expect they'll leave office before it all goes to Hell and it's very profitable for them and their friends to continue the charade.  Both sides of the aisle knew damn well that Obama was lying about virtually every respect of Obamacare and yet Pelosi literally said that Congress had to pass the law to know what was in it, which is a rank admission that she knew she was screwing the entire country.  You don't care either because she's still in office.  CEOs come on CNBC and other media channels to tout their "greatness" just as Mozillo did -- or for that matter Dick Fuld of Lehman who promised he was going to "burn the shorts."  When his own pants caught on fire instead who called him on that?  

Nobody.

What does it say about us when we're more-interested in whether Miley Cyrus is twerking with a foam finger than the rip-offs on Wall Street promulgated with HFT, blatant falsehoods spewed forth in Congressional testimony by Fed officials and outright lies by the head of the NSA?  What does it say about us when a Congressperson documents that they and the President lied about your health care, intentionally destroying your insurance coverage and relationship with your physician -- and yet they still sit in their offices drawing paychecks funded with your money, voluntarily handed over, more than four years later?

What does it say about us when we're too damn busy dredging up old bullshit to demand that the foundation of this nation actually mean something?  What does it mean when the most-important aspect of our lives is prattering about who's porking who (or who did pork who) instead of why we as a society tolerate grift on a wholesale basis to the point that 40% of our population gets a check that they literally steal from everyone -- including themselves and their children?

Maybe we all deserve what's happening and what's coming.  Maybe we deserve the sort of thing that's happening in the Ukraine.  After all, we watch those TV shows.  We patronize the advertisers.  We spend money making the paparazzi photo worth something; they wouldn't bother with the long lens pointed at the high-rise window or assaulting people in the street if nobody bought the magazine with the pictures.  There's a whole section of magazines and newspapers in virtually every grocery store in the country filled with this crap at the checkout line and you're the reason it's there and is produced because you buy it. 

Why is it considered acceptable when you have a garf with someone to blast them by text message instead of picking up the phone -- or talking to them in person?  Where has our sense of reason gone and why don't you simply walk away if you conclude that you don't like someone?  What does it say about your life when you find it so compelling to see how much crap you can load on someone else?  Why is destruction so much more interesting to people these days than construction?  Which moves the needle forward on balance for everyone, and which simply blows shit up for fun?  How is that any different than chortling over the latest photo taken by the paparazzi?

You can't even drive to the store any more without running into someone who's hyper-aggressive about getting somewhere now and will ride your ass even though you're driving not only safely but somewhat faster than the speed limit.  Nope -- they gotta go 70+ in a 55, on a bridge with one lane in each direction -- and no way to pass.  When you won't accede to playing Speed Racer for a whole 30 second advantage in travel time they sit 2' from your bumper with their high beams on.  Oh do I long for the days when I drove an AMC Pacer with rusted floorboards that was worth about $200 and could claim I saw a squirrel run across the road!

Why do we put up with exploding products?  Manufacturers buy intentionally-cheapened components in modern electronics that are virtually guaranteed to fail not long after the warranty runs out.  I've lost count of the number of LCD monitors and TVs I've resurrected that were felled by $5 worth of this crap made in China -- intentionally selected, I'm sure, for "lowest price."  I can fix them for $5 in parts and 30 minutes with a soldering iron but how many people know that -- or know how to fix them? More to the point how many billions of dollars are wasted every year by consumers buying replacements for things that broke because they were designed to fail and how many tons of toxic waste are sitting in landfills that don't have to be there? How much of our so-called "GDP" is in fact spending driven by these intentional acts that rob us all? Why do we tolerate a "smartphone" or music player with a non user-replaceable battery that has a design life of 12-18 months when cycled from empty to full daily -- and better, why do we buy them for our kids and set that example for them?  I have a Pioneer stereo receiver sitting next to me as I write this that I use for my computer speakers; it's two decades old and works perfectly.  Can you say the same will be the case 20 years hence if you buy one today?

What does it say about us as a people when we build up and promote so-called "crypto-currencies" predicated on nothing more than the expenditure of electricity while intentionally ignoring the fact that they are designed to be self-extinguishing, exponentially-more-difficult to "mine" over time and the cost of verification of transactions increases with both volume and use? That's like trying to apply future value to a burning candle and yet many claim there is alleged "value" in these things -- or even worse, that they're "money."  Where did the hallucinogenic drugs come from that are powering these fantasies?

What does it say about us when we build so-called "professions" up that lie to our youth as a matter of course -- and get paid for it?  Why do we not only tolerate this but vote for the tax levies that fund these people instead of throwing them all out into the street on their ear?  What purpose does "zero tolerance" actually have as applied to suspending children from school and giving them a permanent disciplinary record for biting into a Pop Tart in the wrong way, or pointing their finger? By the same token what does it say about us when a group of teens get a young girl drunk and then after she passes out remove her clothes, draw slurs on her thighs and assault her, and when we find out about it we make excuses for and protect the "kids" who did it even when it drives her to commit suicide?  A singular, sad incident?  Nope; Steubenville Ohio anyone, and I'm sure there are more.  If you think this sort of crap is new, think again; it goes back at least decades.  I have my own personal list of people I believe will burn in Hell that used to work in so-called "education" with culpability for similar, if in some cases less-severe, cover-ups and white-washes.  You know who you are and if you're still breathing and read this piece I place my trust in God to judge you appropriately, for that decision is not mine to make.

Why do we have Fire Stations with "Safe Place" stickers on them where a woman can drop off a newborn baby without signing anything or identifying herself, and that child is forever gone from the perspective of its father, utterly without recourse?  At the same time if she chooses to keep said kid she can hammer the same man for 18 or more years of child support, file false allegations of abuse to keep him from ever seeing the child for so much as 10 seconds and never be punished for the harm done to that kid or the false allegations.  At the very same firehouse, however, five firefighters can ignore a man having a heart attack across the street despite being asked for help and after he dies as a consequence one of the involved parties is allowed to retire with her pension intact.  In what sort of world do we live where life has become someone's plaything to be exploited for profit, both in birth and death say much less all the time in between?  Want more examples?  Go to your nearest hospital; you'll find hundreds of them each and every day from the ER waiting room to the patients in the beds.

Why would anyone bother to try to write opinion pieces or even news stories when they present a concise position in a paragraph and the second sentence is intentionally ignored so as to take a cheap shot at the author's point of view and claim they support something that is 180 degrees opposite from their actual and expressed position?  Is that poor reading comprehension or intentional misconduct?  Does it matter?

Maybe I have the wrong perspective here.  Perhaps I should have looked at what I do as being part of the entertainment industry.  Then it would all be par for the course; paparazzi are part of the deal, you smile for the camera and you pump out whatever crap you think people want to consume, damn the truth to Hell and back again.  You expect to be the subject of tabloids and similar bullcrap.  Oh, and to play my part well I'd have to speak in words of less than six letters, composing sentences of less than five words.

Just to make sure people can read them, of course.

But that's not why I set up The Market Ticker and Tickerforum.  That's not why I spent a couple of thousand hours writing the software that runs this place (currently at version 41.4 as I pen this), say much less writing the articles herein.

It is, however, quite-clear that's what the expectation is of many who are consuming what's on this site -- complete with being a recipient of all the crap that has and does come with it.

There is more but I decline to dignify it with public commentary.

For all of the above reasons, enumerated and not, I decline to continue under the current arrangement. I'm seven years into this and enough is enough.

I'd rather go running with actual friends and then perhaps partake of a drink at the local pub where I can have a face-to-face conversation with real people.  Or, maybe I'll go fishing.

Therefore what was is no longer.  The Market Ticker will continue to publish articles at my whim if events catch my eye, much as Musings used to before The Ticker existed.  I suspect there will be plenty that I want to comment on in the coming months and years.  However, all comments will be moderated and will appear whenever I get around to looking at and approving them, starting here and now.  The rest of what was Tickerforum has been closed.

Bonne chance mes amis.

I have refrained from commenting on the Ukraine situation for a while now because it's really far more complex internally than it first appears, and it serves nobody's interest to render commentary that's half-baked.

But now, it appears, it's time.

First, let's not bury the lede and get to the bottom line: Once again we have a demonstration that government exists only with the consent of the governed, and when that falls the government either modifies its position or it is replaced.

The only question that remains at that point is how it is replaced.  One would hope that happens peacefully.  Sadly, that is unfortunately too often not the case.

Ukraine is a major energy pipeline route both for itself and into eastern Europe for natural gas originating in Russia.  There have been many spats over threats to turn off the gas, particularly into Ukraine, over payment and pricing disputes over the years.  While most in the West have ignored this you can be certain that a freezing Ukranian in the middle of winter isn't going to ignore that sort of thing at all.  That's one contributing factor here, but hardly the whole story.  It's complicated by the fact that natural gas, unlike oil, cannot be easily shipped by other than pipeline and as such supplies and prices are inherently a regional thing.

Obama, for his part, is rattling his saber, but that's immaterial and I'm sure the Ukranians know that.  The United States not only has no skin in this game it has no means of exerting influence of materiality.  This is really about a government that lost the confidence of its people, who in turn demanded that the government change -- now.

Note carefully that until Friday Parliament supported Yanukovych.  Then the President fled Kiev for an Eastern city, and last night his plane was denied departure clearance, presumably intending to leave the country.  Yanukovych has since disappeared and it's not hard to figure out why.  

Parliament, in a full 180-degree about face, has changed its mind and both voted to remove him and set new elections for May.  Simply put the members of Parliament recognized (correctly-so) that they were about to lose consent of the governed and be held personally accountable by the people -- who were not going to stand down.

As with many nations there are divided desires.  The Eastern part of the country is closely tied to Russia.  The Western areas want closer integration with the EU.  In the end the attempt to force one side to accede to the other's desires led to the people saying "nuts!" and deciding that government was going to leave one way or another in the immediate sense.

What do we take from this nation of 46 million people?  The same thing we should have recognized from the start, and that every government should always keep in mind: Government only exists with the consent of the governed, and when that consent is lost government will change.

The only remaining question at that instant in time is whether the change will be peaceful, and that is under the exclusive control of the existing government apparatus.  It can either choose to bow to the will of the people through peaceful process or it will be excised through less-than-peaceful means.

Ukraine's government decided to employ snipers to try to "put down" the protests in an attempt to deny the demanded change by force of arms.  What they got instead was emboldened protests, despite shooting a fair number of protesters.  Yanukovych correctly surmised that he was going to be held personally to account for each of those sniped protesters, and now we have a Parliament that undoubtedly switched sides largely in an attempt to keep it from being held personally responsible as well.

The former Prime Minster, who had previously been jailed in what certainly looked like a political prosecution at the time, has emerged as having apparent public support and is further evidence that what was desired in Ukraine by the people was not anarchy, as so many propose to be the case -- it was change in the government.

Are the United States and Russia involved in stoking the fire over there?  Probably.  Can I prove it?  No, but I don't need to, and neither does anyone else.  The simple fact of the matter is that both of our nations have a history of interference in places we don't belong, but the Russians at least have the plausible argument of a neighboring nation that could generate a refugee crisis or threaten their energy sales.  Never mind that Russia's view of a "peace deal" means surrendering arms, which no free people should ever do under any circumstance.  Put them down, yes, but surrender them no, for those arms are the only guarantee that whatever got the people mad enough to rise in the first place will not be repeated. In this regard Russia's interference has little excuse other than trying to suppress the people in favor of policies their government likes.

The United States, on the other hand, has no excuse for interference at all.

It would be nice if governments around the world recognized that when consent fails this is the inevitable outcome, and that such conflicts always resolve in the people. Recognition of this fact, incidentally, was explicitly laid forth in The Declaration of Independence.  

Cessation of pushing people beyond the point that they choose to risk death, whether by taxation and privation or simple raw abuse of power, would be nice but history says that governments in general are incapable of accepting this reality.  Governmental blindness in this regard tends to continue right up until the noose is in front of them, at which point those in power scamper in a puerile attempt to avoid having it put around their necks.  Parliament's abrupt reversal is just the latest exhibit in this sad saga of governments writ large through the centuries.

Will both our government in the United States and others around the world learn from this rather than have to repeat it?

I can and will pray for that, but I doubt my prayers will be answered.

So by now you have three reasons to tell the college finance office to go blow a donkey when they "propose" that you go into debt to fund your education.  You can read them here, here and here again if you need to.

Now I'm going to give you the biggest reason of all not to do it, and it has to do with your personal wealth over time.

It's simply this: Statistically speaking you will never get rich working for someone else.

Oh sure, there are exceptions.  You might wind up working for the next Google before it goes public, and be far enough up the food chain that you get stock options and the company hits the home run in the public markets and those options vest and they're successful long enough for you to cash them out.

That's a lot of "ands", by the way, so let's put probabilities on it.

• Working for the next Google: 1 in 10, if you work for a startup. 9 of 10 fail entirely.
• Being far enough up the food chain to get a lot of options: 1 in 5, if you're high-skilled.
• The company hits the home run: 1 in 10 again; from venture capital to IPO with nothing that blocks them in the middle somewhere due to a mistake.
• The options vest: 75%, probably, provided you get the other three first.
• The firm succeeds long enough to cash them out: Lockup periods and all, you know.  Maybe 50%.

So how's this work out?  .1 * .2 * .1 * .75 * .5 = 0.08% chance.

In other words, less than 1 in 1,000.

Still think this is a good path to getting rich?  Uh, no.

By the way, I still have some paperwork somewhere around here with a bunch of options that I was granted in a spin-off that ultimately did go public.  So I got 1-3, and guess what -- the firm failed anyway and thus the options were worth zero.

Oh well.

This, by the way, is why you never, ever count those options as part of your compensation when you're figuring out whether to take an offer in a non-public firm, even if it's planning to go public.  The odds are overwhelming that you have a nice small stack of pieces of paper with their highest and best value will be found in starting a campfire or your BBQ in a few years.

Now sure, there are exceptions.  Google has its share of millionaires, as does Facebook.  But remember that people win the Powerball all the time as well -- this does not make buying Powerball tickets a good investment.  In fact the lottery, just like options in non-public companies, are a stupidity tax to the extent that you actually expect either to be worth anything.

What options in non-public companies are is an incentive for you to work hard in an effort to make them valuable.  They do a very nice job of that, by the way, and my comment on the odds has nothing to do with whether they're proper to grant to people.  They clearly are, and they clearly serve a purpose, but the purpose isn't making you, the grantee, rich.  It's to do the firm's level best to spike your performance in your job to the maximum possible extent.

So how do you get rich?  You work for yourself.

Let me clue you in on a secret to working for yourself: It is utterly essential that your life overhead is as low as possible in order for you to succeed in working for yourself.

The reason is this: On average you will fail at least once, and probably more than once, before you succeed.  It is only through having a very low life overhead in the form of essential spending that you will personally be able to get through those failures without being rendered destitute, having creditors chase you, being thrown into the street or all of the above.

Don't be fooled either by the claim that you "have to" go to college to earn a good living.  That's a lie.  You can do a number of things that don't involve college yet make a darn nice living, and give yourself the opportunity for entrepreneurship.  How about plumbing or electrical work?  Both have no college requirement and reasonable apprenticeship or certificate requirements with you actually getting paid to learn the trade instead of the other way around.  There are dozens of others, from various forms of physical labor to intellectual labor such as web design, and the nice thing about all of them is that none require going into debt of any sort in order to gain the "first job", and most have a direct path into self-employment.

Now let's look at the economics.  Let's assume instead of four years in college you instead spend them apprenticing for electrical work.  Let's further assume you can make $15/hour doing so as an apprentice, then $25/hour once you have the certificate or license.  There are 2,000 working man-hours in a year, assuming 50 weeks of 40 hours and two weeks off for vacation.

So in the first two years you earn $30,000 each, and then $50,000 the next two.  You do not blow all of this on creature comforts nor do you go into debt.  Instead you stash 20% of your gross and live frugally.  In those first four years you have amassed $32,000 in savings and have no debt.

The college graduate, on the other hand, has $52,100 in debt and at the nice low current interest rates will be paying $522.35 a month on graduation.  The problem is that at graduation if he gets a $50,000 a year job he has $4,166 a month in gross income less the $522.35 in loan repayment, or $3,644.32 before taxes.

You, earning $50,000 a year at the same point in time, have $4,166.67 a month in gross income and no debt obligation at all.

Now let's assume two things: First, from that day forward you both live equally frugally and spend the same amount.  Second, the $32,000 the trade-follower amassed continues to expand.

Let's assume that inflation is 3%, or roughly historical averages (yes, that's 50% higher than Fed target, but it's reality over the last 50 years or so.)  Let's further assume you can earn 6%, or 3% after inflation, and that we will do so for 45 years before you retire.

That $32,000 the non-college-goer amassed turns into $440,467.55.

What's worse is that if you both live under the same standard of frugality from that point forward for the next ten years the non-college goer gets to add $6,268.20 to that balance every year for the first ten while the college graduate has to pay off the debt.

Now let's look at what happens.  The college graduate has zero saved at that 10 year point.  The non-graduate has $139,926.99, and both are living under the exact same standard.  The entire difference is the loan repayment the college graduate has to make.

Can he make this up over time with better salary?  Maybe.  How much does he have to make up?  More than you think.

Guess what happens in 35 more years?  The non-graduate has $1,075,490, and all of that is due to (1) living frugally during the four years while the college grad is in school and (2) socking away only the loan repayment he is not making during the next ten years.

By doing just those two things the guy who doesn't go to college has over a million dollars when he's 65.  Note that this is a quite-conservative set of assumptions -- if you can manage to get an 8% return (hint: not without a lot of risk you can't!) then that "nut" is over $2 million at age 65.

Note that neither of these guys stuck one penny in a 401k or 403b, or anything like it, from that 10 year point forward.  The college graduate is literally over a million dollars behind in retirement income at the point his student loans are paid off and he's also 14 years behind in contributing -- a crippling deficit that will require that he both make a hell of a lot more money and save more of it to catch up.

Now here's the other part of it.  Neither of these two guys will get truly rich doing this.  The college grad and non-grad will work for someone else and while both can find their way to retirement and be ok, neither is going to hit the jackpot and retire at 40 on this path.

And here's where the real bad news for the college guy who has to take out loans comes from.

During those first ten years the college grad can't start his own business because he needs that $500+ a month every month without interruption -- if he doesn't pay he's screwed, permanently.  There is no way for him to cut way back for the inevitable bad months while starting up a business where there is little or no income.

The non-graduate has the option at any point in time to split off from working for someone else, and after a decade or less he's going to be in a utterly excellent position to do so, assuming that he or she does good work.  And it is there, in entrepreneurship, that one finds the path to wealth.

Wealth, by the way, is not really about having a lot of money when you get to 65.  Wealth is actually about freedom.  The choice to change careers, to raise your kids and be there for their important times, to take a day or a week off when you want to, to "retire" at 40 and go do something else.  To have a kid that needs you there for him or her in some form or fashion so you back off on what you're doing and voluntarily accept far less economically for a while, because you can and in doing so you'll be ok. You can never do these things working for someone else; that set of options simply doesn't exist.

If you're a young adult there is one thing I will tell you above all else that will impact your economic success in life: Do not go into debt no matter how it's sold to you or what someone claims you can accomplish with it.

Either find another way or do a different thing.

How do I know this is utterly true and works?

Because I've been there and done that, both personally and in business.

That is, in fact, why I can write this column, and why you're reading it today.