the happy conservative

I often argue that college simply isn’t for everyone. I’ll enumerate my reasons later, but before I do I’d like to give a pointed vignette about innumeracy.

I went into a gas station last night. I have a diet dew addiction, and diet dew is served on tap at this particular gas station. I usually prefer to buy two-liters and keep them in the fridge, but I had planned poorly and was all out.

As I was standing in line to checkout, the attendant fetched the lady in front of me some short cigarettes. I don’t have a problem with smokers; they’re providing a service by contributing to social security and medicare and not living long enough to collect. Hurray.

Worse, though, was her next request. Here’s how it went:

Lady: I’d like five powerball tickets.

Attendant: Would you like me to run them all at once?

Lady: No, can you do them separately? Whenever I get them all at once the numbers are too close together.

Alright, folks. That displays an unbelievable inability to do math. Naturally, your odds of that much money falling out of the sky are better than your odds of winning the lottery. No problem, some people just like buying lottery tickets because they’re fun to scratch. I don’t have a problem with that.

But if you’re playing for fun, what difference does it make where the numbers are? After all, every single ticket has an equally good chance of returning zero percent.

And what does this have to do with college? Not a lot, except that this is the sort of person who’s going to collect federally subsidized loans at the expense of people who actually work for a living. This is the sort of person who pays no income tax. In fact, I’m glad she bought those tickets and smokes, cause otherwise she wouldn’t contribute to society at all.

College. It’s just not for everybody.