And still yet more on why the skilled trades remain to the smart choice.

 Trade Schools Vs. Traditional College: What You Should Know 

Robert Farrington

We all know that a college education is usually worth the financial cost, but what about attending trade school instead? Unfortunately, many adults with influence over high schoolers never take the time to ask this important question.  

I'm not only talking about school guidance counselors and other educators, but I'm also talking about parents themselves. For far too many parents with kids in their junior or senior years of school, the stigma surrounding having a child skip four-year college would just be too much to bear. 

But, it's time to change the narrative, and for more reasons than one. Not only does trade school help students land a job faster, it also costs significantly less than traditional college. Plus, jobs in the trades are booming in general, whereas many other industries are oversaturated with new graduates looking for work. 

Have you tried to hire a contractor lately? How about an electrician? If you have, you probably already know these jobs are in high demand.

These are just some of the reasons to consider trade school, but there are others. And if you have your child's best interest in mind, you will at least hear me out. 

How Much Does Trade School Cost? 

The initial cost of attending trade school is one of the biggest benefits this type of education has to offer. Where the average cost of attending a public, four year school worked out to $10,740 for in-state students during the 2021-22 school year per CollegeBoard figures, you can attend trade school for as little as $5,000 per year. Not only that, but you can often learn a trade and enter a related profession in 18 months to 24 months vs. the four years or longer it takes to earn a bachelor's degree. 

As an example, you could attend a public two-year in-district community college for an average of $3,800 per year, finish a vocational degree within two years, then go on to work as a dental hygienist or even a registered nurse in states that only require an associate degree. Conversely, you could attend trade school to learn a skill like carpentry, or to become an electrician, a welder or a boilermaker.

With many trades, you can also take part in a paid apprenticeship that lets you earn money while you learn on the job. According to statistics from the U.S. government, 92% of apprentices who complete their program retain employment and go on to earn an average annual salary of $72,000. 

Trade School Education Pays Off (Literally) 

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Trade Schools Vs. Traditional College: What You Should Know

Robert Farrington

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I write about personal finance, college and student loan debt.

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Feb 21, 2022,11:30am EST

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We all know that a college education is usually worth the financial cost, but what about attending trade school instead? Unfortunately, many adults with influence over high schoolers never take the time to ask this important question. 

I'm not only talking about school guidance counselors and other educators, but I'm also talking about parents themselves. For far too many parents with kids in their junior or senior years of school, the stigma surrounding having a child skip four-year college would just be too much to bear.

But, it's time to change the narrative, and for more reasons than one. Not only does trade school help students land a job faster, it also costs significantly less than traditional college. Plus, jobs in the trades are booming in general, whereas many other industries are oversaturated with new graduates looking for work.

Have you tried to hire a contractor lately? How about an electrician? If you have, you probably already know these jobs are in high demand.

These are just some of the reasons to consider trade school, but there are others. And if you have your child's best interest in mind, you will at least hear me out.

young apprentice in vocational training working on a turning machine in the industry

young apprentice in vocational training working on[+]GETTY

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How Much Does Trade School Cost?

The initial cost of attending trade school is one of the biggest benefits this type of education has to offer. Where the average cost of attending a public, four year school worked out to $10,740 for in-state students during the 2021-22 school year per CollegeBoard figures, you can attend trade school for as little as $5,000 per year. Not only that, but you can often learn a trade and enter a related profession in 18 months to 24 months vs. the four years or longer it takes to earn a bachelor's degree.

As an example, you could attend a public two-year in-district community college for an average of $3,800 per year, finish a vocational degree within two years, then go on to work as a dental hygienist or even a registered nurse in states that only require an associate degree. Conversely, you could attend trade school to learn a skill like carpentry, or to become an electrician, a welder or a boilermaker.

With many trades, you can also take part in a paid apprenticeship that lets you earn money while you learn on the job. According to statistics from the U.S. government, 92% of apprentices who complete their program retain employment and go on to earn an average annual salary of $72,000.

Trade School Education Pays Off (Literally)

While trade school costs less in general, and while trades typically require less than four years of higher education, jobs in various trades also pay more, too. Yes, you read that right. Sending your kid to trade school can result in benefits like lower student debt or no student debt plus higher earnings later on.

A quick look at May 2020 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates from BLS.gov makes this readily apparent. While there are many different trades and educational paths to consider, here are some of the highest paying trades students could enter plus how many years of higher education they require.

While these trade school and community college jobs definitely pay well, also keep in mind that these salaries apply to employees. If a student is especially business-minded, all kinds of trades work well for all kinds of small business ideas. 

For example, someone who learns the art of plumbing can easily go on to open their own plumbing business, and the same is true for carpenters, electricians, and other skilled tradespeople who are good with their hands. I also know that, all over the country right now, we're facing a dramatic shortage of skilled workers who can remodel kitchens or bathrooms, install flooring, or take on any number of small remodeling jobs. 

The bottom line: The work is there for students who pursue the trades, and the jobs pay handsomely for the most part. If your trade school student is prepared to break out on their own and start their own company, that's even better. 

I.D is not merely mainstream it's indispensable.

 The Silence of the Space Aliens 

David Coppedge 

National Geographic jokes about the silence of the space aliens.

For more than 50 years, we’ve been eavesdropping on the cosmos, searching for transmissions that would reveal the existence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life.

To date, nobody’s bothered to call.

Is it something we said?

As the silence keeps up, the alternatives get narrow. (1) We are alone in the universe as intelligent beings or (2) “the morbid alternative: Intelligent life periodically emerges on other worlds, but has an unfortunate tendency to self-destruct.” (3) A third possibility is that aliens know about us but cloak their presence for some reason.

Possibility #2, that alien civilizations have a tendency to self-destruct, has been seriously considered by some who look at humans’ bad example of creating devastation “during our relatively brief span as the dominant species on this planet.” 

"That’s why a trio of scientists recently published a guide to help astronomers detect alien apocalypses — whether it’s the chemical signature of a world filled with rotting corpses, the radioactive aftermath of nuclear warfare, or the debris left over from a Death Star scenario where an entire planet gets blown to bits. [Emphasis added.]" 

Extinct Aliens and the Design Inference 

We see here the makings of a design inference. It might be called Cosmic Forensics. Since forensics is a type of intelligent design science (e.g., determining whether a death was natural or intentional), why not apply the same principles to alien beings? It is, after all, a search for extinct extraterrestrial intelligence (SEETI). That’s a goal far beyond astrobiology, the search for biomarkers that could indicate life down to the microbial level. SETI and SEETI are looking for beings “at least as clever as we are,” as Seth Shostak likes to say.

The clues for SEETI could be very indirect and faint: 

"SEETI research, however, is not looking for biosignatures — signs of life. Instead, scientists have to hunt down necrosignatures — signs of death — that would indicate destruction on a colossal scale.

Consider a scenario in which biological warfare rapidly wiped out a planet’s population. Microorganisms that cause decomposition would gorge themselves on alien corpses. In doing so, they would excrete chemical compounds, dramatically increasing the levels of methane and ethane in the atmosphere.

If the population size of the alien world were comparable to that of Earth, the methane and ethane gases would dissipate in about a year, so there would be only a short window of opportunity to detect the cataclysm.

However, if the biological arsenal included a genetically modified virus capable of jumping species, then the planet’s casualties might also include its animal life. In that case, the telltale signs of catastrophic biowarfare could be visible for several years." 

The leftover glow of a nuclear holocaust could be another clue. Planets don’t typically nuke themselves. Some intelligent cause would have had to push the button 

Evidence of Intention 

It’s repulsive to think about global destruction, but intelligent design doesn’t distinguish moral purposes from immoral ones. ID merely looks for evidence of something intentional. Like SETI, SEETI depends on the researcher being able to tell the difference between a purposeful act and a natural act.

SEETI thinkers even consider “speculative technologies” of aliens. If advanced civilizations create self-replicating nanobots that run haywire, they could reduce a planet to a “grey goo” of dust where once an intelligent society thrived.  

"But, what sort of evidence would exist for this heinous act? One remote possibility is the detection of artificial compounds in the debris disc, indicating that the planet was once home to a technologically-advanced civilization." 

A “heinous act” is an intentional act, implying moral and intellectual responsiblity. We don’t call a lion taking down a wildebeest “heinous.” Something unnatural has happened. 

More of the Same? 

Perhaps, as evolutionists, the trio of scientists contemplating SEETI as a research program view human planetary destruction on a continuum with animal death — just a particularly egregious advanced form of ecological collapse. Why, then, call it SEETI with emphasis on the “I”? Animals like birds and dolphins have intelligence. Is human intelligence just more of the same? 

Their language betrays something unique about human intelligence that carries over to alien intelligence. They talk about warfare. Animals have predator-prey relationships, but they don’t engage in warfare. Animals don’t “genetically modify” other organisms for the purpose of wiping them out. Animals don’t create “artificial compounds” that can be distinguished from natural compounds. 

The SEETI thinkers are looking for signs of intention. Even in global death, they believe they could separate natural causes from intelligent causes. That’s the design inference. 

And still yet more on mathematics antiDarwinian bias.

 Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: Appealing to the Unwashed Middle 

William A. Dembski 

I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier post here.

Before leaving academia for business, I used to lecture on intelligent design at colleges and universities, and often debate people on the Darwinian side. Michael Shermer and Michael Ruse were my most frequent debate partners. My philosophy at these debates was not to try to convince Darwinists that my views were correct. Nor was I particularly concerned about the intelligent design proponents — if they were proponents of ID, they had presumably put their necks on the chopping block and knew what was at stake, academically and culturally, in taking the side of ID. My challenge, rather, in these debates, was to win the unwashed middle — those who had not made up their minds — those who didn’t reside in the cloud cuckoo land of Darwinism. So this response is mainly directed at them. 

Rosenhouse’s book is objectively bad. It purports to be a critique of mathematics as used by ID proponents and of my mathematical work in particular. Yet it betrays a lack of comprehension throughout. It makes a virtue of misrepresentation. It’s aim is not to understand but to kill. In my review, I called Rosenhouse on his many failures in the book. It’s clear in his reply that he simply ignored the points I was able to score — points he made it easy for me to score because he did such a hack job. Read his book and read my review, and decide for yourself.  

A New Dimension of Bad 

His reply, however, adds a new dimension to the debate. The reply, too, is objectively bad in the same sense as his book. But it adds a level of delusion that in reading it made my jaw drop. I’m not writing this for rhetorical effect. In the reply, he lets loose with two whoppers that make me question what planet he’s been living on. Indeed, I have to seriously wonder about the degree to which Darwinists are in their right minds if they find in Rosenhouse a voice that speaks for them.

But before getting to the two whoppers, buried in his reply are two substantive points worth addressing. They came up in my review, received comment in the reply, and deserve some additional comment here. They concern (1) the connection between irreducible and specified complexity and (2) the role of the environment in supplying information to the Darwinian process 

Irreducible versus Specified Complexity 

I addressed this point in my review, but let’s have another go at it. Consider Sisyphus. As long as you can remember, he’s been rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down before it gets to the very top, which, let’s assume, is a stable equilibrium, so if he gets it to the very top, it will stay there (though he never does). What is the probability that Sisyphus will get the rock up to the very top? As a historical or inductive probability, it is quite low. All your life, you have been seeing him try to get the rock up there and somehow it never quite gets there That historical probability for Sisyphus is the same type of probability as inherent in Mike Behe’s assessment of Darwinian processes being unable to build irreducibly complex molecular machines. All the attempts by biologists to trace a detailed Darwinian pathway of how an irreducibly complex system might emerge from an evolutionary precursor performing a different function have failed. 

Richard Lenski, for instance, has run tens of thousands of generations of E. coli, and produced no novel irreducibly complex system. The record of failure of evolutionary biologists in their inability to provide detailed Darwinian pathways for irreducibly complex systems is as complete as Sisyphus’s efforts to get the rock to the top of the hill. If you disagree, please provide an irreducibly complex system, its precursor system performing a different primary function, and then the step-by-step path of how to get from one to the other. Silence? Crickets? 

The Nuts and Bolts 

By contrast, specified complexity gets at the nuts and bolts of the probabilistic hurdles that render an evolutionary transition intractable. To continue with the Sisyphus analogy, specified complexity would look not at Sisyphus’s record of failure so much as the types of obstacles he faces in getting to the top and how those might render getting to the top improbable. 

For instance, perhaps in rolling the rock up the hill, most of the path is clear and unproblematic, but at one point there’s a bump so that given his strength he just can’t get over the bump. Or perhaps, there are multiple bumps, where he’s got a positive probability of getting over each bump, but when all these probabilities get combined, he’s bound not to get over all the bumps. Or perhaps he gets tired, running out of steam as he moves up the hill, so that bumps lower on the hill would be no problem, but by the time he gets up the hill, they do become a problem, and his probability of getting over all of them approaches zero.

The point to appreciate is that such a probability analysis of Sisyphus adds to our understanding of his failure. His record of failure is enough to justify assigning a low historical probability to his being able to roll the rock to the very top of the hill. But an empirically based probability of his failure needs to look at the particularities of the probabilistic hurdles that he’s facing. The same holds for irreducible complexity. There’s a long record of failure by biologists to explain how these systems might evolve. Specified complexity attempts to understand the probabilistic particulars that could explain the record of failure. 

But specified complexity is not merely a supplement to irreducible complexity. Not all biological systems are irreducibly complex. In consequence, specified complexity can assess the evolvability of biological systems that are not irreducibly complex. For instance, the beta-lactamase enzymatic system that Doug Axe examined (described at greater length in my review) is not in any clear sense irreducibly complex, but it is analyzable probabilistically and exhibits specified complexity.  

Consider a Bridge 

One more analogy to try to nail all this down. Again, I write for the unwashed middle and have no expectation of assuaging Rosenhouse. Consider a bridge. It’s stood for 100 years, faced all kinds of weather and hardship, and has remained imperturbable. And yet one day it suddenly collapses. Before its collapse, we might think that its probability of continuing to stand was quite high, and so the probability of collapse was quite low. Given its collapse, is it therefore safe to say that a highly improbable event happened? 

Those versed in the use specified complexity as a tool for disentangling the probabilities underlying various systems would say that such historical probabilities are of little interest now that the bridge has collapsed. Rather, we need engineers to examine the wreckage to see if there were any tell-tale signs of weaknesses in the bridge that would increase its probability of collapse. The probabilities in this case would be empirical and structural rather than historical. Specified complexity substitutes actionable empirically and structurally based probabilities for historical probabilities

Some more circles for Christendom's apologists' to square.

 Hebrews2:3,4NIV"3how shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. 4(the)God ALSO testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will."  

If ,as Christendom's apologists insist, the Lord Jesus Christ is the most high God ,who is this God who ALSO testified re:the gospel? 

Revelation20:14NIV"14Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. " If the lake of fire is meant to be taken literally how can abstractions like death and hades(KJV says death and hell)  be literally thrown into it? If as some claim this imagery is a figure of the intense mental and physical suffering of lost souls and their resurrected bodies, we still need to ask how can abstractions like death and hades   be thus afflicted? 

Revelation14:14,15NIV"4I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man b with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. 15Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, “Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” ,"  

If this heavenly Son of man is  in fact the most high God ,why is he taking orders from his creatures? And why does any creature need to instruct him regarding the proper time for the fulfilling of the divine purpose? 

Daniel2:21KJV"And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding:"

Hebrews6:13NIV"13When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself" 

John14:28NIV"You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. " 

How can the Lord Jesus Christ be the same God as the one who was compelled to swear by himself because there could never be anyone greater?

Physics begot biology?

 Michael Behe: It’s Not a Scientist’s Job to Be Led by Aesthetics 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

A new episode of ID the Future continues the conversation between Catholic intelligent design biologist Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. Both agree that nature points to a cosmic designer, but Ramage says he prefers, on aesthetic grounds, the idea that the biological realm has the capacity, gifted by God, to evolve on its own without the need for intervention by God. Behe notes that people have different aesthetic predilections, but it’s the scientist’s job not to figure out how he would have preferred things to have happened in nature, but to discover how they actually did come about. Behe also says that while the sun, moon, and stars do move according to fixed natural laws, it doesn’t follow from this that the many complex forms we find in biology arose purely through natural laws. The question of how they arose requires scientific investigation. Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn leads the discussion. Download the podcast or listen to it here.