My wife’s grandfather was a wildcatter, way back. A very bad one. He thought he had sold off all his leases in a crises but had not. There were some tiny factions of shares left. After he died, his kids (my MIL and her sibs) found them.
They were worthless until a few years ago when they started horizontal drilling. Then very modest payments began. But Texans live for this stuff. and they all are genetically programmed to understand mineral rights.
My wife’s uncle explained to me using math and maps how to check the payments. Talk about geeking out.
This is my preferred implementation, as well. Earn a passing grade and you can use your tax credits to pay for them. This also makes it easy to reward those who have already worked their way through the system without acquiring debt - add a line to the Federal tax return, let folks claim the tax credit and voila, everyone who qualifies gets it.
And I would like to take this time to remind folks that this is not a “give-away” to “freeloaders”. There is both a public good and private good component to having an educated workforce, and this payment is the government financing its public good obligation to those who improve the nation through their efforts. Just as we pay for primary education, roads and other infrastructure, we need to fund a trained and educated workforce.
True story - I started an Internet technology consulting company in Canada and it was quite successful, with the bulk of our clients actually outside of Canada, so we were a net importer of foreign exchange for quite a while. Unfortunately, we eventually joined the tech exodus to Silicon Valley as myself and virtually every one of my extremely Internet-savvy employees relocated because of the lack of bureaucracy and wealth of opportunities available in Silicon Valley at the time. Montreal has since figured out how to have a niche tech presence in electronic game development, but the advantage of having a pool of educated workers to draw on is absolutely real and as important as reliable electricity grids (hi, Texas!), water supplies (hi, most of the US west!) and working bridges (hi, most of the US!).
Somewhere along the way, the US has “lost the bubble”, as pilots say, but maybe we can hope that what will come out of the current insanity is a return to some of our more fundamental values. Here’s hoping…
Sorta like living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the winter when -50 still sets in routinely for weeks at a time. Love those pictures of students posing in bathing suits beside the University of Alaska sign with the thermometer reading -60 behind them. I’m from Northern Michigan but hitched up from there to go to school at UAF in '74. The cold was brutal starting the day after the Autumn Equinox. Had never seen plug ins for cars in parking lots before but every space at the University has them so your car doesn’t freeze while you are in class. You adapt.
I have a relative who specialized in oil lease accounting. When the company off-shored her job, she was stuck training her replacements for close to two years.
On a related note, Scorsese is filming Killers of the Flower Moon right now.
Paxton and Abbott are now 0-2 on Supreme Court cases THIS YEAR. These are the same assholes who brought the suit to challenge the Nov. 2020 Election by claiming voter fraud in “Yankee” states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. The good people of Texas should ask for their tax money back for filing this frivolous suits, and should get to vote to recall both of these geniuses.
Everything is bigger in Texas including official corruption and stupidity.
Heh
In the winter of 1979-80 I was finishing my PhD in Pullman, WA at Washington State University. For the entire month of December it never got above +5 degrees. Frozen pipes at my house. I adapted. I left in January 1980 and drove south to Tucson where I had friends. Camped on their couch until my first paycheck and then I could afford my own place. Adapting with a young family in tow. These days it’s bloody frigging hot around here. We adapt. It’s true. At the moment it’s 109 outside. Rain sure would be nice. But I suspect we will not see any this “monsoon season” which has been one of our two “wet” times of the year. The drought here right now is brutal.
The Onion had an article about young aspiring filmmakers too!
“Growing up as introverted, soft-spoken siblings with a keen eye for minutiae in an affluent suburb, there’s a certain expectation that you’re going to grow up, get BFAs from Tisch, and then win a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance,” said Mark, adding that people often assumed the brothers had used their elementary school years to brainstorm the funny-yet-disturbing arthouse classic that would catapult them to mainstream fame. “Yes, we’re eccentric and spend our days running around with cameras filming vignettes featuring our parents, but we don’t even know which one of us is going to be the writer or the director yet. Between figuring out our writing process, our vibe, and the well-connected Hollywood family friend that will pluck us from obscurity, there’s just so much to figure out before we have to create our own Uncut Gems and send it to festivals by the time we turn 18.”
Seriously though…filmmaking can’t be and shouldn’t be a dream for only affluent young white men.
Even an MFA from a high quality film program (last year Columbia University’s program cost $71,000 per year before housing, and it’s a 3-year program!) doesn’t guarantee a well-paying job. Most graduates still do at least one or two no-pay internships just to get experience and make connections. Then after that, it’s mainly gig work unless one finds the money to make their own movie. Then even after that, there is no guarantee that the movie will ever be completed. If by some filmmaking miracle that it does get completed, will anyone ever see it…let alone will it ever make money?
But, we need skilled filmmakers! Good luck to your niece! If she doesn’t go for it now, she may never try…so I say, “Go for it!”
Let me guess. Your plumber used electric current on copper pipes in an attempt to heat up the frozen pipes? Been there, done that. And my plumber sent me a horrendous bill also. Didn’t do much to unfreeze the pipes, but it sure unfroze his bank account.
(to be fair, frozen pipes are one of the most difficult plumber problems- they just don’t have any good remedies. Only thing one can do is wait for the temps to rise and the electric service to come back on after an ice storm)
I read he is taking money out of prison funding, which is nuts because his “plan” is going to require more prisons. In the meantime, current prisoners are still suffering in extreme weather.
Abbott’s wall plan does seem a bit like an Underpants Gnomes scenario.
In the early 70s, I went to a small private school where the tuition was probably 4-5X a state school of the time. I think it was about $1200 tuition for the year; that amount seems so low now but was scary then.
For both my adventures in education, I had to borrow the equivalent of the purchase price of a compact car (at that time). This was not an onerous amount to repay.
The second-tier (or third . . .) system branch campus here costs students more per year than my private liberal arts college cost in the 70s.
