How does one manage to pay 1.2 million dollars for a condo in Minnesota? Are real estate prices really that insane there? It ain't San Francisco.
You just answered your own question. It ain't San Francisco, which is why people will pay a lot to live here.
IIRC, they lived in the Carlyle, a luxury downtown highrise building. It's a really nice building and their condo is on a high floor and probably pretty large, I'd guess over 2000 square feet and probably is a unit with views of both the river and the skyline.
I would have thought there could have been some kind of hierarchy to it so that a two-word combination could have described a larger area with the third word providing the exact 3x3 square. Sort of the way IP routes summarize a network.
I suppose two words isn't enough for that purpose but three manages to give them a ton of resolution, but still its kind of non-helpful to have such fine-grained resolution with three words only to have adjacent places be named something completely different.
I can see people arguing -- "you're supposed to be at wet.stinky.dog!" "I'm really close, at fire.table.nose".
I had orthopedic surgery a few years ago and at followup office visits, my surgeon had a dedicated data entry person with a laptop who followed her around and did record keeping for her.
At the time, I wasn't sure if this was a statement on willful ignorance, her elevated partner status or the sheer lack of usability of the record keeping system.
If this ends up being a verified political terrorist attack in the vein of Paris, it will get real ugly around here.
But it seems like an unlikely choice for a political attack -- no real symbolism, and not even really much of a government symbol. I would expect anti-western terrorists to attack a mall or some other symbol of decadence -- and to die doing it, right down to the explosive vests.
It almost seems like a gang hit or some other kind of targeted killing, considering the attackers drove away. There's a lot more to this story than a lunatic with a gun or some kind of jihad.
In my experience it does. The SSD is still faster in every way than the HDD and USB3 is fast enough to exceed the performance limits of a generic SATA HDD.
Where you really notice is things the SSD is vastly better at, like random I/O, where the bus isn't really the limiting factor but the ability of the storage device to deliver the data.
IMHO, if Microsoft would have allowed Windows to install to and boot from USB when Windows 7 came out, it wouldn't surprise me to see low end desktops with a 64 GB USB stick in the motherboard and no SATA ports on the motherboard.
And with USB 3.1 @ 10 Gbps, it wouldn't surprise me to see SATA being dropped completely, with USB 3.1 replacing it on consumer products, NVMe on enthusiast or higher end boards.
But only if Microsoft supported it as an install/boot mass storage bus. Since they don't, we're stuck with SATA. And there are good arguments for SATA being better for mass storage at current USB 3.0 data rates, but at 10 Gbps of 3.1, I see little reason for consumer-focused PCs to hang onto a separate, storage-only bus and connector when the data rate is slower.
You joke, I know, but perhaps this is really some social situation that nobody knows about, some kind of cyberbullying that she was exposed to that gave her such emotional anxiety that it produced physical symptoms.
The "wifi" connection could have been that the bullying was most intense where the people doing the bullying were together and had good network connectivity, which turned out to be at school.
Perhaps mom was never aware of it or daughter never was able to consciously face it, and once the anxiety and pain could be transferred to blaming the wifi signals, the daughter and the mom made that their focus and whatever was the real cause got buried or forgotten.
Obviously this is just a guess, but there has to be some other explanation besides EMF.
This one was more recent and I haven't seen it show up here or elsewhere, but it's moderately more interesting because it's a newer Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB and it didn't fail until after 7 PB of writes.
Now, there's all kinds of problems with these tests as being not exactly definitive or especially scientific, but they do show that MLC SSDs are more durable than generally believed.
IMHO, a lot of the complaints about SSDs are mostly regurgitated info from early adopters and often early adopters who bought cheaper drives. I've put about a dozen 840s in random desktop PCs with no failures, an even older Samsung 120GB model in my old desktop never failed before I retired the drive after 4+ years.
Personally, I'd like to see someone step up and put 850 Pros in an external enclosure in a hardware RAID set and run the kind of normal production workloads a 12 or 24 drive shelf might see in a normal business -- neither too low utilization or too high utilization -- to get an idea what 3-5 year lifespans would be. I'd like to guess that failures might exceed normal HDD failure rates (although, what's normal? I'm staring at a 5 year old EQL PS4000E with 6 of 16 512GB disks replaced) -- but, the drives themselves are cheap enough that the high performance would be worth a slightly elevated replacement rate. Plus with sensible RAID policies like double parity and hot spares, the risk of catastrophic array failure wouldn't be any worse than a HDD array, especially when you consider rebuild times would be an order of magnitude faster.
My general suspicion is that other than for extreme write workloads, better MLC SSDs are probably good enough now and only inertia and SAN vendor profit margins on SLC SSDs are keeping us from seeing cheap, flash-based arrays now.
There's some truth to the premise of the movie "Brewster's Millions". After a certain point, spending money is not easy to do. If Zuckerberg is keeping half a billion to support his family, the other $45 billion won't make any difference to him. He can still live more extravagantly than most other multi-millionaires.
I think spending money is easier than you think. At one point when the Powerball lottery was at some big number, I put together a spreadsheet to see how easy/hard it would be to spend it, and found that I could spend it pretty easily. A private jet, like a G650 will set you back $65 million and that doesn't include hiring a flight crew or operational costs. Real estate is another place you can sink a lot of money.
You do kind of have to throw out the kind of common sense thinking about money, though, and put some creative effort into it.
One idea that did occur to me was what if you didn't buy any real estate and just chose to live in the most expensive hotels. Even if you spent $20,000 a night, you're only out $7 million a year, which might be not a whole lot more than the taxes and operational cost of a few luxury properties.
I owned a '99 Accord V6 from 1999 to 2007 which was really bulletproof. I think EGR valve and the alternator went out, but both were replaced under some special extended warranty.
I expected the tranny to go out on that car, but I sold it to a guy who drove it for a year and then sold it to someone he knew who was still driving it as of a year or two ago, no tranny issues.
I also owned a 2003 CR-V for about two years -- no problems with that vehicle, but it got sold when we upgraded to a 2005 Pilot. The Pilot was equally reliable, but I think some part of the front end drive system got worked on -- it was my wife's car, so I don't remember the details. We sold it for decent money last summer when she bought an Acura MDX.
I know a guy who owned two VWs with quart-a-month oil consumption, told by the dealer that was normal. How that's normal for anything that's not two cycle I'll never know.
I think US car quality went into decline with emissions standards and ever-escalating UAW labor costs that forced them to cut engineering quality to maintain margins. There was also probably something of a monopoly mindset where foreign brands by and large were a lot less available and not desirable by American standards (small, slow, etc).
It's funny, but I've heard horror stories about Mercedes reliability and few positive things about Audi. BMW I hear mixed bag stories -- expensive to maintain, but not completely unreliable, either. My wife and I owned a VW Jetta 20 years ago that was junk.
We've had excellent luck with Honda, but my understanding is they've had their own problems -- "a quart of oil a month is normal" and Toyota has had its sludge problems.
But hasn't BMW a long track record of relatively more advanced engineering in their cars which has more or less always accounted for some of their price premium? Do you think the relative-to-other-cars increases in sophisticated engineering has increased or stayed constant?
I also wonder if BMW pricing (especially for higher-end models like the 6 series) hasn't increased merely to defend its position as a status item? If their market demographic has seen an increase in income, BMW raises their price to both extract more of that income from its customers as well as maintain its status position and exclusivity.
In my experience, flat-rate projects succeed or fail by the contract terms. The deliverables have to be fixed and the project completion has to be extremely well-defined so you can declare it complete when the deliverables are complete. Scheduling should also be part of the contract so that client delays can't sap momentum and drag the project out. All change orders should be time and materials at a rate significantly higher than the flat rate average to discourage scope creep.
I usually see the problem with flat rates as being lack of client acceptance (using troubleshooting or whatever as an excuse) and delays as the main problem and vague deliverables contributing to both.
Overall, you have to be hard negotiator AND willing to tell the client "the deliverables are completed as specified, I'm not working anymore". Few businesses are willing to do this and even fewer individuals, which is why T&M is always the safer play.
The student housing is pretty astonishing anymore.
When I was in college (in the 80s), even the new dorms were spartan -- small, box rooms with a desk, a closet and a bed. I thought I scored huge when I snagged a room in a somewhat renovated dorm that had carpet and hotel-style HVAC units (which only let you control the airflow; the heat and A/C were steam-derived, so the system did heat until they switched the loop over to cooling, which always seemed to happen about two weeks too late).
At the University I attended, I'm pretty private dorms now outstrip the University dorms by at least 3:1 -- I don't even recognize the near-campus neighborhood anymore because of the vast student housing blocks. My guess is that Universities are taking an MBA-style view of their housing and figuring that they need $X/sq ft revenue from their dorm buildings to justify the land use and are trying to compete with the private dorms just off campus, which means they need the kinds of amenities the off campus units have.
I'm actually surprised the older dorms haven't been razed and replaced, since structurally they can't accommodate the en-suite bathrooms or private bedrooms of double rooms.
My sense is that as tuition has increased, student loan borrowing has increased, leading students to a sense of false affluence, causing them to increase their living standards. My guess is that the tuition increases are the main driver and if tuition had risen only at the rate of inflation there would be less student loan borrowing overall and less borrowing available for luxury accommodations.
* Young -- because you can't trust anyone over 15 * Hip-hop savvy -- shows your street cred * Long hair -- because personal grooming is political * Unpronounceable name -- you have to be ethnic to be taken seriously * Filed a lawsuit -- This shows you mean business and are willing to take the law into someone else's hands * Coloradan -- Dude, you can hook people up, ya know.
I'm sure he's a total hero with his brave, hip-hop flavored anti-authority, not to mention probably getting more dewy-eyed hippie chicks than even a 15 year can handle.
Is there a central way to do this versus "the surplus depot" or FleaBay? The only way I've ever seen to get anything useful surplus is to know somebody inside. In my experience, the reasonable used hardware get re-purposed at least once internally before it gets turned loose as surplus, and when it does it's often so old as to be handicapped by old hardware standards which make performance fairly useless.
I bought a used Cisco 2960G two years ago for $200, which is still a low price even by recent Ebay standards, but I knew the guy and got the bare-minimum price the money people needed to make their books balance.
I went into consulting with the idea that I could go freelance once I had some exposure to it. The company I work for was small at the time, so it seemed ideal.
My impression (still) is that succeeding as a pure IT freelancer is difficult -- there's all the overhead work that's tough to get any compensation for, a fairly unfriendly tax system, healthcare costs and so on.
And then there's most clients who want IT support but don't want to rely on a single person and prefer a company. Some of the clients I worked with left one-man shops for this very reason.
I think it might be viable for some narrow types of IT work -- software development or certain types of infrastructure projects that demand one-time-only high skill sets.
My wife worked marketing freelance for about 5-6 years. She was really only able to build up a pretty small recurring business portfolio, the bulk of her income came from essentially infill and project work.
FWIW, I think people are better off with the eponymous well-rounded education, but I also think they're better off with 5 years of global travel, too, but that isn't the kind of hoop-jumping social standard (yet) that a 4 year college degree currently is.
So much of "going to college" isn't about the well-rounded part for probably 90% of the students -- it's about achieving some vocational credential that employers want before they will hire someone. In many cases, the vocational education really has no bearing on the actual vocation. A degree in marketing doesn't actually provide you with the specific education to do any specific marketing job.
And even where this is some kind of specific vocational skill being learned (engineering, medicine, etc), how much of even those educational experiences are spent on classroom instruction that's actually vocationally beneficial? Could we train civil engineers in 3 years instead of 4 by cutting out the crap? Could we train doctors in 6 years or even 5 if we cut out the nonsense? Is it REALLY vocationally beneficial for a doctor to have a semester or year of organic chemistry?
There's so much hand-wringing about the cost of college but almost never does anyone question the underlying assumption that the college experience as we know it is actually beneficial. Much of it seems to be a way of socializing the costs of corporate HR screening and training, much of which would be better for the corporations to do themselves, so they can focus on the specific attributes and skills they want.
And if you think about it, it doesn't even socialize those costs well -- the in-demand jobs demand higher salaries, so where there is demand for workers the corporation is paying some of the inflated educational costs themselves. It all seems to be a giant pork barrel for Universities, who manage to jack of tuition relentlessly without ever reforming a sclerotic educational system that doesn't really produce well-rounded graduates anyway.
Income inequality in the USA has increased since 1970 but is far below historically normal levels. The poorest in America are demonstrably better off today than their grandparents ever were. This is true based on housing, sanitation, health care, education, life expectancy, nutrition, entertainment, transportation, clothing, and safety from crime, natural disaster, or accident.
Kind of a mixed bag, isn't it? Historically worse income inequality suggests that whatever present gains we have made are likely to slide back to more historical norms. Given the likely trends in automation globally and trends toward outsourcing to low income nations (which may be an aggregate benefit for global growth, but in the short term tends to undermine gains in developed economies), income inequality is likely to get worse.
And there is some scholarship (http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/) that suggests inequality is as bad as it's ever been -- it's estimated that even ancient Rome had a better GINI coefficient than modern day America.
I've heard economists make similar arguments about *qualitative* improvements that measurements of relative inequality don't represent. Much of material life even for poor people is better than it was 100 years ago -- housing, clothing, food, transportation, are all better made and more durable than they were. Foods that were expensive luxury items even when I was little in the 1970s are commonplace and inexpensive, and compared to 100 years ago it's like a dream -- fresh fruits and vegetables available year round, meat safe, cheap and abundant, including items exotic and unobtainable in many places, like fresh seafood.
Or are there other interpretations that explain why it *seems* bad?
Enduring and worsening (I don't know about the worsening part) income inequality, with automation and globalization likely to make income inequality even worse, and automation predicated by many to lead to widespread under/unemployment?
The environment getting much worse -- mass deforestation, global warming, declining fresh water supplies, much of it abetted by ever-spiraling population growth?
While it's true we don't actually worry about a US/Soviet nuclear exchange every day, the number of states with nuclear weapons has increased and the newer states that have them or are working on having them are less stable or have chaotic or messianic motivations.
The nature of some of our conflicts seems more intractable due to the lack of state actors involved and in some cases leaving states that are marginally viable or stateless altogether (Libya, parts of subsaharan Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria).
It seems too simple to just dismiss a sense of pessamism as human nature and media styles.
Back in the day you kept track of the picture on the blotter because experience suggested that it might take 3 hits of "globe" to get the job done but if it was "orange sunshine" you really only needed one. And that windowpane? You either got nothing or you lost track of the next 36 hours completely.
Fixed dilution makes sense if you know what you're starting with, but my experience was you didn't really until you had sampled the batch a few times to figure it out.
I read of guys into powdered drugs with good lab skills who test and refine everything they buy so they can get the dose right, but that's almost practical with stuff dosed in the 10-20 mg range. At the microgram range? You'd need a decent starting quantity and a mass spectrometer.
LSD doses at tripping strength are tiny by measurement standards. How are they cutting something measured in such tiny amounts with any accuracy? And how do they know the strength of their sources?
It would be nice to have a low carb replacement for flour that would provide a convincing replacement for bread, chips and pasta. You can kind of do some stuff with almond flour, but I haven't always been impressed with it.
I'd like to see something more interesting done with pork rinds, even. They're not a bad replacment for crunchy chips, but it seems like the only kind you can find are really bad BBQ or "spicy" flavors. It would be nice to have some kind of yellow corn or neutral flavorings that could be used with guacamole or salsa. I stumbled across a decent nacho cheese flavor on a trip -- you can order them online, but there's like a 2 case minimum and that's a lot of commitment.
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How does one manage to pay 1.2 million dollars for a condo in Minnesota? Are real estate prices really that insane there? It ain't San Francisco.
You just answered your own question. It ain't San Francisco, which is why people will pay a lot to live here.
IIRC, they lived in the Carlyle, a luxury downtown highrise building. It's a really nice building and their condo is on a high floor and probably pretty large, I'd guess over 2000 square feet and probably is a unit with views of both the river and the skyline.
I would have thought there could have been some kind of hierarchy to it so that a two-word combination could have described a larger area with the third word providing the exact 3x3 square. Sort of the way IP routes summarize a network.
I suppose two words isn't enough for that purpose but three manages to give them a ton of resolution, but still its kind of non-helpful to have such fine-grained resolution with three words only to have adjacent places be named something completely different.
I can see people arguing -- "you're supposed to be at wet.stinky.dog!" "I'm really close, at fire.table.nose".
I mean really, that's what we're most interested in.
I had orthopedic surgery a few years ago and at followup office visits, my surgeon had a dedicated data entry person with a laptop who followed her around and did record keeping for her.
At the time, I wasn't sure if this was a statement on willful ignorance, her elevated partner status or the sheer lack of usability of the record keeping system.
Unreliable energy sources like wind and solar cannot power a first world economy.
The unspoken agenda is deconstructing the economy so that renewable energy works. Zero or negative growth.
If this ends up being a verified political terrorist attack in the vein of Paris, it will get real ugly around here.
But it seems like an unlikely choice for a political attack -- no real symbolism, and not even really much of a government symbol. I would expect anti-western terrorists to attack a mall or some other symbol of decadence -- and to die doing it, right down to the explosive vests.
It almost seems like a gang hit or some other kind of targeted killing, considering the attackers drove away. There's a lot more to this story than a lunatic with a gun or some kind of jihad.
In my experience it does. The SSD is still faster in every way than the HDD and USB3 is fast enough to exceed the performance limits of a generic SATA HDD.
Where you really notice is things the SSD is vastly better at, like random I/O, where the bus isn't really the limiting factor but the ability of the storage device to deliver the data.
IMHO, if Microsoft would have allowed Windows to install to and boot from USB when Windows 7 came out, it wouldn't surprise me to see low end desktops with a 64 GB USB stick in the motherboard and no SATA ports on the motherboard.
And with USB 3.1 @ 10 Gbps, it wouldn't surprise me to see SATA being dropped completely, with USB 3.1 replacing it on consumer products, NVMe on enthusiast or higher end boards.
But only if Microsoft supported it as an install/boot mass storage bus. Since they don't, we're stuck with SATA. And there are good arguments for SATA being better for mass storage at current USB 3.0 data rates, but at 10 Gbps of 3.1, I see little reason for consumer-focused PCs to hang onto a separate, storage-only bus and connector when the data rate is slower.
You joke, I know, but perhaps this is really some social situation that nobody knows about, some kind of cyberbullying that she was exposed to that gave her such emotional anxiety that it produced physical symptoms.
The "wifi" connection could have been that the bullying was most intense where the people doing the bullying were together and had good network connectivity, which turned out to be at school.
Perhaps mom was never aware of it or daughter never was able to consciously face it, and once the anxiety and pain could be transferred to blaming the wifi signals, the daughter and the mom made that their focus and whatever was the real cause got buried or forgotten.
Obviously this is just a guess, but there has to be some other explanation besides EMF.
I'm aware of at least two endurance tests of SSDs that showed write endurance greatly exceeding expectations:
http://techreport.com/review/2...
This one was widely reported on Slashdot and other sites.
http://packet.company/blog/?ca...
This one was more recent and I haven't seen it show up here or elsewhere, but it's moderately more interesting because it's a newer Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB and it didn't fail until after 7 PB of writes.
Now, there's all kinds of problems with these tests as being not exactly definitive or especially scientific, but they do show that MLC SSDs are more durable than generally believed.
IMHO, a lot of the complaints about SSDs are mostly regurgitated info from early adopters and often early adopters who bought cheaper drives. I've put about a dozen 840s in random desktop PCs with no failures, an even older Samsung 120GB model in my old desktop never failed before I retired the drive after 4+ years.
Personally, I'd like to see someone step up and put 850 Pros in an external enclosure in a hardware RAID set and run the kind of normal production workloads a 12 or 24 drive shelf might see in a normal business -- neither too low utilization or too high utilization -- to get an idea what 3-5 year lifespans would be. I'd like to guess that failures might exceed normal HDD failure rates (although, what's normal? I'm staring at a 5 year old EQL PS4000E with 6 of 16 512GB disks replaced) -- but, the drives themselves are cheap enough that the high performance would be worth a slightly elevated replacement rate. Plus with sensible RAID policies like double parity and hot spares, the risk of catastrophic array failure wouldn't be any worse than a HDD array, especially when you consider rebuild times would be an order of magnitude faster.
My general suspicion is that other than for extreme write workloads, better MLC SSDs are probably good enough now and only inertia and SAN vendor profit margins on SLC SSDs are keeping us from seeing cheap, flash-based arrays now.
There's some truth to the premise of the movie "Brewster's Millions". After a certain point, spending money is not easy to do. If Zuckerberg is keeping half a billion to support his family, the other $45 billion won't make any difference to him. He can still live more extravagantly than most other multi-millionaires.
I think spending money is easier than you think. At one point when the Powerball lottery was at some big number, I put together a spreadsheet to see how easy/hard it would be to spend it, and found that I could spend it pretty easily. A private jet, like a G650 will set you back $65 million and that doesn't include hiring a flight crew or operational costs. Real estate is another place you can sink a lot of money.
You do kind of have to throw out the kind of common sense thinking about money, though, and put some creative effort into it.
One idea that did occur to me was what if you didn't buy any real estate and just chose to live in the most expensive hotels. Even if you spent $20,000 a night, you're only out $7 million a year, which might be not a whole lot more than the taxes and operational cost of a few luxury properties.
I owned a '99 Accord V6 from 1999 to 2007 which was really bulletproof. I think EGR valve and the alternator went out, but both were replaced under some special extended warranty.
I expected the tranny to go out on that car, but I sold it to a guy who drove it for a year and then sold it to someone he knew who was still driving it as of a year or two ago, no tranny issues.
I also owned a 2003 CR-V for about two years -- no problems with that vehicle, but it got sold when we upgraded to a 2005 Pilot. The Pilot was equally reliable, but I think some part of the front end drive system got worked on -- it was my wife's car, so I don't remember the details. We sold it for decent money last summer when she bought an Acura MDX.
Honda actually settled a class action lawsuit regarding oil consumption -- http://www.autoblog.com/2013/1...
I know a guy who owned two VWs with quart-a-month oil consumption, told by the dealer that was normal. How that's normal for anything that's not two cycle I'll never know.
I think US car quality went into decline with emissions standards and ever-escalating UAW labor costs that forced them to cut engineering quality to maintain margins. There was also probably something of a monopoly mindset where foreign brands by and large were a lot less available and not desirable by American standards (small, slow, etc).
It's funny, but I've heard horror stories about Mercedes reliability and few positive things about Audi. BMW I hear mixed bag stories -- expensive to maintain, but not completely unreliable, either. My wife and I owned a VW Jetta 20 years ago that was junk.
We've had excellent luck with Honda, but my understanding is they've had their own problems -- "a quart of oil a month is normal" and Toyota has had its sludge problems.
But hasn't BMW a long track record of relatively more advanced engineering in their cars which has more or less always accounted for some of their price premium? Do you think the relative-to-other-cars increases in sophisticated engineering has increased or stayed constant?
I also wonder if BMW pricing (especially for higher-end models like the 6 series) hasn't increased merely to defend its position as a status item? If their market demographic has seen an increase in income, BMW raises their price to both extract more of that income from its customers as well as maintain its status position and exclusivity.
In my experience, flat-rate projects succeed or fail by the contract terms. The deliverables have to be fixed and the project completion has to be extremely well-defined so you can declare it complete when the deliverables are complete. Scheduling should also be part of the contract so that client delays can't sap momentum and drag the project out. All change orders should be time and materials at a rate significantly higher than the flat rate average to discourage scope creep.
I usually see the problem with flat rates as being lack of client acceptance (using troubleshooting or whatever as an excuse) and delays as the main problem and vague deliverables contributing to both.
Overall, you have to be hard negotiator AND willing to tell the client "the deliverables are completed as specified, I'm not working anymore". Few businesses are willing to do this and even fewer individuals, which is why T&M is always the safer play.
The student housing is pretty astonishing anymore.
When I was in college (in the 80s), even the new dorms were spartan -- small, box rooms with a desk, a closet and a bed. I thought I scored huge when I snagged a room in a somewhat renovated dorm that had carpet and hotel-style HVAC units (which only let you control the airflow; the heat and A/C were steam-derived, so the system did heat until they switched the loop over to cooling, which always seemed to happen about two weeks too late).
At the University I attended, I'm pretty private dorms now outstrip the University dorms by at least 3:1 -- I don't even recognize the near-campus neighborhood anymore because of the vast student housing blocks. My guess is that Universities are taking an MBA-style view of their housing and figuring that they need $X/sq ft revenue from their dorm buildings to justify the land use and are trying to compete with the private dorms just off campus, which means they need the kinds of amenities the off campus units have.
I'm actually surprised the older dorms haven't been razed and replaced, since structurally they can't accommodate the en-suite bathrooms or private bedrooms of double rooms.
My sense is that as tuition has increased, student loan borrowing has increased, leading students to a sense of false affluence, causing them to increase their living standards. My guess is that the tuition increases are the main driver and if tuition had risen only at the rate of inflation there would be less student loan borrowing overall and less borrowing available for luxury accommodations.
* Young -- because you can't trust anyone over 15
* Hip-hop savvy -- shows your street cred
* Long hair -- because personal grooming is political
* Unpronounceable name -- you have to be ethnic to be taken seriously
* Filed a lawsuit -- This shows you mean business and are willing to take the law into someone else's hands
* Coloradan -- Dude, you can hook people up, ya know.
I'm sure he's a total hero with his brave, hip-hop flavored anti-authority, not to mention probably getting more dewy-eyed hippie chicks than even a 15 year can handle.
Is there a central way to do this versus "the surplus depot" or FleaBay? The only way I've ever seen to get anything useful surplus is to know somebody inside. In my experience, the reasonable used hardware get re-purposed at least once internally before it gets turned loose as surplus, and when it does it's often so old as to be handicapped by old hardware standards which make performance fairly useless.
I bought a used Cisco 2960G two years ago for $200, which is still a low price even by recent Ebay standards, but I knew the guy and got the bare-minimum price the money people needed to make their books balance.
I went into consulting with the idea that I could go freelance once I had some exposure to it. The company I work for was small at the time, so it seemed ideal.
My impression (still) is that succeeding as a pure IT freelancer is difficult -- there's all the overhead work that's tough to get any compensation for, a fairly unfriendly tax system, healthcare costs and so on.
And then there's most clients who want IT support but don't want to rely on a single person and prefer a company. Some of the clients I worked with left one-man shops for this very reason.
I think it might be viable for some narrow types of IT work -- software development or certain types of infrastructure projects that demand one-time-only high skill sets.
My wife worked marketing freelance for about 5-6 years. She was really only able to build up a pretty small recurring business portfolio, the bulk of her income came from essentially infill and project work.
http://emojipedia.org/fork-and...
It's got a knife, too, but you might say it's already been forked.
FWIW, I think people are better off with the eponymous well-rounded education, but I also think they're better off with 5 years of global travel, too, but that isn't the kind of hoop-jumping social standard (yet) that a 4 year college degree currently is.
So much of "going to college" isn't about the well-rounded part for probably 90% of the students -- it's about achieving some vocational credential that employers want before they will hire someone. In many cases, the vocational education really has no bearing on the actual vocation. A degree in marketing doesn't actually provide you with the specific education to do any specific marketing job.
And even where this is some kind of specific vocational skill being learned (engineering, medicine, etc), how much of even those educational experiences are spent on classroom instruction that's actually vocationally beneficial? Could we train civil engineers in 3 years instead of 4 by cutting out the crap? Could we train doctors in 6 years or even 5 if we cut out the nonsense? Is it REALLY vocationally beneficial for a doctor to have a semester or year of organic chemistry?
There's so much hand-wringing about the cost of college but almost never does anyone question the underlying assumption that the college experience as we know it is actually beneficial. Much of it seems to be a way of socializing the costs of corporate HR screening and training, much of which would be better for the corporations to do themselves, so they can focus on the specific attributes and skills they want.
And if you think about it, it doesn't even socialize those costs well -- the in-demand jobs demand higher salaries, so where there is demand for workers the corporation is paying some of the inflated educational costs themselves. It all seems to be a giant pork barrel for Universities, who manage to jack of tuition relentlessly without ever reforming a sclerotic educational system that doesn't really produce well-rounded graduates anyway.
Income inequality in the USA has increased since 1970 but is far below historically normal levels. The poorest in America are demonstrably better off today than their grandparents ever were. This is true based on housing, sanitation, health care, education, life expectancy, nutrition, entertainment, transportation, clothing, and safety from crime, natural disaster, or accident.
Kind of a mixed bag, isn't it? Historically worse income inequality suggests that whatever present gains we have made are likely to slide back to more historical norms. Given the likely trends in automation globally and trends toward outsourcing to low income nations (which may be an aggregate benefit for global growth, but in the short term tends to undermine gains in developed economies), income inequality is likely to get worse.
And there is some scholarship (http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/) that suggests inequality is as bad as it's ever been -- it's estimated that even ancient Rome had a better GINI coefficient than modern day America.
I've heard economists make similar arguments about *qualitative* improvements that measurements of relative inequality don't represent. Much of material life even for poor people is better than it was 100 years ago -- housing, clothing, food, transportation, are all better made and more durable than they were. Foods that were expensive luxury items even when I was little in the 1970s are commonplace and inexpensive, and compared to 100 years ago it's like a dream -- fresh fruits and vegetables available year round, meat safe, cheap and abundant, including items exotic and unobtainable in many places, like fresh seafood.
Or are there other interpretations that explain why it *seems* bad?
Enduring and worsening (I don't know about the worsening part) income inequality, with automation and globalization likely to make income inequality even worse, and automation predicated by many to lead to widespread under/unemployment?
The environment getting much worse -- mass deforestation, global warming, declining fresh water supplies, much of it abetted by ever-spiraling population growth?
While it's true we don't actually worry about a US/Soviet nuclear exchange every day, the number of states with nuclear weapons has increased and the newer states that have them or are working on having them are less stable or have chaotic or messianic motivations.
The nature of some of our conflicts seems more intractable due to the lack of state actors involved and in some cases leaving states that are marginally viable or stateless altogether (Libya, parts of subsaharan Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria).
It seems too simple to just dismiss a sense of pessamism as human nature and media styles.
Because a "tab" is a known quantity?
Back in the day you kept track of the picture on the blotter because experience suggested that it might take 3 hits of "globe" to get the job done but if it was "orange sunshine" you really only needed one. And that windowpane? You either got nothing or you lost track of the next 36 hours completely.
Fixed dilution makes sense if you know what you're starting with, but my experience was you didn't really until you had sampled the batch a few times to figure it out.
I read of guys into powdered drugs with good lab skills who test and refine everything they buy so they can get the dose right, but that's almost practical with stuff dosed in the 10-20 mg range. At the microgram range? You'd need a decent starting quantity and a mass spectrometer.
LSD doses at tripping strength are tiny by measurement standards. How are they cutting something measured in such tiny amounts with any accuracy? And how do they know the strength of their sources?
It would be nice to have a low carb replacement for flour that would provide a convincing replacement for bread, chips and pasta. You can kind of do some stuff with almond flour, but I haven't always been impressed with it.
I'd like to see something more interesting done with pork rinds, even. They're not a bad replacment for crunchy chips, but it seems like the only kind you can find are really bad BBQ or "spicy" flavors. It would be nice to have some kind of yellow corn or neutral flavorings that could be used with guacamole or salsa. I stumbled across a decent nacho cheese flavor on a trip -- you can order them online, but there's like a 2 case minimum and that's a lot of commitment.