In the old folks' defense, our morals are in fact much looser nowadays and only the most educated are capable of basic arithmetic without a calculator, so at best we haven't seen any improvement in the brain-rot factor.
Erm, I disagree on both counts. Today minorities hold positions in industry they didn't 50 years ago. Blacks can ride at the front of the bus. After 9-11, we didn't round up the Muslims in this country and put them in internment camps like we did with the Japanese in WWII. We don't use nerve gas in battle anymore a la WWI. Or we could go further back. Slavery. Burning witches at the stake. The Inquisition. And on and on and on.
And regarding the brain rot fallacy, IQs today are higher than they have ever been [source]. "Researchers who study intelligence say scores around the world have been increasing so fast that a high proportion of people regarded as normal at the turn of the century would be considered way below average by today's tests. Psychologists offer a variety of possible explanations for the increase, including better nutrition, urbanization, more experience with test taking, and smaller families. Some even say that television and video games have made children's brains more agile."
It's easy to say, "Man, things were so quaint back in the day," but in reality, they really weren't.
Eh, but if everyone in the current generation does it, what choice will employers have in the future? While I agree with your premise, I can't help but think such statements are eerily similar to the admonishons from parents in the 50s - listening to that Elvis Presley music is going to rot your brain and loosen your morals!
I guess my real rub is this (and it's a bit of a selfish complaint) - the housing bubble has hurt others because it's priced out blue collar and first-time home buys who have a moticum of financial sanity. Take my neck of the woods, San Diego. The median home price at the height of the bubble crested $600k. Single family homes in my neighborhood start in the $800K range for 1,500 sq. ft. shitboxes that were build in the 1970s.
Five years ago the same house was 1/3 or 1/4 what it is today. (My wife and I bought our condo in 2001 for ~$275k. Four years prior the owner had paid $160k. Last year, a neighbor sold their identical condo for $545k.) Such irrational increases have priced out many folks, sadly. They are the silent victims of this RE bubble.
Good point. So thanks to your company matching 3% you make $780. (Of course had you not taken the money out that $3k would have compounded... but I digress.)
Realistically speaking, college loan debt is something you as an individual really don't have control over.
I disagree. I won't say it's easy - I ended up borrowing through student loans about $2,500 over my four years, IIRC - but to say it's impossible is hogwash. First off, who says you HAVE to go to college immediately after high school? Why not work for a year and save? Second, scholarships are a good source of income, and there are scholarships for all sorts of things, not just academic. There's also Federal grants and other "free" money one can go after if they are in certain socioeconomic positions.
Finally, one thing that I did that really helped on the income side of things was to take a semester off to do "cooperative learning," which basically meant I worked for a semester and summer at a company and, while not paid much, was probably paid as much in those 9 months as the rest of the time I did working in student jobs during my education.
It is hard, though, I won't argue with you there. It all depends where your priorities are, I guess. Also, when contemplating the decision as to whether to take on loans, it's important to have an objective, ROI-type analysis. Point being, it's one thing to borrow $100k to become a doctor, where you can hope to make back the debt relatively quickly, it's another thing to drop $50k to spend four years "discovering yourself" and studying Russian literature at some private college.
I am married to a woman whose financial views are in line with mine. In fact, she's more on the wanting security in the sense of no debt/large cash reserves than I. I'm just more anti-debt/only buying stuff one can afford, etc.
From the GP: I didn't pay off everything. I blew some of the dough on a home wireless network, and other things
So was that wireless network for you or your better half?;-)
I am fortunate in that, for me, the unenjoyable weight of debt far exceeds the enjoyment attained from shiny new things. When I hear about those people with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, tens of thousands owed on cars, tens of thousands owed on student loans, and a big fat mortgage... well, if it was me my head would explode, sending bone and brain fragments everywhere.
However since bubbles are really a sort of cross between a pyramid scheme and a lottery the only people who are hurt are those who are not paying attention.
Ahem. Tell that to those who lost their jobs because they worked for the companies that went bust (or took it on the chin) in the dot com fiasco. Or those whose retirement savings lost half their value. Tell that to the construction/realtors/appraisers/mortgage brokers who are edging closer to being jobless. I'm not saying that there's no personal responsibility, but it's kind of cold to just say to someone who is, say, a construction worker, "You should have been smarter and seen that the housing explosion was really just a bubble artificially inflated by increased liquidity by the Fed and loose lending standards" when he's been out there swinging a hammer all day.
If I'm not mistaken (and I very well may be), if you withdraw your funds at any time from a tax-deferred account you're taxes at your current income tax rate on any gains you've realized.
Ah, I think I was mistaken/mistyped - you're taxed on EVERYTHING, not just your gains, since the money was put in tax-deferred in the first place (regardless of when you take out the money).
Mine matches up to 3%, which is al I'm putting in becasue I'm a starving college student, but even if I took it out early and suffered the (I think the fund people said something like 26% taxes on it) I'd still be making money in the deal. Not compared to responsible investment, but certainly compared to hiding the money under my matress.
If I'm not mistaken (and I very well may be), if you withdraw your funds at any time from a tax-deferred account you're taxes at your current income tax rate on any gains you've realized. If you do it early (before age 59.5), you are not only taxed on your gains but also hit with a 10% penaltyacross the board. So unless your employer is matching > 10%, or unless your tax rate now is substantially lower than what it was when you put in the money into the 401(k) in the first place, you are not getting ahead by taking your money out early.
I reiterate - if you need to pay off debts (which is a good thing), spend less. Cashing out a 401(k) is a short term move, because if you don't change your habits you'll be back to that same trouble spot once the retirement account money has run its course.
you don't cash out if you're young...you just borrow some of it
I disagree. We should be encouraging people not to borrow, period. Don't borrow on credit and certainly don't borrow from yourself. The phrase, "robbing Paul to pay Peter" rings ever so true here.
From a more rational side, borrowing from one's 401(k) does have drawbacks. If you get fired or laid off you have, what 30 or 90 days or something like that by which 100% of what you borrowed must be refunded to your account, or you're paying penalties.
After the dot com fiasco, the bubble transferred to real estate. Now that that bubble's ending, it's moved over to commodities. (Gold, oil, and other precious metals are exploding.)
Personally, it feels like something's got to give. I'm not as well versed in economics/macro-economic history as some others here likely are, so I pose this question: have there been times of such bubbles? Yes, I know there have been bubbles in the past - tulip mania, the stock market in the late 1920s/late 1990s, SoCal real estate in the late 80s, etc. - but has there before been this swell from one bubble to the next to the next without any real sort of crash or correction across the board? Yes, stocks got hammered in 2001, but real estate in my neck of the woods appreciated like 25% that year and for the next several years.
What is the cause of this? Is it the Fed flooding the marketplace with liquidity? Or is this nothing too abberational, and we're just headed for one helluva bust?
Cashing out a retirement account, IMO, is the last thing to do. If your house is in foreclosure, or you can't afford to keep the lights on or buy groceries, then, sure, cash that retirement account out. But otherwise it's probably more cost effective to do it the old fashioned way: reduce spending, live on a budget, take a second job.
To be honest, the short story was pretty piss-poor, too. I think the greatest disparity in quality between King work and movie quality is:
The Running Man - awesome concept/novella, a rather dull-minded movie
Trucks - the movie was called Maximum Overdrive and while it didn't suck that bad, it was a shell of what it could have been.
The movie Apt Pupil turned out OK, but the ending wasn't in line with the book's, unfortunately. The best King-to-movie translation was probably Stand By Me (can we get an amen for Wil Wheaton?).
Did you ever read the Stephen King short story? They used King's name in promoting the movie. I've never seen the movie, but from what I heard, it's nothing like the story. In the story, a guy calls up a lawn service company and this guy comes over (a "lawn mower man") who mowes his yard. But it's this demon, possessed lawn mower that runs by itself and hunts down rodents and the home owner's cat and what not (and eventually the home owner). And the lawn mower man's naked, crawling behind the mower, eating whatever it churns out.
In other words, it has absolutely, positively, nothing to do with VR or 3D stuff...
Writing, like most everything in life, gets better with practice. Encourage your students to write often, giving them many small assignments rather than focusing on just a couple of "big" projects. Also, for technical writing, I find it helps to know your audience and to think about what it is you're trying to communicate as if you were a member of your audience. What questions would someone from the audience have after reading one of your paragraphs? What ambiguities are there? What follow-up questions would naturally arise? And so on and so forth.
Your post brought back a flood of memories from grad school that I would have cared to have forgotten!:-) (Namely, having to spend a semester on exploring correctness theorems, which are about as exciting as spending a week to prove that paint will dry when it would clearly be more entertaining to just sit there for a day and watch it dry.)
Can you imagine what the ads would be like in Office? As soon as you type in, say, "computer" into your Word document, Clippy pops up, does a little jigg, and says:
It looks like you're interested in buying a computer!
One thing I would use this for is fishing through a series. There are always episodes worth watching over and over again. Before this the only ways to find them was to luck out on reruns, hope someone could nail it down with hints on a messageboard/usenet, or bittorrent/emule in hopes of finding it.
Let's hope. I wouldn't be surprised if they only kept up like the last six episodes, meaning if you wanted to watch previous seasons' content you'd have to buy the season series DVDs.
What's odd is that some shows, like Alias, have multiple episodes, whereas others, like Lost, have just the last one. Hopefully they'll add past Lost episodes and keep the ones from henceforth online and available.
You make a great point, but I wonder how many business applications are being designed today (i.e., brand new projects, not adding on to existing, legacy applications) that aren't web-based? Sure, a great number of the commercial applications are still desktop-only, but I'm talking about customized, in-house software development. I wish there were some numbers to compare, but from my experience and talking with others, a good deal of new development is definitely intranet-based. (Of course take my views with a grain of salt, since I am a web application developer...)
This is why I was/am a fan of Kuro5hin.org. User-submitted content, but it must (slowly) be voted out from an article queue where it has a chance to be "peer reviewed." It leads to some very well-written and interesting essays/stories/commentaries. But it's clearly not built to handle "breaking news" like Digg &/.
Personally, I don't see the point of censorship at all unless it's spam and other such content. E.g., on my blog I've had a variety of negative comments left by readers about me, the site, my work, etc. But Rob et al should know that you can't sanely publish on the Internet unless you can take it all with a grain of salt. Now spam, on the other hand, is quickly deleted...
What's the expenses for FaceBook? A room full of developers and hosting fees? (Or is there a large marketing budget? I'm not too familiar with the site, being a number of years out of college...)
Also, WinZip's sales are in the face of Microsoft's inclusion of ZIP capabilities starting with Windows XP, IIRC, which came out when, 2001? I'm not saying that WinZip doesn't put out a useful product, but those numbers, to me, are impressive because over the past four years there has been a free alternative. (Granted, I pay to use WinRAR, but I'd fathom WinXP's ZIP capabilities are sufficient for 99.9% of computer users out there...)
Are students richer today than when I was in college or something?
Probably not, just more willing to go into credit card debt. Also, it may be the whole, "Get 'em while they're young" approach. Sure, the college student may not be in the market for a BMW today, but when they graduate, are single, and making a decent living, then that pre-advertising might start to pay off.
Well, if it's anything like the bubble days of the dot com era, the idea's not to make a profit on the site, per se, but to make the investment back selling ownership of the site through shares to the public. Or, more realistically, they may be hoping to sell "up" to a bigger fish (like MySpace sold out), who would probably hope to also either sell "up" or sell shares to the public.
I don't think the parent was meaning that banks, hospitals, etc. are hosting B2C applications remotely, but rather their software that they use internally is being hosted as a service by another computer elsewhere, either one they run or one run by another company.
If I'm not mistaken, my bank (Wells Fargo) has their tellers using what looks to me to be a web page in IE coming from a remote site. Similarly, I've worked for a couple of clients in the past that have provided hosted software applications for hospitals. They provide either an SSL-enabled website or a network that the hospital staff are VPNed into, and through which they interact with a website where they can manage various client aspects (activities, billing, etc.). These type of hosted applications are especially appealing for smaller clinics that can't afford an in-house IT/programming staff.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, I disagree on both counts. Today minorities hold positions in industry they didn't 50 years ago. Blacks can ride at the front of the bus. After 9-11, we didn't round up the Muslims in this country and put them in internment camps like we did with the Japanese in WWII. We don't use nerve gas in battle anymore a la WWI. Or we could go further back. Slavery. Burning witches at the stake. The Inquisition. And on and on and on.
And regarding the brain rot fallacy, IQs today are higher than they have ever been [source]. "Researchers who study intelligence say scores around the world have been increasing so fast that a high proportion of people regarded as normal at the turn of the century would be considered way below average by today's tests. Psychologists offer a variety of possible explanations for the increase, including better nutrition, urbanization, more experience with test taking, and smaller families. Some even say that television and video games have made children's brains more agile."
It's easy to say, "Man, things were so quaint back in the day," but in reality, they really weren't.
Eh, but if everyone in the current generation does it, what choice will employers have in the future? While I agree with your premise, I can't help but think such statements are eerily similar to the admonishons from parents in the 50s - listening to that Elvis Presley music is going to rot your brain and loosen your morals!
I guess my real rub is this (and it's a bit of a selfish complaint) - the housing bubble has hurt others because it's priced out blue collar and first-time home buys who have a moticum of financial sanity. Take my neck of the woods, San Diego. The median home price at the height of the bubble crested $600k. Single family homes in my neighborhood start in the $800K range for 1,500 sq. ft. shitboxes that were build in the 1970s.
Five years ago the same house was 1/3 or 1/4 what it is today. (My wife and I bought our condo in 2001 for ~$275k. Four years prior the owner had paid $160k. Last year, a neighbor sold their identical condo for $545k.) Such irrational increases have priced out many folks, sadly. They are the silent victims of this RE bubble.
Good point. So thanks to your company matching 3% you make $780. (Of course had you not taken the money out that $3k would have compounded... but I digress.)
I disagree. I won't say it's easy - I ended up borrowing through student loans about $2,500 over my four years, IIRC - but to say it's impossible is hogwash. First off, who says you HAVE to go to college immediately after high school? Why not work for a year and save? Second, scholarships are a good source of income, and there are scholarships for all sorts of things, not just academic. There's also Federal grants and other "free" money one can go after if they are in certain socioeconomic positions.
Finally, one thing that I did that really helped on the income side of things was to take a semester off to do "cooperative learning," which basically meant I worked for a semester and summer at a company and, while not paid much, was probably paid as much in those 9 months as the rest of the time I did working in student jobs during my education.
It is hard, though, I won't argue with you there. It all depends where your priorities are, I guess. Also, when contemplating the decision as to whether to take on loans, it's important to have an objective, ROI-type analysis. Point being, it's one thing to borrow $100k to become a doctor, where you can hope to make back the debt relatively quickly, it's another thing to drop $50k to spend four years "discovering yourself" and studying Russian literature at some private college.
You know what happens when you assume! :-p
I am married to a woman whose financial views are in line with mine. In fact, she's more on the wanting security in the sense of no debt/large cash reserves than I. I'm just more anti-debt/only buying stuff one can afford, etc.
From the GP : I didn't pay off everything. I blew some of the dough on a home wireless network, and other things
So was that wireless network for you or your better half? ;-)
I am fortunate in that, for me, the unenjoyable weight of debt far exceeds the enjoyment attained from shiny new things. When I hear about those people with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, tens of thousands owed on cars, tens of thousands owed on student loans, and a big fat mortgage... well, if it was me my head would explode, sending bone and brain fragments everywhere.
Ahem. Tell that to those who lost their jobs because they worked for the companies that went bust (or took it on the chin) in the dot com fiasco. Or those whose retirement savings lost half their value. Tell that to the construction/realtors/appraisers/mortgage brokers who are edging closer to being jobless. I'm not saying that there's no personal responsibility, but it's kind of cold to just say to someone who is, say, a construction worker, "You should have been smarter and seen that the housing explosion was really just a bubble artificially inflated by increased liquidity by the Fed and loose lending standards" when he's been out there swinging a hammer all day.
Ah, I think I was mistaken/mistyped - you're taxed on EVERYTHING, not just your gains, since the money was put in tax-deferred in the first place (regardless of when you take out the money).
If I'm not mistaken (and I very well may be), if you withdraw your funds at any time from a tax-deferred account you're taxes at your current income tax rate on any gains you've realized. If you do it early (before age 59.5), you are not only taxed on your gains but also hit with a 10% penalty across the board. So unless your employer is matching > 10%, or unless your tax rate now is substantially lower than what it was when you put in the money into the 401(k) in the first place, you are not getting ahead by taking your money out early.
I reiterate - if you need to pay off debts (which is a good thing), spend less. Cashing out a 401(k) is a short term move, because if you don't change your habits you'll be back to that same trouble spot once the retirement account money has run its course.
I disagree. We should be encouraging people not to borrow, period. Don't borrow on credit and certainly don't borrow from yourself. The phrase, "robbing Paul to pay Peter" rings ever so true here.
From a more rational side, borrowing from one's 401(k) does have drawbacks. If you get fired or laid off you have, what 30 or 90 days or something like that by which 100% of what you borrowed must be refunded to your account, or you're paying penalties.
Personally, it feels like something's got to give. I'm not as well versed in economics/macro-economic history as some others here likely are, so I pose this question: have there been times of such bubbles? Yes, I know there have been bubbles in the past - tulip mania, the stock market in the late 1920s/late 1990s, SoCal real estate in the late 80s, etc. - but has there before been this swell from one bubble to the next to the next without any real sort of crash or correction across the board? Yes, stocks got hammered in 2001, but real estate in my neck of the woods appreciated like 25% that year and for the next several years.
What is the cause of this? Is it the Fed flooding the marketplace with liquidity? Or is this nothing too abberational, and we're just headed for one helluva bust?
Cashing out a retirement account, IMO, is the last thing to do. If your house is in foreclosure, or you can't afford to keep the lights on or buy groceries, then, sure, cash that retirement account out. But otherwise it's probably more cost effective to do it the old fashioned way: reduce spending, live on a budget, take a second job.
- The Running Man - awesome concept/novella, a rather dull-minded movie
- Trucks - the movie was called Maximum Overdrive and while it didn't suck that bad, it was a shell of what it could have been.
The movie Apt Pupil turned out OK, but the ending wasn't in line with the book's, unfortunately. The best King-to-movie translation was probably Stand By Me (can we get an amen for Wil Wheaton?).In other words, it has absolutely, positively, nothing to do with VR or 3D stuff...
Writing, like most everything in life, gets better with practice. Encourage your students to write often, giving them many small assignments rather than focusing on just a couple of "big" projects. Also, for technical writing, I find it helps to know your audience and to think about what it is you're trying to communicate as if you were a member of your audience. What questions would someone from the audience have after reading one of your paragraphs? What ambiguities are there? What follow-up questions would naturally arise? And so on and so forth.
Your post brought back a flood of memories from grad school that I would have cared to have forgotten! :-) (Namely, having to spend a semester on exploring correctness theorems, which are about as exciting as spending a week to prove that paint will dry when it would clearly be more entertaining to just sit there for a day and watch it dry.)
It looks like you're interested in buying a computer!
Would you like help?
<shudder />
Let's hope. I wouldn't be surprised if they only kept up like the last six episodes, meaning if you wanted to watch previous seasons' content you'd have to buy the season series DVDs.
What's odd is that some shows, like Alias, have multiple episodes, whereas others, like Lost, have just the last one. Hopefully they'll add past Lost episodes and keep the ones from henceforth online and available.
You make a great point, but I wonder how many business applications are being designed today (i.e., brand new projects, not adding on to existing, legacy applications) that aren't web-based? Sure, a great number of the commercial applications are still desktop-only, but I'm talking about customized, in-house software development. I wish there were some numbers to compare, but from my experience and talking with others, a good deal of new development is definitely intranet-based. (Of course take my views with a grain of salt, since I am a web application developer...)
Personally, I don't see the point of censorship at all unless it's spam and other such content. E.g., on my blog I've had a variety of negative comments left by readers about me, the site, my work, etc. But Rob et al should know that you can't sanely publish on the Internet unless you can take it all with a grain of salt. Now spam, on the other hand, is quickly deleted...
Also, WinZip's sales are in the face of Microsoft's inclusion of ZIP capabilities starting with Windows XP, IIRC, which came out when, 2001? I'm not saying that WinZip doesn't put out a useful product, but those numbers, to me, are impressive because over the past four years there has been a free alternative. (Granted, I pay to use WinRAR, but I'd fathom WinXP's ZIP capabilities are sufficient for 99.9% of computer users out there...)
Probably not, just more willing to go into credit card debt. Also, it may be the whole, "Get 'em while they're young" approach. Sure, the college student may not be in the market for a BMW today, but when they graduate, are single, and making a decent living, then that pre-advertising might start to pay off.
Although who knows how much FaceBook makes. I was surprised to learn that WinZip was pulling in ~$23 MILLION/year.
If I'm not mistaken, my bank (Wells Fargo) has their tellers using what looks to me to be a web page in IE coming from a remote site. Similarly, I've worked for a couple of clients in the past that have provided hosted software applications for hospitals. They provide either an SSL-enabled website or a network that the hospital staff are VPNed into, and through which they interact with a website where they can manage various client aspects (activities, billing, etc.). These type of hosted applications are especially appealing for smaller clinics that can't afford an in-house IT/programming staff.