Good book. Promoted it in an above comment before seeing you mention it. My head still spins at the NYTimes article I read a few months back of the guy living in New York City and complaining that $250,000 is only lower middle class. The things I could do with his money. Oy!
Despite your trollishness, I'll pipe in to plug the book, "The Millionaire Next Door." So you don't have to RTFB, here's the key point: people who live below their means can save money. Oodles of it, in some cases. And their neighbors don't have a clue because there are no fancy cars in the driveway, and no bragging about expensive vacations. To some people, the definition of rich is "being able to pay for everything I need and then some," which becomes much easier to achieve when you downsize your list of needs. For most folks, an iPhone with a data plan is not a need; neither is cable TV or regular movie-going or season tickets to XYZ. These are all wants, and perfectly justifiable if they fit within your finances, but there are alternate ways to achieve the ultimate pleasures that they offer. Sounds like killkillkill is going down that path, and is happy with his direction in life. (If his wife is on board and happy with it, he'll definitely be happy with it.) I do sincerely without sarcasm hope that whatever path you're choosing is fulfilling as well, and that if your path is not fulfilling, that you have opportunities to reorient. I'm in the process of trying to reorient myself, and it looks like work, but looks worthwhile too.
By the way, with 2% average annual inflation, today's $9,000 / year college will cost about $12,800 per year.
2% average annual inflation is a wonderful idea. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that never in my lifetime has college tuition risen by that little in one year. Every year it was between 3.98% and 13.44%. From the day I was born to the day I entered college, tuition rose 480%. By that math, today's $9K/year would become $52K/year, wiping out the savings in one year flat.
Why couldn't the driver just pull over for a few min to correspond with his boss? How do you know that the boss didn't assume that is what the driver would do because it is illegal to text and drive. How do you know there isn't a text to speech device that reads out texts as the driver gets them (actually pretty common in commercial trucks).
The text to speech device sounds cool; the reciprocal speech-to-text device is less reliable. Presuming the boss wants a response beyond a mere "ok", the driver has to engage in texting communications. As for pulling over, most commercial trucks have GPS and other tracking that identify what the vehicle is doing every minute. Fleet managers use this to monitor speed, for one, and ensure a driver isn't taking breaks and then speeding to make up for lost time. So they could know he's pulled over and get all irate about it if they chose.
I think it smacks of micromanaging, and putting people at risk for efficiency's sake, but people tend to do things I don't care for.
What APRs are you looking at? A 30-year fixed with 5% APR is about 50% principal, 50% interest over 30 years. Current mortgage rates are 4.5%. Granted, in the 1980s, 15% interest rates were more common, but these are different times.
If the company has no financial information to go off, maybe I can see this being valid,
Yup, that's exactly the point of the article which you read.
If I don't have proof whether you're responsible with money, but I do know that you are currently active friends with a deadbeat, your family members are likely highly supportive of you declaring bankruptcy, and your social circle has disproportionally high foreclosure levels, you look like a risk. Short of monitoring your conversations to ensure that you're not discussing anything financial with them, I have to assume that you rub off on them, and they rub off on you. And even if I know good things about you, which rubs off on them positively, this still takes you down a notch, because if you fall on hard times, you don't seem to have a network that will push to help you make your payments, unlike the guy whose friends and family all have stellar credit histories.
That's always the pain of statistical models: someone's an exception. But lenders aren't venture capitalists; nobody's going to pay them back 10x their investment. So they minimize risk. The bank insists on 20% down for the best mortgage rates; the payday lender charges you $45 upfront for the $300 loan. In the absence of personal relationships that establish information and trust, everybody tries to protect their bottom line. Makes sense to me.
Casualty: uninterrupted TV--the dancing dinosaurs that interrupt regular programming are a direct result of advertisers trying to find a way around TiVo. Ditto for banner crawls during newscasts.
Casualty: Movies free of product placement. Probably a casualty of TiVo also
Don't blame TiVo. Product placement was visible in movies in the 1970s, long before TiVo. Watched "Ice Castles" the other night and was surprised at the number of blatant Coca-Cola placements throughout. And the alien E.T. eats Reese's Pieces because Mars Inc (M&Ms) turned down the opportunity.
So it was nothing to do with faith, your parents made a medical decision? Elective surgery that has debatable benefits and which addresses problems that most people never encounter and which are almost impossible to predict in infants isn't a very sensible decision, considering the risks and doubts over the long term effects.
Science has since learned more and therefore the aggregate data and expectations have since changed; it was previously thought to be more beneficial than it is thought to be now. Your argument applies to future decisions, and is invalid to his situation or his parents. Please do not insult them for acting on the best info they had.
How do we then punish or reward the people who do things that incrementally affect many folks? If I have a barbeque, which releases some amount of toxic smoke into the air, it possibly shortens someone's life by a number of days in return for me getting very tasty meat. Who will be the judge, jury, and executioner? Because this is a very slippery slope. Will you sue your parents for giving birth to you though you were genetically likely to develop certain diseases?
Mod Parent Up. Studies show that career criminals do consider the risk of being caught, the risk of conviction, and the size of the penalties. Example: when the crime of assault with a deadly weapon was reclassified as a capital offense, murders rose. Why? Now that the penalty for either crime is the same, the difference between the two is that murders leave people dead, reducing the witnesses who can testify and thus reducing the likelihood of conviction. I regret that I don't have the citation handy; it's been a decade since I studied that stuff.
If the FISA laws have not kept up with the changes in society and technology, then the oversight is misguided. And this is the problem with laws about secret government doings: the government develops secret things far faster than appropriate legislation guides it. FISA laws have not yet addressed metadata, and we now know we need laws about that. And FISA laws were needed because intelligence agencies were doing things in secret that Congress found reprehensible. FISA has been amended several times to clarify things and further rein in government intelligence services, because their creativity has always found a way to do something that the public and the Legislative Branch find appalling. So it is a continual arms race, but the NSA et al are always a step or three ahead of the laws, which means that any claim of "following the laws" or "effective oversight" is hogwash and not to be relied upon as controlling these agencies.
"If we let the gays marry, then everyone will want to marry their dogs...
Have you read how noted fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has stated in the past week that he wishes to marry his cat? You wrote sarcastically I'm sure, but the world is already ahead of you.
I think you should bear in mind that your experience involved a relaxed attitude to what was a fairly vocational course at a two-year business school, and yet you feel you can generalise your observations to make dismissive (and implicitly self-congratulatory) comments about tertiary education in general. There is a big difference between your experience and a rigorous academic degree course from one of the leading universities.
Then I will speak as someone who graduated with honors with a rigorous academic degree from a US News & World Reports top-10 school. College is not a trade school; it is meant to teach you how to think, and to expose you to a lot of ideas. Most of the material in most of my classes has not mattered an inch in my years since graduation, and it doesn't need to, because if you know how to research, how to learn, and how to engage ideas, you can learn the fine details of the job
as you go. The degree shows perseverance and is used to thin the stack of resumes in the HR department. But unless you're in a semi-trade-school major (engineering of the non-software type), don't expect to crack open your textbooks at the office.
This right here is what needs to stop: just because you're a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, doesn't mean you're dumb. Likewise, going to college doesn't mean you're smart.
Please read GlennC's statement again. He never said anybody was dumb or smart. You projected that onto his words. He talked about talent and desire. I have no art talent and no desire for art school or music school, landscape design, or interior decorating. Does that make me an idiot? No. It makes me a guy. A guy who understands his strengths and weaknesses, and makes a living off his strengths.
I agree with you and Glenn that college isn't right for everyone, and we shouldn't look down on someone who maximizes what he has, be it book smarts or hands-on smarts. With good career counseling, we might help more people understand their talents and desires, and find greater happiness and fulfilment as a result.
Smart plus polite can equal bored. I chose not to pull out a textbook from another class or a personal reading book when the lectures went slow; it would have been called rude where I grew up. And I don't have an aptitude or interest in drawing. Thank you for the suggestions, though.
Yes, but school districts focus on giving everyone a minimum level of competence, in order to break the Matthew Effect. This is because once you are above the threshold, you pose no risk to their test scores, accreditation, state funding, etc., and misguided programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have only exaggerated this focus. Spending on remedial education is way up -- tutors, coaching, extra support is available if you can't understand things. But if you understand the basics already, sit there and be bored like I was; there are no bonuses for you; funding for Gifted and Talented Education is not a priority in America.
Worse problems elsewhere do not mitigate the effect of problems faced here, smarmy statements like 'firstworldproblem' notwithstanding.
No, but organizations of very smart people in America have learned how to lie quite effectively with the statistics they develop. Terms such as "food insecurity" may be very real for some people, but get overextended quite easily so that the number of people in danger gets inflated, and consequently the importance of their cause, and how much funding you must give them as a consequence.
I don't believe this study proves anything. [...] I will propose that social skills have a much higher correlation to financial success than intelligence OR the "socioeconomic status" of one's parents.
That would be a neat Ph.D. thesis topic! But first you need a way to quantitatively measure social skills, before being able to test its correlation or covariance.
Also, you can't use a personal anecdote (sample size = 1) to disprove a statistical study of large magnitude (sample size = 17,000). There were probably a couple geniuses who became criminals, went to jail, and had very low income as a result. And a couple idiots who became reality TV stars and made a lot. But these do not disprove the general trend.
The ITWorld link is just a blog post based on the other link, a press release, which clearly said, "The long-term associations held even after the researchers took other common factors into account." Does it list the common factors or the strengths of the correlations? No, but that might be too much for a press release that's attempting to draw readers to the full article. I for one am satisfied, apart from wanting a free link to the article itself.
I expect the big parties to do a better job at analysis than you have - it isn't about capturing all of the Green voters, it is about capturing enough of them.
So do I; they get paid to do it, so they have high incentive to not only figure out the factors but precisely quantify them to determine whether it makes sense or not.
As for why we don't see it in the USA - that's because people don't vote their conscience in the first place. The more people who did so, the more effective it would be.
That's very reasonable; there are probably a lot of lesser-party-leaning major party voters out there. However, your analysis ignores the "spoiler effect" and its role in people voting their conscience. Remember the controversy in 2000 when folks wondered if Ralph Nader's presence on the ballot took enough votes from Al Gore in Florida to give George Bush the win? I don't say this to rehash the 2000 election, because any of that would be a tangent at this point. I say it just to point out that "keeping the wrong guy out of office" is part of folks voting their conscience; when you ask folks to vote their conscience, you need to address their perspective of "I'll vote for decent B over wonderful A, if it keeps horrible C from winning," and explain why they should vote for wonderful A instead.
Voting strategically only works if the strategy bloc is worth capturing. That's a factor of 1) how close the race will be, 2) how big the bloc is, and 3) how easy it is to capture the bloc -- the size of the changes needed, weighing the risk of alienating some of your existing bloc. And the big parties know any overtures they make won't capture all the Greens because some Green votes are from lifers -- party die-hards who'll never budge, and some are from "anybody but X" people -- who always vote in protest for any party but the one(s) in power, and some filled out the ballot at random or liked the name of the candidate. So in a highly dynamic coalition government system, you'd expect these overtures often, but much more rarely in the USA.
If A and B depend on a common cause C, I'd say, it's still causation
Most people would say differently. The purpose of causation is to be able to change A and affect B. But if I tell you that I found a positive relationship between ice cream sales and burglaries (this does exist in some regions, by the way), could you as the police chief reduce burglaries by banning ice cream within the city? No. Because this is not the causative relationship. The causative relationship is that when the weather gets hot, people buy more ice cream and are more likely to leave their windows open for fresh cool air at night, making burglary easier.
This is why we care that correlation != causation. If we want to affect something off-limits to us by adjusting something under our control, we need causation, rather than just correlation. Big data will be hard-pressed to prove causation, but it may give us some more correlations to explore. And this/. thread will show a hundred examples of outliers, because that's what we're good at finding here.
I first received my AARP application when I was 25. I displayed it for several years on my office door. I received another not long ago, at 38.
I get one about every other month. I think I'm not living in the right neighborhood...
They took my money and I had a valid membership at age 29. But when I called to get my darn discount card, they said, "Oops - you're too young for the card, but you can keep paying dues and receiving the magazine if you'd like." I don't know how they missed that beforehand; the application asks for your birthdate.
My membership in AAUW was about as short-lived as well.
Let the haters hate, and the lovers love. We know who's who by their comments.
If your daughter wanted it all princessy, and you loved her, you'd do it too. Remember (if you RTFA), she asked to play as not-Mario; we don't know what more she said beyond that. If my son asked for an elephant in the game, I'd make peanuts for him to use. And a little feather because of Dumbo.
Got my man-card, and my dad-card, and nobody's pulling either of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Good book. Promoted it in an above comment before seeing you mention it. My head still spins at the NYTimes article I read a few months back of the guy living in New York City and complaining that $250,000 is only lower middle class. The things I could do with his money. Oy!
Despite your trollishness, I'll pipe in to plug the book, "The Millionaire Next Door." So you don't have to RTFB, here's the key point: people who live below their means can save money. Oodles of it, in some cases. And their neighbors don't have a clue because there are no fancy cars in the driveway, and no bragging about expensive vacations. To some people, the definition of rich is "being able to pay for everything I need and then some," which becomes much easier to achieve when you downsize your list of needs. For most folks, an iPhone with a data plan is not a need; neither is cable TV or regular movie-going or season tickets to XYZ. These are all wants, and perfectly justifiable if they fit within your finances, but there are alternate ways to achieve the ultimate pleasures that they offer. Sounds like killkillkill is going down that path, and is happy with his direction in life. (If his wife is on board and happy with it, he'll definitely be happy with it.) I do sincerely without sarcasm hope that whatever path you're choosing is fulfilling as well, and that if your path is not fulfilling, that you have opportunities to reorient. I'm in the process of trying to reorient myself, and it looks like work, but looks worthwhile too.
By the way, with 2% average annual inflation, today's $9,000 / year college will cost about $12,800 per year.
2% average annual inflation is a wonderful idea. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that never in my lifetime has college tuition risen by that little in one year. Every year it was between 3.98% and 13.44%. From the day I was born to the day I entered college, tuition rose 480%. By that math, today's $9K/year would become $52K/year, wiping out the savings in one year flat.
Why couldn't the driver just pull over for a few min to correspond with his boss? How do you know that the boss didn't assume that is what the driver would do because it is illegal to text and drive. How do you know there isn't a text to speech device that reads out texts as the driver gets them (actually pretty common in commercial trucks).
The text to speech device sounds cool; the reciprocal speech-to-text device is less reliable. Presuming the boss wants a response beyond a mere "ok", the driver has to engage in texting communications. As for pulling over, most commercial trucks have GPS and other tracking that identify what the vehicle is doing every minute. Fleet managers use this to monitor speed, for one, and ensure a driver isn't taking breaks and then speeding to make up for lost time. So they could know he's pulled over and get all irate about it if they chose.
I think it smacks of micromanaging, and putting people at risk for efficiency's sake, but people tend to do things I don't care for.
What APRs are you looking at? A 30-year fixed with 5% APR is about 50% principal, 50% interest over 30 years. Current mortgage rates are 4.5%. Granted, in the 1980s, 15% interest rates were more common, but these are different times.
If the company has no financial information to go off, maybe I can see this being valid,
Yup, that's exactly the point of the article which you read.
If I don't have proof whether you're responsible with money, but I do know that you are currently active friends with a deadbeat, your family members are likely highly supportive of you declaring bankruptcy, and your social circle has disproportionally high foreclosure levels, you look like a risk. Short of monitoring your conversations to ensure that you're not discussing anything financial with them, I have to assume that you rub off on them, and they rub off on you. And even if I know good things about you, which rubs off on them positively, this still takes you down a notch, because if you fall on hard times, you don't seem to have a network that will push to help you make your payments, unlike the guy whose friends and family all have stellar credit histories.
That's always the pain of statistical models: someone's an exception. But lenders aren't venture capitalists; nobody's going to pay them back 10x their investment. So they minimize risk. The bank insists on 20% down for the best mortgage rates; the payday lender charges you $45 upfront for the $300 loan. In the absence of personal relationships that establish information and trust, everybody tries to protect their bottom line. Makes sense to me.
Casualty: uninterrupted TV--the dancing dinosaurs that interrupt regular programming are a direct result of advertisers trying to find a way around TiVo. Ditto for banner crawls during newscasts.
Casualty: Movies free of product placement. Probably a casualty of TiVo also
Don't blame TiVo. Product placement was visible in movies in the 1970s, long before TiVo. Watched "Ice Castles" the other night and was surprised at the number of blatant Coca-Cola placements throughout. And the alien E.T. eats Reese's Pieces because Mars Inc (M&Ms) turned down the opportunity.
So it was nothing to do with faith, your parents made a medical decision? Elective surgery that has debatable benefits and which addresses problems that most people never encounter and which are almost impossible to predict in infants isn't a very sensible decision, considering the risks and doubts over the long term effects.
Science has since learned more and therefore the aggregate data and expectations have since changed; it was previously thought to be more beneficial than it is thought to be now. Your argument applies to future decisions, and is invalid to his situation or his parents. Please do not insult them for acting on the best info they had.
How do we then punish or reward the people who do things that incrementally affect many folks? If I have a barbeque, which releases some amount of toxic smoke into the air, it possibly shortens someone's life by a number of days in return for me getting very tasty meat. Who will be the judge, jury, and executioner? Because this is a very slippery slope. Will you sue your parents for giving birth to you though you were genetically likely to develop certain diseases?
Mod Parent Up. Studies show that career criminals do consider the risk of being caught, the risk of conviction, and the size of the penalties. Example: when the crime of assault with a deadly weapon was reclassified as a capital offense, murders rose. Why? Now that the penalty for either crime is the same, the difference between the two is that murders leave people dead, reducing the witnesses who can testify and thus reducing the likelihood of conviction. I regret that I don't have the citation handy; it's been a decade since I studied that stuff.
If the FISA laws have not kept up with the changes in society and technology, then the oversight is misguided. And this is the problem with laws about secret government doings: the government develops secret things far faster than appropriate legislation guides it. FISA laws have not yet addressed metadata, and we now know we need laws about that. And FISA laws were needed because intelligence agencies were doing things in secret that Congress found reprehensible. FISA has been amended several times to clarify things and further rein in government intelligence services, because their creativity has always found a way to do something that the public and the Legislative Branch find appalling. So it is a continual arms race, but the NSA et al are always a step or three ahead of the laws, which means that any claim of "following the laws" or "effective oversight" is hogwash and not to be relied upon as controlling these agencies.
"If we let the gays marry, then everyone will want to marry their dogs ...
Have you read how noted fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has stated in the past week that he wishes to marry his cat? You wrote sarcastically I'm sure, but the world is already ahead of you.
I think you should bear in mind that your experience involved a relaxed attitude to what was a fairly vocational course at a two-year business school, and yet you feel you can generalise your observations to make dismissive (and implicitly self-congratulatory) comments about tertiary education in general. There is a big difference between your experience and a rigorous academic degree course from one of the leading universities.
Then I will speak as someone who graduated with honors with a rigorous academic degree from a US News & World Reports top-10 school. College is not a trade school; it is meant to teach you how to think, and to expose you to a lot of ideas. Most of the material in most of my classes has not mattered an inch in my years since graduation, and it doesn't need to, because if you know how to research, how to learn, and how to engage ideas, you can learn the fine details of the job as you go. The degree shows perseverance and is used to thin the stack of resumes in the HR department. But unless you're in a semi-trade-school major (engineering of the non-software type), don't expect to crack open your textbooks at the office.
This right here is what needs to stop: just because you're a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, doesn't mean you're dumb. Likewise, going to college doesn't mean you're smart.
Please read GlennC's statement again. He never said anybody was dumb or smart. You projected that onto his words. He talked about talent and desire. I have no art talent and no desire for art school or music school, landscape design, or interior decorating. Does that make me an idiot? No. It makes me a guy. A guy who understands his strengths and weaknesses, and makes a living off his strengths.
I agree with you and Glenn that college isn't right for everyone, and we shouldn't look down on someone who maximizes what he has, be it book smarts or hands-on smarts. With good career counseling, we might help more people understand their talents and desires, and find greater happiness and fulfilment as a result.
Smart plus polite can equal bored. I chose not to pull out a textbook from another class or a personal reading book when the lectures went slow; it would have been called rude where I grew up. And I don't have an aptitude or interest in drawing. Thank you for the suggestions, though.
Yes, but school districts focus on giving everyone a minimum level of competence, in order to break the Matthew Effect. This is because once you are above the threshold, you pose no risk to their test scores, accreditation, state funding, etc., and misguided programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have only exaggerated this focus. Spending on remedial education is way up -- tutors, coaching, extra support is available if you can't understand things. But if you understand the basics already, sit there and be bored like I was; there are no bonuses for you; funding for Gifted and Talented Education is not a priority in America.
Worse problems elsewhere do not mitigate the effect of problems faced here, smarmy statements like 'firstworldproblem' notwithstanding.
No, but organizations of very smart people in America have learned how to lie quite effectively with the statistics they develop. Terms such as "food insecurity" may be very real for some people, but get overextended quite easily so that the number of people in danger gets inflated, and consequently the importance of their cause, and how much funding you must give them as a consequence.
I don't believe this study proves anything. [...] I will propose that social skills have a much higher correlation to financial success than intelligence OR the "socioeconomic status" of one's parents.
That would be a neat Ph.D. thesis topic! But first you need a way to quantitatively measure social skills, before being able to test its correlation or covariance.
Also, you can't use a personal anecdote (sample size = 1) to disprove a statistical study of large magnitude (sample size = 17,000). There were probably a couple geniuses who became criminals, went to jail, and had very low income as a result. And a couple idiots who became reality TV stars and made a lot. But these do not disprove the general trend.
The ITWorld link is just a blog post based on the other link, a press release, which clearly said, "The long-term associations held even after the researchers took other common factors into account." Does it list the common factors or the strengths of the correlations? No, but that might be too much for a press release that's attempting to draw readers to the full article. I for one am satisfied, apart from wanting a free link to the article itself.
I expect the big parties to do a better job at analysis than you have - it isn't about capturing all of the Green voters, it is about capturing enough of them.
So do I; they get paid to do it, so they have high incentive to not only figure out the factors but precisely quantify them to determine whether it makes sense or not.
As for why we don't see it in the USA - that's because people don't vote their conscience in the first place. The more people who did so, the more effective it would be.
That's very reasonable; there are probably a lot of lesser-party-leaning major party voters out there. However, your analysis ignores the "spoiler effect" and its role in people voting their conscience. Remember the controversy in 2000 when folks wondered if Ralph Nader's presence on the ballot took enough votes from Al Gore in Florida to give George Bush the win? I don't say this to rehash the 2000 election, because any of that would be a tangent at this point. I say it just to point out that "keeping the wrong guy out of office" is part of folks voting their conscience; when you ask folks to vote their conscience, you need to address their perspective of "I'll vote for decent B over wonderful A, if it keeps horrible C from winning," and explain why they should vote for wonderful A instead.
Voting strategically only works if the strategy bloc is worth capturing. That's a factor of 1) how close the race will be, 2) how big the bloc is, and 3) how easy it is to capture the bloc -- the size of the changes needed, weighing the risk of alienating some of your existing bloc. And the big parties know any overtures they make won't capture all the Greens because some Green votes are from lifers -- party die-hards who'll never budge, and some are from "anybody but X" people -- who always vote in protest for any party but the one(s) in power, and some filled out the ballot at random or liked the name of the candidate. So in a highly dynamic coalition government system, you'd expect these overtures often, but much more rarely in the USA.
If A and B depend on a common cause C, I'd say, it's still causation
Most people would say differently. The purpose of causation is to be able to change A and affect B. But if I tell you that I found a positive relationship between ice cream sales and burglaries (this does exist in some regions, by the way), could you as the police chief reduce burglaries by banning ice cream within the city? No. Because this is not the causative relationship. The causative relationship is that when the weather gets hot, people buy more ice cream and are more likely to leave their windows open for fresh cool air at night, making burglary easier.
This is why we care that correlation != causation. If we want to affect something off-limits to us by adjusting something under our control, we need causation, rather than just correlation. Big data will be hard-pressed to prove causation, but it may give us some more correlations to explore. And this /. thread will show a hundred examples of outliers, because that's what we're good at finding here.
I first received my AARP application when I was 25. I displayed it for several years on my office door. I received another not long ago, at 38.
I get one about every other month. I think I'm not living in the right neighborhood...
They took my money and I had a valid membership at age 29. But when I called to get my darn discount card, they said, "Oops - you're too young for the card, but you can keep paying dues and receiving the magazine if you'd like." I don't know how they missed that beforehand; the application asks for your birthdate.
My membership in AAUW was about as short-lived as well.
Sorry -- yes I omitted a word at 2 am. Thanks for the humorous way of pointing it out.
Let the haters hate, and the lovers love. We know who's who by their comments.
If your daughter wanted it all princessy, and you loved her, you'd do it too. Remember (if you RTFA), she asked to play as not-Mario; we don't know what more she said beyond that. If my son asked for an elephant in the game, I'd make peanuts for him to use. And a little feather because of Dumbo.
Got my man-card, and my dad-card, and nobody's pulling either of them.