kingkongreveng_

> Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country

That is not true. The many colleges originally founded on agricultural science curricula were started from the 1860s onward. Students were middle class. They were very cheap.

> Student loans are some of the least-risky loans to give

You can't shed student loans through bankruptcy, which is another big problem in the same vein driving up costs.

> there is a thriving private market for non-government guaranteed student loans

To my understanding this is not the case. The market is dominated by government backed loans. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure "peripheral" is a better choice of word than "thriving".

> Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

This really doesn't address the issue. It should cost the same in real dollars to graduate an English major as it did 60 years ago. Realistically, it should cost less due to economies of scale and technology. Instead it's many times as expensive.

I couldn't figure out what exactly he did from the article. Set black and white photo paper on top a metal table and fire up a van de graaff?

> You are making an effort to eat cheaply

It's more about convenience and I what I like, actually. No real effort to each cheap. I like eggs and I like whole fat dairy. And in truth I do often eat cod or flank steak or whatever, so up the daily cost by maybe 50%, but it's still peanuts compared to eating out.

> a glass of half and half? Really?

I go through half a stick of butter, a glass or two of half&half, and some whole fat yogurt daily. First, it's delicious. Second, dairy fat is frickn diesel. You can run on all cylinders for ages.

OK, let's allow $4 for dinner: frozen chicken, bagged frozen vegetable, bagged frozen squash; takes about 15 minutes to nuke up.

$2 for breakfast. Three eggs scrambled in plenty of butter. Some nuked frozen berries in half a cup of whole plain yogurt. Five minutes prep.

$2 for lunch. Some celery, a can of sardines, and a large glass of half&half. Zero prep time, aside from rinsing celery.

This is roughly what I eat and there is no way you can save time or come close to matching the cost at restaurants or even with pre-packaged food. I don't even go to the grocery store: peapod drops my list off every two or three weeks.

I'd have to make an effort to spend more on groceries than eating out, and I eat zero rice & beans. A diet of nuked frozen vegetables, eggs, butter, yogurt, and various cheap meats/fish costs me I think a few bucks a day. Prep time is usually less than ten minutes.

> But I think the normal way countries get out of it is through war, which isn't terribly rosy either.

The idea that war has worked to end depressions is well debunked. In any useful measure economies always deteriorate through war. Living standards in the US fell all through WWII and continued falling until demobilization. GDP goes up during war because of weapon purchases. And unemployment goes down when you draft (enslave) people. So these are meaningless measures. You have to look at households.

You can boil much of the Japanese bubble and persistent malaise down to pervasive fraudulent accounting. Fictitious book values and profits were and are everywhere. I dare say it's more common to Asian cultures than Western, as the 1997 crisis and current practices in China indicate.

The moves in the US to weaken mark to market accounting rules to paper over weakness give great pause.

The increase in two income families much more than offsets that. Where one income used to be sufficient two are now necessary.

Try a lost three decades. Real median household income hasn't increased since the 70s.

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/family_a.htm

There's an inverse correlation to early rising and income, so I guess no. But that probably boils down to low wage people waking up to do shift work. Also, to my observation, less well off middle class people wake up early to commute in from the boonies.

Lots of high income deal maker types do business in the evenings.

The substantive political environment is identical now. The study already indicates that people in areas with winning sports franchises are less happy, so there goes the "in power party makes me happy" explanation.

You basically just restated the article without contradicting it.

The whole point is that striving harder to afford a comfortable standard of living in a higher tax, higher cost environment reduces happiness.

The stats the government already provides are baked to hell, and manipulated to suit the political cycle. It's a stupid idea.

The government shouldn't even be in the measurement and statistics business. We need a census and that's about it. Why should the government calculate GDP and so on? Competing private estimations provide greater depth already.

I haven't seen it yet, but I assume it's just a regurgitation of a "noble savage" story.

I want to make a movie about a technologically and culturally advanced people who encounter a primitive race. The primitives have high murder & infanticide rates, endless stupid tribal wars, etc. The technologically advanced people force assimilate or drive off the primitives and live happily ever after. The End.

District 9 is a movie about refugees made by a refugee.

Always remember: There is no sex in the champagne room. None.

Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems the study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology.

I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.

> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers

This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

Go try and find a randomized intervention where more vegetables improved health. Many have tried, all have failed.

I assure you "mostly plants" has no scientific backing. There are plenty of randomized intervention studies introducing more fruit and vegetables into diet and they all show a null result. Well controlled studies within populations also do not show any longevity advantage to eating more vegetables.

Just post a normal ass link to a regular video file. Let the user's file type preferences and video player take over. Do the same for PDFs and audio.

Why are people going through conniptions trying to get a markup reader to be a video player?

The fiber does not compensate for the high levels of fructose in modern fruits. Modern varieties are much sweeter than they were even thirty years ago. Modern seedless grapes are basically candy.

The whole video is about how fructose is toxic. Many, many plants are rich in fructose. It's not as simple as "eat plants." A modern variety apple or orange is a blast of fructose.

It's also perfectly healthy to eat predominantly meat, organs, and dairy if the animals are properly pastured. So the "mostly plants" claim makes little sense without a lot of qualification.

I'm not sure what convenient means to you, but I'm thinking it means near jobs and culture.

> Most likely no convenient place to buy groceries, poor communications, poor amenities generally.

Incorrect on all points. We're not talking about a remote place. We're talking about a one hour drive from a major city.

Come off it. A spacious and fairly pristine spot on the beach was once affordable. Such a spot would now be worth millions because of overpopulation. There is no interesting twist to do with technology.

I'll also add the fish and crabs were plentiful, where now they are quite scarce.

They worked much less, for sure.

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/2008/03/SWA08_Ch...

And this ignores that one income supported a stay at home wife.

You are missing the general point about quality of life and cost of living. Also, I might add, about income inequality. Conveniently located housing or easy access to nature is now more something for the rich where-as it used to be for everyone.

> most people don't get a whole month off in the summer

This is directly related to the population and labor supply issue.

I call hooey on your claim it's still possible. Quintupling the drive and substituting for nice house right on the beach a condo on a densely developed block is not what I'm talking about. There are barely any beaches that aren't over-developed on the entire east coast, anyway.

Slums of Manilla, Bogota, Delhi, Rio relocated? You really don't get that we're not talking about a bunch of guys in khakis and polos showing up ready to pitch in at the office on Monday? Believe it or not, the well educated and accomplished are generally happy where they are. The Mexican middle class does not emigrate.

Freshwater issues alone dictate a fall in the standard of living with further population increases.

The US got away with rather open immigration during the Ellis island wave by having virtually no safety net or public assistance. Over half of Italians who tried to make it here went broke and went home. If you want to kill every form of social welfare, public school included, maybe we can consider highly liberalized immigration. But not before.