Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.
6,021 karma · joined January 12, 2021
Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually choose a school based on the living accomodations over the education.
Programs to assist students who should really not be there, and other programs that don't seem to recognize that college students are adults and should be expected to manage their lives by themselves. Do they really need the university to arrange coloring book time to help with the stress of mid-terms?
I started programming in BASIC and it was interesting but I felt I was missing a lot in my understanding of what was really going on.
At some point I found a program called "picoprocessor" that was along these lines, but vastly simpler of course. It created on the display an operator panel for a 4-bit computer, it had maybe 2 registers and only a few operations but it was enough to get the light bulb glowing in my head about how computers worked at the assembly language/machine code level.
Seeing the state changes visually on the "panel" as the program ran was so helpful to my understanding that I still remember the experience quite clearly some 40 years later.
My dad also commented about the computers in the lab where he worked, that had operator panels with toggle switches and LEDs. He could tell what loop the program was running by the pattern of lights on the panel.
I once worked in a place in the 1990s that took it to such an extreme that every table name, column name, and variable name had to be approved by a naming standards committee before it could go into production. IIRC the committee met once a month, maybe twice? Which was not ideal for the developers but changes only went to production once a month during a "change window" anyway.
Naming conventions can help with code readability, but don't let the process become more important than the goals.
For your online stuff, I'd do a mass delete of anything over 90 days old (or pick some other cutoff). You just have accept what's already obvious: you're never going to go through all of it, so why keep it?
As soon as you start processing forms and doing anything transactional based on that, you'll be quickly reinventing a lot of wheels if you aren't using a DBMS of some sort.
If you have a multistory house you can open windows at the top and bottom, the warm air will tend to flow out and pull cool air in the bottom. In that situation if you have a fan, it would make sense to have it blowing air in on the lower level, or out on the upper level.
If you have a single level, the fan will just create a slight pressure difference in one direction or the other. You just need to open several windows, preferably on opposite sides of the room, and if you use a fan to pull cool air in that creates a positive pressure inside the room, which will force the warm air to be exhausted through the other open windows. If the fan is blowing warm air out, then the room pressure will be negative relative to the outside, and cool air will be pulled in through the other open windows.
I enjoy it. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. I don't have to consider anyone else when I decide what I'm going to do. If I want to stay at the gym for an extra hour, I do. Nobody will complain about it when I get home. If I don't feel like doing the dishes tonight, I don't. If I want to sleep until noon, I do. Nobody will wake me up. Everything that happens in my life is a result of what I decide to do (or not do).
We are less active and we're eating more. Thus we got fat.
Also, when you throw huge balls of government money at these problems once every 10 or 20 years, it's a lot less efficient that just funding needed maintenance every year. Those huge federal spending bills tend to get frittered away on all kinds of middlemen and pork projects, and when the dust clears the original problems have not gotten any better.
They are statistically as safe or safer than they've ever been, but the drama-driven "news" reporting today would love to have you believe otherwise, so that you tune in every day to learn about everything you're supposed to be afraid of.