yalurker

Am I the only one who thinks 'household income' is a terrible measure for this? Isn't a single person making 60k/year living a more affluent lifestyle than a married couple at 75k?

Isn't it a huge confounding variable that they are using a single value for the money, but that may be for just a single person or shared among an entire family?

I'd suspect it's less to do with cognitive dissonance, and more intentional lying to meet social norms or out of fear of future problems.

Anything controversial, highly personal, or with stigmas attached will get biased results from self-reporting. Alcohol, drugs, sexual history, religious views, political views, racial prejudices, etc will almost always be biased towards what the person thinks is the right answer.

There was an article posted here a while ago that talked about this "scene vs p2p" dynamic, but presupposed the audience knew what "the scene" was. I'm still confused as to what it refers, is "the scene" just private file sharing / piracy?

Also, wintermute - great username. Had a momentary "that's familiar..." before it clicked.

"Common sense will always trump "science" in our understanding of areas such as this and will allow us to sense intuitively what we really don't need people in white lab coats to tell us."

Wow, there is so much wrong with this sentence I can't believe it got up votes. This particular study may have flaws, and/or there may be errors in extrapolating the results of this isolated game to general workplace dynamics, but that doesn't mean science is bad.

"Common sense" does not, ever, trump science. "Common sense" is a lazy excuse for "I have an opinion that I can't back up with any data". How many times haven't we all read someone trying to make a claim like "It's common sense that marriage should be between one man and one woman".

Different people might have wildly different ideas backed up by "common sense". That's why we do studies - to find out what the truth is, even if it disproves our initial guess or we are uncomfortable/unhappy with the result.

I would think the exact opposite of this. Gold, from my perspective, is at absolute peak hype. You have Glen Beck and a thousand infomercials selling gold to the most absolute novice of investors at this point. Everybody and their mom has heard about gold's rise in value recently and "safety" from every imaginable financial disaster.

Maybe I'm seeing things from a skewed view point, but from where I sit, gold is the absolute ultra-hyped fad investment right now.

It looks like we interpreted the author differently. I took the "more degrees" coupled with a graduation age of 21 to mean the son had a Bachelor's and the father had only a high school diploma.

I was looking at it as college vs no college, not college today vs college 30 years ago.

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?"

Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of applicable skills that landed me a high-paying software engineering job instead of doing the manual labor or trivial office tasks that I was qualified for before college.

If you go to a private school to get a history degree then sure, it was 4 years of expensive partying that doesn't leave you any more employable. Go get a science/engineering/JD/MD heck even an MBA and you damn well better be smarter at the end.

And why the heck would a kid in band go to Harvard? He should be getting in a van and going on tour. And why would a kid in the chess club go to Yale? He should be playing chess. And why would a kid on the baseball team...

The typical over-achieving student is going to be in dozens of activities, none of which necessarily correlate with their future career. Agriculture might seem really weird or foreign to you, but for much of America being in FFA/4H/Eagle Scouts/whatever is just as normal as band, chess or sports.

You've missed the point. The "fairly obvious point" would be that ALL whites are disadvantaged by providing a certain quota or advantage to non-white applicants, but that's not the point here.

The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa.

The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?

I'd question you even need to qualify your statement about perception of the police as "poor or ethnic minority communities".

My social circle is mostly educated, upper-middle class white males. Most still see police as oppressors, many have had negative experiences with police abusing power & harassing them.

I think you misunderstand the parent post, HOAs are actually a perfect supporting example. Even the most tyrannical HOA rule isn't actually that bad, because you can just move a few blocks away to a less-strick HOA or a house with no HOA at all.

However, if a law is passed at the federal level, you're pretty much stuck with it. With local (or hyper-local like HOAs) you can vote with your feet by moving.

That hypothesis is stated in both the article and the source material. However, even if financial considerations are a part of it, they can't explain the full extent of the discrimination though - that 4H & Future Farmers of America count against an applicant while all other extracurriculars help.

Your analogy is not valid. You're ignoring reality, and the posts above which explain it. You are imagining that the women hooking up with these men are so naive/gullible/stupid that they went home with a guy they just met in a bar, expecting a deep long-term emotional relationship.

The truth is, women are a lot smarter than you seem to believe. They know what the men are up to, and they are willing participants. They are not being used. Your analogy would only hold if the bums were intentionally looking to find someone to murder them.

And with this law passing, the death of the family farm is complete. Now instead of the midwest being full of family farms passed from father to son, we'll only have corporate farms, since the typical family can't come up with the cash to cover half the value of their land that now belongs to the government.

I have little sympathy for the mega-millionaire trust fund kids this impacts, however, the estate tax completely destroys a way of life for millions of people in fly-over-country that has existed for generations. Sad.

Keep in mind, ties are sometimes strategic. Many games this world cup have seen teams playing very conservative/defensive because they were intentionally hoping for a tie.

Side-note, the Champions League and Europa League (where the top teams from each European Country's pro league compete against each other) uses a two-game system, one home and one away. The winner is decided by the cumulative score of the two games.

I have to think you're taking too negative a view of the intelligence of average. There is nothing subtle about this parody.

I could be wrong, but I'd be shocked that any competent person who had seen the chrome advertisements wouldn't recognize and understand this parody.

My read of the article makes this sound more like a natural failure than a regulatory one. The anti-venoms are very expensive to make and very rarely needed.

I see no reason that these drugs should get a pass on FDA testing that other drugs are held to, so it doesn't seem like a regulatory failure. It seems like some body acting for the general good (ie, government or nonprofit, maybe some life/health insurance?) should pay for the FDA trials to help get the alternative drugs to market.

My first thought reading the article: Could something like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation step in to make life-saving but unprofitable drugs available?

This seems like a very legitimate problem that might be worthy of attention from some non-profit, but maybe it just effects too few people?

Is there a FIRST Robotics or FIRST tech challenge team at his school or in his area? (http://usfirst.org/) Programming robots is a great way to pull in kids (for FRC, they can use C/C++, LabVIEW or Java, FTC is LabVIEW or C I think).

I'd avoid HTML/CSS/PHP like the plague for a newbie. Have him write an ELIZA-style chatbot in Python or do some Project Euler questions in Python/C++/C#/Java

Cost of living varies widely across the US. HFT jobs most likely take place in Manhattan where 150k is the same quality of life as maybe 80k in a place like Austin.

As others have suggested, the location is as important as the salary. Check out the various cost of living calculators on the web to be able to compare jobs in different cities.

I actually like that counter-point articles are posted and that new themes occur each week with multiple articles. It can certainly get excessive (as Reddit is prone to do) but a handful of articles from varying view points on a topic is a healthy thing for a social links site.

Which may sound shocking, even offensive at first. However, the correlation between vocabulary and socio-economic class is a very concrete result of many other studies, such that it is a reasonable thing to leave implicit in this case.

Seriously Ars Technica? That was one of the worst articles I have ever read. The mental gymnastics required to equate network neutrality to mandating "search neutrality" for a search engine made me question the validity of anything in the article.

There is nothing hypocritical nor dishonest about Google's stance. The interests of Google are luckily perfectly in line with the interests of every internet user in the world. Preventing the telecom monopoly/oligopoly from abusing their non-competitive market has nothing to do with controlling the content of any given website.

Was this article intentionally absurd? I'm genuinely confused how anyone could put forth such a fundamentally unsound and illogical argument.

Don't put off college. Go now, while you will get the most out of the experience. Even in the hypothetical situation where you learned nothing that you couldn't have taught yourself, that piece of paper will be incredibly important to your future. There is also something to be said for the life experience of being around professors, other students and the environment and energy of campus.

Find a part time job through your University. Apply for work-study, check out bulletin boards, talk to your school's career center.

Many sites allow editing, often a post is editable for a couple minutes or until someone has responded. Some forums allow editing even after that.

I see nothing unusual about commenting conventions on Hacker News.

Mostly, it sounds like you've just had bad experiences in the past, or you live in a place that makes life harder.

I live in the US, make an average salary for a software engineer, and live an incredibly comfortable life. I'm not going to retire at 30 or own a private yacht, but life isn't the dickensian struggle you present.

Exactly! If the wife in the story wanted to know why her husband didn't talk about any of the various men's problems on their fishing trip, she could have just asked the rhetorical question "how would talking about the problem while fishing make the problem go away?"

I will talk to a friend about a problem only if they can help solve it. I have absolutely no desire to try to get empathy or sympathy.

From the article: "Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of American adults made more than $100,000 in at least one or two of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three."

Am I the only one shocked by that statistic? That is far more people making six figures than I would have imagined. I can see one year by virtue of selling stock or real estate or even inheritance, but the 40% with that income continually paints a different picture of America to me.

For what it's worth, there are many mutual fund -> hedge fund relationships similar to what you have described. Average investors can't invest directly in a hedge fund, but they can buy into a mutual fund which has major holdings in one (or several). It's not the one-to-one relationship you described though.

Am I the only one who found the most troubling item in the article that the middle school is handing out 3 day suspensions for "even a minor social network offense".

How is that even allowed? If I were a parent with a child at that school I'd be joining the PTA and campaigning to have whoever implemented that policy fired. Schools shouldn't be trying to police what their students say or do while at home.

We have laws for threats & libel, let's have our schools handle education and let our judicial system handle legitimate complaints if there are threats of violence or whatever.