throwawayjava

B in particular. Products like the Yaris compete on price alone.

By the time you finish the product design and manufacturing pipeline the chip shortage will be long over, and the market for a car without any modern amenities is not actually that big.

If someone told me I were killing it, I would feel like a 22 year old engineer again and have flashbacks to that one PM who loved my work but who came to work still tripping some Mondays. Glad to be making a key stakeholder happy, but holy fuck am I glad we finally fired that tool.

If someone told me I was doing above average and they appreciated my work, I would feel... appreciated and proud of my work.

The world where killing and crushing are used in an unironic way is tiny and occupied mostly by people under 30. Can you retire at 30?

Doubling down on the tech, no matter what that means quantitatively, would mean qualitatively increasing your bet on the actual product. E.g. you’d fire every last milin if that meant you could keep a LiDAR engineer on staff.

Cruise won’t work out. GM is dead.

In this case, lower court ruling would stand

Rural regions get their fair share of wins.

E.g., the massive amount of money that is redirected from productive cities into relatively unproductive rural counties, many of which subsist on jobs that would not exist without superfluous military bases, over-incarceration, massive farm subsidies, or, yes, branch campuses of state university systems. This happens at the state level too. Many of our state’s rural school districts are almost entirely funded by redistributed taxes. Because their local populations won’t even pass no-tax-increase no-debt-load-increase bond issues to fix roofs.

Hopefully work from home will take off and rural communities/states will find a way to become more productive.

The "Ethnic and national feuds" section seems like it gets a certain point across: things that seem silly in current context were extraordinarily important cultural touch-points at one point, and could well become so again. E.g., the U2 Irish/UK thing. Easy to laugh at today, but equally easy to understand why to some people at some point in time nationality difference between Irish and UK really mattered. Most flamewars are just real arguments that happen in the wrong time/place/tenor.

OFC some examples are clearly just the product of either drugs or a bad week, or more likely both.

Kind of like reading slashdot articles about "websites", hacker news articles about "capitalism", or newspaper article comment sections about "immigrants" in the late 20th/early 21st century. Or whatever. You get the point ;)

Okay. So, everyone needs to be able to pass MIT's electrodynamics course if they get a degree that requires and electrodynamics course. And without intensive one-on-one and in person tutoring.

I'll risk sounding like an asshole or making an ass of myself and just straight up ask: Have you ever taught before? Somewhere other than a top ten CS or ivy league university?

What you're proposing sounds way more expensive than the status quo.

In other countries banks don't make five+ figures on every doctor's education, and their doctors certainly don't make enough to service six figures in education debt.

Finance capitalists keep the vicious cycle going. Doctors' unions scratch and claw for high comp because without it their new entrants are screwed.

To clarify: Are all rents in the US monthly and due on the first of the month?

Yes, at least in all the markets I'm aware of. If someone moves in after in the middle of a month, you'll pro-rate the rent for that first fraction of a month so that everyone's back on the monthly cycle for the rest of the lease (typically 12 months, but in some markets there's a strong preference for a particular month and so the lease will be written to end after less than 12 months. Typically uni towns where you really want to lease to end on August 31st regardless of when it started).

To clarify the 15th: paychecks typically also always arrive bimonthy and on fixed days. So, people would fail to budget for the 1st but would be able to cover rent when their second bimonthly paycheck hit their account. As a land owner extracting rent from folks, I think it's more than fair that they get a ~10 day interest fee loan as needed. And even if I were an asshole, it wouldn't be in my economic interest to do anything about those sorts of 10 day delays.

But I sort of suspect a lot of the folks who couldn't afford rent on the 1st of April 2020 won't be able to afford rent on the 15th of April 2020 either...

Depends on how long the rent goes delinquent. It's not uncommon for the rent to finally show up around the 15th. I used to rent out a property and would typically write the lease so that the rent was due within 5 days of the 1st. I would send a reminder but I didn't really start to worry as long as it showed up before the 20th. If it took longer than that I would start to worry.

The difference here is that the percent of that 31% who really can't afford the rent -- not now, and not any time soon -- is probably closer to 100%.

Everything that you just listed is basically how our current system works.

Accredited institutions can issue degrees if you pass their courses. There are various "grades" that bucket people, but as far as getting the degree goes, you just need to pass. Grading is at least ostensibly objective. Admissions to accredited institutions is selective, and colleges compete with one another for students.

The only two differences are price per class and "objective grading".

The former amounts to "what if we had our current system, except everything were cheaper". Which, I guess I have to admit, would indeed be nice. It'd be nice if healthcare and cars and real estate were cheaper as well. Not sure how to actually do it, though.

And for the latter, we've done that in K12 (standardized tests). Almost everyone seems to agree it's a terrible system.

Shelter (rent and "owners' equivalent of rent") are included in the CPI.

For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home

1. That wouldn't allow us to pause all economic activity. Not even close. Not even remotely close. Notice that 0% of the economic damage caused by coronavirus could have been prevented by stockpiling food and water.

2. Lots of economic activity is not possible to pause. Think about e.g., large construction projects or any manufacturing process. There's an enormous amount of economic activity that just can't easily be paused, at varying timescales. At the short timescale, for example, you can't simply stop pouring a foundation and come back to it later. On a longer timescale, you simply can't restart an oil well at $0 cost. These facts aren't due to bad planning. They're due to the fundamental laws of physics. And for any given type of disaster scenario, even the most resilient and localized supply chains might be disrupted. In fact, it's not really clear that localized or even redundant supply chains/processes would make you more resilient in any given scenario. There are likely fundamental tradeoffs and, even if not, individuals and small firms simply can't plan for every possible apocalypse.

3. That level of food/water stockpiling would be enormously expensive. Stockpiling would become a nontrivial drag on GDP, not only through unproductive resource allocation but also due to new frictions (e.g., moving 2 states over now becomes a five figure investment).

4. Like it or not, most folks simply don't have the means to stockpile at that scale. A waitress working 80 hours a week will never be able to afford the space and continuous investment necessary to maintain a multi-year food and water stockpile. Heck, even the largest firms with the best margins have to take on some existential risk in order to operate. At some point, the choice is between extreme resilience and having a given sector of the economy.

5. I can't find the problem you're trying to solve with multi-year food/water stockpiling. I'm having trouble figuring out what scenario would only last a few years, and would result in substantial destruction/disruption of the agricultural sector, but would not result in either a) also damage stockpiled food/water or b) trigger extinctions/mass-deaths that aren't possible to prevent through stockpiling. Literally no massive natural disaster or attack I can think of fits that bill. Not blight. Not super volcanoes. Not pandemics. Not nuclear war. Not bioterror. In none of those scenarios would stockpiling likely be particularly helpful at a multi-year timescale. Maybe in some of those scenarios stockpiling buys you a full growing season, if all of the other stars perfectly align.

So what?

So, people are choosing to go to expensive universities that don't subsidize their tuition. It's a choice, and there are much cheaper options for most of the country.

If you're paying $30K in tuition and planning on a "normal" career path, then you're paying way too much.

This whole post seems a little holier than thou

Well, if sound financial advice is perceived as a personal attack, then we're never going to solve this problem.

People whose parents can support them by allowing them to live at home for free during college can graduate with almost no debt by attending a cheap institution, working while going to school, and getting a head start in high school or community college. And most people whose parents cannot allow them to live at home will qualify for state and federal grants.

This country does have affordable college options for most people. The problem is that most people who go to college choose the more expensive options (state flagships and non-elite private universities) even though their local state university branch campuses are capable of providing a perfectly adequate education at a third of the price.

More importantly, the only way we'll reduce the debt burden on undergraduates is by providing more subsidy to state branch campuses. That will only work, however, if people choose to go to those state branch campuses. There's just no world where the taxpayer subsidizes a big chunk of room&board&tuition at research institutions for the majority of college students. For the top ~5% of students by merit, sure. But that model just doesn't make any sense when there are far cheaper options.

eg Grey's Anatomy

Medical debt is an entirely separate issue. Intertwining it with the undergraduate debt issue confuses things -- the solution to med school debt will be different from the solution to undergrad debt.

If you're a cruise line or a convention service, there's no market

Cruise lines are in a rough place. Same as airlines.

Lots of convention and vacation related businesses might face a more interesting dynamic. I briefly worked for one in college. Their fixed costs were probably less than $500/year and they kept low six figures in the bank (very high variable costs, mostly enterprise clients, and a fairly old-school owner).

Lots of small travel-related business can “survive” basically in perpetuity. But they will probably face a lot of new friction when events held at the convention center start running again. They can burn capital to stay alive and feed the owner in the mean time, but as that capital burns away, so does the business's feasibility (because of cash flow issues). Bankruptcy and business closure rates are going to vastly under-estimate the number of small business that de facto die out.

due to an ability to constantly grow markets with cheap oil energy and new markets. But more importantly the US had a lot of power and regulatory oversight to keep it from happening. All of that is no longer the case

Growth: emerging markets have decades of gangbusters growth ahead of them. More people will exit extreme poverty than ever before in the coming decades. China will transition from middle income to rich in our lifetimes, introducing hundreds of millions of new rich country consumers.

Federal power and responsiveness: The fed expanded its balance sheet in a rather incredible and history-making way. The CARES act is one of the largest subsidies ever.

Cheap oil energy: POTUS is currently begging SA and Russia to increase the price of oil. Meanwhile, alternative energy sources get cheaper every year.

A GD is possible, but not for those reasons.

$15/hr at mine, although if I include freelancing prior to that it's probably closer to $8. It's kind of nice. My floor is so incredibly low that the "scary times" don't look so scary.

CS was a contrarian career bet in the few years after dotcom; you didn't do it if you were listening to the wise old men and wanted a good paying job. Realizing that opportunity -- or, more commonly, doing what you wanted to and not worrying about the $, paid off incredibly well for those who took advantage from between 2004ish and today. I don't think fortunes will change for our cohort; there's still a huge dearth of principal engineers in pretty much every subarea of software engineering.

The enrollment surge also hasn't yet effected CS PhDs, because undergrad enrollment wasn't matched by a corresponding growth in phd enrollment. That might change in the next 5 years.

But the entry level positions seem extraordinarily competitive at the moment; I've never had this many qualified applicants (and that goes for before covid19 as well). The only saving grace is that more and more non-programming positions require some programming skills, and those folks seem to have a hard time recruiting/hiring.

1. 30k/year is REALLY high for tuition. Most state flagships -- which are some of the best universities in the entire world -- aren't that expensive. UIUC, definitely one of the best CS departments in the world, has tuition that's about half that per year [1]. And that's a top-tier state flagship research university; a bit of an overkill for any but the most ambitious (phd or md or jd or elite co.)-bound students. The regional campuses, which do an excellent job at preparing you for typical entry level industry gigs in most fields, have tuition closer to $10k/year [2]. If you want a "normal" life -- decent salary in exchange for a 40 hour work week, in a relatively normal stress environment, and without attending a top-tier graduate program -- don't go to a top-tier state flagship.

2. Most private universities do have sticker prices in that range, but a) why go non-elite private (e.g., mid-low tier liberal arts colleges) since they're usually not even as good as comparable public schools, and b) almost no one actually pays the sticker price at private universities. The average discount factor at private universities is around 50% [3].

3. It's definitely possible to make >$10K each year while doing university full time. Even very conservative estimates -- state minimum wage and only working summers/weekends with no overtime -- put the number north of $8K [4].

4. Living at home is often an option (not always, but the percentage of people who can't live at home and also don't qualify for need-based aid has to be pretty small).

5. Four years is an upper bound, not a requirement! College-ready students can and should transfer credits from high school AP, IB, or college credit courses; one of those three options is available in the vast majority of US high schools. Students who are not college-ready should start off at community college, which, again, brings the price down substantially.

So, for example, if you:

* go to your local branch campus of a state university like SIU-E or UMSL,

* live at home,

* work a minimum wage job for 40 hours over the summer and on the most weekends during the school year [4], and

* come in with sophomore standing OR do you first year at community college

then you can graduate with a very modest amount of debt (less than a used car, or possibly none at all). Cutting any one of those assumptions still keeps you well below $100K and possibly much lower than even $30K.

Plus, some of those assumptions are conservative. E.g., for most of that time you should be able to make substantially more than minimum wage by taking internships, tutoring ($20/hr+ is typically a "low" rate), etc. Scholarships and fellowships are typically available as well.

College is far too expensive in the USA, but you really have to be a huge outlier to graduate from undergrad with $100K in debt. And it's still possible in many parts of the country to graduate with "used car" worth of debt or even no debt at all.

Part of our "college affordability" problem is real, but part of the problem is a "buying luxury goods with a credit card" problem. Attending one of the best universities in the world and living in their dorms and staying for four full years and not working full time over the summers + weekends during the school year... that's the most expensive option possible. There are plenty of much less expensive options for most college students in the US.

[1] https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/tuition

[2] https://www.siue.edu/paying-for-college/tuition-and-fees/und...

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-report...

[4] (408.2512) + (168.25(52-12-3)) = $8,844

But it might go away for a year or two, which is enough time to do an incredible amount of economic damage -- far more than what we save by not bailing them out.

They don't need to be indispensable. they just need to be critical enough that not bailing them out is much more expensive than bailing them out.

The solution is to prevent this scenario from ever happening in the first place, by either requiring sufficient competition, or requiring sufficient capital reserves (see: banking and reinsurance), or just nationalizing the thing.

Seriously, use your small claims court!

I've used small claims 4 times now. Each time, I spent less time with the court than I did with customer service prior to the court.

Lesson learned. I ask customer service once, in plain english, on a recorded line. If they don't resolve it at that opportunity, I just go to small claims.

And it's not like this is totally unprecedented. That's exactly what we did with banks in 2008.

Only if you assume perfect liquidity and either 1) a constant or monotonically increasing stock price or else 2) a huge cash reserve such that selling stock at basement prices or taking out highly leveraged loans is never necessary.

If a company parks $1 in a treasury bond during good times, they have that $1 + approximately inflation in bad times.

If a company buys back their stock at $N and then has to sell a large amount of stock at $M for M << N (or take a leveraged loan), then the company is only getting fractions on the dollar of that original $1.

Unfortunately, the scenarios where huge companies really need cash now pretty well overlap with the scenarios where there are huge liquidity shocks and crashing equities prices. Such as a financial crisis or a pandemic.

If students in your program can ask the mentor questions about their problem sets, I highly doubt Duke CS department will allow this.

Came to write this. Homework help services were specifically called out in our course policies as a form of academic dishonesty. Getting outside help on a problem set would get you kicked out of the major. It would take a lot of care to design a tutoring program that was specific to our courses and didn't run afoul of our academic integrity rules.

OP: this is a nice service for universities that allow this sort of thing, but you should be sure you're not running afoul of programs with stricter academic integrity rules (which, AFAIK, includes most top programs).

Yes, 2 full standard deviations would be the higher (ie, lower) extreme of my "within a std.dev. or two" ballpark.

I use that ballpark because I'm told it's (very roughly) the population that my students were randomly selected from. My methodology isn't perfect, to be sure, but I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air :)

The specific criteria is that none of my students had an IEP. And, by definition, everyone more than two standard deviations from mean had an IEP.

Now, probably there are a lot of students with IEPs who are less than two standard deviations from the mean. Hard to know who those students were in terms of the IQ distribution. Probably a lot of them are on the lower end, but possibly learning disabilities are more smoothly distributed than that. And I also don't know how many students were excluded, so even if we knew where to concentrate their mass in the IQ distribution, it wouldn't help.

It's worth noting that this means I also never worked with students who tested above two standard deviations from the mean. "Gifted" students had their own special education that ran concurrently with the period of the day when the enrichment activities were done. I guess the assumption is they'd be fine, but I'm told by some teachers that's not necessarily the case.

As white collar automation starts to hit hard over the next 5-10 years, the number of desk jobs will massively decline. Also, most of the remaining people who work desk jobs will be doing some sort of programming.

I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to code or become programmers...

Why?

Most programming isn't as hard as people seem to think.

I used to think that a perhaps some really smart middle schoolers can learn enough about programming to build a simple CRUD-based web app: a bit of Python or PHP, just enough SQL (the idea of tables, columns, rows, and cells; SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements), and just enough HTML/Javascript.

However, after doing a few semester-long middle school enrichment activities with randomly (not self) selected students, I am now relatively certain that EVERY "normal" middle schooler can learn enough Python, SQL, and HTML/Javascript to build a CRUD web app.

...because trucking jobs will be gone.

Driving a truck is quite a bit more difficult than people seem to think. Frankly, I'm fairly confident that truck drivers will be better off than your average white collar worker, even if trucking is completely automated.

In the world where "everyone at a desk does some programming", any properly educated person within a std.dev. or two of average intelligence will be fine. The only question is whether there will be enough work to go around.

As it is, insurance companies are both not insuring against it and also teeing up to massively increase rates [1].

Why only dip once when you can dip twice?

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/26/health-insurance-p...

The fundamental conceit of csrankings.org is right in the name. US News (and anyone else) does just as good a job. And always will. You can matter have your measurement gamed. Or you can measure in obscurity. Or you can matter and not measure. Pick one.

For undergraduate, just go wherever is cheapest with a reasonable curriculum and non-joke professors (decently difficult to hack: couple hundred citations and also real industry experience). Emphasize places that will also teach you non-CS skills (a second major, a great network that in addition implicitly teaches you the right type of communication skills, etc.).

For a masters, just don't.

For a phd, go with the best advisor you can find and finish fast.

Ignore rankings. They exist to be hacked. And academics are great hackers.

Those are called taxis.

The pros think that demand is going down due to economic activity

Does that make any sense? Do people eat fewer grains when economic activity goes down?