TPRJones' Last 10 Shared Items in Google Reader

Remember Bronzemurder? It was a Dwarf Fortress after-action report told in illustrations by New Zealand artist Tim Denee. You don’t? God, is that smell you? Isn’t it a little early to be drinking? Nevermind. The point is he got commissioned by an Australian mag PC PowerPlay to do another one, Oilfurnace, and it’s now available on his blog. Again, in true Dwarf Fortress style it’s a tale of bravery and ingenunity that nevertheless ends horribly. Go read. And, if you like it, go buy a print. You might as well browse Mr. Denee’s Ten Feats of Ernest Hemingway while you’re over there, too.

Shared by TPRJones
Finally, a company that does things RIGHT.

It won't last, of course. Every organization eventually starts to fill up with dead weight. It can't be helped. It'll start with some upper management jerkoff that's not worth anything but there's noone who can fire him for it. And then he promotes worthless ass-kissers, and the tree rots from the head.

But in the meantime, this is a shining example of the way to run a company.

Netflix lets its staff take as many vacation days as they want, and they can take them whenever they want, and according to news site The Telegraph, it works. Now we're wondering: How much vacation time do you get every year?

With a long weekend ahead here in the States, everybody's gearing up for a little government-sanctioned R&R. But how about the rest of the year, when it's not a government holiday?

How Many Vacation Days Do You Get Every Year?online surveys

Regardless of how many vacation days you get, it's also worth keeping in mind that you still need to, you know, use them—something Americans are particularly bad at doing. Photo by biker germany.

Shared by TPRJones
Allow me to say, "No shit." Life is that which survives. After billions of years it's gotten pretty darn good at it. Ecosystems are no fragile little breakable things, they are robust and will spring up anywhere if given half a chance.

This sort of new story is only surprising to those foolish enough to believe in all the hogwash theories about how mankind is destroying the planet.

It has come to my attention that the torrent located at [URL] is ridiculous.

Not only it requires installing APE plugin, and generating keyfiles using some scary tool, it contains an [expletive] *WINDOWS* program to verify the validity of this release. The "How-to" section in the description is just incomprehensible, and won't be understood by anyone other than the writer of this description.

Clearly, the "cracker" Minamoto did a lazy job and don't know how to crack software. It's an [expletive] SINGLE BOOLEAN SWITCH that validates the licence, it doesn't require any Application Enhancer tricks or whatever.

I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.

TUAWMac indie dev asks The Pirate Bay to keep a torrent of his software originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Moar graphs n charts dis wai!

Source: XKCD

Shared by TPRJones
What makes this trend really insane is that the quality and value of higher education is - as an average - very nearly zero. There are exceptions, of course, and it depends a lot on the degree program being studied. But for the vast majority of students in a four-year institution the quality experience they get from it is completely outside the classroom and has nothing to do with professors, books, or tests. And then over 60% of them drop out before they get that piece of paper.

This chart from Clusterstock (via Carpe Diem) shows the cost of college tuition comparison to historical housing prices and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the same period. The CPI is designed to track our cost of living by estimating the average price of consumer goods and services purchased by households. Everything was normalized to 100 starting in 1978.

While housing went up 4x at its peak (~400), college tuition has gone up over 10x. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds says the higher education bubble is about to burst:

It’s a story of an industry that may sound familiar. The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they’re buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn’t.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I’m afraid it’s also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it’s better for us to face up to what’s going on before the bubble bursts messily.

The college tuition prices being tracked in the chart was done by the CPI for US cities for “College Tuition and Fees”. According to this BLS.gov link, this tracks actual expenditures by households, and not some measure of median college tuition, which is often just the “retail price” before various forms of financial aid and/or scholarships.

Another hot topic is the rapidly rising cost of health care. Well, college tuition CPI beats that too, from this Wikipedia chart:

I know that I’m scared to imagine what college will cost in another 20 years. Dealing with this issue will be tricky, with huge amounts of easy government credit being given to 18-year-olds that are being told by everyone (including parents) that it is totally worth it. For many people, it will indeed be worth it. For others, not so much.

In my humble opinion, it also seems obvious that this trend can’t survive forever. But will it burst like a bubble? Perhaps if the government turns off the loans suddenly, but that seems unlikely. I like Reynold’s idea that there may be an educational revolution with the internet, online coursework, and changing educational standards.