Archive for 2011
August 18, 2011
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In The Atlantic, The Debt Crisis At American Colleges.
How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford’s professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there’s more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.
As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is “only” $27,650. What the Board doesn’t say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.
A fact of academic life is that the tuition-debt nexus keeps most colleges going.
Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. This can’t go on forever.
TOP 10 RICK PERRY ONE-LINERS SO FAR.
August 17, 2011
READER DAVE GARTEN SPOTS A DEAL: “Professor, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Marked from $299.99 to $149.99. Prime shipping, too.” I’ve never used Lightroom, but people who do seem to like it.
UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz writes: “Lightroom is worth trying. It has most of the processing power of Photoshop CS5 but is easier to use and much easier for batch processing.”
And reader Dale Burnett emails: “Thank you for posting that link to the good deal. I didn’t buy last time you posted an Amazon deal on Lightroom and have been kicking myself since. Didn’t miss it this time and I used your link so you get paid.” Thanks!
FIREBAGGER? Obama Campaign Staffer Sends Out Email Bashing Paul Krugman And The ‘Firebagger Lefty Blogosphere.’
I think that’s supposed to be a counterpart to “Teabagger,” but it makes me think of something entirely different. “I’ll get you damn kids for this!”
MARINES HOLD Diaper Derby. “All the babies did outstanding.”
AT AMAZON, deals on textbooks.
ADVICE TO SELF-DEFENSE SHOOTERS: Slow Down.
LONGEVITY UPDATE: Switch in cell’s ‘power plant’ declines with age, rejuvenated by drug. “Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found a protein normally involved in blood pressure regulation in a surprising place: tucked within the little ‘power plants’ of cells, the mitochondria. The quantity of this protein appears to decrease with age, but treating older mice with the blood pressure medication losartan can increase protein numbers to youthful levels, decreasing both blood pressure and cellular energy usage.” Faster, please.
GIVE ME A NICE 2008 RIBEYE: Naturally Occurring Preservative Could Give Fresh Meats a Three-Year Shelf Life.
TEST-DRIVING THE NEW Toyota Yaris.
ANOTHER ROBERT HEINLEIN QUOTE:
It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants “just a few minutes of your time, please — this won’t take long.” Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!
So learn to say No — and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.
(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don’t do it because it is “expected” of you.)
Not as good as the “bad luck” one, but good.
SO CAN THEY GET ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROTECTION? Data: The Vanishing Millionaires.
RICK PERRY’S POLITICAL OPENING IS A BIG SUCCESS:
Wednesday saw a full-blown media hyperventilation – stoked by the president and White House press secretary – over Perry’s comments that it would be “almost treasonous” if the Federal Reserve chairman were to print more money in a bid to boost the wilting economy in advance of the 2012 election.
The Obama campaign and its liberal backers have begun to build the narrative that Perry is a reckless and radical figure, including one cable and radio host who cut a Perry sound bite to make it seem that Perry had said Obama was “a dark cloud” hanging over the American economy instead of what he did say, which was that uncertainty and debt were dark clouds hanging over the economy. This led to a long discussion about Perry’s secret racism and the racist tendencies of the Tea Party movement.
Meanwhile, other reporters have been digging through the trove of piquant Perry statements from his decade governing Texas, including the hot microphone moment when he left the set of a querulous TV interview saying “adios mofo.”
None of this is going to hurt Perry. In fact — do I really have to spell this out to our lame punditry? I guess so — they’ve played right into Perry’s hands. First, he’s building a narrative that consumer inflation, currently accelerating, is the fault of reckless Obama spending and the Bernanke money-printing that supported it. The attacks on him over the Bernanke comments just draw attention to it. Right now inflation, especially in food and other necessaries, is an irritant, but it’s likely to be a much bigger issue by election day. Second, when former Bush people attack him for dissing Wall Street and the Fed, it’s helping him put distance between himself and Bush. That’s not as important as it used to be, since the Bush era is starting to look like an economic golden age compared to what came later — those $180 billion deficits and sub-5% unemployment rates don’t look so bad now, do they? — but it’s still essential to Perry building the necessary separation. And watch him attack Obama for being too close to Wall Street and the Fed before this is all over.
As for the “Adios, mofo,” line, well, it calls up another Perry resemblance. That’s not going to hurt him either. If you’re living through a seventies rerun, why not look like a seventies clean-up hero? And I can think of worse advice for Obama than A man’s got to know his limitations. . . .
HMM: Scientists may have found early biomarker for ovarian cancer. “An antibody present in infertile women might also be an early biomarker for ovarian cancer, raising hopes that more lives can be saved with early detection of what is often called a ‘silent killer,’ since ovarian cancer is often not detected until late stages. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago say that the marker could be an antibody that responds to the presence of mesothelin, which is found all over ovarian cancer cells, but in limited numbers on normal cells.”
THE “FOOD PRICE SPIKE” is still with us.
UPDATE: For first time, more corn used for ethanol than livestock. Reader Drew Kelley writes: “Pretty soon, $5/lb bacon will be ‘the good old days’.”
HOW TO pitch a blogger.
WHY YOU SHOULD apply for that job.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals.
UPDATE: Yeah, the link’s not going to the right page, and I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with the HTML, and it came from the Amazon link-generator. This has happened a couple of times. If anybody at Amazon is reading this, what gives?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, try it now.
DAVID STOCKMAN: Rick Perry Is Right, the Fed Is “Totally Wrong.”
MICHELLE MALKIN not so hot on Rick Perry.
ACTIONS THAT MAKE HEROES: Medford man returns rare handgun to Medal of Honor winner.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING UNION: “So the Communications Workers of America are out on strike against Verizon. The most remarkable thing is not the alleged acts of sabotage against land lines that serve hospitals , or the shocking willingness of an anonymous Verizon manager to threaten retaliation against the more pugnacious strikers when they go back to work (the NLRB rather frowns on that sort of thing). No, the really remarkable thing is this: who cares? . . . In other words, while profits have recovered since 2008, the striking workers aren’t generating those profits. In fact, the legacy network of copper wires they service is rapidly turning into a cost center rather than a source of profits. They’re essentially asking that the firm divert money from the wireless business to beef up pay and benefits for the union workers even as the number of subscribers they have to service is falling. It’s not really surprising that management is saying no.”