I'm an audio nerd but I believe in the old adage: "Garbage in, garbage out." The problem with fidelity today is that there is almost not a single recording since 1990 that has been mastered properly.

Almost every single recording is overdriven to clipping amplitude levels, which makes a fidelity argument nonsensical. The loudness wars are partly to blame, but also the advent of digital audio workstations that allowed any idiot with a computer to record a "passable" album without possessing the kind of finer knowledge required to fine tune ("sweeten") during the mastering process to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of the analogue systems.

I'm not advocating spending thousands of dollars on the consumer end because once it's ruined in the recording, it's ruined forever. that and consumer audio is a ton of snake oil.

Speaker cables: get yourself 16-gauge zip cord from a hardware store, as long as it's OFC (annealed) copper it won't corrode and its thickness and shortness will dictate the only two parameters that matter: capacitance and inductance.

Vinyl: Bullshit. I can't begin to tell you the number of ways in which vinyl is inferior as an end user format. From the wear and tear on the grooves, to the compression on spiral grooves that causes one channel to pitch slightly differently than the other (due to pressure of the cutting stylus on each concentric portion of the groove already cut), and the limited (~80dB) dynamic range due to the narrow groove width and clarity... It's about the shittiest format you could listen to a highly dynamic recording in.

Then again if all you listen to is LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire, it doesn't matter... They'll sound like a dogs ass on a cheese grater recorded on crumpled wax paper and edited with a potato peeler no matter what format you buy their recordings in.

Not everyone is a Mark Zuckerberg or a Bill Gates. In fact, there are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. There are about 6.7 billion people who aren't Madonna, Michael Jackson or Warren Buffett, also.

We live the Age of Entitlement, where post-boomer parents sought to break from their parents' generation by not telling their kids "no" or treating them as average human beings. Every parent has a tendency to tell their child they're special, that they can do anything... but they can't. Just like I have cerebral palsy and I can't run a four minute mile, there are very few people who can come up with the right idea at the right time in the right set of social, financial and geographical circumstances to be the next Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Berkshire Hathaway*.

But most people aren't going to have that kind of royal flush of timing, circumstances and resources. Consider what it takes academically to get into a Harvard or Stanford, MIT or Princeton... The people who drop out of schools like this already have an intellectual and/or financial advantage over the other 99% of us. So regardless, you're probably going to have to work hard to be in the kind of environments where these people found others to collaborate with and to raise capital to make these startups not end up in the bottomless pit of the ones that failed miserably.

Additionally, consider if Zuckerberg had finished college... he might be less of a robot. I've seen the guy in interviews. If Facebook didn't work out for him, I'm not sure I know anyone who'd want to work with the guy. But college tends to, on average, produce well-rounded human beings with a considerably broader world view than high school graduates. As an employer, if I have a choice between picking some basement dweller who codes exceptionally well, and an affable guy with a college degree who codes equally well, guess who I'll hire 9 times out of 10. But even aside from the numbers, there's value to having more knowledge than simply that which is necessary to be a walking money laundering machine.

The financial analysis presented in the OP as counterpoint to the "stay in school" argument is a bit flawed. For one thing, they compare investing $76,000 (roughly) from high school onward. Can I ask you how many high school graduates have $76,000 saved up? Most people who enter college aren't going to spend $76,000 of their own saved up money, nor given their average income without a college degree are they going to have an easy time saving up that amount of money over even the next ten years afterward. Sure, if you're Warren Buffett then by the time you were 20 you had $90,000 saved up (in 2009 dollars) because you started your first business at age 10... but, again, how many of you did that?

Another point... an undergraduate degree today really is the equivalent of what high school diplomas used to be... It's a minimum requirement in many cases. It doesn't end there. If you really want an edge, a graduate degree is where you're going to need to be. Most of the hardcore software engineering or network engineering jobs I see really require at minimum a BSEE or Comp Sci undergrad degree... unless you want to hit a ceiling and stay there.

The conventional reality is that college grads will either a) borrow, or b) get through on scholarships and grants. The latter come out ahead any way you slice it... because it takes hard work, academic competence, intelligence, and resourcefulness to get scholarships. They don't just fall into your hands. Those people will be successful no matter what, but college gives them an edge by introducing them to even more people, resources and methods to getting something off the ground.

Those who borrow aren't necessarily sunk. When I started college the loans I took were about 8%, and fixed, which in perspective is a pretty good rate for the time... right now, rates are considerably lower. Suffice it to say I consolidated my loans at a fixed 3.37% for the life of the loan, so that's probably the cheapest money I'll ever borrow... and the return is a substantial increase in my income ceiling.

Over that time, if I invest that marginal income wisely, particularly if I follow the value investing school of thought that Buffett championed for half a century, I can average better than 7% annually compounded over the next 40 years, beating both the effective rate of my loan as well as inflation. Of course, having some coursework in finance, economics and accounting also gives me a considerable advantage in being able to actually achieve sustainable long term returns intelligently without succumbing to the casino of speculation (read: daytrading, swing trading, derivatives, etc.). Can you get lucky on the market? sure but chances are more likely that you will not quintuple your money overnight on an IPO you had special shares set aside for because, unlike me, your aunt was not the CEO of a business class DSL startup (which, by the way, went under just a couple years later)... and even then, making money is one thing, but it takes skill to know how to KEEP it.

So, the net of all this, to me, is that there are tangible and intangible benefits to an undergraduate degree that far outweigh the costs. What one has to do, however, in this Age of Entitlement is avoid some of the pitfalls. Some students estimate their total expenses will be $100,000 because they're factoring in $4 lattes, a new car, an expensive laptop, an iPod, eating out every day, an uptown loft... things they don't NEED. Strip it down, and if you have to even live with your parents for a bit until you get through and save every penny, do it. Kids ideas today about living are pretty warped... they'll rack up $25,000 in credit card debt on gadgets and crap before they graduate, because, as surveys show, they think (not unlike many adults) that they are entitled to a standard of living they haven't yet earned. This trend may continue, but if value investing has taught me anything, its that regardless of what everyone else is doing, you don't have to be a moron. Let others be morons, and instead do the smart thing, invest in your education, invest in your future, and you'll have a much greater chance of coming out ahead of your peers by whatever measure pleases you—material, intellectual or otherwise.

* It should be noted that Warren Buffett, the 2nd richest man in America, 3rd richest in the world, was the only student to earn an A+ in Benjamin Graham's investment class at Columbia University, where he earned his M.S. in Economics.

God damned hipsters.

The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division's next case will involve Hamburglar and his doppelganger, H.R. Pufnstuf. This cold case has been unsolved for more than 20 years.

Rest assured, however, the SLOC Sheriff's Office: Antiquated Memes Division is determined to get to the bottom of it!

It appears that you can toggle instant off and just use regular search.

I had a conversation with a hipster the other day... Keep in mind I grew up in the 70's and 80's:

Hipster: "I had LCD Soundsystem's debut album before they recorded it."

Me: "i liked LCD Soundystem better when they were Gil-Scott Heron."

Him: "I stopped listening to the Arcade Fire years ago."

Me: "I liked Arcade Fire better when they were The Cure."

Him: "I listened to 80's music in the 90's."

Me: "I hated 80's music in the 70's."

Him: "I buy demo tapes on CD and transfer them to vinyl."

Me: "In 1981 I bought a Sony PCM-F1 and recorded digital on VHS."

Him: "I bought a $3000 Mac to run an NES Emulator."

Me: "I hacked my Atari VCS to make international phonecalls."

Him: "My other computer is an Amstrad."

Me: "I sold my Amstrad to some hipster shmuck for 10x what I paid... Hey..."

Him: "Back in the day we only had 8-bit colors."

Me: "Back in my day, we didn't have colors. We had A color... Amber, white or green."

Him: "I watched Ninja Warrior when it was called Sasuke."

Me: "I watched Power Rangers when it was called Voltron."

Him: "I was the first kid on my block to play Mortal Kombat."

Me: "I was the only kid on my block to own "Pac Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia."

Him: "I played the first popular FPS, Wolfenstein 3-D."

Me: "I have Silas Warner's original Wolfenstein... in 2-D."

Him: "I listened to Massive Attack before House made their music popular."

Me: "I listened to Massive Attack when they had lyrics."

Him: "Oh yeah, I buy corduroy pants from the thrift store."

Me: "I gave my corduroy pants from third grade to the thrift store. You're wearing them."

I listen to bands so obscure they haven't been formed yet.

IRC never had cool people. I know, I was one of them.

Either you have a life, or you're feigning ignorance trying to one up us all... damn hipsters.

I hear every bar that you go to is more relevant than every bar I go to.

Despite electromagnetism being many times stronger than gravity at close range (for an illustration of this, pick up a paperclip with a small magnet... the small magnetic field is counteracting the much larger gravitational field of the entire planet), if RF signals as one part of the EM spectrum have THIS strong a wide-field (the school) effect, wouldn't many other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from longwave to microwave to visible light, induce other kinds of effects? We evolved in a world bombarded by all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, the vast majority of which our senses cannot detect.

I smell a teenage conspiracy to avoid school... or at least some other, much more plausible cause at work.

First adopters are always the biggest geeks. The internet, however, is less about its applications today than it is about content. When I started college, the World Wide Web was just emerging, and one had to have some technical aptitudes to know what to do with a PPP dialer, Eudora or, even more primitive, PINE mail, Gopher, Telnet, etc. The first major graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, had just come out. But the net is so ubiquitous and content driven that users aren't talking about the net in terms of its technology... they're talking about it in terms of content: movies, music, images, news, friends, games, etc.

A technology becomes most useful is when the tech itself is at its most transparent, and the user is directly interfacing with their content with no tremendous awareness of the underlying layers (e.g. OSI model)... and that is precisely how it ought to be, be it for casual or business usage.

And let me add... that fiction implies misreporting of the facts. I am not advocating that, and that isn't what editorializing is. That's punditry, that's bullshit and that is the business of deception.

We journalists leave that business to the bloggers and network news outfits.

By that logic, scientists should never construct scientific theories, which are defined as the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.

You have a very odd definition of journalism that excludes 99% of what journalism is comprised of. Then we'd never have Hunter S. Thompson, Roger Ebert (whose "non-journalism" apparently earned him the first Pulitzer Prize in Criticism), Cameron Crowe and countless other writers who have contributed substantially to the fabric of our culture.

What you seem to be thinking of is sensationalism pieces with edge, the kind of crap Fox News does where they intentionally blur the line... but that isn't reporting, and it isn't editorializing, and it isn't even journalism. That's punditry, or as I like to call it, Talking Head Syndrome. CNN does it as well, as does MSNBC in some segments (though one can hardly confuse "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" or "KEITH OLBERMANN" for news reporting, as they're clearly delineated op-ed shows).

But what you seem to advocate is doing away with ALL op-ed, which is patently ridiculous for the reasons I already mentioned. Whether your personal experience is hobbled by what idiot bloggers and network news programs call "journalism", whether you believe it or not, it is possible, even beneficial, for a journalist to inform you from a given point of view, so long as they can properly substantiate their viewpoint.

Film criticism is still journalism as long as the writer's primary purpose is to inform the reader about the movie. But ALL reporting is inherently biased by what we see and how we perceive it, which may not necessarily represent exactly what has taken place.

It's just that reporting is biased to varying degrees. There's no objectivity in reporting because it is a subjective perspective, and only that perspective, through which one observes the world. Without rigorous testing of the assertions, which reporters never involve themselves in, they're always reporting on what limited information they have filtered through their perspective.

But again, I think you have a corrupted idea of editorializing thanks to network news and bloggers... Both of which barely qualify as journalism, news or reporting... if at all.

I didn't go into film criticism to change the world. I did it because I enjoy analyzing art, the way some people enjoy analyzing politics. If nobody used their critical thinking skills to share their analyses with others, we would be better off how, exactly?