Obviously uniquely shared by thousands of fellow students.

Protip: that means you're paying a lot less money as a result. Maybe everyone should be going to schools like that.

Thanks for the link. I wonder if those limits get adjusted each year for education-related inflation?

This reminds me of the NASA New Start Inflation Index. It's supposed to be an estimate of inflation particular to aerospace projects that NASA is involved with. The problem comes in that it also gets used to adjust costs estimates for future NASA projects which in turn affects the index in the future. As a result there's a feedback in the index that causes it to grow faster than normal producer inflation by a great amount.

Meh, I'e had a successful career without college. It's a bitch finding that first professional job, but after that college really stops mattering.

Only if you are trying to comply with US regulations, say because you work at Stanford University (the source of the linked document). Since any hypothetical "professional" fitters in China would not be complying with US regulation, there's no guarantee that they would fit properly. It would have been better to link to generic fitting instructions for the masks in question as that would actually be useful.

If I'm sorting stuff lexicographically, I generally use bin sort (often grouping things into four or so large bins first like say A-G, H-M, N-S, and T-Z for sorts on people's surnames). For numerical records, I use merge sort. Sometimes I use both, like for sorting cards (bin sort on suit and then merge sort each suit). It can be quite a time saver when you have to sort a large number of paper records to learn these sorting algorithms.

I suppose what could make this story more interesting is what sort of nontrivial algorithms do people use on a regular basis in a non-programming situation?

Why would a school deliberately try to lose either accreditation or eligibility for student loans? Just because they aren't accidentally or deliberately running into these limits, doesn't mean that the limits don't exist. For example, I doubt a program could just double their tuition costs overnight and still expect to be covered by the various loan programs.

I got a doctorate in math for around $-150k. Yes, that's a negative sign. And it would have been awesome, but for the fact that I spent ten years to do that.

In the "STE" portion of STEM fields, if you are any good, there's no reason to take on debt at all for a post-graduate education.

It doesn't need to be perfectly leak-proof. Or last that long. I wonder why there's all this drama over nuclear waste and yet not over normal trash, which contains a lot of stuff with near-infinite half-life like lead or mercury, for example.

Extrusion will probably stay a lot cheaper than 3d printing for making flat strips like this.

Except that there isn't anything at Fukushima which is wildly uncontained.

Nothing is good for a start. Can't you discuss this without veering into irresponsible hyperbole?

I agree with you here. As others have noted, the accreditation system is a big obstacle to supply meeting demand. I'd wager that most of this growth is in established campuses which don't have to try very hard to keep accreditation.

But it's also in the nature of the various loan programs. I doubt schools could arbitrarily increase their costs from year to year without losing access to the loan programs.

It is. For example, total enrollment in college went from 8.6 million students in 1970 to 19.1 million in 2010. Also, female enrollment rates have gone up a lot. So supply more than doubled over that time period.

There were three similar accidents (at least partial core melt down) to Fukushima in the past 60 years in civilian nuclear power plants. None of those accidents were due to an overwhelming environmental factor damaging the reactors in question. Given the number of reactors out there, that's quite a small number. And I think it does matter how many such accidents there were.

They don't need to be. Fukushima is not so costly that we need to avoid it at all costs. Further, there's this thing in engineering called "learning from experience".

Unless you can't meet payments.

And if the earthquake didn't happen there wouldn't have been that acceleration or the inundation by tsunami.

I think one of the things I find most offensive about the Fukushima accident are all the armchair engineers who, although exercising no real experience, responsibilities, or perceivable judgment in engineering themselves, have no trouble equating hindsight with foresight. It's easy to claim that there were "management failures". You just type it in. A work of a few seconds and you can go on to picking your nose or whatever it is you do when you aren't berating nuclear power plant operators.

I'll note here there was no real attempt on your part to consider the accident. From the beginning, you've been squawking about management failures without giving any thought to what was going on. For example:

Why build for a 30+ meter tsunami? If that never happens aside from the occasional near hit by a fair-sized asteroid every few million years, then what is the point of that bit of overengineering aside from just making the whole project a lot more expensive? Keep in mind that the current protection was more than adequate and if they hadn't flooded out all their backup generators, this whole thing would have been a non-story. Now we know that's a problem we can look for it in existing and planned nuclear plants.

But the ignorance of the above quote shines through on the claim that they should have designed for a magnitude 15 earthquake. That ends up being a billion times more energy than the magnitude 9 earthquake that actually happened. There's no known mechanism by which the crust can store that much energy in one place and release it. There may not be enough such energy tied up in all of the Earth's crust to do that.

So it's real easy to play armchair engineer on the internet. On the other hand, it takes extraordinary effort on the part of the nuclear plant operators and their regulators to anticipate all these scenarios despite having a very limited history of reactor failures. Nor do they or their needy customers have unlimited sums of money with which to entertain every possible scenario that the armchair engineer can dump on the internet or implement ridiculous factors of safety just because it makes the armchair engineer feel smug.

Similarly, I understand that nuclear reactors, especially the older ones, are rather complex. Yet no one has thought to consider that maybe the generator placement slipped through the cracks just because of how complex the Fukushima plant was? No it had to be criminal negligence!

Finally, engineering doesn't magically get it right the first time. They learn by doing. So if say, you want a nuclear power plant operator who can meet your exacting standards for not fucking up, then you need to endure a few generations of operators who don't quite get there. If we were to just get rid of the plants and the operators, then we would never acquire the experience.