The irony of your comment is that it reproduces exactly the line of thinking that you criticize. You realize that janitors, by having physical access to almost all parts of a business, are capable of more havoc than IT folks. They often have physical access to all the same systems that IT people do and much more. If potential to cause damage should correlate with compensation, I'd argue that the janitors should get paid the most in any organization.

I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me? Do you know how much I value the things I learned (both in and out of the classroom) at the university? No, of course not, because you don't know me. It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.

Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck. Some of us want to enjoy the journey too.

I am a far better person for my university education. Even if it cost me money in the long run, I'm happy I went.

The previous discussion is why the base rate fallacy is so dangerous. According to wikipedia, the base rate for autism is 6 / 1,000. That means a random child has a 0.6% chance of having autism. A test that raises that to 5% is a huge improvement (almost an order of magnitude).

Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.

I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.

No evil associated with a company?

I find this defense of high speed trading odd -- it puts the cart before the horse. Liquidity is not a good in itself which should be promoted above all else. Liquidity in a market is important so that the price can correctly reflect the value of the thing being traded -- without liquidity a person may want to buy or sell without someone on the other end and thus the price may not reflect the actual value.

But, if high frequency trading creates liquidity but does so by also introducing price distortions (like a sudden crash), then we *should* get rid of high frequency trading so that we can maintain correct (and mostly stable) prices.

"Reading both sides" is not always a good way to find out the truth. If one side is willing to lie and the other isn't, then you won't get a balanced sense of the situation from reading both sides. Your view will be slanted toward the side willing to lie.

Perhaps no news outlet will outright lie (perhaps), but I am very confident that Fox News is perfectly willing to report things with the slimest of corroboration as cold, hard fact if it suits their political agenda. I don't mean to pick on right, there are plenty of left wing organizations that do the same too.

My point is simply that reading a bunch of different sources is not guaranteed to give you an accurate picture of the world. More broadly, this is why I think news aggregation, like google news, cannot take the place of a single, good news source.

Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events. The problem with google news is that they include every major news source without preference for reliability.

If the NYT and Fox News are covering the same story, I want to read the NYT coverage and not Fox News. I don't trust FN, and I do trust NYT (at least I trust them more).

This is completely right. Just because a particular vehicle for speech doesn't allow *all* speech doesn't imply that it's not a vehicle for public debate about certain topics. The newspaper doesn't print porn, does that mean that newspapers are not involved in an active democracy? Or that any attempt to censor a newspaper doesn't effect free speech because the newspaper doesn't allow a totally unvetted expression of ideas?

Thinking about free speech in this all-or-nothing way is not productive, and it tends to alienate people from supporting free speech because they feel like they have to support porn.

They do. Both CMU and Pitt have private police forces. And you don't think that things like Pitt games bring venue to the city? The city seems to think so.

I would hope you think we should also charge churches real estate taxes. I feel pretty confident all the churches take up more real estate than the universities. I wonder what the public reaction to that would be?

Greedy? CMU has a *tiny* endowment compared to their status (only 10% of their operating budget). None of student tuition goes to the endowment, its all used to operate the university. And, of course, many students seem very happy to pay it. I wish that universities didn't have to charge that much, but I think it's unfair to call CMU greedy.

It's not the shrinking tax base that's to blame. Its the city mismanagement of it's pension fund. "That need stems from decades of questionable management of the city's pension fund, which holds around one-third of the $899 million it should to cover future obligations."

Not only do they pay state taxes, but the city of Pittsburgh has an income tax (not an insignificant one either). In addition Carnegie Mellon along with other non-profits in the city *voluntarily* contribute money to the city to help pay for services. Many university students stay in the city after they graduate, getting jobs, etc. Of course the employees of these universities pay a lot of taxes. Even more, universities like Carnegie Mellon attract businesses. Several businesses (including Google and Intel) have offices on Campus and have employees (who pay taxes).

This is an utterly absurd attempt to cover a budget shortfall by preying on those who have little political power. They mayoral election just happened two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, so the students who are angry about this will have moved on by the next time there is an election. Many of them aren't registered to vote in the city anyway.

Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.

Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)

Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.

This is the standard response I always see to people questioning day traders (or to the more recent high-frequency trading). Liquidity is a good thing, so that those who want to buy can and those who want to sell can. But, as I recall, day traders are a recent invention. Is there any real evidence that the market had insufficient liquidity before day traders? Why isn't the vast amount of trading done for slightly longer term investments sufficient to create liquidity? And don't go telling me we need liquidity from day traders to support other day traders.

Yes and no. My contractual duties don't require anything *in particular*, but they do require that I do several of a list things to get promotion or tenure. On that list is writing a textbook.

I don't know about where you work, but for me the distinction between "spare time" and "work time" is extremely blurry. Other than for classes and meetings, I don't ever have to come to campus. But, of course, I'm expected to do a significant amount of work -- probably more than I could accomplish if I only worked 9-5 M-F.

That's only true in two cases: 1. the textbook is for a big market class like an introductory class. No matter how widely adopted, I don't think an advanced textbook on, say, the philosophy of biology is going to make much money. The market is too small.

2. You have to get the book adopted at a lot of universities. My parents wrote an introductory physics textbook that was adopted at a good number (more than 10), but they never made much money at it. We have a friend that has the majority of the introductory physics market and he's rich, but he's a rarity.