It'll probably get lost in the junk down here, but I was curious just how many human life equivellents was being sapped by these inane ads. If you look up the 2011 sales figures, the top 100 DVDs sold 147 million copies. Assuming each was watched only once, and by one person, the anti-piracy warnings waste a total of 93.27 years of human life per release-year (6.33775293*10^-7 Year Waste/DVD * ~147 million DVD/Release Year).

I'm comfortable with that dimensional analysis. Easy peezy. I'm less sure about the power consumption of warning: 20 seconds at 35 watts (A typical DVD player) would be 700 watt seconds. That times 147 million would come out to around 28.58 Megawatt Hours a year. That seems a bit much, though, so I may have made a mistake there. The average home supposedly uses around 11 megawatt hours a year. At 11 cents a kw/hr, that's 3,144.16666 dollars.
Now I'm not sure how to price leisure time, but I think the right economic thing to do would be to assume it's worth greater than or equal to the alternative activity (earning whatever per hour). I don't know what that number is, so I'm just going to assume it's a buck fifty arbitrarily. I don't think I could find many people to sit willing to sit being bored for 1.50 an hour, but I don't have time to dig through the lit to find a better one. At 1.50 an hour, the 20 seconds waste around 1.22 Million Dollars a year. which is a fair bit than the 3.1 Thousand dollars wasted electricity.

For those who must know, 93.27 years is 0.000213 Library of Congress equivalents, assuming you can read one book a week.

If you'd read, you'd see the number is 40 years off. That's 10 less than 50!

I think you're being unfair with the money begging. Basically, here's what they'd said (by my reading): Fusion power is going to happen. It's a matter of when, not if. But if we want it in a timeframe that most humans are used to working (before most of us are dead and buried) we need to start taking it seriously. Insert allusions to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions, both of which involved pouring a ton of money into a specific scientific problem.

I'm pretty disappointed they didn't talk more about the NIF. Pretty much every article I read about "Yet another fusion problem solved; thinks rosier than we thought!" has been work coming out of the NIF.

To quote the great, late Carl Sagan,
I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

I don't know enough, for and against, to make a reasonable decision. And I'm not in a position to effect change, even if I had an opinion. I think it's better for me to leave the debate to the real experts, instead of trying to prognosticate from my armchair. It's a crazy idea. It just might work.

That would be nice. Except it's entirely untrue. And there is money, it's not 3k, and it's not for `simply living there.` It's royalties on oil money and rent, which instead of directly being plugged back into education, or whatever, the state decided to let people spend as they see fit. The amount doesn't even cover cost of living, which is incredibly high due to logistics.

In Alaska, there's two places that do the same. Good food. Amazing pizza. Reasonable tickets, and bar prices for beer and wine.

Everytime I'm in Anchorage, I go to the Bear Tooth, because it doesn't matter what movie is showing, it's worth it for the experience of seeing a movie like that.

Are you kidding me? Lab quality animals are cheap compared to the site licenses for good software to do the same. Never mind you lose a crapton of the detail. Site licenses can run into the five plus digits, easily, depending on enrolment. Plus you need computers to run them all on, and people to support those computers (granted, that's usually dumped onto IT's workload without ever giving them more pay or new workers). And if enrollment is high enough, as it is in many A&P courses (since pre-med, pre-vet, nursing, EMT, and general biology students all get fed through there), you might need a dedicated room to house all that. It adds up incredibly quickly. And that's ignoring that simulations are currently vastly inferior.

No. None of the models or simulations we've looked at capture the complexity or even the essence of what we're trying to teach in Anatomy & Physiology. And when it comes to practice of things like surgery, the answer becomes even more emphatic. And my area is Wildlife, where dead bodies are not in short supply. I've heard (And hearsay is the best evidence) the issue is larger in human work, where you have fewer human cadavers to practice on before you can move on to practising surgery on pigs. Not that many people donate their bodies to medical purposes (or donate their organs to people who need them, period!).

Who watches ads anymore anyways?
The overwhelming majority of Americans?

The problem is not the average loudness. If a channel is quiet, you can raise the volume and be fine. Loud? Turn it down, you're fine. It's sudden variation in volume that's the problem. You're cruising along, watching some TV, and then suddenly there's a super loud ad yelling at you at the top of its lungs. What's to do? Turn down the volume? Can't hear the news cast. Turn it down, and then up again? At some point, the average user is left with either "put a lot of effort into moderating the volume" or "say screw it and let things fall as they are."

I'm probably going to rot in obscurity down here, since I'm posting so late to the story. However, someone over here did a really basic analysis with the typical "unemployment by college major" data that the Wall Street Journal put up. They looked at variance in unemployment related to popularity of a major. While the data set was incomplete (they didn't have true sample size, so they used rank, and transformed rank), it showed clear indications that those with the lowest sample size had the highest variance in unemployment. Far from making some broad claims about the utility of a major, it suggests that the less popular majors have big issues with small sample size. A single individual's employment history has far more effect on the statistics of those rare 'terrible majors' than the more populous ones. The only way to make the data trustworthy is to look at it for a much longer slice in time than we typically examine it for.

Also, it's worth putting on your economics hat when you think of modifying incentives like this. The problem with the proposed structural change is it assumes that the government can react to changing incentives faster than an individual can. Where there is demand for labour is a shifting target from year to year, and decade to decade (Hell, it shifts from quarter to quarter in some cases!). By deciding where the incentives are, they government needs to be able to shift them to match need fast enough so when there's a shortage of Psychologists and a surplus of Biologists, people can react to it accordingly. I'm skeptical about a government's ability to react that quickly with policy. If you're going to include incentives, it's best to include incentives for education in general, and not for specific major, so such bias won't occur. If the incentives in the form of subsidization are equal across the board, demand signals should still be seen.

And taking off my stats and economics hats, and putting on my skeptic hat, I want to see percentage-wise how much these 'terrible' majors actually cost the system. My intuition based off of the variance in unemployment vs. rank-popularity is that it doesn't cost the system much at all, and this is much-ado about nothing while the real expenses (Military spending, Medical spending) is ignored. Of course, much of the current fury over debt ignores the fact that the government is not like household/private debt. The two are functionally different.

The clipboard is key. I've found the following pattern for having people leave me alone when I'm doing work out and about in outdoor places where people might (and sometimes should) ask me what the hell I'm doing there. An official looking hat works some of the time, and if people ask what I'm up to, I can point to it and say I work for them (even if I'm wearing a hat for a totally different organization). This seems to satisfy people. A clipboard works the majority of the time, although sometimes I have to wave it around and say I'm with XYZ organization. Any explanation, even a bad one, seems to work. An orange reflective safety vest has worked 100% of the time. It is the ultimate in human camouflage for walking around without question.

Luckily, I actually belong in those places when I'm working. But I've often wondered what sort of trouble other folks could get up to without anyone noticing.