Bad advice

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck. For decades, the typical college graduate’s wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn’t grow, even among those who went to college. The government’s statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor’s degree, adjusted for inflation, didn’t rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level. College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only.”
—The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2008

I was listening to a this American Life program with a segment titled “Hey Mister DJ.” In it NPR financial reporter, Adam Davidson, attempts to convince his cousin, DJ, to go back to college.

The spoiler is the Georgetown economist that he enlists to convince DJ ends up taking DJ’s side of being a dropout.

I don’t object to the advice per se. But I do have three issues to pick with this idiot economist.

  1. The economist claims that because DJ’s job is non-tradeable it is more secure than a job after a college educator? Where is the economic data for that? The answer is, there is none.
  2. The economist says that the reason people want you to stay in college is “because [college educated people] have snotty biases” Where is the proof of that? The answer is, there is none because it’s a statement of belief. Dj admits that the members of the family who have been college educated are “very successful.” I guess very successful == snotty. I’d like to see that economic study.

I shouldn’t be surprised of such a fact-free advice from a a free-trade nut.

Why does that get me angry? Because here are the facts.

  1. A college graduate earns, on average $25,000/year more than a high school diploma. Adjusted for inflation and the cost of that education, that’s $300,000 ROI—pretty much the best deal around.
  2. You need a college education to get a higher degree which opens even larger pay and higher lifetime economics ROI. A college education doesn’t preclude you from any of the jobs that DJ has had.
  3. Here is a typical statistic against a college education, it comes from the Wall Street Journal and I quoted it at the top of this article. Read it very closely, what it is saying is that the wage gap between college and high-school is no longer increasing and that you have to get an even higher degree if you want guaranteed employment. The clever use of words omits the fact that from 2001-2006, all wages have been depressed—hence the economics term “jobless recovery.” It never disputes the basic premise that college-educated workers make more money, have more job security, and have more stable and healthier households. And how will you get that higher degree anyways without a college degree?

Let’s apply my overpriced, college-educated brain to this economics professors arguments, shall we? (All of which gives me my third issue with her if you’re counting at home):
Continue reading about The application of my college education after the jump

Autoloading and Lazy Loading

Two and a half years ago, when first wrestling with the Tagged codebase, I asked Andrei about replacing all my PHP includes with __autoload. I was told under no uncertain terms to not do this.

I did it anyway.

It’s not that Andrei is wrong in his admonition. Far from it! For reasons that I don’t quite care to know, there are caching and lookup optimizations that APC cannot do when it has to switch context to run __autoload. But the problem in practice was two-fold:

  1. The company was bug-driven and the easiest way to eliminate an “Undefined class” error was to go into the preinclude script and include it. Voilá! problem solved at the expense of code bloat. (This bug happens often when deserializing nested objects from cache.)
  2. There are slowdowns when you use include_once where include would do, or when you don’t use the full path in your include, or when you construct your full path from symbols. How many of us do this? Heck, I’m still trying to get used to the idea of include_once and require_once. Ahh the days when I’d have to write symbols with every include file!
  3. More to the previous. If you have deep dependencies and don’t use a FrontController pattern, you’re going to have to use require_once() which will get executed multiple times. An __autoload only gets executed once.

At a certain point, optimization gives way to convenience and practicality.

For Tagged, this was that PHP would allocate 12MB/80ms to say “hello world”, 20MB/465ms to display the homepage, and 22MB/1965ms/1207ms to return my profile page

After the rewrite it takes 0.3MB/3ms to say hello world and 3.7MB/109ms to return my profile page.

Continue reading about lazy loading after the jump

Vee-oh-la

Voilá!

I am forever reminded of the French section of my Latin I class when reading the first lesson, J— pronounced this “Vee-O-La!”

If it isn’t obvious from the repeated mentions of me almost failing French I, I’m glad J— was called to read that day.

New York vs. New Yorker

There was been a lot of hoopla a couple years ago that New York Magazine was eclipsing my beloved The New Yorker.

It bothers me that people often confuse the two.

So for your edification, The New Yorker is the magazine where we first found out that America was torturing people and it published a photo essay moved a prominent politician to switch parties. And New York Magazine publishes stuff like this:

Jake DeSantis, a 40-year-old commodities trader at AIG, was an unlikely face of Wall Street greed. Stocky and clean cut, with an abiding moral streak, he’d worked summers for a bricklayer in the shadow of shuttered steel mills outside Pittsburgh; he was valedictorian of his high-school class and attended college at MIT.…

When DeSantis arrived at the office the morning his letter appeared in the paper, the AIG traders gave him a standing ovation. In some quarters of the press, he was vilified.

It might help to remember who Jake DeSantis is. (The whole article is similarly unintentionally revealing more of the magazine’s values and the author’s preferences than of anything else.) And lest you think that this is some weird outlier for the Magazine, it’s not.

While I applaud Jake for donating his bonus, Really?, I mean, Really?!?

Continue reading about Some comparisons after the jump

Join Kiva for a Developer Drink-up

Image:Kiva.org logo.svg

Halle is interning at Kiva, which, given her personality, I figure is her dream internship.

Kiva is a microfinance site for the poor that allows anyone to give flat-rate microloans via PayPal. As a coincidence of the “I seem to have a lot of cash” and my New Year’s resolution to be a more responsible person, I’ve recently started to put a tiny fraction of my income into Kiva. You can view my lender page here to see that I currently participate in 17 microloans.

I mention all this because Kiva will be sponsoring a Developers Happy Hour this Thursday at their headquarters in San Francisco. Considering I give 5% of my money lent back to Kiva, I’m going for the drinks. 🙂

(Find out more about the concept from Muhammad Yunus’s Nobel lecture, the FrontLine program on social entrepreurship, conservative columnist Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the New York Times, and the books Banker To the Poor, and Creating a World Without Poverty.)

Continue reading about Moneywatch.com after the jump

CableBox

The CableBox

I like to wait at least a day to mull over a purchase, sale or no sale. But I was waiting months on a purchase of some stuff, so tacking on a <a href="http://www.bluelounge.com/cablebox.php" title="CableBox—Blue LoungeBlueLounge CableBox (or two) to my A+R order didn’t seem such a bad idea.

Blue Lounge Cable Box(es)

Blue Lounge CableBox(es). You can Buy them in white or black.

Usually snap buying decisions are a bad idea, but this one turned out not so bad.

White side preinstalledWhite side installedThe white CableBox installed

The “white side” before, during, and after the installation.

Who knew a bunch of plastic boxes with cutouts could do so much!

Continue reading about More shots of the CableBox after the jump