Thursday: New office day!

Of course, I didn't take a picture of it or anything.  That would have made sense.  I also need to figure out what you put in an office.  I have a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookshelf, and a trashcan.  This fills about 25% of the space.  Fridge?  A second chair in case someone stops by?  I'd kind of like a tiny table that I could use to work on my laptop if I ever had to do that for some reason.  I also need to put up something that isn't "bland white walls."

Something like this, but less "god-y."

• So I think this is a good thing.  Here's why:  someone who studies economics thinks it would have been bad for Scotland.  Second reason: losing Scotland would probably force the rest of England to be run by the Tories all the time.  They're basically jerks, so that'd be a bad thing.
• Pizza.
• Surely there are polling results from long ago.  It seems like empirically determining the outlier distribution would be a better way to handle things.  Or at least confirm that the t with 2 degrees of freedom is a satisfactory model.
• Yes, but also no.  First up, anytime there's a "H/T" to the American Enterprise Institute, it's best to be on the look out for how you're being lied to.  The BLS link relies on java, and fuck you BLS, we don't need java to plot data.  I have a suspicion that the numbers listed in this plot are not inflation adjusted, and since "journalists" suck at everything now-a-days, I can't find any information on what kind of dollars they're using.  Looking at figure 3 (page 18) of this report compiled by Sheeo (no, google, I did not mean sheep), the cost of college per unit of education (their FTE) is roughly constant in inflation adjusted 2013 dollars at $12000.  My inflation calculator suggests that if the "annoying gif graph" is using unadjusted dollars, then that's 200% of the increase right there.  Looking further at Sheeo's figure 3, the "tuition" portion has increased by another 200% or so, which to within the handwavy numbers I'm using, matches the gif graph.  Great, so it all checks out, so there's the yes.  The "no" part is that if the tuition portion is increasing, yet the cost per unit is constant, the other part must be decreasing.  That's "educational appropriations."  The portion of the unit cost that's paid by the government as part of the taxation and disbursement of funds.  Tuition is not increasing because colleges are building fancy new dorms and hiring too many people who teach some dumb class no one needs.  Tuition is increasing because colleges have to make up the money that's been stolen by tax cutting assholes.
• James.