Here’s a quick link: “Why I bought a house in Detroit for $500” which, unlike the usual Buzzfeed fare, is an in-depth article rather than list illustrated with pictures. I got suckered into reading it on a “I’ll just check facebook while my file loads” browse. Read more

Here’s a link which is probably not going to get anyone (except WSJ subscribers) anywhere:  “More Students Subsidize Classmates’ Tuition.”  But if you copy the lines quoted below into your browser, you should be able to get to the non-paywalled version. Well-off students at private schools have long subsidized poorer classmates. But as states grapple with the rising cost of higher education, middle-income students at public colleges in a dozen states now pay a growing share of their tuition to aid... Read more

What the heck . . . coming off a discussion on Althouse on the non-cooking poor: what are your go-to fast-and-easy recipes, of the sort that can be made without access to high-falutin’ ingredients and fancy cooking tools, that would be perfectly adequate replacements for eating at McDonalds? The sort that, if such a thing existed, would be in the above-titled cookbook for the working poor that everyone should get along with their food stamp allotment? Read more

So everyone in the right-of-center blogosphere is talking about the oversupply of humanties Ph.D.’s, and I thought it would be useful to actually get the opinion of a real humanities professor, namely, my old friend who teaches Old English at a state university (hence, in the English department but nothing flaky like Postcolonial Studies): I think we need to be very honest, to the point of talking them out of it a *little*. What I don’t want to do is... Read more

Facebook links:  from mashable.com, taken today, and more from the Daily Mail.  Here in the actuarial household, we’re very fond of St. Joe — but we like its beach and lighthouse much more in the summer! Read more

Ah, the lazy way to write a blog post:  see two posts/articles, connect them together, and add commentary. Post/article #1:  Megan McArdle’s speculation on whether the existence of Obamacare (that is, both the subsidies and the no-preexisting-condition-exclusion requirements) will enable people to be more entrepreneurial, “Will Obamacare Inspire Small-Business Ownership?”   Her answer is basically that the jury’s still out (or, in other words, it’s a “talk among yourselves” kind of post). Post/article #2:  Via marginalrevoluation.com, an article at the New... Read more

So Heather McDonald (whose writing I’m nearly always impressed with) has a piece in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the fact that UCLA has changed its requirements for the English major.  I can’t actually link to the WSJ piece itself, which is behind a paywall but findable by searching for text in the article, but here’s a link to a blog post which excerpts a significant portion, and here’s the key information from the post/article: Until 2011, students majoring in... Read more

This is that time of year when we actuaries are calculating whether we have a sufficient number of hours of continuing education to remain credentialed and authorized to sign actuarial reports.  Same as many professions, I suppose, but fairly new for us, as the requirements were first instituted five years ago.  The twist is that we need a relatively small number of hours of formal credits, and are able to count various forms of self-study — from reading about a relevant topic to... Read more

So I wrote about this before, but the Jahi McMath saga continues, with the parents trying to find some location to take the child, and the hospital insisting that they won’t insert a feeding tube because it’s wrong to operate on a dead body. The latest update is that the hospital and family have entered mediation to extend the court-ordered ventilator, while the family tries to line up a doctor to insert a feeding tube. I am not a neurologist... Read more