MIT Engineers

[hedge]

After guaranteeing it would go to 25,000, he got in at 8000 and out at 12,000, but only for a couple hundred bucks...

[hedge]

You can watch it trade here:

https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD

[DooKSucks]

You can buy Mac and Apple stuff from local GI's on facebook marketplace here for a reasonable price. You just have to work it.

I bought a 128gb 12.9" iPad Pro from a local pawnshop for $450.00 out the door. They even pulled the number on it and searched to make sure it wasn't locked up by a carrier for failure to pay it off. I took it to Verizon, had them put a card in it, and it works great.

[hedge]

Lite coin was trading $92 on Sunday, got up to $420 this morning. Almost a 500% increase in 48 hours. Whacky...

[Saint]

How much is 2 bits worth in bitcoin?

[hedge]

At this point, about 0.0001

[Jungle Rat]

Idiot

[eCat]

two women decide to continue their argument in SUVs, bumper car style - watch it to the end - 5 minutes long

[eCat]

I'm probably the only one this happens to but when I'm half asleep, whatever was on my mind when I went to bed stays with me and sometimes that has bad side effects.

About 25 years ago my my truck was broken into when I lived in Alabama and I had been worrying about that, so one morning early like 4am early, my neighbor is dragging his trash can down to the sidewalk to put his trash out and I determined that someone was stealing my lawnmower - actually - stole my lawnmower, so I hopped in my truck, in whatever I was wearing to sleep, and drove around the neighborhood trying to find them. The first corner I went to just happened to be two policemen and I couldn't believe my luck, so I stopped to talk to them and before I could tell them someone stole my lawn mower they commence to questioning. Just by coincidence they were looking for some guy casing the neighborhood in a truck and no matter what I told them about my mower or that I had just got up, they were convinced I was the guy looking for homes to break into. And no, I never bothered to check if my lawnmower was there, I couldn't waste time while they were getting away with it. I never really understood all that happened until the next time my neighbors trash can woke me up.

About 12 years ago we went to bed with a tornado watch and I guess somewhere in the night I dreamed a tornado was hitting the house, so I hop up yelling for my wife to grab my son and I run into my daughters bedroom and grab her running down two flights of stairs to the basement in a crazed rush - In my half sleep stupor, I remember my daughter telling me "daddy you're scaring me" - only to get down to the basement and realize after about 30 seconds that the storm is long gone and the wind isn't even blowing.

So a couple of weeks ago I had a racoon tear a hole into my roof and take up residence in my attic. I chased him off but last week I'm dead asleep and my dog decides he wants to sleep under the bed so he crawls under the bed and shoves some boxes out of the way making a scraping sound - boom - that gotdamn raccoon is breaking into my house, where is my gun? I'm gonna end this, so now I'm in my fleece pizza slice pants, my winter coat, a flashlight and a gun running around my yard in the snow trying to find this racoon on my roof at 2am. If any of my neighbors saw it, I'm sure it was unsettling to them. Mind you I had to take time to open my combination lock safe to get my gun- all while half asleep

In between those years there have been countless staring out the bedroom window at 3am moments trying to come to terms with whatever was happening on the news the night before and just happened to be in yard , oh yea, and my house was collapsing on me, but I was alone when that happened so I fell onto the floor and was just going to ride it down until I realized it was a dream about earthquake in Mexico.

This is why I will never take ambien. Because I already am about 3/4 of a sleepwalker as it is.

[aTm]

[hedge]

I'm asea...

[eCat]

so I want to give my college rant now. I've touched on this on and off the last few weeks.

So my daughter has been doing the college search thing and she is lucky enough to be in a position to where colleges are willing to give her some financial package in the form of a merit based scholarship.

In the past year or so she's received several letters from schools including some ivy league congratulating her on her academic achievements and that she should consider applying.

Now most of these schools have subscribed to a standardized application process where the general information you normally provide is filled out online once and then submitted to however many schools you want to apply. Most of the serious schools also require additional content- essays, transcripts,etc., - I'd say each school requires an additional 5 hours of effort in order to complete the application, plus there are the external activities of teacher recommendations and so forth.

At one time she considered the Ivy League schools until I started looking at the reality of being accepted.

Take a school like Princeton for example -

Of the incoming freshmen class, they will admit roughly 1900 students anticipating that 1300 or so will show up on campus as freshmen/transfers in the fall.

of that 1900

13% are legacy children of Princeton Alumni - about 250

22% are Asian
11% are Latino
8% are African American
6% are American minorities that don't fit the categories above

or roughly 900 students.

13% are International - 167 from countries outside the U.S.

so of the 1900 students admitted, its hard to avoid the overlap, but its safe to say that over half are spots taken by either children of alumni or non white or foreign students.

so let's say conservatively that is 51%

so that's about 930 students.

Most colleges have an early acceptance period and a regular admission period. While I didn't see reasons why , in theory , because of restrictions on early admission, a smaller number of students apply in the early period. In this case about 6000 students applied for early admission to Princeton and 730 were accepted, meaning that roughly 1130 slots are open for the regular admission, of those 580 will be spoken for based on the diversity and legacy criteria listed above.

For the regular admission - 25,000 students will apply for those 1130 slots, 550 of which will be available to white students with no ties to the university.

now here is the kicker. Princeton charges $80 to apply to the University in the common application process. Some students are granted a waiver based on economic conditions - meaning if your family is at or below the poverty line and you go thru the effort to prove this, you can apply for free. I have no idea what the number is but I'll just pull a number out of the air and say 28% of all students who apply are granted this waiver.

That means that Princeton generated $1.8 million dollars in application fees from students who had virtually no chance to be accepted to that college. If you are a white student with no ties to the college you have less than a 6% chance to be accepted to this college, and your odds don't noticeably improve unless you are a 4.0 with an SAT score above 1500. Even then the odds are still less than 9%.

So why am I writing about all this? Because my daughter received 4 letters and 2 large packets from Princeton, detailing how based on her academic achievements - Princeton determined she should apply. I saved the last letter because on the previous 3 I didn't really investigate what the odds really were. I showed the letter to my BIL who went to Hofstra over Xmas. He told me that if he received this letter, he thought he would have been a lock to be admitted to the school.

To a typical student who is doing well in school - say a 3.8 GPA with AP classes and a 1460 on the SAT - top 5% of his/her class - you have no chance whatsoever to attend Princeton, Yale, Harvard, M.I.T., Cal Tech, University of Chicago or Stanford. You might have a chance with Cornell, Pennsylvania, Brown, etc but the odds are still only in the teens to maybe low 20's. But they'll never know that from the literature they receive in mass mailings from the schools which implore them to apply.

The reality is these schools, unsolicited, receive far more applications of qualified applicants - and qualified meaning 4.0, 1540 SAT kids than they can admit, yet under the guise of diversity they do this mass mailing routine targeting students by creating this false hope they actually have a chance to attend an elite school.

Sure, they probably spend well into the millions of dollars in terms of college recruiting and admissions, but this approach is still a revenue generator - and I think its a borderline unethical one at that. People playing the lottery know their odds are so against them they could play their entire life and never win a meaningful amount, but what if the lottery department sent you a letter saying "we've noticed you've taken the time to choose historically repetitive numbers and we believe that you have what it takes to win the lottery and become a millionaire, why not buy tickets tomorrow?"

To me that's essentially what this is.

Now is this sour grapes on my part? - yea a little, she didn't apply to Princeton so I'm not out $80 and we had the discussion of applying to a lesser Ivy League school in the hopes of improving her chances, but she opted not to thinking if you can't land at the big 3 or other prestigious schools, then whats the point?

But she has received all told more than 100 mailings from Ivy League and other prestigious "highly selective" schools in the past year knowing that my daughters odds were single digit acceptance for all of them.

But what I do know is these schools have about 1400 slots to fill and have acceptance rates between 5 and 8% - meaning there are about 30,000 kids applying to each one of these schools every year, many of them applying to multiple ones, all paying the $80 application fee.

[hedge]

I think the Ivy League schools have a separate minority classification for people from Paducah, just slightly less desirable than unicorns...

[eCat]

I think the Ivy League schools have a separate minority classification for people from Paducah, just slightly less desirable than unicorns...

they wouldn't go because of the snow anyways

[hedge]

Where do you think she would like to go?

[AlabamAlum]

Just check a minority box. There is no way to vet that, no papers you have to present.


If she is a bit chubby, just go with Pacific Islander.

Tan, African-American.

Good at math, Asian.

Etc, etc....

[aTm]

The laziest and yet most used way of evaluating which college is "awesomest and bestest!" is how many people they turn down for admission. It improves their academic reputation to generate applications that they can deny.

[eCat]

Where do you think she would like to go?

she has 5 or 6 schools she is looking at.

Accepted to 4 of them with meaningful scholarship offers to two of them.

We won't know about two schools until early March and we're waiting on a possible scholarship offer from another.

In the meantime, I'm going to spend about a grand at two schools to make sure she gets priority housing, even if she doesn't end up going there until she decides because the housing stuff for accepted students kicks in on February 1.

Oddly enough she doesn't want anything to do with University of Cincinnati or Ohio State. Its mostly from experiences from girls she knows who either went there or went somewhere else. I dumped money into a 529 plan for her and I'm limited to Ohio Schools with it. Not sure what I need to do in order to get that back out.

We did joke about checking the minority box - like American Indian (like a senator ....) and then what are they going to do, make you submit a DNA sample?

[hedge]

Why are you so eager to name the schools where she doesn't want to go but so secretive about the ones she likes? Why the mystery?

[AlabamAlum]

You could do one of those ancestory.com things and check any minority box she tests for.

Harvard, here she comes....