tim strube

“Dear Class of ‘13: You’ve been scammed”

Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. Some would wonder if you have received a degree even one times as good.

According to the College Board, in 1983 a typical private American university managed to provide a bachelor’s-degree-level education to young people just like you for $11,000 a year in tuition and fees. That’s in 2012 dollars.

Instead, those of you at private colleges paid this year an average of $29,000. 

Read on.

Related reads:

• “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College” from The New York Times, May 2012
• “We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.” from TechCrunch, April 2011
• “Debt by Degrees” from The New Yorker, November 2011

parislemon:

msg:

kskobac:

I love the simplistic, beautiful onboarding experiences that betaworks creates for its apps.  The screenshots above are from the first time you open the new Dots game betaworks released.  The intro experience for Tapestry was really enjoyable too.

Credit for the beauty+joy of Dots and Tapestry should go to Patrick Moberg

Dots is pretty great.

Agreed.

It’s incredibly refreshing to open a game for the first time and not get a progression of obnoxious, over-done splash screens, and hard not to appreciate a developer that doesn’t feel obligated to over-brand their gaming experience.

Without a doubt one of the most enjoyable + well-designed games I’ve ever wasted time on.

(via reddit)

Beautifully animated look at the inner-workings of the Bitcoin economy. Hats off to the writer/creator of this explainer.

(via thefoxisblack)

(via bezmenia)

[via]

(Source: Spotify)

Hollywood “Waking Up”

But it turns out that 2009 was the pivot point for many in the entertainment industry. That Christmas, Brian Robbins treated his two sons, Miles and Justin, then 10 and 12, to a luxurious Miami Beach vacation at the Fontainebleau Hotel. The actor turned producer/director got tickets to a Heat game, and he booked a room equipped with an enormous flat-screen TV, which Robbins assumed would be perfect for his entertainment-devouring boys. Wrong. “I was like, Do they not know about the TV?” Robbins told me recently, sitting in his loftlike production office in West Los Angeles. Instead, the boys whipped out their laptops and watched everything from The Simpsons to wrestling videos on YouTube. Something about the experience of seeing his kids treat a state-of-the-art home-theater system like a clunky transistor radio “crystallized things for me,” he says. He realized, This is it. The Internet is not the future. It’s now.

A good read, though if you’re in the media/entertainment sphere and unaware that 13-17s have been increasingly spending more time on their laptops and phones than in front of the TV, you may as well pack your bags.

Netflix’s Neil Hunt believes 4K content “will likely be streamed first before it goes anywhere else” and it seems the company’s original smash hit series House of Cards was produced with just that in mind.

“‘House of Cards’ was shot in 4K, could stream at full resolution this year,” leap-frogging the traditional TV and positioning itself to lead the pack in the UHD res-race.

Well looky here! The trailer I supervised (cut by Jeffrey McHale) for “Generation Um…” is the most popular trailer on Apple Trailers right now (the Keanu intro in front of an elementary school photo studio backdrop is the icing on the cake).

Next up for us: trailers for Refn’s “Drive” follow-up “Only God Forgives”, Weinstein Co.-acquired Sundance documentary “Cutie and the Boxer”, and Toronto International Film Festival selection “Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp” — all fantastic films worth looking forward to.

Journalism vs. Euphemism

In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”

Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.

Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”

…U.S. media outlets, it seems, are perfectly comfortable with the term “targeted killing,” now that it is a major tool for the Pentagon and CIA.

It’s also clear American media outlets are comfortable suppressing news the government does not want published. Today’s story reveals not just that the Americans have operated a secret drone base for years in Saudi Arabia, but that the Post, along with various other news organizations, have been keeping that fact to themselves at the government’s request.

Relevant discussion here from BBC 4’s Allan Little on Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

And Glenn Greenwald on point as always re: the implications of WaPo’s knowledge of the Saudi drone base.

(Source: cbc.ca)

nprfreshair:

David Bianculli on the new Netflix series House of Cards:

It is, to Netflix, what The Sopranos was to HBO, what The Shield was to FX, what Mad Men was to AMC. It’s an identity-maker, and a game-changer.

This is where I put on my Nikki Finke hat and say, “TOLDJYA!”

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

— Aaron Swartz (great reads on Aaron here and here)

(Source: swiss-miss.com)

apsies:

Innocence Lost | Nick Anderson

Ignore the headlines. Go see this movie. 

Adbusters magazine and its editor Kalle Lasn have been at the forefront of the global resistance to capitalism exemplified by the Occupy movement. Their new book, Meme Wars: the Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economies, uses startling images to back up its hard-hitting points. Here are a selection of some of the best.

[from theguardian]