Installing Linux, Part 2

Continued from Installing Linux.

Start the Install

1. Boot the Live CD.
2. After the machine comes up, click the Install to Hard Drive icon. This is where the real fun starts.
3. Select keyboard from list: Selected U.S. English and click Next.
4. Types of storage devices: Selected Basic and click Next. The installer then examines the storage devices.
   
5. Name the computer: Set it to alpha and click Next.
6. Select the nearest city in your time zone: Selected Chicago and click Next.
7. Pick root password: Set it to ******** and click Next.
8. Which type of install: Used default of Replace existing Linux system(s) and click Next.
9. Select storage devices:
   

• Data storage: WD external drive
• Boot loader: ATA internal drive

At this point I got an error. The installation program complained that it could not find enough space for automatic partitioning. The problem was that I need to manually repartition the hard drive in order to make room for Linux. Basically, Windows has the whole drive allocated as one big partition. Click OK.

Note: I also later noticed that the installation guide recommends unplugging USB drives during the install. I had left the WD external drive plugged in, but everything still worked out OK.

At this point I did a lot of reading in the installation guide. There is a lot of detailed information in there about repartitioning your hard drive. There is also a recommended layout. Given the size of my system, I settle on roughly the following:

• boot partition: 250 MB
• '/' root partition: 5 GB
• swap partition: 2 GB
• /home partition: 10 GB

Repartitioning the Hard Drive

1. (resuming at) Which type of install: At this point I was unsure about whether to select Shrink current system or Create custom layout. I decided on Create custom layout, which worked.
2. Please select a drive: Selected the internal drive sda1 with the ntfs file system. Click Edit.
3. Resize from 139163 MB to 115000 MB, which should leave about 20000 MB of free space for Windows to operate. Click OK.
4. This will also free up about 24000 MB for Linux to use. Only about 10000 MB is needed for a full install of Linux, so I'll have about 14000 MB for data. Click Free.
5. All of the following partitions are created on the sda drive.
   
6. Click Create to create a partition.
   
7. Select Standard partition. Click Create.
8. Enter /boot, 250 MB, ext4. Click OK,
9. Click Free.
10. Click Create to create a partition.
    
11. Select Standard partition. Click Create.
12. Enter '/' for root, 5000 MB, ext4. Click OK,
13. Click Free.
14. Click Create to create a partition.
    
15. Select Standard partition. Click Create.
16. Enter 2000 MB, swap. Click OK,
17. Click Free.
18. Click Create to create a partition.
    
19. Select Standard partition. Click Create.
20. Enter '/home', fill to maximum allowable, ext4. Click OK,
21. Click Free.

In the summary screen, I ended up with the following:

• Hard drives
• sda
• -- sda1 115000 MB ntfs
• -- sda3 250 MB /boot ext4
• -- sda4 23913 MB extended
• -- -- sda5 5000 MB / ext4
• -- -- sda6 2000 MB swap
• -- -- sda7 16910 MB /home ext4
• -- sda2 13463 MB vfat
• sdb
• -- sdb1 953867 MB vfat
• -- free 2 MB

Once you accept that partitioning scheme, you get a huge warning message. The installation program hasn't actually made any changes to the system up until now. This is the point of no return. If you have misgivings, you can back out without making any changes to the system. If you proceed and have made a mistake, or the install fails to complete, you could end up with an unusable system. In that case you might need to reformat drives and reinstall, losing all of your data. Make sure you have a good back-ups first. Since I have good back-ups and feel lucky, I proceed with the repartitioning.

Repartitioning takes a while and you cannot do anything to help it along. So I take a break and check back later.

Install Boot Loader

Next comes installation of the boot loader. I accepted the defaults, which installs the boot loader on /dev/sda. The O/S list in the boot loader is:

• Other /dev/sda1
• Fedora /dev/sda5

Click Next. The you get a message indicating that it is copying the image to the hard drive. Finally, you get an Installation complete message. Click Close. The click Logout -> Reboot.

Continued at Installing Linux, Part 3.

Consequences of Free Spending

Greece set for severe bail-out conditions - Peter Spiegel, Quentin Peel, Ralph Atkins

European leaders are negotiating a deal that would lead to unprecedented outside intervention in the Greek economy, including international involvement in tax collection and privatisation of state assets, in exchange for new bail-out loans for Athens.

People involved in the talks said the package would also include incentives for private holders of Greek debt voluntarily to extend Athens’ repayment schedule, as well as another round of austerity measures.

Officials hope that as much as half of the €60bn-€70bn ($86bn-$100bn) in new financing needed by Athens until the end of 2013 could be accounted for without new loans. Under a plan advocated by some, much of that would be covered by the sale of state assets and the change in repayment terms for private debtholders.

Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund would then need to lend an additional €30bn-€35bn on top of the €110bn already promised as part of the bail-out programme agreed last year.

Officials warned, however, that almost every element of the new package faced significant opposition from at least one of the governments and institutions involved in the current negotiations and a deal could still unravel.

In the latest setback, the Greek government failed on Friday to win cross-party agreement on the new austerity measures, which European Union lenders have insisted is a prerequisite to another bail-out.

In addition, the European Central Bank remains opposed to any restructuring of Greek debt that could be considered a “credit event” – a change in terms that could technically be ruled a default.

Markets Fret About Euro 'Slow-Motion Car Crash' - Catherine Boyle

Reports that Greece has not met any of the fiscal targets set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) as part of its 110 billion euros ($157 billion) bailout knocked down the euro Monday, as other countries in the euro zone are threatened with being dragged into the Greek morass.

...

“Europe’s debt crisis remains a slow-motion car crash. If sovereign wealth funds did not remain so determined to diversify out of dollars, the euro would surely be much lower,” Simon Smith, chief economist at FXPro, wrote in a research note.

So the good news for Europe is that the U.S. dollar is being rapidly devalued by the Federal Reserve. Even with Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal going down the tubes, investors are exchanging their dollars for euros.

More Trouble in Paradise

SCOTUS Makes It Official: California A Failed State - Walter Russell Mead

Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state. Virtually every important civil institution in society has to fail to get you to this point. Your homes and houses of worship are failing to build law abiding citizens, much less responsible and informed voters. Your schools aren’t educating enough of your kids to make an honest living. Your taxes and policies are so bad that you are driving thousands of businesses away. Your management systems must be fouled and confused to the max for you to create something so dysfunctional, so wildly beyond your means, that the Supreme Court of the United States (wisely or foolishly is another question) starts to micromanage your jails.

California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.

Inflation? What Inflation?

Gas tanks are draining family budgets - Jonathan Fahey

As Memorial Day weekend opens, the nationwide average for a gallon of unleaded is $3.81. Though prices have drifted lower in recent days, analysts expect average price for 2011 to come in higher than the previous record, $3.25 in 2008. A year ago, gas cost $2.76.

The squeeze is happening at a time when most people aren't getting raises, even as the economy recovers.

"These increases are not something consumers can shrug off," says James Hamilton, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies gas prices. "It's a key part of the family budget."

The ramifications are far-reaching for an economy still struggling to gain momentum two years into a recovery. Economists say the gas squeeze makes people feel poorer than they actually are.

They're showing it by limiting spending far beyond the gas station. Wal-Mart recently blamed high gas prices for an eighth straight quarter of lower sales in the U.S. Target said gas prices were hurting sales of clothes.

Every 50-cent jump in the cost of gasoline takes $70 billion out of the U.S. economy over the course of a year, Hamilton says. That's about one half of one percent of gross domestic product.

Jobs and Migration

Why New York's future is fleeing - Fred Siegel

For more than 15 years, New York state has led the country in domestic outmigration: For every American who comes here, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a recent Marist poll suggests that the rate is likely to increase: 36 percent of New Yorkers under 30 plan to leave over the next five years. Why are all these people fleeing?

For one thing, according to a recent survey in Chief Executive, our state has the second-worst business climate in the country. (Only California ranks lower.) People go where the jobs are, so when a state repels businesses, it repels residents, too.

Indeed, the poll also found that 62 percent of New Yorkers planning to leave cited economic factors -- including cost of living (30 percent), taxes (19 percent) and the job environment (10 percent) -- as the main reason.

Upstate, a big part of the problem is extraordinarily high property taxes. New York has the country's 15 highest-taxed counties, including Nassau and Westchester, which rank Nos. 1 and 2.

Most of the property tax goes toward paying the state's Medicaid bill -- which is unlikely to diminish, since the state's most powerful lobby, the alliance of the hospital workers' union and hospital management, has gone unchallenged by our new governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Installing Linux

Although I've been using various flavors of Unix for over 25 years, I'm a novice when it comes to system administration. I'm also a Linux novice. However, I'd like to try out Linux on one of my home machines. I'm hoping it will provide a reasonably easy and inexpensive way to break away from Microsoft and its inexhaustible supply or virus, malware and spyware problems. I'm also hoping to use Perl scripts to manage a lot of routine tasks that I find difficult in Windows.

Starting from the beginning, this is everything I needed to do to acquire and install Linux for my Windows XP PC.

Obtain Live CD

1. I went to wikipedia and browsed the Comparison of Linux Distributions page to investigate the various distributions that are available.
2. Also valuable is the List of Linux Distributions page, which has a graphic describing the lineage of the various distributions. The graphic indicates that the majority of distributions originate from Debian, Slackware/SUSE or Red Hat.
   
3. I eventually settled on Fedora because it is based on Red Hat, is described as a general purpose distribution, has Live CD support, graphical installation procedures, support for several processor architectures, and it has a cool web site.
4. I went to the Fedora web site, then to the downloads page and downloaded the ISO-format image of Fedora 14 for 32 bit Intel PCs.
5. I went to my C:\temp folder and tried to burn a CD from the ISO file, but Right-click -> Send to -> CD Drive just creates a corrupted CD.
6. I looked around on some Microsoft forums and learned that Windows does not have the capability of creating ISO image CDs. You need to load a CD burning application.
7. I went to Kim Komando's web site and searched for software to burn an ISO CD.
   
8. Kim recommended CDBurnerXP, which is cost free and hopefully virus/malware free.
9. Installing CDBurnerXP, I accepted the license agreement, chose to not install the extra languages, and declined the extra Registry software.
10. After that CDBurnerXP started up and I blocked the outgoing internet traffic it generated.
11. Then I put a new CD in the CD drive, used CDBurnerXP to burn and verify the ISO file, and 10 minutes later I had my new Live CD.

Boot the Live CD

1. I put the Live CD into the CD drive of my guinea pig computer and restarted it.
   
2. It restarted with Windows XP. Try again.
3. This time when it said To interrupt normal startup, press Enter, I pressed Enter.
4. On the next screen, I selected Load from CD/DVD.
5. A few minutes later, I had a running Linux system with a cool picture of a bullet hole through the monitor.
6. From there I was able to run Mozilla, start a console window, view the hard drives, including Windows files, and run basic linux commands. It is apparently running the GNOME desktop environment.
   
7. When finished, I restarted the system and booted Windows XP.

Fedora 15

I set this project aside for a week and in the meantime Fedora released a new version 15. At first I was inclined to go ahead and install the previous version 14, but then I noticed that all of my machines had processors which are compatible with the 64-bit version. So I decided to download the 64-bit Fedora 15 with the KDE desktop.

I created a new CD using CDBurnerXP and rebooted to try out the KDE desktop. It has a lot of nice features, but I didn't really like the taskbar. It must be configurable, but I found it very difficult to read compared to the defaults on Windows XP.

Next, I downloaded and tried out the 64-bit Fedora 15 with the LXDE desktop. LXDE is very clean, but since I was using a Thinkpad in combination with an external monitor it was initially very confusing. I could tell from the background graphic that I was only seeing the right half of the screen. Eventually I figured out that the other half was visible on my Thinkpad, which I normally don't keep in view. After fiddling around some more, I figured out that right-clicking on the background gives you a configuration menu which allows you to enable more configuration menus. Once I got to the additional configuration menus it didn't take too long to figure out how to disable the Thinkpad monitor. After that, I could see everything on the external monitor. In all, it took about 30 minutes to figure this out. Still, LXDE is my favorite so far. It seems more like a Unix environment than a Windows environment.

So at this point I intend to install the 64-bit, GNOME-based version of Fedora 15 on the family computer. I expect that everyone else will be happy with that. For my own use, I plan to additionally install LXDE. Maybe someone else will try it out too.

Default/GNOME-based Fedora 15

I restarted the Thinkpad with external monitor with the new CD and immediately hit some difficulties. Both the Thinkpad monitor and the external monitor were enabled in 'mirror' mode. I could see the top bar which contains the Activities icon in the Thinkpad monitor, but not the external one. I found the System Settings menu and started tweaking that, turning off the Thinkpad monitor and setting the resolution on the external one. When I applied the settings, the Thinkpad monitor went off, as expected, but the external monitor output was completely scrambled. Reboot to Windows.

Next, I put the CD into the family computer. It booted OK and I could see the top bar OK. At this point you get an almost entirely blank screen. The key to finding anything you actually want to do is the 'Activities' icon in the upper left corner. Click that and you'll get some icons on the left side, including Firefox.

One thing the user immediately notices is that the top bar of every window only has an 'X' button to kill the window. The minimize and maximize operations are buried in the right-click menu. OK, I can adapt to that. The next oddity is that when you minimize the window, it seems to just go poof. The window disappears from view and the icon disappears from the top bar. That's just plain strange. To find it again you need to click Activities, which switches to a view of all of the activites in that workspace, and then you click on the item you want to restore.

Speaking of workspaces, they are buried in the Activities view also, all the way on the right side in a vertical bar. I don't think I like that either. Why bury them? To switch from one to the other you have to click on Activities, then double-click on the window you want. OK, I can adapt to that too, I guess.

Upon further inspection of the Activities view, there is a button labled Applications. Click on that and you'll see everything you'ld normally expect to see as icons on the desktop or in the right-click menu of the background (which, by the way, doesn't exist). At this point, I'm thinking that the GNOME interface is going for a Mac look-and-feel rather than Windows. But everything seems to be available and make sense once you find it. It looks good too, with more of a 'black and white' look rather than the former 'shades of gray'.

Back to minimizing windows. If you minimize some window, it goes poof as previously mentioned. If you click on Activities to see your various Desktops, you can see the un-minimized window in the mini-desktop. If you double-click on the mini-desktop to switch to that desktop, the minimized window is not there (even though it appeared to be there in the miniature representation of the desktop). To rematerialize the window, you need to click Activities again and then click on the picture of the minimized window. Humpf.

On the other hand, I'm writing these blog entries from this environment, so obviously it is working well enough.

It's time to reboot back to Windows and I don't see anything that says shutdown or restart or anything like that. I decided sign out to see if that would help, and eventually I got to a sign on screen which also had a restart icon. I used that to restart and just pushed the button on the CD drive when it starting rebooting Linux again. The machine booted to Windows OK.

In all I'm underwhelmed by this version of GNOME. Everything seemed hard to find. I did notice that it is version 3.0.1, so this is a major version change compared to the one I looked at in Fedora 14.

Installing LXDE

So the new plan is to install the 64-bit, LXDE, Fedora 15 on the family computer and see how that works out for everyone.

Continued at Installing Linux, Part 2.

College Tuition

College and university executives have huge incentives to set high tuition rates:

1. It enables them to enroll a certain number of lackluster, but well-funded, students.
2. It enables them to scoop up a larger share of the easy-money student loan dollars.
3. It enables them to pose as the generous benefactor of those receiving deep tuition discounts, even though it is really just a shell game.
4. It gratifies their egos.
   

Discounting the Bottom Line - Kevin Kiley

Discounting is part of a tug-of-war that colleges and universities play with their enrollment numbers and bottom lines. They place their sticker price beyond the reach of many potential students but make up the difference between that price and what a student can or will pay through institutional grants and scholarships. Proponents have argued that there are some psychological benefits to having a high sticker price, such as the perception of quality, and high discounting, such as the value a student perceives when he is offered a large package.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE - Glenn Reynolds

On Path To Riches, No Sign Of Fluffy Majors: “Exactly what an English major makes in a lifetime has never been clear, and some defenders of the humanities have said that their students are endowed with ‘critical thinking’ and other skills that could enable them to catch up to other students in earnings. Turns out, on average, they were wrong. Over a lifetime, the earnings of workers who have majored in engineering, computer science or business are as much as 50 percent higher than the earnings of those who major in the humanities, the arts, education and psychology, according to an analysis by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.”

And lots more there.

Tuition Comparison

Information About Law Schools, Circa 1960: The Cost of Attending - Brian Tamanaha

Median annual tuition and fees at private law schools was $475 (range $50-$1050); adjusted for inflation, that's $3,419 in 2011 dollars. The median for public law schools was $204 (range $50 - $692), or $1,550 in 2011 dollars. [For comparison, in 2009 the private law school median was $36,000; the public (resident) median was $16,546.]

Employment After College

Plato and Thucydides are all well and good, but if you're going to spend all of that time and money on college, make wise practical decisions too:

1. Make sure that you graduate with realistic prospects for earning enough money to support (or help support) a family.
2. Don't get buried under a mountain of consumer and student loan debt.
3. Do something you really like to do.
4. Life has ups and downs, but quality work is generally recognized and rewarded.
5. Always keep learning.
   

The “Careers” of College Graduates - Daniel Luzer

In an update, of sorts, to the recent post about the influence of the Recession on current college graduates, Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post is letting us know that it’s actually even worse. Two charts explain it:

A HIGHER ED BUBBLE? - Glenn Reynolds

This sounds familiar:

So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Computer Malware

Trojan Feigns Failures to Increase Rogue Defragger Sales - Eoin Ward

Hard disk failures are a fact of life in the tech world. It’s something many of us have experienced, and not with fond memories. Trojan.FakeAV writers are aware of this, and the end of last year saw a move by some into the creation of fake hard disk scanners and defragmentation tools, which we covered in Fake Disk Cleanup Utilities: The Ruse. In this blog we are going to look at Trojan.Fakefrag. What sets this apart from standard fake disk cleanup utilities is that the Trojan makes changes on the computer and displays messages that make it appear as though the hard disk is failing. Then it drops a member of the UltraDefragger family called Windows Recovery, which offers to repair these disk errors for a mere $79.50!

We’ve put together a short screencast that takes you through the experience.

Be very about careful about clicking OK.

Israel

Israel in Peril - Rick Santorum

President Obama’s immoral Middle East policy goes beyond directly pressuring Israel; see how he has treated other allies and enemies in the region. President Obama told Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak he had to leave office but he has coddled Syria, rewarding that rogue state with a U.S. ambassadorship George W. Bush pulled years ago. Going further, despite Syria’s much more brutal crackdown on its own people, President Obama has yet to call for Syria’s leader, Bashar Assad, to leave power. The confusion to most of us — but not to our or Israel’s enemies — is precisely this: Mubarak was an ally, and the key leader in Egypt responsible for maintaining peace with Israel. Assad is an enemy, heading up one of the chief state sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East. President Obama opposed the ally and sided with the enemy.

Israel has long enjoyed the support of the United States. Our mutual ties have been historical, cultural, religious, and strategic. Today those ties have been put in more doubt than at any other time in the history of our relationship. Israel hasn’t changed, the United States has. But the United States, a large and powerful country, is not in danger of disappearing. The same cannot be said of Israel and it is to our shame that we have increased that risk for the Jewish state. One can only hope this dangerous turn in our foreign policy will change. In the meantime, it is the duty of each and every American citizen who abhors terrorism and supports freedom to stand up and say, “I support Israel.”

Federal Debt Ceiling

Dear Congress, Your Credit Application Has Been Turned Down - A. Barton Hinkle

Thank you for your interest in the American Public Trust's Gold Card credit program. Rest assured your application has been given thorough and careful consideration by the American people.

After reviewing the information provided in your application as well as your credit report, we regret to say that we are unable to extend you further credit at this time. The reasons for our decision are as follows:

(1) Inadequate income.Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public's debt-to-income guidelines for credit issuance.

(2) Excessive spending. The receipts you provided indicate your annual expenditures for the 2011 fiscal year total $3,820,000,000,000, or $1,650,000,000,000 more than your total income for the year. The American Public prefers that its members of Congress maintain a positive or neutral rather than a negative cash flow.

(3) High debt utilization. Your credit report indicates that you have a credit limit of $14,300,000,000,000, and of that amount you have utilized $14,300,000,000,000, for a debt utilization ratio of 100 percent. Consumer banking industry guidelines recommend a debt utilization ratio of no greater than 30 percent for standard creditworthiness, and 10 percent for exemplary creditworthiness. A debt utilization rate of 100 percent meets our classification of "You're *&^%$#@! kidding, right?"

...

You may also wish to contact a consumer credit counseling agency. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling can help you locate a reputable counseling agency in your area. You may also wish to visit the NFCC's website for helpful tips on such subjects as

• drawing up a budget
• living within your means
• saving during tough economic times
• steps to take when your finances get out of control

Economic Crisis in Spain

Spain’s Socialist Utopia Mugged by Reality - Soeren Kern

Spain’s ailing economy too is a symptom of much broader problem, including the inability of the social welfare economic model to create jobs, as well as a highly paternalistic labor market that benefits an older generation seeking to preserve the status quo. Although Spain’s economic crisis has affected workers in all age groups, youth unemployment is more than double the overall jobless rate of 21.2 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Around half of Spain’s youth are unemployed and the other half that is working often does so under highly exploitative employment conditions.

...

Opinion polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists on May 22, as voters punish them for the government’s handling of the economic crisis and the painful austerity measures aimed at avoiding a debt default. Polls published in the centre-left El País and the center-right El Mundo newspapers predicted broad losses for the Socialists including in strongholds such as Barcelona, Seville, and the Castilla-La Mancha region. According to El Mundo, the Socialist Party is “on the edge of a catastrophe.”

California Taxes

Golden State blues - George F. Will

“Californians already labor under sales-tax rates usually reserved for states without income taxes (at 8.25 percent, the nation’s highest) and sharply progressive income-tax rates usually reserved for states without sales taxes (the state’s top rate is 10.55 percent, and it doesn’t allow you to deduct your federal taxes, as some states with income taxes do).”

Those tax levels are surely related to these demographic facts: Between 2000 and 2010, Los Angeles gained fewer people than in any decade since the 1890s, and Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have the slowest growth rates since the end of Spanish rule. For the first time since 1920, the Census did not award California even one additional congressional seat.

Terrorism

Massacre in Pakistan: A Teachable Moment for the West - Barry Rubin

–The main cause of terrorism is not America (or Israel, or any other country) killing terrorists but revolutionary Islamism’s attempts to seize state power or attempts of those revolutionary Islamists (and their allies) already in power (see Iran, Syria, Hamas in Gaza, Hizballah in Lebanon, and perhaps soon the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?) to overthrow neighbors.

–These policemen were targets not because they were oppressive instruments of capitalism or imperialism but because the revolutionaries want to destroy order so they can operate in a situation of anarchy which they hope to replace with their own rule.

...

–Until Western leaders understand the above principles, their policies will not only fail, they will be counterproductive for the interests of both their own countries and millions of Muslims, who do not want to be ruled by revolutionary Islamism.

Now here’s an interesting question. Suppose the above list of propositions was submitted to leading politicians, policymakers, journalists, and academic experts. How many of these points would they accept as obvious and how many totally reject? If this list were given to average people, how many of these points would they say that they’ve never heard expressed by their mass media or leaders?

College Costs

The Student Loan Bubble - Ian L. Cooper

The same warning signs that preceded the housing bubble burst of 2007 are now rapidly unfolding in the higher education bubble.

The price of tuition is up more than 900% since 1978, while household income has increased just 150%.

Only 10% of all graduates can find work out of college. Unemployment for college graduates sits at the highest rate since 1970, leaving many students with no jobs and tens of thousands in debt.

David Mamet

The turning of David Mamet - Scott

David Mamet is the accomplished playwright, screenwriter, novelist, author, essayist, and filmmaker. In 1984 Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, his utterly harrowing update of Death of a Salesman. The new issue of the Weekly Standard carries Andrew Ferguson's moving cover story on Mamet's turn to conservatism. It is an intensely interesting and thought-provoking piece.

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' - David Mamet

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f--- up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

Converting Mamet - Andrew Ferguson

“I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.”

He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period.

...

Before long, when Finley didn’t budge, the books from Mamet stopped arriving, and Finley asked if he could send Mamet some books too. One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the “constrained vision” of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet’s greatest plays—and the “unconstrained vision” of man’s endless improvement that suffused Mamet’s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.

“He came back to me stunned. He said, ‘This is incredible!’ He said, ‘Who thinks like this? Who are these people?’ I said, ‘Republicans think like this.’ He said, ‘Amazing.’ ”

Finley piled it on, from the histories of Paul Johnson to the economics of Milton Friedman to the meditations on race by Shelby Steele.

“He was haunted by what he discovered in those books, this new way of thinking,” Finley says. “It followed him around and wouldn’t let him go.”

...

One day Voight handed him Witness, the Cold War memoir by the Communist-turned-anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers.

“This book will change your life,” Voight told Mamet.

“And he was right,” Mamet said. “It had a huge effect on me. Forcing yourself into a new way of thinking about things is a wrenching experience. But first you have to look back and atone. You think, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? What was I thinking?’ You realize you’ve been a co-dependent with the herd. And then, when you decide to say what you’ve discovered, out loud, you take the risk that everyone you know will look on you as a fool.”

Sitting on an overstuffed sofa in his office, he threw up his hands.

“But what the hell,” he said. “I’m the troublemaker. That’s my role in life. I’m the class clown.”

Inflation

The One Hundred Trillion Dollar Note and Other Visual Aids - John B. Taylor

Whenever someone says inflation is not caused by central banks printing too much money, I pull out this note and tell the story of Zimabwe’s hyperinflation.

How to Turn 100 Trillion Dollars Into Five and Feel Good About It - Patrick McGroarty and Farai Mutsaka

A 100-trillion-dollar bill, it turns out, is worth about $5.

That's the going rate for Zimbabwe's highest denomination note, the biggest ever produced for legal tender—and a national symbol of monetary policy run amok. At one point in 2009, a hundred-trillion-dollar bill couldn't buy a bus ticket in the capital of Harare.

But since then the value of the Zimbabwe dollar has soared. Not in Zimbabwe, where the currency has been abandoned, but on eBay.

The notes are a hot commodity among currency collectors and novelty buyers, fetching 15 times what they were officially worth in circulation. In the past decade, President Robert Mugabe and his allies attempted to prop up the economy—and their government—by printing money. Instead, the country's central bankers sparked hyperinflation by issuing bills with more zeros.

The 100-trillion-dollar note, circulated for just a few months before the Zimbabwe dollar was officially abandoned as the country's legal currency in 2009, marked the daily limit people were allowed to withdraw from their bank accounts. Prices rose, wreaking havoc.

Federal Debt

The Millionaire Retirees Next Door - John Cogan

According to my calculations based on government data, such married couples will begin receiving monthly Social Security checks that will, on average, total about $550,000 after inflation. They will receive health-care services paid for by Medicare that, on average, will total another $450,000 after inflation. The benefactors will be a generation of younger workers who are trying to support themselves and their families while paying taxes to finance the rest of government spending.

We cannot even remotely afford to make good on these promised benefits. Although our system of personal liberty, free enterprise and limited government has made us an affluent and upwardly mobile people, we are not yet a nation of John Beresford Tiptons.

...

Under the federal government's fee-for-service Medicare program, every time a senior citizen meets with his physician or health-care provider for a check-up, lab tests or surgery, somebody other than the patient foots most of the bill. That such a program should produce runaway costs is hardly surprising.

Employment and Recent Graduates

Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad - Erica Ho

Thanks to a high unemployment rate for new grads, many of those with diplomas fresh off the press are making a return to Mom and Dad's place. In fact, according to a poll conducted by consulting firm Twentysomething Inc., some 85% of graduates will soon remember what Mom's cooking tastes like.

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Air Rifle

Girandoni Air Rifle

Government Spending

Inevitability of a Default in Greece - Floyd Norris

A Greek debt restructuring — a polite term for default — is unthinkable, according to the Greek finance minister.

“It would have a tremendous cost, with no benefit,” the minister, George Papaconstantinou, said in an interview on Greek television. “Greece would be out of markets for 10, 15 years.”

To financial markets, and to many other observers, it is more than thinkable. It is very close to a sure thing. When, how, and how messy it will be are open to question.

Thoughts on a Surreal Depression - Victor Davis Hanson

The combination of 2 billion Indians and Chinese in the world marketplace, exporting cheap goods, has meant fewer jobs for Americans and far more material playthings now accessible to every stratum of society. Again, easy credit, combined with little shame or penalty in defaulting on what one owes, has allowed a superficial parity with the upper-middle class. Massive government transfers and relaxed eligibility have ensured households thousands of dollars in entitlements and subsidies. We have printed $5 trillion since 2009, and borrowed $1.6 trillion just this year. And the huge influx of easy government cash shows here.

Cash wages have meant augmented entitlement money and are competitive with those who are formally employed and who pay 30% of their money in payroll, health care, and federal, state, and local income tax deductions. The result is an odd sort of poverty, in which superficially the unemployed and poor to the naked eyed are almost identical to the upper middle classes.

The CAP Act - Bob Corker

The only real way to place America back on a path to solvency is by imposing what amounts to a fiscal straitjacket. To that end, colleagues from both sides of the aisle and both houses of Congress have joined me in offering the CAP Act, legislation that, for the very first time, would establish an across-the-board, binding cap on all federal spending. A real cap on spending tied to a percentage of gross domestic product is a responsible way to impose fiscal discipline and achieve smaller government while incentivizing lawmakers to pass policies that promote economic growth. The CAP Act would result in $7.6 trillion less spending over ten years, fundamentally change the way Washington does business, and finally put America on a trajectory toward fiscal sanity.

Natural Gas

Forget About Wind & Solar – Natural Gas Is Our Energy Future, Says Policy Expert - Stacy Curtin

Most notable is Schwenniger's assertion that Obama's clean energy initiative, which is supposed to bolster competitiveness, create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources, will actually drag on U.S. economic growth in the short- and medium-term.

He cites subsidies for clean energy programs as the main culprit for two reasons: opportunity costs and foreign investment, rather than domestic investment.

"The program subsidizes the commercialization of inefficient wind and solar technologies, many of which are produced abroad, while ignoring more efficient alternatives that would cut America's oil import bill and reduce the overall cost of energy in the United States," he writes in his report. "It makes no economic sense, for example, to subsidize the installation of imported wind turbines when natural gas fired generators can produce an equivalent amount of energy for one-third to one-half the cost." (See: What Energy Problem: U.S. Oil Exports Are on the Rise)

Good Riddance

Why Bin Laden Lost - Brendan Greeley

This is the lesson of the past 10 years, and one Osama bin Laden, a man animated by a grandiose vision of restoring a 7th century Muslim empire, never grasped. The most successful organizing principle the world has ever known is a simple guarantee that we can buy and do things that have no point greater than the satisfaction of our own happiness.

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What I'd like to be able to say to myself, 10 years younger, is that Osama bin Laden will lose because nobody actually wants to live in a cave. Even bin Laden didn't want to live in a cave. As Bloomberg News reported, in Abbottabad he sent runners out for equal amounts of Coke and Pepsi, for Nestlé milk and the good-quality shampoos. The societies that make these things do not turn up their noses at the consumer and his whims, the needs that lack any justification larger than the personal.

Tuition Bubble

Financial land of perpetual bubbles - Dr. HousingBubble

This is where the cost of college is really pronounced. In 1980 the typical California household would be able to finance 17 bachelor’s degrees at a UC with one year of household income. In 2000 that number had dropped to 5. Today it is only enough to purchase one bachelor’s degree at the UC system. Now keep in mind we are looking at the cheaper public option partially backed by the state of California. You have other institutions in SoCal like USC that charge over $50,000 per year. Without a doubt higher education is in a bubble more so in the private sector.

Part of the reason for the bubble is similar to what we saw in the housing market. Banks and their government backed supporters work in cahoots to increase liquidity in these markets which helps to create a casino like environment. Initially this starts out slow and ends with option ARMs that have no way of being paid back even though they are made on large ticket items. We now know how the bubble pops with housing but how does it look when it bursts in higher education? The option ARM or subprime equivalent in higher education is the for profit institutions. I’m sure you can find a handful that are strong but many simply operate as a clean setup to extract as much government and private loans from students without producing any measurable results. I know many will say that education is more than just the amount of money you will earn once you graduate. I agree. However, you do not need a multi-million dollar football team to help you read Cicero, Dostoevsky, Kafka, or even Hemingway. You can do that for free at your public library. College in many cases is about making solid contacts and working in a stimulating environment while learning to think critically. What has changed from 1980 to 2011 that has made it so much more expensive? Are professors 20 times better at teaching calculus or derivatives in 2011 than they were in 2008?

Gerrymandering

A Proposal to End the Practice of Gerrymandering - Robert Zubrin

The practice of gerrymandering is technically legal, and indeed, will soon celebrate its 200th anniversary in this country. However, it remains the case that, as it is a method of rigging elections to secure office holders against the judgment of the voters, it is a crime against democracy. It is time to end it.

But how can this be done? While it is apparent that weird district shapes are clearly contrived by conspiracies of politicians desiring to disenfranchise the electorate, what objective standard is there for assigning fair boundaries?

In fact there is a standard. The degree of contrivance behind the design of a set of districts is directly related to the oddness of the shapes employed to reach the election-rigging objective. There is a precise mathematical way to measure such malformation. That is, if you take the square of the perimeter of any shape, and divide it by the shape’s area, you arrive at a number, which can be called its irregularity. For example the irregularity of any square, regardless of its size, equals 16 (because (4s)2/s2 = 16.) On the other hand, the irregularity of a rectangle whose long side is 10 times the length of its short side is 48.4 (because (22s)2/10s2 = 48.4.) The odder and more contrived the shape, the higher will be its irregularity.

Now congressional districts need to have equal population sizes, so the task of dividing a state fairly is more complicated than simply slicing it up into low-irregularity shapes. Still, there is a solution which can be objectively ascertained that does accomplish the goal of creating equal population districts with the minimum total irregularity. This can be found either by humans or computers.

Social Security Reform

Chile's Private Social Security System Turns 30 - Monica Showalter

May 1 marks the 30 years since Chile became the first nation to privatize its social security system. By turning workers into investors, the move solved an entitlement crisis much like the one America faces today.

"I like symbols, so I chose May Day as the birth date of Chile's 'ownership society' that allowed every worker to become a small capitalist," wrote Jose Pinera, former secretary of labor and social security and the architect of this pension revolution. He is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

What he designed has succeeded beyond all expectations. Yet Congress remains reluctant to adopt anything like it, despite efforts by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to partially privatize an American system.

Instead of paying a 12.4% Social Security tax as we do here, Chilean workers must pay in 10% of their wages (they can send up to 20%) to one of several conservatively managed and regulated pension funds. From the accumulated savings, they get a life annuity or make programmed withdrawals (inheriting any funds left over).

Over the last three decades these accounts have averaged annual returns of 9.23% above inflation. By contrast, U.S. Social Security pays a 1% to 2% (theoretical) return, and even less for new workers.