Turns out great grandpa was a bootlegger during prohibition so what better way to celebrate my ancestry than bootleg pubski and some moonshine?
Woke up with a sore throat this morning, so I had the pleasure of cancelling a fun work visit and a walk outside with a friend in favour of getting a Qtip shoved up my nose. I really hope it's nothing, because we had a mini-camping trip planned with our bubble for my boyfriends birthday this weekend, and we'll have to cancel if it's Covid. FUCK. Vaccines for my age group are still far far away, and I'm beyond tired of the social distancing. I really hope we can open things up at least a LITTLE this summer.
How are you doing? Have you gotten your test results back?
That's great! Hope you feel even better tomorrow and have a great weekend!
Good work hawkthorne. Way to take command of the situation, and make the Pubski yours this week! I had a musical breakthrough this week. I went all-in on the Native Instruments ecosystem, with Komplete 13 and the S49 MkII midi controller/keyboard, and have been mostly befuddled and lost for about a month, now. Spending endless hours trying to figure out how to make one small thing happen, and losing all will to live, and moving on to playing Fallout 76 instead. This week I finally figured out how the system "thinks", and therefore I now know how to troubleshoot it when things don't work like I expect them to. It's a HUGE fucking relief. And in a nice little bit of synchronicity, my friend Helen (who was the voice on my last song), came by to drop off my new masks she has been making (she's an actress who has put her costume skills to work making masks since COVID)... and it turns out we both have the feeling that our friendship needs to go on the front burner and be much more focused and intent-ful going forth. She's just the kind of creative spirit I need more of in my life, and everything we have collaborated on has been awesome. That song, Monsieur Bon, was what we could do, via SMS and Google Drive, during the dark days of January under COVID lockdown. I'm SUPER jazzed for what we might be able to create if we were actually able to sit in the same room together and, ya know, TALK! :-)
If you're just getting stabby stabby today you still have to wait for two weeks for full efficacy don't go licking doorknobs just yet.
Brag away I just don't want you making love to streetlamps before it's safe for you to do so. Also let me know how J&J is. Everyone I know was a two shot bitch but we just started getting and administering J&J too so I am really curious to hear how it goes. Side effects, ease, etc.
It's a single data point, but a coworker got J&J and said he was wrecked the next day.
My close friend also got J&J and had a 102 fever and all the nastiness that accompanies that for almost an entire 24 hours. Pretty bad, but also pretty typical. So far the worst side effect I've seen was a colleague got facial paralysis for a couple days after the Pfizer vaccine. I had Pfizer and had nothing but minor arm soreness.
I got Moderna. My arm was sore for 48 hours after the first shot. I got the second Wednesday morning. By Wednesday night I was feeling not great and woke up yesterday feeling like I had a bit of a cold. Not bad but not great. A bit achy, headache. After coffee and water and breakfast I felt better, and by the end of the day, 36 hours after my shot, I felt 90%. Today I'm probably 98% good. My arm is still a little sore, and there's a little redness and warmth. It's minor but it's there. A friend said after her second Moderna she felt like she fell down the stairs for 48 hours. All in all better than covid.
My second moderna shot was brutal. I got it at 9 AM and almost exactly 12 hours later I was in bed with chills and a fever, hiding under as many covers as I possibly could sweating profusely and very cold. I decided to try to drink water because I knew I'd be dehydrated and all that did was make my body hate me for introducing cold into it while it's trying to burn the virus inside me and get even worse chills. I rolled over to try to sleep and it was just night-long fever dreams. I woke thinking it was 6:30-6:45, right before my alarm because the night had lasted so long already. It was 2 AM. I was only halfway through. Second half of the night went a bit better. Woke up with a headache. Was fine by noon. Wild ride all around.
Y'all why is education so expensive. Got a week to decide. Hopkins offered a scholarship and is the most expensive. Scholarship brings it to Emory's price. Emory was like we can loan ya money but no freebies. Georgetown STILL HASN'T GIVEN ME INFO AND TOLD ME TO WAIT A FEW MORE MONTHS like no I need to decide in a week. It's all a load of bullshit. Probably gonna be Emory but not 100% sure yet. Anyone got a spare hundred thousand dollars lying around?
Jeff Selingo just published a book about this. As part of his investigation, he embedded with the Emory admissions department (as well as UW and one other school I can't remember at the moment). About ten years ago, he published another book about this. As part of that book he spent a great deal of time breaking down the finances of college and what they mean. Of the four books he's written, I've read two. I also have some undue interest in the macroeconomics behind things like education so let's see if I can break things down into one sentence: "Education" is so expensive because prestige education is an inelastic good funded by insoluble debt, evaluated blindly without metrics and purchased as a social signifier by the elite. Selingo's latest book points out that there are "buyers" and "sellers" in the education marketplace and that everywhere you've ever heard of is a "seller." Why is Emory expensive? Why are Ferraris expensive? Because only so many Ferraris can be made in a year and Ferrari benefits more from scarcity than they do from quantity. But even the "buyers" are expensive because state expenditures on college decreased rapidly in the Great Recession and never really recovered. As a consequence, colleges and universities became more reliant on endowments whose yields have plummeted since said-same Recession. The colleges mask this by refusing to list a price until the applicant has been admitted, or even having a frank discussion about expenses and financial aid. They also double down by forcing "early decision" candidates ("early decision", on average, has the same effect on your admission as a 100-point improvement on your SAT) to contractually forego financial aid of any kind and pushing minors to decide their future during the most stressful point of their high school careers. On average, a college will spend less than six minutes deciding who to offer admission to and then require that minor to make a six-figure decision in the midst of standardized tests and senior-year anxiety. The price paid also goes largely to facilities, not faculty, as we have no appropriate metrics whatsoever to evaluate the value of a college. No one would give the first fuck about US News & World Report if it weren't for their college rankings, which have been aggressively gamed since their introduction in 1983. Any other rankings rely on the same gamed metrics as US News so every ranked college out there is basically demonstrating their ability to massage their data. As a consequence, 80% of college acceptance is predicated on a college visit and that visit is largely driven by landscaping, student facilities and dorm life, not academics. Much of this investment happened between 2000 and 2008 and is still being amortized. The investments expected to pay for these facilities were projected to make 6% or better, and they've been lucky to make 3%. The first generation to graduate into the Great Recession has also been demonstrating the worthlessness of a college degree. Millennials are the most over-educated, overqualified workforce in the history of America and every niece and nephew has been able to see just what a millstone a college degree is for a Starbucks barista. Contrast that with the elite class that can afford one, two or three years' worth of free internships in the most expensive cities in the world. The people who need financing to go to college are eschewing it. Meanwhile the average "endowment" necessary to get your kid into an elite institution is $2m and legacies are being actively avoided in pursuit of the healthy donations (bribes) and full-ride-paying elites for whom an education means basically "Daddy can only afford a 50' instead of a 60' yacht". Finally, the saving grace of educational institutions for the '00s was foreign students, who invariably paid full rack rate. Unfortunately the Trump administration has pushed the growth projections every college had into decline: Here's the reality of the situation: COVID cased a wealth transfer of approximately $3.5T from the working class to the elites. You can come in through the front door, for $2m, or come in through the back door,, for $500k-$1m. Yet here we are, with everyone unsure as to the future, and the colleges waiving standardized testing (one of the few equalizers between the elites and everyone else), and all institutions leaning heavily towards overadmission, AND YOU GOT IN. Ten years from now? College will be for the Mandarins. It'll be the Anointed Class and only the Anointed Class. We were saying "K-shaped recovery" six months ago but now we're just at "Here’s How Bored Rich People Are Spending Their Extra Cash". If you did not grow up with a vacation home you are about to be forever denied any interaction other than waiting on people who grew up with vacation homes. The bifurcation has accelerated and one of the only ways to jump the divide will be an elite degree. Selingo managed to dig up a few quotes about Harvard and Yale. One of the reasons Harvard took all sorts of creepy biometric data about its students for years is it allowed them to exclude minorities through eugenics. One of the reasons the college boards exist is they allow the Ivies to exclude the poors through prejudicial testing. Selingo even managed to find someone at Harvard willing to say that Harvard doesn't produce Harvard grads, it keeps people who aren't already Harvard Elites from attaining the degree. But that's the dumb shit they had to do during our brief flirtations with socialism. Now they can just jack up the price. Emory's gonna be a spare couple hundred thousand in five years, and a spare million in ten. There are dumber investments.
It's fucking wiiiiiild to me that my university, in 2010 when I entered, was approximately $40k per year all-in (tuition, room, board, fees, etc.) and is now approximately $67k per year all-in, 10 years later.
I believe my first semester of tuition in fall 1999 was $1850. Looks like spring 2021 was $5371. That's an increase of 4.9% every year.
Well, they're all great institutions, so at least there's that. If Emory and Hopkins are tied via price, then I suppose the question is which program would you enjoy more? Where would you enjoy living more? 20 years from now, where will you look back at more fondly? I've found that certain institutions instill a comradely that others don't. I have a teammate that went to Notre Dame. It's INSANE how much they support one another. These things matter. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. Re the expense of the education, perhaps future administrations will forgive such loans, or at least make them less predatory?
I think Hopkins has a bit of a toxic culture. They take their "#1 in public health for 20+ years" thing seriously and it makes for a very competitive group of kiddos. Which is also fair being that it's difficult to get in in the first place. I think Emory is a bit more friendly. Baltimore is a dangerous city. Atlanta isn't a ton better but it is better. Atlanta is very much so a global and public health capital. Emory's program is global and Hopkins' isn't. Georgetown is the only one that guarantees international experience but it should be possible elsewhere. DC is stupid expensive and very frat boy, mommy and daddy money kinda people who I hate. Baltimore and Atlanta are fairly cheap, Baltimore more so than Atlanta but Atlanta isn't expensive. I do think Emory is probably the best choice for me. I just need to actually play with finances some. I appealed the financial aid decisions and will hopefully hear by April 15th. And if I work in fed or non-profit, they theoretically forgive student loans, but only after 120 qualifying monthly payments which is a decade and I'd love to not owe money for that long.
That magical 120-payment thing was never really defined. Last I checked, something like 40,000 people had applied for disbursement under the terms and something like 6 had succeeded. But then, that was like 2018. The fact that every student loan out there has been in forbearance for a year leads me to believe that our entire structure of financial aid is about to change. I'm not sure how, I'm not sure to whose benefit, but what we have now will not survive. Especially as every single graph the Fed chooses to generate is going to take a massive hit to the nuts the minute they end forbearance. Look - my wife has like $250k in student loan debt. I did the math on it and discovered that making the payments they want will have us paying $1.5m by the time we're done. That's the point where you recognize that the social contract is broken, that students are getting a raw deal, and FUCK YOU Granite State, we're going to bend over backwards to demonstrate how shitty our financial status is and pay the income-adjusted minimum until we hit 360 payments. My wife will probably die with seven figures of student loan debt. What's the fucking point of paying more than the absolute bare minimum on an arrangement like that?
My boyfriend works at John Hopkins, and complains every day they've gone downhill. Dont pick them just because they sound prestigious. A less expensive, but also good school will give you just as good of an education. The majority of JH's students have rich parents that are either connected to members of the school or parents or donate a ton of money. JH had to dumb down their programs so these students wouldn't bring the whole schools GPA average down. Grades predominantly focus on just completing work, more than how much a student learns. If you like JH for other reasons by all means go for it, but while deciding don't thing more expensive = better. Also, just because they offer you a scholarship this semester doesnt mean they will in the future. Factor your entire college experience into this decision, and not just the impacts of your first semester.
Had a good weekend camping and brewery hopping. I think I need to invest in a beer fridge now. Between what I brought back from California and what I picked up last weekend I have taken over two shelves in our fridge in the kitchen. It should last me a couple months. Had to repair our washing machine last night. The lid switch broke (again). This time I got a replacement instead of trying to jerry-rig it to make it work. Today I have easily 10 loads of laundry to do to get ready for our vacation next week. It is nice working from home so that I can run down every 40-45 minutes and switch the laundry. Even better since we got a dryer a couple years ago. I miss the fresh smell from line drying outside but I don't miss the effort of hanging the laundry and having to shake bugs out before folding it. Our puppy got a hold of my wife's wallet and chewed up a couple of credit cards (no loss in my eyes) and her vaccination card (thought she was going to blow a gasket). Only reason I noticed was because I heard her chomping on a quarter and was trying to figure out where she got it from. We were spoiled by our first two dogs that were never anywhere near as energetic as this puppy. It's the simple things in life that make it good. I'm going to just keep rolling with it.
The beer shelf is a beautiful thing. What'd you get out there? I love Pliny the Elder from Russian River and it's impossible to get outside a very small area in California. I have a neighbor who also enjoys beer and his company is headquartered in Cali. He has a business trip next month and shipped two coolers out to the office to fill up and ship back while he's out there.
I picked up a some IPA's from San Diego: - Modern Times - Belching Beaver - AleSmith - Duck Foot - Pure Project - stopped at a few others but didn't bring anything home Last weekend in Rhode Island I grabbed some from: - Long Live - Buttonwoods - Moniker Long Live is by far my favorite right now. I haven't had a bad IPA from them in four trips in the past two years. They have a good variety with very different flavors, but everyone is good. If you are into IPAs and live near RI, I would highly recommend a visit there. We had a friend ship some Pliny the Elder and Younger to us last year. I wasn't as impressed as I had expected based on the reviews everyone gives it. I found it too malty.
RI has great beers! Have a friend up there who I visit on occasion. He introduced me to Whalers Brewing and their Rise APA. That's a thing of beauty. I'll try to get a hold of Long Live at some point.
LOL. I love the image. We were on a team call earlier and mk had to leave abruptly. I'm sure the pub will open, though it may be later than usual. Till then, I'll have a dram of that moonshine!
i'd have to leave early too if i forgot to open the pub!