I’m no stranger to tuition based on major as I have both a business and engineering degree. Interestingly these degrees were significantly more expensive than say English or sociology.

The argument to charge more stems on one around value based pricing, people value these degrees “more” because they generally lead to a higher salary. The question is, why do they garner such a high salary? Is it that there is a lot of demand for good graduates with the skills these degrees teach?

If so, shouldn’t we do the opposite when deciding what to charge for these degrees? To be clear by “we” I mean society as a whole. If we demand some skill, shouldn’t we make it easier to gain that skill to help meet that demand?

The problem with pricing highly demanded degrees at a high price is that it’s a positive feedback. High prices reduce accessibility and thus supply which further increases demand. If you did the opposite you’d get a negative feedback and hopefully help address supply.

Let anyone who has the chops get an engineering degree. Even encourage people to give it a go with a lower price. Meet that demand.

What do you think? Should a sociology degree be more expensive than an engineering degree?

Note: I’m writing this up on an iPad on a car trip so please overlook any oddities above.

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The UI is pretty crappy but I don’t want to waste time CSSing it all up.

Any ideas? I’m not the ‘long article’ type of person so I think that road is dead.

Last weekend we decided to put up lights above our Bar so we went to the lighting store. Let me tell you, lighting is highway robbery. We couldn’t find lights that had light green shades on them (a colour we wanted to use since it would tie in with the living room and add a nice accent to the bar area) so we started looking at alternatives. We found an “ok” alternative which the lady priced out to us at $300 EACH! We needed 2 and I’m not that much of a sucker to buy those lights.

After a long adventure of trying to figure out what to do and then how to do it, we decided to buy the super cheap ($40 each) hanging lights that have just frosted glass shades on them. We then painted them.

Since there weren’t any obvious instructions on how to do this on the Internet I have decided to post our instructions here.

Step 1. Don’t be a chump. Buy the el’cheapo lights with glass shades. I don’t think frosted vs non-frosted makes a difference but we had frosted glass.

Step 2: Buy stain glass window paint, protectant, and a very soft brush. See below for what we bought. We bought this after checking the bottle to make sure that the temperature it listed on the back was within the range of heat we estimated the glass would get up to. We figured no more than 70 degrees Celsius based on the wattage of the lamps and some assumptions. Yes I’m an engineer.

Step 3: Tape up the parts of your glass shade you don’t want to get painted:

Step 4: Use the soft brush you bought to paint a thin layer of the stain glass paint on the shade. A thin layer won’t look like it will do much but it will get the job done and you can always add a second coat later if you want. Downward strokes worked best on our style shade. We came up with this after a bunch of trial and error and quickly washing off the paint once we realized we had screwed up. The picture below shows a trial that was too thick and raidal (two wrongs don’t make a right).

Step 5: Wash your brush and let your painted glass dry. We let it dry for the requisite 72 hours noted on the instructions. After that, paint on the sealant with the same brush and downward strokes etc. Let it dry for the 24 hours the bottle says

Step 6: Mount them on your hanging lights. Pictures of the finished product below.

In conclusion, screw you lighting stores and your “you’re just a stupid yuppie so you’ll pay crazy fees to get what you really want” pricing. Total cost: $40*2+$30=$110 for 2 lights.

…and here’s Sabrina with Molly…

Sabrina says it’s a ‘freudian slip’ of sorts since I’ve been talking of getting a new laptop but never really had a reason to get a new one.

What drives me insane is that Outlook allows others to flag a message before it’s sent to me. This breaks my system (why did you allow this Microsoft?) because all of a sudden I have a bunch of red flags for things I don’t think I need to do.

Luckily I can setup an Outlook rule to take care of this… but should I have to?

Anyways, I’m done venting.

via Gizmodo (and SLR)