Home Ownership

So a billionaire with a gambling problem is less rich than I am?

In what way is he less rich? Is he not a billionaire after he gambles?

Obsession, by Calvin Klein.

That was a bad analogy. Let’s change it to somebody making $25M a year, but gambles and spends $24.9M away at casinos. Is that person less rich than an actuary making $150k?

I think this is one fallacy that really creates a lot of problems. People look at the result of the students that graduate from a school and determine it’s quality. My experiences are that all schools do a good job of providing an education. It’s often the number of students that are amenable to receiving that education that determines the outcomes. So school X with an A rating on Greatschools, is probably providing the exact same quality of education as school Y with a D rating on Greatschools only because school Y is in a poor neighborhood and has a lot of students with non-existent parenting. The quality of parents at a school has much more of an impact on a Greatschool rating than the quality of the teaching.

I had a boat, the old saying about the 2 best days of being a boat owner is very true.

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I’m not sure what point you’re making here. Is this about expenses?

Sure, and the quality of the parents is highly correlated with their socioeconomic status. The top 5% of high schools in my state are certainly not in the top 5% solely because of the quality of teaching, or necessarily even have that as the strongest predictor, but it’s still a better school to go to.

You were just saying to determine how rich somebody is you have to consider expenses. Gambling seems like an expense to me.

I think it is. Yeah.

But also I have my own definition of rich.

Someone who spends most of their money on gambling is not rich to me.

I wouldn’t classify gambling losses as “expenses” in the same way that a baseline amount spent on food, clothing, and shelter is an expense.

Eh, differences in quality of education from one school to the next certainly exist.

But yeah, the school rankings are largely based on things that are not due to the fault or success of the school, like attendance, graduation rate, percent of students going to college, test scores that make no adjustment for the starting point of the students, etc.

I’d look for things like how many AP courses do they offer and the average AP test scores among the kids who take them, and my personal favorite way to gauge a school’s commitment to education: find out who teaches the honors 8th grade Algebra I class. Is it an elementary-certified teacher or a mathematics-certified teacher? Either is legally permitted to teach it, but it’s a high school level course and ought to be taught by someone who chose to specialize in mathematics. And while you may stumble upon the occasional awesome elementary-certified math teacher… generally you’ll do better with a math-certified teacher. If they have a policy that 100.00% of academic teachers in the middle school are elementary certified, that’s probably a bad sign. The Algebra I teacher might have been teaching Social Studies last year.

I recall talking to an 8th grade Honors Algebra I teacher who proudly explained to me that she doesn’t teach the quadratic formula (a required component of the curriculum) “because it’s too confusing and no one ever uses it anyway”. To reiterate, she was teaching the honors students. They were obviously severely short-changed due to her incompetence.

it’s more like … burning money.

Someone who makes a billion a year but burns it all for warmth isn’t exactly rich. Goes back to my definition of rich. If you don’t spend it, you don’t have it.

My kids school has 0 AP courses, but they can go take classes at the community college for free (as long as they get a C or higher) and get credit hours. That’s a fantastic benefit.

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our HS kids have:
AP classes
CIS (college in schools; classes on HS campus with dual credit at HS and U of MN)
Option to take classes at local community college or even 4 yr school for free and get dual credit

I know students who finished HS and got an associates degree at the same time.

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Not that I was nearly a good enough HS student to get this benefit, but one huge benefit I saw was that the kids who had college credits already freshman year were able to be first in line in their grade in signing up for classes since they already had the pre-reqs that everyone would be scrambling for. I was always very envious of that, particularly in the Econ department where you’d be fighting tooth and nail to get into certain courses.

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Was it the course itself? Or a time slot other than first-thing-in-the-morning or late-Friday-afternoon?

This is a travesty, and should be a part of school rankings. It’s something that should not occur. If a college can’t get students into the courses they need then the college is accepting too many students.

I had trouble getting into precisely two courses at Miami: Figure Skating and History of Miami University. Neither was required for graduation; just fun courses I wanted to take.

Was a thing at my school, for sure. I had priority registration due to being Honors College and even then, we’d all be sitting around refreshing our laptops and somebody would yell, “REGISTRATION IS OPEN!” and we’d register as fast as possible according to our ordering of preferred classes.

But if you spend it to consume a rich lifestyle, then I consider you rich.

Have they moved away from the whole IB thing?