patrick.net

My daddy was the CEO of a large cap mining company, so I am fine

And you mommy was a cum gobbling whore, so what?

oh, dryfly already answered... my guess was remarkably close!

wow, SFWoman2! this is like DC or Marvel Comics where an alternative spiderman or superman suddenly appears...

I believe the proper grammar and punctuation you seek is to add an apostrophe when pluralizing an acronym term ending in S.

not sure. i don't think you are meant to use ' to signify a plural with any acronym or abbrev. (did you notice how i abbreved abbrev? self-referential) the use of ' (apostrophe) is only for possessive case or in place of a letter, e.g. the dog's dish, it's a nice day, i won't blog today. notice the common confusion with its and it's, it's is not correct for possessive case, otherwise you would say hi's and her's also -- 'where is its leash?' is correct, 'where is it's leash?' is not. or isn't. but people have a tendency to use it's as a possessive, myself included. and definitely realtors. 'lovely dinning room, seperate from kitchen, with it's own entranceway from the mane coridor' a.k.a. the grocer's apostrophe... (cabbage's 50c)

DS,

Thanks for 'dinning room'. It's one of my favo(u)rites!

I actually saw 'dinning room' recently in an ad, it's not even fabricated... and 'seperate' too, i think...

however, the general rule i found in engineering was the worse the spelling, the greater the engineering genius... the very best engineers could neither talk nor write, heh...

It is an exercise worth doing - especially before you head off to college. Anyway I sent the analysis into an econ prof who moderated the blog & it got pretty heated.

That's very true. It's not quite as bad here where 3/4 of the cost of tuition is borne by the taxpayer, although it goes around again later when you're earning and paying tax. Still, plenty of people who do a general business or arts degree end up working the same job as if they'd never bothered, e.g. customer service. However, it pays off for most of the professions, altho law is a wild card like you say. Possessing the basic piece of paper will open doors tho.

The academics end up acting like salesmen for tertiary education, they aren't impartial or 'seeking truth and knowledge' about it at all, nor really trying to articulate supply and demand for employment with the real world - I imagine the American system is even more prone to hucksterism from what I've seen because of the cost factor disincentive. When I queried the merits of doing a 6-year psychology stream with the psych faculty just to get registration, they got very defensive, and fabricate outcomes for their students without any backup stats as almost standard fallback lines ('all our students get jobs', etc.)

And we dress pretty natty too.

hmm, I forgot that part -- flannelette shirts ring a bell... I was in a scavenger hunt group when I was 18 called 'engineers who don't own flannelette shirts' or something like that... I remember bringing in an obscure vinyl LP and a complete (new) toilet, but couldn't manage the human brain for extra points. I'm ethically horrified now, things have changed fortunately.

Much of the US education is borne by endownments or the government. When I was going to a pricy private first tier college while my parents were making a slightly above avg income ($70-80K/yr) my college bore about 60% of the retail cost, I took on $2,500/yr in subsidized loans and my parents paid the rest out of their income. They didn't have much asset outside of retirement funds at the time though.

My big plan for dealing with kids' (if any) education is as follows, in order of preference:

clumping kids together

go in-state tuition shopping - Georgia and CA seems to offer the best deals for one's tuition dollars

transfer assets to parents as gifts (up to $40K yr tax free), expect to get money back as estate asset -- this one is actually pretty awesome since it also can also get rid of a lot of capital gain, but only works if one has frugal and trustworthy parents with relatively low networth, and it really helps if you have no siblings. Also have to buy parents long term care insurance so long illnesses does not waste the asset.