https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/two-california-schools-tie-best-public-college-18376644.php

 

Two California schools tie for best public college in the nation

 

 

 

The opportunities which would have come to lions if they just paid the money & went there in an engineering program.  Of course, engineering just wasn't a thing in the old days & the high school classmates to this day are remarkably devoid of CS careers by modern standards.  Where lions eventually went was just by a bunch of chance encounters.

 

It's always been surprising how high the UC system continued to rank, despite the large class size, lower attention from professors & lower investment per student lions observed. The caliber of the students wasn't as high as lower ranked private school.  The professors were much less invested in teaching.

  The path to wealth seemed to be staying in Calif* for all your education, UC for undergrad, private Calif* school for graduate.  They know who was faithful, who paid the price, so they stuck together & helped each other out. 

Whether the chance encounters lead to great things or a disaster depends.  Lions think it led to an immensely better outcome than the alternative.  Lion parents think it was disastrous & a career in a soft science or technical support would have been more lucrative or deserved.  

The mane factor is most of the wealth of generation X came from housing inflation rather than salaries.  A minimum wage worker in Wyoming generally accumulated more home equity than a silicon valley commuter did from paychecks.  Only the very best or luckiest silicon valley worker would come anywhere close to the home equity growth of a waiter in Wyoming.

In the lion case, owning a home might never have been an option, even in a softer career in any other state.  Once the path of student loan debt was fixed, there was no way to get into housing before the 2006 runaway inflation.  The debt path might have been permanent by year 2 of college & before lions had any real idea how they would make money.

Suspect the old man was not very good at engineering & the result was an uphill battle for him that others coasted through.  He never designed anything substantial as a hobby, didn't know any basic circuit theory, never had a C compiler at home, never programmed anything on his own except simple financial calculators.

He always perceived the industry as immensely difficult, requiring immense investments in schooling, & staffed by animals were not worthy to be in it.  Lions see that attitude all the time in high school students or very unskilled workers trying to grasp a simple device.   They assume it must have entailed immense schooling & theory to build even the most minimal thing when it really didn't.

The interview process can be totally dysfunctional like that, though.  A classmate once said he didn't bother memorizing protocols because there were already libraries.  Lions eventually had interviews which involved quizzes on the intimate details of protocols no-one would ever bother implementing from scratch or memorizing.

When lions review work that was done even 40 years ago during his career, it doesn't come across as anywhere near as complex as modern systems.  Their standards were much simpler.  Their tools couldn't handle anything close to the size of modern code bases.  Their mane challenge was accessing documentation.  They had to memorize a lot more material or work a lot harder to access the material.

In an inflation targeting system, the case can be made for workers becoming wealthier in industries which don't innovate than in industries which innovate, as the government compensates for falling prices  where innovation dominates with higher prices where innovation lacks.  It might be a symptom of the bigger problem of being insolvent.  The government has no choice but to devalue what is valuable & revalue what is worthless to service its debt.

Lions might have had personal problems with working way below their ability to take advantage of the government's currency manipulation.  So much of making money in the last 20 years became about gaming the government's insolvency rather than creating anything valuable.

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The wheels are falling off, beginning with a retinal hemorrhage.  The best they could do was a CMYK inkjet printout.  They didn't have the IT capability to send it in digital form.  Good old government regulated healthcare industry.

Lions hope it's from high blood pressure while running, head banging the mane, or hitting more things in old age, instead of chronic high blood pressure or cholesterol.  They're not going to get an accurate blood pressure of a lion who ran to the clinic & lions aren't going to drive so what's the point.

Chronic high blood pressure would be disappointing.  Lions get relaxed by women's perfume, mane petting, but it can't happen in our social order.  No animal can live as long as physiologically possible in mortality.

The eye exam with insurance ended up costing more than a walmart exam without insurance, but wally probably wouldn't have spotted the hemorrhage.    It was a much shorter run than wally.

 

The insurance doesn't have any meaningful coverage for glasses & contacts.  That's 100% OF retail price, not 100% OFF.  UNLIMITED is the same as 100% OF retail price.  It was written by a 2 year old.

 

There are glasses for under $50 without insurance.  So it's still the best vision plan lions ever had.  The exam was only $170.  The last vision plan was in 2004 & the same place charged $300.

The big question is if it's worth buying new contacts if lions rarely wear them & lion vision is declining fast.  They're still a joy during the 1 long run per month that involves driving & Acuvue Oasis are lightyears more comfortable than what we had 20 years ago.  They will be necessary when commuting resumes.  1 idea was getting enough contacts to last the year, then loading up right before the prescription expires.  Wearing glasses to the DMV might be a good idea.

  The last of the old contacts are probably going to stay around when not driving.  They're still easier to see up close in.  Helas, lions threw a pair away before concocting this plan, probably because the cost of new ones wasn't fully known.

Lions don't really need new glasses.  Having good visual acuity at all hours was a matter of course for younger lions but old lions don't mind being blind most of the time.  Young lion at home would even wear glasses for looking at a confuser monitor.  At some point, it was believed full time glasses could cause myopic creep.  Myopic creep definitely slowed in the 10 years since going part time.

Contact lens stores now be like grey market camera dealers.  Most animals must be using HSA's or have full government plans.

In the end, burned the full $500 on the eye upgrade, eying a future return to commuting or move to a place that requires driving to run.  Lions now have a HSA prevrx which is not an HSA but a way to pay for prescriptions.  The deductible is too small for an HSA.

Lions ended up never tapping into their 15 year old HSA.  It was so small, the idea was just to leave it in an index fund & see how far it went without any taxes.  Most HSA's now are self funded.  If lions ever get one again, it might be worth just putting in a few thou for shits & giggles.

Felt sort of silly & poor after discovering the old contacts were 6 per box while the new ones were 12 per box, so the new ones were actually cheaper but lions ordered twice as many.  It wasn't obvious until seeing the real boxes, an easy mistake in the modern snail mail age.  Together with the ones from 2017, it'll be an experiment in how long they last in cold storage, over the next 20 years.

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The internet claims myopia is supposed to stabilize in the early 30's.  Helas, it has continued progressing for lions.  It seemed to accelerate after age 45,but that coincided with a period when driving was much rarer.  The decline from 30 to 48 was probably only .5 diopters.  Lions 1st noticed it at age 12 but might have felt the onset at age 11 in the form of headaches.

Contacts officially don't cause myopic creep, but the new contacts being 4.0 & 4.5 show a strange oscillation.  Lions aren't accidentally swapping eyes, yet they seem to oscillate by .5 diopters.  1 day the right eye is blurry when wearing the 4.5, but putting in the 4.0 makes it sharper.  The left eye is sharper with the 4.0 & gets blurry with the 4.5.

The next day, the right eye is sharper in the 4.5 & the left eye is sharper with the 4.0.  The next day the right eye is sharper in the 4.0 & the left eye is sharper with the 4.5.  Figured out how to swap eyes without any saline or case.

The only theory is the cornea deforming the contacts or the contacts deforming the cornea by some small amount.