jmm

If anyone has any ideas for a data source to look at besides census data, Crunchbase, and maybe national chain cafe store locators, give a shout. pg??? I'd obviously share the report...

Comment · 15 years ago

Call me insensitive, but I think the drama here is overblown. Renting out your room to strangers comes with risks. Theft is an obvious one. Could have been a one or two paragraph post, but maybe this is part of the catharsis in getting over a robbery.

And now call me a cynic, but I kind of have the feeling that the the public drama of this complaint is a way of getting the sweetest customer service response ever from AirBnB. Like, new gear, near apartment, moving costs, all of it. Almost like a cooked up insurance claim... if it's not that, AirBnB will probably experience that kind of scam at some point.

Comment · 15 years ago

I went to go see the dude from Catch Me if You Can speak a few years ago and one of the takeaways was that a cross cut shredder isn't very secure (pages are easy to reconstruct). Gor for a micro shredder.

Comment · 15 years ago

Disruptive criticism? :)

Comment · 15 years ago

Kickstarter campaign, anyone? (to produce an iPad + Square dongle enclosure)

Comment · 15 years ago

My uncle owns a few elder care franchises and had me look into monitoring services as a funemployment project. So I've spent a bit more time with this than I'd like to admit...

The company I was most impressed with was http://www.halomonitoring.com . The device seems to be designed well and the monitoring services (online portal for caregivers or family members) are impressive, comparatively.

There's kind of a sea change happening with home health monitoring -- from the "I've fallen and can't get up" devices to more robust and interactive solutions. GE recently bought a company that provides institutional monitoring equipment and services.

Lemme know if you want the full report :)

Comment · 15 years ago

Thanks. The relationship to the housing bubble is interesting, no doubt. In my mind, no two things have been more connected to class aspirations/freedoms over the last 50 years than home ownership and higher ed. There are class and race issues at play in both cases, which makes new prescriptions pretty tough to make, especially on a political level.

But a problem has been identified here -- too many people are spending too much on money on phantom educational assets. Now the solution -- fewer people should go to college. (Especially expensive low to mid tier schools?) I guess what I was really asking above, is: so what should they do instead? And I'm guessing the answer ain't so pretty, something even more offensive to the idea of the American dream than the analogous housing case, of "sorry, just keep on renting."

Comment · 15 years ago

What gets me about many of these articles is how broad a brush they often use when describing "the education bubble." And so I appreciate that this article at least gestures at different types of grad school, and how student/consumer demand may be decreasing.

But I'd to read more about specific bad "educational investment" decisions, and what makes these decisions bad, as a way of prescribing better pathways for students sizing up their college or grad school options. Specifically, what are the bigger competing opportunities that should entice these "kids" away from educational debt and opportunity cost? Thiel's program can only be a very small part of the re-balancing act, I think.

Point me in the right direction if you've already read it...

Comment · 15 years ago

Just as Cornell U uses the water from Cayuga Lake. Pretty cool :)

Comment · 15 years ago

I think there are different facets to the bubble that need to be separated out to talk coherently about its implications...

You can look at the bubble from the vantage point of the schools that are competing to keep up with the spending of the ivys and have overextended themselves: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

And you can also look at it from the perspective of the students that are emerging from mid or low tier institutions with a hefty chunk of debt relative to their likely earning potential.

Peter's (or Sarah's) focus on the Harvard kids seems to be the least compelling part of a potential education bubble. These are smart kids who either leave school with no debt in the case that they are poor to lower middle class, and with parental support (of the monetary kind) if they're on the other side of the wealth spectrum. So maybe they're "wasting" four years where they could be creating a business, but they're not in dire straights upon graduation or necessarily compelled to sell their souls. Check out Harvard's financial aid policies: http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/hfai...

I do think there needs to be some different paths put before kids in general as they contemplate "college as the only option" but I don't think Thiel is quite right to target the ivy kids as they have the least reason to fear an education bubble bursting -- because of the lasting [perceived] quality of their degree, their lack of debt in a lot of cases, their campus-born connections to smart and wealthy classmates and alums, and their smarts.

Comment · 15 years ago

Right. Tho the pop up restaurants that I've heard of have been set up by chefs with some sort of following via a previous venture... this thing here ain't that.