Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.
Well, sure, but it isn't like taxes are that much higher - honestly, my taxes moving from the US to Norway weren't realistically higher than state + federal + health insurance, and if you consider the out of pocket for health care, the bill is cheaper. Not to mention that Folks that go to school and wind up working a lower-paying job (teaching, for example) aren't on the hook for all of it either.
And you aren't even paying for the same sort of things: Many colleges have sports teams in the US, for example, and the degrees take longer in the US. For example, you don't have to get an undergraduate degree in Norway to become a doctor so you spend less time actually in school.
I'm failing to connect your comment with mine. Yes, of course it came from additional taxes. Those additional taxes did not put people into $30K of debt in those countries. If you're poor, you don't pay that much in taxes. My mythical European parents did not get go into debt paying those taxes so I could go to school.
Another commenter pointed out that German universities need 1.3% of GDP to educate 27% of the population without charging them tuition. USA actually gives more public funding to colleges than Germany and yet those colleges are still asking for tuition.
Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually choose a school based on the living accomodations over the education.
Programs to assist students who should really not be there, and other programs that don't seem to recognize that college students are adults and should be expected to manage their lives by themselves. Do they really need the university to arrange coloring book time to help with the stress of mid-terms?
>Many of these people have mediocre ability
Perhaps. University never intends to compete for top talent with their salary offerings. I recall during a salary discussion years ago, my manager at the time mentioned that the salary was indeed below market but offered up the point below as an advantage.
>don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Yup. This was true and was a definitely a benefit.
Source: 6 years working as IT for a public university.
Athletics is normally (always?) a separate self-funding enterprise attached to th e university. Tutition dollars don't pay the coaches; alumni donations/gifts, sponsors, and ticket sales do.
Used oil is very much burned for heat. Common for shops in areas that need heat in the winter to have a "waste oil heater" instead of using utility gas or electricity for heat.
I used to used dd to convert EBCDIC to ASCII reading tapes from a 1/2" reel-to-reel tape drive. The "convert" capability of dd is what differentiates it from utilities such as cat.
Sometime in the first half of the 1980s I had a TI99/4a, my first computer.
I started programming in BASIC and it was interesting but I felt I was missing a lot in my understanding of what was really going on.
At some point I found a program called "picoprocessor" that was along these lines, but vastly simpler of course. It created on the display an operator panel for a 4-bit computer, it had maybe 2 registers and only a few operations but it was enough to get the light bulb glowing in my head about how computers worked at the assembly language/machine code level.
Seeing the state changes visually on the "panel" as the program ran was so helpful to my understanding that I still remember the experience quite clearly some 40 years later.
My dad also commented about the computers in the lab where he worked, that had operator panels with toggle switches and LEDs. He could tell what loop the program was running by the pattern of lights on the panel.
I once worked in a place in the 1990s that took it to such an extreme that every table name, column name, and variable name had to be approved by a naming standards committee before it could go into production. IIRC the committee met once a month, maybe twice? Which was not ideal for the developers but changes only went to production once a month during a "change window" anyway.
Naming conventions can help with code readability, but don't let the process become more important than the goals.
That's fine, as long as you are still solving the original problem in the required time. The IRS won't excuse that you missed filing your withholding data on time because you were making the reporting tool easier to extend upon later.
Came here to say this sounds like hoarding behavior. To OP: do you also have problems accumulating physical things, organizing them, being unable to discard anything?
For your online stuff, I'd do a mass delete of anything over 90 days old (or pick some other cutoff). You just have accept what's already obvious: you're never going to go through all of it, so why keep it?
