This article regarding Minnesota schools is well worth a read. It shows how even the best districts in the state in fact have fairly poor test scores. My home schooled kids are fourteen and eleven years old, and are already at those tenth and eleventh grade proficiency levels. It makes me wonder what the schools are doing with all of that time and money they put into each student.

Changing gears, one of my pet peeves is when people say, "A-hah, when you adjust for inflation video game systems from the 90s cost two bajillion dollars today, boy gaming was expensive back then!" What these people are missing is best explained by this comment, buried in the thread:



I can personally attest to this. My dad made a modest salary in the late 80s and early 90s, yet sixty bucks still "felt" like sixty bucks does today. This is because my parents had to pay very little for their home; cars and car insurance were cheap; they could buy a heaping cart of groceries for fifty dollars; health insurance was a fraction of the cost it is today; and so forth.

So we accumulated a rather large Sega Genesis collection from 1990 to 1994, plus built a couple of cutting edge PCs during that time period, and it didn't feel like we were were spending a couple of hundred bucks every time we bought a game-- it felt like we were spending $59.99 per game, like how that would feel today. Heck, $59.99 might feel worse today than then because of how expensive everything else is!

You have to look at the big, contextual "what was life like then" picture-- not just adjust the game or system prices for inflation.

Take my previous post, where I show houses which went from $180k to $1.2 million from 1995 to 2024. Or take this article: monthly mortgage payments of four and five thousand dollars are mentioned, to the point where people are renting out their yards to dog owners! The average payment is $2800 per month, more than double just three years ago! My parents never had to rent out their yard to survive, and they had money left over to buy Sega Genesis games too.

Or how about a thousand dollars a year to "cover" the average vehicle with insurance? That's not taxes or the car payment or gas or maintenance-- that's just the insurance! I could go on and on.

In other news, I got a kick out of this article. It reminds me of the vending machines from the Dreamcast launch title "Blue Stinger"! Maybe these stores play this song during Christmas?

Changing notes again, t's interesting to see the knives come out for Biden. Notice how as long as Biden was the vehicle for "the press" to maintain power, they were willing to give infinite free passes and run endless interference to and for the Democrats. But now that Biden is threatening their power, they are suddenly acting like real journalists.

Finally, my daughter officially starts her job next Tuesday. Everyone is very excited, especially her! I was talking to the location's general manager today, and he and his nine siblings were home schooled.