The 100 by 30 project

I've been throttled.

After years of being a Netflix member who rented what I'd estimate to be one DVD every two months, I recently started becoming a more active member. For the past three months or so, I'd been pushing my two-DVDs-at-a-time plan to the limit, probably cycling through 1.5 DVDs per week (my husband and I are catching up on the brilliant but not a little bit sexist "Rescue Me").

When I first started cranking out the rentals, I was astonished at how quickly they came. It was essentially a two-day turnaround: one day to get back to their facility, they shipped out my next flick that day, it arrived the day after.

After awhile, though, the pace slowed. It would take two or even three days to get a confirmation email that they'd received my returned disk, and the new one often wouldn't arrive the day after the email.

At first I thought I was imaging it. Had I just been misremembering the speed of my earlier rentals? But some poking around revealed that this slowing down is an intentional practice by Netflix that critics have labeled "throttling".  Essentially,  Netflix  bumps frequent users to the back of the queue when it helps them to more quickly service infrequent customers; because those infrequent customers cost Netflix very little but pay their monthly fees anyway, it's important to Netflix to keep them happy.

I actually don't have a problem with this. It's not entirely a clear line: I'd raise holy hell if someone tried to rearrange customers waiting in line at, say, Panera, and I was strongly opposed to the proposal to allow people to buy their way into faster TSA lines at the airport, but for some reason this doesn't disturb me at all. Although if the service gets even slower, I might just cancel.

What he said!

See, somebody agrees with me. And he has a PhD in econ and everything...

Post-nups

This is an interesting article on post-nuptial agreements, which are, as you'd expect, contracts about the assets made once a couple is already married.

Luckily A. and I are as close in financial outlooks as people can be, but if we weren't, I'd consider this in a heartbeat.

Is this the worst possible housing bill possible?

I would love to see a housing bailout bill that refinanced loans for primary homeowners who are in homes at high-rate ARMs that they could actually afford with a 30-year-fixed at, say, 5-6%. Cuts down on foreclosures, but doesn't waste money on hopeless cases or reward speculation.

But the Senate just stripped that out of their "housing relief package"! Luckily, "forty percent of the cost of the bill will fund a business tax break expected to help homebuilders." Yay! Anything in the name of preserving jobs.

Unbelievable.

Advice for people who contact my department looking for tutors:

I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.

So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.