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“A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group. He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so we’re applying for some programs that support undergrads in research. He isn’t a physics major, but he has broad interests, and I think we need more people like him.
In the process of reading drafts of his application essays, he sounded incredibly naive, and his writing skills could stand considerable improvement, so I began to despair. But somebody took me on when I was a kid who didn’t know squat, so I have a favor to return. In reading his naive statements, I started to think about what I actually got from undergraduate research. I was working in a space science lab, helping build an instrument. Now I do theoretical optics applied to biology. Not much connection there. So, what did I get?”
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“So let’s correct the inaccurate conclusions one might reasonably draw from the misleading Bain chart:
Wrong: The music industry is down around 40% from its peak in 1999
Correct: The music industry is down 64% from its peak.
Wrong: At least the music industry is almost 4 times better off than in 1973.
Correct: The music industry is actually down 45% from where it was in 1973.
Wrong: The CD era was the aberration. (Mr. Gruber’s reasonable take)
Correct: The CD peak was only 13% better than the vinyl peak, not over 250% better as the Bain chart implies.
The overall conclusion is that the music industry is actually doing much worse than the Bain chart implies:
10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.
26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.” -
“You’ve experienced this. More than once. You’re at a restaurant with a large party of friends or co-workers or castmembers or — riskiest of all — people from church, and everybody is on one tab. The bill gets passed around the table and the money gets piled up in the middle and you wind up $20 short — not to mention the tip. “Who didn’t put in?” No one says anything. Everyone insists they paid more than enough for their share, with plenty of extra for the tip, but you’re $20 short, so somebody is lying. More than one somebody, probably. But since no one fesses up, you end up tossing in way more than you should have had to and those $5.99 nachos wind up costing you $40.
That’s the sort of experience that makes it seem easier and even cheaper to just buy your own lawnmower.”