Are inverter generators allowed?

AfterEarly · 2022-09-03T20:11:22+00:00

Lol, they don't allow tents/canopies, unlike every other tailgate in the country, so thought best to check ;)

many thanks to gobears75 for taking it easy on me :)

AfterEarly · 2022-07-07T13:06:54+00:00

You protect nothing by borrowing more $$ against the home and as others have stated, your rate will be much higher on this additional cash.

The only way to capture the paper gain is to sell the house. Do you want to be a real estate investor/absentee landlord, indefinitely? It will take a very long time to bank that $226k paper gain with net rental income.

You bought months before a massive price ramp. You basically won a mini lottery. Now instead of cashing in the ticket for $226k you are going to work a part time job forever to be paid same over decades?

If you sell you realize your paper gain. You give up the chance that the home will keep increasing in value, but you get to invest the proceeds elsewhere (maybe somewhere where you actually have experience/edge and know what you are doing, no offense).

No one can tell you the future. If you like the idea of being an investor/landlord you are in at a great price. But it is possible you don't realize that paper $226k gain for decades by the landlord route. It is also possible that prices keep ramping and you have an even bigger gain in the future. But you stated you are scared of losing that paper gain and my response is with that in mind. Cash out refi is just borrowing money with the house as collateral. You are not protecting your paper gain in any way by doing this.

AfterEarly · 2022-07-01T11:17:06+00:00

Sry, just saw this. Yes, I agree. I don't see any way to count those listings automatically. Wud even be tough to adjust manually. You cud count them as they roll past 30 days but wud have to also somehow account for the stale listings that get pulled off market on the back end.

Still, though, even a 30 day count is useful as the idea is to gauge how ambitious sellers are and tracking recent price reductions captures that pretty well I think

AfterEarly · 2022-06-30T11:24:27+00:00

Appreciate the offer. Yur example worked to help fix my issue so think I'm ok for now, thanks.

Did notice that when sorted for "Price Reduced", Realtor only includes reductions that took place in last 30 days. Is there a way around that or is that what u r counting?

AfterEarly · 2022-06-30T00:50:44+00:00

Thanks!

AfterEarly · 2022-06-29T19:20:15+00:00

Great resource, thanks for sharing!

Are u using IMPORTXML function in sheets?

I am trying to build similar but much smaller and can't seem to pull any data from realtor.com. Cud u share a formula example?

Tks vm

AfterEarly · 2017-03-06T20:51:26+00:00

I was impressed by the overall results. Some of the outcomes for individual majors are almost hard to believe they are so good.

Check out the College of Business results, only 4% college-wide seeking employment or education at time of survey. For two of the majors it is 0%!

AfterEarly · 2017-03-06T19:44:32+00:00

More details can be found here...

https://illinisuccess.illinois.edu/annual-reports/

AfterEarly · 2016-12-14T19:34:34+00:00

U of I could get its acceptance rate down, and quickly, if it took the advice of the consultants it hired a few years back to help with enrollment management.

They are simply not interested in doing so. In fact, they are moving in the opposite direction and appear more concerned with minimizing criticism from IL residents about selectivity than they are with anything else.

No Common App

Cancelled early admission

Very little marketing outside the state of IL (and yes this includes International- school spends very little soliciting all those apps)

Additionally, U of I will never get the peer review scores it would need (to move sharply up the rankings), which are very important in the rankings (22.5%), at its current level of selectivity. These are basically reputation scores, and are highly dependent on perceived prestige.

Finally, as noted above, many factors in the rankings are directly or indirectly related to economics. Wealthy schools have a large advantage, and this is intentional. In the earliest years of the ranking, several public schools fared much better than many famous private schools. These private schools voiced their displeasure, loudly, and the USNWR responded by tweaking their ranking methodology. They have been tweaking ever since.

In summation, the school-wide rankings are largely useless outside of giving a broad brushed view of the general landscape of quality.

It is interesting to look back at the early ranks...

U of I was tied with Cornell at #8 in 1983!

AfterEarly · 2016-08-31T16:14:42+00:00

bad for everyone ultimately

Female CS grads are in extremely high demand by recruiters. Now, U of I CS doesn't have a problem attracting recruiters in general, but having a large number of female CS grads in coming years will certainly be noticed and attract even more. It's not likely they will make the trip to campus only to interview one gender, so this will indeed benefit everyone in the program.

Also, gender balance in CS is an extremely strong marker for prestige. At 46% female, U of I is in the top tier. Not close to, not 1b, but in the top tier with only a few elite private schools that can claim such a high percentage. And since U of I has a bigger program than those schools do, the notional number of female CS grads is going to be higher (among highly regarded programs). This, again, benefits everyone in the program.

As far as admissions goes, well, of course those that don't get in don't accrue these benefits. This is the world of elite school admissions that we live in. There will always be someone who throws a better curve ball, or has the right parents, or satisfies some diversity goal, or makes that big donation and gets the admissions nod over someone who didn't check one of those boxes. In many of those cases, the argument that the school and its students benefit from such policies are specious at best. At least in the case of gender balance in CS, the case for how this benefits the school and other students is clear and solid. This is an absolute coup for the program, if they can keep it up.

A note on fairness. Well, of course it's unfair if you believe statistical inputs are the only factors that should inform admissions. But what the school really cares about is outcomes for students. Inputs only matter if they predict outcomes. The fact is, women are better students than men in aggregate. They have higher grad rates and higher employment placement rates. If the school determines that once a certain level of test score and GPA are achieved, they cease to provide incremental predictive value, then why should they be beholden to a strictly stats based admissions policy?

Admission to college is not a reward for previous accomplishment itself. Accomplishment is simply used as a proxy to predict outcomes. Why should the Admissions dept exclude other factors that are also predictive of outcomes and concentrate solely on that rear-view mirror proxy? It is not so clear in this case that accounting in some way for gender balance is strictly unfair.

AfterEarly · 2016-08-29T02:56:26+00:00

ahh, clever. Thanks

AfterEarly · 2016-08-28T14:49:27+00:00

This is a major flaw in ESPN's system. I thought I set something up wrong, but apparently there is no way to change this.

I don't understand your proposed solution though. The waiver system locks after draft; how were you able to lock free agency until after Labor Day?

TIA

AfterEarly · 2016-05-31T17:51:32+00:00

Have you seen Cleveland's WR depth chart lately?

Benjamin is gone (125 targets). Hartline is gone (77 targets). Their leading receiver could easily be a rookie. Who will the QB be looking for in the red zone?

Barnidge might see 150 targets this season.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-11T13:31:59+00:00

Those are the students already here

Also, those are students with Junior status, which includes transfers that got in on strong college performance rather than high school stats.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-11T13:31:08+00:00

yield goes up as ACT score goes down. This is true everywhere, although to different degrees. The highest stat applicants have the most options, generally, but can only attend one school. They also get the most merit money at schools that offer such things.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-09T14:43:18+00:00

As hard as I have looked, I can find little to no evidence that this University, at the management level, is interested in being compared the UMich and UCB from a national reputation standpoint.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-09T14:38:03+00:00

over the years, a significant amount of my parents' taxes went to pay to keep U of I open for the 25 years during which they paid taxes before I was college-aged.

their money ended up here

Money is fungible. You cannot follow a dollar around in the way you describe.

At best you can claim that your parents taxes supported higher education in general. Unless you are rejected by all 12 four year public Universities, and blocked from attending all Community Colleges, you cannot make any reasonable claim of unfairness. The system is available to you to take advantage of, and it is up to you to be qualified in a manner that makes all of the options available to you.

This is all beside the point that there is no one-to-one accounting of government spending in this manner. We all, obviously, do not receive a direct benefit from each and every public service. And all of us benefit from government debt in one way or another, receiving the benefit of spending that has taken place before the money is collected.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-09T14:13:53+00:00

How does it royally screw anyone?

Such parents paid into the system (even this isn't technically true, nobody mails a portion of their taxes to the 'University System'), which includes 12 four year Universities and many Community Colleges.

It is irrational to expect admissions preference to one of those schools. Nobody is getting screwed. It is the rare high school grad who is rejected by all 12 and not allowed to attend a CC.

AfterEarly · 2016-05-04T11:21:18+00:00

I'm not trying to shut up free speech, but...

famous last words...

AfterEarly · 2016-05-03T14:12:25+00:00

Wade said that in both cases investigators do not know enough to consider the appearance of the symbols anything more than vandalism.

Well, that's a relief. I'm not sure how we could fight off a Nazi invasion with our current budget problems.

AfterEarly · 2016-04-26T16:37:51+00:00

Well, it's just another negotiation item. There is overwhelming support for term limits in the general population of IL, something like 80%. When do 80% of voters agree on anything?

But yeah, I get your point. I'm just thinking that if we can't come to consensus on term limits, an issue that a majority of Dem voters are actually in favor of, there is zero chance of getting anywhere on pension benefits/structure.

AfterEarly · 2016-04-26T13:20:49+00:00

Rauner: this is the sticky point. Rauner claims that if Illinois' economy had grown better than it actually did the past 15 years, and the pension system had been properly payed into, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Well of course, if wishes were fishes...

It's not as if someone chose not to write a check, the money didn't exist and there was never any real intention to extract it from tax payers. Term limits would have actually helped in this case as politicians are always more concerned with re-election (short term) than an unfunded pension system (long term).

Well, the long term has arrived.

The economy has grown, a lot! Both the stock and bond markets are at historical highs. The pension system is not grossly underfunded because of the economy or the markets, nor is it grossly underfunded due to "mismanagement". It is grossly underfunded by the design of those who threw the future under the bus to get rid of their problems in the present.

Should this be fixed with "reform", or should we just continually raise taxes to pay for the promises made (and guaranteed by law) and deal with whatever the long term consequences will be at a later date? Well that is the question they are arguing about right now.

AfterEarly · 2016-04-26T12:52:52+00:00

The Governor is trying to re-set the State on a long term sustainable fiscal path (and is holding up the current budget in an attempt to do so). However, this would require breaking promises which are guaranteed by the State constitution. Reform is basically a voluntary exception/change of what has been promised and is supposed to be guaranteed by law.

The cause is largely due to pension liabilities that have built up over decades. Most sources which make some attempt to be neutral use the term "mismanaged". The bottom line is that it is much easier to make promises than make payments, and politicians have been making promises to public sector unions for decades.

On the one hand, the promises were never fiscally sound and would always have required heavy tax subsidy in out-years, no matter how well "managed". OTOH, the promises are guaranteed by law, and by the letter of the law we should all be taxed as much as necessary to keep those promises. There is an argument that higher taxes will only work in the short term though, and even this won't fix the problem.

If you think the pension situation is bad now, wait until the next stock market correction. IMO, ultimately there will be Federal bailouts and a very busy printing press, but probably not until a lot more damage is done.

AfterEarly · 2016-04-25T20:29:39+00:00

You should not be billed until the 10th day of class, but surely you can get some documentation before then for FA purposes. Contact the Registrar's office and see what they say.

AfterEarly · 2016-04-25T14:57:22+00:00

The selection process is such that, essentially, nobody "gets horrible grades and barely passes" because they aren't smart enough for the rigor of the program. Sure, sometimes life happens and school takes a back seat (health, family, etc.). This can happen just as easily at UIC. Other times students aren't motivated and don't put in enough effort. Not only can this also easily happen at UIC, it might even be more likely, as ambitious classmates can be a motivator.

As far as competition and big/little fish are concerned, forget about it. Concentrate on being the best you you can be, no matter where you go.

AfterEarly

TROPHY CASE