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.
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?
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?
Yeah, none of that may matter for a "brochure" type of website, or a blog where you are the only person updating it.
As soon as you start processing forms and doing anything transactional based on that, you'll be quickly reinventing a lot of wheels if you aren't using a DBMS of some sort.
I don't see that it matters much which way the fan is blowing. What matters is the air exchange, which is about creating an airflow.
If you have a multistory house you can open windows at the top and bottom, the warm air will tend to flow out and pull cool air in the bottom. In that situation if you have a fan, it would make sense to have it blowing air in on the lower level, or out on the upper level.
If you have a single level, the fan will just create a slight pressure difference in one direction or the other. You just need to open several windows, preferably on opposite sides of the room, and if you use a fan to pull cool air in that creates a positive pressure inside the room, which will force the warm air to be exhausted through the other open windows. If the fan is blowing warm air out, then the room pressure will be negative relative to the outside, and cool air will be pulled in through the other open windows.
I disagree. Maybe because I've worked with computers for my entire career. The last thing I want to do when I'm old is interact with technology. I'd much rather have a dog.
I'm getting close to 60. I live alone since my wife moved out 20 years ago. The closest friend I have was a co-worker who retired at the end of 2021 and I have not seen him since.
I enjoy it. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. I don't have to consider anyone else when I decide what I'm going to do. If I want to stay at the gym for an extra hour, I do. Nobody will complain about it when I get home. If I don't feel like doing the dishes tonight, I don't. If I want to sleep until noon, I do. Nobody will wake me up. Everything that happens in my life is a result of what I decide to do (or not do).