Money-Shredding Alarm Clock Is Completely Unforgiving [PICS]

Money-Shredding Alarm Clock Is Completely Unforgiving [PICS]: "Bringing new meaning to the phase “you snooze, you lose,” when you place this unforgiving clock across the room from your bed, if you don’t get up when the alarm sounds, it’s going to cost you.

Might we suggest at first being easy on yourself, placing a lower-denomination bill into this sleeper’s trap before you start punishing yourself too much. From the looks of these pics, that shredder does a thorough job of destroying currency or whatever else you’d like to place into it. And look at that — the designer has placed not one, but what looks like a stack of $100 bills into the clock’s hungry maw.

Once Again: Is College Worth It?

NYTimes.com:
College provides plenty of intellectual and psychic benefits alongside the potential economic ones, granted. Let’s just focus on the economic ones. Is college worth it, economically? My colleagues David Leonhardt and Floyd Norris had a blogging debate about this question, which I encourage you to go back and read. For now I’d just like to highlight a few factors to consider.

It’s true that the job market for new college graduates stinks right now. But you know what? The job market for non-graduates is worse.

People with more skills have a broader range of jobs they can do, and having a postsecondary degree sometimes serves as litmus test for employers who can be picky about hiring.

As a result, unemployment rates decline as workers become more educated:

Source: Bureau of Labor Analysis, via Haver Analytics

College graduates also earn more money than their less-educated peers. That gulf in earnings has only widened in the last few decades: the inflation-adjusted pay of college graduates has risen, and the inflation-adjusted pay of every other group has fallen.

(Aside: People with higher degrees have even lower unemployment rates, and earn even more money.)

Additionally, in a survey of recent graduates from the Heldrich Center at Rutgers — the same survey that produced figures on graduates’ poor job prospects — respondents seemed to wholeheartedly agree that college is indeed “worth it.”

Nearly three-quarters of recent graduates said they believed their degree was as valuable now as they thought it would be when they first enrolled in college. Additionally, three-quarters said their college education did extremely well or pretty well in preparing them to be successful in their first full-time job.

That’s not to say they don’t have some regrets. About that same proportion said they would do something different if they could start college over again. Here are some of the things they’d like a redo on:

“Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University.

Lots of people would have changed their major, or done an internship, or started looking for work sooner while enrolled. Did you notice what category of regrets got the lowest share of responses?

Wishing they hadn’t gone to college.