$5 per Month Cell Phone Service from Speedtalk

Speedtalk has a $5 monthly plan for cell phone service.   You can get their preloaded SIM at Amazon for $5 plus $4 shipping.

The service level includes 250 minutes OR 250 text or 250MB data per month.   So its pretty limited, but for $5 its a pretty decent offering for light users.

You can also get 12 months of service from Speedtalk for $60 at Amazon with free shipping.    That works out to $5 per month and the shipping is free.  However it does NOT have rollover so the monthly allotment is use-it-or-lose-it.

Speedtalk is a reseller that uses the T-mobile network.   I haven't used them myself.



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Effective Federal Funds Rate for 60+ Years (1954 to 2017)

The St. Louis Fed's FRED database has historical info on the federal funds rate

Wiki says that "In the United States, the federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions (banks and credit unions) lend reserve balances to other depository institutions overnight, on an uncollateralized basis."

Here's the graphic - click the picture for a full size version:

(source St. Louis Fed )

Seemed to me the trend was gradually going up and then peaking around 1980 then going down.   I used Excel to plot a (polynomial) trend line :

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How much Does High School Quality Matter In College? Lots.

I've no doubt that the quality of your high school matters in preparing you for college.   But how much does it typically matter?     I went searching for studies that looked at it and I found : the report Can You Leave High School Behind?  (link to PDF)   It looked at data from University of Texas Austin students.  

In Texas they've had a program where the top 10% of all high schools are admitted to UT automatically.    This means they get a good distribution of students from high schools of varying quality.   And it gives them a lot of data about >25 thousand students who came from varying quality high schools and then went to UT.    Looking at the grades in UT for those kids they can see what the correlation is between high school quality metrics and college performance.

In short:    If you go to a good or bad high school does it reflect in your college GPA?

The answer is YES.   Definitely.

Here's a excerpt from the study that illustrates :

"As an example, we estimate a predicted GPA for a simulated student with high school characteristics from two different campuses – one of the highest-ranked and one of the lowest-ranked high schools in the Houston area. Our simulated student is female, Hispanic, age 18, and has a mother with a high school diploma, family income between $20,000-40,000, and $1,000 in unmet financial need. Graduating from the high-performing high school, this student’s estimated freshman year GPA 3.21. Graduating 23 from the low performing high school, her estimated GPA is only 2.30 – a difference of over 1.6 standard deviations."

So they modeled that an specific student would end up with a 0.9 GPA difference if they'd' gone to a good high school versus a bad high school.  

Thats a pretty big swing.    I'd consider a 3.2 GPA in college a success and a mere 2.3 GPA to be a failure or at least a pretty mediocre performance.

Of course the study is just looking at averages.    A kid from the worst high school could go on to ace college and win a Nobel prize and a kid from the very bestest high school could flunk out of college and end up a homeless drug addict.    But on average... the quality of high school is reflected in the average grades of the students who go on to college.

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Money Can't Buy You Feelings of Worthlessness, Hopelessness and Sadness

Money cant buy happiness they say?     Well poverty can buy you feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and sadness all or most of the time.    I'll take the cash instead please.

I've made this point before and again and again.    But I will go ahead and keep making it.

The report How Are Income and Wealth Linked to Health and Longevity? from the Urban Institute had the figure below :

(Source : Urban Institute, click image for full size)

Clearly all rich people aren't happy and all poor people aren't sad.    But it is just one more data point that there is clear correlation between happiness and money.   Now note that I'm using the word correlation there.    Its an important detail.     Its possible at least in some cases that the feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness or sadness caused the poverty.

If you really truly think money doesn't make you happy then I implore you to make the world a better place and give all your money to a poor person.
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