The compression is basic run-length encoding, leveraging the Perl repetition operator (x), and the property of the Perl print/say functions that they concat items passed in a list before writing to STDOUT.
Probably the best citation is a remarkable, rigorous paper by Chetty et al (2014) that uses individual IRS returns [1].
To quote those authors: “We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the ‘birth lottery’ – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past.”
The portrait of the college grad painted in the article is consistent with what I’ve seen as an undergrad at Harvard in econ and CS circles.
> [College students want money, structure, and sex appeal.]
But I’ll add another motivation to the laundry list, that draws smart grads to selective/prestigious programs (including Harvard, Goldman, Google, and even YC): Smart grads want to be surrounded by other smart grads, because they want to build peer relationships with future co-founders and business partners.
This article considers hedge funds in the aggregate, which seems to me to be a fallacy. It doesn’t consider variation within a category which we can usefully select against.
“Money in hedge funds is a bad investment” seems similar to saying “going to college is a bad investment,” when the value of a college degree is highly dependent on institution and major. CS at Stanford may be a fabulous investment, while Folklore/Mythology at U of Phoenix may not be.
I assume “ACCESS GRANTED” is preferred over your root prompt because it is more legible to the vast majority of viewers.
In fact, I suspect one noble goal in ItsAUnixSystem-style sequences is making sure everybody watching understands what’s going on: The access was granted, dummy.
Of course sometimes that’s gonna conflict with realism.
> The only real restriction is that fast lanes can’t be offered exclusively to a company also owned by the cable or phone company.
This fast lane already exists, and it exists for the cable company itself.
E.g. Comcast’s digital television (including Netflix-rivaling “Xfinity” on-demand service) is delivered over bandwidth that is dedicated/statically allocated to serving their entertainment package.
Worse still, Comcast’s data also has a dedicated backhaul. Live TV is collected from satellite feeds at a local “headend” facility, and on-demand content is likely cached close to the user à la Netflix Open Connect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding
https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Multiplicative-Operator...
https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/say.html
https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/print.html