One adult, 15 kids? That's not gonna work. The issue here isn't what's best for the economy, that would pretty clearly be the mom working, it's what's best for the mom and her family. With five kids it is very hard to make the numbers work with no adults at home.
Now if you've got a more normal family situation then this (various forms of "taking a village") is precisely what people end up doing, and they do end up being slightly more productive then they would otherwise. But even with just one kid, $160 a week childcare is only affordable if the childcare is grandma.
If you add in gas (AFAIK I am the only person in the entire state of Ohio who prefers working and taking the bus to having a job that doesn't pay enough for a car), extra food expenses (mom can't be home to make the cheap $0.50 cent meal three times a day if she's got work), etc. the job is break-even at best. Since she probably lives in a low-income area, it probably has to have high tax rates to fund basic functions of government (my hometown of Detroit, for example, does not get enough tax revenue to function, yet it's tax rates are near the statutory maximums; this makes sense when you realize that the per capita income is a third of the regions, yet it is not 2/3 cheaper to hire a cop on the Detroit side of the border), that knocks her down a lot. Given that she could reduce her food stamps/Section 8/etc. as well it could be money-losing.
Where she'd actually make money is the Earned Income Credit. $8,000-$8,500 gets you almost $3k tax-free if you have a kid. Note that this is actually a reason for her City Councilman to try and stop her from getting the job, because he can't get the City's hands on the $30-$90 it would have gotten if it was taxable.
The other advantage is that she could (in theory) get promoted to a job that isn't break-even.
This is America. We could spend a bajillion posts arguing over who is in what class because everybody is firmly convinced that they are middle class. You basically have to homeless before everyone agrees you aren't at least lower-middle.
I suspect your redneck friends from Texas are very interested in how things work. Working class/lower class/whatchamacallit class lifestyles are very dependent on knowing a guy who can fix things cheap. And if you don't know roughly what he has to do you won't be able to figure out whether he's actually fixing your problem cheap, or just getting drunk on your $50.
I also suspect that their kids in High School don't sign up for formal training in any of this stuff because it's not required, it costs extra money, and AP classes are something Mitt Romney would do. Up North rednecks have generally gerrymandered themselves into school districts that offer very few of these classes, largely because they don't want to pay the level of taxation that's required when you share a school district with people who freak that the little bastard agreed to a Gym class that's NOT AP, and will therefore BRING HIS GPA DOWN, thusly RUINING HIS LIFE FOREVER.
So now we get to discuss my lack of pantry technology...
You're also assuming utensils appropriate to food preparation, facilities to wash them, etc.
And you ignored a pretty sizable problem I did mention in my original post. Transporting anything bulky (such as groceries) is not practical. I've never asked, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't let me tie a cart to the rear bumper of the bus.
And yes I'm sure if I discussed this with a nutritionist, an anti-poverty activist, and priest we probably could have come up with a solution that only involved me spending 10-15 extra hours a week in food preparation/transport. But at the time I had a half-dozen equally pressing problems that require the same level of attention, and would be solved by roughly the same time investment. If I solved them all instead of having time to take H and R Block's tax class, which qualifies me for a second job which pays me enough to brute force my way through these problems with money.
Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
Why would somebody choose to have children they can't afford? Perhaps it's because we have so many entitlement systems that having a child guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and perhaps another factor is how much we privilege Mothers.
Because they're 16 and horny and if they're black their family is almost certainly spending 6 hours a week in a very strict Protestant Church.
Believe me when I tell you the people in my workplace who have kids are worse off then the ones who don't. Section 8 is useful, after you get through the waiting list, but the kid will be in pre-school by the time that happens. Food stamps generally don't cover the cost of feeding the kid. WIC might, but WIC is a lot harder to use then food stamps, and it's harder to get on. MediCAID is ok healthcare, but it's not as good a health plan as a middle class person expects. EIC is a nice chunk of change, but you don't qualify if you earn enough to be middle class.
Moreover apparently you haven't done any actual math since the Reagan years when Welfare costs were higher, white people still had kids (plural), and more importantly middle class still had kids. In the long-term the only way for America to pay the bills is have people working, which means we have to have people, which means we have to have a birthrate above 2.1 kids per person. Otherwise we turn into fucking Japan.
I'm not saying the fat guy you watched was right, but OTOH when I was on food stamps my actual job involved burning 4,000 calories a day as a loader at a Home Depot. My food-stamp budget was $117 a month. I had no car. I had no place to store food in my room. This meant the way middle class people save money (ie: making nutritious lunch at home and bringing it to work) was impossible. Therefore was spending $6-$7 every workday on lunch at Wendy's. Which meant the $117 had to buy the other 1,000-1,500 calories a day or I'd fucking die of starvation. That meant pop and candy. With all this I still ended up losing like 40-50 pounds. My teeth are shit, but I'm alive. And if I'd tried to eat like a middle class person I wouldn't be.
My current situation is somewhat better monetarily, but the things middle class people assume I have when they give me food advice still don't apply. My fridge is about 1.5 cubic feet. This is enough room for a jug of milk and an apple. I do not have a stove. I do not have a car, so food that is at all hard to get (ie: isn't at every single Walmart) will not happen. Since taking multiple grocery bags on the bus is a huge pain in the ass (and my commute alone is already 2 hours on the bus system every single fucking day) multiple grocery trips every month to said Walmart will not happen.
Being poor the options open to you are simply so different that the strategies a middle class person develops for dealing with the world simply don't apply. Take the simple advice from the eater's manifesto: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Rules 1 and 3 are useless to me because I can't afford 'food,' and I can't store vegetables. You might as well give me three sure-fire rules for blowing up an Imperial Star Destroyer using only a Bat'leth.
And yes, I'm aware that one of those is Star Wars and the other is Star Trek.
If you're a single parent 100% of poverty is $15,510. If you're minimum wage you're under the poverty guidelines even if you work 40 hours. Since many jobs at that level don't give you full-time employment it's very very easy to have a job (or two jobs) and still qualify for multiple government programs,
I worked in one of those stores. A single mother of five is almost certainly better off not joining the staff.
She's starting 20 hours a week* at just above minimum wage. That's about $160 a week. Daycare for five kids destroys that. Since it's a big box store all associates are expected to open once a week and close once a week, and they really like to change the schedule every week so you have no clue whether you'll be home Tuesday night three weeks from now, which means she has no clue whether your eldest will need to babysit his brothers or he can agree to go to an Academic Games tournament.
In other words getting the job is going to make her a worse mother without bringing in anywhere near enough to pay the bills. The only reasons for her to take the job are a) it might convince some self-righteous asshole who inherited $500k and turned his hobby into a job in the State Senate that she's not one of Those People, allowing her to keep her government benefits longer, and b) it qualifies her for the Earned Income Credit at tax time.
The reason left-wing working-class black city councils tend to be anti-Walmart isn't that black people are stupid morons who've been brainwashed by hippies, it's that they've done this math.
*Cashiers at my store usually start at 10 hours, and cashier is the entry-level for almost all women who are hired in, so 20 hours is probably an exaggeration. Garden is the other way women get in, they only get 20-25 hours there, and it's not unusual for Corporate to decree that there's no budget to hire them permanently after six months.
And I am extremely tired of people who are convinced that they know everything that is going on in my mind because I kinda them remind of this one dude they talked to 30 years ago.
I said jack-squat about PSAs or elaborate (and costly) media strategies. You are setting up straw-men. Hell your straw-men doesn't actually work. PSAs are free or the station loses it's broadcast license, the actual video used in a PSA is made by a non-profit at no cost to the government, therefore a strategy based entirely on PSAs would not cost any tax money at all.
"Publicization" could mean any number of things, some of which cost tax money, but others don't. For example it would be free to the government for a feminist organization to make a 15-minute Youtube video on Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, and then AP CompSci teachers could show the video to girls they thought would do well in their program. Since finding kids who would be benefit from their classes is part of a teacher's job then finding female kids who want to learn programming is by definition part of the job.
It probably wouldn't get participation to be fully equal, but I've never met a feminist younger the 60 who actually thinks that 50-50 in every profession will ever happen. If you want kids to program then you must want there to be more kids in these classes, and if a class is 82% male then the easiest way to grow it is to add girls.
Sexual hiring quota? I have actually dealt with feminists, and precisely zero of them have asked for any kind of quota.
They really dislike a lot of the joking that goes on in a team of geeks that's almost entirely male, and they're convinced the Valley's family leave policies are Evil and Anti-Woman, but they do not think a hiring quota would solve either problem. This particular study actually makes quotas less likely because if women don;t want to be programmers making a company hire a bunch of them is fucking stupid. Which means that if the Prof who did the study is a Feminist she probably thinks the problems are hard-to-measure things like teen girls thinking no woman programs, ComSci teachers who have trouble relating to females, and young geek guys bullying young geek girls out of geekdom.
The solution would probably be a lot of publicizing various female CompSci and Computer Engineering types (so that HS girls know that girls code), jawing at AP CompSci teachers in hopes that some of them recruit girls, and trying to recruit new female-friendly AP CompSci teachers.
He could have gotten AP from reading the actual article. When I post about A-Levels don't refer to them as the SATs just because I'm American and we don't have A-Levels.
I was actually responding to his use of "fancy" as a verb. Sometimes Americans who like sounding British will use the phrase "fancy that," but otherwise we just don't use it much. Wiktionary lists several definitions of"fancy" as a verb, and they're almost all UK, formal, or archaic.
For somebody on a high horse about misusing statistics you're abusing them yourself. The government counts many Hispanics as white, so if you're reading an article on Hispanics the white population is useless What you want is non-hispanic white. And in both states that's under 90% Utah is actually under 80% at 79.9%, Idaho is 3.6 points higher (83.5%). The states combined should have had 15 Hispanic test-takers. They had 6. Which means that if your "personality" test is applied to Hispanics you just argued that Hispanics only have the proper "personality" for programming at 40% the rate of whites.
It's also interesting to note that you assume they're arguing racism when they didn't say anything about racism. In fact given that anybody can take the class, and take the test, the test-administrators have no control over the racial makeup of test-takers. You can blame things like the design of local school districts, which has been referred to as "structural racism". AP classes ain't cheap, so a school district with an upper-class (and thus disproportionately white) tax base is gonna have more AP tests. OTOH you could also blame black and hispanic parents for not forcing their districts to have AP classes.
It's also pretty telling to me that your source is an unrelated debate from the Reagan years. In my experience conservatives have been running off the fumes of Reagan's ideas for decades. "Sowell won a debate that had nothing to do with AP Tests back when he had an Afro" just is not a convincing counter-argument to anything in 2014.
Note to my fellow white men: 90% of the time when you think people are subtly accusing you of being racist you're not being accused of actual racism. You're either being accused of being too immature to understand that non-white, non-men don't think it's funny when you bully them; or you're not actually being accused of anything. At all. This is a clear case of the latter.
The article says too few black/Hispanic/female teens are interested in Computer Science as is shown by their not taking a voluntary test. Since most of the population is female, and another good 15-20% are minority males, this means that CompSci is missing out on 65-70% of it's potential brightest stars. You arbitrarily assumed that an article half about how girls don't get into CompSci was 100% about racism I will ignore sexism. And if I ignore sexism the people you could blame for little black boys not taking the test include almost no groups dominated by white men. I'll go through the list:
1) Minority parents are not forcing their little darlings to take challenging academic classes. Which is not the white man's fault.
2) Local education boards do not have the classes available in minority areas. Since most people live in an area where they're a majority this is not the white man's fault.
3) State education systems are set up so that local education boards in minority areas don't have the cash to fund a dozen 15-person AP-level classes in every High School. Since blacks are disproportionately working class they can't afford to move to a wonderful district with $500k homes and great schools. Since many Latinos spent all their capital moving here, and now have working-class near-minimum wage jobs they can't afford those $500k homes either. Without revenue sharing schools in places they can afford to live won't be able to spend a butt-load on AP classes. Note that a) most voters are not white men, so if this is a problem it cannot be a problem caused solely by white men, and b) most white men are actually on the wrong end of this one, because the white working class can't afford that beautiful $500k suburb either.
How does one student attend two schools? Ever heard of transfers?
The meat of the argument is national. By their math half the students should be female, 22% should be Latino, and 14% black. So 36% should be minorities, half the rest should be female, which should leave 32% white/Asian males. Instead 12% were black or latino and 18% female. Which means at least 70% were white/Asian males. Assuming 12% of the females were black/latino it's 72%. That's double the expected number, which is a pretty weird. And anything weird is by definition worthy of further study.
As for the state data, keep in mind that they admit that they've got a tiny sample size in most states, and only really harp on Utah and Idaho. Both are 10% Latino, and both had dozens of kids take the test, but Idaho had no Latino test-takers. None. They should have had 5 or 6. Utah had 6, but that's only half what they should have had.
That's probably part of it. But there's a much simpler explanation.
If you want to be valedictorian/Harvard material/etc. you have to take a lot of AP classes, and you have to take three or four years of math. You don't have to take any computer classes. There are only a couple AP courses that are pure mathematics -- Calc AB and Calc BC and Statistics -- and Calc AB is probably the only one offered at most schools.
OTOH if you need a full load of AP classes senior year CompSci is probably optional.
The "low status" jobs you mention aren't that low status. Believe me, I'm in retail. Lumber-jacks, crab fisherman, etc. not only make more money then I do they also have better hours and more benefits.
More importantly they are jobs that many people physically can't do. All involve heavy machinery that occasionally has to wrestled with. You need upper body strength to do that, and women just don't have as much upper body strength.
That's just not the case with Engineering.
And, as somebody else pointed out, this isn't just a gender-gap, it's a race-gap.
I suspect the reason for the gender-gap is that 16-18 year-olds are obsessed with race/gender/etc. roles, so when the only comp sci guys they see are on TV geeky upper-classish white men they assume that non-geeky, non-upper-classish, non-white, and/or non-male people are betraying something important by taking a CompSci AP class.
From your word choices I will make the entirely stereotypical and somewhat racist assumption that you're a Brit.
Would you be cool with it if the only 18-year-old kids in Scotland who evinced an interest in one of the most lucrative career fields were the children/grandchildren of peers? Would you just be like "I guess the commoners like working for McDonald's?" Or "I guess Irish Catholics don't enjoy tech work." Because that's pretty much exactly what's happening here. The people who ran the country (and, in fact, who created the country specifically for their own benefit) were white men. We've fixed most of the worst problems, now we really pride ourselves on America's ability take anybody (that "Give us your poor" poem on the Statue of Liberty was always jingoistic BS, but that doesn't mean we don't think it should be true) whose willing to work and make them wealthy.
Tech is the career field that is most likely to take you from loser to Millionaire before your 30th birthday. And only the old nobility is taking advantage of it. Therefore everyone else wants to know why. Your explanation ("Black people and women just don't like tech work") works at a logical level, but it's identical to the reasoning white men used to explain why black people and women weren't dominating the economy in 1910; which means that it's not terribly convincing.
What I suspect is going on is a couple things:
1) The white upper-middle class is a lot bigger on college education then anybody else (except possibly Asians, but none of the states mentioned have a large Asian population). This means they send their kids to schools which have lots of AP course options, and force their little darlings to take multiple of these courses. A HS AP course not only raises your GPA, thus increasing your odds of Harvard, if you pass the test it also counts as a 3-4 credit college class. I suspect that if the AP did a survey on class status of test-takers the white working class (which is bigger then the black population in most states) would take the test even less.
Note that the way we do education in America guarantees that non-whites (and poorer whites) will have significantly less access to AP tests. You either have to pay $20k per kid per year in private education, or live in a school district with a bunch of rich people paying taxes to get your kid into a school that offers lots of AP classes. Since school districts tend only to have a handful of neighborhoods, this means to use public schools with AP tests you have to be wealthy enough to live in a very good neighborhood. It also means that in the event a cheap neighborhood ends up in a good district, it stops being cheap.
2) HS kids are obsessed with identity. The ultimate insult to any HS-age boy is to imply he's either female or gay. Girls will try boy things at that age, but not as often as they would a few years later. It's very rare for a non-white HS student to consider a white teacher a role model, but early 20-somethings will happily take a white college professor as a role model. Which means that when one racial/class group monopolizes a career field it's much less likely for HS-age kids of other groups to think they could actually do that shit. A couple years after High School the technically inclined black kids will stop thinking of programming as something that makes white guys (like Zuckerberg) rich, and start thinking of it is something they could do, but generally by the time you're 20 you're already a) in the midst of a career or b) halfway through college in a non-CompSci program.
Note that this is not just a race/gender problem. The kids of the working class white guys aren't likely to go for computer programming when they're 17 because Zuckerberg/Gates/etc. all seem a lot like NPR-listening upper-middle-class geeks and they're proud hicks. But nobody measures this shit because in the US nobody really thinks the white working class is distinct from the white upper class.
Can you think of another way to research this kind of thing?
It's not like you're allowed to kidnap 5000 toddlers with mutations that give high risk of psychoses, dump them on an island, and feed exactly half of them hash brownies every day to find out which ones crack up first.
The data in this study likely no less reliable then the data in a study of when non-mental patients start smoking pot. They're under treatment, so presumably they're in touch with reality, and even when they aren't under treatment folks with mental illnesses are not that much more likely to lie then the rest of us sketchy motherfuckers.
It's pretty clear there's a link between weed a major mental issues (particularly schizophrenia). What's not clear is which way the causality goes. Are schizoes self-treating with weed, or is weed driving people schizo? This is a very cheap way to shed some light on the problem without violating any ethical standards.
It gives some weight to the weed-driving-people schizo camp because when most of these people started smoking pot they had no symptoms. It's not conclusive -- perhaps a mind that hasn't undergone a psychotic episode of some sort feels "wrong" and it's owner tries mind-altering substances to fix the problem -- but it is a very interesting data point.
Just because it's not 100% conclusive doesn't mean it's worthless. Very little science in any field is actually conclusive, especially studying humans, and especially especially studying human mental health. Studying humans is really difficult because you can't do experiments.
For example, if you want to know how adolescent broken legs heal you can't just bring a hammer to an 11th grade class and go crazy. You can sit around a hospital asking 16-year-olds who broke their legs about what happened to them, but none of that data will be 100% conclusive because there's a lot you can't control for.
Mental health problems are even harder because a) they're relatively rare, b) the actual cause of most of the problems is not understood (ie: we don't know what in a person's brain chemistry could cause them to hear voices), and c) mental patients aren't easy to communicate with. Some illnesses involve actual deception, and some involve mental experiences so out of the ordinary that nobody has figured out how to explain them to people who don't have the illness, and almost all involve believing an extremely distorted reality. A schizophrenic in the midst of an episode, for example, is likely to do everything possible to convince you he's not in the middle of an episode, because if you figured out the new curtains are intended to prevent the FBI's invisible cameras from sucking out his life force you'd probably rat him out to his shrink. When he gets better he will be totally unable to explain what was going on in his head in a way you can understand.
This research is actually valuable even if the causation it implies is backwards. If people who are about to experience psychotic episodes start partaking in the marajuana because they can feel that something wrong is about to happen to their minds, and the weed helps, then it is probably a good idea for doctors who know a patient has a genetic predilection to psychotic episodes to send them to a shrink when they start partaking.
Hate to spoil your image of your parents, but the skyrocketing in weed use happened back in their day. My Dad has this great story about the time he got drunk/high and mailed a death threat to the White House (in his defense, it was Nixon). Granpa made it go away with a meeting with the FBI in the state capital. In the middle of it he realized there was a joint in his pocket.
Since the pre-weed-avaliability days were also the everybody-thinks-lobotomies-are-good-therapy days it's really hard to figure out whether we have more psychotic episodes post-weed.
Depends on a lot of factors, including the availability/quality of tech support closer then 90 miles and the transport network. In the Cleveland area, for example, it's frequently easier to drive 90 miles on the highway then it would be to drive half that distance on the surface streets.
If you do the research and find somebody who has parts for your computer (and if it's a laptop that isn't a gimme) closer then 90 miles from your home the better tech support then you're better off with a PC. If you don't need tech support because you're that hard-core a geek then the 90-mile-drive is probably stupid.
As I said I'm not saying Macs are perfect for everyone. I'm just saying that for me the Apple tax is worth it.
And now the post gets modded up +3, despite the fact that all the facts in it are obviously wrong, or clear examples of spin. Since apparently Slashdot can't tell the difference between some idiot making shit up and the truth without being guided to it by an asshole, I will be the asshole:
> Also, if kept reasonably clean, a Mac will last way longer than the typical OEM box/laptop.
No it won't. It will become obsolete faster as it's completely unmaintainable. Anything that breaks will be harder to deal with. Obsolete components can't be swapped out.
False. As this actual poster has pointed in his other posts, in many cases the stuff in a Mac is non-proprietary. It works a little better then in commodity PCs, because there's a bunch of well-paid geeks in Cupertino whose entire job is to make sure driver updates don't fuck each-other up, but in many cases you can actually replace a part on a Mac with a part sourced from generic PC manufacturers with no problems. The last edition of the Mac Pro was pretty much 100% in this category.
It's true that for many parts it's impossible for an ordinary geek who buys his products exclusively from internet sites that sell commodity PC components to replace some random part on Mac from the sites they go to. The current Mac Pro won't be upgradeable, or replaceable, for anything except RAM and it's single HD from NewEgg.
But who cares? If you're a car geek you don't conclude Toyota sucks because your favorite dealer in after-market parts specializes in Swedish vehicles. You just know that if you need a Toyota part you may actually have to go to some other dealer. Why is it informative for a PC geek to say the same thing about Macs?
Places like OtherWorld Computing have plenty of Mac parts. Googles for specific part numbers from Apple show plenty of places with Mac parts. eBay has plenty of parts, or (the cheapest option), you can buy a dead version of your current machine to use for spares. But you actually have to do the research, rather then simply concluding the parts don't exist because some random Windows-centric online store you love doesn't have the damn things.
BTW, the "expensive parts" is a result of one of the blessing of Mac use: the products retain their value incredibly well. I bought my MacBook it was about $1,100 including software and a decent printer. That was early 2010. PowerMax currently sells it for $699. If you can sell the whole machine for $700 you ain't going to the trouble of parting it out for less.
With a PC, I can do this myself or pay someone else. This isn't an option with a Mac.
"Pay someone else" is always an option with the Mac. Apple Stores are incredible about getting obsolete parts, and they do the work themselves. It's not cheap, but it is an option. Hell, in my experience it is cheap. I spilled Dr. Pepper on my Mac. They fixed it for free. The daughter-board that connects to my laptop's AC Adapter died. They charged $10.73. I don't have AppleCare.
And in the past I have done repairs myself. I just don't bother anymore because an Apple store is only an hour from my House, they work cheap, and the two-hour round trip is a lot more convenient then waiting for some random part in the mail.
My old Mac is a doorstop. Can't even get OS updates for it. Similarly old PCs are fine, especially with an upgraded video card.
Either he's comparing OS X to LINUX (which just pulled the plug on 386 support that people only used because it was kinda cool to power up a 386 into a modernish OS), or Windows XP, which will stop receiving support in April. Of course LINUX is more geek-friendly then a commercial OS. The entire point of creating it was that commercial OSes were a pain in the ass for geeks. OS X beats Windows in geek friendliness because the latest version is free, so my 2010 laptop is still getting free updates to the most modern MacOS. I just upgraded for free, and performance actually improved du
None since Apple opened it's stores. The experiences I had prior to Apple opening it's stores are a major reason I do not want a computer from a company that doesn't have retail stores where I can go bitch at a guy in person.
I'm not arguing that it is objectively true that 100% of the human race is much better off getting a Mac, and all people who don't are fucking morons, I'm arguing jedidiah here has no clue what I'm paying for when I pay the Apple tax. If I'd spent a few years learning precisely the skills needed to keep a homebuilt PC in running order, I still had use for a desktop, and/or I lived in a country that has no Apple stores (like New Zealand), etc. I'd be better off going his route. But none of that is true. I need a computer that is well-put-together, works, and to have access to good tech support in-person cheap. Right now that means Macs.
I'm not you. I don't have a pathological need to mathematically prove I got the most RAM per dollar. I know precisely what I'm paying for when i get a Mac.
I don't know how many cards my power supply can support, I don't even know how one would go about calculating such a thing. I know that my video card has drivers, but I don't know the version. I have a Mac. Instead of devoting brain cells and time to computer-skills I don't want to master I simply let Apple do it. And it works.
I have no clue what one does when a sound card goes bad. I do know where an Apple store is, and I'm pretty good at manipulating those guys into giving me free support, so I don't have to learn that, either.
I'll pay an extra 20% for those things. I'd pay 40-50% for the simple reason that I have no use for extra specs, but I can actually use the time I'd spend maxing them out.
Are any of them are your primary machine? Most of my computing life I've had a primary machine that's a Mac more then two years old. Generally they make it to five before I upgrade.
They last longer because Apple machines are higher end, therefore the specs are better (ie: the cheapest Mac from 2010 had better specs then the cheapest Dell because Dell sells a lot of shit-boxes); and because one company makes the entire box. Apple gets in trouble if 4-year-old machines are rendered obsolete by software updates, therefore it actually cares when a mid-range machine from 2009 can't run some popular program, therefore mid-range Apple machines from 2009 are likely to be useful for awhile. Dell, OTOH, can blame Microsoft.
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One adult, 15 kids? That's not gonna work. The issue here isn't what's best for the economy, that would pretty clearly be the mom working, it's what's best for the mom and her family. With five kids it is very hard to make the numbers work with no adults at home.
Now if you've got a more normal family situation then this (various forms of "taking a village") is precisely what people end up doing, and they do end up being slightly more productive then they would otherwise. But even with just one kid, $160 a week childcare is only affordable if the childcare is grandma.
If you add in gas (AFAIK I am the only person in the entire state of Ohio who prefers working and taking the bus to having a job that doesn't pay enough for a car), extra food expenses (mom can't be home to make the cheap $0.50 cent meal three times a day if she's got work), etc. the job is break-even at best. Since she probably lives in a low-income area, it probably has to have high tax rates to fund basic functions of government (my hometown of Detroit, for example, does not get enough tax revenue to function, yet it's tax rates are near the statutory maximums; this makes sense when you realize that the per capita income is a third of the regions, yet it is not 2/3 cheaper to hire a cop on the Detroit side of the border), that knocks her down a lot. Given that she could reduce her food stamps/Section 8/etc. as well it could be money-losing.
Where she'd actually make money is the Earned Income Credit. $8,000-$8,500 gets you almost $3k tax-free if you have a kid. Note that this is actually a reason for her City Councilman to try and stop her from getting the job, because he can't get the City's hands on the $30-$90 it would have gotten if it was taxable.
The other advantage is that she could (in theory) get promoted to a job that isn't break-even.
This is America. We could spend a bajillion posts arguing over who is in what class because everybody is firmly convinced that they are middle class. You basically have to homeless before everyone agrees you aren't at least lower-middle.
I suspect your redneck friends from Texas are very interested in how things work. Working class/lower class/whatchamacallit class lifestyles are very dependent on knowing a guy who can fix things cheap. And if you don't know roughly what he has to do you won't be able to figure out whether he's actually fixing your problem cheap, or just getting drunk on your $50.
I also suspect that their kids in High School don't sign up for formal training in any of this stuff because it's not required, it costs extra money, and AP classes are something Mitt Romney would do. Up North rednecks have generally gerrymandered themselves into school districts that offer very few of these classes, largely because they don't want to pay the level of taxation that's required when you share a school district with people who freak that the little bastard agreed to a Gym class that's NOT AP, and will therefore BRING HIS GPA DOWN, thusly RUINING HIS LIFE FOREVER.
So now we get to discuss my lack of pantry technology...
You're also assuming utensils appropriate to food preparation, facilities to wash them, etc.
And you ignored a pretty sizable problem I did mention in my original post. Transporting anything bulky (such as groceries) is not practical. I've never asked, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't let me tie a cart to the rear bumper of the bus.
And yes I'm sure if I discussed this with a nutritionist, an anti-poverty activist, and priest we probably could have come up with a solution that only involved me spending 10-15 extra hours a week in food preparation/transport. But at the time I had a half-dozen equally pressing problems that require the same level of attention, and would be solved by roughly the same time investment. If I solved them all instead of having time to take H and R Block's tax class, which qualifies me for a second job which pays me enough to brute force my way through these problems with money.
Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
Why would somebody choose to have children they can't afford? Perhaps it's because we have so many entitlement systems that having a child guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and perhaps another factor is how much we privilege Mothers.
Because they're 16 and horny and if they're black their family is almost certainly spending 6 hours a week in a very strict Protestant Church.
Believe me when I tell you the people in my workplace who have kids are worse off then the ones who don't. Section 8 is useful, after you get through the waiting list, but the kid will be in pre-school by the time that happens. Food stamps generally don't cover the cost of feeding the kid. WIC might, but WIC is a lot harder to use then food stamps, and it's harder to get on. MediCAID is ok healthcare, but it's not as good a health plan as a middle class person expects. EIC is a nice chunk of change, but you don't qualify if you earn enough to be middle class.
Moreover apparently you haven't done any actual math since the Reagan years when Welfare costs were higher, white people still had kids (plural), and more importantly middle class still had kids. In the long-term the only way for America to pay the bills is have people working, which means we have to have people, which means we have to have a birthrate above 2.1 kids per person. Otherwise we turn into fucking Japan.
Great advice. But since it requires cooking it requires a stove I won't be able to use it anytime soon.
I'm not saying the fat guy you watched was right, but OTOH when I was on food stamps my actual job involved burning 4,000 calories a day as a loader at a Home Depot. My food-stamp budget was $117 a month. I had no car. I had no place to store food in my room. This meant the way middle class people save money (ie: making nutritious lunch at home and bringing it to work) was impossible. Therefore was spending $6-$7 every workday on lunch at Wendy's. Which meant the $117 had to buy the other 1,000-1,500 calories a day or I'd fucking die of starvation. That meant pop and candy. With all this I still ended up losing like 40-50 pounds. My teeth are shit, but I'm alive. And if I'd tried to eat like a middle class person I wouldn't be.
My current situation is somewhat better monetarily, but the things middle class people assume I have when they give me food advice still don't apply. My fridge is about 1.5 cubic feet. This is enough room for a jug of milk and an apple. I do not have a stove. I do not have a car, so food that is at all hard to get (ie: isn't at every single Walmart) will not happen. Since taking multiple grocery bags on the bus is a huge pain in the ass (and my commute alone is already 2 hours on the bus system every single fucking day) multiple grocery trips every month to said Walmart will not happen.
Being poor the options open to you are simply so different that the strategies a middle class person develops for dealing with the world simply don't apply. Take the simple advice from the eater's manifesto: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Rules 1 and 3 are useless to me because I can't afford 'food,' and I can't store vegetables. You might as well give me three sure-fire rules for blowing up an Imperial Star Destroyer using only a Bat'leth.
And yes, I'm aware that one of those is Star Wars and the other is Star Trek.
If you're a single parent 100% of poverty is $15,510. If you're minimum wage you're under the poverty guidelines even if you work 40 hours. Since many jobs at that level don't give you full-time employment it's very very easy to have a job (or two jobs) and still qualify for multiple government programs,
I worked in one of those stores. A single mother of five is almost certainly better off not joining the staff.
She's starting 20 hours a week* at just above minimum wage. That's about $160 a week. Daycare for five kids destroys that. Since it's a big box store all associates are expected to open once a week and close once a week, and they really like to change the schedule every week so you have no clue whether you'll be home Tuesday night three weeks from now, which means she has no clue whether your eldest will need to babysit his brothers or he can agree to go to an Academic Games tournament.
In other words getting the job is going to make her a worse mother without bringing in anywhere near enough to pay the bills. The only reasons for her to take the job are a) it might convince some self-righteous asshole who inherited $500k and turned his hobby into a job in the State Senate that she's not one of Those People, allowing her to keep her government benefits longer, and b) it qualifies her for the Earned Income Credit at tax time.
The reason left-wing working-class black city councils tend to be anti-Walmart isn't that black people are stupid morons who've been brainwashed by hippies, it's that they've done this math.
*Cashiers at my store usually start at 10 hours, and cashier is the entry-level for almost all women who are hired in, so 20 hours is probably an exaggeration. Garden is the other way women get in, they only get 20-25 hours there, and it's not unusual for Corporate to decree that there's no budget to hire them permanently after six months.
And I am extremely tired of people who are convinced that they know everything that is going on in my mind because I kinda them remind of this one dude they talked to 30 years ago.
I said jack-squat about PSAs or elaborate (and costly) media strategies. You are setting up straw-men. Hell your straw-men doesn't actually work. PSAs are free or the station loses it's broadcast license, the actual video used in a PSA is made by a non-profit at no cost to the government, therefore a strategy based entirely on PSAs would not cost any tax money at all.
"Publicization" could mean any number of things, some of which cost tax money, but others don't. For example it would be free to the government for a feminist organization to make a 15-minute Youtube video on Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, and then AP CompSci teachers could show the video to girls they thought would do well in their program. Since finding kids who would be benefit from their classes is part of a teacher's job then finding female kids who want to learn programming is by definition part of the job.
It probably wouldn't get participation to be fully equal, but I've never met a feminist younger the 60 who actually thinks that 50-50 in every profession will ever happen. If you want kids to program then you must want there to be more kids in these classes, and if a class is 82% male then the easiest way to grow it is to add girls.
Sexual hiring quota? I have actually dealt with feminists, and precisely zero of them have asked for any kind of quota.
They really dislike a lot of the joking that goes on in a team of geeks that's almost entirely male, and they're convinced the Valley's family leave policies are Evil and Anti-Woman, but they do not think a hiring quota would solve either problem. This particular study actually makes quotas less likely because if women don;t want to be programmers making a company hire a bunch of them is fucking stupid. Which means that if the Prof who did the study is a Feminist she probably thinks the problems are hard-to-measure things like teen girls thinking no woman programs, ComSci teachers who have trouble relating to females, and young geek guys bullying young geek girls out of geekdom.
The solution would probably be a lot of publicizing various female CompSci and Computer Engineering types (so that HS girls know that girls code), jawing at AP CompSci teachers in hopes that some of them recruit girls, and trying to recruit new female-friendly AP CompSci teachers.
He could have gotten AP from reading the actual article. When I post about A-Levels don't refer to them as the SATs just because I'm American and we don't have A-Levels.
I was actually responding to his use of "fancy" as a verb. Sometimes Americans who like sounding British will use the phrase "fancy that," but otherwise we just don't use it much. Wiktionary lists several definitions of"fancy" as a verb, and they're almost all UK, formal, or archaic.
For somebody on a high horse about misusing statistics you're abusing them yourself. The government counts many Hispanics as white, so if you're reading an article on Hispanics the white population is useless What you want is non-hispanic white. And in both states that's under 90% Utah is actually under 80% at 79.9%, Idaho is 3.6 points higher (83.5%). The states combined should have had 15 Hispanic test-takers. They had 6. Which means that if your "personality" test is applied to Hispanics you just argued that Hispanics only have the proper "personality" for programming at 40% the rate of whites.
It's also interesting to note that you assume they're arguing racism when they didn't say anything about racism. In fact given that anybody can take the class, and take the test, the test-administrators have no control over the racial makeup of test-takers. You can blame things like the design of local school districts, which has been referred to as "structural racism". AP classes ain't cheap, so a school district with an upper-class (and thus disproportionately white) tax base is gonna have more AP tests. OTOH you could also blame black and hispanic parents for not forcing their districts to have AP classes.
It's also pretty telling to me that your source is an unrelated debate from the Reagan years. In my experience conservatives have been running off the fumes of Reagan's ideas for decades. "Sowell won a debate that had nothing to do with AP Tests back when he had an Afro" just is not a convincing counter-argument to anything in 2014.
Note to my fellow white men:
90% of the time when you think people are subtly accusing you of being racist you're not being accused of actual racism. You're either being accused of being too immature to understand that non-white, non-men don't think it's funny when you bully them; or you're not actually being accused of anything. At all. This is a clear case of the latter.
The article says too few black/Hispanic/female teens are interested in Computer Science as is shown by their not taking a voluntary test. Since most of the population is female, and another good 15-20% are minority males, this means that CompSci is missing out on 65-70% of it's potential brightest stars. You arbitrarily assumed that an article half about how girls don't get into CompSci was 100% about racism I will ignore sexism. And if I ignore sexism the people you could blame for little black boys not taking the test include almost no groups dominated by white men. I'll go through the list:
1) Minority parents are not forcing their little darlings to take challenging academic classes. Which is not the white man's fault.
2) Local education boards do not have the classes available in minority areas. Since most people live in an area where they're a majority this is not the white man's fault.
3) State education systems are set up so that local education boards in minority areas don't have the cash to fund a dozen 15-person AP-level classes in every High School. Since blacks are disproportionately working class they can't afford to move to a wonderful district with $500k homes and great schools. Since many Latinos spent all their capital moving here, and now have working-class near-minimum wage jobs they can't afford those $500k homes either. Without revenue sharing schools in places they can afford to live won't be able to spend a butt-load on AP classes. Note that a) most voters are not white men, so if this is a problem it cannot be a problem caused solely by white men, and b) most white men are actually on the wrong end of this one, because the white working class can't afford that beautiful $500k suburb either.
How does one student attend two schools? Ever heard of transfers?
The meat of the argument is national. By their math half the students should be female, 22% should be Latino, and 14% black. So 36% should be minorities, half the rest should be female, which should leave 32% white/Asian males. Instead 12% were black or latino and 18% female. Which means at least 70% were white/Asian males. Assuming 12% of the females were black/latino it's 72%. That's double the expected number, which is a pretty weird. And anything weird is by definition worthy of further study.
As for the state data, keep in mind that they admit that they've got a tiny sample size in most states, and only really harp on Utah and Idaho. Both are 10% Latino, and both had dozens of kids take the test, but Idaho had no Latino test-takers. None. They should have had 5 or 6. Utah had 6, but that's only half what they should have had.
That's probably part of it. But there's a much simpler explanation.
If you want to be valedictorian/Harvard material/etc. you have to take a lot of AP classes, and you have to take three or four years of math. You don't have to take any computer classes. There are only a couple AP courses that are pure mathematics -- Calc AB and Calc BC and Statistics -- and Calc AB is probably the only one offered at most schools.
OTOH if you need a full load of AP classes senior year CompSci is probably optional.
The "low status" jobs you mention aren't that low status. Believe me, I'm in retail. Lumber-jacks, crab fisherman, etc. not only make more money then I do they also have better hours and more benefits.
More importantly they are jobs that many people physically can't do. All involve heavy machinery that occasionally has to wrestled with. You need upper body strength to do that, and women just don't have as much upper body strength.
That's just not the case with Engineering.
And, as somebody else pointed out, this isn't just a gender-gap, it's a race-gap.
I suspect the reason for the gender-gap is that 16-18 year-olds are obsessed with race/gender/etc. roles, so when the only comp sci guys they see are on TV geeky upper-classish white men they assume that non-geeky, non-upper-classish, non-white, and/or non-male people are betraying something important by taking a CompSci AP class.
From your word choices I will make the entirely stereotypical and somewhat racist assumption that you're a Brit.
Would you be cool with it if the only 18-year-old kids in Scotland who evinced an interest in one of the most lucrative career fields were the children/grandchildren of peers? Would you just be like "I guess the commoners like working for McDonald's?" Or "I guess Irish Catholics don't enjoy tech work." Because that's pretty much exactly what's happening here. The people who ran the country (and, in fact, who created the country specifically for their own benefit) were white men. We've fixed most of the worst problems, now we really pride ourselves on America's ability take anybody (that "Give us your poor" poem on the Statue of Liberty was always jingoistic BS, but that doesn't mean we don't think it should be true) whose willing to work and make them wealthy.
Tech is the career field that is most likely to take you from loser to Millionaire before your 30th birthday. And only the old nobility is taking advantage of it. Therefore everyone else wants to know why. Your explanation ("Black people and women just don't like tech work") works at a logical level, but it's identical to the reasoning white men used to explain why black people and women weren't dominating the economy in 1910; which means that it's not terribly convincing.
What I suspect is going on is a couple things:
1) The white upper-middle class is a lot bigger on college education then anybody else (except possibly Asians, but none of the states mentioned have a large Asian population). This means they send their kids to schools which have lots of AP course options, and force their little darlings to take multiple of these courses. A HS AP course not only raises your GPA, thus increasing your odds of Harvard, if you pass the test it also counts as a 3-4 credit college class. I suspect that if the AP did a survey on class status of test-takers the white working class (which is bigger then the black population in most states) would take the test even less.
Note that the way we do education in America guarantees that non-whites (and poorer whites) will have significantly less access to AP tests. You either have to pay $20k per kid per year in private education, or live in a school district with a bunch of rich people paying taxes to get your kid into a school that offers lots of AP classes. Since school districts tend only to have a handful of neighborhoods, this means to use public schools with AP tests you have to be wealthy enough to live in a very good neighborhood. It also means that in the event a cheap neighborhood ends up in a good district, it stops being cheap.
2) HS kids are obsessed with identity. The ultimate insult to any HS-age boy is to imply he's either female or gay. Girls will try boy things at that age, but not as often as they would a few years later. It's very rare for a non-white HS student to consider a white teacher a role model, but early 20-somethings will happily take a white college professor as a role model. Which means that when one racial/class group monopolizes a career field it's much less likely for HS-age kids of other groups to think they could actually do that shit. A couple years after High School the technically inclined black kids will stop thinking of programming as something that makes white guys (like Zuckerberg) rich, and start thinking of it is something they could do, but generally by the time you're 20 you're already a) in the midst of a career or b) halfway through college in a non-CompSci program.
Note that this is not just a race/gender problem. The kids of the working class white guys aren't likely to go for computer programming when they're 17 because Zuckerberg/Gates/etc. all seem a lot like NPR-listening upper-middle-class geeks and they're proud hicks. But nobody measures this shit because in the US nobody really thinks the white working class is distinct from the white upper class.
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I don't really know if there's a way
Can you think of another way to research this kind of thing?
It's not like you're allowed to kidnap 5000 toddlers with mutations that give high risk of psychoses, dump them on an island, and feed exactly half of them hash brownies every day to find out which ones crack up first.
The data in this study likely no less reliable then the data in a study of when non-mental patients start smoking pot. They're under treatment, so presumably they're in touch with reality, and even when they aren't under treatment folks with mental illnesses are not that much more likely to lie then the rest of us sketchy motherfuckers.
It's pretty clear there's a link between weed a major mental issues (particularly schizophrenia). What's not clear is which way the causality goes. Are schizoes self-treating with weed, or is weed driving people schizo? This is a very cheap way to shed some light on the problem without violating any ethical standards.
It gives some weight to the weed-driving-people schizo camp because when most of these people started smoking pot they had no symptoms. It's not conclusive -- perhaps a mind that hasn't undergone a psychotic episode of some sort feels "wrong" and it's owner tries mind-altering substances to fix the problem -- but it is a very interesting data point.
Just because it's not 100% conclusive doesn't mean it's worthless. Very little science in any field is actually conclusive, especially studying humans, and especially especially studying human mental health. Studying humans is really difficult because you can't do experiments.
For example, if you want to know how adolescent broken legs heal you can't just bring a hammer to an 11th grade class and go crazy. You can sit around a hospital asking 16-year-olds who broke their legs about what happened to them, but none of that data will be 100% conclusive because there's a lot you can't control for.
Mental health problems are even harder because a) they're relatively rare, b) the actual cause of most of the problems is not understood (ie: we don't know what in a person's brain chemistry could cause them to hear voices), and c) mental patients aren't easy to communicate with. Some illnesses involve actual deception, and some involve mental experiences so out of the ordinary that nobody has figured out how to explain them to people who don't have the illness, and almost all involve believing an extremely distorted reality. A schizophrenic in the midst of an episode, for example, is likely to do everything possible to convince you he's not in the middle of an episode, because if you figured out the new curtains are intended to prevent the FBI's invisible cameras from sucking out his life force you'd probably rat him out to his shrink. When he gets better he will be totally unable to explain what was going on in his head in a way you can understand.
This research is actually valuable even if the causation it implies is backwards. If people who are about to experience psychotic episodes start partaking in the marajuana because they can feel that something wrong is about to happen to their minds, and the weed helps, then it is probably a good idea for doctors who know a patient has a genetic predilection to psychotic episodes to send them to a shrink when they start partaking.
Cannabis skyrocketed recently?
Hate to spoil your image of your parents, but the skyrocketing in weed use happened back in their day. My Dad has this great story about the time he got drunk/high and mailed a death threat to the White House (in his defense, it was Nixon). Granpa made it go away with a meeting with the FBI in the state capital. In the middle of it he realized there was a joint in his pocket.
Since the pre-weed-avaliability days were also the everybody-thinks-lobotomies-are-good-therapy days it's really hard to figure out whether we have more psychotic episodes post-weed.
Depends on a lot of factors, including the availability/quality of tech support closer then 90 miles and the transport network. In the Cleveland area, for example, it's frequently easier to drive 90 miles on the highway then it would be to drive half that distance on the surface streets.
If you do the research and find somebody who has parts for your computer (and if it's a laptop that isn't a gimme) closer then 90 miles from your home the better tech support then you're better off with a PC. If you don't need tech support because you're that hard-core a geek then the 90-mile-drive is probably stupid.
As I said I'm not saying Macs are perfect for everyone. I'm just saying that for me the Apple tax is worth it.
And now the post gets modded up +3, despite the fact that all the facts in it are obviously wrong, or clear examples of spin. Since apparently Slashdot can't tell the difference between some idiot making shit up and the truth without being guided to it by an asshole, I will be the asshole:
> Also, if kept reasonably clean, a Mac will last way longer than the typical OEM box/laptop.
No it won't. It will become obsolete faster as it's completely unmaintainable. Anything that breaks will be harder to deal with. Obsolete components can't be swapped out.
False. As this actual poster has pointed in his other posts, in many cases the stuff in a Mac is non-proprietary. It works a little better then in commodity PCs, because there's a bunch of well-paid geeks in Cupertino whose entire job is to make sure driver updates don't fuck each-other up, but in many cases you can actually replace a part on a Mac with a part sourced from generic PC manufacturers with no problems. The last edition of the Mac Pro was pretty much 100% in this category.
It's true that for many parts it's impossible for an ordinary geek who buys his products exclusively from internet sites that sell commodity PC components to replace some random part on Mac from the sites they go to. The current Mac Pro won't be upgradeable, or replaceable, for anything except RAM and it's single HD from NewEgg.
But who cares? If you're a car geek you don't conclude Toyota sucks because your favorite dealer in after-market parts specializes in Swedish vehicles. You just know that if you need a Toyota part you may actually have to go to some other dealer. Why is it informative for a PC geek to say the same thing about Macs?
Places like OtherWorld Computing have plenty of Mac parts. Googles for specific part numbers from Apple show plenty of places with Mac parts. eBay has plenty of parts, or (the cheapest option), you can buy a dead version of your current machine to use for spares. But you actually have to do the research, rather then simply concluding the parts don't exist because some random Windows-centric online store you love doesn't have the damn things.
BTW, the "expensive parts" is a result of one of the blessing of Mac use: the products retain their value incredibly well. I bought my MacBook it was about $1,100 including software and a decent printer. That was early 2010. PowerMax currently sells it for $699. If you can sell the whole machine for $700 you ain't going to the trouble of parting it out for less.
With a PC, I can do this myself or pay someone else. This isn't an option with a Mac.
"Pay someone else" is always an option with the Mac. Apple Stores are incredible about getting obsolete parts, and they do the work themselves. It's not cheap, but it is an option. Hell, in my experience it is cheap. I spilled Dr. Pepper on my Mac. They fixed it for free. The daughter-board that connects to my laptop's AC Adapter died. They charged $10.73. I don't have AppleCare.
And in the past I have done repairs myself. I just don't bother anymore because an Apple store is only an hour from my House, they work cheap, and the two-hour round trip is a lot more convenient then waiting for some random part in the mail.
My old Mac is a doorstop. Can't even get OS updates for it. Similarly old PCs are fine, especially with an upgraded video card.
Either he's comparing OS X to LINUX (which just pulled the plug on 386 support that people only used because it was kinda cool to power up a 386 into a modernish OS), or Windows XP, which will stop receiving support in April. Of course LINUX is more geek-friendly then a commercial OS. The entire point of creating it was that commercial OSes were a pain in the ass for geeks. OS X beats Windows in geek friendliness because the latest version is free, so my 2010 laptop is still getting free updates to the most modern MacOS. I just upgraded for free, and performance actually improved du
None since Apple opened it's stores. The experiences I had prior to Apple opening it's stores are a major reason I do not want a computer from a company that doesn't have retail stores where I can go bitch at a guy in person.
I'm not arguing that it is objectively true that 100% of the human race is much better off getting a Mac, and all people who don't are fucking morons, I'm arguing jedidiah here has no clue what I'm paying for when I pay the Apple tax. If I'd spent a few years learning precisely the skills needed to keep a homebuilt PC in running order, I still had use for a desktop, and/or I lived in a country that has no Apple stores (like New Zealand), etc. I'd be better off going his route. But none of that is true. I need a computer that is well-put-together, works, and to have access to good tech support in-person cheap. Right now that means Macs.
I'm not you. I don't have a pathological need to mathematically prove I got the most RAM per dollar. I know precisely what I'm paying for when i get a Mac.
I don't know how many cards my power supply can support, I don't even know how one would go about calculating such a thing. I know that my video card has drivers, but I don't know the version. I have a Mac. Instead of devoting brain cells and time to computer-skills I don't want to master I simply let Apple do it. And it works.
I have no clue what one does when a sound card goes bad. I do know where an Apple store is, and I'm pretty good at manipulating those guys into giving me free support, so I don't have to learn that, either.
I'll pay an extra 20% for those things. I'd pay 40-50% for the simple reason that I have no use for extra specs, but I can actually use the time I'd spend maxing them out.
Are any of them are your primary machine? Most of my computing life I've had a primary machine that's a Mac more then two years old. Generally they make it to five before I upgrade.
They last longer because Apple machines are higher end, therefore the specs are better (ie: the cheapest Mac from 2010 had better specs then the cheapest Dell because Dell sells a lot of shit-boxes); and because one company makes the entire box. Apple gets in trouble if 4-year-old machines are rendered obsolete by software updates, therefore it actually cares when a mid-range machine from 2009 can't run some popular program, therefore mid-range Apple machines from 2009 are likely to be useful for awhile. Dell, OTOH, can blame Microsoft.