They didn't embed and data/antenna hookup to it. So while it has GPS... if you want data or cell you have to use your phone.
That all being said, I believe they set stuff up so it can connect to the internet if there's a wifi hotspot nearby (mobile or whatever). In which case they COULD make it so you: park in your garage, connect to the internet, click on something to patch it.
But trying to get Grandma to figure out how to connect to the WiFi with that touch screen... it might be easier to say: Plug this plastic thing in a hole that looks like this, click this button, take out the plastic thing and plug it into the same hole in your arm rest.
I'm asking because I don't carry a phone and when I did I didn't always answer a call until I felt like returning it. I didn't like being interrupted every 10 minutes by someone sending me a text that had nothing important to say.
Then turn off your phone or set it on vibrate. Instead of inconveniencing passengers on cars / trains / whatever.
I've been in many a situation where the passenger being able to talk to someone on the phone was a god-send. Especially in cars either without GPS or without the built-in-Traffic GPS.
If it only affects less than 5% of their users, why do they bother to throttle and piss them off?
Simple, it's not that they're only talking about 5% of their users... it's that those 5% of users are making up something like 20% of their traffic.
A bad analogy since we're talking about food vs bandwidth...
But imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet: $5 per seat. Most people get in there and have a large meal, *maybe* the equivalent of 2 meals. But let's say you find out that 5% of your customers are eating 10x as much food as other people per seat.
Let's say in this imaginary situation they're jobless and essentially staying there with a laptop + newspaper for breakfast + lunch + (maybe) dinner. Whatever, the just eat, digest, eat a little more, digest, eat desert, and leave.
That small % using 10x as much food (bandwidth) is covering like 30%-40% of your overall "supply" or infrastructure. So you can raise the price and lose some business to another restaurant, or do "something" like "it's all you can eat, but you can only stay here for 3hours".
Same thing here... a small percentage of users are "using up" a LOT of bandwidth... meaning they have to worry about keeping up their inventory.
It's providing premium customer support for a flat rate. On average, most people only take up 30minutes a week. But then you have those couple of customers that take 8hrs a week. They're using up your resources (personnel, whatever) for the same price as someone not using any. So you either expand, or do "something" to reduce those insane requests.
With the growth of Javascript libraries like JQuery for more UI features, more images, I can see it reaching that high.
Meanwhile, web developers don't care because more and more people are getting faster and faster broadband speeds. So as long as the page-load metric works OK on their rig or perhaps what the envision most of their viewers have... they think it's all OK.
A four-year degree at an in-state school should not cost more than $15-20,000 including fees. If you went $60k into debt for school, consider that a $40-45k math lesson. Teach your kids that one at home so they don't have to pay for it again.
I went to an in-state university in NJ, one of the cheaper solutions. NOT a private University or a anything.
Tuition was ~ $12,000 a year Room & board was hefty too, though I forget the exact numbers.
Personally, I had a tuition scholarship so 4 years of school + 3 years of dorm + food was around $22,000
Without the scholarship, it would have easily been $60,000 total.
Did anybody ever blame the developers or the local governments for putting houses there?
It's kind of dumb to buy a house there, but I could see somebody not knowing just how loud an airliner can be.
I recall seeing one on the news... the town was built pretty much as close as you can get to an airport. Some new home-owners were trying to get the airport to close earlier / turn of lights / be quieter.
Even as young as I was, I recall thinking "What the heck, why did you by that house anyway."
Sure, some situations where you're 40 miles from an airport and not knowing that you're under a pathway is one thing...
But most of what I was hearing was like they moved within 1-2 miles of the flippin' airport (if not as close-as-possible) and then tried to get teh airport to close for business earlier, turn of lights at night (seriously), close it down entirely, etc.
It's like buying the house across the street from the fire station and whining about being woken up by the fire truck and asking them to close down / etc.
I think what the grandparent was talking about is something that used to happen a while back... there would be news stories about it a lot when I was a kid. There was a large "Urban Sprawl" between the 70s and 90s.
New suburban communities would start being built quite rapidly. Or the population in an area would boom because the prices were so cheap. However town would either be right near an airport or under a heavily trafficked route.
The new homeowners would then then petition the airport/FAA/etc to change their routes to move away from their new cheaply-bought homes. They'd be freaking out about how absurd it was... meanwhile the same planes had been going that route for years.
Eh, I was the same way. I shook my head and thought it was silly... that I'd rather get a cheap 12" or 14" laptop.
Then one day, on a lark, I got some cash and was in the Apple store. I'd been using an iPad at work a lot and figured "what the heck, why not."
It's nice... not "laptop" nice but it's good. I just use it when chilling on the couch or away from my desk. No hinge/parts means it can take more of a beating. I can do my quick browsing/emailing/etc on a larger screen than my mobile phone (less strain on the eyes). Really, for the most part it's just small stuff like that.
Biggest advantage is the battery lasts for flippin' ever. This was a life saver when I was without power for a week due to the recent snow storm. Charge it at work, download some shows, and I can watch TV all evening and only lose like 10%-15% battery life. It's also nice on trips, less of a hassle to take one out and start reading / watching / playing something in the confined seats of a plain/train/etc.
It's nice for some things but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. If you want a tablet, the Nook and such are probably easier to swallow with their cheaper price.
As someone else mentioned: it was a 75%-off coupon.
Such things are usually for loss-leaders, meaning you're willing to give out a coupon (or have a sale) for something that you sell at a loss... in hopes that you either win a customer or while they're buying the cheap-item they're buying more.
VERY OFTEN, in retail people just take advantage of the loss-leaders... they come to the store just for that thing and are never heard from again until another huge sale. Sure, you win some customers but not everyone... and that's even when the potential customers are just in walking distance to your store.
That's the thing here... 75% is a enough off that I'd almost bet it would be a loss-leader.
Sure, you can make a dozen cup-cakes with pre-made mix and basic frosting for dirt cheap. But bakeries usually use higher quality... even at bulk I could see 13 fancy cupcakes costing more than $10 USD to make (between ingredients + labor + incidentals). Especially when have to work people overtime.
So I'm not surprised it was at a loss. Meanwhile, how many of the X-thousand "customers" do you think she really won over? Especially anon-Internet shoppers that would probably never visit the place again.
even with the discount it's $10 for 13 cakes that have a total ingredient cost of, I would guess, less than a couple of dollars. It seems like she should be able to make money on a deal like that, especially as she does not have to worry about the cakes going stale waiting for a sale. Also, she now has reached 8500 new customers, which was presumably the point of the whole thing. I suspect her business mistake is going into a venture where you have to sell a $2 cupcake, even when made in bulk, just to break even.
- Plus cost of labor (perhaps overtime?) - Plus cost of gas + electricity + whatever to continuously pump out a huge order - Plus cost of shipping (or whatever) - Plus the delay you'll face making your regular orders, which might lose you customers
There's more to a thing than the some of the components: whether it's a baked good's ingredients or a iPhone's transistors.
I amd not a meteoroligist and don't know how much I buy into the butterfly effect, but I hear it described in 1-of-2 ways.
1) The minute air displacement from a flap might shift the overall wind current.0000001% and thus make a change down the line.
2) The domino effect a) Butterfly flaps its wings, incredibly small breeze b) Incredibly small breeze moves some pollen / dust / etc c) Floating pollen / dust makes a predator sneeze (like a cheetah) d) The sneeze scares the heard of animals that it was hunting, causing them to run en-masse e) Their running causes an actual breeze f) Now you have a stronger breeze that can actually carry, and might continue along with just larger dominos. e)... N) Eventually you get a strong enough wind that might affect something in the weather pattern.
Again, I'm not saying either would feasibly alter the weather. But at least #2 could continue onto something like shifting a storm.001% off course affecting which town gets hit.
not even Cat like reflex's will help you since most handgun murders are within 5 meters. So with a 9mm traveling at 335mps you have about 2msec to get the clipboard into the bullet path and here is a hint, no ones limbs can move that fast. This wont help you against a pro since they will simply pop you in the melon from behind and you will never even know it happened. But hey if it makes you sleep better at night.
True, but you figure when you're reading from a clipboard you're holding it around your center mass... which is where (A) most people aim for and (B) statistically the place you'd get shot since that's where so much of your mass is anyway.
So if you're a cop on a call standing outside his/her squad-car reading a warrant, and some wacko decides to take a pot-shot at you from his house, there's at least a *chance* it will be in the way already..
I'm not saying a great chance, and if you're serving a warrant you should probably wear a vest anyway.
Who is watching TV and listening to the radio these days? How will the system reach those of us that get 90% of our content online? I guess it would work during a sporting event, but what about the rest of the time?
Actually, a large percentage of people still watch TV now-a-days. Just because a larger percentage of SLASHDOT has moved off TV and onto Hulu+Netflex+Torrents+Whatever doesn't translate very well to Joe Sixpack that just wants to watch a few shows in the evening or the occasional Football / Baseball game.
Granted, at 2PM most people would be at work where they won't have access to TV and as much radio but a lot of people (including the elderly and unemployed) will be watching.
I remember reading somewhere that the pencil vs zero-G pen is actually not that great of an example. The problem with the pencil is that both the tip (if it breaks, as pencils are prone to do, especially russian ones) and the shavings aren't really things you want floating around your spaceship cabin. Not only are they eye hazards, but the graphite tip is also conductive to some extent, which could potentially cause all sorts of fun issues if it floated its way into the electronics of a 60's era spaceship.
The story is really a better illustration of how the Russians were willing to take risks to save money while the Americans were more into leaving nothing to chance.
Once again, NASA had nothing to do with the "space pen"
Fisher, a civilian company, decided on their own to design it. When they did, they came to NASA who decided to buy a bunch.
Also, the Soviets didn't use graphite pencils and paper. They used Grease pencils on plastic slates.
You are correct though, the many hazards of a wood + graphite pencil made it an impractical tool in space.
I don't know... at the air ports I've been to the eating area and shops are behind the scanners and such. Getting hired to work there probably requires more security checks than your average McDonalds or grocery store but I doubt it's THAT hard.
Besides, the concerns are usually less along the lines of the FBI's most-wanted list doing something, but some recently converted kid making a suicide run. Such a person might have a clean record.
In other cases though, it has a benefit... so long as the project has long-term benefits worth the cost. Like the Hoover Dam was pretty much busy work to get the economy going again (jobs, money flow, pride, etc) and when it was complete it became a large source of electricity.
Or perhaps a bridge, of course assuming it doesn't go to "nowhere," where the long-term fiscal benefits are harder to calculate but still there. Easier travel to a city = less gas used + less traffic + fewer accidents + etc.
However with the scanners, it's mostly "to make the public feel safer, so long as they don't think it causes cancer." Sure, if stops someone from sneaking onto a plane with a weapon than you can say "it just saved X lives + plus the cost of the plane + plus the cost of insurance pay-outs + plus the cost of property damage + etc" but have they REALLY stopped anything? If someone wants to do something to the plane, they know enough not to just walk into line... they'll just try to infiltrate the employees that don't use them.
It's always seemed rather bizarre that you can be a deadbeat car dealer, subdivision developer, banker - hell just about any "profession" that you care to name --run up unsupportable debts, and then declare bankruptcy and have them disappear with no significant long term harm to you.
Student loans though - the one debt that actually might make you more likely to avoid repeating the boom/bust credit cycle - is somehow untouchable.
I *thought* the Bankruptcy laws changed in recent years... so that it wasn't as much a "free pass" as it used to be.
Of course, considering how hot-and-bothered 'net posters get when even something minor is changed, it was probably hard for Netflix or the non-Netflix-customer community to see that it was a big deal. Considering people "flip out" over the change of a color scheme or moving a couple of buttons around on WebsiteX the valid complaints about Netflix were just swept under the rug.
I'm all for UI redesigns every X years, but you should never severely chop the feature list or reduce usability... at the same time.
The only *real* problem with that, is it's insane how young kids are when they figure out how to bypass various nanny-ware. A friend's brother shows them, they find out online, the parent forgets to turn it back on after some "research," etc.
The reason that's a problem, is some of that stuff might be setup to help stop online predators... or at least help the parents/cops look at the logs if the kid goes missing.
The end result being, some kids might be able to get around the parents' security while still being too young / immature / dumb and fall victim to an online predator... with less PC help in finding them.
Granted, that goes with the whole "think of the children" thing that ticks so many people off... but this is about a family's setup and not a gov thing.
In a lot of ways, they do inflate the cost of education...
That's the only thing about the overall article/statement I agree with. Colleges are able to justify costing an arm-and-a-leg because kids can just get student loans. Sure, let's charge out-of-staters $25k or $30k per year since they'll just get loans. Who cares if the market stinks and they are stuck in loans for decades?!?!?
BUT it's also on the fault of students / parents though... aka the customers. Too many want to go to an expensive out-of-state university instead of a solid in-state university.
Agreed, things can go pear-shaped very quickly. I know a couple of families that went from "financially comfortable" to "financially screwed" very quickly due to a family member's illness. Though their situations weren't as bad as yours. Since then, I don't take from granted how quickly my finances can go into the toilet.
Your situation definitely sucks, and what's worse is it isn't that unique. I'm sure there have been tons of students whose parents either died or the financial situation took a dive and thus burdened them with huge debt. Unfortunately, when you're 18 you're not prepared for any of that stuff to happen.... let alone how to deal with the aftermath and pretty much be 100% on your own while dealing with it.
It's like how some people shake their head and think it's impossible for a family to become homeless; when it's actually scary how fast and easy it is for it to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't embed and data/antenna hookup to it. So while it has GPS... if you want data or cell you have to use your phone.
That all being said, I believe they set stuff up so it can connect to the internet if there's a wifi hotspot nearby (mobile or whatever). In which case they COULD make it so you: park in your garage, connect to the internet, click on something to patch it.
But trying to get Grandma to figure out how to connect to the WiFi with that touch screen... it might be easier to say: Plug this plastic thing in a hole that looks like this, click this button, take out the plastic thing and plug it into the same hole in your arm rest.
I'm asking because I don't carry a phone and when I did I didn't always answer a call until I felt like returning it. I didn't like being interrupted every 10 minutes by someone sending me a text that had nothing important to say.
Then turn off your phone or set it on vibrate. Instead of inconveniencing passengers on cars / trains / whatever.
I've been in many a situation where the passenger being able to talk to someone on the phone was a god-send. Especially in cars either without GPS or without the built-in-Traffic GPS.
If it only affects less than 5% of their users, why do they bother to throttle and piss them off?
Simple, it's not that they're only talking about 5% of their users... it's that those 5% of users are making up something like 20% of their traffic.
A bad analogy since we're talking about food vs bandwidth...
But imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet: $5 per seat. Most people get in there and have a large meal, *maybe* the equivalent of 2 meals. But let's say you find out that 5% of your customers are eating 10x as much food as other people per seat.
Let's say in this imaginary situation they're jobless and essentially staying there with a laptop + newspaper for breakfast + lunch + (maybe) dinner. Whatever, the just eat, digest, eat a little more, digest, eat desert, and leave.
That small % using 10x as much food (bandwidth) is covering like 30%-40% of your overall "supply" or infrastructure. So you can raise the price and lose some business to another restaurant, or do "something" like "it's all you can eat, but you can only stay here for 3hours".
Same thing here... a small percentage of users are "using up" a LOT of bandwidth... meaning they have to worry about keeping up their inventory.
It's providing premium customer support for a flat rate. On average, most people only take up 30minutes a week. But then you have those couple of customers that take 8hrs a week. They're using up your resources (personnel, whatever) for the same price as someone not using any. So you either expand, or do "something" to reduce those insane requests.
With the growth of Javascript libraries like JQuery for more UI features, more images, I can see it reaching that high.
Meanwhile, web developers don't care because more and more people are getting faster and faster broadband speeds. So as long as the page-load metric works OK on their rig or perhaps what the envision most of their viewers have... they think it's all OK.
A four-year degree at an in-state school should not cost more than $15-20,000 including fees. If you went $60k into debt for school, consider that a $40-45k math lesson. Teach your kids that one at home so they don't have to pay for it again.
I went to an in-state university in NJ, one of the cheaper solutions. NOT a private University or a anything.
Tuition was ~ $12,000 a year
Room & board was hefty too, though I forget the exact numbers.
Personally, I had a tuition scholarship so 4 years of school + 3 years of dorm + food was around $22,000
Without the scholarship, it would have easily been $60,000 total.
Did anybody ever blame the developers or the local governments for putting houses there?
It's kind of dumb to buy a house there, but I could see somebody not knowing just how loud an airliner can be.
I recall seeing one on the news... the town was built pretty much as close as you can get to an airport. Some new home-owners were trying to get the airport to close earlier / turn of lights / be quieter.
Even as young as I was, I recall thinking "What the heck, why did you by that house anyway."
Sure, some situations where you're 40 miles from an airport and not knowing that you're under a pathway is one thing...
But most of what I was hearing was like they moved within 1-2 miles of the flippin' airport (if not as close-as-possible) and then tried to get teh airport to close for business earlier, turn of lights at night (seriously), close it down entirely, etc.
It's like buying the house across the street from the fire station and whining about being woken up by the fire truck and asking them to close down / etc.
I think what the grandparent was talking about is something that used to happen a while back... there would be news stories about it a lot when I was a kid. There was a large "Urban Sprawl" between the 70s and 90s.
New suburban communities would start being built quite rapidly. Or the population in an area would boom because the prices were so cheap. However town would either be right near an airport or under a heavily trafficked route.
The new homeowners would then then petition the airport/FAA/etc to change their routes to move away from their new cheaply-bought homes. They'd be freaking out about how absurd it was... meanwhile the same planes had been going that route for years.
Eh, I was the same way. I shook my head and thought it was silly... that I'd rather get a cheap 12" or 14" laptop.
Then one day, on a lark, I got some cash and was in the Apple store. I'd been using an iPad at work a lot and figured "what the heck, why not."
It's nice... not "laptop" nice but it's good. I just use it when chilling on the couch or away from my desk. No hinge/parts means it can take more of a beating. I can do my quick browsing/emailing/etc on a larger screen than my mobile phone (less strain on the eyes). Really, for the most part it's just small stuff like that.
Biggest advantage is the battery lasts for flippin' ever. This was a life saver when I was without power for a week due to the recent snow storm. Charge it at work, download some shows, and I can watch TV all evening and only lose like 10%-15% battery life. It's also nice on trips, less of a hassle to take one out and start reading / watching / playing something in the confined seats of a plain/train/etc.
It's nice for some things but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. If you want a tablet, the Nook and such are probably easier to swallow with their cheaper price.
As someone else mentioned: it was a 75%-off coupon.
Such things are usually for loss-leaders, meaning you're willing to give out a coupon (or have a sale) for something that you sell at a loss... in hopes that you either win a customer or while they're buying the cheap-item they're buying more.
VERY OFTEN, in retail people just take advantage of the loss-leaders... they come to the store just for that thing and are never heard from again until another huge sale. Sure, you win some customers but not everyone... and that's even when the potential customers are just in walking distance to your store.
That's the thing here... 75% is a enough off that I'd almost bet it would be a loss-leader.
Sure, you can make a dozen cup-cakes with pre-made mix and basic frosting for dirt cheap. But bakeries usually use higher quality... even at bulk I could see 13 fancy cupcakes costing more than $10 USD to make (between ingredients + labor + incidentals). Especially when have to work people overtime.
So I'm not surprised it was at a loss. Meanwhile, how many of the X-thousand "customers" do you think she really won over? Especially anon-Internet shoppers that would probably never visit the place again.
even with the discount it's $10 for 13 cakes that have a total ingredient cost of, I would guess, less than a couple of dollars. It seems like she should be able to make money on a deal like that, especially as she does not have to worry about the cakes going stale waiting for a sale. Also, she now has reached 8500 new customers, which was presumably the point of the whole thing. I suspect her business mistake is going into a venture where you have to sell a $2 cupcake, even when made in bulk, just to break even.
- Plus cost of labor (perhaps overtime?)
- Plus cost of gas + electricity + whatever to continuously pump out a huge order
- Plus cost of shipping (or whatever)
- Plus the delay you'll face making your regular orders, which might lose you customers
There's more to a thing than the some of the components: whether it's a baked good's ingredients or a iPhone's transistors.
I amd not a meteoroligist and don't know how much I buy into the butterfly effect, but I hear it described in 1-of-2 ways.
1) The minute air displacement from a flap might shift the overall wind current .0000001% and thus make a change down the line.
2) The domino effect
a) Butterfly flaps its wings, incredibly small breeze
b) Incredibly small breeze moves some pollen / dust / etc
c) Floating pollen / dust makes a predator sneeze (like a cheetah)
d) The sneeze scares the heard of animals that it was hunting, causing them to run en-masse
e) Their running causes an actual breeze
f) Now you have a stronger breeze that can actually carry, and might continue along with just larger dominos.
e)...
N) Eventually you get a strong enough wind that might affect something in the weather pattern.
Again, I'm not saying either would feasibly alter the weather. But at least #2 could continue onto something like shifting a storm .001% off course affecting which town gets hit.
Fix the title to include "Billion" otherwise it looks like one hell of a deal. I could afford $1.90 with the spare change in my car.
not even Cat like reflex's will help you since most handgun murders are within 5 meters. So with a 9mm traveling at 335mps you have about 2msec to get the clipboard into the bullet path and here is a hint, no ones limbs can move that fast. This wont help you against a pro since they will simply pop you in the melon from behind and you will never even know it happened. But hey if it makes you sleep better at night.
True, but you figure when you're reading from a clipboard you're holding it around your center mass... which is where (A) most people aim for and (B) statistically the place you'd get shot since that's where so much of your mass is anyway.
So if you're a cop on a call standing outside his/her squad-car reading a warrant, and some wacko decides to take a pot-shot at you from his house, there's at least a *chance* it will be in the way already..
I'm not saying a great chance, and if you're serving a warrant you should probably wear a vest anyway.
Who is watching TV and listening to the radio these days?
How will the system reach those of us that get 90% of our content online?
I guess it would work during a sporting event, but what about the rest of the time?
Actually, a large percentage of people still watch TV now-a-days. Just because a larger percentage of SLASHDOT has moved off TV and onto Hulu+Netflex+Torrents+Whatever doesn't translate very well to Joe Sixpack that just wants to watch a few shows in the evening or the occasional Football / Baseball game.
Granted, at 2PM most people would be at work where they won't have access to TV and as much radio but a lot of people (including the elderly and unemployed) will be watching.
An Episode of Leverage?
That was my first thought.
I wonder if, like the episode, the whole system is running on some 80s-era desktop sitting in some guy's man cave.
Maybe we should give those guys a call
Too late.
Another documentary I saw showed the last surviving guy was mistaken for a zombie and shot by a kid with a shotgun. His one regret was "Garfield"
I remember reading somewhere that the pencil vs zero-G pen is actually not that great of an example. The problem with the pencil is that both the tip (if it breaks, as pencils are prone to do, especially russian ones) and the shavings aren't really things you want floating around your spaceship cabin. Not only are they eye hazards, but the graphite tip is also conductive to some extent, which could potentially cause all sorts of fun issues if it floated its way into the electronics of a 60's era spaceship.
The story is really a better illustration of how the Russians were willing to take risks to save money while the Americans were more into leaving nothing to chance.
Once again, NASA had nothing to do with the "space pen"
Fisher, a civilian company, decided on their own to design it. When they did, they came to NASA who decided to buy a bunch.
Also, the Soviets didn't use graphite pencils and paper. They used Grease pencils on plastic slates.
You are correct though, the many hazards of a wood + graphite pencil made it an impractical tool in space.
I don't know... at the air ports I've been to the eating area and shops are behind the scanners and such. Getting hired to work there probably requires more security checks than your average McDonalds or grocery store but I doubt it's THAT hard.
Besides, the concerns are usually less along the lines of the FBI's most-wanted list doing something, but some recently converted kid making a suicide run. Such a person might have a clean record.
In this case, I agree.
In other cases though, it has a benefit... so long as the project has long-term benefits worth the cost. Like the Hoover Dam was pretty much busy work to get the economy going again (jobs, money flow, pride, etc) and when it was complete it became a large source of electricity.
Or perhaps a bridge, of course assuming it doesn't go to "nowhere," where the long-term fiscal benefits are harder to calculate but still there. Easier travel to a city = less gas used + less traffic + fewer accidents + etc.
However with the scanners, it's mostly "to make the public feel safer, so long as they don't think it causes cancer." Sure, if stops someone from sneaking onto a plane with a weapon than you can say "it just saved X lives + plus the cost of the plane + plus the cost of insurance pay-outs + plus the cost of property damage + etc" but have they REALLY stopped anything? If someone wants to do something to the plane, they know enough not to just walk into line... they'll just try to infiltrate the employees that don't use them.
It's always seemed rather bizarre that you can be a deadbeat car dealer, subdivision developer, banker - hell just about any "profession" that you care to name --run up unsupportable debts, and then declare bankruptcy and have them disappear with no significant long term harm to you.
Student loans though - the one debt that actually might make you more likely to avoid repeating the boom/bust credit cycle - is somehow untouchable.
I *thought* the Bankruptcy laws changed in recent years... so that it wasn't as much a "free pass" as it used to be.
Honestly, unless I see it spelled out in the title or whatever... whenever I see "C&C" I simply think of the ol' Command & Conquer game.
Agreed.
That re-design was quite horrid.
Of course, considering how hot-and-bothered 'net posters get when even something minor is changed, it was probably hard for Netflix or the non-Netflix-customer community to see that it was a big deal. Considering people "flip out" over the change of a color scheme or moving a couple of buttons around on WebsiteX the valid complaints about Netflix were just swept under the rug.
I'm all for UI redesigns every X years, but you should never severely chop the feature list or reduce usability... at the same time.
The only *real* problem with that, is it's insane how young kids are when they figure out how to bypass various nanny-ware. A friend's brother shows them, they find out online, the parent forgets to turn it back on after some "research," etc.
The reason that's a problem, is some of that stuff might be setup to help stop online predators... or at least help the parents/cops look at the logs if the kid goes missing.
The end result being, some kids might be able to get around the parents' security while still being too young / immature / dumb and fall victim to an online predator... with less PC help in finding them.
Granted, that goes with the whole "think of the children" thing that ticks so many people off... but this is about a family's setup and not a gov thing.
In a lot of ways, they do inflate the cost of education. ..
That's the only thing about the overall article/statement I agree with. Colleges are able to justify costing an arm-and-a-leg because kids can just get student loans. Sure, let's charge out-of-staters $25k or $30k per year since they'll just get loans. Who cares if the market stinks and they are stuck in loans for decades?!?!?
BUT it's also on the fault of students / parents though... aka the customers. Too many want to go to an expensive out-of-state university instead of a solid in-state university.
Agreed, things can go pear-shaped very quickly. I know a couple of families that went from "financially comfortable" to "financially screwed" very quickly due to a family member's illness. Though their situations weren't as bad as yours. Since then, I don't take from granted how quickly my finances can go into the toilet.
Your situation definitely sucks, and what's worse is it isn't that unique. I'm sure there have been tons of students whose parents either died or the financial situation took a dive and thus burdened them with huge debt. Unfortunately, when you're 18 you're not prepared for any of that stuff to happen.... let alone how to deal with the aftermath and pretty much be 100% on your own while dealing with it.
It's like how some people shake their head and think it's impossible for a family to become homeless; when it's actually scary how fast and easy it is for it to happen.