I'm fine with that - at the least I think our world has changed since the high school diploma became the de facto public education cutoff and I believe that we would benefit collectively from having public education at least through associates/trade school.
But the expectation of what you get for free needs to come way down. There are so many amenities on college campuses today that are just not necessary to the educational mission. I don't mind people using their own money to pay for these, but I think we'd need to take a serious look at how tax dollars are spent if it becomes entirely publicly funded. At the end of the day, you'd be subsidizing the entertainment of the top 50-ish % of the population that actually continues school after high school.
It can be worse than nothing because it distorts the free market. If these distortions produce unwanted side effects like high income inequality, low labor force participation, and high dependence on government safety nets then you would have been better off with slightly higher prices at Wal-Mart.
That forward-thinking might be advantageous. If, say, Vietnam ever becomes a regional economic powerhouse, you have already locked in a trade agreement when you were in a strong negotiating position. This comes at a cost, however. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Vietnam is not much of a market - so you are mostly granting import preferences to Vietnam. That's a slight win for consumers, as prices go down. It's also a loss for the current producers of those goods - some of them might live in your country. Now, on balance and in theory, it's a win. In reality, you just created a sub-group of your population who lost. They will be pretty angry, and probably a lot angrier than the general population is happier with slightly lower prices. Create a big enough trade deal and this sub-group can get really big - big enough to nominate and elect a populist.
Whoops.
But aside from that, free trade can really screw up a free market. If you are ideologically aligned with free markets, you can't ignore that free markets require free movement of goods, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor. The TPP largely focused on the first two. 2 out of 3 is not a free market, it is a distorted market that will not produce all of the usual benefits of a free market. They let the magic smoke out.
I completely disagree. 126kbps AAC would be pretty much transparent even in good listening conditions. 126kbps MP3 would probably be pretty bad. Depending on the source and encoder, it could be as annoying to listen to as tape (but with different flaws). Tape mostly had hiss, wow/flutter, and poor dynamic range. The hiss was not usually a big deal except in fancy-pants music with quiet components... this was not a problem for my rock/pop listening. The poor dynamic range was something that my brain seemed to adapt to fairly quickly. The wow/flutter was really annoying, and a stretched tape or low batteries really made for a poor listening experience. MP3 does not suffer from any of those things, but it does have really nasty artifacts - especially on things like cymbals. I have to admit that these are so terrible what I will usually take the time to find another source. With that said, AAC does not have this problem (though it still has other artifacts), especially at anything over 100kbps+.
I used to listen to cassette tapes on a Walkman, so I'll take "free, way better quality than tape" over "expensive, and maybe you can hear the difference in a quiet room with expensive headphones".
I guess the moon is still massive enough to have significant gravity. I don't know how he numbers work out, but it's possible that the extra energy needed to boost iron out of the moon's gravity well exceeds the cost to mine the astroid, depending on where the end product is going.
If my limited knowledge of nuclear energy is correct, then iron is also the furthest you can go down the periodic table before fusion stops being energy-positive. So if we ever master fusion, we might end up with a lot of leftover iron:)
In my parents' case, they had high, solidly middle class or even upper middle class incomes but got into credit card and tax trouble related to doing outside contracting. This all happened right around the same time that I went to college, so it was very bad timing. The IRS fines really add up quickly, and credit card trouble is bad news, and was even worse in the late 80s with high interest rates.
When you say "financial aid", I suspect you are not including loans. I think that is why it seems like we are talking past one another. I don't doubt that you make too much to qualify for certain need-based grants and scholarships. You almost certainly qualify for public loans and tax credits.
It's not so black and white. I'm an unabashed pirate, and cost is only one factor. When I was young, "free" was the main reason and I would jump through hoops if necessary. The primary reason for my piracy now is DRM and the lack of a centralized repository. Sorry, I'm not going to browse iTunes, Amazon, my cable box, Roku, Hulu, etc until I find the movie or TV show that I'm looking for when 99% of the time it is on usenet, ready to stream to any device that I own. If you want me as a customer, you need to be - at the minimum - as convenient as the free option. Easy search and no DRM are my prerequisites. Music is better - most of the big guys have abandoned DRM, and services like Spotify have made free and legit even more convenient than pirated.
They count as financial aid. They certainly aren't grants or scholarships (which middle class students also qualify for), but they are still considered financial aid.
As I mentioned to the other commenter, I know that costs have increased - but I was addressing the claim that middle class kids do not get financial aid, which I'm pretty sure is absurd.
I know school is more expensive, and at quite a bit more than the pace of inflation. What I doubt has changed is the middle class getting financial aid - I'm betting they still do.
Then things have changed. In the 90s, both my brother and I got a combination of grants and loans. Neither of us nor our parents had any savings to speak of - so we financed almost the entire amount. My parents were solidly middle class.
Even the summary indicates that these schools bend over backwards to accommodate their poor students. Not only that, this isn't an article about poor students, but rather the entire lower 60% income bracket is compared. If you are in the 60th percentile for income, you are not poor.
Also, without education the poor will remain poor no matter how smart they are.
I think that is a large part of what the parent was saying.
So many issues to take a stand on, and he picks this? Man, pick your battles. His time, his money - just don't look for sympathy or understanding as this wound is self-inflicted.
Here in the Philly area my latency went way, way down with FIOS vs cable. Pings to google.com are less than 15ms. I'm not a gamer so I'm not sure if this is a decent test or not, but I've seen an improvement over the service I had with Comcast.
This is why I like to buy used rental cars - in addition to not having leather seats (I prefer cloth, especially on a hot day), they typically have very simple stereos and lack a lot of the bells and whistles that often break or become obsolete. I'd much rather clip my smartphone into a holder and have the very latest nav technology, up to date maps, and entertainment options.
Does Verizon cap FIOS? Here there is no hard cap, though the sales guy said that if you end up being in the top 0.xxx% of users, they would likely cancel your contract (or push you into a business tier). DSL reports seems to indicate that this number is around 4TB/month. For me I guess the discussion is academic since I don't come anywhere near 4TB.
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I'm fine with that - at the least I think our world has changed since the high school diploma became the de facto public education cutoff and I believe that we would benefit collectively from having public education at least through associates/trade school.
But the expectation of what you get for free needs to come way down. There are so many amenities on college campuses today that are just not necessary to the educational mission. I don't mind people using their own money to pay for these, but I think we'd need to take a serious look at how tax dollars are spent if it becomes entirely publicly funded. At the end of the day, you'd be subsidizing the entertainment of the top 50-ish % of the population that actually continues school after high school.
It can be worse than nothing because it distorts the free market. If these distortions produce unwanted side effects like high income inequality, low labor force participation, and high dependence on government safety nets then you would have been better off with slightly higher prices at Wal-Mart.
That forward-thinking might be advantageous. If, say, Vietnam ever becomes a regional economic powerhouse, you have already locked in a trade agreement when you were in a strong negotiating position. This comes at a cost, however. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Vietnam is not much of a market - so you are mostly granting import preferences to Vietnam. That's a slight win for consumers, as prices go down. It's also a loss for the current producers of those goods - some of them might live in your country. Now, on balance and in theory, it's a win. In reality, you just created a sub-group of your population who lost. They will be pretty angry, and probably a lot angrier than the general population is happier with slightly lower prices. Create a big enough trade deal and this sub-group can get really big - big enough to nominate and elect a populist.
Whoops.
But aside from that, free trade can really screw up a free market. If you are ideologically aligned with free markets, you can't ignore that free markets require free movement of goods, free movement of capital, and free movement of labor. The TPP largely focused on the first two. 2 out of 3 is not a free market, it is a distorted market that will not produce all of the usual benefits of a free market. They let the magic smoke out.
I completely disagree. 126kbps AAC would be pretty much transparent even in good listening conditions. 126kbps MP3 would probably be pretty bad. Depending on the source and encoder, it could be as annoying to listen to as tape (but with different flaws). Tape mostly had hiss, wow/flutter, and poor dynamic range. The hiss was not usually a big deal except in fancy-pants music with quiet components... this was not a problem for my rock/pop listening. The poor dynamic range was something that my brain seemed to adapt to fairly quickly. The wow/flutter was really annoying, and a stretched tape or low batteries really made for a poor listening experience. MP3 does not suffer from any of those things, but it does have really nasty artifacts - especially on things like cymbals. I have to admit that these are so terrible what I will usually take the time to find another source. With that said, AAC does not have this problem (though it still has other artifacts), especially at anything over 100kbps+.
I used to listen to cassette tapes on a Walkman, so I'll take "free, way better quality than tape" over "expensive, and maybe you can hear the difference in a quiet room with expensive headphones".
That compiler explorer web site is really cool.
I guess the moon is still massive enough to have significant gravity. I don't know how he numbers work out, but it's possible that the extra energy needed to boost iron out of the moon's gravity well exceeds the cost to mine the astroid, depending on where the end product is going.
If my limited knowledge of nuclear energy is correct, then iron is also the furthest you can go down the periodic table before fusion stops being energy-positive. So if we ever master fusion, we might end up with a lot of leftover iron :)
In my parents' case, they had high, solidly middle class or even upper middle class incomes but got into credit card and tax trouble related to doing outside contracting. This all happened right around the same time that I went to college, so it was very bad timing. The IRS fines really add up quickly, and credit card trouble is bad news, and was even worse in the late 80s with high interest rates.
When you say "financial aid", I suspect you are not including loans. I think that is why it seems like we are talking past one another. I don't doubt that you make too much to qualify for certain need-based grants and scholarships. You almost certainly qualify for public loans and tax credits.
Exactly - you only install a browser if you want to.
It's not so black and white. I'm an unabashed pirate, and cost is only one factor. When I was young, "free" was the main reason and I would jump through hoops if necessary. The primary reason for my piracy now is DRM and the lack of a centralized repository. Sorry, I'm not going to browse iTunes, Amazon, my cable box, Roku, Hulu, etc until I find the movie or TV show that I'm looking for when 99% of the time it is on usenet, ready to stream to any device that I own. If you want me as a customer, you need to be - at the minimum - as convenient as the free option. Easy search and no DRM are my prerequisites. Music is better - most of the big guys have abandoned DRM, and services like Spotify have made free and legit even more convenient than pirated.
They count as financial aid. They certainly aren't grants or scholarships (which middle class students also qualify for), but they are still considered financial aid.
As I mentioned to the other commenter, I know that costs have increased - but I was addressing the claim that middle class kids do not get financial aid, which I'm pretty sure is absurd.
Right, but that's a more complex explanation that is essentially the exact point that the original commenter was making.
I know school is more expensive, and at quite a bit more than the pace of inflation. What I doubt has changed is the middle class getting financial aid - I'm betting they still do.
Then things have changed. In the 90s, both my brother and I got a combination of grants and loans. Neither of us nor our parents had any savings to speak of - so we financed almost the entire amount. My parents were solidly middle class.
Even the summary indicates that these schools bend over backwards to accommodate their poor students. Not only that, this isn't an article about poor students, but rather the entire lower 60% income bracket is compared. If you are in the 60th percentile for income, you are not poor.
Also, without education the poor will remain poor no matter how smart they are.
I think that is a large part of what the parent was saying.
So many issues to take a stand on, and he picks this? Man, pick your battles. His time, his money - just don't look for sympathy or understanding as this wound is self-inflicted.
Here in the Philly area my latency went way, way down with FIOS vs cable. Pings to google.com are less than 15ms. I'm not a gamer so I'm not sure if this is a decent test or not, but I've seen an improvement over the service I had with Comcast.
This is why I like to buy used rental cars - in addition to not having leather seats (I prefer cloth, especially on a hot day), they typically have very simple stereos and lack a lot of the bells and whistles that often break or become obsolete. I'd much rather clip my smartphone into a holder and have the very latest nav technology, up to date maps, and entertainment options.
Does Verizon cap FIOS? Here there is no hard cap, though the sales guy said that if you end up being in the top 0.xxx% of users, they would likely cancel your contract (or push you into a business tier). DSL reports seems to indicate that this number is around 4TB/month. For me I guess the discussion is academic since I don't come anywhere near 4TB.
I just wanted to thank you for the irony. First smile of the day.
Wow! I thought I was living the good life going from the old 25/5 to 150/150...
This would suck epically. We JUST got FIOS here in Comcast country, and there is finally competition.