> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Provided the criteria are transparent and directly applicable I don't see the issue. I wouldn't object to a grocery store that offered standardized discounted rates if you applied with documentation of your financial situation. Whereas an opaque operation with the goal of maximizing the final bill on an individual basis using entirely arbitrary criteria is dystopian and clearly extremely consumer hostile.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
Grocery stores already do this! Why do you think there's "senior discount day"?
The thing is nobody will pay more than the advertised price so they want to not list a higher price, and then offer discounts. They do it via coupons and other mechanisms, but they'll never get anyone to pay $20 for a $5 bottle of Coke.
I realize that. My point is that you can view university financial aid favorably while also being against individualized offers from retailers. The current or historical practices of grocery stores isn't the primary issue under contention here.
A coupon that you must be over a certain age to redeem is an entirely different beast than one which was sent only to you specifically with an individualized price based on opaque criteria aimed at directly and immediately optimizing revenue. It is entirely possible to outlaw the latter (though Maryland appears to have failed to accomplish that) without restricting the former.
> Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
What I said is correct. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages are down.
You posted a link that people are working more hours per year, so their yearly inflation-adjusted income is up.
So you're really posting the second negative here, thanks. As I said, tge average hourly median wage is below what it was 50 years ago. From the same federal reports you linked. Plus, we can see from here, that not only are people paid less per hour, they have to work more.
I don't know why you think these two negative things post a rosy picture.
It's immensely frustrating that Operation Warp Speed was probably the most successful government program in my lifetime, and now nobody wants to acknowledge it (Republicans because of anti-vax idiocy, Democrats because they don't want to credit the Trump administration).
Republicans don't want to call attention to the fact that "big" government actually can cut through red tape when it needs to. Suddenly, getting results means the vaccine is too "experimental".
And it's silly. A person earning $100 a year is not "twice as poor" as a person earning $200 in any meaningful sense; both are extremely poor and will require essentially the same amount of public support. But this metric treats the difference as so huge (80 hours to earn $1 vs 40) that it drowns out any differences in the rest of the income distribution.
Say you have 10 people: one making $800/year, 8 making $80k/year, and one evil billionaire making $800 million. Their times to earn $1 are respectively 10 hours, 0.1 hours, and essentially zero. If you take the arithmetic mean of that you get 1.09 hours, and that's dominated by the single poor person. If you double that person's income to $1600, then they're at 5 hours to earn $1, and the overall average is nearly cut in half to 0.58. Meanwhile you can reduce the income of all the middle class people to $40k and not much changes; the average time to $1 would be (5+8(0.2)+0)/10=0.66.
It captures the income distribution much better than average income.
Not really, and certainly not better than median income which is what people typically use. It tries to measure exactly how little income the very poor make, which is not normally what people mean when they talk about inequality or poverty, and also hard to measure at the accuracy that you need when small changes produce huge swings in the result. In particular I don't believe he's correctly accounted for government benefits; hardly anyone in the US is consuming less than $8000/year.
Thanks for the comment, I was trying to parse the meaning of "time needed to earn $1" for a bit. This just boils down to what countries have the highest floor for their poorest members.
you need more RAM? Throw it away and buy a new one.
Or sell it, which is much easier to do with Macs because they're known quantities and not "Acer Onyx X321 Q-series Ultra".
There is then the software issue, with Apple devices you are forced to use macOS that kind of sucks, especially for a server usage
That's a fair point. Apple would get a ton of goodwill if they released enough documentation to let Asahi keep up with new hardware. I can't imagine it would harm their ecosystem; the people who would actually run Linux are either not using Macs at all, or users like me who treat them as Unix workstations and ignore their lock-in attempts.
Comment section isn’t nuanced enough to have this conversation and I am on a phone, but that is the way that the industry slandered the luddites as the parent claims.
The truth was that the machines produced worse quality goods and were less safe, not that people couldn’t skill up to use them and not that there wasn’t enough demand to keep everyone employed. It was quality and safety.
You should look into the issue further, because I had your opinion too until I soberly looked at what the luddites really were arguing for, it wasn’t the end of looms, it was quality standards and fair advertising to consumers.
Every party in the dispute was acting out of economic self-interest: the manufacturers wanted cheaper labour and higher margins, Parliament wanted industrial growth.
Only the workers are getting framed as though self-interest invalidates their position. The Luddites’ arguments about quality standards and consumer fraud were correct on the merits regardless of their motivation for raising them.
“More affordable clothes” that fall apart in a month aren’t more affordable.
And the choice was never mechanisation versus no mechanisation… it was whether the transition would include basic labour and quality standards. With regulation, you’d still have got mechanisation and cheaper clothing in the end… just without the fraudulent goods and wage suppression. Framing it as “society versus a few jobs” is exactly the manufacturer’s argument from the 1810s, which is very effective propaganda reaching through centuries.
“After a few bumps”, mate, people were transported to penal colonies and fucking hanged for asking for quality standards and fair wages.
Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence to protect manufacturer profits. Saying it all worked out eventually doesn’t justify the process, any more than cheap cotton justified the conditions under which it was produced. And frankly, look at modern fast fashion: cheap clothing that falls apart in weeks, produced under appalling conditions overseas. We’re still living with the consequences of the principle that cheapness trumps everything else.
Trying to keep all of labor's sweat as capitalist's own cash is bad actually.
Making clothing more efficient by employing children in dangerous factories is bad actually (what happened in the original factories and now at fast fashion).
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