Yes it did. They were magnetic disks. And they were floppy. The outer case of a 3.5" was solid but just rip it open and you can see the disk itself is floppy.
Edit: oh right, you're talking about the different spellings. Those were entirely arbitrary. We mixed between the two.
I would be cautious with any argument about higher ed that focused on student pricing. Higher Ed is full of completely opaque pricing activity, where colleges publish a ridiculous nameplate price, then give enough grants and other financial aid that the average student pays less than $2,500 per year, plus room and board:
> Since 2016-17, the average net tuition and fee price paid by
first-time full-time in-state students enrolled at public four-year
institutions has been declining after adjusting for inflation; it was
an estimated $2,250 in 2022-23.
I do not believe that the comment above is about the effectiveness, but merely stating facts here. University "sticker prices" are often inflated to maintain prestige and very often supplemented with grants and financial aid based on income. Opaque pricing is never a good thing, but there are two sides this story.
> University "sticker prices" are often inflated to maintain prestige
Another function they have is to exclude the poor and naive. Richer and more worldly students probably have higher completion rates.
Median is more important than average. A 2 or 3 variable analysis would probably be even better. I'd like to see how costs actually distribute for all students.
Just in case other Americans are surprised and dubious about these figures: remember that the vast majority of students are not attending the flagship state institutions that you might be thinking of. Public four year institutions include places like Western Michigan University and Southern Utah University, far from expensive urban areas.
Reports like those are not great for people trying to understand data and solve problems. They're for bureaucrats. They're always full of aggregation errors, which is also a common problem many people often get frustrated with from armchair experts. People __should__ be suspicious when reading that the average price paid for college is $2.5k but student debt is almost $2T and the average student debt is nearly $40k. The way the data is presented should cause people to be suspicious because the narrative doesn't make sense. The problem is with the narrative around these numbers, which is how people "lie with statistics" (because math isn't just numbers, data analysis is about stories).
A good way to think about this, and why it should reason that this data at face value isn't useful, is with a rather extreme example. If you took the average income across the globe then you'd conclude that no one could afford college. But that'd be unreasonable because the distribution of incomes is not the same as the distribution of people going to college.
Similarly, in these types of numbers there's a large difference in groups. In fact, contrary to popular belief, those straddled with the most debt are not liberal arts degrees for people with low job prospects but rather high level education of and high prospect jobs. Graduates take out more loans[0]. Medical students take out by far the most[1] -- side note: maybe we should discuss this given the doctor shortage -- followed by PhDs and then masters. Obviously these are in lower numbers though But there are a lot of variables at play here that affect things and it should be rather obvious that you can't treat all these things equally. There are also other issues where private colleges have higher debt burdens and there's also a lot of dubious institutions taking advantage of people (which do we want that happening for people who are specifically trying to become more productive members of society? The most vulnerable are also the "least productive" and even small changes can result in large outcomes).
The argument is that the same problems occur in education: take your education specific points & you can find the equivalent issues in healthcare (Healthcare is full of completely opaque pricing activity, ridiculous nameplate price, give enough grants and other financial aid).
These are probably emergent effects of capitalism. I have a systematic fix, but I can find no margin to write it.
> These are probably emergent effects of capitalism.
Regulated, subsidized capitalism. If insurance was only for catastrophic losses, and all premiums (government, employee and employer paid) were instead paid into things like health savings accounts, network and oligopolistic effects would start to disappear. Maybe not disappear entirely, but instead of locking people into networks the effort would go into marketing their networks as 'the best'.
You could also fiddle with pharmaceutical costs by allowing the patent monopolies to exist until a certain amount of revenue is collected from the patent, and then negate the patent. Instead of the current system with time-limited patents. This would massively disincentivize a lot of pharma-to-physician marketing (at least until the patent expires). Though there would still be some incentive to profit before the next drug comes out that makes yours irrelevant.
Let's do what robocat said and find a comparison with health care and school systems.
One big driver to health care costs is artificial price inflation through insurance negotiations. Where insurance brokers need to get a deal but hospitals can't give a better one, so they raise the price and give a bigger discount on that. You know, the same thing that happens on Prime day.
Schools do this too, in many different forms. Let's look at graduate student pay, for instance. A lot of graduate students don't actually pay because they're doing a lot of work for the school and bringing in a lot of money. But if you go look at the pricing of credits you'll find that it is common for graduate credits to be more expensive than undergraduate. Is this because graduate students cost more? No, they definitely cost a lot less. So why is this number high? Because it is used to validate any pay from outside the university for those graduate workers, where the school takes a large chunk of that not just for admin fees, but to cover "the student's academic costs." This too is an artificial "book keeping" number and why we should not be counting this as income (yes, some states want to do that). It also creates for weird situations when a student needs to pay for credits themselves.
Or how about business class on airplanes? Few people are paying that actual rate.
Also, I think you cherry picked form your source. They also say:
> Over the 30 years between 1992-93 and 2022-23, average
published tuition and fees increased from $2,340 to $3,860
at public two-year, from $4,870 to $10,940 at public four-year,
and from $21,860 to $39,400 at private nonprofit four-year
institutions, after adjusting for inflation.
I should also mention that the $2,500/yr claim you're making (drawing from their numbers, but your interpretation) is a clear example of an Aggregation Paradox (see Simpson's and Berkson's). If we took this number at face value the $1.63 trillion debt level wouldn't make sense. Room and board isn't that much, even if many colleges require Freshmen to stay in dorms and buy a meal plan. Given that number, clearly there's a large variance to those numbers. There's always an advantage to reporting the mean, and if we have the mean and average we know these are within one standard deviation of one another. It is interesting to see that college board is reporting averages but when they talk about incomes they are using medians (which are reported from the fed).
Averages, alone, are often a terrible metric and you need significantly more information that that to make any reasonable conclusion from data. Relying on averages alone will make you come to poor conclusions. Reports like these are for bureaucrats, not people trying to understand or solve problems.
Room and Board is a significant factor. See figure CP-9. Through the entire period, RB exceeds $10k/yr, as compared to ~$3k/yr for tuition. That's 3x the cost!
I would not say that I cherry-picked from my source; the argument expressly is that *published* tuition numbers are meaningless, because few students pay them. The correct number to use is tuition net of Grant Aid, which is also listed in figure CP-9, and hits my $2,500/yr. The $1.63 trillion debt level does make sense when most students do use loan money to pay their room and board, and do so for 4 or more years.
Obviously, some families do save money to cover college costs, so most students aren't taking out 20k+ worth of loans each here, but the driver is not the expenses of the colleges. Indeed, if you look at Figures SA-1 and CP-11A, you can see that when college affordability became newsworthy, as loan amounts went up by over 75% is exactly when states were slashing support for students, during the Great Recession, between 2006-2010. Since then, states have been restoring funding, and loans are down. Many state college tuition rates have been flat or flat in real dollars for the last decade. As an example, the UC system had completely flat tuition rates for 4 straight years, and now guarantees each student that they will not be subject to tuition increases during their undergraduate education, and will pay a flat rate.
They'd like to go to top universities because they're the best. Being private is just one more filter that stops poor people from getting the education they deserve.
It's more about capacity. There are hundreds more public universities than private. The money picture is ... messy and more complex. Some private universities are cheaper for low-income students than public schools (Harvard), some are drastically more expensive.
And not all private universities are "better" than all public universities. Think Berkeley, UT, umich, etc. All fantastic and in many areas clobber many / most private universities. There are some obvious outliers at the very top-ranked schools but, statistically, almost nobody goes to them.
It's messy and complex, but at the end of the day, the public universities educate drastically more people and generally do a good job of it; they have to be considered any time we talk about access to education.
> College is mostly about the private institutions at a national level. That's where people would like to go.
Yeah, I think this is an uninformed take, and that many students never even consider a tier-1 private university. They attend their local university, or even a community college before transferring.
I suspect the high cost of health care, education, and housing are all caused by the same thing: the enormous amount of third party money involved. People are willing to pay a lot more for a monthly payment over time than they are willing to pay in cash.
Higher Ed is being propped up by a second tier of consumer credit that basically lends extraordinary amounts of money for almost no interest, never allows defaulting and can be paid back over essentially your entire lifetime. Were it not for education lending, we would not see these prices.
I have not seen data that supports this claim. At the least, there is a strong correlation between cuts in state support for public higher ed, and increases in tuition. In the 60's many states paid 100% of the cost, and tuition was free. Room and Board in college towns is also high, as part of the overall housing affordability issues. If unlimited education lending were a factor, we would see these increases in expenditures, but we don't. Costs are higher, but tuition increases are driven by changes in the revenue mix.
Your numbers support parent's argument. It's an unsecured loan to 18 year olds, given in identical fashion at institutions where non-graduation rates are substantial.
Those rates should clearly be higher than the rates for Americam mortgages, which, after all, have down payments and are secured by the most privileged asset in the history of the world.
If they weren't protected from discharge, they would be. That's why the rates are lower, because there's no loan maturity, it just keeps generating interest until it is paid off.
If the argument is "student loan interest rates should be higher" then 1) they should be dischargable, and 2) I'm not sure I'd agree. Though I'd hope that that (and falling applications to schools) would have a downward pressure on tuition rates, I'm skeptical that would happen. So now student loans just become more expensive, and less attainable.
And some of the ones we do have might have contractual arrangements with corporations that funnel students into jobs at those corporations (possibly by contractually binding the students into a job at those corporations for a defined period of time). There are both pros and cons to that sort of apprenticeship arrangement. It would be bad, though, if the apprentice also had to monetarily pay part of the cost of attending college.
There's an opportunity here. Put the video on both YouTube and a blockchain, make it easy to find on the latter via the YouTube URI, then when one discovers a non-working link you YouTube you can pivot to the blockchain-based backup. Once enough people know about this hack it then, with a browser plug-in, censorship be gone!
This is obviously off-the-cuff, undetailed thinking here, but an approach like this might make sense in the future.
Easy: Your extension looks at the HTTP status code and if it’s 404, query the distributed hash table for another copy of the video. Then replace the <video> element on the page with a different one that plays bytes from your callback function (Media Source Extensions) just like WebTorrent.
(Note: There are alternatives to YouTube that already use WebTorrent to make videos harder to delete, but their content is incredibly hard to sort through. Instead of improving on YouTube by making filters optional, they just didn’t implement filters at all. So most of the videos in search results are scams or political)
Dead comment that I can’t vouch for asks:
>Why do you need Blockchain for this?
I’m not sure if you need blockchain. I’d avoid it if possible because it’s expensive and slow. But you might not have a choice if you need a censorship resistant distributed log.
>Why can't you just cross post on Rumble with the exact same title and make an extension which replaces 404d videos with the equivalently titled Rumble video?
Hell even my team has built a shitty YouTube alternative during a 1-day hackathon. The videos are downloaded peer-to-peer with webrtc and my site has better clustering/search than most *tubes; but of course the site is dead today and all the videos are inaccessible: https://github.com/NavinF/NodeVid.com
But then you're relying on the IPFS version to accurately say which Youtube video URL it is equivalent to. I could upload any number of videos claiming to be the same as your video, right?
True. Maybe that can be solved with an oracle[1] that runs the command “yt-dlp <url> -o - | sha256sum”. So every file you upload must be identical to the YouTube video at the same link.
Maybe get a mechanism of law passed which makes it difficult for platforms to sweep content from view in cases of changes of moderation. If youtube decies Charlie Bit Me is violent and they know longer wish host it, then they must provide some sort of redirect if video owner provides. I don't know?
You can’t store a video on the blockchain. How incredibly bad of a design would that be! The ledger is shared. People typically mint the hyperlink as an NFT.
It was indeed "diddle," not "twiddle." At BAML, it's a "tweak." Beacon Platform is another implementation by the same team (but with support for the public cloud, and many more advanced features, I believe, including tighter web integration). I think it uses the terminology "bind."
[Disclosure: I was part of the Quartz Core team in 2011/2012.]
But it's only debt if business decisions mean you must change it. I've seen far too many programmers crawl through legacy code that need not be replaced (it does its job) merely because it's using an outdated technology. But if there's no business justification for that, I'd argue it's not debt at all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with some ugly COBOL code doing its job with no current need for modification. That's not debt. Debt is something you have to pay back.
I'm having trouble grokking the results here. If I put in 50 basis points for a seed-funded company it calculates as no return until a $40M exit. I'd like to see the justification for this.
