> For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow similar patterns resulting in a large percentage of students paying no tuition, the middle ground of students paying some fraction, and a small number of students from wealthy families subsidizing everyone else.
As someone from a country (Sweden) that to a larger extent has decreased people’s reliance on their families, and grown the welfare state instead, it’s weird to think that your parents wealth or income should have any impact on things like tuition, once you’ve reached the age of majority
Once I finished high school, my parents had nothing to do with my business as far as any institutions were concerned, and vice versa. But uni was tax-funded and free at the point of use. And when they get too old to care for themselves, it will likely be the government supporting them financially, not me (unless I strike it rich first, in which case I suppose they’ll spend their sunset years in style)
There's always this subtext that Europeans solve these problems just by caring more about human values, but the truth usually involves interesting sets of tradeoffs. So in Europe the norm, besides free university, is extensive tracking: in the US, your choice of major is essentially a consumer decision, where in many European systems it's fixed at a relatively early age by your performance on things like the Abitur.
I'm not saying the European system is bad. Certainly there's a lot to complain about with a system that asks 18 year olds to make life-defining decisions about both their career and their financial prospects. But the differences do go beyond whether or not you're on the hook for your tuition.
It could, it just doesn’t want to. Or at least the inertia and obstacles of gaining enough political support for doing it, paired with the reluctance of the powerful entities that gain from the existing system, prevents it from happening. But there is nothing that makes it fundamentally incompatible with still allowing private enterprise and profit
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
They turned in their badges that allows them to access certain spaces in the pentagon. They're still reporters, they still work for their employers, and they can still do reporting.
To what extreme do you take this? Would you rather be killed than scam someone? That’s a principled stance if so, but I’d personally rather you try to scam me if the alternative is you being beaten up, or worse
> I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims
That’s an interesting moral philosophy. Do you think that no one ever deserves sympathy for something they were forced to do? If a Mexican drug cartel threatens to kill someone’s entire family if they don’t perform a reprehensible act, no one should feel the tiniest bit bad for them if they don’t stand on principle?
I assume you don’t actually think that, but when you hear that people are being kidnapped, trafficked abroad, and forced to work in clandestine Burmese call centers, what do you think their options are?
Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)
I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)
As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)
I think my point my have been lost somewhere around how much making music actually costs.
Yes, anyone can _do_ music at little cost at any time. But there is a real cost to make "good music" and it isn't in sheer musicianship or equipment - it's also in time.
I've never done music full time but I've been in several studio and live sessions and I assure you it's exhausting and time consuming.
And are more or fewer people able to put in that time now than before piracy and streaming became a thing? The answer to that question is not obvious to me, but I lean towards ”more”, or at least ”roughly the same”
Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?
I don't think you can really compare because the culture is so different.
Before the internet, you weren't going to get famous without being an actor, musician, artist, author, etc.
Sam Walton was not famous the way Elon or Jeff Bezos are famous.
I would think there is less because music just isn't as important as it use to be and there are just so many other creative outlets now. The hard thing to account for though is electronic music. You would have had to spend quite a bit of money in the 90s just to make a track and now you can do it basically for free.
If it was 1990, I would be in a band because there wasn't much else to do. Being in a band then was like having a podcast now.
The music industry was never this static thing either. There isn't much before 1950. It is hard now to imagine how huge folk music was in the 70s. MTV was such a big deal in my youth but that only had a 25 year run of being relevant if that.
I don't think there is a real alternative to streaming or the power law distributions that are going to come with that.
It's tricky. From everything I know first hand and reading, both piracy and streaming never had a net negative impact on the artists themselves. This was often only a concern for labels.
I don't want this to come off as backpedaling - the original comment I was responding to said that if the artist became unavailable on streaming services, then they would not engage with the artist. As it turns out, artists don't rely on these people for income.
Both streaming services and piracy have the knock-on effect of increasing concert and merchandise sales (through reach), which have much higher margins for artists. I've obtained studio grade LP's from several artists entirely for free, as they have the expectation that we'll be paying them in person at concert. If the only way you support your artist is through a streaming service, then your specific engagement doesn't matter.
This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.
What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?
What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
> “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.
No, not at all.
Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.
This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.
> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
Cheers. Do you have any citations handy for the old studies? I’m open to being wrong, but after some very brief searching and reading I’m skeptical that they properly controlled for increased feed intake (possibly due to palatability) to conclusively determine that some other mechanism was at play
DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0
But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here:
Yes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995. If you’re, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in 2025 much more appealing
Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc…
That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up
I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:
Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).
In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.
Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).
One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).
This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.
This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
> This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.
> Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?
> This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.
> We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.
As someone from a country (Sweden) that to a larger extent has decreased people’s reliance on their families, and grown the welfare state instead, it’s weird to think that your parents wealth or income should have any impact on things like tuition, once you’ve reached the age of majority
Once I finished high school, my parents had nothing to do with my business as far as any institutions were concerned, and vice versa. But uni was tax-funded and free at the point of use. And when they get too old to care for themselves, it will likely be the government supporting them financially, not me (unless I strike it rich first, in which case I suppose they’ll spend their sunset years in style)
reply