It's not all sunshine and rainbows though. I've been lucky to have Google Fiber for a number of years and I still get buffering issues with YouTube and YouTube TV.
I think there's a big difference between being in the mall, and acquiring a mall and gutting it. I didn't see the shopping center it was before, but the ACC building is really nice and looks like it was completely renovated from what it was previously.
Growing up middle class in the 80s and 90s in a midsized city about an hour north of Austin, Highland Mall was a prime destination for the back to school shopping trip. The presence of Banana Republic made it rather upscale to us hicks from Bell County, though The Gap was the real scene of teen girl vs mom drama.
I was mostly interested in it for the ice rink, though. An indoor ice rink was an exciting novelty in Central Texas at the time, and that was the only public one between San Antonio and Dallas when I was a kid.
I also own a TCL Roku TV and the interface is easily twice as slow as my Roku Ultra. Right on the home screen is a giant ad(unless you have network adblocking). Over the years Roku and Google have been fighting about Youtube/Youtube TV on Roku, just like Disney/ESPN fought the cable companies.
I also own a Toshiba built FireTV that suffers from those same problems but far worse. Way more ads, much slower interface, and the hilarious part is a hidden power off button in the menus(it's fun trying to turn the TV off without the proper remote).
Don't use the interface? Use it as a dumb monitor right?
I'll go as far as to say that you can't complain about a slow interface of a cheap smart TV if you went out to buy it with the purpose of using it just as a monitor which is what you really should be doing. The smart isn't a value add except for being able to use a remote app on your phone especially if you're a HN frequenter. You gotta have computers lying around that can replace all the "smart".
1) I'm not the sole user of these TVs.
2) If I wanted a "dumb monitor" I would have bought one.
3) When I sit down to watch something, I put my phone away and in a different room so I am not distracted by it, that goes against using the "remote apps".
Granted I have never owned a Roku Ultra but the UI is plenty fast for me. And yes I pay for NextDNS so I don’t see giant ads. I think about it so little that I forget to mention it.
I believe there is a technical challenge they are not willing to overcome. My Google Apps account has long had broken integrations with almost all of the "new" google services. There is also a limitation in that you can't join a family group using a Google apps account, so I'm forced to have a regular gmail account anyways in order to participate in that.
I believe the limitation stems from the fact that Google Family uses the same underlying mechanism in Android as Mobile Device Management that's part of Workspace. I once managed to create an account that was simultaneously in Google Family AND in Google Workspace, but the end effect were constant notifications in Android that the account has joined Family, then deleted from Family, this several times a minute.
The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school. When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not even rank in the top quarter at another school.
If you ever find a case of a wealthy family moving to a rural area to improve their children's chances of getting into a state school, please let us know.
I went to high school in a science magnet program in Texas. Students from 3 high schools were eligible for the magnet program, and the magnet program was housed in one of the 3 high schools. Our math+science classes were in the magnet program, but our English/history/PE/art/all other classes were in the host school. The program made up about 10% of the host high scool, and students in the program were counted as part of the host school for purposes of university admission.
This understandably made people unhappy at the host school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from out of the school zone who take most of the admission spots reserved for the top N%.
I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of that if it happened. I do know of some people set on going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so they could have less competition.
The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less competitive school.
You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents most often send their children to good private schools, and their children have lots of options for college if they are talented and hard working.
That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools. Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper middle class families send their kids to public school.
This is in fact exactly what happens in Texas. I've met many people who attended UT whose parents or friend's parents did exactly that for the explicit purpose of increasing their chances of their child being in the top 7% of their graduating class so that they could get automatic admission to UT Austin, a very good school to attend compared to the usual options for someone graduaitng #35 in a class of 500 from a public high school with low educational achievement rankings.
They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if their career path is as calculated during college as it was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the problems with Houston's gas sector).
For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire path to the middle class is what they consider their main responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a worse school district just to get them on the above track.
If you're as cynical about the value of education (to provide a "job") as the people described, you'll absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or credentialed teachers and possibly less academically gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in order to game the system.
Well, assuming this also moves funding this may actually do wonders for balancing out the system. And there may be some benefits to all the students, in seeing how the other half lives, making more advanced classes available in poorer neighborhoods, etc.
Eh, kids from rich/educated families probably get a much smaller marginal benefit from the quality of the school since they're getting tons of extra stimulation at home (stability, parents reading to them at night, parents encouraging academic pursuits). Meanwhile lower-achieving kids benefit just from having the higher-achieving kids in the same classroom.
They can, but they don't, just like how Jeff Bezos can choose to live under a bridge, but doesn't.
Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong kind' of people.
You are making an implicit assumption that groups should be treated equitably. Some of us disagree with that--we feel *individuals* should be treated equitably and see these attempts to treat groups equitably as treating individuals *inequitably*.
Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??
Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against another.
It's all a hack job to try and work around the fact that we haven't yet figured out a good objective measurement. Things like SAT do the same in reverse, aid the wealthy students at the expense of the poor ones. It's not an easy problem.
https://www.sqlite.org/lang_attach.html