Experience on the ground says:

(1) The combination of free + open admissions (U.S. community colleges have no entrance requirements aside from high school diploma) means that most of the resources are spent on students entirely unable to do college work, and just cruise to nowhere until the free money runs out (graduation rates hover around 20%).

(2) Many folks have heard students say that they didn't start taking their classes seriously until the free money ran out, and they had to start paying out of pocket.

I'd be in favor of free college OR open admissions, but trying to do both makes for a system that's mostly wasted effort.

whoooooosh

https://youtu.be/1MefXuHn0ac

This, 100%.

I got a lot of value from Twitter, and used it as the primary promotions site for a couple projects. But (echoes of Reddit here), the massive increase in API pricing cut off the site manager application I'd been using, so basically since May our posting went from 1/day to zero.

Personally I'm waiting for Bluesky to become publicly available to jump ship. From what I hear it basically works the same (contrast e.g. with Mastodon), and I could imagine a sizable exodus at that time. I'm a little puzzled why they haven't moved to open it more quickly, as it seems like a good window of opportunity.

psst... our community college 2-year CS major has a 5% success rate

This is one of the best examples in some time of the right's inability to argue about anything in good faith.

(1) CEO is on record lying about everything in terms of safety and performance of their new vehicle.
(2) CEO claims to be invested in DEI and hire only young, disadvantaged, minorities for the team.
(3) Vehicle implodes killing a full crew of all rich, mostly old, men (who are all white or could easily pass for that).

But the right can't add 1 + 2 + 3 together to determine the CEO was simply lying about #2.

The image presentation (first link on Reddit) ends specifically with a comparison of those characters side-by-side. Not sure if that's a common typography idiom, but seems like a good idea.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/130394986/233751533-e7e48e6f-a448-4a37-988e-4cfc2bcc2d60.png

Actual statement in university-wide committee meeting in 2015:

"Our goal was to make a test that no one could fail, and we haven't succeeded, because some students are still failing. So we need to fix that."

Also CNN seems in the same ballpark right now (Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav trying to right-tack it in the last year, puppeting through head Chris Licht, then firing him last week).

Lot of really batshit direction calls from the billionaire media class at the moment. Maybe they just lost their minds in the AI jolt.

It's a strong theory.

Another theory is that they just want to temporarily convince clients of the IPO that this sky-high cost is actually viable and that people will pay for it. I remember about 20 years ago when AT&T Broadband (which I had) was selling itself to Comcast. Workers showed up at both my place in Boston, and my parents place in Maine, saying they had to do maintenance for the "switch to digital". What they didn't say was that they were changing the service package to something twice as expensive. Once we both saw the bill, we called up and downgraded or quit the package -- but there was a month or two window in which the negotiations were happening and AT&T could claim to Comcast they had a much high revenue stream than they normally had.

So it's at least an outside possibility that the Reddit CEO is using the same bank-shot -- if the inflated price isn't sustainable and gets reduced post-IPO, who cares. And this tracks pretty well with his "weather the temporary storm" direction.

Most city apartment buildings don't have attics.

Or just a good bullshit detector, really.

This sci-fi-based argument is never coherent. The whole point to a war is that the other side refuses to accept your results, and you're willing to apply violence to their bodies to remove that blocker one way or another. No amount of tooling is going to change what a fundamental refusal-to-agree-no-matter-what looks like.

That feelgood article is from early 2021, and casts a spotlight on Sri Lanka as a shining example. A year later, Sri Lanka defaulted on all debt, president fled the country, "half-million industrial jobs have vanished, inflation has pierced 50% and more than half the population in many parts of the country has fallen into poverty" (current article).

The whole point of the current article is that China successfully hid large loans, terms, etc. that are conventionally on the public stage so researchers wouldn't know how bad they are until recently.