And soooooo unexpected!

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

The speed of Excel are due to the core functions being written in finely tuned assembler, or at least they were in the past. It's not a secret. It's just not easily to duplicate in an open source way.

Yep, pretty much. Not all of them but far too many. And some of the malicious ones are exceptionally loud in addition.

For most people, the LLM is "smarter" than they are because their skills regarding understanding and insight are essentially zilch.

I see the victims of bad tech are, again, out in force and insist the bad tech is actually good tech. How pathetic.

Your comment does not make sense, hence I interpreted it as insult and gave right back. A prototype that has been running 5 years without major problems is a successfully proven prototype but in no way "proven technology". That requires a bit more.

I don't know if I'd call giving up on prevention or cures and focusing on treatment "moving forward" - I'd call it profitable.

You don't get coursework for a doctoral. That's not how that works. You write a research paper and have peers review it.

What the hell is writing this crap? It's not somebody going through a doctoral program in teaching that's for sure...

we just used to subsidize it more. When we were kids the government paid 70% of tuition, most of it was money given directly to the colleges who passed that money on to you and me via lower cost tuition.

In the early 2000s Bush Jr and the Republican party slashed those subsidies, which is why the cost shot up. It's got nothing to do with administrative costs or fancy dorms (the dorms literally are paid for by rent paid by students, I know, I put my kid in one of the prison style dorms in college because the nice ones were too pricey).

As usual we're all being lied to.

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These are canaries in the coal mine for the collapsing economy. There's a ton of money in Wall Street chasing meme stocks and trying to extract value without offering it. But they can only survive while the economy at large does and can absorb their losses.

When the broader economy collapses various ponzi schemes go with it. Usually we prosecute the crooks and clean things up a bit, but I don't think anyone is expecting that this cycle.

As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?"

AI is just one more aspect of that trend of post-scarcity technological change, as (AI-based) one-on-one tutoring is now cheap (or effectively free if you are paying for AI access for other reasons).

A six-figure income today is enough to rent a decent apartment and maintain a okayish car.

I can tell you're an old man because you say six figure income when six figures isn't a lot of money.

I saw a joke that has really stuck with me, it's a wonderful Life is a timeless movie because it has the the line "do you know how long it takes a man to save $5,000"

Basically we have been screwing over the kids and they're feeling it. Pretty soon they're going to take away old people healthcare and social security. If only out of spite

Yeah you can read the studies but basically jobs that don't involve a college degree require that you build up over time to a higher income and when you lose those jobs you're starting over because without that degree employers do not value your experience.

Furthermore college educated employees tend to be more productive because they are not doing the work of one person but instead building out systems that due to work of multiple people. In the cases where they are doing individual work it's typically very high skilled specialized work which limits the number of people who can do it and competitive forces kick in keeping their wages high and keeping them employed longer.

Basically think of it like this. In the old days you didn't need any school you just worked the fields. Then we started to automate farming and improve that so we started to have to educate people up to about third or fourth grades so they can work factories which were much more efficient and productive. Then we started to automate those jobs so we started to require high School level education in order to maintain the kind of productivity we demand from workers. Now we've automated most of the jobs involving a high school education so that if you want to earn a living you need a college education.

Basically we demand increased productivity from workers every year and the only way to get that is with more education for more advanced workers.