Totally, and that's fair; I hope the discussion can be more about the topic and not the quality of the article itself. Lots of other links in this thread on the topic (rural wood banks) that are relevant, and I think it's an interesting story about community, rural self reliance, governance system failures, etc. "Think in systems."
It's easy to say "this article is trash and move on." Lets do the hard way and talk about the topic instead of the piece specifically. Please try to be curious.
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced.
You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
It really depends. In many states, for the latter, there are state programs that cover tuition if the student can meet some GPA and enrollment minimums. I knew someone in such a state still telling their kids to start in CC because that's what they knew from 30 years ago and they haven't bothered to research how things work now.
I think the point is that you need to feel out the options available, which are fairly unique to each kid based on geography and grades and parents and extra curriculars, not just take a one size fits all approach of going to community college.
His word choice and tone are unfortunate, as he did put a few words in your mouth you didn’t say. But… I agree with his underlying point. As other siblings have pointed out, this certainly seems like selection bias.
This is interesting. I’ve been tinkering with using Jupyter Notebooks for our somewhat intensive onboarding of new engineers. Is Pathbird solely focused on the education market? Is there pricing info anywhere?
The original version of it was developed while teaching a data science course for non-CS grad students at the University of Michigan so most of our early efforts has been focused on the education market. My co-founder/advisor/UMich-professor has been using it to teach some courses outside UMich as well (namely https://pathbird.com/compml which is a very high quality math-focused DS course), so there's some precedent for it. If you're so inclined, feel free to shoot me an email (travis at pathbird.com) and I'd be happy to discuss things.
Pathbird looks really interesting. I am trying to understand what the main product is. One can design a curriculum and the lesson content is hosted in a Jupyter Notebook? If you were designing a course to teach a language, that language would have to be supported by Jupyter?
It’s not the Jupyter notebook (or lab) frontend, it’s a custom webapp built for learning and specifically around exercise based, guided learning. So a student will go through exercises (mostly multiple choice and code-based “autograded” exercises) to check their understanding and guide them through a lesson.
This style of learning tends to work best with interactive languages (Julia and Python and R at present). Theoretically we could support other languages with Jupyter kernels (including Go and C++, etc) as well. I wonder how well those languages would work in this context considering it’s a bit hard to be “iterative” with those (but consider than a challenge rather than a limitation!).
Feel free to reach out with any questions/comments/concerns and I can answer in more long form!
They do, as I bought a Peloton using Affirm. I was ready to pay cash, but they offered to do an interest free, no fee loan thru Affirm and split it across a couple of years. So I did it, because why not?
I’m guessing this was probably an arrangement between Peloton and Affirm to where the former paid some fee to the latter, and all of that is absorbed as marketing overhead just to get more people buying bikes.
Correct any zero % rates are deals with the vendor. Affirm is just another predatory lender. Rates are sent to the user by who ever is giving the most kickback to affirm. Credit scores only give a yes/no on to next logic. My gf has just about zero credit history 690 and I am 790 we both get same offers at 18%
When the offer is $X now or $X/36 for 36 months, it's clear the seller is paying the financier, but that doesn't mean the seller will offer a discount for current payment.
Some do although, especially when you poke them about it. You see it often with cars where you offer all cash vs the %0 financing option, you can often get a discount that way. The $2000 in interest you were going to pay implicitly through the inflated price of the car goes away.
I've used off-the-shelf superglue on cut fingertips where I couldn't get bandages to stay. I believe it's also commonly used in place of stitches where you don't want the scarring that stitching would cause (e.g., parts of the face.)
I found out that one of my doctors received $200K for the last reporting year from the manufacturer of my medication. The medication is $600/month. Granted the medication does work for me and insurance picks up most of it, but it still seems like a massive conflict of interest. I honestly have half a mind to switch doctors.
