Why doesn't Monopoly have a calculator piece?
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@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@dcon Carnage asada. But needs some seasoning.
;-)
Classy.
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@TimeBandit When I was in high-school (long ago...
) in France, TI was second to Casio in market shares (and HP was a distant third, maybe 1-2 per classroom at the very maximum), and from what I can see of younger relatives, this still seems to be the case nowadays. But that's likely just a quirk of different regional markets and doesn't change the main idea of those things still being around, relatively costly, and haven't evolved that much for decades. The main change I saw is that apparently now you can directly write (some form of) Python, but that's just a change in how to program them, not much more.What surprises me though is that no one has managed to launch a cheap alternative. It's clearly a large-ish market, not only in the US, and technologically nowadays it should be trivial to do even cheaper than TI (or Casio) -- the article says $15-20 of production cost, I'm betting it could be made for less than that. Heck, you could probably cobble something together from an Arduino or Raspberry or similar and get more power (and less work to build it) than a TI! Sell them for half the price of a TI (or even less), it should make a killing while keeping a good margin.
(and while I'm sure that TI/Casio have some patents to try and protect themselves, the fact that there are at least 2 manufacturers competing and still producing almost-identical products shows that you should be able to fit between them)
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@remi said in In other news today...:
in France, TI was second to Casio in market shares (and HP was a distant third, maybe 1-2 per classroom at the very maximum), and from what I can see of younger relatives, this still seems to be the case nowadays. But that's likely just a quirk of different regional markets and doesn't change the main idea of those things still being around, relatively costly, and haven't evolved that much for decades.
We had Casios, too. While also having not evolved much for ages, at least they only cost like €15, which is almost reasonable even for such underpowered devices.
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@topspin Oh. You're right, I did not know. In my time Casio was maybe a tiny little bit cheaper, but not significantly, but a quick search does indicate that nowadays they have some very cheap models (EUR 15-20) that TI doesn't seem to have (they start at around EUR 70). I haven't looked at features but they're likely more than enough for 99% of high school students.
Which would explain why all younger relatives now seem to have Casio's. Casio is already taking that market of cheap calculators. OK, so
is indeed TI's stranglehold on the US market.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@topspin Oh. You're right, I did not know. In my time Casio was maybe a tiny little bit cheaper, but not significantly, but a quick search does indicate that nowadays they have some very cheap models (EUR 15-20) that TI doesn't seem to have (they start at around EUR 70). I haven't looked at features but they're likely more than enough for 99% of high school students.
Which would explain why all younger relatives now seem to have Casio's. Casio is already taking that market of cheap calculators. OK, so
is indeed TI's stranglehold on the US market.Yeah, the cheaper ones have fewer features. Which is fine, because nobody uses those features. Best thing you maybe need is line editing mode1. Even the simple ones have a stats mode, but nobody ever used that even on exams that went like "here's 10 numbers, compute mean and variance".
Need something programmable with fancy plotting and shit? There's probably a free app for the phone you already own. Not like you're going to use it (in an exam, or otherwise) anyway.1 BTW, I don't like these new calculators that make you literally type sin(π/2). I'm used to typing in execution order, i.e. π/2=sin. That's probably just habit, but not
enough to prefer full RPN (which is still shorter).
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I quickly found an article (in French) about the French market:
Casio et Texas Instruments règnent sur l'éternel marché des calculatrices scolaires
Les ventes des calculatrices scientifiques et graphiques demeurent stables en France, à plus de 1,6 million d'unités en 2018 pour plus de 55 millions d'euros de chiffre d'affaires, selon l'institut GfK.
Unfortunately it doesn't say much about the split between Casio and TI, but it says that they sell about 1.6 million calculators per year, for an estimated revenue of 55 millions (EUR), which averages out at EUR 35 / calculator. That's much cheaper than the US figure, and than the cheapest TI (back of the enveloppe computation: if Casio's are EUR 20 and TI's are EUR 80, that'd be 75% Casio and 25% TI).
(EDIT: a forum discussion (in French, again) has a table of market share cobbled together from constructor's claims, and it matches almost perfectly my guess of 75% for Casio)
An interesting aside is that the article says that manufacturers have to tailor their models to each country's market, since they have to follow exactly the curriculum and exam restrictions of those countries. That probably also helps them renewing their market since old models become obsolete because of the curriculum, not their actual capabilities (kind of like the market for school manuals). But forcing people to buy new models is less of an issue when a model costs EUR 20 than when it costs EUR 80 or more...
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@remi said in In other news today...:
the price
isn't the issue. It's that all the fucking standardized shit was forcibly written around them (if memory serves), so unless you're good at providing quirks-compatible clones and skirting copyright, they just won't make it.
Hell, I've had my Ti-89 backed up into my phone for decades (ish), but that definitely wasn't allowed when it came to using it in the classroom!
Edit: This.
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Need something programmable with fancy plotting and shit? There's probably a free app for the phone you already own. Not like you're going to use it (in an exam, or otherwise) anyway.
Edit edit: heh.
I do random shit sometimes...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
the price
isn't the issue.
Well, as the situation in France that we discussed just above shows, yes, the price is the issue. There is something happening in the US that forces pupils to use something at least 3-4x more expensive than it should be. French pupils manage to get the same thing with Casio costing EUR 15-20 (and that's not for outdated models: the most recent one is apparently the FX-92+ and you can find it under EUR 20 at most large national retailers).
It's that all the fucking standardized shit was forcibly written around them (if memory serves), so unless you're good at providing quirks-compatible clones and skirting copyright, they just won't make it.
Casio manages to do it for a fraction of the price of TI here, so why not there? In a free market, a captive market (there will be high-school students every year, you can even predict closely how many, and they will need calculators) of that size should attract competition and shrink margins. Again, back of the enveloppe: if it's 1.5 millions unit/year in France (population 65 millions), it should be somewhere around 7.5 millions unit/year in the US (population 350 millions, roughly 5x more, similar levels of education). At the upper bound ($100/unit), TI is making around $750 millions out of it (TFA says $1.5 billion but for a wider category of items, so it seems consistent). A cheap model sold at $30 (1/3 of a TI) has a potential revenue of $200 millions/year. With a production cost of $20/unit, that's still a margin of $70 millions/year. Really, no one is going to compete for that?
(again, in comparison, the French market where 75% of the market is held by a product sold at EUR 20 i.e. with small margin, seems much saner)
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
I do random shit sometimes...
They sell adult diapers.
Luckily I have most of the prng mapped out for more than half the available entropy space, so there's rarely any surprises!
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@remi said in In other news today...:
free market
Ah, but it's not, any more than students get to choose which maths book the class uses.
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@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
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@Bulb Yeah but again, we have that in France as well, according to the article I found and mentioned above (in French, I know, sorry...). Well, the article says it is the other way round (calculators have specific features that are added explicitly to match the ever-changing requirements of the curriculum), but it still shows that building a device to weird specs that change every year is feasible, and is feasible while keeping a low cost.
So unless the features are such that only TI can ever implement them (patents? that seems unlikely on this kind of features, but you can patent having a round corner on a phone, so who knows?), I still don't understand what prevents competition in the US market.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
In Sweden, at least in my backwater town, the books didn't have anything to do with calcumalaters, so the teachers just said we could use whatever we wanted, but that they knew how to use one or two models so you could get help from the teacher with the usage.
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@Carnage That's how specific models come to be the standard here as well. Teachers will say at the start of the year that they recommend a specific model because they are familiar with that one, and that you can have another one but then are on your own, and lo and behold, everyone in the classroom gets the same.
Which isn't that much of an issue when that model is cheap. It's not much different from art teachers who require pupils to have a specific pen or a notebook in some specific format.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
I still don't understand what prevents competition in the US market.
Lobbying by TI of the curriculum/examination boards. They set those to require the TI device, and TI then reaps the effectively unearned income. America: the best democracy that money can buy!
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
That's probably just habit, but not
enough to prefer full RPN (which is still shorter).I actually had an RPN calculator in high school, given to me by a family friend. For the most part it didn't make any difference, but I did have to write a note explaining it for a handful of exercises like "what sequence of keys would you push to do ..." (
)
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
Lobbying by TI of the curriculum/examination boards.
Textbook publishers too.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
I still don't understand what prevents competition in the US market.
Lobbying by TI of the curriculum/examination boards. They set those to require the TI device, and TI then reaps the effectively unearned income. America: the best democracy that money can buy!
I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).Curriculum is set to match the current feature of TI because TI bought them. Right. There's still a huge market (see rough estimations above), with a huge margin. In other markets elsewhere in the world, the same thing happens, and every year at least 2 makers manage to produce a new model that matches the requirements. And yet in the US, only one maker manages to do that. How is that possible? What is in those "features" that makes it literally impossible for a competitor to come and take a slice of a market of several hundreds of millions (upper bound being $1.5 billion, the total TI revenue that includes calculators, according to TFA)?
I mean, take school manuals, which everyone mentions and is in a similar situation. Is there a single, unique, nationwide editor that has a total monopoly on all books used by all schools in the country (which, with a slight hyperbole, seems to be the situation for TI and calculators)? Or are there several editors, each having its own share of the market, each defending their own little bought-democracy but sometimes losing here and gaining there? As far as I know, it's the later, not the former. So why is it that the same doesn't happen with calculators? Especially since, again, I have at least another example of another country where the same (or very similar) shenanigans happen, and where there is an arguably much saner market with prices much lower (for calculators, I mean. For books it's probably worse in France because most books are now provided by the schools themselves so while in theory they should be able to put more pressure on publishers, in practice it's likely to be nice cosy little arrangements for publishers because those who decide don't really pay with their own money so they don't care).
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@remi It depends on how the textbooks/course materials are written. If they include lots of pictures of the particular model of calculator and describe things as "press the third button down on the right side" and other things like that, disrupting the market is very much harder than it appears at first glance.
And there are quite a few people who want their instructions at that level of detail, and who can't be relied upon to do even trivial remapping of things from one keyboard to another. Morons.
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@dkf I think @Benjamin-Hall has had a lot to say on the subject of textbooks, their publisher
s, and the ridiculous amount of influence they wield
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Yes. They tell you that if you don't get an approved calculator they probably won't help you figure out your weirdo (read: non-TI) device so you'll probably fail and end up homeless and addicted to drugs. I might have made up some of that.
I'm not certain where that all comes from (how freakin' hard is it to do some math on a calculator?!), whether it's TI lobbying or some more natural convergence of curriculum designers or some combination.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
So unless the features are such that only TI can ever implement them (patents? that seems unlikely on this kind of features, but you can patent having a round corner on a phone, so who knows?), I still don't understand what prevents competition in the US market.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.
It's the schools.No, but seriously, as I said, they literally tell students to only buy TI.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@remi It depends on how the textbooks/course materials are written. If they include lots of pictures of the particular model of calculator and describe things as "press the third button down on the right side" and other things like that, disrupting the market is very much harder than it appears at first glance.
We're talking curriculums (-a? -i?) here, not textbooks. If a curriculum can go down to specifying pictures of the calculator to use (or buttons to push) and that has been judged as being legal ('cause again, billion-dollars market is going to attract attention and a competitor is bound to challenge that), I guess that would shift
to the legal framework that allows that, but yeah, that would explain it.And there are quite a few people who want their instructions at that level of detail, and who can't be relied upon to do even trivial remapping of things from one keyboard to another. Morons.
In text books, I'm not surprised to see it. Which is also the reason why teachers will recommend a single model for all their pupils. Children can be morons, especially when they're not really interested in whatever they're supposed to be learning, which is most of the time, news at 10.
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@boomzilla I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
I still don't understand what prevents competition in the US market.
Lobbying by TI of the curriculum/examination boards. They set those to require the TI device, and TI then reaps the effectively unearned income. America: the best democracy that money can buy!
I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).No, you didn't, but I understand that you think you did.
IT'S NOT ABOUT ACTUAL FEATURES. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO MAKE SENSE.
Welcome to the American public school system.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).
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@boomzilla So what are those mystical features-that-are-not-features? Do the curriculum say "only TI are allowed", and is that legal? If the answer is yes and yes, then
is not your school system (well, not only it), but also the legal framework that allows writing such a curriculum.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla I'm sorry, but that still doesn't make sense (and I addressed that several times already, it looks like I'm once more stuck in a loop of repeating the same thing because every new reader only reads one post before replying... I know, I know, expecting people to read everything is
).I blame protocol asynchronicity (i.e. I wrote my message while you wrote yours and you posted before I saw yours).
In other words, you messed up switching alts and posted in the wrong order.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla So what are those mystical features-that-are-not-features?
They're something you're imagining. I have no idea what features you think are missing.
Do the curriculum say "only TI are allowed", and is that legal? If the answer is yes and yes, then
is not your school system (well, not only it), but also the legal framework that allows writing such a curriculum.Goddamnit...
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra Again, same here, and yet the market is clearly working better...
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Yes. They tell you that if you don't get an approved calculator they probably won't help you figure out your weirdo (read: non-TI) device so you'll probably fail and end up homeless and addicted to drugs. I might have made up some of that.
I'm not certain where that all comes from (how freakin' hard is it to do some math on a calculator?!), whether it's TI lobbying or some more natural convergence of curriculum designers or some combination.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
@remi It depends on how the textbooks/course materials are written. If they include lots of pictures of the particular model of calculator and describe things as "press the third button down on the right side" and other things like that, disrupting the market is very much harder than it appears at first glance.
And there are quite a few people who want their instructions at that level of detail, and who can't be relied upon to do even trivial remapping of things from one keyboard to another. Morons.
I don't remember any instructions about calculators in our math textbooks. The books were about math, that you could use a calculator from a certain grade on was incidental.
Also, the calculator comes with a manual if you need one. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who read it. (To figure out previously mentioned stats functions)
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla So what are those mystical features-that-are-not-features?
They're something you're imagining. I have no idea what features you think are missing.
Me neither, and that's exactly the point. If there are no features missing in competitors, why isn't there any competitor?
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Yes. They tell you that if you don't get an approved calculator they probably won't help you
And where in the frigging curriculum does it say that only TI are "approved"?
(I would have assumed that "approved" meant that it has the "features of TI devices" to which the "curriculum is so tailored", but then again no one seems to know what those features are, nor whether they even exist...)
If you're answer is that it doesn't, but that TI has bought (lobbied, whatever) so that all individual schools are "spontaneously" recommending TI against all other makers, then you're implying that TI is powerful enough to entirely corner a billion-dollar market, bullying literally thousands (tens of?) individual schools into obeying them, and that not a single competitor has managed to break into that, while there is a huge avenue for them to do so by cutting prices by 5 or so. Not only that's a huge market failure, but since a comparable market operating under similar rules doesn't have this failure, my minds boggles even more at how that might even be possible.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Me neither, and that's exactly the point. If there are no features missing in competitors, why isn't there any competitor?
Momentum and people wanting to be part of the pack. If everyone has a TI calculator do you want to be the student that is the odd one out? Because last I checked, a whole lot of teenagers do an awful lot to make sure that they are part of the group.
@remi said in In other news today...:
And where in the frigging curriculum does it say that only TI are "approved"?
Why does it need to? A simple "only tested with TI", "works best with TI" goes a really long way.
Not only that's a huge market failure, but since a comparable market operating under similar rules doesn't have this failure, my minds boggles even more at how that might even be possible.
You thinking the markets are comparable is your first mistake. They are not. We have a vastly different culture and when it comes to things like which product a consumer chooses to buy, culture makes a very big difference.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
bullying literally thousands (tens of?) individual schools
What makes you think the schools have any say?
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@dkf I asssumed this too, but at least for current AP course exams (which often allow students to use high school courses for college credit), other brands appear to be allowed: https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/exam-policies-guidelines/calculator-policies
Maybe it was more restricted in the past, and now everyone is just locked in because of "calculator network effect" e.g., AP course teachers alredy know the TI stuff and strongly encourage their students to buy those ones.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla So what are those mystical features-that-are-not-features?
They're something you're imagining. I have no idea what features you think are missing.
Me neither, and that's exactly the point. If there are no features missing in competitors, why isn't there any competitor?
Because...there are competitors? Otherwise teachers wouldn't have to scare students into buying TIs.
Because it probably is. I understood the article so that the American curriculum is so tailored to the exact features of the TI devices that having any other is between highly impractical and not acceptable.
Yes. They tell you that if you don't get an approved calculator they probably won't help you
And where in the frigging curriculum does it say that only TI are "approved"?
I have no idea. I just know what the teachers tell the students. It's likely it's what the teachers are trained on. Or it's in the text books (press this button, then this one...).
(I would have assumed that "approved" meant that it has the "features of TI devices" to which the "curriculum is so tailored", but then again no one seems to know what those features are, nor whether they even exist...)
Yes, I think you need to get the features thing out of your head. It's more about, "This calculator has a slightly different button or menu layout to use that feature and I don't know how to do it on that one so you'll get no teacher support."
If you're answer is that it doesn't, but that TI has bought (lobbied, whatever) so that all individual schools are "spontaneously" recommending TI against all other makers, then you're implying that TI is powerful enough to entirely corner a billion-dollar market
Fuck you. I'm not. Stop making this shit up.
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OK, I see none of you has actually read what I wrote before since you're still parroting the same line about teachers that I rebuked several times (maybe not convincingly, but then address my arguments instead of yourself making the same again and again).
Fine, fine, the US is The Specialzzz and I'm
for even trying to think that anything else in the world can be compared to it.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Me neither, and that's exactly the point. If there are no features missing in competitors, why isn't there any competitor?
https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-how-texas-instruments-monopolized-math-class-67ee165045dc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoGl8-Wc-L0
also relevant but less directly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6jQVqkpjc8
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@remi said in In other news today...:
yeah? and?
TI has a monopoly because TI influenced the curriculum to require their calculators, so you need their calculators because the teachers say you do and they say you do because they've been trained to.
TI's losing market ground as people catch on to the fact that there are better options, but without regulatory interference it's going to take a long time or a lot of financial investment from a competitor to break free.
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
I don't like it. I think it's scummy and shady and unethical that they did it, but the reason they did it is at least understandable and a basic understanding of the education market (and how slow it is at changing) along with economics in general explains why they are still more or less unchallenged.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
OK, I see none of you has actually read what I wrote before since you're still parroting the same line about teachers that I rebuked several times (maybe not convincingly, but then address my arguments instead of yourself making the same again and again).
Your rebukes were nonsense aimed at strawmen.
Fine, fine, the US is The Specialzzz and I'm
for even trying to think that anything else in the world can be compared to it.There's someone acting special around here but it's not anyone from the US.
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@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
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@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
... and exempted poor families from paying for them.
Coincidentally, the calculators we're using at my school can be had for 20€. Then again, we also don't mandate the exact type but only exclude function (i.e. non-programmable, no CAS, etc.)
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
... and exempted poor families from paying for them.
Yep. Because they'd be unavailable.
Coincidentally, the calculators we're using at my school can be had for 20€.
Be careful. Sounds like capitalism going on.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@Vixen said in In other news today...:
I'm not sure why you have a hard time understanding this..... They bought a monopoly and enforced it through scholastic curriculum requirements. It was shady, unethical, but legal so exactly what you would expect capitalism to do.
Yes, that most capitalist institution of public schools.they being TI, not the schools.
TI bought the monopoly by paying the schools to adopt the curriculum requirements.
Ah, OK, fair enough. Under non-capitalism they would have just made the monopoly the law.
... and exempted poor families from paying for them.
Yep. Because they'd be unavailable.
Right.
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.... ffs..... here we go again.....
Wake me up when the fire department's been by to put the flames out, okay?
