Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with
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@PotatoEngineer said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Though I do have an honest question: just what is the typical amount of inefficiency in government, for programs designed to disburse money/services? I'm curious because people like to point to "the insurance companies" as why healthcare is so expensive in America, but for those marketplace/Obamacare plans, the insurance companies must disburse ~90% of the money they take in, so the maximum inefficiency due to the insurance company alone is ~10%. (...I'm sure there are other opportunities for inefficiency, of course.)
Depends on many factors like what is counted as "money they take in" and what, if any, parts of the law are actually enforced. People sometimes have this very black and white textbook view that isn't exactly reflective of reality, thinking it says X should happen so X does happen. I can tell you, at least in the limited arena of government IT outsourcing, that the "savings" are often a phantom that might be supported only by a math error in a spreadsheet.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
How many of them are unable to move to Spain, UKFrance, Germany, or any other of the fucking 24 countries that offer free college for EU citizens?
The other part is that you still need to cover living costs. So even though (for example) Sweden has free university education, a lot of people end up taking student loans to cover living costs (and other costs, e.g. books and so on).
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@PotatoEngineer said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@PotatoEngineer said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Even if an inefficient government manages to waste 50% of the money (please don't challenge them)
Are you suggesting that a government program might manage to waste less than 50% of the money?
Excellent
, would read again.Though I do have an honest question: just what is the typical amount of inefficiency in government, for programs designed to disburse money/services?
The number I hear most often is 40%. But that ignores difference in quality, which absolutely does exist too.
I'm curious because people like to point to "the insurance companies" as why healthcare is so expensive in America, but for those marketplace/Obamacare plans, the insurance companies must disburse ~90% of the money they take in, so the maximum inefficiency due to the insurance company alone is ~10%.
The problem is more complex than just insurance companies taking their cut. One of the biggest problems is that nobody advertises actual prices for medical services so the normal market forces cannot do their job. Another one is that for most people, the employer picks the insurance company for them, which again interferes with market forces by making it very painful to change providers. Third, doctors are tied to insurance companies (or even particular plans within one company), so it often happens that you can't change one without the other, and the selection of doctors is drastically reduced too - which again disrupts the market forces that would normally drive expensive doctors out of business. And doctors take full advantage of that, partly because they can, partly because they must since the law forces them to get a useless 4-year degree in another field before they can go to medical school, which doubles their student debt compared to other people.
US healthcare is a fractal of bad design.
I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of
PHPgripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.)
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
How many of them are unable to move to Spain, UKFrance, Germany, or any other of the fucking 24 countries that offer free college for EU citizens?
The other part is that you still need to cover living costs.
And if you don't study you don't?
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
And if you don't study you don't?
If you don't study, you presumably work and have an income.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
presumably
There are, of course, numerous counterexamples.
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@cvi I'd go even further - if you aren't dead yet, you presumably have an income. Be it from your job or your parents. Whether you study or not doesn't impact it much.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi I'd go even further - if you aren't dead yet, you presumably have an income. Be it from your job or your parents. Whether you study or not doesn't impact it much.
Well, the question is if you can have a reasonable income holding a job on the side of full-time studies (there's the other aspect of having a life, but I guess people occasionally end up considering that optional).
Not everybody has parents that can bankroll them going through university. So it wouldn't be surprising that there are students that end up in debt from their studies. (The Swedish system with the special loans and allowances for students implies that parents don't have to do the bankrolling, or at least as much of it.)
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi I'd go even further - if you aren't dead yet, you presumably have an income. Be it from your job or your parents. Whether you study or not doesn't impact it much.
Well, the question is if you can have a reasonable income holding a job on the side of full-time studies
Yes. Yes you can. And if you think you can't, you're just a lazy fucker. Or you're super irresponsible with money. Which would also explain why you think it's a good idea to take a student loan.
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Just to be clear - between the ever increasing minimum wage and ever decreasing value of a diploma, I believe it's never a good idea to take a student loan no matter how small your income is, and as time goes on, it'll be more and more true. Secure a scholarship, and if you can't, move to Europe, and if you can't, just forget about college, you really aren't losing much.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Yes. Yes you can. And if you think you can't, you're just a lazy fucker.
If you're working full-time, you can take one, maybe two classes at at time, which means it will take you 10+ years to get a 4-year degree. And without a degree, you're probably earning
for wages that whole 10+ years.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Yes. Yes you can. And if you think you can't, you're just a lazy fucker
I'm not sure what you think full time studies means, but when I was studying that did ostensibly mean the same hours as a full time job. (We tracked time during the second year, and averaged around 60 h / week of studies, so there's that.)
Not wanting to work more than full time? Yeah, guess that makes me a lazy fucker.
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@HardwareGeek European colleges work differently from US. It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week. With free weekends, it's not hard at all to fit in a full time job in there, if you aren't required to be in office 9 to 5. And if you manage to get a better job than a supermarket cashier, you may even do with less work hours. And many Bachelor's degrees only last 3 years instead of 4, so there's that too. Also, you can significantly cut your living costs by willing to share your apartment with 3 strangers - a very common arrangement in Poland.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
My experience looked very different. First and second year, we had scheduled lectures from 08:00 to 17:30, with a few 4h slots swapped out for mandatory labs. Year three through five had less lectures, but swapped the rest for exercises, assignments, labs and self-study. And, no, you wouldn't get through the courses if you didn't put in the time (we had access to the university pretty much 24h per day - it wasn't uncommon to find groups of students working on certain infamous courses at 2am).
Just because you found a slacker degree mill doesn't mean all the schools are such.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
you can significantly cut your living costs by willing to share your apartment with 3 strangers - a very common arrangement in Poland.
Yeah, I've seen a couple of the websites
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
In US colleges and universities, 12 hours is typically considered full-time, and 18 hours is the most you can take without special permission. But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.). So that 12 hours of class is actually 36 hours, including the outside work, and an 18 unit load is actually 54 hours.
Some "4-year" degrees are, practically speaking, really 5-year degrees. At the school I went to, the Electronic Engineering degree required taking 21 units one term to finish in 4 years, and that 21 units included some of the toughest core, upper-division classes in the major, all at the same time. With more students trying to take those classes than there were seats available. And all require special permission to take more than the allowed class load, which permission (presumably) wouldn't be given to students who were merely average (or below) with a normal class load.
Architecture was explicitly a 5-year degree, and architecture students basically lived in their labs 24/7, working on projects, eating, sleeping, ...
And don't forget the pathological professors who think theirs is the only class you're taking and assign 40 hours of work/week for their class alone.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
My experience looked very different. First and second year, we had scheduled lectures from 08:00 to 17:30, with a few 4h slots swapped out for mandatory labs. Year three through five had less lectures, but swapped the rest for exercises, assignments, labs and self-study. And, no, you wouldn't get through the courses if you didn't put in the time (we had access to the university pretty much 24h per day - it wasn't uncommon to find groups of students working on certain infamous courses at 2am).
Just because you found a slacker degree mill, doesn't mean all the schools are such.
Heh. No, he's accurate talking about US universities. A typical class load is 5 courses at about 4 hours of class time per week (though this varies, especially when you compare semester vs quarter systems). Maybe another hour for a lab for a science class. So, yeah, about 20 hours per week actually in the class room. Of course, you're supposed to be reading and doing lots of other work outside those hours.
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
My experience looked very different. First and second year, we had scheduled lectures from 08:00 to 17:30, with a few 4h slots swapped out for mandatory labs. Year three through five had less lectures, but swapped the rest for exercises, assignments, labs and self-study. And, no, you wouldn't get through the courses if you didn't put in the time (we had access to the university pretty much 24h per day - it wasn't uncommon to find groups of students working on certain infamous courses at 2am).
Just because you found a slacker degree mill, doesn't mean all the schools are such.
Heh. No, he's accurate talking about US universities. A typical class load is 5 courses at about 4 hours of class time per week (though this varies, especially when you compare semester vs quarter systems). Maybe another hour for a lab for a science class. So, yeah, about 20 hours per week actually in the class room. Of course, you're supposed to be reading and doing lots of other work outside those hours.
One lab hour a week? Maybe for a survey course.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.).
Each day of life is also assumed to require at least 4 hours of sleep but I can assure you it's a lie too.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.).
Each day of life is also assumed to require at least 4 hours of sleep but I can assure you it's a lie too.
A pernicious lie. All that helps with is maintaining a continuous sense of self.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Just arrange for weekly/bi-weekly deliveries of a bunch of vegetables, some varied meats, etc. and the people can make what they want with them.
You can't make what you want from a limited set of ingredients, that's not how cooking works
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@TimeBandit I always manage to make what I want from bacon.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.).
Each day of life is also assumed to require at least 4 hours of sleep but I can assure you it's a lie too.
I've gone for an extended period of time with inadequate sleep. I assure you, the resulting psychosis (as in hallucinating words crawling across the page like snakes as I'm writing them) is not fun.
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@HardwareGeek oh right. In that sense, college absolutely isn't free.
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@Gribnit said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week.
My experience looked very different. First and second year, we had scheduled lectures from 08:00 to 17:30, with a few 4h slots swapped out for mandatory labs. Year three through five had less lectures, but swapped the rest for exercises, assignments, labs and self-study. And, no, you wouldn't get through the courses if you didn't put in the time (we had access to the university pretty much 24h per day - it wasn't uncommon to find groups of students working on certain infamous courses at 2am).
Just because you found a slacker degree mill, doesn't mean all the schools are such.
Heh. No, he's accurate talking about US universities. A typical class load is 5 courses at about 4 hours of class time per week (though this varies, especially when you compare semester vs quarter systems). Maybe another hour for a lab for a science class. So, yeah, about 20 hours per week actually in the class room. Of course, you're supposed to be reading and doing lots of other work outside those hours.
One lab hour a week? Maybe for a survey course.
I remember my physics class had a lab. So did a couple of my calculus courses but I never went to those because it was basically a study hall with a TA. I don't think any others had labs.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.).
Each day of life is also assumed to require at least 4 hours of sleep but I can assure you it's a lie too.
I've gone for an extended period of time with inadequate sleep. I assure you, the resulting psychosis (as in hallucinating words crawling across the page like snakes as I'm writing them) is not fun.
False!
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek European colleges work differently from US. It's pretty common for full-time degree to only have 20h of classes per week. With free weekends, it's not hard at all to fit in a full time job in there, if you aren't required to be in office 9 to 5. And if you manage to get a better job than a supermarket cashier, you may even do with less work hours. And many Bachelor's degrees only last 3 years instead of 4, so there's that too. Also, you can significantly cut your living costs by willing to share your apartment with 3 strangers - a very common arrangement in Poland.
At the university where I studied, this definitely depended on the major. I majored maths, which tended toward 12-20 hours of in-class time (and only half of that was lectures), with few students in the classes, and little to no attendance checking. I think I had 2 maths classes which had actual lab time.
I also took a number of computer science classes. Those schedules tended to have way more in-class hours; I believe some semesters were scheduled at 40 hours of in-class time per week if you were majoring it. They tended to have way more students, and have stricter attendance requirements in order to pass the class.
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
I remember my physics class had a lab.
As an engineering student, I took a lot of lab classes — physics, chemistry, electricity and electronics, CS. (One lab I managed to avoid by very careful selection of classes was biology.) They were "1-hour" classes that actually spent 3 hours in the lab, because labs didn't require the extra 2 hours of outside work. Except that they (some of them, anyway) did, because you needed to write reports about your experiment, which usually involved trying to explain why your experimental results didn't match what theory said they should be. I.e., you were learning creative writing as well as physics or electronics or whatever.
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@HardwareGeek yeah...I was business and math, so...almost no lab time.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
reminder: UK is NOT Europe
It is. What it's not is the EU.
The EU allows someone to study in another country on the same terms as the nationals of that country which isn't necessarily free.
Even when the UK was in the EU, a university education for EU students in the UK was the same as for UK nationals which wasn't free.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
As an engineering student, I took a lot of lab classes — physics, chemistry, electricity and electronics, CS
One thing I miss from that time is the variety of stuff we got to do. Most of the courses had some practical elements, math maybe being a bit of an exception (though quite a few of those would add something practical in terms of simulation or coding). We also had a few courses with multi-day labs where we were handed a problem, a lab room with equipment, semi-exclusive access to it for something like 72h or a week, and told to get cracking. Aside from the lack of sleep, those were good fun.
Writing reports wasn't fun, but I think it paid off. I see students that have never had to write a proper report in their lives and are suddenly supposed to put together something like a thesis. Tends to go ... badly.
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@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
I was business and math, so...almost no lab time.
Same with a lot of CS students these days, they only get to code. I feel somethings missing if you never had to solve a practical problem where messing up has at least some minor consequences (we once accidentally flooded a lab).
Also, if you never got to play around with LN2, you're definitively missing something. (Like delicious self-made ice cream. Or exploding PET bottles.)
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla this scheme doesn't even exist and yet you know exactly how it would work, down to what food will be available. And you say you're not clairvoyant.
Correct. I don't know what food, exactly, will be available, but since you've described a centrally planned menu, it will suck and most people will hate it, unless they have enough power to keep the good stuff for themselves.
History of school lunches shows otherwise. They always suck, but sometimes they suck much less. It was actually almost decent in years 2011-2018, even in the poorest of Chicago school districts (and you won't find many places in USA worse than poorest Chicago school districts).
Thanks Obama.
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Are some people talking about credit hours and working forgetting that those 17-19 hours are scattered all over such that maintaining even a retail job while enrolled requires at least some flexibility on the part of the employer?
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@dangeRuss said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla this scheme doesn't even exist and yet you know exactly how it would work, down to what food will be available. And you say you're not clairvoyant.
Correct. I don't know what food, exactly, will be available, but since you've described a centrally planned menu, it will suck and most people will hate it, unless they have enough power to keep the good stuff for themselves.
History of school lunches shows otherwise. They always suck, but sometimes they suck much less. It was actually almost decent in years 2011-2018, even in the poorest of Chicago school districts (and you won't find many places in USA worse than poorest Chicago school districts).
Thanks Obama.
She's the man!
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
you can significantly cut your living costs by willing to share your apartment with 3 strangers - a very common arrangement in Poland.
Also very common for people in Silly Valley who just make enough to be above the poverty line ($100k). That $2k 20sqm room really cuts your costs.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@boomzilla said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
I was business and math, so...almost no lab time.
Same with a lot of CS students these days, they only get to code. I feel somethings missing if you never had to solve a practical problem where messing up has at least some minor consequences (we once accidentally flooded a lab).
Had plenty of...extracurricular activity to cover that sort of thing.
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Are some people talking about credit hours and working forgetting that those 17 hours are scattered all over such that maintaining even a retail job while studying requires at least some flexibility on the part of the employer?
Dunno about US (or any other country really) but in Poland there's usually enough groups made for every class that you can always make a reasonable schedule that works for you.
On the other hand, in Poland, not being able to work Mon-Fri 9-5 excludes you from pretty much every job except retail.
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@PotatoEngineer said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Back to the money part of this, if we're just saying "food should be free with existing taxation," that's trivially true: just take money from every other government program until the food-welfare is sufficiently funded.
If there's enough money, then everyone gets good food, too, with enough variety to supply every possible meal preference. And you can still implement market-like trading between suppliers (with vouchers) if you need a little invisible hand to make things more efficient. (Some food charities have such a market system with points; the various distribution places bid for the stuff they want to give to the homeless, based on the demands/preferences in the various different places.)
Mind you, the rest of the government programs might end up a wee bit underfunded, but doing food-only would be trivial.
I've seen something like this where there are some sort of vouchers that you can use at the local farmer's market. Not sure how to get those vouchers.
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@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
But each hour of class is assumed to require another 2 hours of outside study (homework, research papers, etc.).
Each day of life is also assumed to require at least 4 hours of sleep but I can assure you it's a lie too.
We have ourselves a Napoleon among us.
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@Gąska When I went 20 years ago, there might have been a few classes with two sessions per semester while many others were offered once per year. I specifically missed my chance at taking a robotics class over this. Summer doesn't really count as a semester either because A) very few non-general classes are offered and B) kids are busy working to afford (at the time) a $700-$1200 textbook bill (a significant sum at $5 per hour).
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
afford (at the time) a $700-$900 textbook bill.
Other than buying some copies of the professors’ scripts and lending stuff from the library, I don’t think I bought any books.
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@Zenith said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Are some people talking about credit hours and working forgetting that those 17-19 hours are scattered all over such that maintaining even a retail job while enrolled requires at least some flexibility on the part of the employer?
When I was going to school full-time, I only worked on-campus jobs, so that flexibility was a given. When I was working full-time and going to school part-time, I was limited to whatever classes were offered in the evening.
@Gąska said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
in Poland there's usually enough groups made for every class that you can always make a reasonable schedule that works for you.
There were enough sessions of each class to enroll maybe 70% of the students that needed the class to graduate. Every term was juggling "I need to take classes A, B and C. There are two sessions of A, but one conflicts with one of the sessions of B, and the other conflicts with the one of the sessions of C. The session of B that doesn't conflict with A conflicts with C. And the session of C that doesn't conflict with anything is full and has 20 people on the waiting list already."
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@HardwareGeek I think I had classes for Artificial Intelligence, engineering mechanics, and some useless shit I didn’t care about at the same time slots. So the weeks were split with going to either of the first two (and catching up on the other) and never going to the third.
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@topspin said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Other than buying some copies of the professors’ scripts and lending stuff from the library, I don’t think I bought any books.
Definitively didn't have to pay $700-$1200 per year for books, but we had a few rather expensive ones. Still have some --this one is great because the faux leather look with the embossed title makes your bookshelf look way serious.
Our professors/lecturers were usually pretty good about choosing affordable books, and making sure one could use older versions (as to make it possible to buy used). Hearing about the way students are forced into buying new expensive books unnecessarily ... I don't have a lot of happy thoughts for the people that enable that.
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@topspin I don't think our enrollment system would let you sign up for two classes at the same time, but I'm not sure; I never tried it.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@topspin said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Other than buying some copies of the professors’ scripts and lending stuff from the library, I don’t think I bought any books.
Definitively didn't have to pay $700-$1200 per year for books, but we had a few rather expensive ones. Still have some --this one is great because the faux leather look with the embossed title makes your bookshelf look way serious.
Our professors/lecturers were usually pretty good about choosing affordable books, and making sure one could use older versions (as to make it possible to buy used). Hearing about the way students are forced into buying new expensive books unnecessarily ... I don't have a lot of happy thoughts for the people that enable that.
I seem to remember the books having a new edition every few years just so they can keep you from buying the used ones.
There were also indian editions available for much less for most of the books.
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@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Definitively didn't have to pay $700-$1200 per year for books, but we had a few rather expensive ones.
I had one in particular that I remember as (I think) the most expensive textbook I ever had to buy. In today's dollars, it would be about $100, but the internet tells me that textbook prices have gone up much more than general inflation, over 800%, so that book would cost around $350 today. For just one book. And more than just the cost itself, the class used only 4 chapters of the book (maybe 20-ish chapters total), so 80-ish% of the price was for parts of the book we never even looked at. (For the curious, it was Advanced Engineering Mathematics. We used it for Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, and a couple of other things I've completely forgotten, not that I ever used any of it after I graduated.)
As for used books, they were sometimes available, but between new editions, different books, and students keeping their books to use as references in future classes, the number available was pretty limited.
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@HardwareGeek said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Definitively didn't have to pay $700-$1200 per year for books, but we had a few rather expensive ones.
I had one in particular that I remember as (I think) the most expensive textbook I ever had to buy. In today's dollars, it would be about $100, but the internet tells me that textbook prices have gone up much more than general inflation, over 800%, so that book would cost around $350 today. For just one book. And more than just the cost itself, the class used only 4 chapters of the book (maybe 20-ish chapters total), so 80-ish% of the price was for parts of the book we never even looked at. (For the curious, it was Advanced Engineering Mathematics. We used it for Fourier transforms, Laplace transforms, and a couple of other things I've completely forgotten, not that I ever used any of it after I graduated.)
As for used books, they were sometimes available, but between new editions, different books, and students keeping their books to use as references in future classes, the number available was pretty limited.
Which book is this that costs $350? I was able to find about 5 different books with that title and none seemed to be around $350.
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@dangeRuss said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@cvi said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
@topspin said in Amazon has more stuff than it knows what to do with:
Other than buying some copies of the professors’ scripts and lending stuff from the library, I don’t think I bought any books.
Definitively didn't have to pay $700-$1200 per year for books, but we had a few rather expensive ones. Still have some --this one is great because the faux leather look with the embossed title makes your bookshelf look way serious.
Our professors/lecturers were usually pretty good about choosing affordable books, and making sure one could use older versions (as to make it possible to buy used). Hearing about the way students are forced into buying new expensive books unnecessarily ... I don't have a lot of happy thoughts for the people that enable that.
I seem to remember the books having a new edition every few years just so they can keep you from buying the used ones.
When I was a college teacher (as a grad student, but responsible for the class), we vetted a new edition of the book. The only changes?
- online homework codes for old versions were no longer valid. And code-only purchases were only about $2 cheaper than book + code.
- they'd re-numbered the problems in some chapters. Meaning if you had an old edition and the instructions were to do problems X, Y, and Z...you'd do the wrong problems.
Textbook companies are the epitome of "exploitative business"
