"Working" would be a stretch, but this is how "web of trust" systems like PGP are supposed to function. Although I would say the BlueSky system sounds like it could skirt some of the pitfalls of web of trust because verifiers can also be trusted to revoke verification.
What state are you in? A lot of community colleges have "articulation agreements" or "guaranteed admissions agreements" with nearby public universities that give you guaranteed transfer admission if you meet the requirements. You may be able to transfer more of those credits than you think if you jump through the right hoops.
Indeed, if you live in a state that has this, it's the bargain of the century. I live in Wisconsin, and the community colleges are coordinated with the state university system.
Also, the CoCo's are really focused on teaching and helping people get an education and make it affordable. The advisers are trying to make it work for you. The teachers are unionized, so it's a sustainable career, and teaching is their top priority. I've known three of those teachers, in electronics, math, and programming, and they were all happy with their jobs. That makes a big difference.
The CoCo's also have trade school programs and 2 year degrees that are not designed for college transfer, but the advisors are there to help you figure out what you want, and what classes you need to take.
Now this is just my personal political take, but I think our society and the press should take a hiatus from devoting such exclusive attention on the "elite" universities, and instead, focus on supporting and broadening the public college and university systems.
Are there any intra-city trains that have fare classes? Inter-city trains sell plenty of first-class tickets for the same value proposition, but I've never seen it on public transit (although I've only ever seen transit in North America and Europe).
Most medium-to-long distance trains in Europe have 1st class compartments. These can range from just being quieter because of the increased price, to spacious seats with complimentary food and drink. Italian high speed rail has business class with hireable meeting rooms[0]
It's reasonably common on regional trains in Europe, meaning the trains that don't stop at every station within a city, but do stop at many or all of the stations between two large cities. (The intercity train only stops at the city.)
I've never seen it on a purely urban or suburban train within Europe, but then encountering a "screamer or crazy person" is something that happens perhaps once a year, and only if travelling at unusual times like at night.
I have personally watched very rich people spend 30 mins circling and looking for a meter spot in Manhattan, which saved them ~$15 at a cost of ~$50 worth of their time. (I was also in the car having my time wasted, so the true cost was higher.)
People are not good at making rational decisions when hit with nominal fees.
In SF we have parking meters that adjust to meet demand. I paid $5 for an hour once, and was happy to pay that to get a spot right where I needed to be.
What's crazy is that I doubt the people who live in the area understand why it's so expensive there. It's right next to a pet hospital. Let me tell you, if you're taking you injured pet in and out of a vet clinic, you're going to be willing to pay a lot (as if $5 is "a lot," lol) so the injured pup doesn't have to move very far.
That's exactly the reason why pricing should drive services. The underlying reasoning is so complex, that most of the time you'd never actually be able to understand why things are going for the rates they are.
Oh no no, our planning process knows that people that live in a place know everything about it and have 100% perfect insight in how to best use the place. There's no need for things like "markets" where opinions can be expressed outside of the highly anti-democratic political process of giving voice only to those who show up to "public" meetings and spend hours waiting to scream at commissioners.
I haven't lived in NYC for about a decade, but the subway was the quickest and most convenient way to get from my home (lower Harlem) to my place of work (Flatiron district). Taking a taxi was more comfortable and private, but it took longer and was subject to the vagaries of traffic and cab availability.
By that logic, any policy that assigns a fixed price to a good or service penalizes the poor. Which is true but is just a roundabout way of saying that poverty penalizes the poor.
Roads and signaling infrastructure are an expensive public good whose value is enjoyed unevenly. Attaching usage fees to public goods is never popular but makes sense when they are not limitless.
Yes it is. For example a $100 parking ticket for someone surviving on minimum wage will wreck their finances for months (if they're lucky) but a rich person will take it like just a meaningless fee to park.
Nope, that’s not true. You had monks copying books of course (mostly bibles), and very rich people could afford very expensive books made by scribes, but students at universities were expected to make their own copy during a reading/lecture run by a reader/professor. The words are still used in some older universities.
I was a medievalist before moving into tech, and I was always taught that students usually could not afford parchment on which to take notes, much less to copy down every word read out to them. Please cite a source for this claim.
Also, people bought books to read them outside of the context of universities.
Most students couldn’t afford books. Here is one ref, which revisits pre-printing press university education in a piece about the last step people complained about (the internet)
> Before the printing press, faculty had to assume that none of their students had books. This led to a widely adopted practice known as dictation, in which faculty slowly read out the text for students so that they could make their own handwritten copies. (This was, of course, not the only mode of instruction. But it was a common one.) Blair writes that dictation was widely believed to have pedagogical merit, as “the act of copying out a text was often considered an essential part of mastering it” (p. 46). She provides a wide range of support for this view, going all the way back to Demosthenes and St. Jerome. However, others argued that dictation hurt student learning as the focus on writing distracted students from paying closer attention to the faculty themselves. (Presumably no one likes to stand in front of an audience and have them all looking down at their phones parchment the entire time.)
> You may be unsurprised to learn that there is a strong economic undercurrent to the conversation about dictation, and that it often pit students against faculty and others. Blair notes that students saw it as “a cheaper way of procuring oneself a classroom text” (p.45). Consequently, a ban on dictations by Arts Faculty at the University of Paris in 1355 “anticipated vehement student resistance to the ban.”
I still use Android but have replaced most Google apps with a 3P alternative that works better for me.
Google search has felt useless to me for years, and AI results have made it worse. I use DDG for stuff like finding a business's website, but anything more complex will generally send me to a specialized engine. I've been meaning to try Kagi but haven't gotten around to it yet
My org has a bot that generates AI summaries of all internal pull requests, and it's honestly been pretty helpful to compare that (a fairly accurate guess of what the PR will do) against the PR author's description (a statement of what the PR is meant to do). The main thing I look for in PRs is an alignment of intentions and actions, so the AI summary helps, especially for large PRs.
Of course, some engineers have stopped writing PR descriptions since the bot will do it for them. But that means that the only people who can effectively review that PR are the ones who already know what it's supposed to do, which is generally a small pool.
This has been a pattern I've seen repeated with workplace AI: they make something hard a little bit easier, but in a way that will the underlying problem worse over time.
Libraries purchase the copies they loan out. In the US, libraries can typically only loan out an ebook a fixed number of times, and in other jurisdictions (like the UK), authors are paid per check out.
Please check out a book from a library instead of pirating it; it's much better for the author and your community!
It's just SUCH AN ARTIFICIALLY STUPID process, basically actively engineering the technology to work worse than "by default." As in, it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space.
> it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space
True, but you could say the same of music streaming platforms, but we're still experimenting with ways to make that work. In both cases, the platform is trying to replicate via policy what was previously an inherent limitation of physical media, and different offerings have made competing choices about what limitations are critical to the business model and which can be let go of.
I personally see a lot more promise in the model where libraries use a policy to enforce a loan period but pay per-checkout royalties instead of trying to recreate wear and tear like Libby/OverDrive does. It makes it more feasible for small libraries to have an "infinite catalog" of ebooks, and authors seem to like it better: https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com/post/3liafq4gsoc2...
