>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails.
Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
> You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street,
Confronting people on the street with questions like this won't give you a representative sample of what people really think. The sort of people who support the system to maintain their class/lifestyle are likely to ignore your question or to perceive your activist intent and lie to you to avoid getting sucker punched by the 'crazy person on the street.'
This is a problem of Stated preference vs. Revealed preference. You ask them what they think and they'd tell you "that's awful, I can't believe that, that's so unfair" but you put them up on the ballot at the midterms and get them to repeal it and all of a sudden it's about being "tough on crime" and "keeping our streets clean".
Also, prisons are often located in depressed small town as a stable source of government jobs. Those people don’t want to go back to being in a depressed economy.
The most extreme example of this is that the site of the 1970 Lake Placid Winter Olympics was designed to be used post games as a prison, which it is today.
Not really, you are assuming the people vote on a lot of decisions, which is not true. This is a problem related to permanence of executive power. The "cardinal Richelieu" problem (You know that while the government changes, he is above the government and stays. Most of the executive does not change at all when power changes hands at the legislative level).
Ever notice that executive power is the same everywhere? They think the laws are unfair to them, because they have to implement totally unrealistic laws, and get blamed harshly for "small" problems (you know, "harshly" except it doesn't carry any consequences for them, except, at best loss of face).
They respond by not following laws, refusing even to implement judicial directives and the like. Their own (sometimes personal) interest, for them, trumps laws and the directives of judges. They have largely made sure their names are never revealed to the people they serve, as they no longer have the support of the people, and they feel they cannot be replaced.
Can you give me some reference, or a keyword? I can’t find much about it; what I found is that they can work and get paid, but I didn’t find anything about being forced to.
In America ? Yes. I’m willing to bet a good part of the reason why our prisons they way they are is because many see it as a means of revenge and not rehabilitation. No one cares if a rapist or pedo is saddled with debt , much less of they leave out of there alive.
Based on the comments in the "NYC is owed a bajillion dollars in parking tickets" thread from a couple days ago I bet you could get an easy dozen if you just dropped the phrase "five star hotel prices". People are strongly in favor of harsh punishments for the type of crimes they don't ever see themselves committing, like not paying a ticket apparently.
The NYC parking tickets thing has a few other dimensions, like the fact that the worst scofflaws are actually the diplomatic corps of other countries (there for the UN) that claim immunity to avoid having to pay the tickets. So not only do you get to bash elites, they’re other country’s elites and not countries that the US has warm relations with.
There was actually a sigh of relief in many circles when New York lost the 2012 Olympics bid, because many people did not see the benefit of holding the games being worth the massive headaches of infrastructure overload.
Many are, particularly conservatives. Many aren't, and, well, that's good, but there's a significant enough majority who are and so the status quo prevails.
Is that not implicit in democracy? Things are the way they are, because the People willed it as such?
The actual mechanism probably has many more links including the voting of politicians who share the People's values, who then pass laws in the People's interest. But the underlying axiom of democracy is rule of the People, indirect as the American implementation is, is it not?
This would be unfair to students who were frugal and chose a 20k-25k/yr COA state school with the assumption that their debt must be repaid.
Going to college is an investment that you ideally should plan for and weigh the benefits of the education vs the cost. If you don't think it's worth the 20-25k/yr COA at state schools (or whatever ridiculous amount at private schools) than just don't go. It absolutely is, but okay. This is an incentive to make good choices about college and be educated and productive post-college. But cancelling more debt would remove this positive externality.
Very tongue in cheek answer, but then Jesus dying for our sins is unfair to the newborn baby that was yet to sin (stolen from a bad meme).
I honestly don’t get why we have so little empathy. Just because it sucked for me, I want to suck it for other people as well? Crabs in a buckets mentality is utterly harmful to everybody except those outside that bucket wanting to eat us.
(1) a possible explanation for the administration to choose a 10k flat vs. the proposed percentage based structure by the parent comment and
(2) identifying that having college cost a lot of money is an incentive that forces people to use it in order to get a job that makes a lot of money and (theoretically) contribute to the national productivity, which is good for the government
Nobody wants it to suck for other people. There are X costs involved in paying staff, you pay Y for tuition and the state government subsidies Z, maybe like half. Getting into college is competitive; it's a scarce resource that you outcompeted someone else for.
Snce you had to compete to get into that crab bucket, what about empathy for the people you excluded by doing this and, say, left out for the sharks. Easy to have empathy for the maybe 30% who actually go to a 4y university.
Don't go to college and you'll be drowned in the flood of third world labor that has been allowed to invade the country. This is not the 1950's. You aren't going to graduate high school and support a family as a travelling shoe salesman. You're going to end up working next to Jorge in some dead end minimum wage job and spending most of your money on rent.
Saying that it's a choice is a form of gaslighting. For most people, not going means a life of brutal wage slavery and exploitation. I guess you would say it's a choice to live as well?
i didn't do college and i ended up in a pretty nice position. House paid for, car paid for, rv paid for, plenty of money for food /bills / fun. Could i have ended up in an even better position? maybe, but i could have ended up worse too.
I had some crap jobs sure, but i got the experience to move up and on. Call centers, warehouse jobs, tech support - ended up a system administrator without any class work or even any certs.
There is nothing wrong with the blue collar jobs either, they tend to make more money after 4 years experience than a recent college grad. And lots of them end up being their own boss!
You're the one speaking like we're living in another time. A time where people were freer and there was more economic opportunity. 40% of Americans don't even have $1000 in savings. It's a wildly dysfunctional and oppressive system and you're engaging in gaslighting because you benefit from it.
The biggest apple/orange problem with OPs comparison is that in a university, there is a competitive admission process. Universities are planned, elite communities. You can't do that in a city. "Oh sorry NYC is now for people with 1400+ SAT only, sorry buddy, you're gonna have to go to Detroit."
I guess you can price people out, but that does not really have the same effect as the psychometric screening that universities do.
It feels bad that apps can just bypass the static analysis, versioning, etc. in app stores and just, say, push a malicious update out to everyone simultaneously. I guess that was always allowed in the Android/iOS app models. Seems wasteful to build all that other stuff into the stores though.
>His attempt to improvise failed when he lost track of the chord changes. This prompted Jo Jones, the drummer for Count Basie's Orchestra, to contemptuously take a cymbal off of his drum set and throw it at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. However, rather than discouraging Parker, the incident caused him to vow to practice harder, and turned out to be a seminal moment in the young musician's career when he returned as a new man a year later.
On display in any jam session is thousands of hours of (solitary) practice, study, and reflection.
> On display in any jam session is thousands of hours of (solitary) practice, study, and reflection.
But not necessarily. Some musicians exclusively learn to play through being taught and jamming with others. I admit it's rare, and even as an extrovert it's not true for myself.
However, for a more damning condemnation of this "creativity requires solitude" viewpoint, we only need to venture into the world of improv theatre. Almost everyone in improv is unleashing non-stop creativity, but they've almost never practiced improv alone. It's the total counterpoint to this unnecessary association between artistry and isolation.
Highly extroverted artists exist. They rarely create alone. They rarely practice alone. I urge people to acknowledge that this is a worthy way to be a compelling artist, rather than acting like the preference of the introverted artist is the only worthy way of doing things.
>Highly extroverted artists exist and do not create alone.
Find me one professional jazz musician that is "100% extroverted" and I can find you twenty places or quotations that clearly demonstrate that s/he has listened and studied the history of the music.
I'm not saying who is "worthy", whatever that means. I'm saying what needs to be done to be educated, to understand.
You've shifted the goalpost from "any jam session" to "professional jazz musician".
Yes, I'd agree that all professional jazz musicians have spent considerable time working on their craft alone. That doesn't detract from what I was saying. Professional jazz musicians aren't the only type of people who do jam sessions, and they're not the only type of compelling artist.
In fact, even if every single artist in the world had spent considerable time studying alone, that doesn't necessarily mean it's required. The fact is, every single piece of music theory, every single thing you can read from a book or hear from a record, every single practice session, can be done in a group. It may just be that people prefer not to do that, or don't have the resources to do that.
I am very curious now, because you seem to be alluding to it: is there any real world example of any kind of artist who is both "compelling" and did most of their studying or work in a group? Or is this just all in theory, like "Johnny Thousand-Livers"? https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/organs
The vast majority of human beings throughout time lived in extremely communal situations without separate bedrooms, without sheet music, without books, and without records. Solitude in the home was rarely available. Virtually all folk music around the world was developed in these contexts. We barely know their names or their work, and that's simply because sheet music and historic record were limited to the interests of the rich.
The availability of prolonged solitude to practice an instrument is an aberration in human existence. Modern humans, and the historic rich, do not represent the wider experience of human existence. Unless you think compelling musicians are also an aberration in human existence, I personally believe a wider perspective is needed.
GROHL: Well, I remember we talked about this. I think we were talking about practicing. . . .
STARR: I never practice [laughs].
GROHL: Nor do I! Because I don’t like playing alone. I only like playing when there’s music.
STARR: I’ll play with you all night, but on my own, after two and a quarter seconds, I’m like, “Ugh. That’s not what it’s about.” When I’m doing shows, and people hold up their little seven-year-old: “This is Tommy. He loves you, and he’s taking drum lessons.” And I always say, “I hope he’s not taking too many!”
Incredibly hard to understand. As if, say, Einstein waved his hand and produced a rigorous theory of the general relativity. And spent no time on it himself. Or if, say, Coltrane revolutionized music but never practiced.
I agree that adversarial interactions can produce results. That's not what the OP is saying. What the OP is saying is that you need a whole lot of self understanding to create good work in the space of writing.
I would posit that the person you're replying to is challenging the title, not the article. The title and the article are incongruent.
The article essentially suggests that considerable solitude is required to really take one's writing to a higher place. That might be the true, or it might not be true, and it depends on how we define 'good writing'. But we can agree that it's not so easy to dismiss.
On the other hand, the title plainly states: 'creativity requires solitude'. That's a clear-cut statement. And it's extremely debatable. Not to mention that Rilke never even said that.
All of these models assume the following two things:
1. nobody likes their job
2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid
In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important.
But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.
#1 is not assumed. Clueless like their jobs because they believe their roles (usually in middle management) are more important and respected than they actually are.
And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.
I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.
If only there were this magical piece of paper that everyone presented when they applied listing all their relevant skills and experience so that the company can determine if it's worth giving them 2 hours of their time.
All kidding aside, the efficient thing about resumes is that you write them once and use them everywhere. Coding samples are inefficient because you have to take 4h to write one for each company.
Edit: the other problem with takehomes is that it self-selects the people who have scarce-enough opportunities that they find it worth their time to do them.
It makes sense, it could look really bad for Chewy. Say your cat got eaten by a pit bull, and then a week later you're reminded what happened by a box of cat food they automatically shipped to your door.
I'm happy to pay the $15/month just to have the capability to have stuff shipped to my door overnight for free. There are months where I don't order anything at all. Compared to rent or food it's a drop in the bucket.
I'm saying I'm personally happy to pay for the subscription if I don't use it, and don't care if they move to a "refill" model. So my take is that not all the prime customers are scammed.
That being said it's been a while since I did the signup flow, maybe it's gotten way worse, do you have an example?
Amazon chooses shipping defaults to benefit themselves.
With prime I have to manually select the shipping speed to get it the fastest.
Without prime, it defaults to faster shipping that you pay for. You have to manually select slower shipping to get the advertised "free super-saver shipping"
For me, most products get delivered in 6 days with Prime. It has stopped making sense to pay for the Prime subscription. It's cheaper to pay for faster shipping, given that I only order 1-2 items monthly.
One nice part of shopping on eBay is their proximity sort. IME this tends to minimize shipping time (and, of course, carbon footprint). When I order something locally from the LA area, it’s usually there the next day or two even with free shipping.
I am very frustrated by this article and I don't know why. I mean, they're right, improvisation, that's a good model for how you should design your social networking service. But just given how "realtime systems" (read: social media) evolved from 2010-2022, somehow I feel like this is not what Miles Davis stood for.
Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??