Posts filed under 'Businesses that Suck'
When you take some time to think about the mortgage crisis that’s helped turn our markets to mud, it seems to come down to overpaying for things without a well-reasoned calculation of risk.
Until about a month ago, I lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and walked by New York University’s buildings each day. According to the College Board, the costs for a student who lives on campus total $51,982 a year.
Assuming no increase in costs, that’s $207,928 for an undergraduate degree.
Somehow, they report that the average indebtedness at graduation is $33,637. I presume that they’re referring to the debt load that the student carries. What won’t show up in that figure is the amount of home equity borrowed against by parents to pay the expected family contribution.
In any event, someone’s coming up with $200k. There are many reasons why self-selection would dictate that the median household income of students at NYU would be higher than the $50,233 American average, but even if the average is twice that, after taxes and living expenses for the rest of the family, they’re not coming up with $52k out of pocket, unless they’ve been extraordinarily diligent in saving.
While undoubtedly there are a number of students who will work at high-paying jobs coming right out of school, most of their classmates won’t. Parents won’t always make rational decisions, putting something like the pride of having a child at Princeton above economic sense. If they’ve got the money, it’s none of my concern. If they don’t… who bears the consequences?
Imagine graduating college with $100,000 in debt, at 21 years of age. Assume that the graduate may have a child 10 years later. If a parent’s education isn’t paid off by the birth of his child, when will the cycle end? That’s $833 per month, every month, for 10 years, before considering interest. Twice that for a couple.
How do we get some sanity here?
Making more money available isn’t the answer. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to send everyone to college. Maybe we should treat education loans more like standard unsecured credit, or make education loan decisions based upon likely ability to repay given not just credit history, but school transcripts and historical economic success of similar loan applicants.
Of course, that idea dies an early death at the hands of those who think it unfair to the economically disadvantaged. So… what do we do? And how do we not screw ourselves with subprime education lending?
Are the people losing their houses now paying their student loans? Are they going to be any time soon?
May 3rd, 2009
Spelling does count. If the sender, subject line, or your message is misspelled, I’m far more likely to think that it’s spam and bin it. I’m fine with the false positives which may make it into the bit bucket if you didn’t take the time to figure out how to spell what you wanted to tell me. *cough*joe*cough*
And I’m not buying from you if your math is horrible and it makes a difference to what I’m buying. A dimwitted marketer put this on thestreet.com below an article I was reading.
Hmm… while it’s true that if I’d bought and sold at the prices indicated, $18.37 and $37.82 respectively, I would indeed have made over 50% on the investment, as you advertised. But if you’re advertising what a financial genius you are, shouldn’t you be noting that buying something for $18.37 and selling it for $37.82 brings you a return of over 100%? I think on math alone, I’m far better with my bad guess strategies than with this genius guiding me.
December 15th, 2008
While I did create a “Glycerine” channel, I’ve heard an acoustic rendition of Bush’s Glycerine at least 5 times now on my Ani Difranco channel, and I haven’t listened that much to Pandora.
I don’t know if I ran into a flaw in the algorithm, have had strange luck, or if Pandora isn’t really all that amazing…
August 5th, 2008
I’ve got a lot to say about Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey in the coming days and weeks. I’ll start you out with this screenshot of just the kind of slow speeds I’m getting on a regular basis. 150ms ping to the first hop isn’t infrequent, as well as 10% packet loss to the first hop as well…
At 3AM, I can get 19mbps download on that speed test (I pay for 20mbps Road Runner Extreme). Between 7pm and midnight? The speed tests sometimes show as high as 2mbps or so, but will vary from minute to minute down into the hundreds of kilobits per second. As you can see in the screenshot I included, I’m testing at 220kbps.
Road Runner has sent techs out twice. Both said that the signal looked fine, but one replaced the cable modem. Both said that a service call would be opened for the “plant” folks to do something. One, upon my geeky pleading (I poured on the victim bit… but it was genuine… the tech support line is 30 minutes on hold to have someone run me through the exact same steps: unplug the router, plug in a computer, disable the firewall, disable antivirus, run the speed test. “We have to send a tech out to you”. Lather, rinse, repeat.) mentioned “upgrades” which had been done quite a bit north of me, but hadn’t been done this far down yet. I inquired about the schedule, and he said that he hadn’t been told, even after asking.
Frustrated, I submitted a complaint with the City of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Unfortunately, I was told that their influence about complaints about cable companies is limited to cable television issues, and not Internet access. But he did mention that they were aware of the node-splitting upgrade that Time Warner is performing on Manhattan.
Of course, node-splitting is a way to mitigate oversubscription problems. Too many users on one node, and the internet bandwidth to that node is saturated by the sheer traffic volume.
But if Time Warner has been planning node-splitting, they’ve known about capacity issues.
So why haven’t they offered in any of my multiple interactions with them to a) downgrade the level of service I’m subscribed to because they can’t honestly offer the service when peak time is so incredibly far from what they’ve sold me, b) offer to lower the pricing on my upgraded package until the upgrade happens (and tell me when it would), or c) at least OFFICIALLY ADMIT THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM.
I’ve got some thoughts about how I’ll proceed from here, and I’ll document what happens better and more real-time (this problem began in the fall and has gotten progressively worse).
But alas, it’s bedtime for now.
January 25th, 2008
Digital distribution of music.
The major record labels have fought it to protect the market for their CDs. They grudgingly signed deals with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, Napster, and Rhapsody, with each of those vendors supplying music with DRM. 4 of those 5 chose one vendor’s technology, the other went it alone.
The iTunes Music Store can certainly be called a success, whether that’s attributable to the store or the devices made to integrate seamlessly. The others? Not so much.
A site in Russia, allofmp3.com, sold non-DRMed music, claiming legitimacy through the protection of the laws of its country… some customers may have been assuaged by the cover of claims of legitimacy, but I certainly got the sense that the convenience, price, and quality were key, along with the fact that customers could compile their collections without worry about device compatibility or the prospect of having to fight to get what they bought when a DRM license file goes on walkabout.
Of course, allofmp3 got shut down eventually…
But it did show one thing — for whatever reason, people were actually paying (albeit far less than retail) for the music they were downloading. It may have been illegal, and everyone may have known that, but people paid rather than download from a P2P network. I guess that it’s impossible to tell how many did so because it became difficult or risky to acquire their tunes illicitly, but there was definitely a market for DRM-free music.
Enter Amazon, purveyor of everything from dog food to silk scarves, paperback best sellers to personal armored vehicles, bicycles to computer cycles…
No DRM, all MP3. No DRM means no need to customize the actual files (anyone know if they watermark? if not, their S3 platform is perfect for this). Amazon’s the master of the long tail — they made their reputation on having the largest selection of books.
I’ve seen a few claims about the size of the music libraries of the big players… I haven’t explored very much to compare music services against each other. I realize how trivial it is to inflate the song count with things nobody will ever buy, so song count by itself is quite irrelevant once you get to the “enough” stage. By the same token, though, bytes take up very little space. The disk throughput for the long tail doesn’t need to be anything special — if I’m downloading something I can’t find elsewhere, I’m not going to notice a few extra seconds spent to retrieve it, so it doesn’t need to be on “enterprise class” tier-1 storage. For that matter, since I have a checkout process involved in purchasing, that offers even more time to ready my download.
This is more of a rant than a question, but why aren’t the smaller labels all on top of this? I went looking for the Damien Rice song The Blower’s Daughter. I could find some Damien Rice, or other artists performing The Blower’s Daughter, but not his rendition of that song.
The song was in the 2004 movie Closer, went multiplatinum in Ireland, and I know that it got airplay in the US on mainstream stations.
Where is it?
It’s a song lots of people don’t know by name, but if you give it a listen over at damienrice.com (30 second preview), most of you will recognize it.
I guess I’m just frustrated, but I’m not looking for the magic of the internet to bring me Timbaland and Britney. I’m not looking for someone to magically divine what I want to hear, or to expose me to things I might buy. I’m talking about looking for a song the artist and title of which I know and which I’m not likely to find at the K-Mart across the street.
Isn’t *that* what was supposed to happen with the Internet? The digital age? The pocket-sized terabyte?
December 27th, 2007
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