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Too Poor to Afford the Internet

nytimes.com

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Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#71

Post by technofiend »

chaostheory wrote: post #65
crazydoggers wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The minimum wage in US would be $1200 per month. So if the average price in the US is $55, that's about 4.5% of a monthly salary. Given your quoted numbers, the price in Ukraine is actually higher at 5% of a monthly salary. Of course the US doesn't have a monthly minimum wage (not sure how that works in Ukraine) so many people in the US might only have part time jobs paying the minimum hourly wage, hence they make co…

I could be wrong but I think it's actually lower in the US if you're only making minimum wage. Years ago it qualified you for a subsidized $19.99 plan. UPDATE It seems to be even less today at $5-10: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/technology/access-from-att-d... It's strange that the article doesn't mention this.

Uh, yeah about that.. I have an aunt on permanent disability. She haggled with AT & T in Austin for months trying to get that service. They make it extremely difficult to actually sign up. I believe she finally just switched to the $300 one time cost Google Fiber plan when they came to town.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#72

Post by zargon »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #11

Is it really $50 per month for basic internet in New York? In the UK https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/packages/ shows the cheapest broadband package - which includes telephone line rental - to be £18 per month (average across the contract when delivered router is included). That's around $25 (you can get "free" with a telephone service). What struck me was the kid in the header image has a swanky new laptop, the sto…

Some school districts in my area give students laptops. They have the specs of chromebooks, valued around $150. Various brands are part of this program: Apple, Lenovo, HP. The districts are in suburban areas that you don't think of as poor, but there are still a lot of kids who get laptops from the program who don't have internet at home, or have sporadic internet because their parents can pay for it some months and not others, and/or would otherwise not have a family computer.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#73

Post by superuser2 »

cylinder wrote: post #20
lumberjack wrote: post #4

Rather than home internet access. I'd create safe study places for these kids to do their homework and even just hang around in. Children in poverty often suffer from dysfunctional families that disrupt their studying and lack of life mentors to motivate them to pay attention in school. If you could have supervised after school hours just for these kids to do their homework and maybe engage in a bit of self learning…

Many / most schools have after school programs for this reason.

I have limited experience with these, but don't they tend to be like 45 minutes to an hour? You need to go at least as far as dinner time if you want kids to actually complete assignments there, not just start them.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#74

Post by rayiner »

linkregister wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the cost of any kind of infrastructure is labor, which scales with local wages.[1] A New York subway ticket is about $2.75. That's about 11x more than the cost of a ticket on the Kiev Metro. And it's not like the New York subway makes a profit--fares cover only about half the system's operating costs.[2] In Baltimore, I paid about $50 for a 50mbps connection, or about 20x more than a subway ticke…

How did you get that $50/50Mbps deal in Baltimore? Was this part of a bundle for cable television?

That's what Verizon charged for FiOS in my apartment.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#75

Post by niftich »

escherize wrote: post #68
koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

Do you actually believe the public school system's goal is to educate children? More like freeing up parents to go to work (and tax), and employing teachers and administrators. It's nearly impossible to fire teachers, thanks to a public sector union who's got their back. School is like a prison for kids. One form of punishment is detention - more school. Also, "In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Associa…

Very few institutions are single-purpose. An uneducated populace is detrimental to growth, but as you note, the 'daycare effect' of schools is also a valuable benefit. Your arguments don't negate the possibility that schools are run by good actors who believe their work benefits students in the objective sense.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#76

Post by chatmasta »

superuser2 wrote: post #69
chatmasta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public libraries are amazingly accessible, but university libraries remain complicit in the ongoing racket of pay-to-read academic literature. Although many university libraries allow guest access during the day, you cannot access their academic subscriptions unless you're on the secure wifi.

They have to be, as a condition of their journal subscriptions. Librarians generally want to extend access as far as possible, but they are terrified of pissing off a publisher and getting a journal taken away from their entire university's community of researchers who need it to do their work.

If the universities really cared about open access, they could unionize against the publishers. Imagine the top 20 schools, which also happen to be the ones producing the research, refused to abide by the publisher rules. Would they all have their access revoked?

It's never made sense to me why, despite billions of dollars budgeted toward scientific funding, private companies make money charging for journal access. Why can't all that public funding also go toward funding the peer review, editing, and publishing?

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#77

Post by Jach »

koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

A math course without a computer is not a modern math course. Humans are not going to advance the field, or even keep up to date, when it is insisted that students do everything their equally intelligent predecessors did plus new things. Something has got to go, and top of my list is a vast amount of pen and paper bullshit.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#78

Post by zzzcpan »

lake99 wrote: post #40
drops wrote: post #13

Interesting. I live in a country with a minimum wage of $58 a month (Ukraine) and yet the internet is one of the few things that pretty much anyone can afford: high speed connections (50-100mbps) cost about $2-4; rarely more. Are american high prices the result of scummy pricing on the corporations' side or is it an actual infrastructural issue that prevents the ISPs from providing cheap connections to everyone?

Now I understand why Russian-speakers dominate many gaming communities. I pay around 20$ for an 8mbps connection, with a monthly download limit of about 50GB. Now you know why there won't be Indians competing in global e-leagues for a long time to come.

Russia is also in the same category of cheap high-speed internet access. Romania is there too. In the rest of Eastern Europe it's a bit more expensive, but still below $20.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#79

Post by walrus01 »

qaq wrote: post #58
walrus01 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) it costs a great deal less in salary to pay construction workers to install aerial or buried fiber in ukraine. Or to aim point to point microwave. 2) A network engineeering position that might cost a company $115,000/year in the US could be filled for $35,000/year in Ukraine. 3) Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment they use for core infrastructure. $1500 Mikr…

Be it as it may the quality of service is way better then what I can get with Comcast at about 1/10th the price :)

Your shitty last mile DOCSIS3 connection over 20+ year old coaxial copper is not a reflection of the quality of an ISP backbone... I realize that from a customer perspective the two are indistinguishable, but if you look at the quality of the router/switch equipment used by the top 50 ASNs (ordered by CAIDA ASRank) for major north american ISPs, it's vastly more expensive than what's used in countries where ISPs don't have the budget luxuries for $100,000 routers.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#80

Post by justinph »

escherize wrote: post #68
koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

Do you actually believe the public school system's goal is to educate children? More like freeing up parents to go to work (and tax), and employing teachers and administrators. It's nearly impossible to fire teachers, thanks to a public sector union who's got their back. School is like a prison for kids. One form of punishment is detention - more school. Also, "In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Associa…

> Do you actually believe the public school system's goal is to educate children?

Absolutely. It doesn't work out perfect every time in every place, but it does a pretty amazing job of that given the poor level of funding and constant bashing from the entitled anti-union right. Freeing up parents is a wonderful side effect that has worked out pretty well for contemporary society.

If you're surprised that kids going through puberty are engaging in sexual activity, you must be living under a rock.

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