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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#281

Post by WalterBright »

onion2k wrote: post #250
WalterBright wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when faci…

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to…

Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#282

Post by sgt101 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #60
ratorx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge at the very least provides reasonably affordable accommodation for all years of your undergraduate degree. And some colleges provide accommodation for Masters and PhD students as well. The UK student loan is not perfect, but it does include a living stipend (which is family income based). Obviously it sucks to have to take a loan, but working is not a necessity (until after graduation). I’m not sure how rea…

The loans aren’t great if you are a student not living with their parents and studying outside of London if your parents have a household has a combined income of £45,000 you will be eligible for only £6000 p/a grant. If we take a £80,000 combined household income which won’t go that far in London especially if the family has more than one child and still paying for a mortgage or what is becoming more and more common…

I believe that the financial declaration is for post-graduate courses, and no proof is required for living costs.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#283

Post by notahacker »

makomk wrote: post #207
notahacker wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation. The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve…

Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.) Suppose we take that…

> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent.

Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.

Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.

Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#284

Post by WalterBright »

adrianN wrote: post #240
WalterBright wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China even has a stock market. Isn't that the opposite of communism?

For suitable definitions of communism, a stock market is a good way to get the means of production into the hands of the workers: they can buy stocks and share ownership of the company they work for.

Sorry, a stock market is the antithesis of communism. You're not going to redefine your way out of that one :-)

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#285

Post by eythian »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #254
onion2k wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to…

> If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from How do you then explain the existence of sanctuary cities?

To me at least, they seem like the exception that proves the rule. The fact that they exist with a name means that in general things aren't like that.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#287

Post by WalterBright »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #265
WalterBright wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps - but they're doing it with free markets, not communism.

It’s funny that you are getting downvoted, what you are saying is not controversial and well accepted. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-...

If karma points meant anything, I'd probably write what people wanted to hear :-)

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#288

Post by WalterBright »

breakfastduck wrote: post #275
WalterBright wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it makes us beholden to an employer Oh phooey. I've been an employer and employee many times. At no time was I "beholden" to my employer, and at no time were my employees "beholden" to me. It was a simple transaction - trading labor for money. Either party could (and sometimes did) walk away at any time for any reason they pleased. I've even been fired more than once. Didn't matter, I just got another job. No emplo…

No one is suggesting that you are physically trapped in the job with shackles, but to insinuate everyone is in a position where they can just 'walk away' from their job is disingenuous at best, downright ignorant of the world at worst. It's about the same level as 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps'.

Well, people I've employed walked away whenever they felt like it.

> ignorant of the world

I only speak of the US. Before the pandemic upended things, unemployment rates were very, very low in the US. That doesn't auger for employees being beholden to employers at all.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#289

Post by mattmanser »

agent008t wrote: post #263
rwmj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The noisy ones are the ones making the most noise. You might not have noticed the studious ones, as they were hiding away in their rooms :-) You even say that you didn't see your fellow CS students much. On a more serious note, it comes back to what are top universities for? Excellent learning - you said that the tutorials, lectures and practicals were good to great, and I can assure you this is not true of all unive…

That is true. What frustrated me is that the social/cultural set up only seemed to amplify it, rather than counteract it to balance things out. For example, in fresher's week, 'default' organized activities were clubbing every night of the week. Sports achievements were celebrated with ceremonies, pub parties, chalk drawings on the walls of the college, publications in the magazines. There is nothing wrong with any o…

Freshers weeks for all UK universities are like that. And most teenagers are fine with that, rich or poor. It's an easy ice breaker.

I don't know how you managed to miss this during your university career, but there are absolutely tons of clubs in every university. Sports, political, hobbies, music, etc. Nothing to do with drinking, apart from maybe a once or twice yearly optional social night.

There are 400 clubs registered at the OU student's union:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/life/clubs

Including compsoc, which would have been a way to meet your fellow CS grads:

https://ox.compsoc.net/

And a competitive computer security club:

https://www.ox002147.com/

And they're just the ones I found by searching computer.

You could've packed your calender with different activities meeting new people every night and never have felt the need to drink a single drop.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#290

Post by thorin »

agent008t wrote: post #270
thorin wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the stuff you mention, the drinking/clubbing is just true of teenagers / young people in the UK and you probably missed out the drugs and sex. When I went to a "top tier" uni in the 90s after watching the young ones and reading adrian mole I expected students to be going to rallies and being "intellectual". I spent more time reading about other subjects than my own and underperformed in my degree. Students w…

I can't help but think that for every student more into drugs/sex/drinking/clubbing, there is a kid out there who was genuinely interested in studying from the top academics that probably didn't even bother applying because they thought they wouldn't be able to get in (or won't be able to afford it). I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it…

I spent some time with students in Russia and they were even worse! Most of Europe is similar to an extent, but sure there are people who are obsessed with studying and learning, but there are a lot more who are keen to get away from their parents, spend money on beer and find girls/boys.

Most Asian students I met who had come over to Europe were pretty serious.

Anecdotally some friends from Wales who went on a study year to America were put into counselling and threatened with expulsion for their "drinking problems", they were pretty normal British students really, I think they ended up somewhere fairly conservative.

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