Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

I never mentioned that it was specific to my school. Thus with no specific mention the implied meaning is that it's applied to a generality.

I made no statement about my school or your school specifically in reference to how hard they are in general. We both did however use our schools as anecdotal supporting evidence for each of our respective opinions though.

But anecdotal evidence is worthless. That's why I moved to numbers. This is what the numbers say:

Selectivity is causal to difficulty in general.

Your school could be an exception and my school may be an exception as well. But given my statement above, by probability, it is highly unlikely.

In short, it's more probable that my school is harder than your school and this probability is only escapable if someone who attended both can give us a more accurate first hand comparison.

I live there, grew up with a strong dose of it, but I take your point and understand. I'm not ideological on the issue except that I think we can do better, so a viewpoint rooted in (for me, cynical) practicality is easy for me to relate to. It's different than an ideological one, which is what was the question I was trying to understand from your statement. It's harder to have productive conversation on matters of ideology.

At the end of the day your situation may have been more iffy (you don't know whether it was actually beneficial). That indicates to me you weren't going to starve to death

Eh, yes and no. Again, personal details involved. But, mostly, not about extreme food security problems. A parent worked in food service as a second job, which helped. (No theft, just generous owners)

In general I find child labor laws to be deeply ironic in a Kafka-esque way for the reasons you touch on. Out socioeconomic system produces situations that all but require such labor, but then it is outlawed. Like so many other laws, it doesn't solve the problem that leads to the bad thing in the first place.

Better to have an extremely strong safety net w/ a strong job training & job placement system. It's often a catch 22 though. In my state unemployed people can go to community college for free, and there are even 1-year full time programs for in-demand jobs that have okay pay. The problem is, how do you love during that the new period? That's one gap. Another one are people who are employed but don't make enough money-- no free college for them, so they're stuck in their economic niche. And if they lost the job they'd still face the first issue of living while they learn. Another gap is the job market: fix the above issues and the college programs I referenced would be flooded beyond their capacity and wages in the job market kept low by a higher labor supply.

I think we could chip away at some of these issues, but the most common political solution, probably because it seems quick and easy, is to raise the floor on minimum wage. There's a little elasticity there, but I don't think it can be raised enough to solve these problems. Low-margin businesses (supermarkets!) especially will have to raise prices, which will then eat into the cost of living. The idea that minimum wage can be doubled without inflation always strikes me as wishful thinking.

Personally I think you just have a chip on your shoulder thinking a selective program is generally more difficult than a non-selective program. Elitist arrogance.

>Where the hell are you getting that 99.9% number? I would think someone who went to a good school wouldn't pull random numbers out of thin air.

I said could be, because you decoupled by saying now that it merely COULD be that a selectivity influences difficulty, before backtracking to play your devious and treacherous claim you were never talking about the school from which your anecdotes came. YOU pulled the figures like 25% and 50% out of a hat, which is fine because we acknowledged they weren't hard numbers. Don't be a hypocrite.

>Selectivity is causal to difficulty. Period

Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

Edit: here's a comment from a student at one non-selective school

"This leads to > feeling very impersonal for Freshman and Sophmores while the university treats you more or less like an experiment to see if you can handle the pressure. This can lead to people that would normal be denied to being accepted and excelling, but it can also lead to other students who shouldn't have been placed in such rigorous programs having to drop out, transfer, or graduate late. This is from a personal observation and 2 good friends transferring schools and another friend who dropped out his Junior year."

they note the university "Put them in extremely tough classes go start with and weed out those who can't handle the pressure."

This is how it tends to work in non-selective schools. They hold students to the 'selective' school standard freshman/sophomore year until by junior year you're effectively in a cohort that looks like the cohort at the selective school. The difficulty is still there, although it's an independent variable from the selectivity.