Such an event could send us back to the middle ages
is that hyperbolic or do EMPs cause feudalism?
It's worse than that, I fear. A catastrophic solar storm in the 5th century sent the world as we know it into the dark ages. It took about a thousand years for society to recover from that particular storm, and there are few records left to talk of this catastrophe.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
The time to have grown up was the time PRIOR to making a poor financial decision and borrowing $100k on an education. Even in the poorest of states, a state run university will not run you that much money. If you can't afford to go the private school, then don't go! Problem solved.
It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college>
It strikes me as absurd that people are finishing their secondary education without understanding the fact that such school loans would be crippling. We must really be doing our high school children a disservice if they have such a poor understanding of economics and mathematics./P.
The government's ability to monitor everyone's financial transactions is part of the broad surveillance state enabled by technology.
To be fair, it's a requirement that banks report cash transactions of $10k or more (or a group of lessor transactions exceeding that threshold) to the Fed. Want to avoid this, write a check. As others have mentioned, walking around with a suitcase of cash is a little sketchy.
As, I believe the statue of limitations had expired on the alleged crime he was hushing up, Hastert could simply have told the truth about the cash withdrawals and avoided lying to the FBI.
Why is it sketchy? I've entered into property agreements that require me to present a large sum of money in cash or certified check to the receiving agent. My bank charges me a fee to get a check from them. They don't charge me a dime to pull out $10,000 in cash. If I pull out $10,000 in cash for a deposit on a property, the FBI is automatically notified by the bank. Yet there is nothing shady about me paying a security deposit in cash. In fact, every time I've asked the agent if they were okay with cash, they've always preferred it.
How many years ago was the latest console designed?
You realize consoles aren't even competitive with high end graphics when they are brand new?
Build a ship with 3 or 4 hundred components and watch the frame rate crash in KSP.
I do realize that they do not use the latest and greatest hardware in consoles. The current console generation has been on the market for less than two years. The GPU in there is based on a 2011 model from AMD. I just checked and my desktop card is based on a 2009 product line. I've not built anything with more than about 200 components, but it has not been an issue so far at that resolution.
All outputs are not created equal. First, most consoles target 30 FPS. Second, like the old consoles at 1080p, this output is likely just an upscale. They simply do not have the horsepower to render content at that resolution. Equivalent GPUs can be had for $100 or less in computers.
Well that is true. I don't whether or not it scales at that resolution. I have a 5 year old desktop card that can do Kerbal Space Program at 2560x1440 with no problem. You'd think the latest gen console could at least do that without scaling, but I don't know.
"for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson - illustrates the proper attitude.
The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.
My understanding is that Jefferson loved his slaves so much that he enjoyed the company of a few of his female slaves.
And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels.
Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 support 4k output. I don't know what the performance is like, but I can easily play a game at 2560x1440 without any sort of issue with performance. I don't have anything higher than that, so I can't speak to its performance at higher resolutions.
This might seem like a novel concept but you could add the appointment with the French tutor to your child's calendar. You know, set up the appointment on one account and invite the teacher as an attendee. Then it shows up on the teacher's calendar AND on your child's. Then you can sync the child's calendar and only have to see their appointments. In fact, this is how these appointment systems are supposed to work.
I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.
So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.
That 50ms lag in a game is noticeable because there are other people who are also experiencing latency and the game is doing things to compensate for everyone being at a slightly different point of reference. If you were just controlling a camera pointed out your window with a 100ms latency, your mind would not notice the latency between your motion with the hand and the results with your eye.
Given the current state of security in "smart" automobiles, who would want to be able for anyone to plug something into the USB port of the car's entertainment system and completely update the software for the car?
.
Isn't that just asking for your car to be hacked?
Besides, Timothy can't even edit an article summary. What makes any of us think he'll be any better at editing code?
Thanks for the info. I checked with T-Mobile, and the $50/month plan gives you 1 GB per month of 4G data. If I understand correctly, after you reach that limit, your phone continues to work at some slower data rate (how slow, they don't say) and your tethered devices stop working altogether. (Is that consistent with your understanding?)
So for that reason alone, I think this is a no-go as a replacement for my home DSL service.
They may not offer the plan I have anymore. It was $30 for unlimited data and text and 100 minutes of phone calls per month. I signed up for that years ago, before they became the "uncarrier". It was also a pay as you go plan, and not one of their contract plans at that time.
Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?
Depends on the conditions, but I can usually get about 20Mbps. I'm on T-mobile, but I would not recommend using it for any serious surfing. For one thing, my phone gets hotter than a $2 pistol after about 20 minutes of tethering. Plus, I try not to abuse the ability. T-mo is the only provider that just doesn't care if people tether. I think if that were abused, they might change their tune.
Anyway, the service is reliable for me, I have excellent coverage. T-mo has spotty coverage in some areas, and along some rural highways, particularly in California. The latency can be pretty high, though.
If you're like me, it's the expense of your talk, text and data plan that you dislike, not the features of a smartphone.
I pay $20 every 90 days to Virgin Mobile (works out to $6.67 per month). I'll upgrade to a smart phone if and when the price of a plan that includes a reasonable amount of data drops to $15 per month. Until then, I'll make a mental note of what online content I'd like to consume, and wait until I get home to consume it.
Calculate the annual cost of your cell phone plan; do you find that having instant gratification of your online desires is worth that cost? Not judging; just curious.
Yes. For $50 a month, I get unlimited everything and free tethering. When I am at the airport, or a crappy hotel, etc I can tether my laptop and still get work done.
There are a few people using their.gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address
No, you can't. Remember, several different court cases have stated, and people on here have wholeheartedly agreed, you can't tie an IP address to a person, even if there is only one person at a residence.
So either you can use an IP address to tie it to someone or you can't. Which is it?
You can verify that someone with a.gov email address accessed a website with an IP address that corresponds to a government entity in the US. That's about all you can safely do.
Besides, if you can do it in 1/16th of the time, you might find your maintenance budget get slashed to 1/16th of previous year/quarter.
From what you described, it seems you/they allocate about a day to upgrade each station (16 units at 0.5 hour each.) Beats driving around in traffic to 16 different stations a day, too.
Don't be silly. The maintenance will still take just as long. He'll just have much more time to focus on his real priority - Clash of Clans.
Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.
In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.
'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.
You could make ramen with a Keurig. I use one to make oatmeal in the mornings.
The annual booster shots for dogs is greed. So is the leptospirosis vaccine, and heartworm treatments for anything bigger than a squirrel. The leptospirosis vaccine only protects against 6 of the more than 150 types, and it's transferred by wild infected animals pissing on your dog's food. For heartworm, just keep the mosquito population down, the same as you should be doing to prevent the transmission of West Nile disease in humans. It's not like dogs can catch it from each other.
There are some places where it is very difficult to control the mosquito population. I lived in Venezuela for a while. They have trucks come around and spray pesticides on everything and everyone in order to try and control the mosquito population and thereby prevent dengue fever. I can tell you right now that the mosquitoes were not under very good control. I also dated a girl whose dog died of heartworm. She had the dog on heartworm medication for its entire life until the dog was about 6 and then missed two months of treatment. In fact, where I live now, the animal shelters often have to put down stray dogs that are dying of heartworm. I rarely even see a mosquito in town.
California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.
They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.
This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.
Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.
If you watch California elections they only borrow money for education and repairing aging infrastructure. They seem to find the money they need for everything else by raiding the schools. If the dumbasses who vote in California would stop approving billions of dollars in school bonds every election, this practice might actually change.
But the numbers you have come up with are not comparable to each other, as they are for different areas and data sets.
25% of calls are pranks, while 70% are dialled inadvertently - an inadvertent dial is not a prank, and a prank is not an inadvertent dial, so these figures are not comparable.
Of course they are comparable. You only have 100% of calls available to you. If 70% were dialed inadvertently and 25% were dialed as pranks, that would suggest that only 5% were dialed on purpose and NOT a prank.
The problem is that the language from that report suggests that some of the calls may be legitimate, but non-emergency calls. People call 911 all the time for the stupidest things. For instance, calling 911 to report a fender bender. That is entirely inappropriate, and a complete drain on emergency resources.
The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.
There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.
Is that all expenses or just tuition expenses? The university has no control over outside expenses.
You trust the infrastructure between you and the second party, but only in the US (and some tourist areas) is it considered acceptable to hand over your card to a 3rd party who disappear with it for a while. The rest of the world, the third party never, or rarely even touches your card. So you don't have to trust a 3rd party with your card to use it. At most, you trust the infrastructure between you and the credit card company.
Except that the third patty controls the card terminal. If they're unscrupulous or if they don't have proper security, then anyone could come in there and install hardware that would get your card details, even your PIN if you're on a chip and pin system. Will that allow them to clone your chip? I'm not sure - probably not. But that doesn't stop them from having someone mug you when you're a few blocks away, either. Plus, you don't use the chip or pin for online purchases.
"A better question may be, why do "federally-guaranteed loans" need to exist in the first place..."
Exactly. If the question is "Why is higher education so expensive," that is the answer.
Don't be ridiculous. The loans don't exist because school is prohibitively expensive. I finished school just with the current group of "I can't pay my student loan" cry babies. I paid for all of my education, and have been supporting myself since I was 16 years old. My student loan total for 3.5 years (I graduated early) was $12,000. That included tuition, books, and my apartment minus the costs I paid myself by working throughout school. I received $1000 total in scholarships and did not qualify for grant money. I went to a school that I could afford. A state university program. Without the federally subsidized student loan, I would have been forced to work more, and would have had to spend more time on my degree.
At the time I started school, my girlfriend wanted me to attend the same private school she went to. I applied and was accepted but passed on the program because the tuition alone would have cost me over $30,000 a year. With decreased funding, my state university now charges double what it did when I attended, but your 4 year tuition is still less than 0.75 years at a private university. I have about as much sympathy for those crying about student loan repayment as I have for those people who took out a 5 year ARM on property back in 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
Such an event could send us back to the middle ages
is that hyperbolic or do EMPs cause feudalism?
It's worse than that, I fear. A catastrophic solar storm in the 5th century sent the world as we know it into the dark ages. It took about a thousand years for society to recover from that particular storm, and there are few records left to talk of this catastrophe.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
The time to have grown up was the time PRIOR to making a poor financial decision and borrowing $100k on an education. Even in the poorest of states, a state run university will not run you that much money. If you can't afford to go the private school, then don't go! Problem solved.
It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college>
It strikes me as absurd that people are finishing their secondary education without understanding the fact that such school loans would be crippling. We must really be doing our high school children a disservice if they have such a poor understanding of economics and mathematics./P.
The government's ability to monitor everyone's financial transactions is part of the broad surveillance state enabled by technology.
To be fair, it's a requirement that banks report cash transactions of $10k or more (or a group of lessor transactions exceeding that threshold) to the Fed. Want to avoid this, write a check. As others have mentioned, walking around with a suitcase of cash is a little sketchy.
As, I believe the statue of limitations had expired on the alleged crime he was hushing up, Hastert could simply have told the truth about the cash withdrawals and avoided lying to the FBI.
Why is it sketchy? I've entered into property agreements that require me to present a large sum of money in cash or certified check to the receiving agent. My bank charges me a fee to get a check from them. They don't charge me a dime to pull out $10,000 in cash. If I pull out $10,000 in cash for a deposit on a property, the FBI is automatically notified by the bank. Yet there is nothing shady about me paying a security deposit in cash. In fact, every time I've asked the agent if they were okay with cash, they've always preferred it.
Well it's 2015 now, you should just run out and buy a Mr Fusion portable fusion generator. That way you never have to buy power from the grid again.
How many years ago was the latest console designed?
You realize consoles aren't even competitive with high end graphics when they are brand new?
Build a ship with 3 or 4 hundred components and watch the frame rate crash in KSP.
I do realize that they do not use the latest and greatest hardware in consoles. The current console generation has been on the market for less than two years. The GPU in there is based on a 2011 model from AMD. I just checked and my desktop card is based on a 2009 product line. I've not built anything with more than about 200 components, but it has not been an issue so far at that resolution.
All outputs are not created equal. First, most consoles target 30 FPS. Second, like the old consoles at 1080p, this output is likely just an upscale. They simply do not have the horsepower to render content at that resolution. Equivalent GPUs can be had for $100 or less in computers.
Well that is true. I don't whether or not it scales at that resolution. I have a 5 year old desktop card that can do Kerbal Space Program at 2560x1440 with no problem. You'd think the latest gen console could at least do that without scaling, but I don't know.
"for I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson - illustrates the proper attitude.
The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.
My understanding is that Jefferson loved his slaves so much that he enjoyed the company of a few of his female slaves.
And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels.
Both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 support 4k output. I don't know what the performance is like, but I can easily play a game at 2560x1440 without any sort of issue with performance. I don't have anything higher than that, so I can't speak to its performance at higher resolutions.
This might seem like a novel concept but you could add the appointment with the French tutor to your child's calendar. You know, set up the appointment on one account and invite the teacher as an attendee. Then it shows up on the teacher's calendar AND on your child's. Then you can sync the child's calendar and only have to see their appointments. In fact, this is how these appointment systems are supposed to work.
I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.
So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.
That 50ms lag in a game is noticeable because there are other people who are also experiencing latency and the game is doing things to compensate for everyone being at a slightly different point of reference. If you were just controlling a camera pointed out your window with a 100ms latency, your mind would not notice the latency between your motion with the hand and the results with your eye.
...I'd like access to all of the software.
Given the current state of security in "smart" automobiles, who would want to be able for anyone to plug something into the USB port of the car's entertainment system and completely update the software for the car?
. Isn't that just asking for your car to be hacked?
Besides, Timothy can't even edit an article summary. What makes any of us think he'll be any better at editing code?
Thanks for the info. I checked with T-Mobile, and the $50/month plan gives you 1 GB per month of 4G data. If I understand correctly, after you reach that limit, your phone continues to work at some slower data rate (how slow, they don't say) and your tethered devices stop working altogether. (Is that consistent with your understanding?)
So for that reason alone, I think this is a no-go as a replacement for my home DSL service.
They may not offer the plan I have anymore. It was $30 for unlimited data and text and 100 minutes of phone calls per month. I signed up for that years ago, before they became the "uncarrier". It was also a pay as you go plan, and not one of their contract plans at that time.
Now the tethering thing would have value for me, if it would allow me to shut off the expensive DSL service to my home. Is that realistic? Who's your provider, and what kind of speed/reliability do you get?
Depends on the conditions, but I can usually get about 20Mbps. I'm on T-mobile, but I would not recommend using it for any serious surfing. For one thing, my phone gets hotter than a $2 pistol after about 20 minutes of tethering. Plus, I try not to abuse the ability. T-mo is the only provider that just doesn't care if people tether. I think if that were abused, they might change their tune.
Anyway, the service is reliable for me, I have excellent coverage. T-mo has spotty coverage in some areas, and along some rural highways, particularly in California. The latency can be pretty high, though.
If you're like me, it's the expense of your talk, text and data plan that you dislike, not the features of a smartphone.
I pay $20 every 90 days to Virgin Mobile (works out to $6.67 per month). I'll upgrade to a smart phone if and when the price of a plan that includes a reasonable amount of data drops to $15 per month. Until then, I'll make a mental note of what online content I'd like to consume, and wait until I get home to consume it.
Calculate the annual cost of your cell phone plan; do you find that having instant gratification of your online desires is worth that cost? Not judging; just curious.
Yes. For $50 a month, I get unlimited everything and free tethering. When I am at the airport, or a crappy hotel, etc I can tether my laptop and still get work done.
There are a few people using their .gov email addresses for this, some of those can be verified by the IP address
No, you can't. Remember, several different court cases have stated, and people on here have wholeheartedly agreed, you can't tie an IP address to a person, even if there is only one person at a residence.
So either you can use an IP address to tie it to someone or you can't. Which is it?
You can verify that someone with a .gov email address accessed a website with an IP address that corresponds to a government entity in the US. That's about all you can safely do.
Besides, if you can do it in 1/16th of the time, you might find your maintenance budget get slashed to 1/16th of previous year/quarter. From what you described, it seems you/they allocate about a day to upgrade each station (16 units at 0.5 hour each.) Beats driving around in traffic to 16 different stations a day, too.
Don't be silly. The maintenance will still take just as long. He'll just have much more time to focus on his real priority - Clash of Clans.
Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.
In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.
'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.
You could make ramen with a Keurig. I use one to make oatmeal in the mornings.
The annual booster shots for dogs is greed. So is the leptospirosis vaccine, and heartworm treatments for anything bigger than a squirrel. The leptospirosis vaccine only protects against 6 of the more than 150 types, and it's transferred by wild infected animals pissing on your dog's food. For heartworm, just keep the mosquito population down, the same as you should be doing to prevent the transmission of West Nile disease in humans. It's not like dogs can catch it from each other.
There are some places where it is very difficult to control the mosquito population. I lived in Venezuela for a while. They have trucks come around and spray pesticides on everything and everyone in order to try and control the mosquito population and thereby prevent dengue fever. I can tell you right now that the mosquitoes were not under very good control. I also dated a girl whose dog died of heartworm. She had the dog on heartworm medication for its entire life until the dog was about 6 and then missed two months of treatment. In fact, where I live now, the animal shelters often have to put down stray dogs that are dying of heartworm. I rarely even see a mosquito in town.
California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.
They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.
This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.
Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.
If you watch California elections they only borrow money for education and repairing aging infrastructure. They seem to find the money they need for everything else by raiding the schools. If the dumbasses who vote in California would stop approving billions of dollars in school bonds every election, this practice might actually change.
But the numbers you have come up with are not comparable to each other, as they are for different areas and data sets.
25% of calls are pranks, while 70% are dialled inadvertently - an inadvertent dial is not a prank, and a prank is not an inadvertent dial, so these figures are not comparable.
Of course they are comparable. You only have 100% of calls available to you. If 70% were dialed inadvertently and 25% were dialed as pranks, that would suggest that only 5% were dialed on purpose and NOT a prank.
The problem is that the language from that report suggests that some of the calls may be legitimate, but non-emergency calls. People call 911 all the time for the stupidest things. For instance, calling 911 to report a fender bender. That is entirely inappropriate, and a complete drain on emergency resources.
The expected total expenditures for a student at my university when I graduated back in 2003 were in the range of $19,000 per year in today's dollars. Estimated total costs for students at the same university in the upcoming school year are about $35,000.
There really is no comparison here. School is vastly more expensive today than it was even 15 years ago. And that is tremendously unfair to current students.
Is that all expenses or just tuition expenses? The university has no control over outside expenses.
You trust the infrastructure between you and the second party, but only in the US (and some tourist areas) is it considered acceptable to hand over your card to a 3rd party who disappear with it for a while. The rest of the world, the third party never, or rarely even touches your card. So you don't have to trust a 3rd party with your card to use it. At most, you trust the infrastructure between you and the credit card company.
Except that the third patty controls the card terminal. If they're unscrupulous or if they don't have proper security, then anyone could come in there and install hardware that would get your card details, even your PIN if you're on a chip and pin system. Will that allow them to clone your chip? I'm not sure - probably not. But that doesn't stop them from having someone mug you when you're a few blocks away, either. Plus, you don't use the chip or pin for online purchases.
"A better question may be, why do "federally-guaranteed loans" need to exist in the first place..." Exactly. If the question is "Why is higher education so expensive," that is the answer.
Don't be ridiculous. The loans don't exist because school is prohibitively expensive. I finished school just with the current group of "I can't pay my student loan" cry babies. I paid for all of my education, and have been supporting myself since I was 16 years old. My student loan total for 3.5 years (I graduated early) was $12,000. That included tuition, books, and my apartment minus the costs I paid myself by working throughout school. I received $1000 total in scholarships and did not qualify for grant money. I went to a school that I could afford. A state university program. Without the federally subsidized student loan, I would have been forced to work more, and would have had to spend more time on my degree.
At the time I started school, my girlfriend wanted me to attend the same private school she went to. I applied and was accepted but passed on the program because the tuition alone would have cost me over $30,000 a year. With decreased funding, my state university now charges double what it did when I attended, but your 4 year tuition is still less than 0.75 years at a private university. I have about as much sympathy for those crying about student loan repayment as I have for those people who took out a 5 year ARM on property back in 2008.