What about it? It was expensive and it remains expensive.
The Doctors aren't evil... they just practice medicine the old fashioned way. Most learned their diagnostic skills when rotary phones were the standard.
That's a nice bit of data you made up. Twenty seconds on google would have shown that you are wrong. The average age of a physician in the US is 51 years old. That means the average doctor was in medical school between the late 80s and mid 90s and half have trained more recently than that. Sure there are some old farts out there but they are the exception at this point. You seem to have some notion that diagnosis and treatment of disease has undergone some radical change in the last 20 years that makes the skills of older physicians obsolete. This view is entirely incorrect and worse it wrongly presumes that doctors stop learning when they finish their residency.
Furthermore I'm married to a doctor so I know personally that your notions about how "out of date" their skills are is quite incorrect. Most are actually fairly up to date in the area of their specialty. You also have a very false notion about how they practice medicine. Most are eager to use the best techniques available PROVIDED that they can be shown to be an improvement. Doctor's as a rule have a very sensible "show me the data" attitude but they aren't at all averse to new tech, quite the opposite in fact.
As for the FDA... They're not that bad.... just usually very blinder focused.
That statement is so vague as to be meaningless.
and you'll be surprised that most of your medical procedure data is already in the cloud, if you used insurance or put your SSN on any form
I'm well aware of what is out there. My wife's practice uses a medical records system that stores data through a company in another state as does basically any big insurance company. Apple isn't really set up to deal with the regulatory burden that comes with that. Not to say they couldn't be in theory but I doubt they will in any big way. Apple is a consumer products company, not a medical device company. In my day job I work with medical device companies (we make wire harnesses for them) and it is a very different industry with very different cost structures and very different regulatory requirements. Producing a heart rate monitor or fancy pedometer is one thing. Producing a device that is going to actually communicate with your doctor about serious medical conditions is a whole different kettle of fish.
The problem is most of the diagnostic information is in islands that the MDs don't even have good access to.
Wrong. They do have access to all sorts of information and can usually get what they need. The problem is that the access too often isn't efficient (slow and expensive) and that the data is complicated. It is HARD to make a database that efficiently captures all relevant medical information. It is much harder still to make a database that can communicate with all the other databases out there is an useful and efficient manner for an economically sensible price. This has nothing to do with the doctors directly. This has to do with the technical difficulty and economic problems of creating a networked and efficient medical records system. Doctors don't write software, IT people do and not the sort that tends to work at Apple.
All we have to do is tunnel below the Moon's surface.
Oh is that all? An pray tell, where can I get one of these robotic tunnel borers on the moon? You're talking about getting a HUGE piece of equipment to the moon which has to operate remotely, reliably and requires virtually no servicing. We don't have tunnel boring machines that fit that description here on Earth, much less ones that can operate on the moon. You can't really just hand wave this problem away. Excavating machines are necessarily very heavy and thus extremely expensive with current tech (chemical rockets) to get to the moon. You're likely talking multiple launches of Atlas V class rockets which deliver the machines with pinpoint accuracy to the moon which then somehow have to be put together. And it isn't just the machine to do the tunnel boring, you need structural materials to support the excavation and all the other building materials for the base. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but what I am saying is that it is a VERY challenging and expensive problem for which we do not presently have the technology.
Even better, it's hypothesized that there's already underground tunnels on the Moon, left over from its formation.
So we're going to rely on hypothetical tunnels to shield us from radiation? Great plan...
Why wouldn't putting a self sustaining outpost on the moon be more worthy?
It's not really a question of it being worthy. It's a question of it being super expensive and the fact that we don't really have all the technology we need to do it yet. Most notably we don't really have adequate radiation shielding for a moon base for manned missions, nor do we have the infrastructure in place to supply such a base. Not saying we shouldn't do it but that is mission that is orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult.
A robotic spacecraft being sent to the outer planets is something we know how to do and the price is comparatively modest. We can do that mission with existing technology. A moon base requires development of a lot of stuff we don't have yet even if it isn't manned.
That is a matter of incompetence and bad policy. Lot's of people in the US love to insist that we have the best healthcare system in the world and that nothing is broken despite the fact that we pay the most (by a wide margin) and do not get even close to the best outcomes by most measures.
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Right... because Apple is really known for driving prices down.
They're also big enough to beat down the FDA and Wizard lobby (aka Doctors).
Damn right, 'cause the FDA and doctors are just evil. Those criminals try to make sure our drugs are safe and that our illnesses get treated. We should rely on the magic of market forces for that. Apple should invent a device that replaces them. [/sarcasm]
All this data fed into the cloud in real time and analyzed for problems? What's not to like?
Lets see... Maybe the fact that there is no actual product and even if there were there are all sorts of likely privacy, security and data interpretation problems.
Those MRE's are as well sealed as the tires on my car.
Unquestionably the MREs are sealed better than your car tires.
The little packets of gum were hard as rocks, and were rumored to contain a mild laxative
Wouldn't be surprising. I have some cousins who served in the army and they informed me that MREs will constipate you rather badly if you have to eat them continuously for a while. I'm guessing that is on purpose since you really don't want an army getting a bad case of the runs.
I've had MREs from time to time. Not exactly fine dining but I've eaten things from actual restaurants that were nastier than some of the contents. A few of the items in them were actually fairly decent and all are calorie dense. If you are a picky eater you are going to hate them but if not they are generally decent if not pleasant fare.
"Based on the amount of education received" isn't a measurable metric.
Nonsense. It is ridiculously easy to measure. Credit hours taken (doesn't matter if they pass) is a trivial way to do it. Semesters attended is another. There are plenty of useful proxies for the amount of time spent in a classroom. Pick some useful ones. This is not hard.
What if you don't pay administrative costs (like dorm deposits, paying for the credits, etc)?
Administrative costs can (and are) easily be rolled into the total amount charged if needed. Not difficult from an accounting standpoint and I am an accountant so I ought to know.
You really aren't ready to discuss solutions when you have no idea about the workings of the US collegiate ecosystem and assume that a bill can be tailored to restructure it at-will to serve a specific purpose.
Interesting how you presume I have no knowledge of the business end of US higher education or lawmaking since you have no idea what my background actually is. You might want to reconsider that.
Depends on the position. If we are talking engineers probably not but that may be "just the right kind of out of the box thinking" needed for the standard MBA types.
Oh yes, engineers are just paragons of virtue. I'm reading a whole bunch of engineers posting in this thread about how they would scam the system and you think someone with a business degree is somehow worse? Seriously, I have both engineering and business degrees. Are you claiming that I am a criminal because I went to school to learn how to run a business? Or are you just interested in scapegoating a bunch of people you don't actually know much about because it is convenient and you don't actually understand what they do?
Let me give you a tip. No matter what your job is, people think you are an incompetent idiot in some way and few people will ever really understand what you do. People (wrongly) think engineers are arrogant nerds with limited social skills and bad hygiene who don't understand anything that isn't a machine and who don't understand money at all. People (wrongly) think all finance people are criminals who are only interested in making a quick buck. People (wrongly) think all marketing people are a bunch of impractical imbeciles who don't understand anything technical. People (wrongly) think that people who manage others are incompetent greedy asshole who can't actually do anything useful and who never make correct decisions. In ANY profession you will find some people who are good, a lot of people who are mediocre and some people who are genuinely incompetent. Just because you've run into some of the later doesn't mean everyone is just like them.
Re:Because you can doesn't mean you should
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Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
So you move the population close to the oceans. Without a currency based society* this shouldn't be that big of a deal to do.
Except that people likely would not WANT to move there. It would be crowded along the coast. Hell, people purposely live in places like Phoenix because they like the heat and the dry. Do you seriously think they will move to the ocean if they can bring the water to them?
For that matter, who says that the water would not have been there?
Nature. It wasn't there before humans put it there ergo it would not have been there unless we were the ones who removed it in the first place. Is that really not obvious?
If anything, you could fix an environmental problem created by us in the first place.
Maybe or maybe not. We don't have a great track record of responsible stewardship even when we (too rarely) know what to do. People generally put short term personal interest above actions that are optimal for society as a whole. If anything removal of economic restrictions would probably make the problem worse. Then you have people able to do all sorts of irresponsible things just because they are bored and have the ability.
If someone doesnt get a job, theres a good chance theyre going to be supported by taxpayer dollars for a long time.
You mean like every stay at home parent? Oh wait, they have spouses who can be taxed too.
Fact is most people have some amount of income and for the most part they are not supported entirely by the state for periods measured in years. Those that are, are rarely the sort that went to college. People who bother to go to college are mostly people who want jobs that don't involve asking if you want fries with that.
I hadnt realized that you could pay taxes in excess of what you make / own.
Apparently you hadn't realized you can read the post you are replying to either so I'll repeat my response. If the person doesn't pay taxes towards their education after some reasonable number of years then you turn it into regular debt and turn them over to a collections agency if needed. Furthermore you can also require a cosigner like a parent or spouse and require them to pay if the student doesn't. This is not a difficult problem to solve but you seem awfully determined to think every little nuance is some insurmountable obstacle.
Unlimited free energy* = low cost desalination = no water problem.
Just because you have some magic technology allowing you to get it doesn't mean you can or should use it. Now you are talking about moving massive amounts of water around from the oceans to locations where it would not have been ordinarily. You think that will have no ecological impact? Just because we can build a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas in the desert doesn't make it a good idea*. The limitations aren't just economic or material, they are also consequential. If you do something it will have an effect on the world around you and there is more than a small possibly it will not a good one. We're not all that great about foreseeing all the consequences of our actions. Removing energy limitations will not make us better at predicting the future.
* I've actually seen idiots saying we should divert water from the Great Lakes to fill up Lake Mead to support Las Vegas. Here's a better idea, don't build a major city in the damn desert.
In all fairness, most homeless in the streets aren't homeless in the streets because of a scarcity of food, energy and shelter.
What you are talking about is local scarcity. Just because the scarcity is caused by distribution problems rather than production limitations doesn't mean it isn't scarce. If you live in a desert, water is going to be expensive because it is relatively had to get. That is scarcity or more properly an economic shortage.
Compare it to a century or two ago and you'll see that many homeless now have a higher quality of life than a good portion of the middle class did back then.
Bullshit. You CLEARLY have no idea what being homeless is actually like, nor do you have any realistic idea what being "middle class" was like 100 years ago. Let me give you a hint. My grandmother is close to a century old so she was around back then and her family could accurately be described as lower middle class. It wasn't all that different than it is now aside from some of the technology advances. Her father was a barber, her mom worked for a state agency, they had a house not so different from the one you probably live in. You seem to have some bizarre notion that people lived in caves and squalor a hundred years ago. It wasn't like that at all nor was it like that 200 years ago.
I hope they are careful. Here is another way to scam the system: Arrange your classes so that at the end of your senior year, you are one credit hour shy of the requirement for graduation. Now you have the education, and the transcripts to prove it to prospective employers, but no actual taxable degree.
So tax them based on the amount of education received, not the degree. I should think that would be obvious. The point is to better fund their education, not their degree.
Plus would you hire someone who did that? Me neither. Such a person would raise all kinds of red flags about how they would game the system at my company.
What happens when those folks dont graduate, and thus dont pay the tax?
You make the tax contingent on time spent in school rather than whether they graduation. You're subsidizing their education, not their degree.
What happens when they dont get a job-- does that mean that the people who succeed are in effect subsidizing those who failed?
You give them a reasonable grace period of a few years (5 maybe?) and if they don't find or seek employment, the subsidy converts to conventional debt which they have to repay similar to the current system. If someone wants to become a stay-at-home parent, that is fine but then they can pay for it like any other loan for the education they are not using.
These are problems with relatively easy solutions if you give it more than about 2 seconds thought.
Who pays for the initial four to six years that the universities won't have tuition coming in to help pay the bills?
The state would have to bootstrap the program. This isn't as big a problem as it probably sounds like at first since you would do it through state universities that already are funded by the state. The money for it would come, it would just take a few years. Could be funded by floating a bond. Once the program is up and running in a few years then it would be self funding and the bond would get repaid. This is more or less how a lot of schools get funded now and the mechanics are well understood.
But, that is not what is being proposed. If they leave the country, how is the money collected?
Couple of options there. I would probably only make this available to US citizens and probably residents of the state. You could require a co-signer like a parent. You also could work out an arrangement with the department of state/justice to revoke passports or extradite the person if they don't pay in a timely manner, just like any other tax cheat. There probably will be some people who manage to welch out on the rest of us but there aren't a lot of people who are likely to flee the country. Many other countries pay for the student's education and yet we don't see those countries having a mass exodus of talent.
What if they claim they can't pay because of financial hardship?
It's through paid through taxation the burden doesn't go away until they repay it. In actuality it would work more gracefully than the current system. If they earn more then they pay it back faster, if they earn less it takes longer.
"In order to get a job, I need a Bachelor's degree!"
So make it for just a Bachelors at first. As you work out the details then you can expand the program.
The "I was denied admission because I didn't do well on the tests but those tests are not geared to people like me!" We have already seen complaints that the admission tests discriminate against the urban poor.
We already have those sorts of lawsuits. Nothing new to see here. It's a real problem but changing the funding model doesn't change the admissions model or the underlying socioeconomic problems of poverty.
Honestly I think this sort of funding model has enough merit to warrant serious consideration. I think there are some potential downstream consequences that will need some serious thought but on the surface it seems to make a fair bit of sense.
1. People who go to college and graduate, only to become stay at home dads/moms would be a burden on the system.. Easy to fix for marriages, but harder for the unmarried.
So give them a grace period to earn money and if they choose not to become a part of the workforce by the end of that grace period then the tax burden becomes conventional debt that must be repaid similar to how it is now.
2. People who dont graduate/stay in school forever.
Easily solved by capping the time subsidized to 4 years and requiring maintenance of minimum academic standards. Anything beyond that requires the student to finance it themselves. Don't graduate and you still are obligated to pay for the education you did receive.
3. Dwindling population, in general, or just of graduates, will destroy the system.
Not anymore than the current system. Falling populations already can decimate schools under the current funding model if they can't adjust costs to stay in line with revenues.
Who pays for the students who go to university and don't graduate?
How about those students. If they drop out due to bad grades or other non-hardship reasons then tax those students for costs incurred.
What happens with perpetual students? You know, the people who have been in school for the last ten to twenty years and haven't received a degree. What happens with them?
Easy. You get subsidized for 4 years (or 2 if for grad school) and then after that you start incurring debt if you need longer to graduate similar to how things happen now.
What is to stop someone from going to a university until they are one class shy of graduating, moving out of state or even out of the country, and then finishing their degree and never falling under the tax?
Probably not much but there are ways to mitigate the problem. First thing is that you incur the tax based on time enrolled, not degrees achieved. Second is that you make it like a contract with any other creditor. You don't pay it back and you get your wages garnished. Third, you provide incentives to keep them from leaving the state like waiving a portion of the cost if they remain local and economically productive for some number of years. Fourth, you can require a co-signer like a parent who is responsible for the cost if the student decides to flee the country. Etc. There are lots of ways to mitigate this problem.
That's a totally brilliant idea! That way, successful people are penalized for going to college, while slackers get a college education for free and then have to pay almost nothing back. What could possibly go wrong?
That basically happens now. I realize you are being sarcastic but the successful motivated people pretty much always end up subsidizing those who are less able and/or motivated. The only question is how.
I have to point out that this is program would remove all barrier to college entry.
You mean except for admissions tests, high school grades, admissions committees, and limited budgets? Just because someone else is paying up front doesn't mean that Harvard is going to let you in. Even big state schools like University of Michigan or University of Virginia have relatively high admissions standards and money doesn't really need to play a role in those. Either you're good enough to get in or you aren't. Nothing wrong with community college or trade schools if those are a better fit for someone.
If there is no cost to start education, and not finish it, then there will be millions of people who do so.
There already are millions who start and don't finish. That's nothing new. Furthermore even if someone doesn't get a degree, there is still probably some value in the education they received. Obviously there would have to be admissions standards and performance standards (minimum GPA, graduate within 4 years, etc) to continue to receive this up front subsidy.
I think the bigger question is how universities would reorganize themselves due to the new financial structure. Right now they have a certain funding model and a structure that flows out of that. Change the funding model and there will be unintended consequences in how universities organize themselves and provide education. The downstream consequences could be very, ummm... interesting.
The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
Not just modern medicine, virtually all modern industry would go away with that commune approach. You won't have steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, most rubber, most electronics, batteries, particle accelerators, the internet, etc. The list goes on and on. I'm pretty sure there are not many of people who really desire that life.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the original iPad.
What about it? It was expensive and it remains expensive.
The Doctors aren't evil... they just practice medicine the old fashioned way. Most learned their diagnostic skills when rotary phones were the standard.
That's a nice bit of data you made up. Twenty seconds on google would have shown that you are wrong. The average age of a physician in the US is 51 years old. That means the average doctor was in medical school between the late 80s and mid 90s and half have trained more recently than that. Sure there are some old farts out there but they are the exception at this point. You seem to have some notion that diagnosis and treatment of disease has undergone some radical change in the last 20 years that makes the skills of older physicians obsolete. This view is entirely incorrect and worse it wrongly presumes that doctors stop learning when they finish their residency.
Furthermore I'm married to a doctor so I know personally that your notions about how "out of date" their skills are is quite incorrect. Most are actually fairly up to date in the area of their specialty. You also have a very false notion about how they practice medicine. Most are eager to use the best techniques available PROVIDED that they can be shown to be an improvement. Doctor's as a rule have a very sensible "show me the data" attitude but they aren't at all averse to new tech, quite the opposite in fact.
As for the FDA... They're not that bad.... just usually very blinder focused.
That statement is so vague as to be meaningless.
and you'll be surprised that most of your medical procedure data is already in the cloud, if you used insurance or put your SSN on any form
I'm well aware of what is out there. My wife's practice uses a medical records system that stores data through a company in another state as does basically any big insurance company. Apple isn't really set up to deal with the regulatory burden that comes with that. Not to say they couldn't be in theory but I doubt they will in any big way. Apple is a consumer products company, not a medical device company. In my day job I work with medical device companies (we make wire harnesses for them) and it is a very different industry with very different cost structures and very different regulatory requirements. Producing a heart rate monitor or fancy pedometer is one thing. Producing a device that is going to actually communicate with your doctor about serious medical conditions is a whole different kettle of fish.
The problem is most of the diagnostic information is in islands that the MDs don't even have good access to.
Wrong. They do have access to all sorts of information and can usually get what they need. The problem is that the access too often isn't efficient (slow and expensive) and that the data is complicated. It is HARD to make a database that efficiently captures all relevant medical information. It is much harder still to make a database that can communicate with all the other databases out there is an useful and efficient manner for an economically sensible price. This has nothing to do with the doctors directly. This has to do with the technical difficulty and economic problems of creating a networked and efficient medical records system. Doctors don't write software, IT people do and not the sort that tends to work at Apple.
All we have to do is tunnel below the Moon's surface.
Oh is that all? An pray tell, where can I get one of these robotic tunnel borers on the moon? You're talking about getting a HUGE piece of equipment to the moon which has to operate remotely, reliably and requires virtually no servicing. We don't have tunnel boring machines that fit that description here on Earth, much less ones that can operate on the moon. You can't really just hand wave this problem away. Excavating machines are necessarily very heavy and thus extremely expensive with current tech (chemical rockets) to get to the moon. You're likely talking multiple launches of Atlas V class rockets which deliver the machines with pinpoint accuracy to the moon which then somehow have to be put together. And it isn't just the machine to do the tunnel boring, you need structural materials to support the excavation and all the other building materials for the base. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but what I am saying is that it is a VERY challenging and expensive problem for which we do not presently have the technology.
Even better, it's hypothesized that there's already underground tunnels on the Moon, left over from its formation.
So we're going to rely on hypothetical tunnels to shield us from radiation? Great plan...
Why wouldn't putting a self sustaining outpost on the moon be more worthy?
It's not really a question of it being worthy. It's a question of it being super expensive and the fact that we don't really have all the technology we need to do it yet. Most notably we don't really have adequate radiation shielding for a moon base for manned missions, nor do we have the infrastructure in place to supply such a base. Not saying we shouldn't do it but that is mission that is orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult.
A robotic spacecraft being sent to the outer planets is something we know how to do and the price is comparatively modest. We can do that mission with existing technology. A moon base requires development of a lot of stuff we don't have yet even if it isn't manned.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That is a matter of incompetence and bad policy. Lot's of people in the US love to insist that we have the best healthcare system in the world and that nothing is broken despite the fact that we pay the most (by a wide margin) and do not get even close to the best outcomes by most measures.
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Right... because Apple is really known for driving prices down.
They're also big enough to beat down the FDA and Wizard lobby (aka Doctors).
Damn right, 'cause the FDA and doctors are just evil. Those criminals try to make sure our drugs are safe and that our illnesses get treated. We should rely on the magic of market forces for that. Apple should invent a device that replaces them. [/sarcasm]
All this data fed into the cloud in real time and analyzed for problems? What's not to like?
Lets see... Maybe the fact that there is no actual product and even if there were there are all sorts of likely privacy, security and data interpretation problems.
For one thing, the police aren't even involved, just the sheriff (an officer of the court).
In most places in the US a sheriff is a police officer with legal responsibility to a county. In a lot of places they are the principal police force.
Those MRE's are as well sealed as the tires on my car.
Unquestionably the MREs are sealed better than your car tires.
The little packets of gum were hard as rocks, and were rumored to contain a mild laxative
Wouldn't be surprising. I have some cousins who served in the army and they informed me that MREs will constipate you rather badly if you have to eat them continuously for a while. I'm guessing that is on purpose since you really don't want an army getting a bad case of the runs.
I've had MREs from time to time. Not exactly fine dining but I've eaten things from actual restaurants that were nastier than some of the contents. A few of the items in them were actually fairly decent and all are calorie dense. If you are a picky eater you are going to hate them but if not they are generally decent if not pleasant fare.
My dad was one of those guys [wikipedia.org]. He was never really happy outside of the service. Needed someone to tell him what to do.
Isn't that what marriage is for? [/rimshot]
Thank you, I'll be here all night. Tip your waitresses...
I like the idea of towable range extenders, but if you're renting one, what are the advantages over automated battery swapping instead?
You can use the existing gasoline/diesel infrastructure. Big advantage since automated battery swapping infrastructure essentially does not exist yet.
"Based on the amount of education received" isn't a measurable metric.
Nonsense. It is ridiculously easy to measure. Credit hours taken (doesn't matter if they pass) is a trivial way to do it. Semesters attended is another. There are plenty of useful proxies for the amount of time spent in a classroom. Pick some useful ones. This is not hard.
What if you don't pay administrative costs (like dorm deposits, paying for the credits, etc)?
Administrative costs can (and are) easily be rolled into the total amount charged if needed. Not difficult from an accounting standpoint and I am an accountant so I ought to know.
You really aren't ready to discuss solutions when you have no idea about the workings of the US collegiate ecosystem and assume that a bill can be tailored to restructure it at-will to serve a specific purpose.
Interesting how you presume I have no knowledge of the business end of US higher education or lawmaking since you have no idea what my background actually is. You might want to reconsider that.
Depends on the position. If we are talking engineers probably not but that may be "just the right kind of out of the box thinking" needed for the standard MBA types.
Oh yes, engineers are just paragons of virtue. I'm reading a whole bunch of engineers posting in this thread about how they would scam the system and you think someone with a business degree is somehow worse? Seriously, I have both engineering and business degrees. Are you claiming that I am a criminal because I went to school to learn how to run a business? Or are you just interested in scapegoating a bunch of people you don't actually know much about because it is convenient and you don't actually understand what they do?
Let me give you a tip. No matter what your job is, people think you are an incompetent idiot in some way and few people will ever really understand what you do. People (wrongly) think engineers are arrogant nerds with limited social skills and bad hygiene who don't understand anything that isn't a machine and who don't understand money at all. People (wrongly) think all finance people are criminals who are only interested in making a quick buck. People (wrongly) think all marketing people are a bunch of impractical imbeciles who don't understand anything technical. People (wrongly) think that people who manage others are incompetent greedy asshole who can't actually do anything useful and who never make correct decisions. In ANY profession you will find some people who are good, a lot of people who are mediocre and some people who are genuinely incompetent. Just because you've run into some of the later doesn't mean everyone is just like them.
So you move the population close to the oceans. Without a currency based society* this shouldn't be that big of a deal to do.
Except that people likely would not WANT to move there. It would be crowded along the coast. Hell, people purposely live in places like Phoenix because they like the heat and the dry. Do you seriously think they will move to the ocean if they can bring the water to them?
For that matter, who says that the water would not have been there?
Nature. It wasn't there before humans put it there ergo it would not have been there unless we were the ones who removed it in the first place. Is that really not obvious?
If anything, you could fix an environmental problem created by us in the first place.
Maybe or maybe not. We don't have a great track record of responsible stewardship even when we (too rarely) know what to do. People generally put short term personal interest above actions that are optimal for society as a whole. If anything removal of economic restrictions would probably make the problem worse. Then you have people able to do all sorts of irresponsible things just because they are bored and have the ability.
If someone doesnt get a job, theres a good chance theyre going to be supported by taxpayer dollars for a long time.
You mean like every stay at home parent? Oh wait, they have spouses who can be taxed too.
Fact is most people have some amount of income and for the most part they are not supported entirely by the state for periods measured in years. Those that are, are rarely the sort that went to college. People who bother to go to college are mostly people who want jobs that don't involve asking if you want fries with that.
I hadnt realized that you could pay taxes in excess of what you make / own.
Apparently you hadn't realized you can read the post you are replying to either so I'll repeat my response. If the person doesn't pay taxes towards their education after some reasonable number of years then you turn it into regular debt and turn them over to a collections agency if needed. Furthermore you can also require a cosigner like a parent or spouse and require them to pay if the student doesn't. This is not a difficult problem to solve but you seem awfully determined to think every little nuance is some insurmountable obstacle.
Unlimited free energy* = low cost desalination = no water problem.
Just because you have some magic technology allowing you to get it doesn't mean you can or should use it. Now you are talking about moving massive amounts of water around from the oceans to locations where it would not have been ordinarily. You think that will have no ecological impact? Just because we can build a city like Phoenix or Las Vegas in the desert doesn't make it a good idea*. The limitations aren't just economic or material, they are also consequential. If you do something it will have an effect on the world around you and there is more than a small possibly it will not a good one. We're not all that great about foreseeing all the consequences of our actions. Removing energy limitations will not make us better at predicting the future.
* I've actually seen idiots saying we should divert water from the Great Lakes to fill up Lake Mead to support Las Vegas. Here's a better idea, don't build a major city in the damn desert.
In all fairness, most homeless in the streets aren't homeless in the streets because of a scarcity of food, energy and shelter.
What you are talking about is local scarcity. Just because the scarcity is caused by distribution problems rather than production limitations doesn't mean it isn't scarce. If you live in a desert, water is going to be expensive because it is relatively had to get. That is scarcity or more properly an economic shortage.
Compare it to a century or two ago and you'll see that many homeless now have a higher quality of life than a good portion of the middle class did back then.
Bullshit. You CLEARLY have no idea what being homeless is actually like, nor do you have any realistic idea what being "middle class" was like 100 years ago. Let me give you a hint. My grandmother is close to a century old so she was around back then and her family could accurately be described as lower middle class. It wasn't all that different than it is now aside from some of the technology advances. Her father was a barber, her mom worked for a state agency, they had a house not so different from the one you probably live in. You seem to have some bizarre notion that people lived in caves and squalor a hundred years ago. It wasn't like that at all nor was it like that 200 years ago.
I hope they are careful. Here is another way to scam the system: Arrange your classes so that at the end of your senior year, you are one credit hour shy of the requirement for graduation. Now you have the education, and the transcripts to prove it to prospective employers, but no actual taxable degree.
So tax them based on the amount of education received, not the degree. I should think that would be obvious. The point is to better fund their education, not their degree.
Plus would you hire someone who did that? Me neither. Such a person would raise all kinds of red flags about how they would game the system at my company.
What happens when those folks dont graduate, and thus dont pay the tax?
You make the tax contingent on time spent in school rather than whether they graduation. You're subsidizing their education, not their degree.
What happens when they dont get a job-- does that mean that the people who succeed are in effect subsidizing those who failed?
You give them a reasonable grace period of a few years (5 maybe?) and if they don't find or seek employment, the subsidy converts to conventional debt which they have to repay similar to the current system. If someone wants to become a stay-at-home parent, that is fine but then they can pay for it like any other loan for the education they are not using.
These are problems with relatively easy solutions if you give it more than about 2 seconds thought.
Who pays for the initial four to six years that the universities won't have tuition coming in to help pay the bills?
The state would have to bootstrap the program. This isn't as big a problem as it probably sounds like at first since you would do it through state universities that already are funded by the state. The money for it would come, it would just take a few years. Could be funded by floating a bond. Once the program is up and running in a few years then it would be self funding and the bond would get repaid. This is more or less how a lot of schools get funded now and the mechanics are well understood.
But, that is not what is being proposed. If they leave the country, how is the money collected?
Couple of options there. I would probably only make this available to US citizens and probably residents of the state. You could require a co-signer like a parent. You also could work out an arrangement with the department of state/justice to revoke passports or extradite the person if they don't pay in a timely manner, just like any other tax cheat. There probably will be some people who manage to welch out on the rest of us but there aren't a lot of people who are likely to flee the country. Many other countries pay for the student's education and yet we don't see those countries having a mass exodus of talent.
What if they claim they can't pay because of financial hardship?
It's through paid through taxation the burden doesn't go away until they repay it. In actuality it would work more gracefully than the current system. If they earn more then they pay it back faster, if they earn less it takes longer.
"In order to get a job, I need a Bachelor's degree!"
So make it for just a Bachelors at first. As you work out the details then you can expand the program.
The "I was denied admission because I didn't do well on the tests but those tests are not geared to people like me!" We have already seen complaints that the admission tests discriminate against the urban poor.
We already have those sorts of lawsuits. Nothing new to see here. It's a real problem but changing the funding model doesn't change the admissions model or the underlying socioeconomic problems of poverty.
Honestly I think this sort of funding model has enough merit to warrant serious consideration. I think there are some potential downstream consequences that will need some serious thought but on the surface it seems to make a fair bit of sense.
1. People who go to college and graduate, only to become stay at home dads/moms would be a burden on the system.. Easy to fix for marriages, but harder for the unmarried.
So give them a grace period to earn money and if they choose not to become a part of the workforce by the end of that grace period then the tax burden becomes conventional debt that must be repaid similar to how it is now.
2. People who dont graduate/stay in school forever.
Easily solved by capping the time subsidized to 4 years and requiring maintenance of minimum academic standards. Anything beyond that requires the student to finance it themselves. Don't graduate and you still are obligated to pay for the education you did receive.
3. Dwindling population, in general, or just of graduates, will destroy the system.
Not anymore than the current system. Falling populations already can decimate schools under the current funding model if they can't adjust costs to stay in line with revenues.
Who pays for the students who go to university and don't graduate?
How about those students. If they drop out due to bad grades or other non-hardship reasons then tax those students for costs incurred.
What happens with perpetual students? You know, the people who have been in school for the last ten to twenty years and haven't received a degree. What happens with them?
Easy. You get subsidized for 4 years (or 2 if for grad school) and then after that you start incurring debt if you need longer to graduate similar to how things happen now.
What is to stop someone from going to a university until they are one class shy of graduating, moving out of state or even out of the country, and then finishing their degree and never falling under the tax?
Probably not much but there are ways to mitigate the problem. First thing is that you incur the tax based on time enrolled, not degrees achieved. Second is that you make it like a contract with any other creditor. You don't pay it back and you get your wages garnished. Third, you provide incentives to keep them from leaving the state like waiving a portion of the cost if they remain local and economically productive for some number of years. Fourth, you can require a co-signer like a parent who is responsible for the cost if the student decides to flee the country. Etc. There are lots of ways to mitigate this problem.
That's a totally brilliant idea! That way, successful people are penalized for going to college, while slackers get a college education for free and then have to pay almost nothing back. What could possibly go wrong?
That basically happens now. I realize you are being sarcastic but the successful motivated people pretty much always end up subsidizing those who are less able and/or motivated. The only question is how.
I have to point out that this is program would remove all barrier to college entry.
You mean except for admissions tests, high school grades, admissions committees, and limited budgets? Just because someone else is paying up front doesn't mean that Harvard is going to let you in. Even big state schools like University of Michigan or University of Virginia have relatively high admissions standards and money doesn't really need to play a role in those. Either you're good enough to get in or you aren't. Nothing wrong with community college or trade schools if those are a better fit for someone.
If there is no cost to start education, and not finish it, then there will be millions of people who do so.
There already are millions who start and don't finish. That's nothing new. Furthermore even if someone doesn't get a degree, there is still probably some value in the education they received. Obviously there would have to be admissions standards and performance standards (minimum GPA, graduate within 4 years, etc) to continue to receive this up front subsidy.
I think the bigger question is how universities would reorganize themselves due to the new financial structure. Right now they have a certain funding model and a structure that flows out of that. Change the funding model and there will be unintended consequences in how universities organize themselves and provide education. The downstream consequences could be very, ummm... interesting.
The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
Not just modern medicine, virtually all modern industry would go away with that commune approach. You won't have steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, most rubber, most electronics, batteries, particle accelerators, the internet, etc. The list goes on and on. I'm pretty sure there are not many of people who really desire that life.