if you stop paying them the bank can take your car/house/etc just as with a default on any debt.
Cite? I have friends who have gone into default, and the bank's recourse was to garnish wages. For federal loans, the sum owed can be taken from your income tax refund, assuming you get one. But seizing property doesn't happen.
Anyway, if you owe much money and can't pay it, better just to move abroad. Banks can't garnish wages earned outside the US, and your credit report is linked to your social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for.
No, the US government claims. The funding is directed at a project that is going ahead in Delaware. The project of building in Finland is something separate. Apparently you're unaware that it's possible for a company to produce more than one good at the same time.
Your entire view of things seems stuck in the 18th-century ideals that may have inspired early politicians, but which may no longer make sense to contemporary society. Utilitarianism, for example, was first argued to a rigorous degree only after the generation of the Founding Fathers, and so they were unable to take it into account. Contemporary society, however, may subscribe to it and put it in practice. Notions of the proper function of government are something that reasonable people may disagree about.
I think this works in countries like Finland for one main reason: Ethnic Non-Diversity. Everyone looks the same and has the same basic ancestry
You have an outdated view of Finland. In certain municipalities, the presence of immigrants is comparable to plenty of other countries, but support for the welfare state remains strong. Even our "far right" party doesn't want to dismantle social services.
In any event, all of the EU offers universal healthcare, even countries that have an enormous amount of immigrants.
Apparently you only read the sensationalistic headline of the recent Slashdot discussion and didn't bother to look into the matter. The cars that Fisker will produce in Finland are not related to the funding received from the US government. The US government funding is linked to other cars that Fisker will begin to produce in Delaware.
You must be joking? The first payment is 6 months after graduation here i Norway as well. I can also tell you that after 3 years in a country with free higher education, I'd paid >$25k in tuition fees.
It seems that you took out loans, which might not have been necessary. In Finland, where I studied, loans are an option, but many students get by pretty well with the monthly payments that the state makes to anyone enrolled in higher education (which do not have to be paid back) and/or through seasonal work. Consequently, they graduate debt-free.
I still don't really understand why you paid tuition fees in a country with free higher education.
If my cultural insight is of any value (I'm from norway) the travelling is usually done after high school, most people go to work fresh after finishing their college education.
FWIW, I'm a postgraduate student in Finland. I know a load of people who, once they finished studying, went WWOFing in Australia for a year, or now they are accustomed to work in Finland for the summer and then travel during the cold months. Even if it's a minority of people who decide to pursue leisure like that, at least they can. The average American university student doesn't get a chance to do fun things like that.
And all those countries some are going to list for me with "free healthcare" and "free education" all have one thing in common, they are either failing or were bailed out by the U.S. of A.
That's a bizarre claim. Take Finland, for example: same welfare state as its Nordic neighbours, including universal healthcare and no tuition fees. It's doing pretty well economically, so it's hardly "failing", and they have refused to join NATO and provide for their own defense, so the USA is hardly "bailing them out."
The Supreme Court disagrees with your interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. The Supreme Court is the body tasked with determining the legality of government action. The system is working as intended.
Traffic cops are not supposed to fill the gas tanks of poor people.
Traffic cops are already an example of redistribution of wealth. Your taxes go to ensure that everyone else (rich, poor, employed, unemployed) are safe on the roads.
Subsidized student loans are "free" money that enslaves most for a lifetime.
I must agree. Look at young people in other Western countries: when they finish their education, they have the option of travelling for a while, or they can start to do seasonal work, save up their money and spend the rest of the year at leisure. Meanwhile, American students are frantic to find a job as soon as they graduate, because the demands for repayment come 6 months after their graduation date and there's no letup. By the time many have repaid their loans, they feel too old or are too burdened with a family to drop things for a little while and pursue whatever interest they have.
Where does it say that the Federal Government can give away my money to other people?
Taxation is a valid function of government and has been since 1787. And if the government was going to spend the money you pay in taxes solely on you, then it would hardly need to raise taxes to begin with.
Acquaint yourself with American history. Some degree of redistribution of wealth has always been part of the operation of the federal government. Now, you may disagree on particular spending, and you have a right to choose representatives who might push for change -- it's taxation with representation, a just way of doing things. But your rhetoric is out of touch with American democracy even as the Founding Fathers conceived it.
Ultimately, humanity must escape the cradle of Earth and venture forth, to provide assurance that we will not be snuffed out by destruction -- self-made or otherwise.
Why? That narrative about it being humankind's destiny to expand and live forever just doesn't hold any more. Plenty of thinkers have speculated that the human race has other possible futures, such as voluntary extinction (declining birthrates in the wake of robots doing almost everything, for example), replacement by a new AI species, living on Earth inside a virtual reality instead of expanding outward, etc.
Finally, the exploration of frontiers unknown brings out the best our kind has to offer. It is why we exist. When we navel gaze we are not fulfilling our purpose.
The "purpose" you want to shackle people to is an accident of evolutionary biology. As a sentient species with (relative) free will, we can choose to enjoy this life we have before us and we are not obliged to propagate humanity unto the ages and fill the cosmos. We owe our descendants nothing if we choose not to have descendants.
If Queen Isabella was developing robotics that could cheaply sail to the west and extract resources for her, then sending people would have been a useless money pit. That lame comparison just won't do any more.
Seriously? All the astronauts from all countries have given first hand accounts of their reaction to space.
The OP said worthwhile accounts. While a poetic statement about "beautiful desolation" or looking down on the Earth might sound nice, it doesn't advance our knowledge of space much.
It's the first hand accounts that really capture people's imaginations. To watch the short film "Yuri" or talk to someone who watched the first moon landing live.
Sure, the public watched the first moon landing and got fired up, but that enthusiasm dropped like a rock with subsequent landings. Human endeavours in space no longer interest the general population. As much as nerds like to talk about the importance of capturing people's imaginations, all the initiatives they launch fail.
There's very few Illiterate people in Finland, the education system is top notch.
"Illiterate" is rather an exaggeration, but my point was that people without much education are able to receive a salary that in the US would seem fairly generous for the work done. When I moved to Finland for graduate school, I didn't speak Finnish for some time and so the only work available to me was cleaning. Among my colleagues, which also included a great deal of foreign students like myself, were refugees who came from some horrible places and had little formal schooling. Nonetheless, we all started off at 9 euro/hour and then received raises after a pretty short time at the same place.
Considering the high price of labour in Finland (where even illiterate cleaners make $13/hour), could this be a rare instance of a company telling the truth when it says it had to outsource because it couldn't get the work done in America? It's hard to believe that this work is being relocated just to cut costs.
The only way to get out is if - God forbids - you get permanently disabled or some other horrific event of that magnitude.
Or just move abroad. Debt is linked to your US social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for. I've met a great deal of Americans who moved to Europe or Asia and then decided to walk away from tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and I recently read an article (can't find the link, sorry) that now there's a rising trend of moving abroad to teach English just to escape creditors.
A resourceful person could do the equivalent of a college education for just the cost of an internet connection (or at the library for free).
At least in my field (a branch of comparative linguistics), the state-of-the-art is something that you'll only pick up through direct interaction with lecturers. The view of things in textbooks from as recent as a decade or 20 years ago is considered very superseded. The current consensus is represented to a degree by journal articles that have appeared in the meantime, but so much is being threshed out through informal conversations among experts at seminars and congresses and can't be found in the library. I can think of a few other fields where the same is true. You just can't do it on your own; the social component is necessary if you want to hear what's really going on.
The Book of the New Sun is science-fiction. It starts out as seemingly fantasy, but the science fiction elements are there from the very beginning if you respond to Wolfe's love of apparently casual relevations. For example, many readers go through the first book oblivious to the fact that the protagonist's home is the ruin of a spaceport. But soon Wolfe introduces directed energy weapons, plenty of spacecraft (propelled by solar sails or antigravity technologies whose advantages and limitations are discussed), terraformation schemes, time travel with grandfather paradoxes, and other speculative elements.
There is horseriding, but the horses are genetically engineered and Wolfe offers a substantial explanation of why warfare might regress from machines like tanks to biological tools.
There's also magic, both of the kind that can be explained as extremely advanced technology and (to a lesser extent) of the sort that defies scientific explanation. But I don't think that challenges the work's claim to be science fiction. After all, Larry Niven's Known Space universe has telekinesis and telepathy with no scientific explanation at all (it's just there, some have it and some don't), but the books are still science-fiction, and often categorized specifically as hard science fiction.
Why is it that people keep lumping science fiction with fantasy? What is it that makes the two in any way related?
In the Golden Age of science fiction, the same authors wrote both. There are plenty of tales from the as far back as the 1950s where seemingly the characters are going through a simple sword and sorcery plot, but in the end it is revealed that the setting's lack of technology is the result of the fall of a hi-tech civilization, or conversely the magic in the story is in fact extremely advanced technology. If major figures like Poul Anderson were blurring the boundaries before you were likely even born, it's hard to blame this on recent morons who don't know the genre.
You might prefer such a strict definition of science fiction, but the list that is the topic of this Slashdot discussion contains not only books where science coexists with fantastical elements, but also outright fantasy. The term "Science fiction" is commonly used to encompass a wide range of genres.
And it has been like that for a long, long time. Wolfe's sequence is hardly more fantastical than e.g. Olaf Stapledon's work, but the latter is regularly seen as a classic of science fiction (and not fantasy). Indeed, it was the prevalence of fantastical elements in Golden Age science fiction that led some to use the term "hard science fiction" to emphasize works that didn't stray from our understanding of physics.
My cynical side wants to attribute it to the genre's turn towards the literary. Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun when Golden Age science-fiction provides a simple tale that can be read in an hour or two.
Dozois's anthologies are a great place to find the standouts of the last few decades. It was his Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction that introduced me to Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Cress, (late-period) Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepherd and others when I had previously known only pulpish science-fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Emacs not important for you? Except for a small C core, everything is written in Lisp.
Cite? I have friends who have gone into default, and the bank's recourse was to garnish wages. For federal loans, the sum owed can be taken from your income tax refund, assuming you get one. But seizing property doesn't happen.
Anyway, if you owe much money and can't pay it, better just to move abroad. Banks can't garnish wages earned outside the US, and your credit report is linked to your social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for.
No, the US government claims. The funding is directed at a project that is going ahead in Delaware. The project of building in Finland is something separate. Apparently you're unaware that it's possible for a company to produce more than one good at the same time.
Your entire view of things seems stuck in the 18th-century ideals that may have inspired early politicians, but which may no longer make sense to contemporary society. Utilitarianism, for example, was first argued to a rigorous degree only after the generation of the Founding Fathers, and so they were unable to take it into account. Contemporary society, however, may subscribe to it and put it in practice. Notions of the proper function of government are something that reasonable people may disagree about.
You have an outdated view of Finland. In certain municipalities, the presence of immigrants is comparable to plenty of other countries, but support for the welfare state remains strong. Even our "far right" party doesn't want to dismantle social services.
In any event, all of the EU offers universal healthcare, even countries that have an enormous amount of immigrants.
Apparently you only read the sensationalistic headline of the recent Slashdot discussion and didn't bother to look into the matter. The cars that Fisker will produce in Finland are not related to the funding received from the US government. The US government funding is linked to other cars that Fisker will begin to produce in Delaware.
It seems that you took out loans, which might not have been necessary. In Finland, where I studied, loans are an option, but many students get by pretty well with the monthly payments that the state makes to anyone enrolled in higher education (which do not have to be paid back) and/or through seasonal work. Consequently, they graduate debt-free.
I still don't really understand why you paid tuition fees in a country with free higher education.
FWIW, I'm a postgraduate student in Finland. I know a load of people who, once they finished studying, went WWOFing in Australia for a year, or now they are accustomed to work in Finland for the summer and then travel during the cold months. Even if it's a minority of people who decide to pursue leisure like that, at least they can. The average American university student doesn't get a chance to do fun things like that.
That's a bizarre claim. Take Finland, for example: same welfare state as its Nordic neighbours, including universal healthcare and no tuition fees. It's doing pretty well economically, so it's hardly "failing", and they have refused to join NATO and provide for their own defense, so the USA is hardly "bailing them out."
The Supreme Court disagrees with your interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. The Supreme Court is the body tasked with determining the legality of government action. The system is working as intended.
Traffic cops are already an example of redistribution of wealth. Your taxes go to ensure that everyone else (rich, poor, employed, unemployed) are safe on the roads.
I must agree. Look at young people in other Western countries: when they finish their education, they have the option of travelling for a while, or they can start to do seasonal work, save up their money and spend the rest of the year at leisure. Meanwhile, American students are frantic to find a job as soon as they graduate, because the demands for repayment come 6 months after their graduation date and there's no letup. By the time many have repaid their loans, they feel too old or are too burdened with a family to drop things for a little while and pursue whatever interest they have.
Taxation is a valid function of government and has been since 1787. And if the government was going to spend the money you pay in taxes solely on you, then it would hardly need to raise taxes to begin with.
Acquaint yourself with American history. Some degree of redistribution of wealth has always been part of the operation of the federal government. Now, you may disagree on particular spending, and you have a right to choose representatives who might push for change -- it's taxation with representation, a just way of doing things. But your rhetoric is out of touch with American democracy even as the Founding Fathers conceived it.
To bring, for example, rare minerals that allow us to produce more nice things on Earth.
Everything's not you, bro...
...and so don't expect everyone to share your personal ends.
Why? That narrative about it being humankind's destiny to expand and live forever just doesn't hold any more. Plenty of thinkers have speculated that the human race has other possible futures, such as voluntary extinction (declining birthrates in the wake of robots doing almost everything, for example), replacement by a new AI species, living on Earth inside a virtual reality instead of expanding outward, etc.
The "purpose" you want to shackle people to is an accident of evolutionary biology. As a sentient species with (relative) free will, we can choose to enjoy this life we have before us and we are not obliged to propagate humanity unto the ages and fill the cosmos. We owe our descendants nothing if we choose not to have descendants.
If Queen Isabella was developing robotics that could cheaply sail to the west and extract resources for her, then sending people would have been a useless money pit. That lame comparison just won't do any more.
The OP said worthwhile accounts. While a poetic statement about "beautiful desolation" or looking down on the Earth might sound nice, it doesn't advance our knowledge of space much.
Sure, the public watched the first moon landing and got fired up, but that enthusiasm dropped like a rock with subsequent landings. Human endeavours in space no longer interest the general population. As much as nerds like to talk about the importance of capturing people's imaginations, all the initiatives they launch fail.
"Illiterate" is rather an exaggeration, but my point was that people without much education are able to receive a salary that in the US would seem fairly generous for the work done. When I moved to Finland for graduate school, I didn't speak Finnish for some time and so the only work available to me was cleaning. Among my colleagues, which also included a great deal of foreign students like myself, were refugees who came from some horrible places and had little formal schooling. Nonetheless, we all started off at 9 euro/hour and then received raises after a pretty short time at the same place.
Considering the high price of labour in Finland (where even illiterate cleaners make $13/hour), could this be a rare instance of a company telling the truth when it says it had to outsource because it couldn't get the work done in America? It's hard to believe that this work is being relocated just to cut costs.
Or just move abroad. Debt is linked to your US social security number, which no one outside the US will ever ask you for. I've met a great deal of Americans who moved to Europe or Asia and then decided to walk away from tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and I recently read an article (can't find the link, sorry) that now there's a rising trend of moving abroad to teach English just to escape creditors.
At least in my field (a branch of comparative linguistics), the state-of-the-art is something that you'll only pick up through direct interaction with lecturers. The view of things in textbooks from as recent as a decade or 20 years ago is considered very superseded. The current consensus is represented to a degree by journal articles that have appeared in the meantime, but so much is being threshed out through informal conversations among experts at seminars and congresses and can't be found in the library. I can think of a few other fields where the same is true. You just can't do it on your own; the social component is necessary if you want to hear what's really going on.
The Book of the New Sun is science-fiction. It starts out as seemingly fantasy, but the science fiction elements are there from the very beginning if you respond to Wolfe's love of apparently casual relevations. For example, many readers go through the first book oblivious to the fact that the protagonist's home is the ruin of a spaceport. But soon Wolfe introduces directed energy weapons, plenty of spacecraft (propelled by solar sails or antigravity technologies whose advantages and limitations are discussed), terraformation schemes, time travel with grandfather paradoxes, and other speculative elements.
There is horseriding, but the horses are genetically engineered and Wolfe offers a substantial explanation of why warfare might regress from machines like tanks to biological tools.
There's also magic, both of the kind that can be explained as extremely advanced technology and (to a lesser extent) of the sort that defies scientific explanation. But I don't think that challenges the work's claim to be science fiction. After all, Larry Niven's Known Space universe has telekinesis and telepathy with no scientific explanation at all (it's just there, some have it and some don't), but the books are still science-fiction, and often categorized specifically as hard science fiction.
In the Golden Age of science fiction, the same authors wrote both. There are plenty of tales from the as far back as the 1950s where seemingly the characters are going through a simple sword and sorcery plot, but in the end it is revealed that the setting's lack of technology is the result of the fall of a hi-tech civilization, or conversely the magic in the story is in fact extremely advanced technology. If major figures like Poul Anderson were blurring the boundaries before you were likely even born, it's hard to blame this on recent morons who don't know the genre.
You might prefer such a strict definition of science fiction, but the list that is the topic of this Slashdot discussion contains not only books where science coexists with fantastical elements, but also outright fantasy. The term "Science fiction" is commonly used to encompass a wide range of genres.
And it has been like that for a long, long time. Wolfe's sequence is hardly more fantastical than e.g. Olaf Stapledon's work, but the latter is regularly seen as a classic of science fiction (and not fantasy). Indeed, it was the prevalence of fantastical elements in Golden Age science fiction that led some to use the term "hard science fiction" to emphasize works that didn't stray from our understanding of physics.
My cynical side wants to attribute it to the genre's turn towards the literary. Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun when Golden Age science-fiction provides a simple tale that can be read in an hour or two.
Dozois's anthologies are a great place to find the standouts of the last few decades. It was his Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction that introduced me to Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Cress, (late-period) Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepherd and others when I had previously known only pulpish science-fiction.