markshead

> After all, their whole "disruption" is "how about we just ignore all the taxi legislation"

The laws I'm familiar with for taxis specifically apply to a vehicle that you hail (wave down) from the street. If you call a car service and arrange someone to pick you up, the rules are entirely different than taxis. Uber found a way to make it really easy to arrange for someone to pick you up which is what allowed them to use drivers who only met the car service requirements. In general, their innovation was to reduce the inconvenience of arranging a ride with a car service and make it even more convenient than dealing with a taxi.

(I'm not saying they haven't ever done anything that ignored legislation, but it is a stretch to say that their primary innovation was to ignore taxi laws.)

At the bottom of her post she says she did just what you suggest. She started interacting with other people. I don't think the whole "nuclear family causes misery" thing made much sense. She evidently didn't either since her solution to being lonely was to go do things with other people rather than trying to change her family social unit.

I'm not sure the isolation she mentions is because of a nuclear family unless there is something about her family that prohibits her from doing things with other people. For example, going to the park as you do.

The article wouldn't have been as marketable if the title was "Could Not Doing Things With Others Be The Reason We are Lonely?" Yet at the bottom of the article the author explains that she joined a group of other people who were also caring for their children and made friends. That has always been the solution to feeling lonely and isolated.

We could find all kinds of things to blame from television to HVAC systems to larger houses to the Internet. Picking nuclear families as a target seems like quite a stretch. There are plenty of pictures from the time period she mentions that show people outside talking over fences, on their front porches, helping each other, and otherwise interacting with people around them. When we stop doing those types of things, we get lonely. The social unit of nuclear families isn't the reason people feel isolated.

Banks used to be able to loan you money but have it guaranteed by the government. I think that ended in 2010.

Wells Fargo does offer a type of student loan, but it looks like you have to have someone cosign it with you (probably your parents).

Back in the 90s over 90% of student loans were Federal. I'm not sure what the percentage is now.

> I've never met anybody who believes that the government is solely responsible for educating children

Parents who think it is their responsibility to educate their kids and see the public school as one of the ways to provide that education will do things like show up for parent-teacher conferences, make sure their kids complete their homework, understand what their kids are struggling with, and seek out additional help when it is needed (asking the teacher, using internet resources, etc.). I'm sure there are some teachers who would say that describes everyone in their class, but most of the teachers I've talked to say that such a classroom sounds like a wonderful dream.

> There are parents who just aren't capable of taking a more active role in educating their own children

If someone who didn't graduate adopted a high school age student, then I would see your point. However, kids don't start out in high school. They start out much younger. While I'm sure you can find some very unusual exceptions, a parent should be able to take an active role in their kid's education from the beginning. Maybe by the time the kid gets into high school, some parents aren't going to be able to fully understand the math their kids are doing, but you can still take responsibility for what your kid's education even if you don't fully understand their calculus homework.

> make them dischargeable by bankrupcty and let the market price in the default rate and see what happens.

These loans aren't coming from the market. If students had to go to a private bank and make a case about why they were a good investment, student loans would look a lot different--to say nothing about college in general.

Everything I've seen suggests that Plus loans will cover any cost of attendance at a college that isn't covered by other financial aid.

https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/plus#how-much

It is possible to discharge student loans (not just Plus loans) in bankruptcy, but you have to basically prove that you can't survive while still making the payments. I don't know if it is easier to discharge the Plus loans or if they all require the same level of hardship.

> adding any situation where bankruptcy is impossible seems like it destroys the purpose of having bankruptcy exist in the first place.

Agreed, but keep in mind we aren't talking about loans in the traditional sense. Normally a loan requires some entity to take on the risk of default. With student loans this would mean looking at what the individual was studying, how much of their own money they were supplying, the typical default rate, etc. The amount that they will loan and the interest rate will be determined by the answers to those questions.

When you have the government making loans to students without asking those questions, you are no longer running a normal loan program. When you remove the way a loan program usually adjusts to the risks up front, you have to try to deal with the risk elsewhere. This is done by removing the bankruptcy option.

I think the solution is to account for the risk of the loan up front like we do with other loans. This probably means removing or decreasing the government's role in issuing these types of loans. Eventually, I could see colleges sharing the default risk with a private bank. Colleges who don't think their education is worth much would be less likely to participate in such a program, but that probably isn't a bad thing.

That is possible, but in smaller communities where everyone knows each other, I see teachers and parents working together to help their kids succeed. I don't want to discount the value of a good teacher, but I think it is very unfair measure someone's teaching ability based on their ability to overcome poor parenting.

As far as the important piece of paper, I think that is something of a myth as far as college admissions go. I've heard a lot of parents say that they need their kids to graduate from a public school so they can go to college.

All the college admission requirements I've seen are the same for public school graduates and kids who graduated from a non-accredited program. It mostly comes down to your ACT and SAT score.

As I understand it, subsidized loans mean that the government will pay your interest for awhile. Unsubsidized Federal Student Loans are still loans from the government, but you have to start paying interest right away.

As far as I can tell, a combination of different loan programs the government will loan any amount of money toward the cost of college with the only "limit" being for undergraduates. Your parents have to take out the loan for an amount in excess of the $12.5k to $18k yearly undergraduate limit. Once you get to grad school you can borrow the entire amount directly. Once you get to the Plus loan program (which doesn't appear to have any limit) there is a credit check required.

There used to be a private loan program (FFEL) where the government would guarantee the loan amount, but I think that was shut down in 2010. I'm sure you can also go to a bank and just get a loan directly, but I don't know what type of special rules apply to those.

> Citizens who make similar mistakes when they're young get their lives destroyed.

Except in this case the mistake is that the government is willing to guarantee huge loans made to an 18-year-old. There are colleges out there that you can graduate with only a couple thousand dollars of debt and there are other colleges where you can graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

A potential fix would be to limit the amount of government-backed student loans to something people can reasonably pay off. If students want to go beyond that, they would need to convince a bank that funding the more extravagant tuition was a reasonable risk to take. With the government-backed student loans, you rely on an 18-year-old to accurately do the risk analysis themselves and the current situation seems to indicate many aren't good at doing this.

There is a huge difference between parents who feel they are responsible for their children's education and see the public school as an important tool in fulfilling that responsibility and parents who feel the government is responsible for educating their kids.

Communities with a large number of parents who feel that education is their responsibility tend to still do a good job of educating their kids in their public schools. Without that parental mindset, the quality of education goes down.

For basic electronics, you might check out Understanding Modern Electronics by The Great Courses. I think they have a free month-long demo to watch their content online.

> and we've stayed current over the years

I think this may be the key.

Well, the discussion here was UBI so I guess the same magical pool that UBI would be paid from. :) Seriously though, the money that funds unemployment benefits and some other welfare programs would be a possibility because it seems a program like this should replace some of the money paid out in those programs. If we look back at the WPA program, the community that was benefiting (say they were building a stadium for the high-school) would pay for up to 1/3rd of the cost.

Having a way to easily verify jobs is the hard part. If there is valuable work that can be done by low skill workers that was easy to verify, it seems like the market would have already created these jobs. I guess Mechanical Turk is an example of that happening. On the other hand, I think there are physical jobs that could be done like painting buildings in parks, picking up trash, etc. that would be valuable to a community but where the market is unlikely to create a solution.

In the stuff I've read about the WPA, it sounds like having supervisors who cared about the quality of the work was one of their biggest problems too. On the other hand, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have found ways to quantify and judge the quality of work pretty well, so maybe there are ways to do this that just haven't been tried.

I believe this is talking about overall hikes and cuts in fees charged overall not the increase the is charged during peak hours.

Imagine something that pays based on the work you do kind of like AWS Mechanical Turk but for physical work that benefits the public in a community. Basically, if someone wants to work, there is always work available. The jobs could be paid at a market rate or, if society wanted to supplement the pay, it could be higher with the idea that investing in someone getting a work history will benefit society in the long run.

You aren't alone. From the article:

> Hughes is no basic income purist. He believes, for instance, that for this economic moonshot to be politically palatable, it would have to be tied to work. “Not just because it seems more intuitive for people,” he says, “but because work is a key source of purpose in our lives.”

The Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps are pretty close to what you are describing. Many of the parks, lakes, and stadiums in my town were built under those programs.

A guaranteed paycheck basically creates an incentive to not work very hard. Potential employers didn't look on WPA experience as being a positive thing. A Senate inquiry found that there didn't seem to be much incentive for a supervisor to expect or require good work from the workers.

If there were a way to quantify work to the point where everyone is getting paid for what they are contributing I think something like what you describe could work very well. Maybe the solution is a bunch of non-profit businesses that have the goal of creating jobs and breaking event. I think Good Will stores are supposed to do something like this.

As I understand it, this would allow you to create a level of a game like Super Mario Brothers as usually and then it could use that to generate additional levels that work in the same way with the same set of rules.

Interesting idea. As I understand it, you must give it a file with all the objects that will be shown in the game first. I think the general idea might be applicable to 3D but I think you'd need to give it all the objects that could appear as 3D models first.

I'm not trying to downplay the plight of people who lost a lot of money in 2008 and I'm not trying to say "well it is their own fault" to trying to justify not feeling bad for them.

However, I think it is entirely reasonable to assume we will someday experience another similar event. If there was something about this event that caused some people who were following sound retirement investment strategies to lose all of their savings, I wanted to know about it. That is why I was asking.

The reason ALDI pays employees really well is because the entire store is run with only a few employees at a time. A significant portion of the value you get from the store (cheap prices) is because their labor costs are low. I'd go as far to say that the real thing you are buying at ALDI is products that don't have a lot of labor waste built into the price. I've heard most places have 2 to 4 working at a time, but I've seen stores where a single employee is running everything.

Every employee I've seen there is working very hard the entire time. Before they added scanners, they were required to memorize the price of every item in the store. They pay more because they will not get the type of employee they need by paying less. While most of the people who are a good fit for ALDI like it there, you can find many reviews saying the work was too hard and that there was too much pressure.

If you look at retired RVers who have written about working at Amazon.com, you'll find many who felt that while the work was hard, it was good work and paid well (especially with holiday overtime) but you had to be willing (and physically capable) of doing hard work.

Like you say, the cost of each individual purchase from a company has little to do with how much they pay their employees. There is a much stronger correlation between employees who are doing hard things that add significant value and higher pay.

Companies operating in the United States (like ALDI) are going to be subject to all the same labor laws as any other company operating in the United States.

(I believe ADLI is owned by the same parent company as Trader Joes.)

> retired folks needed money to live on and were forced to remove some of their nest egg at the bottom

While I understand that people who are already retired can't just choose to keep working while their investments recover, I'm not aware of any retirement investing strategy that has you fully invested in stocks at the point you retire. The whole point of moving your retirement to safer investments around retirement age is so you don't have to take money out of stocks when there is a financial downturn.

I may be missing something, but you seem to be describing retirees with a very risky asset allocation. I'm not trying to minimize how devastating that was for people, but I am trying to understand what they were victims of. Were they victims of financial advisors recommending that type of asset allocation?

I drove by a closed Amazon.com warehouse in Kansas a few weeks ago. Next to it is a RV campground that is still operating. If you look around on RV websites you can find quite a few reviews from people who went there and other Amazon.com locations to work like this. Those reviews mostly paint a very different picture than what is described in the article.

For many of the Amazon.com camper/workers it was a way to do a lot of work in a few months to help support their retirement travel and the people who were actually doing it seemed to think the pay was pretty good--especially with the overtime.

How did people lose their retirement investments in 2008? Most of the stories I've heard where people lost all of their retirement around 2008 involved doing things were considered fairly risky before 2008 hit. Were there people who lost all their retirement who were following typical retirement investment strategies?

Edit: And to be clear, I know the value of almost everyone's investments went down, but unless your money was all in a single company it seems that most diversified portfolios bounced back.

Eclipse Che might be worth looking into. I'm not sure how mature it is, but it gives you a web interface to Eclipse running on another machine.

https://www.eclipse.org/che/

Normally the way people learn to read cursive is by having some exposure to writing it. Most kids who haven't learned to write cursive can't read it. But I agree with your overall point. Kids could probably learn to read cursive with significantly less effort than what is required to write it.

There is probably some value in being able to read the original founding documents of your government. In the United States those are written in cursive.