> But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY. They are not serving those people and are actively making their lives worse by saddling them with outrageous debt and no prospect of meaningful employment.
If the US changed bankruptcy it would force the colleges to change as well. Lenders are not going to be sending children into the workforce with zero chance to recoup that loan, and they are not going to want to bloat the college stay to ridiculous proportions.
> The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY.
That varies so much by student and to bar a whole class of people out of these things is not going to improve their outcomes. While some students are not served with better employment opportunities by going to college and earning a degree - there are many others who are.
Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better.
> Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better.
Making it harder to get a student loan is hardly "outlawing" anyone from going to college. Schools would still give scholarships. Plus, tuition would almost certainly go down. Right now they can charge as much as they want because banks are will to lend whatever colleges charge. If all of a sudden people stopped buying their product when they raised the price too high then tuition would come back down to what it was only a few decades ago.
Even if fewer people ended up going to college it wouldn't limit opportunity. If anything it would likely make it easier to get ahead. Fewer jobs would require a college degree - there wouldn't be enough applicants who have one - and we'd likely see alternatives to college become more popular and widely respected, which would give high school grads more options for how to get started with a career.
If you're saying that someone who is below a certain income cannot get a loan - how are they going to go to college? Pull-up them bootstraps and find some more money under the couch cushions? You do know that scholarships are not like a dime-a-dozen, right? It's not like every university waives tuition at middle class incomes.
If you want to limit the cost of college then doing it by putting caps on how much a university can charge could be a more straight forward option than hoping costs come down by limiting loans to those who can't afford the cash option. (e.g. If a university wants state funding then they need to cap their student costs) Even then - loans would still need to happen for people who can't afford much more than their basic housing expenses (if even that - think about kids who get kicked out at 18).
You're speaking in a lot of "if market forces behave the way we all think they should thanks to basic econ like supply and demand" but that's not how things always work in the real world.
Considering ~50% families don't have any retirement savings and don't have an emergency fund, do you really their kids are gonna be able to afford all the expense things associated with college? (Remember - these people just got out of high school! They have likely never had a job and have no money at all)
Do you think colleges wouldn't change if they were going to receive far far fewer applicants at their current sticker prices? I don't mean that to come across as snarky. I'm genuinely curious because your comment seems to be based on an assumption that colleges would not make changes to their operations or tuition if they suddenly had a hard time filling their freshman class.
I think of it as being similar to healthcare. People need education to get jobs in the current economy. (In the same way they need healthcare to stay alive) You might make it so expensive they can't pay it back in any reasonable amount of time but if the choice is job vs no job - people gonna take it. If you remove the ability to even get an education (or healthcare) by saying you can only get it with cash then you're just screwing people over.
Regardless if job requirements change (they only will for a subset that no one cares about and no one is trying to get), you're going to screw people over. The lag time between no-loans and job-requirements dropping is going to be too long. There will be a lot of people who fall into the cracks and will be stuck with the lowest tier jobs because they couldn't afford a cash-only education until it was much less expensive.
Regardless of this - I feel like this is the wrong approach to debate lower costs vs no loans vs whatever-where-a-student-pays-in-the-end. I think 4 year college should be free (no tuition, books paid, stipend or special housing, etc.) given how the world works. I went to college for free due to CH 35 of the VA and it was really the only reason I was able to do it and fully commit to it. I have no problem with having a more educated populace - regardless of what they study. I did study something that came with very gainful employment but that wasn't obvious in the beginning of my studies. I think 4 year college would be less necessary if we had better education from the start - but we're never going to get there in this country.
It depends entirely on the school. Harvard could pretty reasonably jack up their tuition well over $100,000/yr without any real resistance or fall in applications. We wouldn't get cheaper colleges, we'd merely watch as all the 2nd and 3rd tier schools shut down.
Here is an idea: let’s have colleges themselves act as the guarantor for a student loan. This way the incentives are aligned; if the colleges are poor judge of a students talent (and admit too many low performers), or having teaching standards are too weak will stand to lose money when a student cannot secure a job and repay their loans.
You only need to look at historical examples to know that cannot be the case.
Take for example, cars. That's how cars started. Look where we are today.
If tuition stays sky high, it will be because of regulatory requirements (and enabling subsidies) to stay sky high, not because theres no market for education for working class folk
>Some of the clips show in the video referenced in the article actually seem pretty "sane" to me - the one guy saying "I'm not worried about getting this illness", another saying for most people it will seem just like the flu. Those two statements, as far as we know, are not that outlandish, right? I'm certainly not worried about myself, and for many people it does seem to be mild or asymptomatic?
The flu season is 6 months for ~ 40k deaths.
We are at 10k deaths of covid in the USA. Depending on how you measure the 'season' it could be as little as a month in. If we keep with these numbers it will surely pass the flu death toll for the same time period.
Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and the virus kills people in the prime of their life just as much as the elderly. We also have no idea on the way this virus works. We are making assumptions that it will work like a normal flu virus. There is anecdotal evidence it resides in people even after they have 'recovered', which isn't the same as a normal flu or cold. It is certainly something to be concerned with.
> Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine and the virus kills people in the prime of their life just as much as the elderly.
Not with the same rates. This should be kept into account, because when lockdowns will be lifted (you will have to at some point, even if it's just to prevent people from becoming insane), you won't have a risk of 0, so letting the lowest-risk population out first is a goood bet.
> Now also consider that unlike flu, we have no vaccine
But there are drugs in development and in trial. None will work miracles, some will not work at all, some will have marginal impact, some will have a little more impact. Those are the best bets at this point in time.
Waiting out for a vaccine, like many governments are hoping for, is irrational IMO, because there's no guarantee that a working one will be found - and you can't lock up your population for 18 months, even if you don't factor the economy in, because people will be destroyed psychologically.
The key feature of coinbase and gemini is of course that they are following all the regs and are the most trustworthy exchanges out there. The people who want 150x leverage on a shady exchange are not the same customers. I would fathom that they are not even in the 'crypto' space as the history of shady exchanges going belly up (btc-e, cryptsy, bitfinex?) should keep anyone with a half descent memory up at night.
The market is proving that the demand for highly-regulated exchanges is far less than the offshore light-regulation ones. The volumes and liquidity speak for themselves.
This is not true; reported volumes are fraudulent or misleading for some of the exchanges you are describing. Look at the entropy of Binance daily volume compared to legitimate exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, etc. They used to be faking it even worse. Average real volume on legitimate exchanges has actually grown since the 2017 bubble.
And comparing real volume against the volume of synthetic instruments like Bitmex's perpetual swap is comparing apples to oranges. There is no fiat currency on those exchanges. There is literally zero real liquidity, simply the mechanics of liquidity that can only be cashed out on a reputable exchange.
For whatever reason my original account is rate limited. OTC desks execute trades on Binance / Bitfinex and hedge on Bitmex / Binance Futures. If Binance quotes you [XXX] BTC at $1 mil it will go through 100% of the time. You are out of your mind if you think they are faking vol. Perpetual futures charge the same bips if you go 100x, if you have 0.2% fee the exchange takes $2 at 1x or $200 at 100x, doesn't change the fees. Leverage inflates volumes but absolutely increases their fees (revenue), both from bips but also maintenance. You're on another planet if you think Gemini and Coinbase have anywhere close the revenue of Binance and Bitfinex. Sorry man.
> If Binance quotes you [XXX] BTC at $1 mil it will go through 100% of the time.
1mm would even go through on Gemini. Even for crypto, that's tiny. You bring up an important point: have you ever noticed the correlation between fees and volume? Bitmex is the best example; they literally pay the maker of each trade and the taker pays an order of magnitude less than KYC exchanges.
Bitmex and Binance are doing well, no doubt, and Bitmex likely has higher revenue than Coinbase's exchange and Kraken combined, in part due to their built in market maker and de-leveraging mechanism. However, the numbers you are looking at will throw you off by an order of magnitude from true values for the argument you are trying to make. The big legitimate exchanges are doing quite well considering the market, although the volume is seemingly consolidating into Coinbase and Kraken.
If you know how to code, check out the entropies. Bitmex volume is real, but synthetic. Binance volume... maybe 40% real, being generous. There was a time when it was more than 90% fake, like most of the exchanges on CoinMarketCap. They literally faked it until they made it. No need to get feisty about it, just fact checking.
Of course it is. If you want to use cryptocurrencies to, for instance, launder the proceeds of your ransomware, or an illegal securities offering, or not pay any taxes on your crypto-day-trading, you probably don't want to do so in a highly-regulated exchange that follows KYC.
Yeah that is pretty disgusting. By doing this, it steals a label with a 'fairly' clear meaning, agenda, and history to prop up any old complaint. This is beyond disingenuous and actually will end up causing more harm to LGBT issues in the future.
> Thiel is, in fact, literally arguing that democracy is bad because it gives people with critiques of capitalism a say in the way their country is run.
Kind of. He is saying democracy is bad because it inherently leads to limits on 'freedom' imposed by the state. The state being the key point here. I read his views as much more in line with a trend towards anarcho-capitialism than with fascism.
It may be fascist, it may not be, but what he's arguing in that piece isn't strictly wrong. Representative democracy has largely failed, and, like Thiel said, is incompatible with maximum freedom. However, whether maximum freedom is desirable (I don't think it is) is up to the reader.
Failure is the right word for indirect democracy, which is also known as representative democracy.
Every terrible President in the past fifty years hasn't been elected by popular vote, representative democracies enable gerrymandering, and direct democracy has been shown repeatedly to have none of these problems. See: Switzerland.
He's stating that that was compatible with what he wanted. He's not claiming in that essay that we should go back to it. He doesn't want democracy, that much is apparent, because he thinks it's incompatible with freedom on a long time scale.
So what you're saying is that even though he's that women's suffarage isn't compatible with freedom, 1920s style "capitalist democracy" that removes the vote from people is compatible with freedom, in one of the most pro freedom platforms out there (the Cato institute) somehow isn't actually pushing for those positions?
I'm not sure that I'm capable of the mental gymnastics to get there.
Did you read the entire article you cite, or did you just get stuck on one paragraph?
> "In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”"
The piece is arguing that ANY government system of politics: democracy, theocracy, communism, or whatever is not compatible in the long term with true 'freedom' as he envisions it, and he is looking towards technology to remedy this problem.
You may not agree with him that a world without a government is a good idea, but make that argument instead of trying to twist what he wrote into some sexist fascist diatribe.
Then why would he bring up women's suffrage specifically other than 'groups who in aggregrate don't vote the way I think they should, should have the ability to vote taken away'?
Like, he specifically brings up the 20s as a positive example.
Stop right there. He does not want to take away votes. He wants to take away the government entirely. Neither males or females would have anything to vote for because there is no longer a government.
>Why do you bring in the left/right partisan divide into this?
Because the right has been complaining about these specific FBI agents biased conduct in this investigation for years now and trying to turn this into a 'we all know fisa is bad' comes off as epic gaslighting.
>The IG report did not find any evidence of political partisan spying, it only faulted the process of getting the warrant.
This is beyond a white washing. He absolutely found evidence that line agents were biased. He did not find clear 'evidence' that the outcome and leadership was biased. The key part is that confessions and a paper trail were not found to lead him to make that conclusion. He stated he made numerous referrals to the doj/fbi about misconduct. If you actually listen to his hearing statements on the 'evidence' for bias he is walking a fine line.
'we did not have documentary or testimonial evidence that (the mistakes) were intentional, but also make note the lack of satisfactory explanations (for the mistakes), from there i cannot draw any further conclusions' - this is during a line of questions from senator whitehouse, but there are many others like it.
James Comey did a victory lap, claiming he was "vindicated" by the report.
Horowitz was asked in the hearing if his report vindicated Comey. He was adamant that his report vindicated no one.
There is definitely a concerted effort to completely mischaracterize the report's contents, mainly because it has proven that the complaining from the Republicans has actually been correct all along.
Check out "Devin Nunes memo" and how media reacted to it last year. They called it a conspiracy theory. The IG report proved everything in his memo was spot on. Wikipedia still has the false info:
Yes I agree. A 'what is the problem with using sshd?' or similar seems valid to me. It gives them a way to actually explain if there is a problem and if not, oh that might work.
> Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct.
Compared to what? Being a primitive mammal? Sure you could claim that the 'nation' didn't exist long enough to support this but devotion to a local city or tribe feels the same to me.
If devotion to a local city or tribe is the same, then why is the Federal government at loggerheads with California over environmental regulations and immigration, and California is at loggerheads with SF over zoning policy and homelessness?
It does not follow from the assertion that devotion to a political unit of any size is a similar mindset or activity, that devotion to any one such thing means precisely identical devotion to all parts of whatever political hierarchy it may be a part of. Your objection doesn't make sense.
How about stop trying to take shortcuts and have an actual rigorous progression? It sure would help out on problems of statistical errors in scientific literature, Sure not everyone might be able to pass these classes, but that is kind of the point. Why do we want to just pass through students with weak to no understanding? Ah yes tuition fees.
Most students don't need the full rigorous understanding that a multi-semester deep dive into probability theory and statistics would provide. It would be nice to know, but there is a significant opportunity cost, since they could be spending that time diving deeper on their primary subject area.
Because the “why” of statistics has many turtles before you get to the bottom. Measure theory, topology, real analysis, abstract algebra. You need to learn a lot of math before you get a complete picture of the theoretical underpinnings of modern probability theory, which forms the foundation of all of statistics.
Most people just want to calculate a P value or a 95% confidence interval for the mean of whatever they’re researching. They’re not interested in how it all works.
You need a bit of analysis, but I'm pretty sure that you can understand p-values for normal distributions of a single variable without abstract algebra or topology. Understanding simple cases from first-ish principles makes it much easier to swallow handwavy explanations for complicated stuff.
You can't understand the why of the normal distribution without Fourier analysis though - which is pretty heavy going for anyone who's not hardcore science or engineering.
Can't you introduce the normal distribution as the limit of the binomial distribution? I think you can prove the central limit theorem without using terribly advanced math.
That's only the most limited version of the theorem which has since been renamed the de Moivre-Laplace theorem [1]. The rabbit hole goes much deeper when you talk about the most general form which works for any set of independent and identically distributed random variables, not just binomial random variables.
That’s moving the goalposts. The original claim was about getting a complete picture. A full understanding of the “why” of statistics going all the way to the bottom.
The only proof of the central limit theorem I know of relies on it. Iterated convolutions tend toward a Gaussian. Essentially you take the Fourier transform of any nice probability distribution, do a Taylor expansion, and Bob's your uncle.
Another child poster pointed out that in special cases (like the limiting case of the binomial distribution) you can get away with other arguments. And you can certainly 'prove' it via simulation. So maybe you don't need the full generality of Fourier analysis in the end.
Probably a semantic difference that I don't equate proof with understanding.
I would call that a colloquial definition of understanding. Very different from mathematical understanding.
If you ask a mathematician what you’d need to know to understand Fermat’s last theorem, he won’t say “high school pre-algebra.” That’s only enough for you to understand the basic statement of the theorem. It doesn’t get you to the why. To understand the problem involves a deep dive into both algebraic number theory and analytic number theory.
On the contrary, I use "understand" quite precisely. It's interesting to study what practitioners of various disciplines mean by "I understand."
For example, most mathematicians would say they understand large numbers of theorems that they cannot prove off the top of their heads. On the other hand they probably have what Borovik in "Mathematics under the microscope" called a "recovery procedure." That is, a set of constraints or path that reproduces the result. They know they can reconstruct the proof if they need to from the various gambits and skills they keep polished.
Also, the proof via the normal distribution being an attractive fixpoint of convolution is fine, but it only works on a particular subset of functions. We know the theorem applies beyond that subset, and there's a cottage industry of extending it in bits and pieces and calculating better convergence bounds. There is no proof available today that says central limit theorem applies iff conditions x, y, and z. So in this case the proof really can't be said to be understanding.
Now, that's well and good for probability alone, which is a field of mathematics. Statistics isn't a subfield of math, or is a subfield of math the way physics is. For a statistician, understanding the central limit theorem is much more about knowing what kind of observations it is reasonable to expect it to approximately apply to, what kind of tests rely on it and which don't, how to check if it applies in a rigorous way, what kind of visualizations and exploratory data analysis is enabled if it does, how the normal distribution and convergence to it fits into a whole family of distributions and features thereof...
1) Mathematics majors should be taught how to prove.
2) Engineering/Applied Math majors should be taught to use.
Fortunately or unfortunately they take the same classes. Personally, I think the obvious solution would have been to just take whichever classes you want to and to get "a degree" once you fill some sort of criterion. But the CAs and actuarial scientists, uhm basically everyone, don't want that human resources headache to actually read through someone's CV patiently and ask a few patient questions.
Well, why not both, really? We’re talking about four years of education - is it really that hard to learn proofs and applications with four years to spend looking at it?
I don't think the current system is abysmal or anything like that—I don't think I am that vociferous or opinionated—but what I do think is that in your first and second year it is likely that you don't know yet whether you want to go the "applied" route or the "abstract" route.
So you might drop out of either of the two by year two and so you don't have the full four years. [1]
[1] In South Africe, a bachelor's degree is three years. I don't know whether this is a good or bad idea, but that is how it works. Your fourth year is called "honours" and is a separate degree.
This is a really spot on take on this moment in time. I also wrote a bot circa 2016/2017 [1] and the constant exchange error handling killed any profit I would eek out of the arbitrage. I was only doing this part time while a student so wasn't a huge deal to me, but losing to an exchange throwing up an error that I had never seen before and never would again, or my all time least favorite exchange cryptsy having one side of their books 'stuck' for hours was fabulous.
The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY. They are not serving those people and are actively making their lives worse by saddling them with outrageous debt and no prospect of meaningful employment.
If the US changed bankruptcy it would force the colleges to change as well. Lenders are not going to be sending children into the workforce with zero chance to recoup that loan, and they are not going to want to bloat the college stay to ridiculous proportions.