I think the cultural stance in the U.S. that to progress in life/elevate oneself/stigma against forgoing college is also a large part of it.
I personally think that one policy that could have an outsized effect in solving this problem is establishing a max percentage of income that student loan repayment can be required to be for a maximum number of years (I'm pulling these numbers out of nowhere but just as an example) like 7.5% of gross income for 20 years. If the student hasn't repayed by that time using that percentage of income, the college is on the hook. Alternatively, a combination of the college and the lender (potentially switching away from government lenders).
The problem I'm hoping to solve is the insane growth rates of tuition for a wide variety of degrees that do not justify their cost. Young kids being told that college is the required pathway into a good life often are not given the commensurate instruction that the college degree should be useful in terms of earning more/securing a job. An instruction of "study whatever you find interesting!" sounds good but is IMO very poor advice. It should be modified "Study things you find interesting but remember that college is to build and refine your skills for your career after"
If you let students default on debt - most of the problems get solved.
Creditors are going to make risk-free high-interest loans. As long as the loans are available - students will take them to get their underwater basket weaving degrees.
If students could default on debt - then there wouldn't be an endless supply of creditors willing to lend them money to get degrees they know won't pay enough money to pay them back.
This doesn't work though because even the attractive degrees can declare bankruptcy based on having greater liabilities than assets immediately after finishing their degree. Allowing students to default on student loan debt without requiring a minimum time period to do so basically means no one can safely provide loans for any degrees regardless of income potential.
Some people have far more than $100k in debt, so the tradeoff might be far more attractive.
If you're finishing undergrad at 22, your bankruptcy won't harm you for buying a house at 29-30 which is kind of when you want to buy a house anyways since saving up 25% takes a good amount of time. It seems like a very worthwhile trade to declare bankruptcy.
As for being allowed to declare, the time to do it is before you have a job. At this point you have debt higher than assets and no income so the case for bankruptcy is extremely clear.
> Some people have far more than $100k in debt, so the tradeoff might be far more attractive.
That would be the lender's problem for lending far more than anyone reasonably needs to be lent to obtain a degree. They'd have to price the loan accordingly.
> It seems like a very worthwhile trade to declare bankruptcy.
You don't get to just declare bankruptcy on a whim because the outcome is favorable to you.
> You don’t get to just declare bankruptcy on a whim because the outcome is favourable to you.
I’ve addressed this in the above by mentioning when you do it. You have assets < debt and no job therefore no income. No court is going to reject this bankruptcy because you are actually underwater and will in theory take infinite time to repay the amount you owe.
Yeah bankruptcy is a legal process. Judges and probably lawyers are involved. It's not "free" and (my supposition) if you have legitimate near-term future prospects for income the judge may not grant it and tell you to get a job and pay what you owe.
We already have what you describe, it's called Income Driven Repayment. Your monthly payment is set to a certain percentage of your income, and after 20-25 years, any remaining balance is forgiven. The only difference being that forgiveness is paid for by the government, not the school.
The program is frankly a mess, with a ton of byzantine rules around eligibility and how the monthly payment is calculated. I work for a company that deals with this and have partial ownership of the code that has to implement these rules, and it's frankly a nightmare.
Furthermore I have serious doubts about the value of the program. It's really only good as a stop-gap measure to avoid defaulting on your loans in the immediate future. Going for the 20-year forgiveness seems unwise to me, since you are experiencing negative amortization for that time and your loan balance will be increasing. So most of the amount forgiven will be accrued interest, which will then be taxed. In most situations it would probably be better to focus on increasing your income and just paying the loans off.
X% of income *above the poverty line*, no time limit, disappears upon death. Administered through the IRS, it's a line on your tax return and thus automatically adjusted for income.
(And I'd do the same thing with child support--x% up to $y.)
This reads a little like the early days of self driving car optimism or factory roboticizing. Everything looks so easy with an easy rollout, but enjoy the long tail. To me, car companies and Amazon have high incentive to use robotics and a really controlled environment and they still need a lot of humans. Those use cases will be more thoroughly solve (IMO) before any variable-environment use cases get fully automated. I'm not a pessimist and I really want a lot of automated stuff, but I don't think the tech is there yet.
I'd love for that to be true, but there's a good chance that in doing broad tests you are incurring costs (both to patient health and cost [whether paid by patient, gov, or insurance company]) without getting anything beyond noisy data without useful signal
Open to how you'd solve it. Fill up the overfilled jails and hospitals? Can't force people unless it's a 5150. You literally cannot stop what is happening without going full militarized police and how is that better?
Best thing you can do as a tourist is know where you are. It's no different than unsafe areas of Mexico and LA? You gonna stay near skid row?
SF weather and wealth is going to attract homeless and drugs, and unless you want to break the law to stop it, adapting is the next best thing.
Actually NVM it's just easier to shit on SF and act like everyone there is an idiot and the solution is simple.
I wonder about World of Warcraft and can't help but think its success and place in our culture can't be replicated for a variety of reasons:
-It had a very popular RTS game series that built up the lore, graphical template of the world, and did a lot of world/character building.
-It released in 2004 which was at a time when the internet was becoming more and more accessible such that kids could reasonably get online. (All MMO's are related to internet access but I would argue that the rollout of the internet has no two time periods that were the same)
-It blended the right amount grind/accessibility being more accessible than competitors like everquest but more enthralling and entrapping that successors.
-The appetite for MMO's may never be the same: revenues for mobile games and their ilk with micrcotransactions vastly outweight the market for MMO's. With how gaming has changed, many customers may not give the time to an MMO the way they used to and companies may not see the point.
Yes WoW definitely was at the right place at the right time. Blizzard was basically the biggest name in gaming at the time. When everyone could get online, it’s natural they would all pick up WoW. It’s unlikely anything with similar network effects would happen now.
There were other games at the time, that may have been better at some things, but probably not better at what it aimed to be good at. WoW certainly wasn't a better RTS than the Warcraft games before it, but those are just different games. WoW was probably the best game out there in a category defined as an immersive online multiplayer game world with actual game and roleplaying elements.
I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience I'd played since final fantasy, but with everyone else playing in the same world for no explicitly stated reason. If you think it rose to the popularity it did because previous rts/roleplayers were just continuing their love for the franchise, you're missing the rest of the picture.
I would be curious though if you have anything specific in mind that beats my claim
> I was excited about WoW because it was the most immersive game experience
In what way was it immersive for you? Not saying it's not immersive, but I didn't find it immersive. I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750. But at the time there was no end-game, liniar progression, once you level there's no need to go back to other area's, etc. So it was quite boring.
But I know people who have played since day 1 till now who swear by it.
I started with Ultima Onine, tried EQ, Lineage / Lineage II, AC, DAoC. But while alot of people during those days played SNES/N64, or games on PC like War Craft, Counter Strike, AOE/AOC. Me playing UO and such I was a 'computer geek' etc, but when WoW landed all of a sudden it was cool to play WoW, people who didn't even know MMORPGs were all of a sudden talking about upcoming WoW game. At the time I didn't understand because gameplay was much more immersive in other games, but they didn't want to play any of the games I played.
I think WoW got alot right to get people into the game even tho they are things I don't like. The hand-holding, bound items, and questing system. But WoW success was definitely not because it was a good game. It got better over time and became great, till it ended up being terrible again. But on release it wasn't good.
> I played on release for the free month, hit lvl 60 and sold my account for ~$750.
Might be the fact that you just power leveled through it.
I played UO and remember when starting on WoW it felt "dumb".
Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.
I think WoW did well by simplifying the mechanics and having more developed storyline which then helped people immerse in it more approachable or enjoyable way. I even read the lore on the internet and the books later, and I think all of that added more. I always enjoyed the questing and adventuring to new places the most, not that much about trying to min-max every aspect of the process.
> Like people or monsters didn't steal your items when you died like in UO. In UO that mechanic would make me very careful to venture outside of cities but also lead to interesting situations when some random monster steals your stuff and you need to go back to find hunt it later. But in the end, it also meant that in WoW I could focus on the adventure and not worry about someone stealing my stuff.
I miss this aspect of UO. Full loot PVP was fun, especially when you would get cheap gear and go ganking with people. One time on a shard (Novus Opiate) there was a ~50+ vs ~50+ blue vs red war for a few hours where we opened portals to the PVP towns and ran in ganking all the reds and they were ganking us.
Lots of fun those days. I missed the PVP because in WoW there was no loss and so no one really cared to try run or fight back, the only loss was exp so they sometimes just stood there let you kill them. It's one of the reasons I rushed 60 was to do PVP but then PVP didn't really exist.
I played the full 30 days and had 2 characters, 1 max and the other I was trying to do all the side quests and I stopped at like lvl 40 cos I just got bored of repeating the same sort of quest over and over in different zones, kill this, collect that, talk to X.
Did you never go over to Tarren Mill? IIRC, back in 2004 there was a ton of world PVP going on there, and one of the most fun aspects of it (IMO) was exactly the fact that there was no purpose other than "hey let's go fight some other players". Then BG came out and kinda ruined that aspect of things by making the PVP experience far more systematic and I guess purposeful. They may have improved it in later years but by then I had lost interest and stopped playing.
I didn't play at launch, but have heard that it could have probably used a few patches before it would have been so immersive. The pace of leveling however probably was its slowest at launch, and it seems like to do that, you would necessarily have been sucked in, because it would have probably taken a hell of a lot of playing, especially without all of the web resources we currently have. I started probably around 2005/6 I'd guess, before leveling was quickened. I'm not really sure what you mean by hand-holding exactly; at best there wasn't much in terms of assistance through any means. Though it was never a technically difficult game, I found it immersive in that it was slow, if you weren't deliberately trying to hit max level in the shortest possible time. I just played it to do something, that had some gradual reward and power system that felt intuitive and meaningful, and it probably took me a year to hit max level. Doing that with people is really what made it compelling, I couldn't imagine playing it alone at that time, it wasn't that kind of game. In contrast to your experience, none of my friends stopped playing the other games you mention, but WoW uniquely augmented our daily lives with questions about what gear you recently got, what level you hit, doing dungeons and raiding together, bumling into someone from the opposing faction and killing them or getting killed. Runescape had elements of that, but the graphics and gameplay were sluggish and more rudimentary, whereas WoW felt like I was "in" something more than ever before.
It just seems like you expected something different going in, when my impression was that it was intentionally designed initially without the focus on end game content that you might have been hoping for, but that they'd later start building on. I didn't really have any expectations, other than that the graphics were way better than what I was playing, which was actually a huge deal for immersion at the time.
In retrospect, the original questing experience and everything were incredibly tedious, but in my mind that also was actually what kept it immersive. It required a social element to be fun, and it was absolutely exhausting to just power through at the rate you might have been. So I'd quest and grind, and then just hangout doing nothing, or work on a profession and try to make some gold, because there were other bits. That's what I do now too to some extent, because games that are played only because they have some sophisticated mechanic are kind of unsubstantial in my view. My friends would play Diablo 2 or Counter strike, and those games were also miserably tedious when reduced to their core game mechanic or whatever is considered meta at the time.
IDK about this article. I was reliably informed earlier today by a front page article that was certain that a gut bacteria's most important job was to do nothing.
(I apologize for the sarcasm, I know this isn't reddit. This is one in a growing number of interesting results about molecules found/created in the gut by bacteria. a previous article today was an idle musing about bacteria in the microbiome having the key job of not being worse strains of bacteria [like c. diff] without much other role)
This is actually a well written no-hyperbole representation of interesting original research, makes no generalization. So your criticism might be misplaced.
The alternative hypothesis you discuss is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the findings in this research though. It all depends on what microbes you define as harmful, though at that point why even bother with the original generalization anyway?
Relevant plug for Lichess mobile app (I am not affiliated). It's a free chess app that allows for rated play against opponents. Tens of thousands of concurrent games. No ads or payments (I don't remember if I paid, but I would be happy to support). No bells, no whistles, just chess.
I have a pseudo addictive personality and mobile phone games P2W have gotten me to shell out more than I'd care to admit. I've stopped playing all such mobile games and my "nicotine gum" game was getting back to my roots (elementary school chess team): mobile chess from Lichess.
Lichess is amazing and I use it every day. Completely free, no ads, and runs 100% on donations. They publish their costs, it takes ~420K a year to keep Lichess running and the primary developer of Lichess takes home about ~56K a year. https://lichess.org/costs
You wouldn't have paid for Lichess but you can donate to keep the site alive (and get some neat wings). You can also view their costs over at https://lichess.org/costs
Start-up/Consulting idea: use ML/RL strategies and tools and help gaming companies improve their AI. In a variety of games, the AI should be a big component of gameplay (all single player games) and ends up being such a liability. I can imagine the litany of issues that prevent this, but I wonder if a company could accumulate some general templates/models/toolkits that could help AI improve for a variety of gaming companies. Most AI in games are more like Stockfish than AlphaZero and the cost to train these models for each of these games is probably prohibitively high. However, I imagine a variety of gaming companies that provide a 1st person game would not mind outsourcing their NPC AI and perhaps a company could find some synergy across games such that the marginal cost of going from game to game could be decreased.
An example game that fits your board game template more or less are turn based games like Civilization. I love Civ games but the AI stupidity is the weakest part of the game. I know RTS games like starcraft are super hard (probably why Deepmind chose to do it) but perhaps turn based games or games with a slower pace and limited action space are doable for a consulting company.
Idk, food for thought, but if you make a billion dollar company I'm saving this post for my records :P
An AlphaZero type AI for Civ is my absolute dream. A huge problem in these sorts of games is that developers have the computer players cheat to artificially raise the difficulty to compensate for the poor skill and decision making of the AI.
