Physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction.
Agreed. Quite aside from questions about whether the govt should be subsiding university education (I think it should) it is clear that retroactive cancelation of debt is the wrong way to do it.
Price controls or subsidies going forwards (for new students) would have a better long term impact, and would also help poorer students more. Right now there are probably people out there who chose not to get a degree, or to get a different one, because they were worried about the debt. We can assume those people mostly were poor, and probably still are. They are the real victims of debt relief landing out of the blue. Imagine, that rich kid who took your place when you couldn't afford uni now get a government bailout. Rich getting richer. Making the actual upfront price lower helps the next generation of these people more than it helps anyone else.
I think you are missing an important one. I am not sure what the title would be, but the ideology says something like: "The students chose which courses to take and loans to pay for them. The debt is to some extent self inflicted."
I think this makes student debt very different from, for example, medical debt. Where medical debt can land unexpectedly and be unavoidable for the unlucky, student debt is taken on voluntarily.
Half a joke, but arguably debt relief should only be available to those willing to forfeit their degrees. (A sort of "We'll return the money if you return the goods" argument). If there was a mechanism by which someone's degree could actually be taken off them in a meaningful way this would actually be quite interesting, as it would further incentivise university's to make sure their courses were less expensive and better value. I am now trying to imagine a world where any student at any time can go to their old university, and demand a (partial?) refund in exchange for giving back the degree. There is some decaying system, where returning the degree the day after graduation gets close to 100% refund but giving it back 10 years later gives much less.
I like this framework.
Often when thinking about a fictional setting (reading a book, or worldbuilding) there will be aspects that stand out as not feeling like they make sense [1]. I think you have a good point that extrapolating out a lot of trends might give you something that at first glance seems like a good prediction, but if you tried to write that world as a setting, without any reference to how it got there, just writing it how you think it ends up, then the weirdness jumps out.
[1] eg. In Dune lasers and shields have an interaction that produces an unpredictably large nuclear explosion. To which the setting posits the equilibrium "no one uses lasers, it could set off an explosion". With only the facts we are given, and that fact that the setting is swarming with honourless killers and martyrdom-loving religious warriors, it seems like an implausible equilibrium. Obviously it could be explained with further details.
This makes a lot of sense actually.
If an investor wants to invest in a couple of different markets then that investor can choose some companies in those markets and buy shares. A single company in two non-synergistic markets is just silly from this perspective, if it was instead two companies investors would be more able to specifically choose which part they like.
If the company doesn't have shares (privately held) then this incentive does not exist.
In "Capitalism and Freedom" Milton Freidman has a section about diverse companies. The book is probably dated but some aspect of the 1960's American tax system meant that if a company you owned shares in paid you a dividend you paid tax on it, but if they re-invested a profit that was not taxed. This meant that, if (cartoon example) 100% of the shareholders in Company A wanted to take their dividends and invest them in a start-up that does X, the same thing can be done more tax efficiently by Company A instead not paying any dividends and using the money to set up a new arm that does X (the new arm essentially being a separate startup company in all but name).
Freidman thought this was a reasonably serious distortion on markets and that investors should have to pay tax on re-invested profits at the same rate as dividends, to correct for it.
Perhaps some aspect of tax systems in some countries is having a similar effect, that taking some money out of my lawnmower company to invest in a chip foundry would incur more taxes than expanding the company to do both lawnmowers and computer chips.
I read an article about McDonalds a while ago. One of the things that powered their early success and growth was an extremely small menu. The slim menu meant that the kitchen had little variety enabling everything to be done faster and cheaper.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_McDonald%27s)
A giant company with 50 products could plausibly have 50 teams, each of which is focussed on making its product the best it can be. So the "focus" doesn't have to be lost at scale, its more like a bunch of different organisations under one umbrella.
One issue is going to be filtering.
Strife and conflict is memorable. So you are searching for the least noteworthy examples, the ones that people are least likely to comment on or remember.
I don't know what qualifies as a "community" really. At work I have seen uncontroversial changes come in a few times.
You are right.
I thought the whole idea with the naming was that the convention whereby "twelve is written 12" the symbol at the end "2" is the one symbolising the littlest bit, so I thought it was called "little endian" for that reason.
I now I have a lot of questions about how the names were chosen (to wikipedia!). It seems really backwards.
How does a little endian do a decimal point? Do they put the fractional part of the number at the beginning (before the decimal) and the integer part afterwards? Eg. 123.456 becomes 654.321? So just like all integers in big-endian notation can be imaged to have a trailing ".0" they can all be imagined to have a leading "0." in little-endian?
The way we do it currently has the nice feature that the powers of 10 keep going in the same direction (smaller) through a decimal point. To maintain this feature a little-endian requires that everything before the decimal point is the sub-integer component. Which has the feature lsusr doesn't like that if we are reading character by character the decimal forces us to re-interpret all previous characters.
[Edited to get the endians the right way around]
Very interesting. It sounds like your "third person view from nowhere" vs the "first person view from somewhere" is very similar to something I was thinking about recently. I called them "objectively distinct situations" in contrast with "subjectively distinct situations". My view is that most of the anthropic arguments that "feel wrong" to me are built on trying to make me assign equal probability to all subjectively distinct scenarios, rather than objective ones. eg. A replication machine makes it so there are two of me, then "I" could be either of them, leaving two subjectively distinct cases, even if on the object level there is actual no distinction between "me" being clone A or clone B. [1]
I am very sceptical of this ADT. If you think the time/place you have ended up is unusually important I think that is more likely explained by something like "people decide what is important based on what is going on around them".
[1] My thoughts are here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v9mdyNBfEE8tsTNLb/subjective-questions-require-subjective-information
Nice post. Gets at something real.
My feeling is that a lot of contrarians get "pulled into" a more contrarian view. I have noticed myself in discussions propose a (specific, technical point correcting a detail of a particular model). Then, when I talk to people about it I feel like they are trying to pull me towards the simpler position (all those idiots are wrong, its completely different from that). This happens with things like "ah, so you mean...", which is very direct. But also through a much more subtle process, where I talk to many people, and most of them go away thinking "Ok, specific technical correction on a topic I don't care about that much." and most of them never talk or think about it again. But the people who get the exaggerated idea are more likely to remember.