If that were true, wouldn’t we be better served by auditing the finances of these universities and imposing caps on university profits based on operating expenses?
Gut feeling here is that this is going to result in significantly lower higher ed enrollment, and therefore a less educated populace.
Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.
We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank for their hard labor. Meanwhile our well educated school teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (although I would argue teachers more so). This is not fundamentally an issue of failing educational institutions (although they may well be lacking), but an issue of societal incentives. The welder is paid by the oil corporation; the teacher by a dwindling percentage of your tax dollars.
We are living in the information age yet we have a crisis of education. We desperately a solution that increases both educational access and quality for everyone regardless of their career path. We need more, better, cheaper education. We need more incentives for an educated populace. This does not achieve that: in fact it aggravates the issue.
I think it’s important to understand that while this is a win, it’s only a small step.
> Deere will now be required to make diagnostic and repair tools available to equipment owners and independent repair shops, not only its own network of authorized dealers.
In practice, this means Deere will now operate similar to auto manufacturers.
They will make their proprietary scanning equipment, software, and manuals available… for a few-thousand-dollar/ month subscription.
You have options as to where you can replace the physical components… but still need to pay a subscription fee in order to use your vehicle’s full feature set or get access to the data you collected but don’t actually own. Your vehicle’s firmware is still locked.
They will make their parts available… but not necessarily to a common standard (we could have used a common bolt size or hose line, or specced a commonly available alternator, but we decided not to), making it prohibitively costly for third party manufacturers to compete on aftermarket parts, and keeping genuine part costs high.
You can (legally) work on the machine yourself… but work done without a licensed mechanic will likely void your warranty, or prevent you from using necessary software features.
Your local mechanic can now repair your equipment… but in order to do that work they may have to invest in not only scanners and software, but an odd handful of unique task-specific or custom tools in order to complete the repair.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a win. It’s high time that the FTC addressed Deere’s blatantly anti-competitive behavior. However, this isn’t a silver bullet that will save farmers from the rising tide of extractive capitalism, or isolate their tractors from nation state cyber threats.
Sorta. It’s still worse than proprietary solutions: in reality when on wilderness backroads (US and CA) I find myself juggling four apps at a time.
CoMaps for course tracking, offline apple or google maps for navigation and satellite, Gia or All Trails for accurate topo and trails (even though I hate having to use it), and an ArcGIS app for information like additional land ownership or historic data.
It’s frustrating juggling apps, but the lack of accurate (or sometime any) topo or additional map layers in CoMaps is the most galling.
I’ve tried finding springs with OSM but I find i still have to verify on findaspring.org.
Would be great to have am OSM based app that did it all, but that seems unrealistic given a) the horrible data accuracy and OSM’s (entirely understandable) unwillingness to pirate and consolidate large proprietary data sets from multiple competitors b) unpaid developer hours needed to create and maintain an accessible user friendly and modern UX that can compete with premier apps.
Cool; but this is one of those instances where I wish the wonderful and benevolent FOSS developers of the world would consolidate efforts behind existing projects to make fewer better things instead of many never-finished forks. Especially since there is not yet a single open source map ui that is polished enough to compete with enterprise maps.
Unfortunately I have yet to find an OSM app that offers a properly usable modern interface. Most are passable if you are a nerd who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced and can work around the quirks; my non techy friends open the app once and immediately delete it. We really need an Apple or Google maps clone.
Imagine if your neighbor walked past your house every day and recorded your property with their phone camera. Imagine thirty strangers did that every day. Imagine being unable to walk more than two blocks out of your neighborhood before passing a random stranger standing up in a crows-nest on a telephone pole with a zoom lens camera photographing you and your kids and taking notes so they could sell your behavioral data to law enforcement and advertising agencies. Imagine several hundred strangers concurrently following you around your grocery store and silently monitoring your shopping habits.
It’s okay though, these are public spaces, and you shouldn't expect to have power of consent over who is watching you.