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"
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
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.
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)
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.
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
Where's the meaningful action against ISP's? In my opinion, ISP monopolies and collusion cause orders of magnitude more consumer harm than FAANG by a lot. If one is truly interested in helping out consumers, start with the less flashy lawsuits against monopolies that do more direct consumer harm than FAANG. Starting with FAANG (in my opinion) betrays the true motivation of this action which is political theater instead of meaningful action.
I sincerely do not intend this observation to be overtly political, BUT I've often wondered about certain very progressive movements having their logical extremes come into conflict. In the US, there's been a movement to remove gender from aspects of language (example, preferring police officer over policeman, business person over businessman). I personally don't really care and re-examining a variety of norms and phrases for entrenched bias makes some sense to me.
Romance languages have gender much more deeply ingrained in the language and present far more challenges in attempting to de-gender them. So, if the progressive attempts to respect the culture of others and be welcoming to different cultures, that can come into conflict with attempting to remove implicit bias that may (or may not) be connected with language (with the claim being that saying businessman inherently discourages non males from pursuing business).
Disclaimer: I'm not very political and align myself largely with moderate democrats with some libertarian sympathies at time. I have nothing against the ideals of re-examining previously held notions for pursuits of greater equality, just an interesting conflict in my opinion with political relevance. I find it fascinating that Trump improved margins with Hispanic voters over past Republicans and I find myself wondering if it wasn't so much about him as aspects of the progressive/democratic movement.
How you could stop the greed of someone wanting to sell those treatments to the mass market? I imagine Mark Cubin (or any other "shark" billionaire) would fucking love to be the first trillionaire or quadrillionaire by being the person who made accessible the treatments for aging. Cancer alone: the ego-boost and vast wealth for the person whose company/research helped "cure cancer" (hell, even just 1 type of cancer). these "sharks" would "chomp" at the opportunity I imagine.
"Death by natural causes" induced by age include alzheimers, cancer, heart disease, strokes, etc. natural causes are just diseases that medicine isn't great at truly treating, often those diseases are exacerbated by age. I don't want to imply you are pro-cancer (for older individuals), but what "natural cause" deaths are unworthy of attention in your opinion?
This point 100x times. I am more paranoid about COVID than most people are because I have an autoimmune disease (which is mild and seems to not really affect outcomes). While my autoimmune caveat can be written off, I see most people seeing death as the only bad outcome and framing their risk tolerance and mitigation based on that. What has given me extra concern from the start is the damage done by COVID for patients who survive and even have a mild case. The rates of Long COVID (potentially overdiagnosed because of similarities with pandemic restriction related depression) are sufficiently high that it more concern than is given.
People who decry climate change as a crisis but are not willing to confront the use of nuclear power lose large amounts of credibility in my opinion. Full stop.
Social media has immediate, physical (dopamine levels while presenting a mental phenomenon are also a physical reality) consequences immediately upon consumption. There are no great comparisons to social media because of its novelty, but social media cannot be shielded from comparisons to all vices.