Living in the Future

Tag: Link

  • How Much Should Free Tuition Cost?

    I don’t think many people – other than say, the Canadian Federation of Students and their wilder-eyed allies – genuinely believe that tuition for children of wealthier families should be free. Most people agree that there should be some sort of net price slope, running from zero for students from poorer families and upwards as family income increases. There’s no consensus about where the threshold for going above zero is, and no consensus about what the grade of the slop should be. That’s mostly because we’ve never had data to look at the question properly before.

    I hope people agree with this, if you make more money, you pay a little more, and if you barely make enough to survive, that shouldn’t stop your kids getting a university education if they’ve earned it. I like this kind of argument because it moves us past the “should we do this” and on to the much more important “how much help do people need.”

    It’s a step in the right direction!

    > The Coming Cost Debate in Ontario | HESA

  • Looking into Ottawa’s past

    Looking into Ottawa’s past

    I’m not exactly sure how I came across this (I think I was seeing how streets lined up and wondering how Ottawa’s streets might have changed), but this morning I discovered a really neat repository of old aerial maps of Ottawa, going back all the way to the 1920s. It’s cool to see how cities change, and what Downtown, the Transitway, LeBreton Flats, City Hall, or Lansdowne all looked like over the years.

    The maps allow you to overlap a modern street map over the old pictures, so you can clearly see how things have changed. The whole thing is viewable at maps.ottawa.ca/geoottawa!

    > geoOttawa

  • Ed Snowden can say whatever he wants

    “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” Snowden said. “Respectfully, that’s bullshit.”

    It must be really nice to be in a position where you can say something like this with confidence, having not a care in the world about repercussions. Not saying Snowden is in an enviable position overall, but he can say what he really thinks even better than the current American Republican front-runner (and he’s much more likely to be telling the truth).

    > Snowden: FBI’s claim that it requires Apple’s help to unlock iPhone is ‘bullshit’

  • The Problem with Homelessness is Poverty

    I attended college pay-as-you-go for a couple years while working, then left because I couldn’t afford to continue and knew better than to take on student debt. My moderate savings was destroyed in my 30s by health care costs that insurance wouldn’t cover. Within the past several years, full-time work that pays a subsistence wage has been hard to come by.

    Another great reason why basic income would be super useful. There are plenty of jobs that don’t pay that much but are vital to the world continuing to run. And with a basic income and solid universal health care, so many of the issues that put people on the streets just don’t come up. This is a long piece but it’s well worth your time.

    > I’ve been homeless 3 times. The problem isn’t drugs or mental illness — it’s poverty. – Vox

  • Handoff for iTunes | iMore

    I’d love to be able to start a playlist on my Mac and then walk away, pick up my iPhone, swipe, and keep right on listening.

    So true. I (and Rene) have been saying this for a few years at least. This is the dream, and it’s sooooo close with Handoff, just not for iTunes.

    > Why I want to see Handoff for iTunes in iOS 10 so ludicrously much | iMore

  • Is group chat making you sweat?

    10. Chat reminds you that you’re behind. Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

    I write a lot about communication. It’s something that is very important to me. There are a lot of good points about chatting in large groups of people (like in Slack). I totally agree with the points raised, but I think chat apps like Slack are doing well to actually cut down on noise in group chat, because not everything has to be sent to every person, but there’s still a lot of transparency in what messages are being sent where.

    Slack also offers 1 on 1 chat, and ad-hoc small groups for chat, so it’s the best of all worlds when you want to communicate with a team or group of people.

    > Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium

  • I’m probably not allergic to peanuts because I love them so much

    The early introduction of peanut to the diets of infants at high-risk of developing peanut allergy significantly reduces the risk of peanut allergy until 6 years of age, even if they stop eating peanut around the age of five, according to a new study led by King’s College London.

    Let’s all talk about something we’ve assumed for years. I’m going to be giving my kids peanut butter baths just in case.

    > Eating peanut in early years helps reduce risk of allergy even with later abstinence, study suggests — ScienceDaily

  • Why Basic Income is so Important

    Canada’s prior experiment with a BIG [(Basic Income Guarantee)], the Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the 1970s, found that a BIG did not cause people to stop working — with two important exceptions. The first was women with infants at home, who effectively used the BIG to purchase maternity leave. We should expect a different response from women in modern-day Canada, where maternity leave benefits are much more extensive. But where child care and other supports for working parents are insufficient, we may see responses to a BIG that will show us those cracks in the system.

    The other group whose employment levels decreased under Mincome was teenage boys. A closer look reveals that with a basic income guarantee, male high school students were more likely to make the decision to stay in school until graduation. Given the Ontario government’s aim of increasing graduation rates and the need for a highly educated population, it will be important to understand how people’s labour market decisions interact with other important decisions, like the decision to improve their skills and buy a better long-term future for themselves and their families.

    > We Should Applaud Ontario’s Plans To Pilot A Basic Income Guarantee | Laura Anderson