I think the example to take here is the German education system: They were proponents of the idea that college isn't the only way. They had a second option, which is vocational school. These often have no tuition.

This is the type of school you don't usually go to 5 days a week. Instead, you split that time between school and apprenticeship (i.e. internship). That way, you're forced to see the industry from day 1 and there's no situations where you graduate without being employable (as I often see in CS majors these days).

The result is that you have training as a skilled technician, and can make a good living immediately. The industry also has skilled workers to fill their gaps. It seems like a no brainer to me. You don't need a 4 year university diploma for everything.

Also, it blows my mind that industry bitches and moans about having no workers yet makes no effort in that direction either. My school, WPI, was founded back in the 1860s by industrymen as a "free school for industrial science". Where is this sensibility now? 20 odd companies and approximately 200 citizens helped build the buildings for the school. What happened to this sense of community?

Edit: Now that I think about it, on a slightly unrelated note, why don't universities have mandatory internships anymore? The more, the better.

> "Edit: Now that I think about it, on a slightly unrelated note, why don't universities have mandatory internships anymore? The more, the better."

Some do. I went to the University of Waterloo - it's well known for its co-op system (i.e. internships). The program I was under put you through 5-6 4-month internships before you could graduate.

Linky McLink: http://cecs.uwaterloo.ca/

I have to say, it is by far the best decision I've ever made. If I had gone through undergrad without taking internships I'd be pretty fucked right now. Instead, I had a small lineup of name-brand companies courting me out of college and that's subsequently opened a lot more doors.

If you're going through an engineering/CS education right now and you're not doing internships, you're doing it wrong.

Not at all. Internships are a valid option (well, as long as they're paid), but they certainly are not the only option. You could be contributing to one of the open source projects out there, participating in research on campus, or doing inter-professional projects if your school offers them.

When it comes to education and employment, there is no single right way of doing things.

Respectfully disagree - if your goal is private sector employment.

If you want to go down the academia path, I'm sure the optimal course of action is different, but for private sector employment it doesn't get better than internships.

I've done a lot of interviewing, and while open source projects are valuable, they are largely not as valuable to a company as real industry experience. Now, this differs in degrees - if you're a core contributor to a well known library for example, I'd give that a lot more credence than "hacked on various open source things".

Research on campus also pales in effectiveness to industry experience. Software in industry has a lot of constraints and differences to hacking on your own time, at your own pace, and similarly has a lot of differences to academia.

This is supported by my interview experiences - I interview a lot of masters-level people with impressive rosters of research projects on their resumes, but many of them cannot code at all, to the point where I wonder what exactly they contributed to these projects, if anything. On the other hand, I've never interviewed someone way out to lunch who has a background interning at the "big names" (e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc).

Having a company with a very high hiring bar on your resume is like a gigantic stamp of approval - people know these companies hire tough, and if you passed their bar (and spent time there, and didn't get fired), you automatically have more cred than someone who worked on anonymous FOSS projects or his/her own projects.

> I think the example to take here is the German education system: They were proponents of the idea that college isn't the only way. They had a second option, which is vocational school. These often have no tuition.

We have a similar alternative here in Australia; often known as "TAFE" (in Western Australia, at least) where the fees are typically just up-front and very cheap (we're talking hundreds, as opposed to 20-30k+ for University) for vocational courses, and a bit more for apprenticeships.

Saying that, and mostly due to our mining activity, there are a lot of people seeking this route. In fact, it's not uncommon for an electrician or fitter to earn a good $80k+ for FIFO work with just a couple of years experience (the news media usually says $100k, but that's the exception). Not bad considering what a lot of DBA's, programmers and sysadmins with 1-2 years of experience get.

Keep in mind we have a Government scheme called HECS/HELP, where the Government pays your fees (with some fairly high limits). You pay them back once you earn a certain level of income (the rate increases as you earn more) and there is no interest, however it does increase in June every year via inflation.

Excuse my very high-level overview.

Every person that I know that has considered starting their own business has decided against it for one reason only, health insurance. They have always been the obtainer in chief of health insurance for the family and it is too risky to go without. I strongly suspect that a public health option would blow the job market wide open between folks who want to retire but can't because health insurance is idiotically expensive and those of us who would love to start a business but cannot put a whole family at physical risk for a potential monetary reward.

I start a business means my present job opens up, as well as any additional hires my business would need. Jobs problem gone.

"I strongly suspect that a public health option would blow the job market wide open ..."

Excellent argument for real reform to health insurance access.

Well, I learned the same logic in school. I found it compelling, too. And I guess I still do. Our teacher said: 'Because we have this safety net here in Germany, we can take more risks.'

Yet, I see more risk taking in the US than in Germany. I suppose, its rather that Europeans are less risk taking, so they also support a better safety net. I know its not my business, but I can't help being scared about the idea, that the most dynamic country in the western world might slow down because of copying Europe.

Israel has a German-like safety net (health, food, unemplouyment, training and otherwise), and more risk taking than the US - at least where technology is concerned (only silicon valley tops israel in startups per capita - even California does not). So neither explanation is good.

I think the difference is more cultural than anything. Making your own fortune is very much part of the American identity (from gold rushes to tech startups), whereas Europe has experienced over and over again that boundless ambition can lead to horrendous things (war, war, more war and genocide).

The US getting more universal health care coverage will not change that.

There are other ways to achieve the goal of breaking the link between employment and healthcare without a public insurer. Public insurers eventually become the predominant insurer by a large margin because they can use their size to obtain lower prices. Markets with few buyers or sellers are less efficient at providing the products people want at the prices they want than those with many. The result in this case would be less profit to be made in healthcare than people would be willing to pay for, so less effort would be spent to do so. Seems undesirable.

This is trending a bit off topic. Feel free to respond, but I won't.

Except that nations with socialized health care have single or few providers yet manage to get extremely low prices because they have the negotiation power of an entire nation behind them and lots of alternative providers.

Your theory may be interesting but is completely opposite from reality.

This is so true... if you don't have a spouse whose coverage you can utilize, the cost of health insurance is prohibitive, ESPECIALLY for anyone over 30 who has a spouse and kids. At that point going without insurance (as I did when doing a startup, and so many other entrepreneurs I've seen do) is not just risky, it's irresponsible and foolhardy. Taking financial risks to start a business is fine - but you shouldn't have to risk your health and your family's health.

If the government wants to see more people starting new businesses and taking risks, it needs to remove the HUGE disparity in healthcare costs between working for a large corporation and going solo. There's just no reason it should exist.

Out of curiosity, what is the large source of the disparity? I was aware you don't get as nice of a tax break (though that will become irrelevant when you are making no money). Individually, I'd be surprised if your family had to pay over $1,500 a month for everyone, which is pretty comparable to group rates.

IIRC employer-bvased healthcare in the US is more heavily regulated, and allows for coverage of pre-existing conditions and so on.

It's not that uncommon for the employer to pay part of the group rate, as far as I can see.

Oh quite true, but then you can view it is salary. e.g. you aren't quitting a $80,000 a year job to do a startup; you are quitting a $100,000 a year job to do so.

(I find it hard to accept that a lack of free health insurance is keeping that many would-be entrepreneurs at their day jobs any more than a lack of free housing is. If you have some form of disease that keeps you from getting insurance, I completely sympathize (and I believe the health care law will solve that issue), but for most people it is just another cost to consider before leaving - like housing, transportation, etc.)

Housing and transportation can't bankrupt you (unless it is some crazy circumstance that is so rare that most people can't possibly fathom). You can walk away at anytime from your home or have your car repossessed. You simply cannot walk away from your chemotherapy unless you want to die.

If we can somehow find a way to rein in costs of health services (perhaps by disincentivizing supplier-induced demand through price ceilings in both malpractice awards AND gasp healthcare service price controls a la Singapore, Japan, or Switzerland), we can get further away from our dependence on large corporations to employ everyone.

A friend of mine was considering dropping his current job and doing some contract work for a while. He has a wife and two kids, and was worried about insurance. He found that he could insure his entire family with a decent plan for about $450 a month (after spending a little time on http://ehealthinsurance.com/). Now, I'm not saying that's chump change when you're bootstrapping a business on no salary, but that's not insurmountable, either, given some up-front planning and saving.

Would a universal health care system make it even easier? Sure, no doubt. But I often hear that it's so difficult and costly to purchase individual health insurance, and that just seems to be untrue. Are there other factors I'm not considering?

These people either don't intend on being profitable in the next 18 months or else they didn't do their research.

If you quit your job, COBRA allows you to continue to pay 101% of the group rates for 18 months and keep your old insurance.

Not everyone can afford the short term hit of paying 3-4X what they're paying now for their health insurance. If your monthly group policy is $1200/month for your family, but the employer's paying $800 of that, and you're only paying $400, you'll get quite a shock when the COBRA bill comes.

No one has to pay 3-4X what they're paying now for their health insurance. They have to pay 101%.

It's possible that they didn't understand the nature of their compensation, and mistakenly believed their compensation was lower than it was. But in that case, I'd suggest they simply failed at financial planning.

(Note: if you can't do proper financial planning, don't do a startup.)

COBRA can be expensive. At my last job, my premium was around 60/month. When I quit, COBRA payments were 750/month. This was before kids.

EXACTLY the same problem in the UK. Under the last government's social engineering caper, millions of teenagers who would otherwise have learned a trade (electrician, plumber, carpenter, etc) from their fathers instead were swindled into going to hastily built "new universities" to get worthless, made-up degrees in "Media Studies" (and a mountain of debt). Now they're not only unemployed but unemployable - and all our skilled and semi-skilled labour we import from Poland (a country where they do still respect honest work).

Now my fondness for all things Eastern European is very well known - but even I think it's insane that while we have millions of English jobless, someone flew 600 miles to serve me coffee at the train station in the mornings.

Right now ND is importing welders and other skilled tradesmen from Canada. They just cannot get enough people. This whole "push people to get a real education" is a crock. People need to get the education (be it vocational or academic) that allows them to have a career that satisfies them, and not some weird perception of the world.

It's the use of the word "real". You got to come out of the other side of whatever theoretical or practical education you choose with something that makes you an asset. Education is supposed to transform you from a consumer into a producer. That's what "real" is. Tangible.

I've never been to Canada but I love Eastern Europe, there's a buzz there, an energy that drove these kids to learn English and travel to where the work is. To be a young Eastern European today is a glorious thing - you could go anywhere in the EU and be better educated, harder working and better looking than 95% of the locals, 99% in some places. These kids are going to rule the world one day and they'll have earned it - but we'll have thrown it away.

Oh, I agree about the asset part. The US just went through a "must go to college" phase that is making it difficult to do infrastructure jobs that frankly are hard to outsource. Educators and funding providers really cut anything not having to do with college prep. I wonder how many people in offices would have been happier and healthier in a vocational profession. It isn't like the money is exactly that much lower, particularly given the cheaper starting costs.

With the same years experience, and putting the same hours in, I'd be earning as much as a plumber today as I am as a database administrator, I am certain of it. Maybe even more, for fewer hours. It's all about supply and demand, plumbing is something I'm sure more people could learn than could learn to be a DBA, just no-one wants to, yet we all still need our pipes seen to...

This is all very true, but you are leaving out the part about dealing with human feces.

Truthfully, a lot of plumbers never see that type of stuff. New construction and other industries. Although, those willing to deal with it had an hourly rate that makes many programmers envious.

Although, as a programmer, I had to remove a dead rat from a track (rail) after the cart (electrified, motor model size) carrying medical samples hit it. It was quite the shock climbing the ladder, opening the false ceiling, and then doing the horror-movie-style 180 with the flashlight.

I have a friend with a sewage pumping business. He pays his drivers $40,000+ per year (high school education not required) and is a millionaire himself. There is money in handling 'issues' that other people don't want to handle.

Being a business owner and having multiple people working for you != 'being a plumber'. 40k is about half of the US median programmer salary.

where did you get your figure for US median programmer salary?

Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm .

"In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer applications software engineers were $85,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $67,790 and $104,870. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $53,720, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $128,870."

On the other hand, from that same page:

"Median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer programmers were $69,620 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $52,640 and $89,720 a year. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $40,080, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $111,450. "

and

"In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer systems software engineers were $92,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $73,200 and $113,960. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,810, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $135,780."

So they make a strong distinction between "programmers" and "software engineers". I guess there's a definition in there somewhere, I didn't read it that closely (which is why I initially took the 85k as 'overall' median).

wow - good find, they actually have a few more classifications lower on the page (developers). I wonder what the difference between responses of the workers versus management under what category they find themselves.

They make it equally difficult to figure the plumber and other vocational professions. The initial pages seems to bunch a varying groups together. ick

defs: Computer software engineers design and develop software

omputer programmers write programs. After computer software engineers and systems analysts design software programs, the programmer converts that design into a logical series of instructions that the computer can follow (A section on computer systems analysts appears elsewhere in the Handbook.)

"Education is supposed to transform you from a consumer into a producer"

What the ....? I'm guessing there are many reasons to get an education, but isn't the primary reason to understand the world better than before?

Yes that's very warm and fluffy but it should be obvious that an education system that doesn't create more value than it consumes will eventually bankrupt it's host society.

I think you're mixing multiple issues into one big ball of yarn.

A solid case can be made that America's biggest problem right now is our populations inability to think critically. "here, take this loan with fluctuatings interest rates that only lasts 5 years. don't worry you can refinance in 5 years after your house is worth more". "Don't worry about eating well or exercising, here are some pills that will solve it all for your". "let's pray for a solution to our national debt" <- I wish I were making that up

That isn't a solid case for our population's inability to think critically, it's a solid case for the problems caused by the necessity of specialization in a highly complex society. In nearly every interaction outside our chosen areas of expertise, we are all on the wrong end of an information asymmetry. Expecting everyone in society to have at least an intermediate level of expertise in <insert as-yet-unknown next thing that screws us> is not the solution.

Here's an example - I go to the doctor, the doctor prescribes a certain cholesterol medication, I go pick it up and start taking it regularly. There's every chance that next year, someone on the internet will be implying that I'm stupid, that I lack critical thinking skills, because everyone knows that this cholesterol drug causes a major medical condition. I'll be told that anyone who knew anything about medicine at the time I was prescribed this drug would have told me that I shouldn't have taken it. And yet, my doctor, who presumably did know things about medicine, told me to take it. Should I have done my own due diligence into this drug? How would I know where to start? Do I need to be taught biology so that I know how to figure out which medicine is and isn't safe? Does everyone need to have enough understanding of medicine to make these sorts of decisions?

The financial system is less complicated than medicine, but it is not at all trivial. People who were sold snake oil by those with more expertise than themselves do not lack critical reasoning skills. They merely trusted authority, which we all have to do on a daily basis just to get by in a world where everything is complex.

tl;dr; People who didn't understand the consequences of adjustable rate mortgages or believe that prayer is the only way they can contribute to solving our debt problem aren't stupid; they don't know much about finance, but they probably know a lot about something else.

Somewhat related, but when I had issues with my heart, had I blindly followed what my doctor said and not done due diligence, I would have missed a very critical parameter that had to be fixed. The doc (multiple doctors, actually) never suggested the tests, I did my research and found it out, with some push got the test prescribed, lo and behold! That test was positive and was a primary reason for my ill health. Does everyone need to have an understanding of these things? I don't know, but it probably saved me from another heart attack for sure!

"I'm guessing there are many reasons to get an education, but isn't the primary reason to understand the world better than before?"

Surely that's rhetorical?

Do you honestly think most people pursue education primarily to understand the world better, and not to increase their earning potential?

I think the smart ones realize they increase their earning potential by understanding the world better, but it also does much more than increase your earning potential.

The idea that an education turns one into a producer from a consumer sounds absurd. People without educations produce!

People without college education sure, but they have a different kind of education, which was my original point. Why is college seen as the only way?

by that definition all of life is an education is it not? I don't think college is the only way, but I still don't think an education is about becoming a producer instead of a consumer.

"To be a young Eastern European today is a glorious thing"

LOL, of course, that's why they flock to the West to pick asparagus &_& . Now I agree that many people from the East have better work mentality than the unemployed here in the West, but that's out of economic necessary, and not some sort of fundamental genetic trait; and it'll be gone in 15 years when the economic standards have leveled and everybody has gotten used to it.

Let us not forget though, that if you see a foreign worker, then you will more likely than not have come across someone that has decided to do something different than the rest of his/her peers, often times leaving friends & family behind in their home country. The goal? To make money/open up to different opportunities, perhaps with a vision to one day return. Thus you will see people more motivated, because the ones that aren't have stayed home. As for people respecting honest work, the shortage of "traders" can be seen in Central & Eastern Europe as well and is being filled by people from beyond the region. There is not an overproduction of these skills in CEE.

Also, I see it as a great opportunity (for say the UK) to have people from the rest of the EU. I mean, you did not have to pay for 18 years of their education and health care. That is not bad for the taxpayer.

Disclaimer: I am Czech and used to work as a fruit picker during Summer months :)

Dobry den :-) Praha is a perfect example of what I mean - a city with a long history full of people who are excited about the future. Compare to Paris, a city that only harks back to past glories. I have many friends in Paris and am often there, but it feels claustrophobic for that reason.

Hi :) Don't know about Prague, have not been in a long time, but you could certainly say that in countries that are still lacking a bit economically, just implementing what exists already in more advanced nations can lead to big gains.

May I ask how old you are? Although some of your observations are correct, I distinctly remember such devaluation of the trades going on under the last conservative government as well, not just the Labour one that came to power under Blair. Indeed, worthless degrees were lovingly satirized by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide as far back as the 70s. To ascribe this problem solely to the faults of a single party reflects a rather short-term view of the problem.

I'm in my mid-30s. Sure it happened in the 80s - but i was a kid then. What was different about Nu Labour is that they sold snake oil too, a false promise of degree== job. Thatcher was heartless, but she never lied like that. She just said, get on with it.

I'm 40. My point is not that Thatcher was heartless, but that while she was busy privatizing a variety of state-owned UK companies (most of which desperately needed to be have their monopolies abolished), she also triggered a recurring asset-inflation/deflation cycle and popularized the idea of getting rich quick through trading up repeatedly. This culminated in a real-estate boom (& bust) after people were given permission to buy their council houses at rock-bottom prices.

Your spelling tics ('nu labour') and use of the suggestion that the party lied by promoting a policy of wider university education which turned out to be a failure suggest a rather intense bias. It seems not to have occurred to you that the Blair government thought widespread higher education was the antitode to Britain's structural economic problems and simply Got It Wrong. Likewise, there are a lot of people on the left who are convinced that Thatcher set out to wreck the economy by plundering the state monopolies, when the reality is that they were in terrible shape and the abrupt recession that followed a long period of financial expansion came as a nasty surprise for the then-ruling Conservatives under John Major.

I mean, it's fun to imagine that wicked politicians crash the economy for their own personal gain; but even a brief study of history suggests that wrecking an economy is usually followed by painful electoral defeat and a long term in the wilderness. Most politicians are not especially malicious, they're just not especially competent either. Gordon Brown looked like a magician until the financial crisis hit, and had probably come to believe he was. Likewise, Thatcher looked like a genius until there were riots in the streets and Sterling collapsed not long after her departure. If you can only remember the faults of the most recent government, then you're in danger of repeating the ones of that which came immediately before, or those of their predecessors.

It was not just a mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to monkey with the unemployment figures before an election! One the electorate fell for. Of course you could make exactly the same case about Thatcher boosting her popularity by winning the Falklands War.

The Nu Labour "project" was very cynically about power for the sake of power, using techniques hitherto reserved for selling consumer goods and pop music. Thatcher, for all her faults, was a true believer in what later became known as Thatcherism. Blair and Brown were so intent on power their whole political careers that they had absolutely no idea what to do when they got it!

Really? Have a look into Thatcher's pre-political career: her biggest achievement was finding a way to cheaply boost the volume of ice cream using an additive extracted from seaweed that was cheaper than using more milk. When you get into arguing about whether people were true ideologues or just going through the motions, you are essentially offering religious arguments. Being Irish and having later in lived in London for a decade, I have little sympathy for ideological purity as a political desideratum. All politicians are self-interested to some degree. It is naive to think you can discuss the quality of others' motives in objective terms.

There is theory and there is practice. Before suggesting any additional funds for SBA loans, I would suggest you read David Einhorn's book "Fooling Some Of The People All of the Time". In short, when the govt. guarantees loans, loan standards go down and fraud goes up. Yes, there are checks and balances in place but motivated parties find ways to scam the system. It is a travesty how much wastage there is in the process.

And for a real life example, just take a look at Fannie May and Freddie Mac.

Perhaps if it were a national system that is centrally-controlled and disbursed end-to-end, fraud could be rampant; but if it were placed in a credit union-type "trusts" managed by each participating states, it would cut down alot more on the inherent single-point-of-fraud scenarios you envision, or at the very least contain it to the few fraudulent areas.

In 5 years all of those trusts will have merged into Small Business Loans of America Corporation, and all the loans will be sold on the derivatives market within a month of origination, and an army of loan brokers will individual figure out how to massage the paperwork originate a bogus loan and collect a commission.

We've done this already.

At best, we might have the benefit of the fraud benefiting a million individuals, like in the housing bubble, instead of a handful, like in the S&L days.

Just stick to the simplified health care, and leave out the credit idea.

So the problem is training, and a passivity-inducing misconception of "entrepreneurship". And the solution is:

1) A flood of government equity, distributed by those ever-so-entrepreneurial bureaucrats. There is, of course, no chance that the same people who brought us ethanol subsidies ("so stupid not even the Soviets tried it"), the Fannie Mae housing bubble and the $3000 hammer won't screw it up.

2) A no-cost-to-government expansion of Medicare, which I'm sure has some Canute-like power to push back the tides of adverse selection. For efficiency and quality of service provision, please refer to sarcasm in point 1).

3) Tax credits for jobs created -- there was a day when this sort of thing was called "profit", which entrepreneurs were allowed to keep, but I suppose funding 1) and 2) will finally put paid to this dwindling concept.

Jokes about "liberals" would be easy, but unfair, as Congressional conservatives have been just about as bad, AND in violation of principles that should have guided them better.

Why on God's green earth would _programmers_ slap kludges like these on fundamental system failures? If someone proposed fixing bugs this way the collective sneering here would break the internet.

We've got billions (trillions?) already deployed in "education", whose product is widely understood as unsatisfactory at best. We just had a post showing that about 25% of the students at a well-regarded university are interested in nothing but the grade, and are so unprepared they can't imagine any way to get it on their own. Why not fix THAT?

And why is it that all fixes proposed amount to hurling more man-months at the problem?

I'm sure you mean well, and there's no doubt the problems are complicated, but seriously, this sort of thing lacks the thought I presume HN types bring to work every single day.

"1) A flood of government equity, distributed by those ever-so-entrepreneurial bureaucrats. There is, of course, no chance that the same people who brought us ethanol subsidies ("so stupid not even the Soviets tried it"), the Fannie Mae housing bubble and the $3000 hammer won't screw it up."

It would be put into a trust, disbursed and managed as a credit union by participant states and guaranteed by the NCUA, not centrally-governed.

And, all of those "waste" slags you have against the government are exactly why my proposal would be decentralized and managed on the state level by default. The $3000 hammer is swallowed into the Pentagon, which is why it's dysfunctional. Decentralized management by default makes the program work effectively: spread the "risk" geographically rather than in one silo.

I think you just fundamentally oppose government action in any scenario because of your political leanings (likely libertarian from the attitude), which is fine, but to write such vitriol while simultaneously offering nothing of your "if i ruled the world" solution smacks as being simply obtuse for trolling purposes.

"A no-cost-to-government expansion of Medicare, which I'm sure has some Canute-like power to push back the tides of adverse selection."

So, every small business is filled with sick people who would enroll because they can't afford private insurance outside?

I'm proposing that it would be a financial boon for SMBs because they can get better rates through Medicare for their group than from private insurers. Bonus: there would be healthy people enrolling in the program who don't need constant healthcare services.

"We've got billions (trillions?) already deployed in "education", whose product is widely understood as unsatisfactory at best. We just had a post showing that about 25% of the students at a well-regarded university are interested in nothing but the grade, and are so unprepared they can't imagine any way to get it on their own. Why not fix THAT?"

Oh, so the answer to fixing economically bloated and unsatisfactory education is to do what exactly to the bloated and unsatisfactory education system? Yours doesn't seem like much of a solution. It's actually a non-solution, no offense.

"I'm sure you mean well, and there's no doubt the problems are complicated, but seriously, this sort of thing lacks the thought I presume HN types bring to work every single day."

You took time to write about how terrible I am for even back-napkinning some solutions, without offering anything in return. Thanks for the gainsaying: I learned alot about you.

You know, your own response raises the elaborated problems to your proposals. But you're so committed to your preferred end-state that you've flipped the obvious answers. State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"? Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?

This stuff doesn't even link up with your first explanation of the problem.

You can see the details enough to see the problems, but you see the implications and don't like them. So you find ways to overlook them without even noticing what you've done. You are outsmarting yourself. It's precisely because you are so smart that you have driven yourself to positions that make no sense.

THAT is the problem. I could pose mathematical proofs of a contrary approach and you'd still fight it.

Because you are smart enough to see that going after the real problems in education would touch some fundamental and touchy subjects: parental responsibility, what "equality" and "fairness" really mean, whether we _can_ educate _everyone_, whether "teachers" as currently organized as a benevolent as they claim. And so on. Lord only knows what the final answers would be, but even talking about this stuff would be enough to blow the Progressive Coalition into a thousand tiny pieces. So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government.

THAT is the offer. You are going about the problem all wrong -- your approach goes against everything you (meaning "you" as a stereotyped smart, problem-solving, elegance-seeking, Hacker News ur-type) do so well, day in and day out.

Now, I apologize for the grandiose generalizations and stereotyping and the reckless assumptions about goals and mental state. I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work. Go ahead, downvote this too, I suppose it deserves it -- but holy mackerel, I just don't get it.

"State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"?"

"Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one counterexample of a government funded program (centralized at that!) that works, and that likely would've never happened without soul-crushing R&D and deployment expenditure from a cabal of private network competitors. In other words, it wouldn't have happened, from the "session" OSI layer back to physical. I can also name other government developments (Polio elimination, Interstate System, Railroad, hell even the USPS up until about 4 years ago) that made America the engine of the world economy; but it belabors the point and you'll just disagree anyway.

"Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?"

They will if they can get a discount over Blue Cross for similar coverage. Why do you think people shop at Wal-Mart? Because of the happy faces?

You say you're all about business, try this exercise real quick: go and see how much it would cost to get coverage for a four-person startup through a private insurer (remember, get like for like coverage) vs. premiums for Medicare. See the difference? Now calculate it if one of the four has/had cancer. Not so fun.

"I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work"

Your design pattern, if I can suss it out from your comment about "equality" and "fairness" and "educating everyone", is that you want simple human nature/nurture to win out against educating all children (even and especially corner cases like poor and problemed ones).

"So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government."

First, comparing educating children to bug-catching programs is asinine on it's face; secondly, there are a number of successful companies out there that have legacy code to maintain that is rife with bugs. Not only that, this code often can't even be read let alone maintained by anyone but a single person that the company then has to continually shovel money at to keep them from leaving. Wall St., the insurance industry (go figure since we're talking healthcare!), hell even the two most successful technology companies on planet earth by any measure (Microsoft and Apple) maintain buggy legacy code for ages. It's in fact, rare that they throw out the entire system. Yet, you want to do that for a country with 75 million kids.

You don't know anything about what I would or wouldn't do, because I'm focussed here on how we think about the problem.

If you think our current educational system "works", then why is it that our economic problems are poor worker preparation and inflexible attitudes about work?

If you are satisfied with how you're thinking about all this, I can't change that. Maybe sometime, when you're wondering why everyone is so stupid / evil that they can't see the brilliance of boosting small businesses with $10bn annual subsidy and their own single payer health system, you'll consider that maybe something along these lines helps explain the disconnect.

BTW, suggesting that the Postal Service was some kind of economic accelerator until 4 years ago is just ignorant. Their productivity is terrible, UPS & FedEx kicked their ass decades ago. They should have been relegated to rural / remote universal service, and the rest privatized, a long time ago. Think about why they weren't and you'll go a long way to understanding why political entities make lousy economic decisions.

The $3000 hammer is an accounting artefact. To make it easier they sold a package of gear to the military as if everything cost the same. So you got a very expensive hammer, and a very cheap gas turbine!

I agree with everything you said but the #1 obstacle to owning you own business is seed capital. You don't have to be a genius or rich to start a company, but you do have to be willing to take a potentially big financial risk to do so. People fresh out of college don't have 20k to live off of for 6 months before they can turn a profit on a business. The average household has 10k+ in debt; those people cannot start a business either.

I agree with you, but I think it's more dire than what you are painting. I'd rephrase something more like this:

People fresh out of college (most of whom are already carrying a 5-figure debt) don't have $60k to live off of for the 18-months before they (might) turn a profit.

I've been around VERY few businesses that were profitable at 6 months. Either you are digging out from the high initial capital costs (like a restaurant) or you're actually having to build the thing you want to sell. Going from inception to profitability in 6 months would be, at least by my estimation, remarkable.

Building products and launching services takes time. If we want to encourage entrepreneurs, we should be focused on getting them over those initial hurdles.

Even if they all had the money, 95% of them will fail. HN likes to focus on the success side of the equation - but with high risk also comes a high failure rate.

I know tons of people who started their own businesses -it's got little to do with seed capital and everything to do with execution. They had it, and they blew it, through bad decions mostly.

"People fresh out of college don't have 20k to live off of for 6 months before they can turn a profit on a business. The average household has 10k+ in debt; those people cannot start a business either."

For those grads, I suppose ycombinator and techstars suit them well. That's only a small part of the "Small Business" equation, however. There are cafe owners that need part-time help and need easy-access capital to help them over supply humps.

Not every inventor can get float money from crowdsourced places like kickstarter, either because their product is not "consumer-friendly" or because it's in a decidedly unsexy industry (like precision gauges, for example). And, while there are cool coworking or tool-borrowing libraries popping up, there are no cool "we'll work on your marketing, sales admin" places. Those take money. The SBA-for-all concept can help, I think.

I should print this out and frame this on my wall: "Why our industry is insular and tunnel visioned."

Entrepreneurialism in the vast majority of this country, let alone the world, is not at all related to computers, the internet, cloud services, or any such hoo-hah.

We exist in a little tiny sphere in a little tiny corner of all that is small businesses.

The vast majority of entrepreneurialism that happens in the world has real costs and a need for real capital. Try running a corner store when you have no money to buy inventory, or pay rent on the space.

How do you pay your own wage?

You can cash in your Twitter followers for money, right?

Bitcoin.

Back in 2006 my brother and I started a business with $0 upfront cost.

1and1 at the time was running a deal for 3 years free hosting. We made a site on there, put up AdSense, made enough money to buy a domain. Then made enough money to upgrade to paid shared hosting, and then dedicated hosting. It's still profitable today.

Agreed. Lets also make sure that these new businesses stay employee owned. If newly created small businesses find success -- only to be bought out by the paragons of the current economic model -- we will end up cycling back into the same negative externalities of the current economic model. If they are bought out we will be back to the same unemployment level, with more public debt that was transferred to the largest corporations and their shareholders.

> America as it currently stands has a total, almost prideful disregard for education (public and higher) and technical training.

I don't think the US disdains education. They just don't like anything related to math or engineering.

I stopped reading when I realized you think we need more vocational training. I agree.

Here's another idea that goes with your thought: Why don't employers stop asking for every cert and piece of experience under the sun? Whatever happened to on-the-job training?

This exists in IT but I'm sure it is the same elsewhere.