Hugo Award for Best Black?

Cycling is unpowered. Walking is unpowered. Both use the same human muscle system and human fuel system, but one accomplishes locomotion with 1/7 as much energy. Walking is obviously very inefficient, and to claim humans are so efficient at walking that we don't know if we can make them any more efficient is ludicrous; there is obviously a lot of loss in the system to look for.

Pendulums swing forever. Have you not seen a pendulum? They get momentum from the rotation of the earth. There's a pendulum that has been swinging since 1855; that doesn't just happen by magic.

OnLive's 5 customers are probably crying now.

Well, maybe these engineers would have had jobs that some other engineers had, and so some other engineers wouldn't have jobs. Somebody would have not had a job.

My $800 inline IPS can apply firewall rules and deep packet inspection to 26GB of traffic per second with a double-digit latency of 10us.

A pendulum is powered by the rotational energy of the earth in its orbit around the sun. It has the largest external power source in the world.

It's funny, too: humans are so efficient walking that we don't know if we can make them walk any more efficiently, but we do know that they use as much energy to walk 1 mile as they use to bicycle 7 miles.

I don't have to take it in the ass to afford it!

Yes, I've thought of that as well. Have you read your employment contract? Mine specifies that I can have $5000 per year of tuition, but I must stay with the company for 2 full years or else pay the whole balance back. It's not even pro-rated. This is the same situation as today, and so it did come to my attention.

When you think about it, it's not really a big deal. It actually moves some control onto the individual, and moves it off the business.

Currently, the onus is on individuals to educate themselves, with all the risk involved. Businesses know what's going on in their market and in their business: they have work performance information and business strategic goals, they have market projections and metrics on their growth, and they have highly-experienced business analysts to tell them how many people they're going to need in the next 2-4 years. An individual has to guess what the whole market will look like, with all of this information opaque to them, and with the worry that other individuals will have the same idea and get the same education: even if you correctly guess that there will be 200,000 new Computer Programming jobs when you graduate, that doesn't much help if 2 million people start college for Computer Programming the same year as you do.

If the business is left to carry the workforce, any market growth quickly dries up the pool of candidates. The business must therefor start hiring entrants, bringing them in, training them, sending them off to be educated, and so forth. During this time, the employer can shift lower-skill work from expensive, high-experienced, highly-skilled labor onto the new entrants, making effective use of them and furthering the business strategy: the entrant, while learning, is valuable to the business. While all of this is going on, the business is paying the student a salary: the entrant is gaining workforce experience, an education, and an income, with all risk on the employer.

Now, I'll agree with you that, as a matter of fairness, the employer should at least pro-rate the student's education over time; besides just being sensible, the employer is deriving benefit from the employee during their education, and so is in fact being paid back. Let's say the entrant has, as I have, a 2 year repayment contract: he must remain with the employer for two years, or else pay back his tuition costs. Well, at graduation time four years in, the first two years are done and gone; the student is obligated for two years of tuition, and must stay with the business to avoid that financial burden. In a sense of fairness, the employee should only owe half of the third year and all of the fourth year; a year after graduation, the employee will only owe one half of a year's tuition.

Of course it would be better for the employee if the employer waived the tuition repayment entirely; as you've pointed out, the employee may decide to immediately quit, and wouldn't want to be saddled with that burden. What about the employer, though? The employer made an investment; don't they deserve good faith on the social contract they've made with the employee? And from the employee's perspective, if another employer places an offer, can't they cover the employee's repayment, as they often do now?

I think this is a net-positive movement, even with your concerns taken into consideration. Perhaps you could consider it for a while, consider the alternatives from the perspective of the employee and the employer, consider the advantages and disadvantages, and weigh each out. I'm sure you'll see that it's at least more complex than a simple matter of employee lock-in.

Do you think there are enough jobs now? What if 100,000 people get a college education today, spending 4 years not developing their careers, and running up mortgage-sized loans? If they come into a field where there are only 10,000 job openings, what happens to the other 90,000 graduates?

In our current system, where we've made college education accessible to every individual, we've made it every individual's personal responsibility to get an education if they want a job. In this system, you roll the dice, and hope there's a nice, soft, cushy job for you to land on after you jump blind off the cliff. If it's not there, you just hit rock bottom.

My proposed system takes you to the cliff sooner, but lets you look over the edge before parachuting off. You'll have to find a job, and there may not be many available; if not, all you've invested is time searching for a job, rather than classroom time and high tuition loans. When you do find a job, your new employer will fit you with everything you need to dive into your career safely: an income, an education, and an all-but-guaranteed position with the company. Your employer is giving you the first two things only because they can't find someone better suited for the third, and so have to make someone suited to fill the position before the company is in dire straits of want of skilled labor; they'll make sure you land safely, unless the market falls into a situation where the fancy degree holder would be laid off anyway, in which case nobody lands safely.

Does this make sense to you? I've written hastily, and these are difficult topics to consider; I've largely done it by running dozens of simulations in my head, looking for the path of least resistance, lowest risk, and highest profit as each party and in each market situation. What if there are skilled laborers? What if there are none? What if my business wants to track large numbers of contracts that no system is suited for, and I need internal developers and accountants and sales people? What if those people don't exist? What if I'm a college student looking at this situation? What if nobody is a college student looking at this situation, because nobody hands us the ability to send ourselves to school, and so there is a desperate shortage of skilled labor in a market that wants skilled labor? What if I'm the employer in that market, and can't find anyone to hire? It keeps coming, and I keep running all the scenarios, working them out, working out interactions, then propagating these into large models to examine cities, countries, whole continents under these stresses. A good grasp of economics gives a good place to start; but I'm not so full of my own hubris that I'd think a pile of textbook examples would prove me right without hammering on the problems myself.

Your argument is:

1) "You're wrong. They're managers."

2) "You're wrong."

So, the statistics, the surveys, the published numbers from the Department of Labor, show a special category of "Managers", which is about 15% of STEM workers--the rough size of Computer Workers or Engineers by trade--and also shows people working in Social Services (these are your trash collectors), Services (fast food), Retail (Wal-Mart), Arts and Entertainment (this technically encompasses everyone from movie theater ticket vendors to strippers--strippers and waitresses at the Tilted Kilt are considered "Entertainment Workers", which legally allows the business to discriminate based on sex, age, body shape, and so forth), Agriculture, Construction, and Production (factory work), and Sales.

The statistics specifically show categories for computer technicians and engineers. The categories of Health Care, Legal, Business, and Office Support aren't about running the IT systems in these jobs--nor are they about being managers, since there's a separate Manager category. You'll notice that Law, Business, and Sales are humanities-based careers.

So, again: we have a lot of trash men, factory workers, burger flippers, and retail clerks with STEM degrees. We also have people doing filing work for accountants and lawyers (you aren't going to be an accountant or lawyer without a finance or law degree). Sales is a strange category: Sears employs commissioned salespeople, and so these aren't considered Retail, but rather Sales; the difference between Sales and Retail is real, but it is also the difference between a Sears cashier and a Sears computer salesman (or a car salesman).

No, we don't have 74% of STEM degree holders managing STEM jobs. We have some 15% of STEM degree holders managing non-STEM jobs, though. We can say maybe 40% got decent jobs, 26% got STEM jobs, and 60% got shit jobs.

This is how they wind up in social services (trash men), retail (WalMart), and services (McDonalds)? They get promoted from Line Sandwich Maker to Line Manager?

It's common practice to stand up a Microsoft Windows 2013 server as a Certificate Authority, and put the CA key on all computers by Group Policy. Then you intercept every SSL connection and replace the certificate with an internal one, of which the IDS has the private key. The routers and such also use the same private key. The proxy server (transparent or otherwise) handshakes with the remote server using the correct certificate, decrypting and re-encrypting all traffic as it flows through.

Yeah, two-dimensional shockwave? What?

Good. Once it's gone, maybe we'll all be rich enough to buy solar panels.

A solar panel tax break just raises the damand by, say, $500 of government incentive, plus persuasive incentive margin. That is to say: a $1500 installation that gets a consumer-reaching $500 rebate becomes a $2000 installation, in theory; in reality, the consumer sees a chance to obtain a discount on a $2000 installation, and manufacturers can profit more by raising that installation cost to $2100 because fewer than 20% of customers are turned off by that extra $100. Thus the consumer needs $600 more in his pocket, and comes out $100 poorer in the end.

These numbers are, of course, illustrative of a concept in market demand economics dealing with subsidies on the consumption end. The reality is more complex. For example, as you have pointed out, the imminent revocation of the ITC is driving up demand as people grab for the perceived free money; this means prices can go even higher, people can be even more disadvantaged by the government rebate, but they will still have more incentive to buy than in a non-credit market where the total cost to themselves is lower because there is no perceived monetary benefit in such a market.