There's a name for the effect, which I can't recall, but we tend to project our current self into our past self's shoes. When someone in their 40s thinks about when they were a teenager, they remember it as if they had the experience and wisdom that they have in their 40s, not as they actually were in their teens. This is one of the main reasons older generations talk about how kids these days are dumber, etc... because they don't accurately remember how kids were in their day, just how they would have been if they had decades more life experience.

TL;DR: You were just as dumb as a kid as the "kids these day" are that you're complaining about... you're just too dumb to account for the decades in between.

"Paper maps don't go flat"

My paper maps are pretty flat to begin with... actually, all of my paper is.

It's also plausible that GPS will outlive us all. The Matrix, Terminator, Bambi, seen them?

According to this timeline of GPS, the first to market with a hand-GPS was the Magellan NAV 1000 in 1989.

However, in 1990, the DoD decreased the accuracy of the system - before the start of the First Gulf War.

In 1994, the FAA and Clinton tells the worldwide (commercial) airline industry that GPS is free for them to use for the "foreseeable future"

1995 was when the first GPS constellation was finally complete, so that at least 4 satellites were always visible from any point on at Earth.

Source: http://www.techhive.com/articl...

I have no doubt that one of them was a great actor, but I'm not so sure about the other one's saxophone skills - did Reagan ever even touch a sax?

A man with an atomic watch won't shut up about it.

A very limited number of companies offer this, to a limited number of customers. It's not very widespread in the US.

The rule of thumb, for at least the last decade, has been that your total amount of loans shouldn't exceed what you can reasonably expect to gross in your first year employed in that field in a job with a reasonably large number of openings. For many people, that means $30-$40k, tops. Sure, the job market can shift drastically while you're still in school, but you pretty much always have the option to change majors - there isn't a severe time penalty unless you're close to finishing your degree, by which point, a drastic shift is usually unlikely or should have been easy to predict already. I discounted a large number of schools because they didn't follow this rule of thumb, and ended up with loans that were just a little more than my first year's salary, which I paid off in just under three years - in 2013, so I don't think it's too outdated.

We had "US Government" in New York. It did a decent job of teaching about the roles of the top levels of the Federal government, but absolutely nothing about the different departments, about state or local government (which, imo, are even more important to know about), or about current issues. About the closest to something relevant that we did was a mock trial of a drunk driver, which of course nobody took seriously.

You seem to think that college is the ONLY way to make a decent living. It's not. Not by a long shot. It's still entirely possible to work your way up from the figurative mail room. You may run into a wall at some point fairly high up the ladder, but by then you can probably pay for college in cash.

Or you can work one of any number of "dirty" jobs that pay well just because they suck, either because they're dangerous, or because they're just shitty (sometimes literally) jobs.

Or you can go to a trade school. Become an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter or any one of dozens of jobs like those. Here's a little secret - for every person that goes to college because, like you, they think they need to, that's one more trade position that opens up, driving up demand for workers and driving up wages for those increasingly rare workers.

So yeah, a little personal responsibility would go a long way towards averting both this and the home loan crisis. People need to do their own research and not just listen to whomever is selling you something. If you expect someone to do their research when buying a vacuum, why not when buying a car? A house? An education?

The reason you see those commercials probably isn't so much that the college as a whole is targeting the been-out-of-school crowd, but because that's the crowd that needs convincing. High school grads are already convinced to go to college, so they're already actively seeking out the colleges and don't need to be advertised to. There are predatory colleges out there, but it's not *all* of them like many people seem to think.

I agree that the main failing is in high school. There's too much focus on "preparation for college" - which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with college - and absolutely nothing about life skills, particularly financial. Perhaps if we revamped high school, we wouldn't have so much trouble with college loans in the first place, and we'd have skills to help with all of those other pesky financial situations as an adult.

Our high school economics class did have us balance a checkbook... a skill I've never actually needed in this electronic age. My state college, however, had a mandatory one-credit class that was basically a "life skills" class - loans, mortgages, credit cards, buying a car, buying a house, family finance planning, etc. Unfortunately, only the IT majors were required to take it. That shit really should have been covered in high school.

I can't speak for the politics, but a lot of state schools spend way too much money on extracurriculars, such as sports. For the very small number of major state colleges that do earn a profit off sports, that's ok. However, for community colleges and most smaller four year state schools, sports is a money pit. The problem isn't so much cutting funding as it is cutting funding in the wrong places. Not long after I graduated, the small ag/tech school I went to spent $5 million on revamping the football stadium. The end result looks like a diseased wart, and it somehow hasn't helped our team, which continues it's success ratio of winning one or two games a year. Either way, state schools are still cheaper than private schools, and many offer decent scholarship packages as well.

Holy shit does University of California have a horrid website. It's like Geocities had a bastard child with sulphuric acid and jizzed it in my eyes.

That said, California is the gold standard for the government fucking things up, which it looks like they did for tuition too. She may want to consider an out-of-state school that offers low out-of-state tuition - an increasing number of them charge the same as in-state residents - or an online school.

As for room and board, that's a trickier comparison. If she's living on her own, you'd have to compare it to the cost of renting an apartment and buying your own food. Around here, that's be around $8000/yr, but that can easily be $20,000 depending on where you are. The odd thing I noticed is that University of California estimates $14,000 room and board on-campus and $9,300 off-campus. That's a 50% increase! It's like they're not even trying to look like a good deal.

California sucks (well, the government).