What alternatives does a young person have to getting a 4 year degree? If you happen to land a _really_ sweet job or you happen to be someone that can get by on 4 hours sleep a night you can slowly work you're work your way though school. Otherwise every time and all your time goes into survival.

No one forced you? You really have no idea what life was like in America until about 1950 and what it is like in most of the rest of the world. Just google "Company Store" and "16 tons" and call it a day. Or read "A people's history of the United States". Also this. A few very lucky people have options. The rich and powerful are working to remove those options.

So I guess I'll qualify my statement: What are the alternatives for those of use that aren't very lucky.

Comments like this are the reason I support bacteria. Its the only culture some people will ever have.

Like Cars? Like Doctors? Like the Internet? Power Grid?

You benefit TREMENDOUSLY from their education. You're just conveniently ignoring that fact because it happens to suit you right no.

Companies don't train anymore. They won't even look at you if you're not carrying a 4 year degree. Why should they? Congress will give them all the Work Visas they want.

if you understand it or not. You still don't have a choice. Right now major employers won't even look at your resume unless you've got a 4 year degree. The HR filters just toss you right out.

Requiring degrees has lots of benefits for employers. You get a more desperate employee (they've got a tonne of debt after all). Odds are you don't have to spend a dime training an employee. If you don't get enough employees you can run to Congress and ask for more work Visas.

The real problem here is that the 1%ers that have most of the wealth are happy to sit on their cash until a better deal comes around. So we're the people that hold the purse strings have no incentive to push education. We used to use a 90% tax bracket to force them to "use it or lose it" and then the gov't poured that money into education. It's all about idle capacity in the economy.

The scam is they just keep raising it every 3 months until they get to the real price. They'll send you all these wonderful letters about how they've "Upgraded" you're connection in the meantime, but they don't actually change your package (because they do technically have an agreement with you).

It's basically a round about way to force you into the higher tier packages. If you call ask for lesser service they offer you 300 kbps for $45/mo.

regular end users (e.g. like my kid) don't mind it at all. Especially once it started booting to a desktop. If the tech had been there to do cheap x86 tablet PCs that didn't get so hot you could fry an egg on them I think it woulda gone over just fine.

Microsoft is looking at google giving away Android/Chrome and wondering if they should do the same. The Office 360 revenue is way more than Windows revenue. The only question is if they give away Windows can they sell other services on top of it that bring in recurring revenue. Sure, they give up a $50 profit on Windows, but if that means $20/year in office fees for 5 years they come out ahead.

grand parent is right. Every now and then I have to explain to a family member why they have to pay $100 bucks to Microsoft for that nice computer that bought at the swap meet from the nice man...

And the Cable companies track on a per person / per neighborhood basis whether you do or not. I was paying $75/mo just for internet at one point because there was no DSL in my neighborhood. My buddy got the same service for $55/mo, but he could jump ship to DSL because his house was newer. When I called to "cancel" they just called my bluff ala South Park

Big Data is real and they use it to screw us.

This guy's got it running on a dead badger.

The credit card companies would have long since started flagging Internet game companies as such high risk that they'd be out of business.

The free market has already handled this. The senator has been bought and paid for, to the tune of $30,000 in campaign contributions from J.P. Morgan Chase. The same J.P. Morgan Chase that is strongly against bitcoin. That weakens the senators argument a bit IMHO.

IT companies are tired of paying $100k/yr for programmers. They're trying to flood the market. Getting women into Programmer is just one part of this.

I'm not sure what's going to happen when all that money exits the US Economy. It's kinda scary actually. There's an overpowering sentiment in America that if you didn't do something unpleasant to get money you didn't earn it. There's also a _lot_ of racism floating around (Welfare Queen == "Black Person", it's called Dog Whistling...).

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you'll never get enough votes behind it...

but I expect it to be turned into tax cuts for the top 1%... We're not spending on infrastructure now. Getting us to start would take a large scale expansion of the federal gov't, just the sort that's politically unpopular right now. There's not enough profit in it to bring private industry to the table. I think the term is "idle capacity". The US economy is sorta winding down. There's only so much money you can make, and if you're already rich it pays to sit on your wealth and use it to broker power deals :(.