Learning multiple languages in most cases has nothing to do with parenting or nutrition or leaning habits. Most people who learn multiple languages learn them because they live in communities where multiple languages are spoken.

Multilingualism is weakly correlated with intelligence. It's strongly correlated with growing up in an area where people speak many languages.

Well, this data says that your best bet is to have learned a lot of languages as a child. The study found that earlier acquisition of multiple languages was more effective than learning additional languages later in life.

I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. I think this is an honest attempt to protect kids from something that is clearly harmful to them. I just don't think it will work. I think it's a situation where people see a real problem and feel like they must do something, but don't really know what can work. This is something, and there's a non-zero (if small) probability that it will do more good than harm.

It was never anything more than an invitation. A degree is a prerequisite for many jobs, but it has never been a guarantee.

That's part of it, but the smaller part. The more important parts are that a college degree demonstrates that you can learn, that you can take on a large, somewhat challenging, multi-year task and complete it, and that you succeeded at acquiring some level of broad-based education. Engineers and other specialists tend to scoff somewhat at "liberal education" because it doesn't seem like it's useful... but there have been endless attempts to substitute narrow vocational education in technical fields and they don't stick.

In the late 90s I worked with people who'd graduated from BM's attempt to provide narrowly-focused education. IBM had scoured the factories for the brightest then sent them to an intensive two-year course in software engineering, paying them to learn. The result was competent software engineers who were difficult to work with because they knew absolutely nothing but software. Their thinking was full of the basic misunderstandings of politics, economics, science, literature, etc. that you find in typical people without any post-high school education -- and who didn't pay much attention in high school either.

They knew information theory and could write good code, but their lack of general education negatively impacted their ability to build software systems in many ways. They didn't communicate well in writing (though technical writing courses had been part of their IBM education), but more fundamentally they just weren't very good at understanding the complex problems of the business. It's hard to pin down precisely what the issue was, but it was real. They were as smart or smarter than many of the college grads... but they were just less effective as employees.

IBM ultimately abandoned the approach and started sending bright young factory workers to regular universities. Even that was less effective than hiring people who had gotten to and through college on their own, though.

Indeed... though I also think that the trap is less crushing than many like to describe. I think the biggest issue isn't that the loan repayment is crushing, but that people don't like paying for something they got years ago. I don't mind paying my mortgage because I'm paying for a house I'm living in now. I would definitely resent making payments on a house I already sold and moved out of.

Personally, I didn't get any student loans. It would have been financially smart for me to have done so, actually, but I didn't.

Or a cheap four-year school, which was my strategy. Even better if there's such a school close to where your parents live, so you can live at home. A lot of the cost of education isn't the education, it's room and board, and if you can get that from your mom & dad for free, do it. This was my plan, though I ended up not following it because I got married -- but I married a woman who is a couple of years older than me and was close to graduation herself. She graduated a few months after we got married and started work that fall as a school teacher; not a lot of money but enough. Financially this strategy worked well for her; she quit teaching after a few years and has since lived on my income, which is an order of magnitude larger than she'd ever have made.

Another alternative is to join the National Guard or a reserve branch of the military. I joined the Air Force reserve. It qualifies you for most of the GI Bill benefits, but only requires a few months up front of full-time service for basic training and specialty training. After that, one weekend per month plus two weeks per year (which your employer is legally obligated to allow you to do). If you pick a military job that is related to your career plans, the specialty training could be extensive, as much as three years in some cases. Or you can pick something with less training requirements. I became a Security Policeman because the training was short... though what I learned about physical security has actually been useful in my software career.

I mentioned above that I should have gotten some student loans... I didn't realize until too late that part of the GI Bill benefits was that the government would have paid off my loans for me. I met another kid who was going to school on scholarships + GI Bill money who took advantage of this: He borrowed $20k (in ~1995) for "school", but used it to buy a brand new Camaro, then let the US Army pay it off.

Start to end, it took me 8 years, though I took a two-year hiatus to be a missionary. The last four of those, I was working full time, writing software. The last year of that time I was actually teaching a C++ programming course at night at the university I was attending, getting paid a small amount as adjunct faculty and getting 50% off of tuition for my own final coursework. That last part was not a common situation by any means, not something you can plan on, but it worked well for me.

I think it would have been marvelous to have done a "traditional" college education, living away from home, immersed in the college culture with lots of other young people. But I graduated with zero debt, and having already started my career, and my family, so it was a great outcome.

CaptQuark's main point is absolutely right: You don't need large student loans to get an education.

Actually those numbers are from OMB. I didn't ask AI. And, yes, they're percentages of spending.

On a percentage basis, mostly what we get for our tax dollars is entitlements, like social security (22%), medicare (14%) and medicaid (10%), plus interest (14%).

Yeah, Musk could definitely drive the whole thing sideways. I'm afraid he might be getting increasingly detached from reality. I'm not so worried about the lack of focus on the chomper; it seems to me that the real issues facing Starship are all about how to handle re-entry heat. Also engine re-lights, but I have little concern they can solve that; it's been done many times before, including by SpaceX. If they can solve the rapid reuse after reentry problem, something no one else has done, ever, building various form factors will be a simple matter of engineering.

Yes, it was all super entertaining, especially with PJ covering all of it, and rarely missing a trick. Good times for those of us watching from the cheap seats. A huge waste of time and resources for IBM.

That's absolutely not what it means.

"Left the labor force" doesn't mean "they lost their job" it means "they aren't looking for a job". Examples of cases where people "leave the labor force" include (but aren't limited to):

* Retired.
* Had a child and decided to become a stay-at-home parent.
* Decided to spend their time caring for an elderly relative.
* Decided to go back to school.
* Gave up on working after being unable to find a job.
* Had a financial windfall and decided to stop working.

And so on. The "gave up after being unable to find a job" is not particularly likely in a job market where only 4.2% of people who want a job don't have one, though I suppose some may choose not to work rather than work in a less-desirable job than they had before.

Also, it's July 2. June employment numbers are basically worthless at this point. Give them a quarter or so to get more data and correct the numbers. The initial numbers are based on only on employer reporting data, which skews it in various ways. The government uses several other data sources including surveys, but it takes time for that data to come in, which is why these numbers are generally corrected 2-3 months after they come out.

Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.

Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.

I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.

Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:

So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."

Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.

The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.

Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.

Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.

Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.

We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.