A large research university nearby me in the USA is going to be offering "Algebra and Geometry" courses for the first time in memory. Think of "Algebra I" or "Geometry" from a public high-school in most of the USA.

It was suggested by the board as a way to offer courses to the incoming classes... It's difficult to not be cynical about it, regarding *both* the overt (Students need it) and the unspoken (means to admit more Students).

Just a personal take: University is expensive. If one is going to "literally" take courses covering things that are part of a high-school diploma, one should consider advancing through those earlier learning steps at a less expensive option. There's no advantage to taking the earlier courses at an expensive university.
Perhaps there are other parts of the university being taken advantage of. It's a trade-off of time and money, really... Like a theater student who needs the math courses, perhaps it makes sense to advance in one's art in that field, even while paying for classes for which there's no benefit taking at the price of a full university.

If you use virtualbox, be aware of the license of "PUEL" [ https://www.virtualbox.org/wik... ].

For instance, this can catch one unawares if using the debian 'contrib' archive, for the package "virtualbox-ext-pack".

It's obvious when installing the package that the license for it is rather "non-free" outside personal use, however operating on a network with users who have control of their own computers (BYOD, office wi-fi, schools, universities), they may download products like this without really understanding the consequences.

"If it was on the debian package server, why was it bad to install it?"

Basically, like Oracle usually does, they do actually pay attention. The extension pack calls out to Oracle-controlled servers and they will confront the operator of any network range where they see a significant use of this package.

Make sure to let people know that something being simply "on a linux package server" doesn't make it free to use, heh...

Commenters, including AmiMojo, I think miss a crucial point in understanding fractional banking:

The money that is loaned out is (can be) itself a deposit in bank, which becomes an asset that can be loaned out.

100 -> 90 loan
90 -> 81 loan
81 -> 72.1 loan ...

Ends up being, with 10% reserve, that an original $100 deposit can become $1000 in loans. This is true if the entire value of all the loans is placed in an account with some commercial bank.. otherwise, it will be somewhere between $90 and $1000 of money multiplication.

In essence, the bank is, in fact, creating money that did not exist when the original deposit was made.

At some point, theoretically, if 100% of the money supply is sitting in commercial banks, then the multiplication stops... so there is a limit to this effect.

The complaints about this are generally things like "banks collect interest on money they don't really have, siphoning value from the population into their pockets" and such.