Most of the debt is owed to the US government.

Medicare and Social Security collect payroll taxes from workers, which it will later pay back for medical care and pension payments. The money during the period between when it's collected and paid out is held in US securities. Basically our Social Security and Medicare programs buy most of the federal debt. After that, other retirement funds and corporations buy a lot of that debt. Most of of the assets that Silicon Valley Bank held were government securities. Most of the cash that Apple holds is in US Treasuries.

Some is owned by individuals, and some is owned by other nations. US treasuries had been considered the safest investment in the world. After we had our debt rating downgraded the last time Republicans pulled this default stunt, that changed a bit.

One big question regarding a US default is who would and wouldn't get paid. The concern being that the federal government would preferentially keep paying Medicare and Social Security, being part of the federal government, and not pay individuals, foreign countries, and corporations that hold that debt.

So could we get rid of it? Sure. The US would also alienate every ally it has on the planet in doing so. The economy would be destroyed. Better to carry the debt. It's not really *that* much debt. The top 10% of the US population have total assets of about $100T. A small annual wealth tax would pay off the debt pretty damn fast.

Can take or will take? Barista grew as a job category long after it was automated. We’ve had coffee vending machines since the 50s at least - even fancy ones. But we don’t hire a coffee shop for making coffee. We hire it for a morning habit, for personal contact at the start of the day, a pleasant interaction that isn’t work related. It’s a kind of social amuse bouche between home and work. We don’t want it to be automated. The whole point of it is that it’s not automated. Society will always value these kinds of jobs. Why is the Apple retail store so popular? It’s literally the most expensive place to buy an Apple product and yet it’s by a HUGE margin the most valued retail in the world. But compared to other retail it’s wildly over staffed by happy people who seem to like their job and are quite knowledgeable. Sure Apple could cut costs, but that would destroy why people like it - as a place that an inexperienced tech shopper can get help and not feel dumb or ignored. That has real value. So we will always create these jobs. Yoga instructor is another example. Sure we may unhire delivery people for automation but we’ll rehire them in a different venue where we want the interaction.

Love how half of Texas doesn't have any building codes and the other half projects the most absurd ones.

I get that the city just wants this done ASAP. And yet, they send this letter that they'll enforce in 30 days, the homeowner may or may not know if they'll enforce, the city may not know if they'll enforce. What's the fucking point of this system? We're going to tell you half a lie, you're supposed to know which half is a lie, we'll not punish you if you guess correctly.

Given the legislative direction Florida has taken lately, are you concerned about efforts to limit access to contraception, from funding support through mechanisms like Medicaid to other measures? Or do you think the intent is to only target women reproductive access? Does the medical community have a responsibility to speak about these issues to government leaders?

Except that public education doesn't set its own price. The legislature does. And if you look at the difficulty of getting into many schools (median GPA of incoming students at my campus was a 4.2) that suggests that tuition is priced well *below* demand. We had 120,000 application for 4,000 seats. We could have doubled tuition and still found enough qualified students. Clearly we were not responding to market dynamics. College loans *should* cause universities to expand because they make college more affordable. The state doesn't have a profit motive here. They do have an educated workforce motive, so their drive is more students completing degrees, not more profit from students, because there are no profits from students. Not even at privates. Their endowments don't come from excess tuition but from donors.

I worked at a UC. So top tier research university. We absolutely paid faculty hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially in market competitive disciplines. I've been involved in retention pay increases of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The professor does not get salary in that way off of grants. They can build in 3 months of salary into a grant (most faculty have 9 month appointments) and at some institutions can use a grant to buy out their teaching. But in most cases the salary is coming out of the larger pool of money of state subsidy, tuition, grant overhead, and external funding sources. In the case of medical faculty, there is also usually a clear split between the teaching institution and a hospital/clinic.

And you're right that the faculty aren't the sole driver of that inflation, but they also aren't the sole source of rising costs. A blackboard and a bunch of tablet chairs are no longer adequate for teaching. We record lectures, transcribe them for accessibility, we have large technology budgets and support around instruction. Lab costs have skyrocketed because again, students still take up the same amount of space as they did 50 years ago, but what's in the lab has changed. A basic computer lab is $1000/sq ft to build. A STEM lab is often 5 times that much. It's not enough to give our EEs a soldering iron and a handful of analogue meters like the 1960s, now it's a programmable oscilloscope at $50K per station, because the market these students are going into has also changed. That lab needs tech support, and the harder we run the institution, the more those costs go up. Want to keep that lab occupied 40 hours a week - you'll need at least two techs available to keep the equipment running and the lab configured as needed. You can't have one tech working from 7AM to 10PM 5 days a week. We could run the lab less, but now we need another lab, that's another $5M to build.

Building and securing a semi-public wireless network that spans multiple square miles is incredibly expensive. Universities typically have their own cellular infrastructure as well. How good are the people who do this? Apple used to hire our techs to design and setup their infrastructure for product announcements back when they were operating out of rented facilities. They were the best you could get, and they aren't cheap. But students losing network access in the middle of an exam, or during a class is a bit of a calamity.

And as you saw last night if you watched the coverage, you saw a quite good response to an active shooter. Universities have to now massively overspend on police and training. Classroom costs skyrocket when you incorporate active shooter safety issues into their design, which we now do on all new constructions. Universities also now invest heavily in other emergency planning. When covid broke out, we had N95s. We had shipping containers full of them, because we have fires here, we are prepared for potential chemical and biological attacks, because we are in a high target terrorism area. We have equipment to do search and rescue for a campus of 50,000 people after an earthquake, emergency food and water and all that.

NONE of these things were in budgets 25 years ago when I started. Some is that the safety issues have dramatically increased - guns, fires. Some is that the expectations have changed - earthquakes, etc.

I just retired 2 years ago and I was a pretty high level administrator and made less than 6 figures (cost was over 6 due to benefits) and for some of my time I had to generate my own salary. That's a LOT of administrators. We expanded into community education programs - summer camps for K-12 students, things like that. We hired a bunch of administrators for those programs. Why? Because there was no way to cover the costs of our needed growth without additional revenue. Our administration cost growth was in areas where they were expected to raise their salary. Yeah, you have high level institution administrators, but they aren't as expensive as you might think. If one of those 6 figure salary faculty becomes a slightly higher 6 figure salary administrator, and you hire a 5 figure adjunct to cover their classes while they are administrator, you haven't increased your costs by that administrators salary, just by the delta from their teaching salary plus the cost of the adjunct. Our university had about the same budget as Twitter did have in revenue. What would you expect CEO pay for that company to be? They aren't small organizations.

If you think wages for professors haven't risen that much, it's because of how universities have abused the adjunct system to make it appear that way. Rank and file faculty make good money. Depending on discipline, they make very good money. You don't think doctors at a top research hospital aren't making near 7 figures? They are the faculty.

That's not the reason.

Higher education is the classic example of Baumol's Cost Disease. There's very little productivity gain in higher ed - you have the same x students in a classroom being taught by an instructors as you had 50 years ago. But other parts of the economy have seen substantial productivity gains, meaning that other industries pay a lot more for the skills/education that a university professor has, which means universities need to pay way above normal costs to get professors.

Apple brings in nearly $3M in revenue per employee - including retail workers. They can afford to pay hundreds of thousands per year for a PhD engineer, which means a university needs to pay hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the productivity of that engineering professor hasn't changed at all, so tuition goes up faster than inflation because everyone else gets more from that worker relative to inflation.

The availability of college loans isn't a factor at all from the university side. What is a factor in public education is the degree to which states have cut off funding.

There's another challenging dynamic to understand. A public university is only subsidized for a specific number of in-state students. The university can't add more students than that number because the state won't pay for them. But the university can add more out-of-state students because they pay their full tuition, and the state pays none of it. This is actually good for state residents over a longer scale because out-of-state (usually foreign) students end up paying for the growth - new buildings, etc. which the state can then make available to in-state students by increasing their enrollment limit. But residents in the state feel like the out-of-state students are stealing seats from the in-state ones. They aren't, the university has no ability to change that (the legislature does, though). But it also means that if you have a scholarship and don't care if you are in the in-state or out-of-state tuition pools, the university can't take you in an out-of-state seat if you are in-state. If you leave the state, the school can take you.

Federal college for all legislation would *dramatically* reshuffle the playing field for in-state students for the better. But out of state students getting into prestigious public schools would get a LOT harder.

Retired uni administrator.

Yeah, but it used to be if you were rolling those profits, you'd rely more on attrition to bring your staffing back in line and hold onto those employees you had already invested in. Hiring and releasing isn't cheap. You have good people, you work hard to hold onto them.

Sorry, man. Before I retired I used your services a lot. They were great. Hope you land safe and soon.

Literally all of Florida.

So the EU is now trying to derail California HSR?

This was never a serious idea and there are countless analyses of why it's not a practical idea.

Yep, I was watching it in the physics classroom at lunchtime - on the east coast. There were about 30 students and about as many teachers in there. There weren't many TVs in the school. That was the classroom that had the sample of a shuttle heat tile that NASA sent to schools and my physics teacher set up a little viewing event. My 4th period teacher (right after lunch) was in the room and she said I could stay there and watch.

There were no mobile phones, no social media, no internet. AV had a few TVs on carts (the red asphalt type safety movies were all on VHS by then, though still a lot of film strips/loops still in use). They set up TVs in the auditorium and let students go watch. Hard to get students to focus after that, and the historic nature of the event wasn't lost on anyone.

Former uni administrator at a highly ranked engineering program here, now retired. Also a background in data science.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Engineering isn't easily automated, and the automation that does get done needs to be designed and implemented by engineers. Engineers are basically the economic apex predator.

Areas that are traditionally in short demand are materials engineering and environmental. I might be careful around Chemical mostly because it's dominated by the petrochemical industry and it's unclear what's going to happen there. Ideas offered below are good - photonics, EE in general.

But here's the suggestion I give everyone. Learn to code, learn data science. These are turning into such broadly applicable skills that having them concentrated in a single major like Data Science or CS isn't going to fly. The real value is in domain experts of any kind that have these skills. Even if Civil Engineering got automated out of existence, the last guy out the door will be a Civil Engineer training those systems, relying on programming and data science to do so. A job I had before working in engineering was doing programming in a humanities project - people that knew classics and can code are VERY few and far between, and that got me in the door.

Learn python. It's a very practical language - lots of applications. Dominant environment for data science right now, and likely the foreseeable future. Learn a lower level compiled language as well. I'd choose Rust for a variety of reasons related to learning good coding practices, plus it's interesting. Just put these in on your longer term to-do. Take some electives in college. Turn them into a hobby.

But pick the discipline that interests you. Keep in mind that the options are a combination of horizontal disciplines and vertical (industry) ones. The broad horizontal ones are Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, Chemical, Materials, Industrial. The vertical ones are Aerospace, Biomedical, Environmental, Petroleum, Software etc. Generally speaking the former are a little more marketable over a career because they build off of fundamentals. The latter may get you up the ladder faster at first, but are built a little more off of where industries are today, and may not prepare you quite as well for where industries are going later. Probably not a huge thing to worry about but a lot of aerospace engineers really hit rough times when the aero industry collapsed in the 90s and had to wait for it come back. The MEs or EEs that worked there could more easily jump to completely different industries.

I'll note that my son is an EE at a Bay Area company 2 years out of college. He does circuit design for high value/low volume hardware (engineer to engineer firm). Most of what made him marketable didn't come out of the classroom. He was interested in it before college and tinkered and learned on his own. He couldn't do the math or really explore the theory, but he showed up knowing the tools, was probably better at soldering than our techs were, was accustomed to reading spec sheets and so on. That confidence really paid off. His bosses love him because he's productive - he writes code to automate his tools. He does his own data science work, doing data collection and analysis. He can go in lot of different directions. He learned to program playing Minecraft. He got interested doing circuit design with redstone. You can learn a LOT outside of school. Go find your interest.

The problem with batteries is that their capacity and throughput are basically the same thing. Capacity is VERY expensive with batteries.

With hydrogen it's different - throughput is the cost of the fuel cell, but capacity is just the tank you store the hydrogen in. You can grow capacity for a LOT less money than throughput. So for short term storage, battery is great. For longer term storage, it falls off.

Iron air is designed to fill that gap a bit - really cheap, but pretty shit efficiency. But you can package them up, slap one under every solar panel, and get a huge gain. Hydrogen still needs distribution, and all that, or getting a reversible fuel cell down in cost enough to compete so you can slap them down as frequently. That's probably not going to happen.

But in both cases, these things are trying to convert a 0% efficiency due to oversupply into something positive. Almost anything is a gain.

FWIW, some breakthroughs in iron air has gotten their efficiencies up over 65%, so given their costs, they're pretty viable. Not useful for transportation applications though, where hydrogen is. Solid state hydrogen energy density is upwards of double that of lithium ion.

UC Irvine has been supplementing its campus power generation using green hydrogen for about 6 years now. They got approval to expand that throughout the campus gas infrastructure and are implementing it now.

Now, there's a few ways this can be used. The campus has something over 4MW of solar installed, and has on-site electrolysis facilities to convert excess into hydrogen. That can simply be pushed into the gas pipeline and burned as part of existing boiler operations. The hydrogen burns more cleanly than natural gas and increases the overall efficiency of the system, though there is still some carbon emissions this way. The pipeline also serves as a form of storage. Ideally you put the hydrogen into on-site fuel cells for power generation, and that too is happening, with only surplus from that operation (and from the on-campus hydrogen fueling station) being added to the natural gas feed. The campus also has things like large scale thermal storage so boiler operations that benefit from solar peak energy can be averaged into non-solar generation hours, etc.

There's a fair bit of industrial scale fuel cell out there, so there is demand. Companies like Apple and Google power their data centers off of solar + fuel cell, often using biofuel. Those fuel cells are largely identical to those that can operate off of hydrogen. So there is production capacity out there and I can see many of the manufacturing or distribution in that area being converted to that.

The question is how will that hydrogen be transported. Are they injecting into the large gas pipelines in the state, is it going into yet to be built dedicated hydrogen pipelines (we have some in CA, but none near Lancaster to my knowledge) or in some other way - such as solid state hydrogen storage from any of the companies working on that?

With the most efficient fuel cells and electrolysis processes, about 75%.

But that misses the point. California is currently working to address some of the problems associated with large scale solar production. Because demand for power doesn't move in alignment with production, each additional megawatt of generation you add reduces its efficiency because you are also adding production at times when there's no demand. There's a few ways of mitigating this, such as batteries, but also by adding demand. As such, in a configuration like this, the hydrogen is a battery, and how efficient of a battery depends on how this plant is being operated. Without mechanisms to either add demand during peak power times, or mechanisms to bank it, the efficiency of the solar infrastructure will continue to decline as it builds out.

CA is currently curtailing about 2TWh of renewable power annually. That's solar/wind that has an efficiency rating of 0%. Using it for literally anything is an improvement.

Beyond *your* understanding. Not beyond scientists/engineers understanding. The mRNA vaccines weren't a fluke.

Just because discovery (science) doesn't have an obvious path to invention (engineering) doesn't mean there's a lack of understanding here. Took us decades after understanding quantum mechanics to figure out how to put that knowledge to practical use.

Deaths? US has ~10 deaths. Is that total deaths, deaths per thousand, per hundred thousand. I can't assume per capita. 10 deaths per capita is pretty fucking bad.