Any reader of this blog can tell you that I often put up notes and updates about my student loans. Well, there is more that I do in the student loan world besides complain about my lenders or celebrate small successes. In fact, one of the things that I try to be active about is advocating for better federal legislation to help those who are in serious student loan debt.
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Posts Tagged ‘Shame’
Update on Federal Tax Credit for Student Loan Interest
Friday, April 24th, 2009Talk About Getting Our Money’s Worth
Monday, January 19th, 2009There is a common joke when talking about government projects that whatever the project is the government should let Wal-Mart do it because it’ll come in under budget and ahead of schedule. I propose that from now on we let NASA take on all government projects.
Remember those two twin Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that landed on the red planet some five years ago? Their mission was to collect data for three weeks and send it back to Earth. The models were designed to survive for three weeks and after that any time we got out of them would be a bonus. Well, here we are more than five years later and those two little rovers are still going strong!
An accumulation of dust on the rovers’ electricity-generating solar panels was expected to be one of the most likely causes of their eventual deaths, but wind has occasionally cleaned the panels.
Spirit, however, has an 18-month buildup of dust and its panels were barely able to provide sufficient power during Mars’ just-ended southern hemisphere winter. At one point it failed to receive commands, and its status fell to “serious but stable” condition.
These little robots are amazing. It’s a shame that we’ll likely never be able to recover them and bring them back to earth. They’ve provided such an incredible view of the Martian landscape – it would be great to have them in the Smithsonian.
Private Water vs. Public Water
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008USAToday.com published an article talking about how water went from a free commodity to a privatized industry via the bottled water giants. The article has some good points in it, but I couldn’t understand this one:
It’s a dangerous state of affairs, Royte explains, because degrading water systems will decrease consumers’ trust in tap water and increase purchases of bottled water: “Opting out of public water in favor of private isn’t going to help preserve — or improve — municipal water supplies, but preserve them we must: too many people can afford to drink nothing but.”
Maybe I just don’t understand the structure of this sentence, but if one is to opt out of using municipal water supplies in favor of private water supplies, then how is that person not preserving the municipal water supply? Go ahead, re-read the sentence. See what I mean? If I’m not drinking water from Source A, then does Source A have more water in it than it would have if I drank from there?
This is getting too close to a weird math problem for my liking, so back to the article!
I once saw a presentation that talked about the lack of potable water supplies in third world countries. Really, it’s a shame when you think about how many people in the world do not have the luxury of getting up and going to the store to get some water. Of course I would argue that before we – as Americans and socially conscious humans – take care of the third world, we should take care of our own folks in this country. There are areas of the rural south in Kentucky, for example, that do not have potable water. We need to help them first.
Take a read of the article on USAToday.com, I think it’s interesting.
