Most low income people can't afford rent. You should spend no more than 30% of your income on it and yet the majority of low income people do. So how do they 'afford' it? Mountains of debt. The better question to be asking is how do we lift low income kids out of poverty if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education?
> if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education?
No one is being "cut off." They're simply no longer receiving a subsidy. Presumably they would still have Internet access through school or public libraries. At worst we are inconveniencing them. And people became educated well before the Internet ever existed.
> how do we lift low income kids out of poverty
You can't. You can create really efficient pipelines to keep them in poverty for the rest of their life if you're not careful, though.
Google Chromebooks are mobile devices, correct? Presumably the student could take it somewhere that does have the internet. Like a library or the school itself.
Get real dude. You try getting out of work and then driving to a library for internet to do some work. Now have someone drive you to the library and pick you up cuz you don't have a driver's license. And pack yourself a snack because you're going to be hungry and after school. Cancel all engagements with your friends. Your library closes at 6:00. But you need to finish this report and it's going to take all night... Should I go on?
> pack yourself a snack because you're going to be hungry and after school
Not exactly a herculean chore. I mean, I'm hungry every day, it comes up as a problem often.
> Cancel all engagements with your friends.
What are my priorities? Education or social engagements?
> Your library closes at 6:00.
School is out at 3, though. Or am I working between 3 and 6?
> But you need to finish this report and it's going to take all night
I have to have internet the entire time I'm writing a report?
> Should I go on?
With less hyperbole?
Meanwhile, you want me to believe that a $30 subsidy is all it takes to erase this, and you don't think this strange imbalance doesn't describe a fundamental problem with our entire model for education and internet costs in literally any other life context?
Even within your own example.. how did I get a job without having constant internet access at home?
You think I'm trying to be mean to poor kids. Instead I'm suggesting you stop using them as an excuse to transfer funds and instead solve the actual problems they're going to face for their entire lives.
> Instead I'm suggesting you stop using them as an excuse to transfer funds
In your mind this is an "excuse" to transfer funds. So in your mind, what is the real reason for the fund transfer? The people who benefit from them directly don't have the power to do the transfer, so who is benefited?
Silver lining: maybe that will prevent schools from assigning homework or otherwise making students use a device that requires an Internet connection. Reminder that you can fit Wikipedia on a $15 thumb drive with 20 GB left over to trivially store all of your classwork, every assigned book, and whatever other reference materials that you will use kindergarten through university.
Many libraries are still on slow DSL connections that do not meet the current (or even the old 25Mbps/3Mbps) definition of broadband, and they have limited hours as well.
T-Mobile's Project 10 Million where they offer capped & throttled data service that is significantly worse than what their cheapest postpaid plan offers certainly isn't a reasonable broadband replacement either, it is clearly a pile of crap T-Mobile is forced to offer to meet the 10% educational usage requirement of their Educational Broadband Service (EBS, 2.5Ghz spectrum running LTE & 5G) licenses.
So what are the kids to do? Get bent, sucks to be poor! Seems to be the current answer our society has chosen.
A quick trip to Wikipedia illustrates that education is indeed an implication of digital divide, and that quite often teachers have homework requiring internet access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide
I would speculate it is easy for such gaps to exist because it is easy to assume internet access is widespread.
Perhaps, as it is no longer the 90s, and with interest in human progress and easier living for all, we could aspire to not trap our lower classes in a decade now 24 years old and counting, with institutional knowledge on how to support techniques of that era fading to time.
What homework necessitates going online, and why? For less than 1 month of this program, schools could hand out flash drives to those students with all of the curated material they could ever need and more. Or just... use paper.
Your Wikipedia article also notes
> In a reverse of this idea, well-off families, especially the tech-savvy parents in Silicon Valley, carefully limit their own children's screen time. The children of wealthy families attend play-based preschool programs that emphasize social interaction instead of time spent in front of computers or other digital devices, and they pay to send their children to schools that limit screen time.
Wealthy, tech-savvy parents are exactly the group that intentionally send their kids to schools that act like it's still the 90s. Technology exists, but modern computers are not at all tailored toward being tools for their owners. In fact they mostly work against you if you don't go out of your way to replace all of the software on them. One must be very judicious about using them in something like an educational setting.
No offense but that comes across about as entitled as it gets. When a kid rides a bus to and from school, and the nearest library is 10 miles away, how exactly are you suggesting they get to the library or school to get on the internet?
> You can't. You can create really efficient pipelines to keep them in poverty for the rest of their life if you're not careful, though.
You absolutely can. We have endless examples and they pretty much always revolve around education and opportunities that normally are unattainable due to financial limitations.
> No offense but that comes across about as entitled as it gets.
No, it's actually because I grew up poor, and we didn't receive any help because our family would have refused it out of weird pride.
> and the nearest library is 10 miles away
What kills me about these discussions is people have to invent, what are to them, these "extreme circumstances" just to demonstrate their points.. without once detailing or even imagining how many students this could possibly be true for. If public transport isn't an option then I would suggest a bicycle. How are they getting to school in the first place?
> You absolutely can.
Would you be willing to define this for me? When is a child "lifted out of poverty?" What does that look like and how is it being measured currently?
> and they pretty much always
You're saying things that would be nice to believe in but when you qualify them like this it makes me wonder what causes you to believe them?
I mentor kids in a large city who depend on the library for internet. They can walk there but they can only use a computer for 30 minute blocks. Then they need to get back in line until their turn comes up again. Afternoon weekdays there are probably 4-5 students for each computer.
It's beyond "inconvenient" for them, it's a major obstacle to their academic success.
lmao no absolutely not. They can download files or plug in thumb drives, and can run executables that way if they haven't been specifically blacklisted. But the machine is effectively wiped at the end of the session.
They pass around software that works this way and I've seen some pretty sophisticated teen thumb drive workflows lol. But the library IT dept here has cop mentality and they don't like to see anything that looks too much like "real" software so it's a constantly evolving situation they have to navigate.
>No, it's actually because I grew up poor, and we didn't receive any help because our family would have refused it out of weird pride.
Ahh yes, the old "pulled myself up by the bootstraps".
>What kills me about these discussions is people have to invent, what are to them, these "extreme circumstances" just to demonstrate their points.. without once detailing or even imagining how many students this could possibly be true for. If public transport isn't an option then I would suggest a bicycle. How are they getting to school in the first place?
So you didn't grow up poor? Or at least didn't grow up poor and rural - because if you had, your response would be "that sounds like pretty much every small town in America". A bicycle down county roads to get to the library to get on the internet 10 miles one way? Ignoring the part where most of the poor kids I grew up with didn't have a library card much less a bicycle, the odds of their parents allowing them to ride to town to get on the internet is pretty much 0.
>Would you be willing to define this for me? When is a child "lifted out of poverty?" What does that look like and how is it being measured currently?
Sure - a child who grows up and doesn't fall below the poverty line as an adult. How is it measured? Census data? I can't tell if you're claiming to be technically literate but completely confused how we would get to such numbers or just intentionally attempting to be condescending. This isn't some black art.
>You're saying things that would be nice to believe in but when you qualify them
like this it makes me wonder what causes you to believe them?
And when you tell me you grew up poor but then think that it's a completely fabricated scenario of kids living too far from a library or school to be able to get to them every day for regular school work makes me wonder if you're just projecting.
People in Appalachia went to school for generations. And yet, the root cause of their plight is a lack of education. It's almost like someone wasn't careful. We tried to give them the best education possible and they couldn't make anything of it...ending up in generation after generation of squalor.
> They're simply no longer receiving a subsidy. ... You can create really efficient pipelines to keep them in poverty for the rest of their life if you're not careful, though.
All that debate is missing the point: it's well-known US residential broadband price ger gigabyte is much higher than Europe, specifically because the US FCC, FTC allow regional monopolies to happen. Most of the broadband mergers of the last two decades should never have been permitted. Covid merely temporarily shone a spotlight on that. Broadband regulation is the issue, not welfare.
This on the same day Reid Hoffman donated to Democrats urging them to fire Lina Khan from the FTC.
