Maryland will hand out 133k Chromebooks to the public
statescoop.com
statescoop.com
It's super easy so I imagine any nerd with a Chromebook that wants more functionality that they can get from mobile apps would do it!
I don't know why they would buy/give out these crippled OS devices vs. just Windows/easiest option.
That might be slightly too much for the aims of the program, in which case adjust as needed, realizing that you're trading off one outcome for another.
For example in New Zealand (public healthcare) there used to be a $5 copay for prescribed medication (by government healthcare doctors). There is now no copay ($0) because 3% of people would not get the medicine because of cost. This was particularly true for low-income families, Māori, Pacific peoples, and disabled New Zealanders. That said, our conservative party wants to bring the fees back: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/budget-2023-5-prescription-fee...
If people don't pay a small amount to get something important like medicine, they perhaps wouldn't pay even a a token $20 or 50% for something luxury/"unnecessary" like easier access to the internet.
It's possible to distribute benefits fairly based on limiting a physical device to 1 per person.
The problem of "someone has no money" should be addressed by giving them money not a Chromebook. If a $200 Chromebook isn't worth $50 to them, I'd rather they keep the $50 and buy something that is worth $50 to them.
In this case essentially everybody could benefit from getting a government paid laptop, if only to resell it, which I think means that there is a big difference between the two cases.
I guess you think they chose to be both sick and poor. Perhaps you also believe children choose to be sick and kids get to select their own parents?
Fortunately I live in New Zealand where we collectively want to care for unfortunate people - even though sometimes the misfortune might be their own fault.
Yes, it costs me a car in taxes every year to pay for a first world government health system. But at least my country enabled me to be rich enough to do that. And I'm lucky to be healthy - for which I can thank my fellow citizens and past governments to a good extent.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck to be healthy and wealthy.
For example, some restaurants may be really efficient at providing a meal for $5, but the people who need a soup kitchen the most don't have $5.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-lap...
I was about to get a chromebook for $120 and put some linux on it.
https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
If you want to get a Google account there’s Crostini, but it’s not the same. AFAICT you need to log in with a Google account.
Choose your poison. Macbooks are tightly knit with Apple and phone home, but are absurdly expensive and people pay for the privilege of getting spied on. Same with Chromebooks: we're just another datapoint for Google, and much more data is collected. Why not hand out Thinkpads flashed with Trisquel Linux[0]? (A Libre Linux that respects privacy?). And don't get me started on Windows 10/11 lol.
There’s plenty of free cash/food/shelter around for those who need it. Adding computers to the list is better than just slightly more cash.
So it’s probably cheaper to just cut checks to people for $300 even though the cost per unit is higher.
And even if they don’t: jobs program.
Bastiat would like a word.
>jobs program
so is the point to help the poor, or is it to pay government workers to do unnecessary work?
In all seriousness, it’s amusing to see how many people in this thread want to apply capitalist principles to a welfare program. The two are opposite - the goal here is to lose as much capital as possible.
The goal with welfare is to do as much good as possible. I contend that by managing administrative bloat, you lose money which could otherwise be given directly to people and do more good. The goal should be to spend money as efficiently as possible, not to spend less money
Same goes for healthcare, the TSA (gvmt in general), much of realty… the list goes on. Basically anywhere you look around and wonder what the hell so many workers are standing around for.
Employment is the number one mechanism of promoting welfare. (and the only one with lasting impact)
Basically a percentage will be wasted.
But you give the money to parents who need a computer and trust them to get a computer.
Not everyone will do the right thing, but I think it’s more efficient, and less wastage, to just hand out money than to hand out chromebooks.
There's plenty, but very little is actually given to those who need it.
I think a bigger factor is that the tiny homes limit how much stuff you can bring (aka 1 bike per person, cant build your own structures on the land, no drugs, etc), which seems to be the most common reason people gave for not wanting to go.
One: many homeless people feel dehumanized by how they're treated by the staff, and
Two: homeless shelters are full of homeless people
You are not describing any homeless shelter that I've ever seen. Usually they are very crowded communal sleeping facilities with barely any security and zero privacy. Theft and assault are a common occurrence.
I actually did all my CS work via a Chromebook in 2013 with a VPS I ssh'd into. Coded everything in vim with makefiles. Was a crucible, but these days I use IDEs
>No you can't just give parents money to go buy food for their kids, they will buy drugs. We need adult humans to prepare free lunches for children.
>Why can't you just give them money? They know what they need most
No skin in the game here, I just always found this thinking contradictory.
Especially Baltimore City which is receiving ~20k of these. The city does ongoing incremental social damage control, this is a part of it. The bottom 15% of people detract from the economy so thinking about it as service cost reduction rather than netting from it. The allocation rate for Baltimore City is something like 3.5% (!) while the rest of the state is like 2% and under.
It is about getting another couple percent of the people on the internet. Some approximate thread of literacy and ability to type and click is huge. The laptop modality is important to have over touch keys only.
There are many who don't have the wherewithal to get themselves online but it's a life changer for them to just have the basics.
As for vendor, Google is the lesser evil than alternatives by a wide margin. Top concerns are AdWords tricking poor into buying junk which is a part of the greater plan anyways; cyclical chronic marginalization with a slight upward trajectory. Gmail account creation is sorta evil. But where else is their email going to live? Hard to imagine a solution other than adverts and gov. surveillance being the cost center recoup. Google is way good at warehouse scale computing for web services (internally, GCP sucks).
Even crazier is that Maryland is already a top state for personal compute [1].
1. https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/a...
edit: grammar
It's just like burning $27 million.
They need to focus on the education and severe crime problems in and around DC + Baltimore. Nothing is getting much better in Maryland for the poor until that improves. This is a temporary 1/4 of 1% improvement maneuver (temporary as in the benefit won't last a year). Make improvements to two dozen schools instead; or pay hundreds of teachers $10k more per year to do these very hard (and sometimes very dangerous) jobs.
You can’t use these meaningfully without agreeing to the Google TOS. Tax money should not be used that way (but there are precedents in things like sports stadiums et cetera). It seems like simple public-private wealth transfer (ie corruption) to me.
Baltimore City Schools received 29 federal Covid grants totaling $799M to fight learning loss. Yet, in 2023, just 9.1% of all 3rd-8th graders tested proficient in math. MEANING, taxpayers gave an additional $799M and 91% of Baltimore students are NOT math proficient. New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.
A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request.
“I was frustrated as a teacher. We’re public servants. And when we see things like grade changing, that’s self-serving. That’s not helping the kids.”
After watching Fox45’s recent investigations into allegations of grade changing at Calverton, the City Schools employee contacted Project Baltimore to say a couple things. First, according to the teacher, grade changing at Calverton is “very common.”
Second, the educator told Fox45, changing grades is the easiest and fastest way to pass more students, which makes the school and its administrators look better. But, it does a huge disservice to not just the kids, but our entire community.
“Teaching a whole generation of kids that they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, or that hard work isn’t valued or valuable when they are in school, is so discouraging and damaging.” “I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”
You can see this happening live in Oregon as they’ve removed all graduation/testing requirements.
Helping businesses with something like an incubator is a good idea, and these businesses can create jobs instead of the government creating jobs.
Hopefully, these Chromebooks will make it easier for people to access knowledge/entertainment, leading to businesses/self-employment/more jobs naturally and sustainably.
First: helping businesses does not avoid corruption and nepotism.
Secondly: I experienced a government subsidised business incubator in New Zealand, and I can honestly say it was a 100% waste of tax dollars. (We were the only positive dollar business outcome and the incubator had very little value for us!)
I have been disappointed watching government initiatives in New Zealand over the years. They ostensibly are there to help businesses. However they usually are wasteful and ineffective. Government departments have no insight about what factors help small businesses. Even business oriented investors (e.g. VC) often fail to understand how to drive growth, so how can we expect policy wonks to do better than that? Governments fail badly from what I have personally experienced in an incubator (government/private mix), and I can't think of a government initiative that has helped. I have certainly experienced many negative effects of government interference. So many poor regulations that damage small businesses. Few good changes that help.
I presume there are successful government initiatives but I haven't seen any in 30 years.
We do have a Maryland Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, but $15/month isn't going to make much of an inroads on a $100+/month bill.
Rural places often have no broadband at all. We have an office trying to solve that over the next three years, but even that's not going to help if the price is over $100 per month.
ChromeOS is a lightweight Linux distro.
No irony here, Chrome has plenty of ads in the browser and that's why they're rolling out Manifest V3
They couldn't, but I agree, it's dystopian. They're using taxpayers money to give more Google users.
This is a good as it gets - a part of governance structure giving something back.
Instead, domestically-manufactured tablets or laptops based on open source would be more sustainable and waste less taxpayer money rather than just handing $50m USD to megacorp.
If so, they better say it up front.
Handing out 133,000 devices is not enough without including a complete lifecycle management mechanism which will recover and recycling all 133,000 devices at the end of their useful life. Otherwise this is just industrial waste being dumped on unsuspecting communities. The Chromebooks will be in landfills in 3 years.
In my experience, homeless people use phones and laptops until the wheels fall off.
Perhaps more of the essential consumables and durable goods society uses should have a responsible public or nonprofit coalitions supply chain: generic medications, microhousing, cereal and pulse crops, basic major electronic components, and software. Leaving everything to the magic invisible hand leads to the Charles Dickens' utopia of healthcare personal bankruptcy, widespread homelessness, and unlivable wage jobs we have now.