Clayton Christensen: Half of U.S. colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/hbs-prof-says-half-of-us-colleges-will-be-bankrupt-in-10-to-15-years.html <comment><USER2> I'm of two minds on this. One the one hand, nothing can replicate the college experience of:

\- Living in a building with a bunch of other 18-22 year olds

\- Living in a town that is mostly populated by 18-22 year olds

\- Having to figure out how to take care of the laundry and dishes while having time to study and go to parties with said 18-22 year olds.

That being said, I'm currently doing YCs startup school, which is run very similarly to the large lectures I had in college. There is a main weekly lecture or two that is viewable online, and then there is a small group discussion with 15 or so others, led by a "TA". The discussion happens online but is live at a scheduled time (conveniently for me at 7pm).

As a 41 year old with kids, this system has a lot of advantages for me. I can watch the lectures at night after they go to bed, I can watch them in double speed so that I can done quicker and my mind doesn't get bored and wander, and I can do the discussion section from pretty much anywhere with internet.

So I think overall this system is better for me now, but if I were 18, I don't think I'd prefer it.

<comment><USER3> Nothing? Ever heard of the US DOD (Department of Defense)? It has many branches, each of which is full of 18-22 year old volunteers, who are getting paid to do exactly the 3 bullets you mentioned. The key difference is they are getting paid vs. having to pay...and, they get that experience in numerous cities/towns over the course of 4 years. Some branches are more like the college life than others (USAF, from my experience).

Granted it's not an apples to apples comparison here, but there are less expensive and more efficient ways (Peace Corp as well) of getting that experience. Universities are (should be) for those that enjoy learning or must have that 4 year certificate for the field there interested in working in.

<comment><USER4> The main difference there being subject to persistent and total authority vs a high degree of freedom requiring personal initiative.

<comment><USER5> You've got the wrong idea regarding western militaries, there is a very big focus on individual initiative. Contrary to the popular belief on this site, people in the military aren't brainless drones who only joined because they had no prospects after high school. A common saying I heard in the USMC was "Tell your Marines what to do, not how to do it. They'll suprise you with their creativity." Yes, you ultimately don't have any say in what task has to be done, but leaders who don't let their subordinates take initiative and figure out the best way to achieve that task are considered poor leaders. I've seen multiple articles about military hacker spaces opening up for junior enlisted to get creative with new solutions to problems. 3D printing is also starting to become more popular with enlisted personnel since it allows to them to make temporary replacements for easily broken parts instead of potentially having to wait weeks for an official replacement to arrive. Examples I can remember are the fan in the air intake of an M1A1 Abrahms, and switches on the control panel of their cargo planes.

<comment><USER6> In the military, you probably don't get to change your mind and do something different on a whim. And there's the whole killing/being killed thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The standard criticism of Christensen's work on disruption is that it applies better to products sold to business than those sold to consumers. The perennial failure of Apple to die as per his predictions is a case in point.

He seems to have jumped into the "online resources will cause the traditional university to fail" bandwagon a bit late. I haven't heard that much hype about MOOCs lately, presumably because the dire completion rates have cleared out the hype circa 2013.

It wouldn't surprise me if he's right, but not for the right reasons. Half of US colleges could go bankrupt in 10-15 years simply because they don't really provide a good education. They won't be replaced by a disruptor, they will just no longer be able to crank out mediocre educational product to people who now realize that a Bachelor of Something Or Other from Podunk U isn't actually a ticket to the middle class.

<comment><USER8> > They won't be replaced by a disruptor, they will just no longer be able to > crank out mediocre educational product to people who now realize that a > Bachelor of Something Or Other from Podunk U isn't actually a ticket to the > middle class.

A lot of people say this, but a College Education has an excellent ROI when you look at median earnings of college graduates vs median earnings of high school graduates.

Some majors such as accounting and engineering offer even better ROIs. Some entire industries, such as Education, are almost entirely blocked to someone without a college degree. Lifelong earning numbers are correlation and not causation. We've all meet great engineers that did not complete college. Still, as long as college graduates are out earning high school graduates by significant amounts colleges will not have to worry about attracting new students.

<comment><USER7> You mention correlation and causation here already, but perhaps you should take it further? A typical college graduate has considerably more factors in their favor to the typical high-school-only graduate even before accounting for the effect of an education.

The big question is, given a _particular_ student, will they do better with a college education? I think the answer is probably 'yes' if they are able enough to go to a decent (not necessarily stellar) school. However, there is a vast educational hinterland offering terrible courses to weak students. These are propped up by subsidies and the idea that "any college education is better than none".

<comment><USER8> > The big question is, given a particular student, will they do better with a > college education?

Maybe, it's really hard to measure. I suspect a good not great college is a very good way to improve a particular person's life, but not the absolute optimal use of four years and about $30,000.

While this question is really important for individuals to ask, I don't think this question is going to destroy institutions of higher learning. I think a lot of people will still take the relatively safe path of completing a four year degree.

<comment><USER7> I absolutely agree with you about "good not great" colleges probably working out pretty well for people. I would imagine that these will survive. It's the bottom half/third/quarter (not sure how far it will hit) that will have problems, in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> Most bottom performing companies will have problems, especially on industry downsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The flaw is, imho, in the fact that we are talking about _business models_.

If you look at thriving universities in Europe, in thriving countries (like Finland, Sweden and Norway) you might see that they are basically run at loss: this is because education is an investment, not an expense.

Education is supposed to be an investment for nations, not individuals (or, more realistically, parents of individuals).

<comment><USER4> The assumption being that it's the government's job to invest in individuals. I'm not here to argue either way, but at least half the country would disagree that it is.

<comment><USER10> > The assumption being that it's the government's job to invest in > individuals. I'm not here to argue either way, but at least half the country > would disagree that it is.

Why is the government involved in teaching children how to read, write, do arithmetic, and sit in a chair for 8 hours a day, then?

Absolute ideological opposition to government involvement in education - period - is a fringe opinion, that is at best, shared by ~5% of the country - not 50%. (Much of the 50% disagrees about the curriculum, but that's another story.)

<comment><USER4> We're obviously talking about higher education here. We all agree basic functioning citizens need 12 years of education. Educational attainment beyond that varies depending on occupation requirements and personal interest.

<comment><USER10> Given the problems that people without post-secondary degrees face, I don't think it's a stretch to say that productive, functioning citizens need 12 + ??? years of education.

For every example you give of a successful college dropout, I can give an example of a successful person who only forced themselves to slog through 12 years of schooling for the sake of social signaling, and not running afoul of truancy laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if there some other services that colleges provide that he misses out:

1\. Space just to get away and think

2\. meeting other people

3\. meeting people to date

4\. Physical scheduled deadlines to ensure that you complete the task

When the online system provides those, I think it'll be game over.

I can see a hybrid though: my underused hotel turns into a dorm with high bandwidth connection to Stanford's curriculum and the local professor will give coaching when necessary.

<comment><USER12> Let's not forget where big public universities have really been spending their (and their donors') money lately:

5\. Luxury student dorms.

6\. High-end gym facilities.

7\. Junior professional sports (Bonus: pay and benefits for the athletes is peanuts.)

The things I don't like about universities are the hardest to replace.

<comment><USER13> > Junior professional sports (Bonus: pay and benefits for the athletes is > peanuts.)

While they don't get money, the athletes at top schools do get compensated in plenty of ways, including tuition, access to world class facilities, and individualized attention from coaches and staff.

<comment><USER14> Until they get hurt, when they're cast aside like yesterday's trash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He's been saying this since 2013, sticking the 15 year horizon (which would now leave 10 years): "Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy, including the state schools. In the end, I am excited to see that happen." (source: [https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/02/07/disrupti...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/02/07/disruption- guru-christensen-why.html))

Even if he is directionally correct, he could be way off on the timing.

</comment><comment><USER16> This doesn't really surprise me. There are so many terrible, and sometimes predatory for-profit tradeschool/colleges out there. State tuition scholarships are only getting worse over time, MOOC's are only getting better, and branching out into larger fields. Many for-profit colleges/tradeschools are using lynda.com and other partnerships with MOOCs anyhow.

Grad schools are now offering online equivalents that are treated seriously (e.g. Georgia Tech especially) at affordable rates.

Even when I had courses in university, sometimes there was an online version of every class. Why spend the effort of going to class, getting ready, when you can just watch everything at 2x playback speed?

There are some classes that require hands on learning. But these are far and inbetween, and mostly are STEM related anyhow. You can't replace the collaborative experience, social connections of a college campus. And wisdom from an instructor, or those connections. But you don't need to go through that twice (grad school - unless for research) and tuition costs for online grad degrees are only lowering down for these

<comment><USER17> MOOCs aren't the competition for colleges: higher education largely sells credentials, not skills.

The risk is a mix of a decline in credentialism (eg, no longer wanting a college degree for babysitting or firefighting jobs) and a rise in an independent credentialing bodies (like what actuaries have).

<comment><USER18> Georgia tech is one of the best comp sci universities out there, and their online masters program is not only accredited, it's indistinguishable from the on site masters program. The peice of paper does not diffirentiate between the two.

So the credentials are there for Georgia tech, I do not know about the others though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Fortunately, Christensen says that there is one thing that online education > will not be able to replace. In his research, he found that most of the > successful alumni who gave generous donations to their alma maters did so > because a specific professor or coach inspired them.

This is still my argument for in-person lectures. Online classes are okay, but the insights gained from the unexplainable passion presented through oration provides unparalleled value to one's motivation and internal framework.

<comment><USER20> Lectures from professors who are supremely skilled at pedagogy are great. Lucky students will have only a handful of those in their academic careers. These can, however, be recorded. It might not be as electrifying as the real thing, but the real thing is so rare.

There are other activities that simply can't be done alone, however: laboratory classes, recitations and interactions where the students engage at a personal level with professors, TA's and other students. This is how students develop relationships that they carry with them past their time in academia.

There is room, I think, for a hybrid approach. A combination of online learning with some kind of periodic on-site and in-person practicum. This drastically lowers the cost of the education, but still engages students on a personal level.

<comment><USER21> One of my CS professors used the "flipped classroom" technique. He would assign the readings and expect them to be done by the time of the scheduled class. Then we would jointly do exercises and collaborate on the topics that were touched upon in the readings. He was ruthless if it was obvious you hadn't done the reading. It was effective.

I think one or two days a week for 2 hours is the perfect amount of lab/in- person collaboration time. Combined with an online forum for questions and video lectures, that would be an ideal course of instruction for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One thing I don't get about online schools and courses is their lack of laboratory facilities. How is a student supposed to do engineering or natural sciences without labs? When I was doing engineering we used to spend so much time in labs doing experiments on expensive machines (electron microscope, X-ray diffractor etc.) that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. For me the real learning happened in the lab. How do MOOC and online courses plan to fill this gap?

<comment><USER23> 99% of course work students do doesn't actually involve labs.

I could see dedicated lab facilities being provided to students taking a MOOC or some other class.

<comment><USER22> Apparently even good universities like UT Austin don't care about labs anymore. They offer an online grad degree in Mechanical Engineering with no lab work! Imagine calling yourself a mechanical engineer without having set a foot in the lab.

[https://executive.engr.utexas.edu/pme/msme.php](https://executive.engr.utexas.edu/pme/msme.php)

<comment><USER24> I am a PhD student at UT Austin in mechanical engineering right now. The MS does not require a lab class in either case. In my division, thermal/fluid systems, you can take either a class on experimental methods or a class on numerical methods (or both if you want) for a MS. Both are required for a PhD.

[http://www.me.utexas.edu/graduate/areas/tfs/courses](http://www.me.utexas.edu/graduate/areas/tfs/courses)

Multiple lab courses are required for a BS in mechanical engineering at UT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The interesting thing about the marketplace disruption model is how difficult it can be to distinguish disruptive from sustaining innovations in their early phases.

Take electric cars, an example that Christensen has talked about in his books. He viewed electric cars as a disruptive innovation.

However, few of the predictions about the electric car market from this perspective have held up. Tesla, the upstart, attacked the market from the top end, not the bottom end with luxury cars. The company now has formidable competitors in major auto makers including Mercades, and GM. Electric cars are still pricy and appeal to an upmarket customer base willing to sacrifice range for other factors.

Christensen's blueprint for the electric car industry was attack from the bottom. Focus on markets where inexpensive, short range vehicles are an advantage. He offers parents buying a first car for their kids as an example.

But that's not how things have played out. It turns out that replacing a combustion-based powertrain with an electric one allows established players to continue using the same business model that got them where they are. Petroleum companies may be disrupted in the changeover to EVs, but that has little to do with automakers who at the end of the day make a bug hunk of metal and plastic for moving people around and sell it on credit.

It's tempting to think of online universities in much the same way as Christensen thought about electric cars: as a disruptive innovation.

What if online universities are instead sustaining innovations that will allow incumbents to preserve their existing business models (selling prestige and a credential to families with college-age children) while proving hostile to startups hoping to break in?

<comment><USER26>
      However, few of the predictions about the electric car market from this perspective have held up

Clayton Christensen making predictions throws me through a loop. I feel like he misunderstood his own thesis. My take away from Innovator's Dilemma was that (1) at every step of the game the most economically rational, profit maximizing strategy is to ride your successful business model all the way to the cliff and (2) you _cannot_ predict what will become disruptive because success is context dependent, path dependent, and highly dynamic. If you could foresee all those interdependencies you could make a fortune in the stock market over night; but you can't. Something appears disruptive only in retrospect; beforehand it's just one among several competing alternatives, most or all of which will be forgotten.

His big solution at the end of the Innovator's Dilemma was GE-style conglomerates that spun off small ventures to test new ideas free from parent companies' economic calculus. But look at where GE and similar corporations mentioned in the book are now. That strategy does nothing to overcome the fundamental impediments to perpetual business success. Failure is inevitable, period. The only real "solution" is a financial market that can quickly reallocate capital to the manifest winners. The more efficient that capital and labor markets become, the less of an advantage large conglomerates will enjoy. But it all comes down to allocation of resources _subsequent_ to the emergence of identifiable market trends.

I never bothered to read his other books because what was the point? He was _right_ in the first-half of the Innovator's Dilemma; everything he wrote after that was a contradiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> People here seem to think Christensen is saying higher ed is dying, but I don't think that is the point he is making. Flagship state schools and the Stanfords, MITs and Princetons of the world will be just fine, but there are many small, private, liberal arts colleges (often with a religious affiliation) that are in a big trouble financially. Many of these schools are fairly expensive at 30k a year or more and they are having a really hard time attracting students. This article has a lot more details about this trend:

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/spate- recent-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/spate-recent- college-closures-has-some-seeing-long-predicted-consolidation-taking)

Something like 30% of the colleges in the US have less than 1,000 students and those are the schools that are in trouble, a drop in enrollment for a school that size is a death knell:

[https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Reason-Small- Coll...](https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Reason-Small- Colleges/236732)

Many of these schools haven't changed their curriculum in decades, in fact they can't even give a reasonable definition to the term "Liberal Arts" and with costs so high parents and students are expecting a little bit more to justify the investment.

[https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding- liberal-...](https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding-liberal-arts- colleges-struggle-to-make-a-case-for-themselves/)

Personally I think the way we handle higher education in the US is totally backwards; get the degree and then try to figure out what to do for the rest of your life? What the heck kind of plan is that? If someone came to you with a business plan written like some of these kid's plans for the future would you invest $200,000 in their business? And yet somehow we loan kids money to pursue this plan and/or parents spend the money to fund it. It is absolutely insane that this has gone on as long as it has. Imagine if these kids had to submit a 10-20 year plan before they could take a out a student loan?

<comment><USER26>
      Imagine if these kids had to submit a 10-20 year plan before they could take a out a student loan?

Imagine if you had to pick a major when you were 6 years old. _That_ would be insane. (Insane is a poor choice of words because this is effectively the case in many countries for cultural reasons, but in the context of U.S. culture would be considered imprudent and impractical.)

In a society like the United States where employees are expendable and life- time employment will involve numerous different companies and positions, there's something to be said for a generalist education. If the U.S. had an industrial policy like Germany than a German-style educational model would make much more sense. But the U.S. has consistently rejected those policies, despite decades of economists of all stripes advising politicians to do so. (The same is true to a lesser extent in the rest of the Anglosphere, which not coincidentally also have higher education models more similar to the U.S. than continental Europe and much of the rest of the world.) Therefore, employers will value the more generalist approach. In the U.S. a 4-year biology degree matters not because of what it says about your knowledge in biology, but largely because it shows you persevered through 2+ years of writing, history, etc. In other words, you had the discipline to take up other subjects you didn't explicitly _choose_ ; not only pass their exams but to go to the classes (i.e. show-up!) and do the coursework (obey orders). And, ideally, it would show that you can integrate and apply those disciplines and methodologies to various tasks. (This is more aspirational.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does this make sense given the astronomical year-to-year increases in college costs with no end in sight? Where is all the money going? I assume ballooning administrations.

<comment><USER29> > How does this make sense given the astronomical year-to-year increases in > college costs with no end in sight?

Do you have a citation for the above increases? There have been big increases at state schools as state governments have reduced funding, but that's mostly over (there's much less state funding to cut now.) Nameplate cost at private institutions has gone up, but net cost to students (actual amounts paid by students after grants and financial aid) has not gone up that much.

<comment><USER30> [https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for- co...](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for- college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national- universities)

>net cost to students (actual amounts paid by students after grants and financial aid) has not gone up that much.

I'm skeptical of that claim and would request a citation as well. College Board says the opposite (tuition and fees increasing faster than aid): [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/25/tuition- and-f...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/25/tuition-and-fees- still-rising-faster-aid-college-board-report-shows)

And another important set of expenses to track are non-tuition related expenses; it costs more than ever to rent an apartment and pay for other such expenses today.

<comment><USER29> So the US News graphs don't adjust for inflation (as they note). If you perform that adjustment, it's a 50% increase over 20 years, which is something, but not astronomical. That pretty much matches this inflation- adjusted data: [https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tabl...](https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tables/tuition-fees-room-and-board-over-time)

Here's the net cost data, showing that the net real cost is only up about 10% over 5 years. Some sub-numbers are even lower. Net tuition for private non- profit schools is _flat_ across the last 15 years ($14,560 in 02-03, $14,540 in 17-18): [https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tabl...](https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-sector)

My argument is that college prices are up, but largely because of disinvestment by state legislatures, pushing up the perceived cost of college, which allows the private schools to increase their nameplate costs significantly, while using financial aid to keep the actual increases to students in-line with the increases in actual costs for state students.

Another way of looking at it is this: If colleges have been raising tuition astronomically, what have they been doing with the additional money? Additional expenditures on students or facilities are not much changed over the past 10 years. Real expenses per-student are largely flat: [https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.asp)

If colleges were jacking prices through the roof to spend way more on unnecessary luxuries or administrators (as the common wisdom would have it), that would show up in the expenditures data, and it's just not there.

I do agree that non-tuition related expenses are an issue, but that's not the university's fault, other than not building dorms fast enough (and dorms are usually pretty expensive, so it's just as likely that the issue is zoning and building restrictions by university town government, rather than university administrators).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just wait and see what happens when they cut off federal student loans. That'd pull the rug out from under the higher ed house of cards much faster than 10-15 years.

</comment><comment><USER32> The title is clickbait. Enough third tier schools will in fact fail to give it the aura of plausibility. And if the US becomes more hostile and closed to foreign students, we _could_ totally screw this up.

But rising economies around the world will produce a lot more high quality students than their home countries' elite universities can absorb, and that will provide enough customers for good quality universities in the US. There will also be a market for children of wealthy families who can't make it into very selective schools. Probably for 30 years+. Beyond that, US schools will face more competition, but a global middle class will continue to grow.

<comment><USER33> I don't have any sources at my fingertips, but the US has some of the most lenient college admissions for "adult" students of any country on the planet. In some countries, if you haven't decided on a college track by, say, middle school, then you are going to a trade school, not college. And it's tough in many countries to get into school at all later if you didn't get all your ducks in a row for college right out of high school.

In contrast, the US makes it easier to go back to school past a certain age. So a lot of foreigners go to school here because you basically need enough money to pull it off. There are a lot of fewer things that automatically slam the door shut in your face because you didn't do a thing at age 13 or whatever.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article. I'm just replying to what is in this comment and agreeing that the US will likely continue to educate the world for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Charlie Munger quotes--

"There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty — everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture."

"I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues — they may know a lot of French [however]."

"Teaching people formulas that don't really work in real life is a disaster for the world."

</comment><comment><USER35> In my opinion moocs have a long way to go to be comparable to an in person experience. First of all the execution of the pre-recorded lectures is not nearly as good as in person. Writing on the board vs seeing slides and hearing a voice vs seeing someone talk in person is very different. The pacing of the pre-recorded lectures is very mechanical as I'm sure it's tough teaching a camera, whereas in person it is pretty natural. The ability to ask questions in class really helps too. Not meeting with other students/tas/professors in person really has a bad outcome on learning.

</comment><comment><USER36> Education + colleges have been my full-time area of research and work for the past 12 months:

\- The funnel of how we access learning has changed, and colleges are further down on the bottom of the funnel. Many are already losing money each year.

\- Traditional education seems simply not able to keep up with the rate of change in society.

\- How the majority of people today learn something, or acquire knowledge/skill/competency seems to be distinctly changing:

1) Find something on Google/Youtube. Failing that,

2) Find a small e-course. Failing that,

3) Find a larger e-course. Failing that,

4) If there's a lot of courses we discover we need, we look for perhaps a micro-credential or small course. Failing that,

5) If our need is beyond what a micro-course can provide, we may look at a program in a community college, polytechnic, etc.

\- Academically speaking, the future of education is not solely online, or offline, or blended. These are dated academic concepts that don't cover the 70% of learning that is informal and occurs outside of the classroom. People just find a way to learn now, or share knowledge.

\- We can't replace instructors, or instruction, we need to better support the instructors who are willing to learn digital skills. Many refuse. We have a lot of educators trying to use technology but not competent with it's capabilities or possibilities.

\- The future of education is about creating better digital learning interactions that can evolve and update with the rate of change of best pracice in a domain. That domain will be digitally supported, whether it's digital classrooms, digital textbooks (of sorts), or digital learning, all powered through human connection.

\- Education can't keep up with speed. Lots of topics are emerging and changing faster than ever before. A 2000 year old model of higher education will need to evolve, because knowledge and how to apply it is evolving quicker than traditional education can.

\- Traditional colleges, while still very relevant, will have a diminished role in the most emergent or changing educational topics.

This isn't new, but I think the change will come not from the top or the bottom of the pyramid, but from the side at all levels. There are many good pockets of activity occurring, and while they don't make a suit quite yet...

</comment><comment><USER37> Bankruptcy isn't a bad idea for universities. They're not supposed to be for- profit corporations, although many have run them as such. Bankruptcy _could_ help schools restructure their operations, but that requires that boards of directors haven't been captured by financial interests.

<comment><USER38> > Bankruptcy isn't a bad idea for universities.

It's important to note that the way university finances / endowments are structured, as well as the demands of alumni make it so that bankruptcy isn't really that simple in higher ed. [0]

> They're not supposed to be for-profit corporations

I suspect that you don't totally grasp the non-profit vs for-profit distinction. The essential difference between a for-profit and a non-profit is simply that non-profits re-invest their profits into the organization rather than distributing those profits to shareholders. The original intent of this structure was to facilitate philanthropic endeavors (which have pretty much always been self-serving in some subtle way), but just because a non-profit corporation isn't associated with some obvious social benefit doesn't make it any less of a non-profit if it doesn't have shareholders.

It's not always obvious, but Rolex and Ikea are both structured as non-profits (with some for-profit subsidiaries iirc).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Briar_College#2015_closu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Briar_College#2015_closure_attempt)

<comment><USER39> > The essential difference between a for-profit and a non-profit is simply > that non-profits re-invest their profits into the organization rather than > distributing those profits to shareholders

They can't distribute to shareholders, but they aren't required to reinvest. What exactly they can do, with profits or more generally, depends on the specific _class_ of nonprofit they are.

<comment><USER38> Didn't know that, but admittedly even my notions of how non-profits are structured is only slightly deeper than the popular notion of what non-profits are supposed to be. I mostly just wish we'd all disabuse ourselves of the notion that non-profits are always meant to promote some greater social cause. Firsthand experience tells me that the statement "non-profit == good, for- profit == evil" doesn't always hold up.

<comment><USER39> > I mostly just wish we'd all disabuse ourselves of the notion that non- > profits are always meant to promote some greater social cause.

There are classes of nonprofits for which this is not true (the NFL, for instance, is one example of a nonprofit for which that is not true), sure, but most of the cases where this comes up about US nonprofits the focus is usually on specifically 501(c)3 charities for which this is specifically, by law, true, as they must be organized and operated for some combination of a specific enumerated list of purposes deemed socially desirable, which is the whole reason that not only are the organizations themselves tax exempt, but donations to them are tax deductible. Relevant to this conversation, that's absolutely the norm for nonprofit institutions of higher education.

<comment><USER38> I'll admit my ignorance about the details, but I do stand by my belief that non-profits are not always necessarily beneficial for society- I don't think that's particularly controversial. In many cases, there's a substantial gap between "deemed beneficial" and actually beneficial that most people don't grasp because they've been indoctrinated to believe that non-profits can do no wrong. More discerning folks will pore over 990s and ratings on Charity Navigator.

<comment><USER39> > I do stand by my belief that non-profits are not always necessarily > beneficial for society

That's a fairly non-controversial claim (even regarding specifically 501c3 orgs), but something being actually "beneficial to society" is not the same thing as it being "meant to promote some greater social cause."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Excellent. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

</comment><comment><USER41> If we unbundle the courses and/or make MOOCS minimally OK - what's to stop students hiring their own TA to help them through. So long as you pair this up with a nationally recognised micro-credential framework you could see the development of a "faculty" led small-school revival. Add in some sort of matchmaker service at critical mass, some sort of pedagogy credential (how to teach well, not what to teach) and education becomes a nice small business opportunity for PhD holders.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a pretty information light article. If we assume that college prices are unsustainably high, and online courses achieve results comparable with a large swath of universities, it's not clear whether he assumes theses schools are unwilling or unable to respond to the changing environment.

He may well be right, but it would be foolish to think that these schools don't see the same data he does, and that they're not going to at least try to address it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Premise makes sense and I want this to happen but have to keep in mind we are easily swayed by extrapolations that forecast doom. Probably won't be to the extent he predicts

</comment><comment><USER44> I think Christensen is generally right here.

Colleges exist as physical institutions for largely obsolete reasons:

1\. _Libraries_ \- pre-internet/digitization, a massive amount of human knowledge lived solely in university libraries. The size and contents of a given university's library was a very real driver of its value as an educational institution. That may be marginally true today, especially in the case of rare manuscripts and whatnot, but the competitive advantage of having an expansive library is basically gone.

2\. _Recruiting_ \- Companies try to recruit new employees at universities for several reasons. First, they're outsourcing basic candidate diligence to admissions committees. Second, they see efficiency in putting the mouth of the candidate funnel where there are lots of smart motivated young people in one place. Third, alumni loyalty to alma mater is often very strong. However, technology (electronic background checks, being able to look at a candidate's repo, etc) has seriously degraded the AdCom's relative value in filtering for people who are smart, not criminals, and can get authority figures to say nice things about them. Similarly, technology has reduced to near-zero the necessity of having face-to-face interaction during the initial stages of the hiring process (employers will always want to do in-person final rounds, but the need for in-person funnel-mouth events like career fairs / company informational presentations / etc no longer exists as it did pre-internet). Alumni loyalty will be far more sticky, but its importance will diminish over time.

3\. _Professors_ \- just as the competitive moat provided by libraries was largely destroyed by the internet, so too is professor access. You can talk shop with many big-name academics on Twitter; you can watch their lectures on Youtube; they will email you their papers if you email them to ask; etc. Is a Twitter argument the same as visiting someone during their office hours? No, but it's a big improvement on the previous status quo.

I think it's going to be a very, very hard landing for colleges over the next couple decades as young people start making different decisions based on the options available to them.

<comment><USER45> Respectfully, I think analyses like this (there are many going back to the 90's at least) miss the -1st and 0th assets offered by elite universities: signaling power of the institution itself, and the opportunity to live among ---and interact nearly continuously with--other full-time learners of diverse backgrounds but of generally similar ability. Elite universities do not exist to impart technical knowledge and skills (both can be obtained via many other routes), but to propagate and modulate the class system by 1) sorting individuals, 2) putting them in a warm fuzzy place where they can acculturate, form new relationships, and figure out how they (and w/e domain they choose to specialize in) relates to the broader array of institutions, and 3) providing a succinct, society-wide signaling mechanism (not that it's good/fair/accurate, just that it is widely accepted).

So far as I am aware, these deeper assets of universities are not under threat. In my experience, people with strong technical skills from non-elite educational routes end up working for people with weak technical skills from elite universities, for a broad variety of reasons (esp. access to capital, comfort in managerial positions). That said, I think we are at risk of seeing the higher education system become increasingly bifurcated: winner-takes-all dynamics gradually centralize power in a tiny number of elite universities (there's a lot of work on this, that 2nd and 3rd tier colleges are under the most financial stress) and a larger 'commodity' higher education system focused on imparting skills (basically extended job training).

<comment><USER29> > I think we are at risk of seeing the higher education system become > increasingly bifurcated: winner-takes-all dynamics gradually centralize > power in a tiny number of elite universities (there's a lot of work on this, > that 2nd and 3rd tier colleges are under the most financial stress) and a > larger 'commodity' higher education system focused on imparting skills > (basically extended job training).

This is a pretty good analysis. Here in California, we have the community college system, which I think fits the description of your 'commodity' system quite well. We also have the Cal state schools, which I think don't, as much, but CA does have a unique system compared to a lot of other states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Colleges will remain in business as long as businesses will use college degrees as a meaningful qualification to hire talent.

Data has shown that companies have continued to use degrees beyond their relation to actual tasks for the job they're hiring for. We've seen decades of evidence that degree inflation is on the rise, signalled by vacancies requiring a bachelor degree while the tasks are high school level. You can see this either by doing a qualitative analysis, e.g. running surveys among employees and categorising their job complexity and linking it to an educational level. Here you find e.g. many administrative jobs which an 18 year old with 2 weeks of on the job training can do, require one to finish a 3 year bachelor in just about anything, first. But the more common methodology is a quantitative one that's a little less accurate, but easier to perform. Survey existing employees at a large firm about their educational credentials, then survey vacancies for people in similar positions at such firms. You'll find various occupations where 60% of vacancies require a certain credential that only 20% of the employees have, indicating that many companies require credentials that are apparently not necessary. And this is on the rise.

Then you can wonder why, and the answer is because they can. If you can choose between a large pool of people who meet minimum qualifications, you have the luxury to select overqualified people.

And that tendency by human resource managers isn't going to change anytime soon, especially not when there's no significant salary premium companies have to pay to get a person with a college graduate to do highschool level work, over hiring a high school graduate. And I don't see that changing anytime soon with increasing competitive pressure from technological advancement and globalisation.

In the end, a college degree is moving more towards a signalling device that shows socioeconomic background and interpersonal aspects such as grit, stability, delayed gratification, and is less and less about signalling subject matter knowledge, academic competencies etc. HR focuses more and more on the former and not on the latter, when requiring a college degree.

As online education is more accessible and easier (i.e., less financially straining, less psychologically straining, less socially challenging, but rather at-your-own-pace learning behind your computer from anywhere), it's typically viewed as not signalling the former aspects I just mentioned (grit, delayed gratification) but mostly signalling the latter (knowledge etc).

That's why I don't necessarily think that online education is going to supplant colleges from the outside as fast as we think. Of course it'll take over eventually, but I think it'll be slow and will happen more from the inside, by existing colleges, not just through disruption of new startups which will bankrupt existing colleges.

Precisely because of a growing number of companies which have stopped using college-degree requirements to hire for knowledge, and have started to require college degrees to select for 'the type of person who has the background and personal traits to be able to survive and complete college', which online education doesn't signal as well.

</comment><comment><USER47> MOOCs have a staggering drop-out rate though, which I think makes predictions about their disruption less clear cut.

[https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/research/csrmaj/dan...](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/research/csrmaj/daniel_onah_edulearn14.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER48> well educational institutions are getting close to extracting most of their ROI from education. if education costs a million dollars, it might make sense for many to just invest the money, and skip the education and career, and go straight to retirement.

</comment><comment><USER49> The same can be said to Boston housing market.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a bit of a strange article.

First, "in his recent book" refers to his 2011 book [1]. And Christensen has been prophesying this general bankruptcy "in the next decade" since that time. [2]

In any case it's interesting to think about the larger argument of the future of traditional higher education in general versus online education.

Bryan Caplan's thesis that (the state should cut funding for higher education because) higher education is mostly about signalling 3 things is a good tool. He argues that higher education signals a combination of intelligence, conscientiousness and conformity. The combination of the 3 is crucial for the model. [3]

Online education, and more generally self-education, fails on the conformity side. Companies do not want in general to risk such non-conformists, when they can hire from a stream of fresh graduates (smart, hard-working and relatively conformist).

Also, I think the socialization, friendships and networking that happen in the university are extremely valuable and not easily replaced by online education (where and with who can a smart, driven 18 year old hang out while studying and learning for 4 years on MOOCs and textbooks?)

And in addition, I hope, traditional universities are starting to improve their teaching methods (eg, flipped classroom, peer instruction) to multiply the pedagogical and motivational value they offer vs MOOCs.

For online education to replace traditional higher ed, it might require taking into account these factors. Could something like workspaces for freelancers or remote workers - but for studying - replace the traditional institution and the above benefits? Such that, for example, you would not be seen as an extreme non-conformist by not enrolling in a university?

Also, outside the US, tuition costs is often much lower. An online STEM degree, say a certified online masters in software engineering such as coursera or edx, could easily be more expensive than regular (or even the best) university.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Innovative-University-Changing- Higher...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovative-University-Changing-Higher- Education/dp/1118063481)

[2] [https://www.economist.com/international/2012/12/22/learning-...](https://www.economist.com/international/2012/12/22/learning- new-lessons)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System- Waste/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System- Waste/dp/0691174652/)

(To be clear, he argues that from the individual's perspective, university is still net positive, if you have what it takes to finish the degree and don't get too much in debt. It's the state that should cut funding since it's inflating credentials.)

</comment><comment><USER51> Teenage pregnancy has been in a nose-dive because the teenagers are online instead of hanging out these days (at least that is what I've read). If young adults went to school online instead of getting together at college... no more sex?

I'm reminded of some sci-fi stories I read in my youth about futuristic societies where nobody interacted in person and babies came from the lab. At the time the notion of people not having sex and babies anymore seemed far fetched. Now... maybe not so unlikely after all.</comment>


Enhancing search using subtraction. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thingsaaronmade.com/enhancing-search-using-subtraction

<comment><AUTHOR> As usual I warmly welcome any questions/criticism anyone has. Part of the reason I love HN is because the feedback you get on ideas is instantaneous and incredibly useful!

<comment><USER2> You made the visual counterpart of the search engine NOT operator.

Google:

      "blue suit AND women -men"

<comment><AUTHOR> One additional point to note is that if you show the user which keywords/tags are associated with the entire result set they are much more likely to be able to intelligently, and quickly, weed out results they don't want. As opposed to having to scan through the result, find the string they don't want, then type it into the search bar preceded by the negation operator...</comment></comment></comment>


How Social Media Destroys an Entrepreneur's Ability to Succeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleywatch.com/2013/06/how-social-media-destroys-an-entrepreneurs-ability-to-succeed/ <comment><USER2> This makes so much sense. I find that when I am bombarded by info all day I get way more ideas for content but yet have a harder time executing writing that content.</comment>


Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/ <comment><USER2> Airbnb is partly responsible for the massive spike in rental prices around San Francisco. I know a lot of people who rented more apartment than they could really afford because they know they can earn extra income via airbnb.

In the short term, this seems like (and may indeed be) a positive trend - people are able to squeeze into better quality apartments than they otherwise could have. But in the medium term, as we now see in SF, market prices simply rise to account for this "new normal" behavior. Unintended consequences follow. First, someone who is not willing to open their apartment to part-time airbnb'rs is now at a disadvantage. Second, at least part, and perhaps most of, the extra airbnb income is now passed on to the landlords in the form of higher rental prices.

Remember it doesn't matter how much money you have, it only matters how much money you have relative to other people who want the same things you do.

<comment><USER3> There is no correlation between the rise in rental prices in SF and Airbnb. It's absurd to think that they could impact that at this point. A large chunk of the hosts on the site rent out a room in their own homes. If you want someone to blame for the raising prices, I think it's more rational to point the finger at the spate of IPOs and the newly minted folks who are in the buying market at the moment. Or if that's not your cup of tea, then perhaps blame the size of the city (as it can't get any bigger) or even more appropriately, blame the blood hungry landlords who still insist you pay by check and raise their rates by at least 30% every time one of their properties free up.

Either way, just wildly saying that without any substantial evidence is pretty weak.

<comment><USER4> It is affecting housing stock, though. The Tenant's Union says they've discovered thousands of apartments and some whole buildings have been taken off the rental market to be used by tourists.

<comment><USER5> But that's good. That's arbitrage between rental and hospitality markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I think most on this site would applaud efficiently allocating anything, there are some drawbacks to efficiently allocating things strictly for money.

Michael Sandel, author of _What Money Can't Buy_ , argues pretty eloquently the economic and social cost-benefit to pricing things like a placement in line, or a spare room in a house.

To extend one of his examples, Airbnb gives you a hard-cash price for your extra room—or even your couch. One of your friends wants to couch surf for a week.

By past social convention, you'd give it to him for free. He saves money he'd spend on something else.

By Airbnb convention, you charge him for it. You kind of have to, because everyone else is, and you can't leave money on the table. You have cash now, but a bit less than he would have, because Airbnb takes a cut.

Sandel was interested in investigating this society where the rich get the best of everything first, explicitly at the expense of the poor.

So I hope there are some comments investigating whether or not we're better off socially, not necessarily economically, by renting our "excess capacity" or being generous with our "excess capacity."

<comment><USER7> I think you may be missing the part where, by drawing in revenue, you help offset the risk of letting random people make use of your capital.

While I agree that perhaps in a better world everyone should simply share resources unencumbered by profit motive, the assignment of a usage fee to a couch or something does help prevent overuse of resources.

In the case of a friend sleeping on my couch, there is our personal relationship and desire not to cause future trouble that helps limit the possible risk of the couch getting destroyed--having a pecuniary barrier to entry for a stranger to use my couch seems reasonable.

<comment><USER8> What is abuse? Abuse is about fairness. Fairness is not about money, though we have tried for a long time to mediate pain and suffering through money. Abuse and fairness are emotional. It is _not_ rational. Putting a monetary value to this is rational _izing_ what is fundamentally not rational.

Just because it is not rational does not make it any less real. You don't negotiate with a hurricane. If you are weighing the pros and cons about renting stuff out to a friend, then there are some deeper issues involved. Is this particular friend widely known for mooching off of you? (Why is such a person your friend anyways?) Generally, if you fear abuse of your assets and personal space/time, then you also have some Jungian shadows related to abusing your friendships.

Renting something out to strangers and taking money to mitigate risk -- that seems fair to me. (But risk is _emotionally_ related to the same kinds of issues related to renting or not renting out to a friend, or a friend abusing or not abusing your generosity).

There are ways to deal with the underlying non-rationalizable emotions that does not involve money. Hopefully, those methods will become more popular going forward.

It's interesting. I have never considered this before. Conducting transactions like this means stripping away the impersonal nature of corporations (<http://onthespiral.com/unifying-value-universe>), makes you much more aware of human nature, maybe gets people to start dealing with it.

Consider also <http://playspent.org> ... It turns out: a social net is very advantageous. ([http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Need-Rise-Network- ebook/dp/B009K8...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Need-Rise-Network- ebook/dp/B009K8R7OA))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like it's classic capitalism as outlined by Adam Smith.

Smith didn't envision massive corporations making money by having the government pass favorable legislation, he envisioned many small players making a decent living through competition rather than rent seeking.

<comment><USER10> The free market, remember, is only efficient under certain circumstances, particularly: transaction costs must be low and there must be few barriers to entry.

AirBnB _et cetera_ lower the transaction costs and remove barriers to entry.

<comment><USER11> Easy discovery of price information is also important to capitalistic markets. Of course, AirBnB helps there as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree that the rise of the share economy is unstoppable, but I don't at all agree that this will or should be a free-for-all with no regulation. We just need to catch up socially and legally with technology.

To me, the biggest problem with the rise of AirBnB is in areas that have tourist appeal but are mainly populated with long term residents. People used to occasionally rent out their place, or just let people stay there for free, but there was almost always some kind of social connection.

The removal of friction has allowed this to become far more widespread. I personally believe that it most definitely has the capacity for harm.

I remember hearing about one incident recently in the california wine country where there are some fruit trees on a public easement. Mostly residential, but lots of appeal to tourists. The neighbors shared the trees as a commons, they'd take a bit, but leave plenty, and would informally contribute time and money to maintenance. One day, the trees were stripped, completely, of any fruit. It turned out that a couple of people renting a nearby house had stripped the trees. The house, which had formerly been occupied by a family with kids, was now a full time vacation rental (at great profit for the owner) and was advertising "fruit picking in the alleyway" as one of the wonderful activities available to short term renters.

I know I risk sounding very trivial here, elevating little neighborhood squabbles about crab apples all out of proportion, but I think the story I heard really gets at the problem. Long term residents, to use a vulgar expression, have to sleep where they shit. Short termers don't. The non-legal self-corrective mechanisms that used to provide social harmony, things we weren't even aware of, may be badly disrupted but a very large number of short term residents. We're all willing to (or should be willing to) tolerate the occasional loud backyard party next door. But would we want to have that go on every night, all summer, from vacationers looking to maximize their fun? All of a sudden, we're using the law to regulate something that used to be managed less formally. The law is a terrible tool, way worse than just talking to your neighbors, but when you have a new neighbor every three days,it may be all you've got.

And even when the short term vacationers are on their best behavior, there is still a loss. There is also absolutely a loss when families who would like to know and socialize with long term neighbors, especially with children, start to get pushed out because they can't compete on price with people who plan to airbnb the crap out the old neighborhood. I don't have a link to this, but I read once that an economist estimated that good relations with the neighbors were worth about $50,000.

I remember PG writing about how new forms of property come into existence with new technologies, just as old ones can go away. We may only become aware that there was this vaguely defined property we owned now that airbnb has found a way to cash in. I really do think that the owner of many of these VRBOs are selling the neighborhood rather than the house itself, and they're harming the neighborhood in the process.

I'm more than ok with some use of airbnb, and obviously it opens up new benefits as well. But I think it is very reasonable for communities to strongly resist widespread short term rentals in their neighborhoods.

<comment><USER13> The United States government is currently responsible for funding people to move into previously peaceful communities and jack up the murder rate, with zero prior review of their propensity to commit violence.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american- murder-mystery/306872/)

      American Murder Mystery

      Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer
      implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs
      of recent decades.

      ...

      About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the
      test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns
      with Betts's map of Section 8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw
      a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe ("He has a
      better imagination," she said). Otherwise, the match was
      near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas
      are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are
      represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas
      are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The
      rest of the city has almost no dots.

      Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map.
      The couple had been musing about the connection for months,
      but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the
      two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this
      would be a "hard thing to say or write." Nobody in the
      antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was
      going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that
      they'd been engaged in for the past decade had been
      bringing the city down, in ways they'd never expected. But
      the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and
      Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening
      all around the country.

That's the US Government "helping". Why would anyone trust them to intercede in a dispute between neighbors?

<comment><USER14> First, crime has been falling in American cities almost monotonically since the 1980's, aside from a slight uptick in the last several years as a result of the recession.

Second, nobody thinks that Section 8 doesn't increase crime in nicer neighborhoods. The rationale is that spreading out the poor families via Section 8 reduces overall crime in the city versus concentrating them into the projects.

I used to live in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Chicago, and many of the surrounding high-rises took Section 8 residents. While I'm sure they raised property crime slightly in the area, I think most people preferred that state of affairs to having the Cabrini-Green projects next door.

<comment><USER13>
      they raised property crime slightly

The article shows that they increased the murder rate substantially. Moreover, most people would prefer to have 10 murderers focusing their attentions on each other than having them next door. A spatially localized Cabrini Green which you can avoid is far superior to one that you cannot, especially when it is your tax dollars that are being used against your will to create this dangerous situation. By contrast, AirBnB is not forcing you to pay the rent for the hipsters boarded in your neighbor's domicile.

      nobody thinks that Section 8 doesn't increase crime in
      nicer neighborhoods

OK. So we agree that official United States government policy increased crime in nicer neighborhoods and that nobody thinks differently. And we probably agree that murders are considerably more serious than any of the hypothetical harms caused by apartment rentals, especially given the statistical evidence for a direct causal effect of government policy presented in the article.

So: given that it is still official US government policy to increase the _murder rate_ in middle class neighborhoods (Section 8's budget was raised to $19B in 2011), exactly why should anyone believe other government housing regulations would promote the common welfare?

<comment><USER14> The article doesn't show shit. It completely ignores the fact that murders in large cities hit record lows right before the recession, even though such cities are the heaviest users of Section 8.

As for mid-size cities? Look at the cities on that list and see what happened to their Hispanic immigrant profile over the last two decades. The article makes no attempt to factor out that phenomenon.

Section 8 is a solution to a problem that has no good solution. Segregation is worse--it destroys economic development in the ghettos and its not like those people can't go up to the nice neighborhoods. Moreover, it's not like people who live in Chicago want to take the suburb route and move to the suburbs, separated by distance so the poor minorities can't reach them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it sharing if you are getting payed for it? Isn't that normal commerce?

Sharing economy to me means sites like freecycle, couchsurfing, and your neighborhood listserv .

</comment><comment><USER16> All the discussion here seems to revolve around AirBnb in particular and neglect all of the other sharing services mentioned in the article.

My first thoughts on this relate to those other services. In particular, car and equipment sharing. Sure it's a great idea to rent out stuff you're not currently using, but if everyone starts to rely on the availability of whatever they need, whenever they need it, what is the incentive to actually buy anything for yourself? Further down the road, when an increasingly large portion of the population just assumes they can borrow/rent whatever they need and have decided to never buy anything for themselves, there will eventually be a shortage in goods to be borrowed/rented. So to me, this seems like a market with a very low cap on growth. Namely, when that threshold of borrowers vs owners is reached.

<comment><USER17> When that threshold is reached people will start buying stuff again, increasing said threshold. Eventually the system will converge to a stable point, or it will continually adapt due to changing economics/demographics.

Isn't it beautiful how markets can self-regulate?</comment></comment>


F-35: What The Pilots Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-most-critical-test-180971734/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a PR piece. Too positive, a lot of discussions of pilot's smiles. Given the very high program costs and the need by Lockheed Martin to convince US allies to buy the plane despite the high price tag, I think HN readers would be well served by skepticism.

To put it another way, it the F35 was really as good as the F22, as the article seems to claim, then it would not be available for export.

<comment><USER3> The cost per unit has actually come down below modern variants of older generation fighters. Boeing has been trying to get the air force to buy some new F-15Xs over the next few years, this has been controversial to say the least because they would cost more per plane than F-35s while being unable to operate in contested airspace. An ex Boeing CEO as secretary of defense has not eased the controversy to say the least.

<comment><USER4> You can load one of those puppies up with 22 air to air missiles, have a forward F-35 pass along target information, and light them up from the F-15. One team. F-15 is a missile truck that can go Mach 2.2.

Ask because it goes Mach 2.2 it is probably the only fighter vehicle that can launch a hypersonic glide weapon, at least from what the early generation is likely to look like.

<comment><USER5> It is a bit disengenuous to imply that an F-15 is a "missile truck" that can go mach 2+.

There is no way it will be going anywhere near mach 2 with double rails carrying AIM-120s, let alone 20 of the missiles in total.

<comment><USER6> In an engagement with an S-400, bits of it will probably end up going at mach 2+.

<comment><USER7> Not unless you have EA-18Gs and EC-130s raising the noise floor along with lots of disposable drones cluttering the fire control RADAR. And more missile truck F-16s, F-18s, and F-15s carrying AGM-88s to supress/destroy the RADARs and MALDs to add more clutter and become seductive targets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > to penetrate sophisticated enemy air defenses and find and disable > threats—requires what the fifth-generation jet offers: stealth and a > stunning array of passive and active sensors

> U.S. forces first took these capabilities into combat last September, when > Marine F-35Bs struck the Taliban in Afghanistan

against disorganized rebel forces less well armed than the average suburban American, with no air force and no surface to air missiles. and the U.S. still can't win that war.

<comment><USER9> I was trying to find an article I read years ago, about how unsuited the supersonic fighter jets are for air support of ground operations. The main contentions were:

1\. Modern jets need long runways (aircraft carrier slingshot notwithstanding) so anytime troops were calling in air support, a supersonic f16 would fly for an hour, have enough fuel for a couple of bombing runs before having to fly back to the closest large airport, compared to what the troops really wanted, a super tucano turboprop, which can take off from the dirt airstrips available anywhere in the country.

2\. Modern jets, with their stunning array of passive and active sensors, encourage an eyes-off approach to dropping bombs : pilots can only trust their data, they are not close enough to the ground to recognize who's friendly and who's not.

Alluded in my sibling comment, A10 warthogs would have been perfect for these missions -- I don't know where the unwillingness to fund them comes from. Googling now reveals that Super Tucano turboprops are now being delivered to the afghan airfoce, since that's what you actually need to fight small arms battles in the remote regions of the country.

Closest thing I found was 2015, detailing why modern technology doesn't win the war, 'low and slow' can be a better game plan:

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and- sl...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and-slow)

<comment><USER10> The idea that low cost STOL aircraft will suddenly solve the CAS conundrum is a Reddit-baked solution void of any actual data or understanding. I'm a military aviator and the public more than anything needs to understand that as with most things in this world, it simply isn't as simple as you make it out to be.

The data from the war in Afghanistan paints a pretty good picture of capability versus perception. The vast majority of the responses to troops-in- contact came in the form of precision munitions from F-16s or F-15s. What the "troops" want is not a good variable in understanding what the best method of providing CAS is. Everyone wants the A-10, it's sexy. The reality on the ground is that even in a low threat environment such as Afghanistan the A-10 doesn't nearly do the job as good as an F-16 for a number of reasons which I won't get into in a public forum.

The Airforce vision of CAS is precision munitions from both manned and un- manned platforms that present very little risk to both the operators of the platform and the infrastructure that support them. It would be a significant de-evolution of our capability as a military to continue to operate the A-10 purley on nostalgia and public perception of its' capabilities. I don't expect the public at large to look at this situation with nuisance or data, but let's use common sense if anything. The reason why the Afghan Airforce is operating A-29s and armed C-208Bs has much more to do with cost and sustainability than it does to do with effectiveness. In fact you can find multiple articles of Afghan brass complaining about how what we are giving them isn't particularly well suited to the mission they are expected to sustain. A couple of tool boxes and spare PT6 parts will keep that fleet flying for a couple of years. I don't see them really providing a meaningful impact on the battlefield however.

Being close to the ground is the Army's mission and they do it really well. Adding a couple gunned turboprops won't change anything on the ground today or tomorrow. We are training and developing doctrine for a near-peer threat. We've been focused on COIN too long, and developing budgets and technology for yesterday's conflicts is exactly what set us back in the early days of the GWOT. So consider for a moment that the F-35, despite it's many setbacks and runaway budget might actually do the CAS mission quite well. I'll take the laser guided 500LB bomb over a spray of Hyrda rockets when some asshole starts throwing IDF my way. By the time we procure, field, and properly employ something like the A-29 it's basically going to be limited to a low threat environment scout attack role. Hey doesn't the Army do that??!!

So I told you what this soldier wants, and what the Airforce is doing. Hopefully that's good enough.

<comment><USER11> I'm struggling to find analogies here.

Everyone, you need to drive the Ford 35 Mustang. It's not the fastest car but it's pretty fast. If you strap a trailer on the back then sure it now loses all it's maneuverability but it's now a truck, right? So we don't need trucks any more.

Since it's invisible you don't need any combat capability, unless you load it out with 8 pylons and now it's not invisible any more, so now it does need to outfly the enemy. But it can't because it needs to carry all this load.

It needs to take off and land vertically which means it needs a small cross section but it needs to be able to have a high wing load to turn so it needs a large cross section.

It needs to do close air support but it can't get close. It needs to be slow but it also needs to be fast.

It needs to be a bomber and have long range, but needs to be a fighter and have high performance (or energy maneuverability).

It's what Boyd warned everyone about during the last generation, you need to avoid mutli role aircraft as they're not good at anything.

<comment><USER12> >It's what Boyd warned everyone about during the last generation, you need to avoid mutli role aircraft as they're not good at anything.

Like the F-16 or the F-15E? Hillaker said he'd have designed the F-16 differently(more akin to the F-16XL) if he had known it was going to be multi- role.

<comment><USER11> Right. It wasn't supposed to be multi-role, the original was a beautiful thing to behold before they started hanging all kinds of crap off of it.

<comment><USER12> Like radar?

Eh, if it went into production as they had envisioned, it would have been built only to F-104 kind of numbers. By compromising a little on the air to air aspect, they gained enormously in the air to ground aspect and overall utility. Most of the sorties have been air to ground for a good awhile now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems to me a bit like a kid begging their parents for a Neo Geo. The parents don't want to, of course, because it's horribly expensive, and not _that_ useful, and their kid already has a Super Nintendo and a Turbografx 16, and doesn't actually need any more video game systems, and probably shouldn't even be playing so many video games in the first place. And the kid's mode of argument is to just keep reminding them, increasingly loudly, how _awesome_ the Neo Geo is.

Obviously, it's not a perfect analogy. One difference is that, in this case, everyone involved is a grown-up.

<comment><USER14> That's my criticism of the F-35 as well. I don't know anything about fighter planes, but as a taxpayer it just seems way to expensive.

Denmark is buying 27 F-35. That not nearly enough to do anything meaningful against an enemy like Russia. Buying a plane, like the SAAB JAS 39 Gripen, would have allowed the Danish Airforce to do basically the same operations, for much much less money. The Danish airforce isn't going to intercept Russian fighters. The missions are patrol and bombings for NATO.

For a country like the US, sure, maybe the F-35 is something they need for the type of missions they fly. I just can see any country do anything with 27 planes. 27 is less planes than an aircraft carrier has.

<comment><USER15> I do worry that there is opportunity for massive "disruption" for fighter jets in precisely the Clayton Christensen / Innovator's dilemma sense.

The innovation shouldn't be around stealth and maneuverability, but rather production cost/rate and AI automation. It is _really_ hard to train a fighter pilot, this means you have very few of them, and the one with the best jet wins.

In the new world of AI the jets themselves are trivial, it's the AI that matters and the VOLUME you can produce them at. In this case someone like China is way better positioned -- just steal the IP for the physical airframe (or develop one that is just good enough) then innovate on the assembly line and AI aspects.

The AI fighter jet problem feels much easier than the self driving car problem.

<comment><USER16> This kind of overlooks that the cost of the aircraft isn't entirely in the original production and (possible) training of pilots. They also require a large ground team burning several man-hours for every hour that they are in the air. The problem with the mass AI fighter drone scenario is that the logistics chain and maintenance costs kill you.

<comment><USER17> Except that the drones themselves can be much simpler than the fighters they replace - there is no meatware inside, no life support or safety equipment that needs to be maintained and checked. With enough intelligence built in, the drone can land with a very detailed list of items that need maintenance because of performance anomalies.

Plus, the AI can be augmented by a human on the ground.

<comment><USER16> That life support stuff has to be replaced by automation, so "much simpler" is probably stretching it. Plus you're talking about adding in a bunch of sensors and software which is even more complexity (IE things that will break or go wrong). The exploding complexity problem is a pernicious one.

<comment><USER17> If the sensors and computers that manage the control surfaces of any modern fighter fail, the plane crashes anyway, so they still need to be there. Not having to route everything to the cockpit can simplify design and improve ruggedness.

A lot of the resistance against this comes from the fact robots don't get medals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $406 billion!!!

Just imagine how many humans you can bring out of poverty with that kind of money? I understand the world we live in but if you spend one tenth the amount they spent on this educating/helping the very people this plane would be eventually targeted at, I think it would cause more of an impact.

I was reading a book by Steven Pinker and in it he lays out the case for how modern society has essentially made war illegal.

And in Sapiens the author (Yuval Harari) makes the case that modern society is no longer based on static wealth that can be conquered and consumed like Gold, Silver etc., Its made of human skill and mind that create wealth that does not exist. So say China occupies the US it sure can take all the wealth that is static but it cannot force people to use their minds to create a Google or an Apple or FB(i know..i know..)..

If you believe the above you have to ask yourself:- "So then what is the benefit of spending so much money?"

<comment><USER19> I think unfortunately people are living in a fairy tale if they think like that.

Resources like fossil fuels and raw materials are critical for the real function of economies. Global wealth inequality between countries can be extreme and quite obviously reflects resource distribution inequality.

Its the same as all of history. Usually one or a few powers dominate the earth. The US has the most most wealth and resource control globally by far. This is not because the US has Facebook or because "war is illegal" (LOL). Its because the US and proxies/allies have the most massive and dominant military ever seen and use that actively to maintain the advantages.

I can understand how people do not realize this since the media does a very good job of distributing propaganda about the numerous wars, suggesting that each military action is isolated and motivated by some mythical moral cause.

<comment><USER20> >> I think unfortunately people are living in a fairy tale if they think like that.

Everything humans create is subjective reality. Shared fictions are commonly held beliefs in fictional entities. For example, belief in the power of money is a shared fiction.

>> Usually one or a few powers dominate the earth

Depends on how you measure "dominate"? What time period? Do they have more wealth than others at time period dT? Do they think they have more power to direct the wheel of the history at that time dT? History teaches all civilizations fail soon or late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It should probably be highlighted at the top of the article that three of those pilots are employees of lockmart.

<comment><USER22> And none of the pilots are in the position to give fair assessment. You are not allowed to give fair assessment for a fighter even you are retired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > For tests in departure resistance, we truly had to trick the system. We > would disengage all the self-protect mechanisms to put it into an out-of- > control regime. And then we would allow the controller to wake up. It would > recognize the situation it was in, and then it would get itself out of the > situation. Absolutely fascinating. It will null all of the pitch rates, yaw > rates, and roll rates to the extent that you can get it out the attitude > that you've got it into.

> When it comes to true departure resistance, we allowed the system to be 100 > percent engaged, and we would [fly like] a very badly trained pilot. So > everything that I have been taught not to do as a pilot since the age > of—crikey, when did I first start flying? Maybe 13—I was being asked to do.

I would love to read about the people who code these sort of controls systems.

<comment><USER24> Those test conditions are absurd. I would never want to be in a position where firmware _I_ wrote had to cold boot, detect position, and correct the plant at 10,000 feet/5Gs!

<comment><USER25> That really puts previous reports about bugs in F-35 software under different perspective. Of course they spent so much time to debug this, the requirements seem to basically be a fully autonomous and capable auto-pilot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We should keep our minds open to the possibility that this isn't the worst plane ever made.

I think the real crime is the ridiculous cost, and putting all our eggs in the F35 basket.

</comment><comment><USER22> All pilots, retired or not, have tight limits to what they can say about new fighter early in the production.

The end result is just PR piece. It's OK to enjoy military porn from glossy magazines, but HN should not be place for it. It has no information.

<comment><USER27> > It's OK to enjoy military porn from glossy magazines

Even when I do this, it's for the kid in me. Show me big guns, fast jets, and give me some astounding numbers. This article has none of that!

<comment><USER17> The unit price is a quite astounding number ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article was in the latest issue of Air & Space. There have been a number of articles that have ridiculed the F35 as a waste of time and money, but it is interesting to hear what the pilots think about the plane now that they are flying them.

<comment><USER28> Are you sure this is what the pilots think?

For me, the overall message is so flattering for the airplane that it sounds more as the result of lots of press training or at least as pilots being very careful in what they say because publicly critiquing this airplane is not good for one's career prospects.

<comment><USER29> Seems entirely possible that the F-35 has grown into a solid piece of engineering and is great to fly from a pilot's perspective without that necessarily invalidating cost-related and overrun-related criticisms of the project.

<comment><USER30> If it had grown into a solid piece of engineering we would be hearing about it from all angles and seeing it at every airshow. There is nothing the military would rather do than demonstrate that this zillion-dollar albatross is not only still alive, but it's also not developmentally disabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> These guys are test pilots and engineers who have thousands and thousands of hours of flight time and have actually flown the F-35.

They can't possibly know what they're talking about, so this must just be a PR piece to cover up how horrible this aircraft is.

It would be so much more credible if they just interviewed a non-pilot/non- engineer tech journalist who can tell us the truth.

/sarcasm

<comment><USER32> True, but when have you heard a test pilot criticising his employer while still having an active career?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The most interesting (fun?) one to read for me was Squadron Leader Andy Edgell, Royal Air Force.

> _"Yeah, Test, you didn't put the right rudder in." I said, "Yeah, I know. I > couldn't lift my leg up."_

> [...]

> _Legalized hooliganism! All in the pursuit of data and good test points, of > course._

> [...]

> _I did, for a moment, stare through the windows of the bridge. And you think > to yourself, "This is a view that no one really gets."_

</comment><comment><USER34> They have their demo team debut this weekend in FL.

[https://airandspaceshow.com/f-35-demo/](https://airandspaceshow.com/f-35-demo/)

<comment><USER35> I saw the F-35 takeoff and a couple of maneuvers at an airshow in 2017, do you know what the difference between that demonstration and the one in FL will be?

<comment><USER36> The article says "North American debut".

<comment><USER35> Right, but it's already flown at at least one North American airshow (since I've seen it fly), so this must be different in some way than the ones that have already been flying. So I'm curious what will be different.

<comment><USER37> Difference between doing fly-by and basic maneuvers, and a full-on all- performance show by effectively a stunt team, as best I can tell.

This news article supports that: [https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/28/f-35-ligh...](https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/28/f-35-lightning- ii-demo-team-make-north-american-debut-melbourne-air-space-show/2434258002/)

<comment><USER35> Awesome! I saw the F-35 in Duluth MN and it was the most impressive takeoff I've ever seen, so I'd be really excited to see it again now. Thanks for the info.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I'm kind of bummed because I'll be at Sun n' Fun, which is one of the largest air shows... and only like an hour away from Melbourne, but apparently the F-35 isn't visiting.

Hard to justify a drive to Melbourne to JUST watch an F-35.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The thing with fighter aircraft is that you don't need the latest and the greatest at production day, what you need is a extendable platform for the future & and good training platform for the pilots. These platforms need to live for about 40 years with constant updates & training (F-16 introduced in 1978).

F-35 is neither.

Because of design decision of marrying three different military branches requirements (air force, navy, marines) with three different fighter roles (intercept, ground support, reconnaissance) a lot of the extendability is already gone.

Cost of flying F-35 is one of the highest yet for a fighter aircraft (except maybe for F-22), this means that the pilots will not get sufficient training. Sure, with modern on the ground simulation you can get quite far, but you need the real deal, especially when training in formation & against real adversaries, like other countries.

Which fighter aircraft will win the dogfight? The one in the air with a skilled pilot and not the empty one on the ground for maintenance.

And of course, future development of highly advanced UAV:s & future radar & missile technology will make the case for expensive fighter aircraft even tougher.

</comment><comment><USER39> Let's say all the claims in this article are correct.

What happens when one gets shot down (as it inevitably will), and the enemy reverse-engineers the stealth tech to either copy or find weaknesses in its capabilities?

If they can reverse-engineer faster than we can improve our stealth tech, which seems reasonable, whatever claimed advantages this plane has will be temporary.

Or is there another way of looking at this?

<comment><USER40> They don't even need to shoot it down. The Chinese already stole the designs, evaluated them, and have been working on their own less-risky copy for years. They have a proven ability to copy and adapt weapon systems at a faster rate than anyone gives them credit for. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_FC-31](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_FC-31)

The J-31 is basically a twin-engine F-35, minus the sensor fusion capabilities. The Chinese are still very poor at making fighter jet engines, so they went with 2 smaller engines probably for redundancy and because they can't build one gigantic reliable engine anyway. The jet is probably still underpowered.

<comment><USER41> Do you think it will save costs if the united states moved F-35 manufacturing to China? Quality will be lower but Apple was able to do it with the iPhone without compromising quality.

<comment><USER40> Sure it would "save costs".....until we get in a shooting war with China and they stop sending us spare parts. Or given concerns about backdoors in Huawei gear, you can be damned sure they would put hardware-level backdoors in fighter jet control systems. So the cost-benefit analysis needs to take into account the degradation of your security posture that comes from having your greatest adversary supplying your equipment.

<comment><USER41> If we get into a shooting war with China then we can switch to Russia. Last resort is north Korea. Although North Korea is really poor with the equivalent infrastructure changes that happened in China we can build it up to a nuclear super power and North Korea can supply the needed parts for F-35 at a really cheap price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Chuck Yaeger still thinks the F-35 is a waste of money:

[https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/111111144983590912...](https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/1111111449835909120)

</comment><comment><USER43> Many of those pilots are literally paid to love it.

</comment><comment><USER44> There's plenty of reason to be critical of the F-35, but wow I loved reading this article.

The two things that really stood out to me:

1\. The F-35s top feature is situational awareness, essentially the way in which it processes and displays information to a pilot. Information is becoming a critical piece of war, and the advances made here will trickle down to us civilians in the years to come. Imagine what their HUDs are capable of? Add to that its ability to essentially fly itself, I have to imagine there are some features of autonomy that will be useful to us down the line.

2\. Speaking of information, from a metatextual perspective, this article is also a great application of the human domain of warfare (1) this article itself being a weapon. The anti-F35 articles used to concern me from this perspective, but I wonder if even those were part of a larger information campaign (The enemy thinks the jet is bad, thus under estimating it).

The first 2019 Redflag was just a few weeks ago, I wish I would have made the drive out to the desert to watch.

1)[https://mailchi.mp/digitalfuture/dff4-316401](https://mailchi.mp/digitalfuture/dff4-316401) (scroll down to the animated gif of a machine gun)

</comment><comment><USER45> " _You are telling the airplane to go up or down, speed up or slow down, go left or right. And the computers figure out what's the best way to do that, and they're going to move the flight controls to do it. And the interesting thing is, they may not do it the same way twice. So let's say the airplane gets damaged, and one of the flight controls is no longer available. A legacy airplane would still try to use that surface because it doesn't know any better. The F-35 digital flight control systems will say, "That surface isn't doing much for me anymore, so I'm going to have to compensate by using some other things. Maybe I'll have to move them a little bit more to get the same effect because the pilot still wants to turn left."_ "

Anyone have the details on how it does that?

A while back, I read a report about an experimental aircraft that would attempt to determine the effectiveness of its control surfaces by moving all of them in a short period of time. The impression I got was that it would have a few seconds of rough flight, after which it would return to flying normally even if it had lost the use of a major control surface.

</comment><comment><USER46> Meanwhile, the F-35's fully mission capable rate remains miserable. [https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2019/03/f-35-far-from- rea...](https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2019/03/f-35-far-from-ready-to- face-current-or-future-threats/)

</comment><comment><USER47> The f-35 is a great example of the practically pathological need for the US military to appear to ne the most technologically advanced military in the world. To be clear, it is, but finally China is making significant improvements. This cold-war hold-over means that instead of making a boring solution for an actual problem, the US made a trillion dollar jack of all trades. The f-35 is worse at each of the individual task than the specialized frames it is supposed to replace. I can't find the link, but I remember an article where f-16 s won every mock dogfight with f-35s.

<comment><USER48> I think horses beat the f-35 in jousts. Dogfights are WWII style of fighting. Modern fighting is done from 50 miles away with missiles, where the f-35 had significant advantages. I still think the plane is an example of design by committee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> its hard to take the opinions of the pilots that fly them with complete confidence. they have a vested interest, their career is over if the f35 is over.

On the low end, the f35 costs about as much as 5 f16s, which also have twice the range over an f35. the f35 is the bf109 of the modern era.

military brass keeps wanting all purpose aircraft, and 100 years of military aircraft experience has shown that never works.

<comment><USER41> Pilots can switch planes like programmers can switch programming languages so "protecting career" is unlikely.

"Obeying my boss" is what is most likely happening here. I get the sense that they are literally instructed not to give bad PR about the plane. Or even worse, this entire article is scripted.

<comment><USER17> > Pilots can switch planes like programmers can switch programming languages > so "protecting career" is unlikely.

Except that military pilots have one single possible employer.

<comment><USER41> What military pilots can't change to civilian pilots when they leave the military?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The Smithsonian Institution is administered by the US federal government. The grain of salt you should take with this is mountain-sized. Even if it weren't direct propaganda (which it likely is), these pilots would be ill-advised to say anything bad about the F-35 in a government-run publication.

</comment><comment><USER44> The first interview mentions the Paris air show as a critical public demonstration. You can watch it here [https://youtu.be/93NdwZAeXhI](https://youtu.be/93NdwZAeXhI)

<comment><USER44> Oh, and more impressive to me is the footage out of the Jedi Transition: [https://youtu.be/d9HqVXGRJL0](https://youtu.be/d9HqVXGRJL0)

For those who don't know, about 3.5 hours from Los Angeles you can go see a ton of amazing jet fighters coming back or going to training exercises. There's no way to know when you'll see something, or what you'll see, but the area is a scene of jet geeks. I keep meaning to go (Should have gone after the recent Redflag).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The iPhone would be more expensive then this aircraft if we only built 100. Just shows the value of scale.

There should be an alternative military group that tries to leverage the existing supply chain to build robust defensive weapons.

The spacex approach.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is so unfortunate in the modern age, with the globe hyper connected, we still need these planes to go to possibly war against other civilized countries.

</comment><comment><USER53> Plane seems like a really good fit for it's role. Would be pretty cool to meet the engineers that designed it.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ten years from now all the cellphones/radars/powerlines/whatever in the US are going to go dead and the Iranian government will start making demands. Your fancy airplane will not help one bit. The military are always fighting the _last_ war :(

</comment><comment><USER55> Amazing that employees of Lockheed say nice things about the F-35.

</comment><comment><USER56> A staggering, epic waste of talent, money, and time. Its advocates have harmed the US and its future prospects.

</comment><comment><USER57> That'll sell some planes.</comment>