Close the beach!
Eliz. Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has introduced her first piece of legislation. It’s called the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, and would reduce the rate students pay on federally-subsidized student loans for one year, from 3.4% to 0.75%.
Without congressional action, on July 1 the rate is set to double from 3.4% to 6.8%.
Warren brings up an interesting point – her bill simply asks students to pay the same rates that big banks pay for borrowing.
She’s literally just asking if college grads can get the same deal as bank CEOs. The exact same interest rate. Not even a bailout or anything fancy (pipe dreams!) - just the same interest rate.
Here’s to deregulation on human cloning research and filling Congress with a super majority of Warrens.
So I’m working from existing maps to create a new Iowa City that remained the state capitol and became a larger, denser city of about 150,000. Coralville is absorbed, and becomes the home of the University, while North Liberty stays a suburb of Iowa City/bedroom community for Cedar Rapids. University Heights residents still claim that they live in a separate town, but they don’t, and nobody believes them. I-80 and 218/27 are replaced by high-speed rail lines, one running from St. Paul to St. Louis, the other from Chicago to Omaha.
This is a first draft, so there are still some things I want to change. It needs another east-west road that will get you across the river (which can be a problem sometimes), and areas still need filling in. The usual town planning issues.
Oh, and that empty chunk of land west of town, by the creek? It’s a self-governed principality run entirely by rabbits.
Updates to follow, assuming the real Iowa City doesn’t get washed away.
Brilliant project.
“Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me.
But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.” - Kurt Vonnegut, (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) A Man Without a Country
Click to zoom in on this gorgeous visualization of Kowloon’s Walled City, demolished twenty years ago this month. The illustration is from an article from the South China Morning Post, which includes a short history of the place and more stories from people who used to live there:
It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.
Dreamy.
