College students may see their debt rise sharply overnight, as the interest rate for Stafford Loans is set to double to 6.8 percent on July 1^st. Fortunately, students have some friends in high places: The Obama administration, House Republicans, and various senators have each proposed plans that would forestall the rate jump. (Inside Higher Ed has a more detailed account of these policies.)

The proposals put forward by Obama, House Republicans, and Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) would tie student loans to the market rate (either the 10-year or the 91-day Treasury rate), though each with its own variation. The boldest plan, from new Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), would reduce student loan rates to .75 percent (the rate at which banks borrow from the Federal Reserve) for one year.

These proposals would offer students some relief, but none of them address the core problem that rising college tuition rates are closely linked to the increased availability of government loans. Stafford loans have been around for just over forty years, and over the past thirty, college tuition and fees surged 1,120 percent—four times faster than the consumer price index, more than medical or food prices. And this isn’t all due to a rising cost of teaching: Colleges have used their newfound wealth to bloat their administrative ranks and spend lavishly on construction projects.

These new student loan proposals, particularly Warren’s, will only feed the higher education beast. Perhaps lawmakers should give more thought to policies that would increase price competition among universities and drive down costs.

California’s “Hydrogen Highway” is a road to nowhere. About a decade ago, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called for the state to invest more than $50 million in the program, which was to lead to the creation of 100 hydrogen fuel stations capable of serving 2,000 fuel-cell vehicles. Today, the state has a whopping total of nine hydrogen stations serving about 200 fuel cell cars.

If you’re wondering what went wrong, don’t think too hard. Reuters reports:

“The general economic thesis of the renewable energy sector hasn’t changed,” said Karl Miller, chairman of Newco Energy Acquisition Holdings, LLC, which acquires energy-related assets. “It’s still a heavily subsidized industry. It requires a major federal tax credit to make it work.” It still doesn’t appeal as “a capital market investment,” he said.

The usual green assumptions, projections, and policy-errors are on full display here. The companies involved in this program were poorly managed, too reliant on government subsidies, and thrown completely for a loop by the US shale boom and the rise of cheap green technology imports from China.

[Green California image courtesy of Shutterstock]

In March, we reported that the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a program created to provide coverage to sick Americans who have been uninsured for at least six months, was in serious trouble. Only a fraction of the expected 400,000 people had signed up, but the program was burning through the cash allotted to the program too quickly. The administration capped further enrollments, but even that wasn’t enough to save the program. The New York Times has more:

Payments to health care providers will be capped at Medicare rates, which are substantially less than the commercial insurance rates they have been receiving. The new policy generally prohibits doctors and hospitals from increasing charges to consumers to make up the difference.

Michael T. Keough, the executive director of the North Carolina Health Insurance Risk Pool, said the new policy was one of several steps taken recently by federal officials to control spending.

“They are trying to stanch the hemorrhaging,” Mr. Keough said.

The PCIP is a temporary program, ending on January 1, 2014, at which point all the people in it will be shifted onto the new exchanges the law creates or onto some other kind of insurance.

The PCIP may therefore seem like an inconsequential piece of a gargantuan health care law, but the failures of this small piece go to the heart of the challenges the ACA as a whole will face in coming years. In effect, beginning on January 1, 2014, all insurance plans will be like the PCIP. The Obama administration is doing everything it can to convince young, healthy Americans to buy insurance through the exchanges. Only with their participation can American insurance plans avoid the cash-flow crisis currently driving the PCIP into bankruptcy. Whether enough young people will sign up is anyone’s guess.

[Ball and chain image courtesy of Shutterstock]

The President of the Philippines announced today that his country is embarking on an ambitious military upgrade to protect itself from “bullies”—namely, China.

“In thinly veiled comments referring to China, [President Beningo] Aquino yesterday vowed in a speech marking the navy’s 115th anniversary that the armed forces would be given the resources necessary to protect Philippine sovereignty,” reports the South China Morning Post.

The upgrade will be huge for the Philippines—$1.8 billion. “[B]y 2017,” Aquino vowed, “Manila would acquire two new frigates, two helicopters capable of anti-submarine warfare, three fast vessels for coastal patrols and eight amphibious assault vehicles.”

The Philippines is adjacent to the most hotly contested islets and shoals in the South China Sea (click map below), much of which are claimed by China. China’s bullying on territorial and other issues has pushed almost all neighboring countries into more nationalist, more antagonistic, more resistant stances, and many of them have formed closer relationships in order to counterbalance China’s rising power. So the Chinese have only themselves to blame for convincing neighbors to arm themselves to the teeth and to defend contested patches of territory by all means necessary.

The Philippines isn’t the first Asian country to push for an upgraded, stronger military, nor will it be the last.

[Image of Philippine Navy ship courtesy Getty]

Two stories tell us that things in the Middle East may have just taken a dark and dangerous turn.

First, Hezbollah fighters played a vital role in Butcher Assad’s assault on rebel-held Qusayr, a strategically positioned town in Syria. Dozens of Hezbollah men were reportedly killed in some of the heaviest fighting yet in the civil war. The battle brought Hezbollah into direct conflict with al-Qaeda-aligned rebel brigades.

Second, a stunning series of car bombs exploded across Iraq yesterday, killing at least 95 people. Ten bombs exploded in Baghdad alone. Another exploded in Balad, north of Baghdad, killing more than a dozen pilgrims from Iran, which strongly supports the Shiite regime of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki. Another bomb targeted a Sunni militia aligned with the government. Gunmen in Anbar, a nerve center of Sunni extremism, killed eight government policemen; another eight policemen kidnapped last week were found dead in the desert, with bullet wounds in their heads.

“Al-Maliki believes this is the time to be tough and show he is in control of the country…. What we are seeing is the backlash to that,” Patrick Clawson, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the AP. ”How long do we have to continue living like this, with all the lies from the government?” wondered a 23-year-old Baghdad resident. April was Iraq’s bloodiest month since 2008; 240 people have been killed in the past week.

Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian regime is governing a country that is slowly slipping into sectarian war, with Sunni and Shiite militias once again fighting each other and the government, and with each attack bigger and more horrific than the last. In Syria, Alawite militias massacre Sunni civilians in a prelude to ethnic cleansing operations. And Lebanon is reeling as Hezbollah draws it deeper into the Syrian black hole.

Maliki, whatever his faults, is at least partly right about this: ”The most dangerous thing in this process is that if the [Syrian] opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.” The same could be said of a number of different outcomes of the Syrian war. The Middle East, from Basra to Beirut, is turning into one big Sunni versus Shi’a milita war, egged on by international players like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

[Image of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki courtesy Getty Images]

“Part-time jobs have become scarcer and scarcer for high school students,” said Alison Cooper Chisolm, CEO of Massachusetts-based Ivey College Consulting Inc. “The job at McDonald’s is now being taken by an adult because the adult needs the work.”

Instead, more high school students—at least the ones who can afford to work without pay—are looking for new ways to better themselves and their college prospects, said Chisolm, who worked for more than 10 years in secondary schools and university admissions before entering independent college admissions consulting.

On the one hand, it’s distressing to see that high-school students have so few options when it comes to the low-wage hourly jobs on which they could once cut their teeth as adult workers. On the other, we see an opportunity here to fill an educational gap left open by the typical primary school experience in America. Internships have the capacity to let high-school students peer into the inner-workings of an industry before they’re ready to commit to a career path (as well as whatever high-priced college degrees lie along that path). If internships were more like apprenticeships, as we believe they should be, some students might even discover that it’s in their best interests to skip college entirely.

[Copier image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Meet Bayonne Medical Center in New Jersey, the most expensive hospital in the country. In an analysis of Medicare data from 2001, the NYT found that Bayonne charged more per treatment than any other US hospital for almost a quarter of common procedures. The data is eye-popping:

Bayonne Medical typically charged $99,689 for treating each case of chronic lung disease, 5.5 times as much as other hospitals and 17.5 times as much as Medicare paid in reimbursement. The hospital also charged on average of $120,040 to treat transient ischemia, a type of small stroke that has no lasting effect. That was 5.6 times the national average and 23.6 times what Medicare paid.

The most surprising thing about these rates becomes clear when you see them in light of two other facts about Bayonne. First, the hospital doesn’t serve some ritzy, star-studded town where you would expect high prices, but a “faded blue-collar town 11 miles from Midtown Manhattan.” Second, these high prices don’t translate into higher quality care. A 2011 report about the quality of care across New Jersey ranked Bayonne only in the 50th percentile of hospitals.

Bayonne is one more piece of evidence pointing to a health care system that is fundamentally broken. In few other sectors of the economy can a service provider get away with repeatedly charging significantly higher prices for a service that is no better, and in some cases worse, than those offered by competitors. The system is also profoundly regressive, foisting the highest bills on the communities that can least afford them.

The key lesson here is that health care is not, and has not been for a very a long time, a true market. That observation has to be at the heart of any health care reform going forward.

[Glove image courtesy of Shutterstock]

[Our hearts and prayers are with all those affected by the tornado in Oklahoma and their families. In light of this tragedy, here are some comments we made on the eve of Hurricane Sandy on natural disasters and our relationship to the higher powers around us. The disaster is different, but the message is just as pertinent today as it was then.]

While the lights went out across Manhattan tonight, and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was cut off from the mainland as flood waters thundered through its streets, many people around the world watched the spectacle and were reminded just how fragile the busy world we humans build around us really is.

Manhattan is one of those places where nature seems mostly held at bay. Except for the parks, oases of carefully preserved nature deliberately shaped by the hand of man, every inch of the city’s surface has been covered by something manmade. The valleys have been exalted, the mountains laid low and the rough places plain.

Those who live and do their business there pay very little attention to the natural world most of the time. It can be hard to get a taxi in the rain, and the occasional winter snowstorm forces a brief halt to the city’s routine, but the average New Yorker’s attention is on the social world, not the world of nature. What’s happening to your career, your bank account, your friendships and loved ones, the political scene and the financial markets: those are the concerns that occupy the minds of busy urbanites on their daily rounds.

Into this busy, self involved world Hurricane Sandy has burst. Sharks have been photographed (or at least photo shopped) swimming in the streets of New Jersey towns; waves sweep across the Lower East Side; transformers explode on both sides of the Hudson as salt water surges into the tunnels and subways. For a little while at least, New Yorkers are reminded that we live in a world shaped by forces that are bigger than we are; tonight it is easy to identify with the sentiments in John Milton’s paraphrase of Psalm 114:

Shake earth, and at the presence be aghast
Of him that ever was, and aye shall last,
That glassy floods from rugged rocks can crush,
And make soft rills from the fiery flint-stones gush.

Soon, though, the winds will die down and the waters recede. The bridges will open, the roads will be repaired, the water will be pumped from the subways and service restored. New Yorkers will go back to their normal pursuits and Hurricane Sandy will fade into lore.

But events like this don’t come out of nowhere. Sandy isn’t an irruption of abnormality into a sane and sensible world; it is a reminder of what the world really is like. Human beings want to build lives that exclude what we can’t control — but we can’t.

Hurricane Sandy is many things; one of those things is a symbol. The day is coming for all of us when a storm enters our happy, busy lives and throws them into utter disarray. The job on which everything depends can disappear. That relationship that holds everything together can fall apart. The doctor can call and say the test results are not good. All of these things can happen to anybody; something like this will happen to us all.

Somewhere in the future, each of us has an inescapable appointment with irresistible force. For each one of us, the waters will someday rise, the winds spin out of control, the roof will come off the house and the power will go out for good.

We can protect ourselves from a storm like Sandy by taking proper precautions; at the Mead manor we have candles, firewood and food stocked against the possibility that our power will go out. But one day, dear reader, a storm is coming which neither you nor we can survive. The strongest walls, the sturdiest retirement plans stuffed with stocks and CDs, the best doctors cannot protect us from that final encounter with the force that made and will someday unmake us.

Coming to terms with that reality is the most important thing that any of us can do. A storm like this one is an opportunity to do exactly that. It reminds us that what we like to call ‘normal life’ is fragile and must someday break apart. If we are wise, we will take advantage of this smaller, passing storm to think seriously about the greater storm that is coming for us all.

A grand and powerful woman I once knew died after two encounters with cancer and a devastating stroke took her from the realm of normal life into the storm tossed waters that surround us all on every side. She’d never been a religious woman and, growing up in a segregated South where so many churches and churchgoers defended a brutal system of institutionalized injustice and cruelty, she was always a rebel against the conventional piety and ritualized religious life she saw around her.

But late in her life when the winds around her howled and the dark waters were rising, she was driven to face the truth behind the illusions and the pretense, and told the person she loved best in all the world that “I’ve made my peace with God.”

That is something we all need to do. It involves a recognition of our helplessness and insufficiency before the mysteries and limits of life. Like the First Step in the Twelve Step programs, it begins with an acknowledgment of failure and defeat. We each try to build a self-sufficient world, a sturdy little life that is proof against storms and disasters — but none of us can really get that done.

Strangely, that admission of weakness opens the door to a new kind of strength. To acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth, and it turns out that to be grounded in reality is to become more able and more alive. Denial is hard work; those who try to stifle their awareness of the limits of human life and ambition in the busy rounds of daily life never reach their full potential.

To open your eyes to the fragility of life and to our dependence on that which is infinitely greater than ourselves is to enter more deeply into life. To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren’t all there is to existence, but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm, and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy. As another one of the psalms puts it, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Accepting your limits and your dependence on things you can’t control is the first step on the road toward finding that joy.

Via Meadia hopes that all our readers survived Hurricane Sandy with their lives intact and their property whole. And more than that, we hope that our readers will take the opportunity that a storm like this offers, step back from their daily lives, and reach out to the Power who plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Getting the right connection with the highest power of all not only gives you a place of refuge when the big storm finally comes; it transforms daily life and infuses ordinary occupations with greater meaning and wonder than you ever understood.

The world needs people who have that kind of strength and confidence. Storms much greater than Sandy are moving through our lives these days: the storms shaking the Middle East, recasting the economy, transforming the political horizons of Asia. It will take strong and grounded people to ride these mighty storms; paradoxically, it is only by coming to terms with our limits and weakness that we can find the strength and the serenity to face what lies ahead.

The 26 year old, whom Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer characterized as “one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with,” is cut from the same cloth as the late Steve Jobs, according to Marco Arment, Karp’s early collaborator and Tumblr co-founder:

David always obsessed over his newest ideas, features, and designs until they were completely polished and ready to go. He’s a workaholic—he truly lives and breathes Tumblr. I’ve never even seen him show any desire to work on a side project. David is all Tumblr, all the time.

He expects people around him to be similarly into work and Tumblr, and often drove me hard with seemingly impossible demands. But David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible.

He sounds like a remarkable young man.

He’s also a high school dropout who never got a GED or went to college—even though he was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science. As we’re fond of pointing out here on VM, more brains does not automatically mean you should spend more years in school. In some cases, it means you should spend less.

Prime Minister Thein Sein of Myanmar yesterday became the first leader from his country to make an official visit to the United States in nearly fifty years. In talks in the Oval Office, Sein sought to assure the President Obama that his country would continue to move forward on political reforms; the President, for his part, brought up the violence against Muslims, especially in Burma’s western Rakhine state. The seething cauldron of ethnic violence in that state and in other parts of the country has become a major complicating factor for US policy.

A hallmark of Barack Obama’s presidency was to be a reconciliation of the US and the Islamic world. It’s now clear that those hopes have been pretty comprehensively wrecked. The first blow was the administration’s failure to help the Palestinians in the first term. The  second was tepid support for the Arab spring, which many saw as too little, too late. The third was the administration’s idle hand-wringing as tens of thousands were killed in the Syrian war. And finally, the administration has lavished aid on a government in Burma that has done little to stop (and whose officials on the ground may actually have connived at) massacres of Muslims.

Americans who do not spend time in Islamic countries overseas may not realize just how powerfully the plight of the Rohingyas has gripped public opinion in countries like Turkey, Pakistan and many more. After earlier violence against Muslims in northeastern India, there is great interest in and concern about what is going on in that part of the world.

Working to improve opinions about the US across the Muslim world was and is a good idea. Given the threat of terrorism, it is a no-brainer for people who care about US foreign policy and national security. But getting this done isn’t as easy as either the Bush or the Obama administrations seem to have thought.

The policy needs to be carefully considered and managed at the very top—and not just as a warm and fuzzy Kumbaya songfest in which we all hold hands. Clarity of vision, strength of purpose, coordination of policy, and a reasonable degree of consistency are what’s needed. We aren’t there yet.