Recent Chromebooks are extremely nice devices. For example, $299 at BestBuy gets you an Asus CM3401. It has AMD Ryzen CPU (with similar performance as 8th gen mobile i7), 1080p screen, and an M.2 SSD you can upgrade yourself. Downside is the weight -- 1.8kg (almost 4lbs) -- and that 16 GB RAM model costs extra. But perfectly good for using Crostini (ChromeOS's Linux VM -- you can run your favorite Debian programs, including those that use GUI, without reflashing your Chromebook a la Crouton).
The used/refurbished market for Chromebooks is great for buyers, too. There's not much demand for used Chromebooks so you can get something quite nice for personal/kid use around $100-200.
That's a pretty great policy - and such a stark contrast to "maybe 3 years of security updates if we feel like it" on Android (Pixels aren't the norm!).
I set up the Linux version of Firefox on our company's Chromebooks so we could use client certificates (not available in the Android version available from Play Store).
It's super easy so I imagine any nerd with a Chromebook that wants more functionality that they can get from mobile apps would do it!
It's so easy that it's great for education. Want to teach somebody Linux? If they have a Chromebook, there's very little you have to go through to get a near-native Linux shell (you can even open ports!).
It has auto-updates until June 2031 (almost 8 years from now), and you can reflash it to Linux after. Sounds like a pretty decent vendor promise for a $300 device to me. Windows/macOS don't promise me anything.
I think it'd more effectively go into the appropriate hands by at least charging some nominal amount. Advertise that anyone may visit the public library and purchase a subsidized internet-capable device for $20. Or $5. Free just has no chance of being an efficient distribution.
When we're talking about fixing outlier issues in society, efficiency is sometimes counterproductive to the goal of addressing problems that exist at the fringes of society. Universality is sometimes better at addressing the problems at the extremes.
For example, some restaurants may be really efficient at providing a meal for $5, but the people who need a soup kitchen the most don't have $5.
Just the other day I saw a crackhead swiping their EBT card and Medicaid card with the crack dealer. They were then able to intercept the section 8 check to the landlord and spend it on crack instead (it is definitely illegal to kick out a tenant who smokes crack, don't look this up, just trust me). The landlord was deprived of that money :(
As to the topic... giving poor people internet access is just not a good idea... I've been to the libraries. After walking past the book displays featuring the evils of white poeple, abortion celebration, and pronouns, I was dismayed to see every public computer occupied with poor people researching how to make crack. A few of them even had USB cooktops plugged into the PC to cook crack right there at the PCs. All that taxpayer funding to power USB crack cooktops instead of subsidizing companies who dump GenX and coal ash into our water sources.
> giving poor people internet access is just not a good idea
Show me the lie. ;) I think the Internet was a better place before Eternal September, when it was the exclusive precinct of relatively affluent white male nerds.
Accessibility has only made it proportionally worse ever since.
Exactly this. The amount of wasteful greedy/hoarding behavior that is induced by free and is curbed by charging even $20 is quite high. Charging 50% of the going resale rate is probably enough to prevent hoarding and substantially curb resale.
That might be slightly too much for the aims of the program, in which case adjust as needed, realizing that you're trading off one outcome for another.
For example in New Zealand (public healthcare) there used to be a $5 copay for prescribed medication (by government healthcare doctors). There is now no copay ($0) because 3% of people would not get the medicine because of cost. This was particularly true for low-income families, Māori, Pacific peoples, and disabled New Zealanders. That said, our conservative party wants to bring the fees back: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/budget-2023-5-prescription-fee...
If people don't pay a small amount to get something important like medicine, they perhaps wouldn't pay even a a token $20 or 50% for something luxury/"unnecessary" like easier access to the internet.
This doesn't preclude giving the people who might not "buy" one $50 to spend on whatever the hell they want and then having one of the things on offer be a $200 Chromebook with a $50 price tag on it.
The problem of "someone has no money" should be addressed by giving them money not a Chromebook. If a $200 Chromebook isn't worth $50 to them, I'd rather they keep the $50 and buy something that is worth $50 to them.
Exactly. This concept is borne of "let them eat cake" wealth privilege gatekeeping/utopian magical thinking. There are homeless people and the elderly who are continually deciding whether to buy medicine or food.
It's possible to distribute benefits fairly based on limiting a physical device to 1 per person.
I admit that I am hard pressed to have sympathy for people who won't even get themselves 5 dollars to scrap together for something as essential as medicine and that may cloud my judgement, but in your example there is still a filter that prevents hoarding, as somebody has to first go to a doctor to get the prescription and the medicine will only be given to people who have some need for it.
In this case essentially everybody could benefit from getting a government paid laptop, if only to resell it, which I think means that there is a big difference between the two cases.
I guess you think they chose to be both sick and poor. Perhaps you also believe children choose to be sick and kids get to select their own parents?
Fortunately I live in New Zealand where we collectively want to care for unfortunate people - even though sometimes the misfortune might be their own fault.
Yes, it costs me a car in taxes every year to pay for a first world government health system. But at least my country enabled me to be rich enough to do that. And I'm lucky to be healthy - for which I can thank my fellow citizens and past governments to a good extent.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck to be healthy and wealthy.
Choose your poison. Macbooks are tightly knit with Apple and phone home, but are absurdly expensive and people pay for the privilege of getting spied on. Same with Chromebooks: we're just another datapoint for Google, and much more data is collected. Why not hand out Thinkpads flashed with Trisquel Linux[0]? (A Libre Linux that respects privacy?). And don't get me started on Windows 10/11 lol.
What normal person wants a Thinkpad with Trisquel Linux? If you market the Chromebook as a general purpose coreboot compatible laptop (since 2013) and give them no OS I'm sure the same person that wants a Thinkpad would be even happier.
At that price point, I'm willing to bet Secure Boot is locked. That means the user can only run Windows or a small subset of Linux distros with lagging kernel versions.
Yes, being a government body they could get a larger discount on bulk orders, and having a computer that can run all software instead of just the web browser (that Chrome OS only allows) will actually help communities.
Seems like a feel-good idea but one which would be better implemented by just giving people the money instead and letting them do what they will with it
Ironically, the most recent survey in the special unhoused enforcement zone near me found that the number of people living on the streets was almost identical to the number of empty beds at the shelter.
I really can't imagine how having a tiny home with 4 walls and a door with a 24/7 security guard would be more dangerous than a tent on the sidewalk. I do know that 1-2 people per month get kicked out of the shelter for fighting, but not sure how that compares to life on the streets.
I think a bigger factor is that the tiny homes limit how much stuff you can bring (aka 1 bike per person, cant build your own structures on the land, no drugs, etc), which seems to be the most common reason people gave for not wanting to go.
>a tiny home with 4 walls and a door with a 24/7 security guard
You are not describing any homeless shelter that I've ever seen. Usually they are very crowded communal sleeping facilities with barely any security and zero privacy. Theft and assault are a common occurrence.
Right but the question is if the government knows what those 133k people need better than they do. There's also the administrative cost of such a system and logistics (if the government decides to ship or deliver the devices themselves). You could avoid having to pay government salaries for the people involved in finding qualified people, getting their info, auditing for fraud, etc.
In all seriousness, it’s amusing to see how many people in this thread want to apply capitalist principles to a welfare program. The two are opposite - the goal here is to lose as much capital as possible.
I'm not arguing for "capitalist principles" (if there were such a thing).
The goal with welfare is to do as much good as possible. I contend that by managing administrative bloat, you lose money which could otherwise be given directly to people and do more good. The goal should be to spend money as efficiently as possible, not to spend less money
The administration people are a key part of the welfare program. The bloat is the jobs is the welfare. The welfare is the jobs is the bloat.
Same goes for healthcare, the TSA (gvmt in general), much of realty… the list goes on. Basically anywhere you look around and wonder what the hell so many workers are standing around for.
Employment is the number one mechanism of promoting welfare. (and the only one with lasting impact)
I believe you could do more good for the same price if you just gave people cash instead of implementing an administrative system to manage distributing laptops. Just give people money and they can buy what they need
That's the debate. What if you give someone a Chromebook instead of $300 and they cannot afford to repair their car. On the other hand giving someone a Chromebook can have a bigger impact than many other ways they could spend $300.
I think the idea is that internet connection is a basic necessity in modern society. A chromebook can help you look for a job, pay bills, etc. For kids it's an educational lifeline.
I actually did all my CS work via a Chromebook in 2013 with a VPS I ssh'd into. Coded everything in vim with makefiles. Was a crucible, but these days I use IDEs
As a tax paying Marylander I believe this is a reasonable economic choice for the state.
Especially Baltimore City which is receiving ~20k of these. The city does ongoing incremental social damage control, this is a part of it. The bottom 15% of people detract from the economy so thinking about it as service cost reduction rather than netting from it. The allocation rate for Baltimore City is something like 3.5% (!) while the rest of the state is like 2% and under.
It is about getting another couple percent of the people on the internet. Some approximate thread of literacy and ability to type and click is huge. The laptop modality is important to have over touch keys only.
There are many who don't have the wherewithal to get themselves online but it's a life changer for them to just have the basics.
As for vendor, Google is the lesser evil than alternatives by a wide margin. Top concerns are AdWords tricking poor into buying junk which is a part of the greater plan anyways; cyclical chronic marginalization with a slight upward trajectory. Gmail account creation is sorta evil. But where else is their email going to live? Hard to imagine a solution other than adverts and gov. surveillance being the cost center recoup. Google is way good at warehouse scale computing for web services (internally, GCP sucks).
Even crazier is that Maryland is already a top state for personal compute [1].
Spent most of my life living in Maryland. This isn't going to go well. The results will be very mediocre. After the fact they'll say: well at least they tried something.
It's just like burning $27 million.
They need to focus on the education and severe crime problems in and around DC + Baltimore. Nothing is getting much better in Maryland for the poor until that improves. This is a temporary 1/4 of 1% improvement maneuver (temporary as in the benefit won't last a year). Make improvements to two dozen schools instead; or pay hundreds of teachers $10k more per year to do these very hard (and sometimes very dangerous) jobs.
The best we can hope that can happen from this is that The Wire reboots with product placements for Chromebooks. Otherwise expect to find a bunch of very cheap Chromebooks on Craigslist
It’s bad that public funds are being used to coerce people into using adtech surveillance services.
You can’t use these meaningfully without agreeing to the Google TOS. Tax money should not be used that way (but there are precedents in things like sports stadiums et cetera). It seems like simple public-private wealth transfer (ie corruption) to me.
Instead of creating jobs, or trying to help businesses, let's buy 133,000 laptops because lack of Chromebooks are what are holding people back. 28 million can't be spent better than buying Chromebooks.
Please do not create jobs. Seriously, this is a good way to get people related to politicians in various places that just pay a salary. Now the whole neighborhood is worse off. This will only lead to corruption and nepotism.
Helping businesses with something like an incubator is a good idea, and these businesses can create jobs instead of the government creating jobs.
Hopefully, these Chromebooks will make it easier for people to access knowledge/entertainment, leading to businesses/self-employment/more jobs naturally and sustainably.
> Helping businesses with something like an incubator
First: helping businesses does not avoid corruption and nepotism.
Secondly: I experienced a government subsidised business incubator in New Zealand, and I can honestly say it was a 100% waste of tax dollars. (We were the only positive dollar business outcome and the incubator had very little value for us!)
First: helping businesses does not avoid corruption and nepotism. - sure. However there is a higher probability of that if gov create jobs. (I have seen Sri Lankan gov create jobs just to pay salaries for friends/etc). Incubator is going to be better than that as even if gov pick someone they like, still the market decide the outcome and someone else can take place)
I think you are imagining a tautologically good incubator.
I have been disappointed watching government initiatives in New Zealand over the years. They ostensibly are there to help businesses. However they usually are wasteful and ineffective. Government departments have no insight about what factors help small businesses. Even business oriented investors (e.g. VC) often fail to understand how to drive growth, so how can we expect policy wonks to do better than that? Governments fail badly from what I have personally experienced in an incubator (government/private mix), and I can't
think of a government initiative that has helped. I have certainly experienced many negative effects of government interference. So many poor regulations that damage small businesses. Few good changes that help.
I presume there are successful government initiatives but I haven't seen any in 30 years.
More transparency isn't it.. (put all documents / budgets /etc in an easy to access / easy to understand and read public website, and please hire a UI/UX person to actually do the frontend)
In all, over the last decade, the [teachers] union spent $6,448,327 on travel expenses. That comes out to an average of $53,736 a month, every month, for 10 straight years. How does that fulfill the union’s tax-exempt mission to “elevate the quality of public education for all students”? That amount does not include "Conferences, conventions, and meetings." https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/marylands-te...
Baltimore City Schools received 29 federal Covid grants totaling $799M to fight learning loss. Yet, in 2023, just 9.1% of all 3rd-8th graders tested proficient in math. MEANING, taxpayers gave an additional $799M and 91% of Baltimore students are NOT math proficient.
New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.
A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request.
“I was frustrated as a teacher. We’re public servants. And when we see things like grade changing, that’s self-serving. That’s not helping the kids.”
After watching Fox45’s recent investigations into allegations of grade changing at Calverton, the City Schools employee contacted Project Baltimore to say a couple things. First, according to the teacher, grade changing at Calverton is “very common.”
Second, the educator told Fox45, changing grades is the easiest and fastest way to pass more students, which makes the school and its administrators look better. But, it does a huge disservice to not just the kids, but our entire community.
“Teaching a whole generation of kids that they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, or that hard work isn’t valued or valuable when they are in school, is so discouraging and damaging.”
Adding insult to injury, the same teacher said that he even passed kids who had been on his roster all year but didn’t bother to show up for a single day of class. But this teacher says grade changing at Calverton goes much further than just taking a failing grade and making it a 60. Some students who pass, according to this educator, don’t even have grades because they’ve never showed up to class.
“There were students on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”
“I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”
The real question is whether the state standards should be expected to apply to inner city schools. The knee jerk reaction is to say yes of course how could they not, but that ignores all sorts of socioeconomic context that goes into education.
People in greater poverty and ignorance have gotten out of worst situations. Even a nuanced response does not excuse this mismanagement of funds or the poor performance. Inner city should not equate "expectation to fail at greater cost than success".
In almost all cases it wasn’t government cash that got them out. Thus I agree “throw money at the poor people” isn’t the answer. The question is whether “decrease the standards proportional to a reasonable statistical expectation based on underling factors of the particular population at hand” is.
It would be a bigger failure of the education system for the youth blessed with stable families and no extracurricular commitments to achieve only at the level of those who need to support their families on the side/etc.
You can see this happening live in Oregon as they’ve removed all graduation/testing requirements.
The major issue I see disadvantage groups face is that in government agencies and school system people are expected to navigate and fill forms, sign documents, submit documents. This can be done on phone but is very difficult. The government should make sure that in the so called chromebooks a user can download a pdf document, edit it and sign it and submit it. If agencies and schools stick to Google Docs and Google Drive, then is a complete solution that works. Everything else is a big if.
If the goal is to "bring high-speed internet to all corners of Maryland", then Chromebooks won't solve the problem. Much of Maryland has either zero broadband providers or one extremely expensive one.
We do have a Maryland Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, but $15/month isn't going to make much of an inroads on a $100+/month bill.
Rural places often have no broadband at all. We have an office trying to solve that over the next three years, but even that's not going to help if the price is over $100 per month.
The state of Maryland funneling the data of 133k low income citizens to a giant spy corp. This is dystopian as fuck. Couldn't they at least have put a lightweight linux distro on it?
ChromeOS is not worse than Windows 11, which would be the alternative here. Ironically enough ChromeOS has no Ads in the OS itself compared to Windows.
depends on who you ask, MS is practically mandating online account, maybe it's better if it doesn't sign in to it by default when browsing in Edge (have no idea how it does things)
No irony here, Chrome has plenty of ads in the browser and that's why they're rolling out Manifest V3
"The housing department partnered with HP Inc. and Daly Computers, a Mid-Atlantic IT services firm, to supply the Chromebooks. It also partnered with the University of Maryland’s TechExtension, which provides free, one-on-one tech support to any Marylander seeking assistance with a device."
This is a good as it gets - a part of governance structure giving something back.
The almost laptops that are like IKEA furniture but worse: by a company that monetizes users' privacy, are unrepairable e-waste, and expire after X years.
Instead, domestically-manufactured tablets or laptops based on open source would be more sustainable and waste less taxpayer money rather than just handing $50m USD to megacorp.
I guess that’s one way to deal with ewaste. But a responsible government would dispose of them properly without putting it on citizens.
If they actually wanted to help people they’d give them real computers.
tl;dr: Industrial waste being dumped on communities
Handing out 133,000 devices is not enough without including a complete lifecycle management mechanism which will recover and recycling all 133,000 devices at the end of their useful life. Otherwise this is just industrial waste being dumped on unsuspecting communities. The Chromebooks will be in landfills in 3 years.
In my experience, homeless people use phones and laptops until the wheels fall off.
Perhaps more of the essential consumables and durable goods society uses should have a responsible public or nonprofit coalitions supply chain: generic medications, microhousing, cereal and pulse crops, basic major electronic components, and software. Leaving everything to the magic invisible hand leads to the Charles Dickens' utopia of healthcare personal bankruptcy, widespread homelessness, and unlivable wage jobs we have now.
