An assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University criticizes the argument that technology "is quickly displacing a large number of workers, and the pace will only increase as automation and other forms of artificial intelligence become more advanced," specifically calling out Universal Basic Income proponents Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and YCombinator Chairman Sam Altman: The problem is, there's no indication that automation is going to make human workers redundant anytime soon. Technologists probably tend to believe in automation-induced job loss because they're familiar with the inventions that are constantly forcing people to change what they do for a living. But even as these new technologies have been rolled out, the fraction of Americans with jobs has remained about the same over time. Meanwhile, evidence that automation causes job losses throughout the economy is slim... [Some studies] fail to say how many new jobs will be created in the process, so they don't give any picture of technology's overall impact on the labor market.

Thus, when UBI proponents make the dubious claim that basic income is necessary to save people from the rise of the robots, they undermine their case. They also send the message that they think a huge percent of American workers are simply too useless to be gainfully employed in the future -- hardly an appealing message.

The second dubious reason to support UBI is the idea that it can replace traditional forms of welfare spending, like food stamps and housing vouchers. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman supported a negative income tax for this reason, and modern-day libertarians often espouse this view as well. But there are reasons UBI will never be a one-size-fits-all solution. First, it's expensive. Giving all Americans $12,000 a year costs a lot more than giving money to poor people only.
He ultimately calls UBI programs "an interesting idea worthy of more attention and more experiments," but argues that the current "flawed" justifications for UBI "serve to distract the public from the simplest, most reasonable case for UBI... [T[hey should simply emphasize the idea's simplicity and fairness."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan embraced the digital money movement on Wednesday, saying his firm has "more to gain than anybody" from the booming trend of non-cash transactions. "We want a cashless society," Moynihan, who heads up the second largest U.S. bank, told attendees at Fortune's Brainstorm Finance conference. He pointed out that more than half of all money transactions are already processed electronically, with the rise of cryptocurrencies, and payment systems like PayPal, Zelle, and digital wallets. The banking sector has "already digitized," Moynihan said on Wednesday. "The business has moved digitally and it will continue to move that way. It's just figuring out how to add the value."

Some users of Yahoo Japan are rising up against Japan's biggest web portal after the rollout of a new rating system that's being compared with a social-scoring initiative in China. From a report: The 48 million people with a Yahoo! Japan ID will have to opt-out within a privacy settings webpage if they don't want to be rated. The score is based on a variety of factors and is calculated based on inputs such as payment history, shopping reviews, whether a user canceled bookings and the amount of identifiable personal information. Unless users opt out, their ratings may be accessible to freelance jobs site Crowdworks, Yahoo's bike-sharing service and other businesses. Makoto Niida, a longtime Yahoo user, opted out of the rating system when he learned about it. "It's a big deal that the service was enabled by default," Niida said. "The way they created services that benefit businesses without clear explanations to their users reminds me of China's surveillance society." Yahoo's new credit-score program follows efforts by Mizuho Financial Group, NTT Docomo and other companies to use algorithms to assign ratings to consumers. Japan doesn't have a system similar to FICO in the U.S., so businesses in the world's third-largest economy have come up with their own solutions to determine financial trustworthiness.

There's now a new $175 million remake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I loved it, Msmash walked out of it, and BeauHD didn't bother to go see it. The movie performed poorly at the box office, but I'm not the only person who still likes Godzilla. There's also a new anime version on Netflix. And critic Matt Zoller Seitz (once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism) is calling the new film "a frequently astounding movie... its imperfections are compensated by magnificence."

For all its crash-and-bash action, this is a real science fiction movie that goes to the trouble of not merely creating a world, but thinking about the implications of its images and predicaments. It cares what the people in it must feel and think about their situation, and how it might weigh on them every day even when they aren't talking about it amongst themselves. It's also suffused with a spiritual or theological awareness, and takes it all as seriously as recent DC films took their comparisons of caped wonders to figures from the Old Testament and ancient mythology...

[A]t the level of image, sound and music, "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" is a frequently brilliant film that earnestly grapples with the material it presents... It deploys state-of-the-art moviemaking tools to try to return audiences to a stage of childlike terror and delight. Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This movie is magic.
No expense was spared. For fans of the franchise there was even a quick Easter egg about what happened to the Mothra twins when they grew up. And of course the film-makers included Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla" song in the closing credits -- an over-the-top remake featuring a chanting Japanese taiko drum group, members of the band Dethklok from Metalocalypse, and heavy-metal drumming legend Gene Hoglan. The film's composer called it "perhaps the most audacious piece of music I have ever produced, jammed to the breaking point...It is complete musical madness."

But what it all for nothing? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Does anyone still like Godzilla?

A little-known cryptocurrency spiked more than 60% after Google gave the project a surprise shout-out in an equally-unexpected blog post on how to use Ethereum and Google Cloud to build hybrid blockchain applications. From a report: That cryptocurrency, Chainlink (LINK), enjoyed a parabolic swing that launched its price as high as $2.00 on Binance. Just hours earlier, LINK had traded below $1.10. The Chainlink cryptocurrency spiked after Google showed how developers could use LINK to allow their Ethereum smart contracts to communicate with Google Cloud. As of the time of writing, the Chainlink cryptocurrency was priced at $1.86 on Binance, which translates into a 24-hour gain of 62%. That gives LINK a $619 million market cap, rocketing it to the 23rd spot in the market cap rankings and vaulting it past better-known crypto assets including Zcash and Dogecoin.

"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?"

This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin."

Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason.
Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality."

They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."

Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.

Bloomberg remembers the launch of Bing ten years ago -- "It was all a little sad". There was even a jingle-writing contest in which song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann won a $500 gift card for his song "Bing Goes the Internet". (After TechCrunch called it "awful" and compared it to the sound of dying cows, the songwriter released a second song which consisted of nothing but the text of TechCrunch's article.)

Now Bloomberg asks, "How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter?" What seemed like a typical Microsoft reaction to fear of Google has become -- with the help of blood, sweat, tears and the Nadellaissance -- a nice business. Microsoft now generates about $7.5 billion in annual revenue from web search advertising. That is a pipsqueak compared with Google's $120 billion in ad sales over the last 12 months. But it's more revenue brought in by either Microsoft's LinkedIn professional network or the company's line of Surface computers and other hardware...

Microsoft in recent years outsourced chunks of its advertising business and stuck Bing in spots that Microsoft controls or that Google couldn't grab. Importantly, Microsoft made Bing front and center for people using search boxes on Windows computers and Office software, practically guaranteeing that a healthy share of PC owners would wittingly or unwittingly use the "decision engine." Research firm comScore estimates Microsoft accounts for a little under one-quarter of U.S. web searches conducted on desktop computers. Microsoft's market share is far smaller outside the U.S. and practically nonexistent on smartphones... [T]his year it struck a deal to handle searches and ads tied to searches on Yahoo, AOL and other Verizon Communications Inc. internet properties. Those aren't glamorous corners of the internet, but they have a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of people searching for running shoes and local dentists. All that helps use of Bing and lifts the ad revenue that flows through Microsoft's accounts.

Microsoft has also pared costs to the point where Bing stopped bleeding red ink... Bing at least stands on its own two feet, and company executives have said that Microsoft has learned from the search business how to run big data-collecting and crunching technologies.
The article argues that Bing's success has been good for Google, since it keeps them from looking like a monopoly.

"A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence company has designed automated 'agents' that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter Quake III Arena, and became so good they consistently beat human beings," reports AFP: The work of the researchers from DeepMind, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, was described in a paper published in Science on Thursday and marks the first time the feat has ever been accomplished... "Even after 12 hours of practice, the human game testers were only able to win 25% of games against the agent team," the team wrote. The agents' win-loss ratio remained superior even when their reaction times were artificially slowed down to human levels and when their aiming ability was similarly reduced....

The team did not comment, however, on the AI's potential for future use in military settings. DeepMind has publicly stated in the past that it is committed to never working on any military or surveillance projects, and the word "shoot" does not appear even once in the paper (shooting is instead described as tagging opponents by pointing a laser gadget at them). Moving forward, Jaderberg said his team would like to explore having the agents play in the full version of Quake III Arena and find ways his AI could work on problems outside of computer games. "We use games, like Capture the Flag, as challenging environments to explore general concepts such as planning, strategy and memory, which we believe are essential to the development of algorithms that can be used to help solve real-world problems," he said.
DeepMind's agents "individually played around 450,000 games of capture the flag, the equivalent of roughly four years of experience," reports VentureBeat. But that was enough to make them consistently better than human players, according to Ars Technica. "The only time humans beat a pair of bots was when they were part of a human-bot team, and even then, they typically won only five percent of their matches..."

"Humans' visual abilities made them better snipers. But at close range, [DeepMind's team FTW] excelled in combat, in part because its reaction time was half that of a human's, and in part because its accuracy was 80 percent compared to the humans' 50 percent."

There's something scary in Fortune's new article about AT&T: "Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you're watching the same live program at the same time," says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. "We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor's in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You're in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you're watching on your phone, and you're not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location."

Such targeting has caused privacy headaches for Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, of course. That's why AT&T requires that customers give permission for use of their data; like those other companies, it anonymizes that data and groups it into audiences -- for example, consumers likely to be shopping for a pickup truck -- rather than targeting specific individuals. Regardless of how you see a directed car ad, say, AT&T can then use geolocation data from your phone to see if you went to a dealership and possibly use data from the automaker to see if you signed up for a test-drive -- and then tell the automaker, "Here's the specific ROI on that advertising," says Lesser. AT&T claims marketers are paying four times the usual rate for that kind of advertising.
"This is a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance," argues the Verge (in an article shared by schwit1): In order to make this work, AT&T would have to:

- Own the video services you're watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams

- Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you

- Know when you're watching something so it can actually target the ads

- Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data to see if you visit a dealership after you see the ads

- Collect even more data about you from the dealership to determine if you took a test-drive

- Do all of this tracking and data collection repeatedly and simultaneously for every ad you see

- Aggregate all of that data in some way for salespeople to show clients and justify a 4x premium over other kinds of advertising, including the already scary-targeted ads from Google and Facebook.

If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle...

AT&T can claim up and down that it's asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they're signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way.

The "blue light" in LED lighting can damage the eye's retina and disturb natural sleep rhythms, France's government-run health watchdog said this week. From a report: New findings confirm earlier concerns that "exposure to an intense and powerful [LED] light is 'photo-toxic' and can lead to irreversible loss of retinal cells and diminished sharpness of vision," the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) warned in a statement. The agency recommended in a 400-page report that the maximum limit for acute exposure be revised, even if such levels are rarely met in home or work environments.

The report distinguished between acute exposure of high-intensity LED light, and "chronic exposure" to lower intensity sources. While less dangerous, even chronic exposure can "accelerate the ageing of retinal tissue, contributing to a decline in visual acuity and certain degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration," the agency concluded. Long-lasting, energy efficient and inexpensive, light-emitting diode (LED) technology has gobbled up half of the general lighting market in a decade, and will top 60 percent by the end of next year, according to industry projections.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Verge: Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr, the blogging platform it acquired along with other Yahoo assets in 2017... The platform hosts 465.4 million blogs and 172 billion posts, according to its about page... On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is "extremely interested" in buying Tumblr and "very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content..."

Price is referring to a major change implemented late last year, when Tumblr took the controversial step of banning porn on its platform. The company has been using AI to detect and automatically block images and videos that contain certain adult content. Existing posts containing porn were made private and are no longer publicly accessible.
Both Fortune and TechCrunch warned the acquisition might actually have bad consequences for adult content producers, since PornHub's owner MindGeek has been accused of ignoring piracy on its streaming sites, "a significant factor in the deflation of salaries for performers in the industry."

In a thread on Twitter, Engadget's senior news editor added "I guess the good news is that things PornHub announces as a publicity stunt don't usually happen, so..."

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a new interview rejected the notion that Capitol Hill has a role to play in regulating big tech companies, breaking with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent willingness to work with lawmakers. From a report: "The problem is if you write a rule, inevitably, you fix the solution on a specific solution, but the technology moves so quickly," Schmidt says. "It's generally better to let the tech companies do these things," he adds. Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011, acknowledged that over his tenure the company did not understand the scale or severity of problems originating from its products. But since then, the company has addressed the issues, he said. "Our response has, in my view, been very strong," he said. "Today, we have all sorts of software that enforces policies of one kind or another. And people complain about the rules, but the fact of the matter is the rules are published."

[...] Schmidt suggested that even if Congress does pass new regulations on tech companies, issues will continue to originate on tech platforms because the sites display unpredictable human conduct. Content moderators and other employees need to ensure that users abide by the rules of a given platform, he said. "All of these platforms that are human centric will have to have a component of them, which is...watching what the users are doing and making sure they're consistent with their terms of service and the law," he says. "These issues are ongoing, because these are human-based systems," he says. "And so humans will continue to use them. They will continue to do unexpected things. There will continue to be surprises." Further reading: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China.

An anonymous reader quotes the AP: Volkswagen is planning to release a fully-electric SUV in China which could compete with Tesla's Model X. The German automaker said Sunday the ID. ROOMZZ will be unveiled at the upcoming Shanghai Auto Show and will be available in 2021. Volkswagen says the zero-emission vehicle can go approximately 450 kilometers (280 miles) before the battery has to be recharged.
Volkswagen also claims it will have "level 4 autonomous driving," Reuters reports, adding that this electric SUV "is the latest move in Volkswagen's aggressive growth strategy in China, where electric cars are given preferential treatment by authorities..." In fact, the company's chief executive says nearly half of VW's engineers are working on products for the China market, though the electric SUV will eventually be shipped to other markets. "We plan to produce more than 22 million electric cars in the next 10 years."

VW's head of e-mobility also tells Reuters that Volkswagen will convert eight of their factories to mass produce electric Volkswagens, and eight more factories to to mass-produce electric cars under a different brand.

Three Romanians ran a complicated online fraud operation -- along with a massive malware botnet -- for nine years, reports ZDNet, netting tens of millions of US dollars, but their crime spree is now over. But now they're all facing long prison sentences.

"The three were arrested in late 2016 after the FBI and Symantec had silently stalked their malware servers for years, patiently waiting for the highly skilled group to make mistakes that would leave enough of a breadcrumb trail to follow back to their real identities."

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The group started from simple eBay scams [involving non-existent cars and even a fake trucking company] to running one of the most widespread keylogger trojans around. They were considered one of the most advanced groups around, using PGP email and OTR encryption when most hackers were defacing sites under the Anonymous moniker, and using multiple proxy layers to protect their infrastructure. The group operated tens of fake websites, including a Yahoo subsidiary clone, conned and stole money from their own money mules, and were of the first groups to deploy Bitcoin crypto-mining malware on desktops, when Bitcoin could still be mined on PCs.

The Bayrob group was led by one of Romania's top IT students, who went to the dark side and helped create a malware operation that took nine years for US authorities and the FBI to track and eventually take down. Before turning hacker, he was the coach of Romania's national computer science team, although he was still a student, and won numerous awards in programming and CS contests.

At a flat-earth conference in May, Mad Mike Hughes will announce details of "an Antarctic expedition with the goal of reaching the edge of the world...to prove once and for all that this Earth is flat." But before that, he's heading for outer space.

An anonymous reader quotes PhillyVoice: If you recognize the name Mad Mike Hughes, it's likely because he strapped himself into a rocket last March and traveled three-tenths of a mile into the heavens in the name of Flat Earth awareness. (See for yourself!) Well, nearly a year to the date after that momentous achievement, the limousine-driving daredevil and gubernatorial candidate has announced he's building upon the lessons learned last year and pushing the limits even further...

We caught up with him Thursday afternoon on the phone from California where he was "putting decals on the rocket right now!" Before any sort of Antarctica excursion, he's planning for a May 9 launch either in New Mexico "or the middle of the ocean if the government tries to stop me..." He hopes to reach the Kármán line, some 62.8 miles above Earth where space begins. "That way, we'll see what shape this rock really is," he said.

"More people will watch this than those who watched the fake moon landing. It will be an incredible, incredible event. People will see what I'm seeing for three hours up there and back and they'll be able to make up their own minds.... I'm the only guy capable of actually proving what shape this rock is, and that's by going up into space to do it."
The Science Channel is now filming Hughes' progress. (Here's a slick trailer for an upcoming documentary called "Rocketman".)

And Hughes says he's also claimed the legal entities that famous people are operating under, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett, putting these powerful people in a precarious position because now "they can't even exist..."

"I have a lot of court cases going on."

Yahoo is offering to pay $117.5 million to settle its massive data breaches that compromised personal information, including email addresses and passwords. "The proposed settlement was announced on Tuesday, but still needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh," reports CNN. From the report: Earlier this year, a different version of the class-action settlement was rejected by Koh, who wanted to see more benefit to consumers and a specific settlement amount. Yahoo was hit by multiple data breaches from 2013 to 2016. The 2013 breach affected every single customer account that existed at the time, which totaled 3 billion. Yahoo previously said names, email addresses and passwords were compromised but not financial information.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Unemployed people derive significant psychological benefits from receiving a fixed amount of financial support from the state, according to a landmark experiment into basic income in Finland that highlights the disadvantages of the country's existing means-tested system.

Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.

A new online tool "analyzes publicly disclosed data breaches and gives concrete advice to victims," reported CNET last week. Now the site's creator, data breach expert jimvandyke, is asking Slashdot's readers for feedback: At BreachClarity.com, just enter the name of any data breach you were in (such as 'Anthem', 'Equifax', 'Yahoo', etc.), and click the bright green 'search' button. Every publicly-reported breach since January 2017 (and noteworthy older ones) are in the database, and eventually every publicly-reported breach will be in the database, thanks to my non-profit partner the IDTheftCenter.org (ITRC). Breach Clarity is now available for free in basic form to consumers, as a very simple UI sitting in front of a comprehensive algorithm of my own design.

The goal of Breach Clarity is to help people by demystifying how any new data breach creates identity-holder risk of identity theft, identity fraud, and other harms. My goal in creating Breach Clarity is to move past the myths and victim-blaming (for instance, my research finds that very few people are actually 'apathetic' or 'lazy' when it comes to security, and it's simply not true that 'everyone's data is all already out there' for any cyber-criminal who wants to commit fraud in another person's name).

Breach Clarity uses dynamic research, technology, and design-thinking to protect people in the face of an onslaught of ongoing data breaches (The ITRC recorded 1,244 publicly reported US ones last year, leading to over $10B in annual identity crimes as reported by my former company Javelin Strategy & Research!)... If you like what you see, please use it and spread the word.
The original submission says the site's creator is currently "a one-person pre-funded operation, aiming to create an advanced and more full-featured version of Breach Clarity that will be licensed for financial institutions and employers." But if this is beta testing, there's some great technical support. "If you're confused by what you see, you can actually call the phone number in the upper right of BreachClarity and talk to a real person for free. You'll reach my partner, the ITRC, who gets grant funding from law enforcement and foundations."

CNET notes that "You can already find out if you've lost login credentials and other sensitive information by visiting Have I Been Pwned or Firefox Monitor. Breach Clarity takes things a step further by helping you decide what to do afterward."

Twelve years after its inception, Readdle is finally venturing beyond Apple's ecosystem with the launch today of its Spark email app for Android. This comes on the heels of Google killing its own popular Inbox email app. From a report: Spark's Android app -- like its iOS and macOS incarnations -- includes three key selling points: It is free for individual users, does not serve ads, and offers a host of features aimed at power users. Plus, it supports all major email providers, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple. Spark for Android, like the now defunct Inbox app, sorts emails -- prioritizing more important messages to help you reach "inbox zero." It offers options to snooze an email and to schedule when an email should go out. You can also pin emails so that it is easier to find them later and get reminders to follow up on previous conversations. Advanced search functionality lets you use conversational keywords to find things like that PDF file your boss sent last week. So how exactly does the Ukrainian-headquartered company make money? Readdle offers a paid version of Spark that is aimed at small to medium-sized teams and enterprises.

"Some innovative colleges, in partnership with private investors and a small number of philanthropies, are experimenting with a new financing model called 'income share agreements' or 'ISAs,'" reports Yahoo Finance: With an ISA, instead of assuming a fixed debt obligation, students simply agree to pay an affordable percentage of their future income over a set time period, subject to an overall cap. High earners will have larger payments than low earners, but all will have an affordable payment, based on what they will actually be making. Importantly, when the college is providing some or all of the funding for the ISA, its return will be aligned with its students' post-college earnings, giving it economic incentives to make sure its students both graduate and find jobs. The college is, literally, invested in its students' success...

With ISAs, there is no principal or interest. Thus, they are much better suited for low income students as their financial obligations never exceed their ability to pay... In a recent paper commissioned by the Manhattan Institute, we looked at the small but growing number of colleges and universities offering ISA programs. Indiana's Purdue University launched the first such program in 2016. About a dozen other institutions have now followed suit, including Lackawanna College in Pennsylvania, Clarkson University in New York, and the University of Utah. Most of these pioneers offer ISAs to students as an alternative to non-subsidized federal loans, though a few are offering them as a complete substitute for borrowing... A common feature of all these ISA programs is that they require payments only when the graduate meets a certain income threshold. All impose time limits and caps on the total amount that needs to be repaid, though they differ widely in where they set those caps and limits.