IANAL, but 99% sure that the situation in Germany is that you have to identify yourself (give name, birthday, (address?)), but you /don‘t/ have to carry (or show) your government issued ID at all times.
I worked through large parts of PQP ([1]) with only the prerequisites that you state, as part of a Uni course taught by Aleks Kissinger.
I got quite comfortable with the formalism and could solve most problems without too much issue, but at the end I still knew nothing at all about quantum physics. YMMV
Worth looking into any COSS (commercial open source) companies that you find interesting.
That’s where you write the code that then others glue together - plus you can inspect the codebase beforehand!
I think you are kinda right in that it might be very hard to get people out of homelessness, but what more housing could do is prevent homelessness in the first place.
Presumably most people start their lives as not homeless, and at some point that changes, because housing prices exceed their income. More housing would lead to lower housing prices and less homelessness.
Interestingly, I think that almost all of the downsides listed in the article and in the comments go away if you use a good framework for creating microservices (example for this: [0]):
No internal glue code, no overhead by writing network interfaces, no slow HTTP calls (faster gRPC instead), no manual handling of asynchronous tasks.
If you want to counteract this tendency, consider getting them into (competitive) sports. Nothing will work right away, they will have to „grind“ (train/practice) a lot, failures are all but certain; but hard work and perseverance get rewarded, and the successes are all the sweeter. As a young guy who has had a modern and easy childhood not unlike the one you describe, many of my most cherished memories come from competing in a sport.
I travel between Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland somewhat regularly, not rarely passing through 3 of the 4 countries for a given trip. I use the Austrian national railway‘s (ÖBB) app to book my tickets, I get a single QR code on my phone that is valid for all legs of my journey, gets scanned by the personnel of whatever country‘s railway company, and I‘m good. Never had any problems whatsoever.
From what I can tell, the field is indeed evolving very rapidly, but I have only worked on a specific application (knowledge graph completion), so I can't give an overview over all the current day applications.
I can, however, recommend William Hamilton's excellent text book, which is available online [1].
I don‘t think it‘s true that there is no competition in the example you give, rather competition simply happens along a differen axis.
In the open source space there are certain characteristics that make your project more likely to succeed. Being, well, open is obviously one of them, just like passing emission tests is a factor in cars. So, open source projects have to be competitive along the openness axis in order to succeed, just like VW needs to pass these tests, one way or the other. To me it seems like the same mechanism really, just fed with different incentives.
>Ask the average person if they'd rather pay to have the paper degree and not have to attend any classes, or get the education for free but not receive any paper credentials. You'll have your answer.
This is an interesting thought, however I don't think it is a good test for whether someone wants to be in college/uni or not. It is reasonable to enjoy the education and be realistic about the value of the paper certificate at the same time.
The overall point about social pressures etc. is well taken though.
Is it really true that, in the US, many college students don't want to be there but go nonetheless, despite having to pay absurd amounts of money?
Where I study, uni is basically free, and I've met very few people in my degree who don't want to be there.
This seems absurd to me.