An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Lambda School, the controversial coding bootcamp, is threatening a former employee for speaking out about problems at the school. In an article published on February 11th, Sabrina Baez, Lambda's former head of career services, told The Verge that she was called a "feisty Latina" and a "bulldog" when she pushed for a diversity initiative at the school. Baez had signed a severance agreement when she left Lambda after the incidents; the school sent her a letter claiming she violated that agreement by speaking to reporters and is demanding the return of her severance money (roughly $36,000). The Verge has seen that letter, which also says Lambda is prepared to file a lawsuit to collect.

Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn't received any documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez's name in the article. She has decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is threatening legal action. [...] The Verge's reporting went beyond Baez's experience, detailing ongoing issues Lambda faces with unhappy students and regulatory hurdles. In January, students from the school's User Experience Design program wrote a letter to the school calling the program "a very bad experience" and "not worth the money." They asked to get out of their income sharing agreements (ISAs), which are the bedrock of Lambda's program. The school is also operating without state approval in California, meaning the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education cannot step in to help students if there is a dispute with the school. In the case of the User Experience program, the agency didn't have to: Lambda let the students out of their ISAs.

Stanford University canceled in-person classes for the final two weeks of the quarter, switching to online instruction amid rising concern about the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: As the coronavirus first reported in China spreads in the United States, several schools have taken this step as a precaution, hoping to avoid further infections on campus. The University of Washington, which has more than 55,000 students on three campuses, announced Friday that it would switch to virtual classes, and some smaller schools in and near the hard-hit Seattle area, such as Pacific Lutheran University, announced similar plans.

On Sunday, Rice University in Houston canceled in-person classes for the week of March 9 and canceled gatherings of 100 or more people through the end of April. An employee tested positive for covid-19 last week after international travel, university officials said in issuing the alert. [...] In New York, where multiple cases have been identified, Columbia University announced Sunday that classes are canceled Monday and Tuesday and that the university strongly discourages nonessential gatherings of more than 25 people. There are no confirmed cases among Columbia students, faculty or staff, but the Ivy League school's president wrote that someone had been quarantined and that the suspension of classes will allow the school to prepare for a shift to remote classes for the remainder of the week.

There's more than 280,000 students in the prestigious University of California system, spread throughout 10 campuses across the state. But now "a growing number" of students and faculty members are walking out of classes and holding rallies, reports the Los Angeles Times, "as a systemwide movement takes hold in support of graduate students demanding cost-of-living adjustments [COLA] to their salaries." During widespread U.C. campus demonstrations, students filled the Janss Steps at UCLA, Sproul Plaza at U.C. Berkeley and Cheadle Hall at U.C. Santa Barbara on Thursday and other pickets unfolded on Friday. At Santa Cruz -- where the protests began three months ago with a wildcat grading strike that ended in the dismissal of some student workers -- students blocked entrances to campus. At U.C. Riverside and U.C. Irvine crowds marched. "Out of the labs, into the streets!" they chanted, and "Give us COLA, we demand it!"

"It seems to be growing like crazy within the U.C.," said Sherry Ortner, professor of anthropology at UCLA. "I think this could really become a national issue."

Students at U.C. San Diego voted to begin a grading strike next Monday. Those gathered at UCLA voted to go on a full teaching strike as early as next week if graduate students in at least 10 departments vote in favor... At U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Barbara, some graduate students are on strike as well, although the number is unclear. At San Diego they will begin a grading strike Monday, and at Berkeley the graduate students in five departments have declared themselves "strike ready."

Google has announced that it will not host an in-person I/O 2020 over coronavirus concerns. The company is looking into an alternative format. 9to5Google reports: Google I/O 2020 was announced in January, with the ticket application and drawing process taking place late last month. Hosted at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, it's right across the street from the Googleplex headquarters. "Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre," reads a statement on the Google I/O website.

Those that purchased tickets will be fully refunded by March 13, while registered guests this year will automatically be able to purchase I/O 2021 passes. Looking forward, the company is going to "explore other ways to evolve Google I/O to best connect with our developer community." At this time, Google does not look to be committing to the original May 12-14 timeframe. Meanwhile, Google will be providing $1 million to local Mountain View organizations to help with the lack of I/O and its over 7,000 attendees. This is specifically aimed at helping raise awareness about the coronavirus, as well as aiding small businesses, increasing STEM education, and supporting organizations working with unhoused neighbors.

Iowa City's school board heard presentations from "two companies pitching digital surveillance services," complains a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, expressing concerns about their offers to "track students' digital lives and flag potential threats for in-house analysts and school officials to review." The student surveillance industry is overrun with buzz words, misinformation and fearmongering. Digital citizenship. Crowd-sourcing. Machine-learning algorithm. Those are warm and fuzzy phrases meant to make us feel secure in the arms of corporate tech.

Discussing an out-of-state case where a student allegedly sought to join ISIS, a Securly company representative at the school board meeting said, "There are plenty of kids like (him) walking around every school in every district in this country who need help." Kids in every school district who are trying to join international terrorist networks? I doubt that....

A parent testimonial from Gaggle aptly sums up the student surveillance philosophy: "If it's going to protect my child or save my child, I don't care how you get the information, just get it." I worry young people will heed that message -- safety at any cost, privacy be damned. They will grow up to accept constant government surveillance in a world where everything they do is recorded. It's all they've ever known, and they won't think to question it.

Remember when Tulsa, Oklahoma offered $10,000 to remote workers who'd relocate to their city?

It was an immensely popular program. "You have better odds of getting into Harvard or Yale than you do of getting into the Tulsa Remote program," the city's mayor told CityLab: All of the Remoters get a free one-year membership to the coworking space, though others prefer to work at home, perhaps because for some of them, home is a luxury apartment building downtown where they receive subsidized rent — another part of their welcome package...

A year after Tulsa Remote launched, the first participants — a mix of expats from expensive coastal cities, wanderlusty young adults, and those with roots in the region — say they've found many of the things they were looking for: a more comfortable and affordable quality of life, new neighbors they like, enough of an economic cushion to ease the stress of buying new furniture, and a fresh start. Many say they'll stick around past the end of the one-year program. More than that: Some of them tell stories of positive personal transformation that are so dramatic, they might appear too perfect, almost canned. But after checking in with participants over the course of eight months, I found that many of them remained just as effusive. Maybe it's something about Tulsa. Or maybe it's something about Tulsa Remote...

One "Remoter," as they're called in the Tulsa program, is a Harlem Globetrotter. Another runs an online finance site, helping people maximize their credit points. Others work in education, and online marketing, and consulting, and media. Of the 100 participants who were originally selected, 70 accepted [program director] Bolzle's offer, and two left within a few months of arriving to the city...

At least 25 participants from the first Tulsa Remote cohort have purchased property in the city, Bolzle says. One bought a $700,000 house... The endgame of Tulsa Remote is that these residents will help build a flourishing new economic ecosystem in town; they'll start families and launch start-ups and tell their friends to come join them. There's a "multiplier effect" expected of a project like this, even if the workers aren't employed by Tulsa-based companies, said Pamela Loprest, a senior fellow and labor economist in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute. "They'll create other jobs and [draw] other people into that area..."

Even a few participants who had initially told me they wanted to leave when the program ended have now changed their minds.
Other states are trying variations on the idea, including Vermont, northwest Alabama, and Topeka, Kansas. "It used to be that talent went where the jobs were," the program's executive director tells them, but "That's shifting." The article notes that new development downtown -- including a $465 million riverfront park -- "seems engineered to look like a Millennial playground. The problem, says Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, is there just aren't enough people to play in it..."

"Now, the program's executive director says, it's the responsibility of cities to create a community that someone would want to call home, and make sure people know to move there..."

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Amazon has agreed to channel funds to a controversial drug rehabilitation charity linked to the Church of Scientology, the Guardian has learned. The web giant will make donations to Narconon — which runs programmes for drug addicts based on the teachings of the Scientology founder, L Ron Hubbard — when supporters buy products through the site, with shoppers able to pledge 0.5% of purchases to selected charities under Amazon's "Smile" feature...

Experts have warned the charity's methods have no scientific basis and its link to Scientology has prompted criticism that it is a front used to convert people to the religion, which some former devotees have labelled a cult... The Guardian discovered that Amazon US allows shoppers to donate funds to more than a dozen Narconon-related charities, including its international branch based in Clearwater, Florida, near Scientology's "spiritual headquarters".
"The Narconon treatment invokes concepts of residual drug in body and brain which have no scientific validity," complains professor David Nutt, who formerly chaired the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. And he also tells the Guardian Narconon's anti-drug talks in schools aren't "truly scientifically or evidence based.

"Sadly we have known for years that Scientology is the main provider of 'teaching' materials on addiction to schools, as the UK government doesn't fund any alternative sources."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons aired The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson, an episode in which Marge — with the help of a song from John Legend ("STEM, it's not just for dorks, dweebs and nerds / It'll turn all your dumb kids to Zuckerbergs") — convinces Springfield to use a windfall the town reaped by seizing shipwreck treasure to build the Springfield STEM Academy to "prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow."

All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share.
The school's administrator was even played by Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who delivered one of the episode's harshest lines, notes The A.V. Club.

"Staging a Norma Rae-style revolt at how the 'non-gifted' students are being trained to do everyone else's dirty work, Lisa's brought up short with a startled 'Eep' by Woods' administrator asking, 'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"

While civic leaders believe AI could help reinvent government services, they are also aware of citizens' profound privacy concerns. To navigate this challenge, the Finnish city of Espoo is conducting experiments that mix consultations, transparency, and limited use cases to demonstrate the potential of civic AI. From a report: Espoo has already conducted AI trials that initially required overcoming technical hurdles but ultimately improved city services. Over the long-term, the city is crafting a model that places ethics at the center of its AI plans by ensuring citizens can understand how these systems work and participate in debates about their implementation. Though the plan is still very much in its early stages, the city hopes to blaze a trail that other governments can follow. "I think Finns trust the government and the public sector more than [citizens] in any country in Europe," said Tomas Lehtinen, data analyst consultant for Espoo. "We wanted to keep that trust in the future. And so we wanted to be transparent about this project for citizens, but also because many of our employees also don't understand AI."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Google on Thursday was hit with a lawsuit by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, alleging the search giant is illegally collecting data on school children. The suit says Google is collecting the personal information through a program the company has with New Mexico's school districts, in which it provides Chromebooks and access to G Suite for Education apps for free. Those apps include Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs. The practice would run afoul of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a federal law that regulates data collection from sites with users who are under 13 years old. The lawsuit accuses Google of collecting information on students' locations, their passwords, what websites they've visited, what they've searched for on Google and YouTube, their contact lists and voice recordings. Balderas also said in the lawsuit that Google "mined students' email accounts" and "extracted" information for advertising purposes until 2014. Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement: "These claims are factually wrong. G Suite for Education allows schools to control account access and requires that schools obtain parental consent when necessary. We do not use personal information from users in primary and secondary schools to target ads. School districts can decide how best to use Google for Education in their classrooms and we are committed to partnering with them."

Ahead of a national day of action led by digital rights group Fight for the Future, UCLA has abandoned its plans to become the first university in the United States to adopt facial recognition technology. From a report: In a statement shared with Fight for the Future's Deputy Director Evan Greer, UCLA's Administrative Vice Chancellor Michael Beck said the university "determined that the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of the campus community." Since last year, UCLA has been considering using the university's security cameras to implement a facial recognition surveillance system.

These plans have been dogged by student criticism, culminating in an editorial in the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper, that argued the system would "present a major breach of students' privacy" while creating "a more hostile campus environment" by "collecting invasive amounts of data on [UCLA's] population of over 45,000 students and 50,000 employees." In an attempt to highlight the risks of using facial recognition on UCLA's campus, Fight for the Future used Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, to scan public photos of UCLA's athletes and faculty, then compare the photos to a mugshot database. Over 400 photos were scanned, 58 of which were false positives for mugshot images -- the software often gave back matches with "100% confidence" for individuals "who had almost nothing in common beyond their race"

Lambda School claims 86% of grads get jobs paying over $50,000 a year. In a new report, Lambda's founder admits the real number is much lower. Additionally, internal documents show Lambda can be profitable if even 1 in 4 grads get a job. Lambda plans to enroll 10,000 students in 2020. From the report: The point of a coding boot camp, obviously, is to help you get a better job. Lambda's claim, reproduced on its website, that "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year" is an understandably attractive proposition for students -- and a key pillar of Lambda's marketing. Students I talked to confirmed that the feeling that it was likely that they would be able to land high-paying jobs was a key part of deciding to attend. However, a May 2019 Lambda School investment memo -- entitled "Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class" -- written for Y Combinator and obtained by Intelligencer, tells a very different story. In a section warning that student-debt collections may prove too low, it matter-of-factly states that, "We're at roughly 50% placement for cohorts that are 6 months graduated." A recent interviewee for work at Lambda School also confirmed to me that the company's own internal numbers, which the interviewee was provided as part of their interview process, seem to indicate a roughly 50 percent or lower placement rate.

So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Lambda School founder Austen Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates -- 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered. Lambda's former director of career readiness, Sabrina Baez, told me that placing Lambda's first batch of students was extremely difficult, largely owing to how underdeveloped the curriculum was at the time. When asked about Lambda's claim that 86 percent of its first graduates were placed within six months, she told me, "I would say out of that 71 students, within six months of them graduating it was probably a 50-60 percent placement rate," and added that Allred sometimes exaggerated student-placement progress on Twitter -- recalling, as an example, an instance in which she told Allred that a student might receive an offer soon, only to find out later that he had tweeted that the student had already received an offer. Further reading: The High Cost of a Free Coding Bootcamp.

In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won't find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word "did." TorrentFreak reports: In 2018, [Sinclair Target, the owner of computing history blog, Two-Bit History] wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world's first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won't find it. As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google's indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?) contained the word 'DID,' it must be illegal. This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that "Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge." At risk of running counter to Sinclair's claim, in this case -- as Lovelace herself would've hopefully agreed -- it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance. Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them. In the complaint sent to Google, "the notice not only claims Target's article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word 'did actually means," adds TorrentFreak. "Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources [including the U.S. Department of Education, Nature.com, and USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey]."

schwit1 writes: Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced Saturday night the university would freeze tuition for the 9th straight year, holding it at 2012 levels through 2021-22.

If Purdue can do it, why can't everyone else?

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: In December, online coding bootcamp Lambda School quietly partnered with Edly, a digital marketplace that helps schools sell income-sharing agreements (ISAs) to accredited investors. The arrangement allows Lambda to receive money from the ISAs upfront, rather than waiting for students to find jobs. But it also flies in the face of the values Lambda typically espouses: namely, that ISAs align its incentives with the goals and aspirations of the students...

Lambda's ISAs promise an alternative to traditional student loans by allowing students to defer tuition until they've landed a job that pays $50,000 a year or more. When that happens, they hand over 17 percent of their income until the $30,000 tuition is paid off. If students don't find work within five years of completing the program, the ISA is automatically dissolved. It's a business model that allows Lambda to brag about investing in students — which, in many ways, it still does. The school provides living stipends and even housing to some students who need it. But reselling ISAs muddies the narrative a bit since Lambda can make money long before students find jobs...

Shortly after the arrangement was called out on Twitter, following a report by The Verge about some students' disappointment with the curriculum, Edly began taking down pages that referenced the Lambda partnership. Edly did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why these pages were taken down, and Lambda declined to comment on the nature of the partnership at all.
"I wonder why Lambda isn't so keen on seeing discussions about how students are being packed into the same kind of CDOs that brought us the financial crisis," tweeted David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, who's been tweeting screenshots of Edly's past statements about their ambitions as well as links to Google's cache of Edly's pitches to investors.

Last year Wired reported that nearly half of Lambda's ISAs had at least partly been sold off to investors. They also note that in January of 2019, Lambda "received $30 million from investors including Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and Ashton Kutcher."

The rise of preprint repositories has helped scientists worldwide to share results and get feedback quickly. But several platforms that serve researchers in emerging economies are struggling to raise money to stay afloat. One, which hosts research from Indonesia, has decided to close because of this funding shortfall. From a report: INA-Rxiv, which was set up in 2017, was one of the first repositories to host studies from a particular region. Previous platforms served specific disciplines: for example, arXiv, the original preprint repository, hosts physical-sciences research, and bioRxiv is a popular repository for biology studies. Other region or language-specific repositories followed, including ArabiXiv, which hosts Arabic-language research; AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv. Managers of these repositories say they increase exposure for research from the regions, and facilitate collaborations. INA-Rxiv, ArabiXiv, AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv are run by volunteers around the world, but the servers are hosted online by the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS), based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The centre's platform hosts 26 repositories, including more than a dozen that are discipline-specific. In December 2018, the COS informed repository managers that from 2020, it would be introducing fees, charged to repository managers, to cover maintenance costs. The charges, which were finalized last December, start at about US$1,000 a year, and increase as repositories' annual submissions grow. The costs can be significant, particularly for repositories run by volunteers in emerging economies.

dcblogs writes: In the federal government, approximately 30% of the 2.1 million civilian employees have a master's degree or above. That's compared to about 15% at large firms in the private sector, according to the White House's 2021 budget. The federal workforce is also older than the private sector. The average age of federal workers is 46, versus 42 for all others. The age gap is most acute for the youngest workers, with only 7.3% of the federal workforce younger than age 30 compared to 23% of private sector workers. "Over-reliance on degrees can be a barrier to entry" to federal jobs, the White House argued. Others disagree and say that many government jobs, such as economists and attorneys, require advanced degrees.

Students at Lambda School say the program hasn't delivered on its promise. From the report: Bethany Surber was sleeping on friends' couches and living out of her car when she first heard about Lambda School, a buzzy coding bootcamp that promised world-class instructors and a top-tier curriculum. Best of all, it wouldn't cost a cent -- at least not up front. The school encouraged students to defer tuition until they landed a stable job, then pay back a share of their income. Surber and her boyfriend, an instructor at the local community college, quickly started making plans. She'd quit her job as a patient services representative at the hospital in Tacoma, Washington, and they'd move in together while she took classes. Then, when she got a high-paying tech gig, she'd renovate his house, maybe take herself on a vacation. Lambda offered Surber a chance at a life she'd never had -- one of job opportunities, tech money, prestige. She'd watched as companies like Amazon and Microsoft changed the fabric of the Seattle area, bringing massive new developments and six-figure salaries that sucked talent from nearby Tacoma. Now, she finally had a chance to be part of that change.

From the beginning, however, the online class wasn't what Surber or her classmates had expected. The instructors changed week to week and often seemed to have no idea what the students had already covered. The curriculum advertised on the website never fully materialized. The online portal where they were supposed to find their homework assignments rarely matched up with what they were learning. Some of the changes were things Lambda students had requested. (The school prides itself on being incredibly responsive to user feedback.) But the constant state of flux proved difficult for first-time designers. By January 2020, six months into the program, Surber's group was in revolt. The program wasn't worth the money, they wrote in a letter to Lambda's leadership. They felt like test subjects in a lab. Many asked to get out of the income-sharing agreements (ISAs) they'd signed, which stipulated that they had to hand over 17 percent of their income once they started making $50,000 or more until their $30,000 tuition was paid off.

"Under the age of 39? Odds are that most of your peers learned to code in C.

"Most Baby Boomers and Gen Xers — or, those between the ages of 40 and 74 in 2020 — learned to code in BASIC."

That's just one of the interesting conclusions from HackerRank's third annual "Developer Skills Report," which this year compiled responses from over 116,000 developers (from 162 different countries). Developed for educational use in 1964, BASIC was a popular instructional language in college classrooms. But that began to change in 1972, when Bell Labs invented C, allowing portability of the Unix operating system. Though it wasn't an instant hit, the language rose to popularity in the late 70s and early 80s alongside the growth of Unix. Today, the language is celebrated for its longevity, flexibility, and ease of use — just some of the reasons it's still popular for Gen Zers learning to code today.

Gen Z is more likely than any previous generation to utilize bootcamps. Nearly one in six say they've leveraged bootcamps to learn new skills. On the flip side, they're less likely to learn coding skills from older generations' go-tos, like books and on-the-job training. As Gen Z comes to rely more heavily on non-traditional education sources like bootcamps, they're poised to become a key talent pool.
Jaxenter also summarizes another interesting finding from the survey. "72% of hiring managers reported that bootcamp grads were equally or better equipped for their job." The I-Programmer site even noted the top reasons managers gave the surveyors for why bootcamp grads exceed:

• Ability to learn new technologies & languages quickly (71%)
• Strong practical experience (61%)
• Eager to take on new responsibilities (52%)

And they also summarize another interesting result. "Almost a third of developers at small companies (1-49 employees) haven't obtained a Bachelor's degree -- a proportion that drops to only 9% in companies with 10,000 or more employees."

Starting in March 2020, public transport in Luxembourg will be free of charge. Primarily a social measure, this policy will also be implemented to decrease congestion in the capital region. From a report: Luxembourg's public transportation system is already heavily subsidized as fares in the country are as low as $2.2 per two hours. Even so, the country has the highest car ownership per person in Europe. This is mainly because citizens and out-of-country commuters argue that Luxembourg's public transportation is more time consuming compared to driving. Additionally, its unique position between France, Belgium, and Germany, draws lots of commuters across its borders every day. Therefore, the investment and legislation for free public transportation will be complemented by improving the country's network, but also for raising the minimum wage, pension adjustments, and financial aid for higher education. For out-of-country commuters, a parallel policy will allow workers to deduct travel expenses from their annual tax bill. However, many citizens argue that the money spent on free transportation and modernising the system can be better spent on rent subsidies or social housing.