• 10 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.

    I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?

    If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolent from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you *already " have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.

    That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.




  • Yes, indeed. Hence the earlier, “HOW GET MONEY?” someone so eloquently asked in relation to this dead drop method. You could arrange your own dead drop for the dealer’s payment I guess, or stuff the money in to the same tree. It’s all a bit fraught, and requires you both to trust each other even more than a deal normally would. The system seems to be pretty flawed. Guess it works of you’re happy to leave an indelible record of you transacting with this person and if you trust them to actually put the goods there rather than just take the money since you’ll never see them and have no recourse.



  • Well I must admit I’ve only really seen bits of various Star Wars films save for being taken to see Episode 1 as a kid so I don’t really know much about it, besides what you can pick up from pop culture, I was just following what seemed a logical inference. Are “protocol droids” one and the same as whatever C3P0 is? I guess I figured a “kit build” in my mind is something like an amateur, enthusiast’s project for kids or something so the fun and silly “personality” would be part and parcel with that design while ubiquitous robots made for more serious utilitarian reasons would I guess be less inclined have such features as they’d not be of great use to anyone.





  • My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think it was something to do with not wanting chilly sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.


  • I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.


  • Shit was crazy, random conservative shock jocks and mainstream conservative politicians all over the world were losing their minds over this kid it was hilarious. It was so funny watching them just fucking PR faceplant over and over again when all they ever needed to do was just shut the fuck up about it and wait for her to disappear from the news cycle in time as she herself said she fully expected would happen. I’m pretty sure her continuing relevance is at least in part because of the Streisand effect generated from a whole international cabal of right-wing old men desperately trying to destroy this child and fucking losing hahaha.





  • Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.


  • But when he took the red pill he was relegated to eating a bowl of snot as his only food and living in a hellscape and had to fight a never-ending war whilst still having to regularly go back in to the matrix he was supposedly escaping. I mean I guess, great, for humanity but it doesn’t make picking Linux sound like a great time if you’re going to use that analogy.


  • Do you ever find that sometimes when you intervene in to other people’s conversations to pull out some of your best absolute cracker lines like “why don’t you google that?” that people just don’t react properly at all? Like you’d expect an appropriate response like some light cheering and maybe lifting you up on their shoulders and handing you a medal and at least a couple of trophies. You know, something befitting of your incisive and insightful contributions, and instead they just kinda stop talking to you? That’s so weird huh?