When SAVE was rolled back, we should have been offered the ability to unconsolidate.
What would stop people/states from suing to prevent the debt relief after it was instated?
3,276 karma · joined November 29, 2021
What would stop people/states from suing to prevent the debt relief after it was instated?
I'm one of the people with a ton of student loans, and I was also one of the people who consolidated my loans when the Biden admin rolled out SAVE. Now the government pulled SAVE but did nothing for those of us who consolidated to take advantage of it. We were told one thing, and it was almost immediately reversed.
The US government is unreliable and sees no need to keep the promises it made a few years ago. Why would anyone sign up to be in mortal harm's way for relief that has a decent chance of not even happening? They've lit their integrity on fire. The promises of something after a few years means nothing.
Something can be a huge problem and still be small potatoes to people having catastrophic problems, and often those of us in very, very dire circumstances are tone policed to within an inch of our lives and have to constantly consider normal people above ourselves (and make no mistake, people with MDD are closer to normal than somebody with ALS or severe cancer). We're never allowed to express anger, never allowed to talk about having it harder, have to stop and attend to the feelings of others while ours are ignored, etc.
Also, no offense, but depression can end up making people very self-centered. It's your illness that makes you think that what you're going through is more important and worse than what anyone else is going through, and it's not. (And it's not for me either: there are definitely people who have it worse than me and could say they wish their problem was 'just' MS. I just wouldn't get offended by that.)
None of this is to downplay depression, but there are absolutely people for whom 'just depression' would be accurate. Migraines suck, but someone with cluster headaches might call them 'just migraines' and they wouldn't be wrong.
I absolutely had withdrawal when I needed to go off of it, and I can say with certainty that the mental effects of going off of it were not just the reappearance of the underlying mental health issues since there weren't any. My emotional regulation was in the toilet, I was extremely irritated, I'd cry constantly, I was horny as hell, etc.
This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.
And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).
The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.
I was born in America. About half of my ancestors lived in Canada on both sides of my family, I know my Canadian cousins, I spent time in Canada growing up/was taught Canadian history as well as American history, I have a Canadian education and half of my professional network is Canadian, etc. I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am pursuing it now, as are other members of my family, whereas we never bothered before because the separation never seemed to matter. With the recent change in Canadian citizenship laws, I'd estimate at least 25% of the Great Lakes population is eligible for dual citizenship at this point.
One of my parents and some of my siblings are Ojibwe/Anishinaabe. My paternal cousins are all French Catholic. (My dad's parents were Protestant but my aunt married into an old French Catholic family and converted.)
I don't even really know how I would separate out the two nations' influence, and that's true of a lot of people, especially those of us whose families have lived here since before America and Canada existed.
Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.
The economics aren't there.
I'm not sure re: the sunscreen being better. Maybe as a platonic ideal, but it's really easy to miss places when applying sunscreen, whereas a UV umbrella does cover everything with no fuss.
Since you're autistic, you might want to buy them in person: the tactile sensation of linens can be pretty different, so you might want to touch them before buying if sensory issues are a clothing concern.
One thing to look out for is that a lot of clothing that will come up when you search for linen are linen blends, which are better than a hoodie by far, but aren't going to have the same breeziness as 100% linen. Also, 100% linen wrinkles, so you've got to hang it right out of the dryer if you care about that.
Also, linen clothing. Far more comfortable in heat while keeping you covered. Hoodies and jeans sounds miserable.
And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!'
Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money.
Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up.
Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use.
To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.
I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do.
OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe.
Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.
One of the best ways to get through airport CBP quickly without being overly hassled is to be overtly, clearly sick in a gross way. If you're about to vomit or have horrible diarrhea, they do not want you in that line any longer than you have to be. If they're the type to want to take people down a peg, they won't bother with you because they're already miserable, and if they like picking on the weak, they're probably going to go for a solo young female traveler who isn't ill.
Nobody wants to risk getting vomit on their clothes or in their work area, having to close a line and shuffle people around while their coworkers glare daggers, or subject themselves or their coworkers to the very fun smells of human bodily fluids.
At the same time, it isn't purposeful so it's not read as malicious.
You don't want a conversation at all.
When I say 'right wing nonsense', I mean nonsense that is right wing, not that right wing inherently = nonsense. I thought that was worth clarifying. I'm left, sort of, in the sense that I'm more left than right, but a lot of my views are so far outside the Overton Window that categorizing them in either way is a futile endeavor. (And there are many instances where I 'cross the aisle' in my opinions: guns and administrative legal theory are two.)
It isn't the statistics that people object to when you present your case: it's the framing and the ideological assumptions behind them.
In writing your post(s) as you did, you embedded the following assumptions along with your statistics:
1.) That the government is 'acting in the place of a father', indicating that there is a specific natural place for a man in the world as it relates to his spouse and children, specifically that he should wield authority and care along the line of traditional roles (versus using the phrasing 'acting in the place of a parent' or 'acting in loco parentis', which would indicate a different critique centering around the amount of external authority in people's lives without prescribing how people should live otherwise).
2.) That we should organize society around/value what people willingly pay for. I disagree. Particularly in modern America, where we've all been raised from birth to be selfish babies and assholes with no ability to look beyond three months down the road (to be generous). Half of this country would throw a tantrum if you asked them to contribute to the roads they drive on. They're definitely not going to pay for cancer research, or to create any strategic resource reserves, if it means they have $5 less now.
3.) That 'bullshit jobs' are more likely to be taken by women and that as a class they're more likely to be impacted by AI than men. I don't agree with that. I think that white collar bullshit jobs are held pretty equally by both sexes: the devastation of the IT/tech job market + all the conversation around what AI means for tech suggests that white collar men are far from immune. In my opinion, pretending that women are going to be more impacted is a cope. They're going to be equally impacted, but women have more of an exit strategy. I also think they've got better non-white collar options, honestly. Pink-collar is going to be more resistant to robotics and AI than blue-collar. I'm betting that construction labor can be automated before hair dressers, and the fastest growing job sector is healthcare services. Or consider in home childcare and jobs like elementary teachers. We'll let robots drive our trucks, but letting them take care of our 4 year olds is going to be a much bigger hurdle.
Overall, I think your case would be stronger and better received if you dropped the gendered element. Discussions happen in a particular context (the Internet's attempts at collapsing that aside), and adding the gender aspect aligns you in the audience's mind with certain positions (just as I did deliberately when I described myself as a leftist woman - I did that specifically so I could present that I agree that women are likely to exit white collar work without aligning myself with other gender positions which in turn makes it easier to discuss the idea on its own merits, or when I started this message by walking back some of my flippancy wrt your message because I appreciate that you took the time to respond and are open to a conversation and therefore am also stepping forward to try to find common ground and reciprocate that I'd like a productive conversation).
The tl;dr is it's not the statistics that are putting people off and earning you downvotes, it's the rhetoric and presentation. Knowing your audience and the context in which an argument is being made is crucial. Like... if I posted this comment in any kind of sapphic group, I'd be run out with pitchforks.
My life is sustained by medicine produced by large international pharma companies, and I also feel really uncomfortable about that.
I've also seen already existing SaaS offerings integrating AI into their already existing product. How well that's going to work... I'm not sure. The economics of at least some of what I've seen is questionable (e.g. giving end users essentially unlimited token spend without passing any of the cost along), and at least one company in my field is clearly adding AI features because they're spooked that the existence of AI is damaging their moat/vendor lock in.
The shift might look like 'company Y contracts with AI companies A, B, and C, and as a result does more with less and therefore needs 30% fewer people'. In theory, companies A, B, and C are creating jobs so the job numbers shift, but your point about a certain level of understanding being needed to do those new jobs definitely stands.
The question is are there enough competent people to staff the middleman companies (I'd say yes specifically because entry level tech is a bloodbath atm) and how simple can these tools be made? Can they be dumbed down enough so that businesses can just buy a package from a vendor where they can give tool access to the people who can't program VCRs and trust that they won't shoot themselves in the foot? That, I don't know.
I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.
Additionally, as working becomes worse and worse, anyone who has an exit path will take it. We'll see an uptick in the lumpenproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term (I'm not a Marxist, but the term is useful) as well. Straight and bisexual women have more of an ability to opt out of capitalism directly than straight and bisexual men do in broad generalities.
Additionally, a lot of the resistance to a more traditional family setup on the women's part is because it places us in a precarious situation where, if the person you depend on financially is abusive, you're screwed. If work gets to a point where most employment involves abusive conditions, it's a better deal to chain yourself to a potentially abusive husband than a potentially abusive employer. The legal system is greatly biased towards an employer and the odds of help or redress are low. If you have to pick an abusive situation, pick the one where it's concentrated in one person and you can poison him if you need out. Your husband can have a 'heart attack'. Much harder to pull that off against a megacorp.
In short: the opt out/traditional path is likely to become a better deal, and selfishness will always win.
Attempts at empathy in cases like this read to me as insulting, like how you'd speak to a toddler. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, and now I have to pretend like I don't know you're lying. It's one more indignity of status being used against me and demanding I play a part and accept the lie, primarily for their ego.
Whereas directness feels more equal to me.
For example, I have very weird/non standard genetics when it comes to processing medications, so I've had to learn which classes of drugs I need very small doses of or that I can't take at all. (Some drug classes aren't made in small enough doses for me to take safely). So I have to relay this to doctors and we make our medication decisions accordingly.
Or if you run hot or cold. My body temperature is usually a ~ 96.5, so I'm feeling awful by the time my temp hits 99.5, even though that doesn't register as a problem generally.
Or how I pushed to get a mammogram covered before it is ordinarily because my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother have all had 3+ rounds of triple-negative breast cancer even though they don't have the BRCA genes: the standard recommendation doesn't fit our family and I am high risk despite not having the standard markers for being so.
I have multiple sclerosis and at the time of my diagnosis the best treatment available to me in terms of slowing the progression of MS had a risk of triggering a rare brain infection that would kill you. So it was a choice between treatments that didn't work as well but had lower risk and treatments with greater odds of being able to walk/work/not be in horrifying constant pain in 10 years but also a small chance of death.
These decisions can end up being horribly complicated, and they are definitely revealing in terms of your values.
Usually, local laws are enacted by a city council with members elected to represent different areas of a municipality (and potentially some at-large seats). Legislation can come from a number of places: lobbying efforts (for example, there's a current effort for municipalities to ban data center development), citizen groups, specially formed committees (my city just had one to create and propose city charter revisions), or yes, occasionally the council members themselves. Typically, there are open council meetings where citizens can discuss their opinions.
In addition, some rules/regulations/taxes are directly put to a vote of the city/town population, and some regulations can be put in place by administrative departments in a locality. (Similar to things like EPA regulations on the federal level).
The specific implementations vary in accordance to municipal charters and how specific states handle the incorporation of local governments.
I at one point took the FS exam and planned to go into the FS (and therefore know the process, how career progression works, and know people who did end up joining). I know how the US system works, but not anyone else's.
Other context: I live in Michigan, and there are actually Muslim majority towns and cities here - I don't live in one, but I do travel to/through those areas and where I live does have a Muslim population and there's nothing unusual to me about seeing a hijabi/visibly Muslim people out and about, so I'm coming from the point of view of those populations establishing places where they are the majority. And they've also used the power they've accrued on the local level to display hostility towards queer people. It's not a theoretical I'm making up in my head to enrage myself.
Specifically, I spent time in Jordan, which is a country that has a wide variety of people and people practicing Islam in different ways, so I'm definitely not under the illusion that all Muslims are the same or are extremists.
I definitely agree that we should question how and why something or someone makes us uncomfortable, and I agree that the first step should be interrogating our feelings and determining if they have a basis or if they're just knee-jerk displeasure towards change or something different. I have actually sat with these feelings for a while specifically because they're so taboo in left leaning spaces, and all I have heard is similar to what you say: That I'm bigoted, don't understand, etc. That's one reason I actually did go out of my way to learn and understand more: I wanted to interpret that criticism in good faith, and I agreed that I should know more before judging.
I have major theological and moral objections to central parts of all 3 of the Abrahamic faiths, even outside of the 'do you believe in God?' question.
Another piece of context is that I'm a 38 year old lesbian woman and I grew up in an environment where conservative religious movements were actively and openly hostile to me. I remember reading articles when I was 6 years old about how damaged and sinful I was, I remember the reactions to Matthew Shepard, etc. If anything, I've grown more comfortable with religious expression over time: when I was younger, I viewed any open display of religious faith as signaling that person was dangerous to me. I've also spent most of my life hating that I'm a lesbian and wanting, desperately, to be at least bisexual so I could be normal. I still struggle with this.
The question of larger society is one reason why I feel uneasy about the situation: I think the most likely path towards assimilation/acceptance for the Muslim community is doubling down on the conservatism and becoming allies with the Christian right. The fact that the Muslim community is full of people who think that my life should involve me being married to a man and unable to say no to sex/being raped repeatedly fills me with horror and makes it very hard to want more of them in my area. That's why I'm pro-assimilation: it's self-preservation.
If Muslims want to live in America and wear hijab, pray five times a day, observe Ramadan, etc. I don't care, but I draw the line at ideologies that perpetuate sexism and homophobia. (And again, I don't want fundie Christian immigrants or fundie Jewish immigrants either, and a white conservative Muslim family isn't any more acceptable to me.)
To me, when I see families/groups that are openly displaying conservative Muslim values, they are openly saying they don't want me in their society and if they had a choice, they'd get rid of me. Why wouldn't that make me uncomfortable? If you went out and about and saw people wearing 'castrate all men' shirts or a symbol that represented 'all men can be made to like cock if you ram it up their ass while they scream until you break them down', you would be comfortable with that? With those people existing in your city?
If you want me to live a life where I'm sexually assaulted regularly to please your God, I'm entitled to view that as a threat. If you openly express affiliation with that, I'm entitled to consider you hostile to me and not want to 'get to know you'.