cannonedhamster

Marijuana is legal for personal use even here. Our police unions supported decriminalizing it because they said it was wasting their time.

Dealing with VCs/CEOs typically involves having the money in the first place. You have numerous cases of people without degrees at all getting VC money and building platforms. I deal with CEOs of large companies on a fairly regular basis. While the Alma Mater matters it's typically a stand in for economic class. People who can afford to not work for a few years to go the HBS aren't typically in the lower echelons. Also workplaces are more conducive to taking time out of your regular schedule for educational advancement the higher up you go, especially since you're usually always working. So the degrees come back to money.

Of the people who voted for President Trump almost all of that lies with white, male voters and that was regardless of whether they were college educate or not, and most of that was in the South. Take from that what you will as neither candidate was a PoC so race wouldn't apply as a divisor. What might have had an impact was the border security discussion. The President's election was as much a fluke as a response to disaffected Sanders voters as a weak Democratic candidate.

Higher wages only occur in places with higher food prices. Diners and the like often don't make much over minimum wage. Try making a decent wage at a place like a Waffle House. Great greasy diner food a a low cost, which means the waitstaff make nil in tips unless they make it up in volume. Some places also force waiters to pay for dine and dashers. The legality of this is questionable but it definitely happens.

The solution is to remove the tipping minimum wage. If customers then want to provide a tip above and beyond that wage level for exceptional service, fine, but removing the tipping minimum wage would allow for more stable wages, would improve the bottom end of the wages, help with lower hours, etc. This way it removes the arbitrary lower wages that might come from discrimination, foreign eaters, management issues, etc. Prices would go up everywhere, normalizing the costs.

Proportional voting or a move to a parliamentary type of electorate would help these issues and allow for more voices to be heard. There's also the fact that more populous states have less representation in the House than do less populous states due to the limits imposed on the number of Representatives due to space requirements. This is problematic. Add to that the Citizen's United verdict that lifted campaign contribution limits on corporations while still enforcing them on individuals and I think I've made my point that our Democracy is in trouble without even touching the malfeasance by the actual political actors of either party.

The real problem though is that the middle class, the foundational aspect of a functional democratic process is being hollowed out.

When you look at the fact that money is considered speech and the top .001 of the US makes as much every year as the bottom 80% of the country there is no way that even the amalgamated voices of the bottom 80% could hope to have the same political sway as those with money and this divide is only getting worse.

Education is a poor classification of Americans, except for the fact that it generally correlates that the higher education you achieve the more likely you are to have higher income. Obviously your position of negative value degrees are the exception, however I'd be less likely to think that the wealthy are getting these poor degrees as are the poor. The wealthy can just write/ghost write their books and have them immediately be New York Times bestsellers without a single person other than themselves buying the book.In fact this is a common trick. The poor are generally less educated than the wealthy and this leads to an information imbalance that would prevent people from going into poor degrees instead of fields in demand like nursing, math, computer science, etc.

I'm sure many people on this board know someone stuck in a poorly paid IT helpdesk job because they got a Bachelors in IT or something else that didn't lead to money.

!wq

Jeff Bezos takes a salary and his income isn't tied to stock.

The only way to save our democracy is by putting in policies that will harm the wealthy aristocracy of the US. The other alternative is war and death that impacts the wealthy, as history has shown time and again. Blood or money, it's their choice.

5 year survival rates vary by the type of cancer, while cancers like leukemia, prostate, and breast cancer have made progress, most of those survival rate numbers are based on catching the cancer early, which, unfortunately most aren't caught early leading to a poor prognosis, my prognosis for example is 5% overall survival for 5 years with a significant drop off after 3 years. The survival rate is also heavily dependent on comorbidities, or other things that impact your health, this can leave things like surgery off the table.

Another fun fact is that we really still suck at cancer treatment because we don't know how it functions, and as previously stated there's over 100 different types of cancer, each with their own mechanisms and subtypes.

So to your main point, no unless there's some massive breakthrough in immunotherapy that's pan-cancer responsive for most patients (right now immunotherapy only works for roughly 20-30% of patients), the costs aren't going to go up dramatically as the primary option is surgery if it's early and if it's late you're probably still going to be dead within 5 years. The number of patients surviving each year only goes up by about roughly 2% per year.