lostmymind66

"What policy change that could be implemented would do anything about the societal belief of college = job?"

We stop federally subsidizing student loans. This will reduce the overall cost of universities, because they won't be relying on instant government money and the universities will be responsible if the student defaults.

It will be in their best interest to push out students that actually succeed and have a chance at paying the money back.

This will not fix the problem with colleges pumping out useless degrees. They got their money up-front, don't have any consequences, and the taxpayers get to foot the bill.

Why not fix the root of the problem? This solution will only serve to enrich the universities and not get them to change their behavior.

We really should be punishing many countries in Asia, like China and India for the amount of pollution they are spewing into the air. They get a free pass because they are 'developing'.

This really just sounds like a money grab to me. If we really want to fight climate change, we should be pouring money into technologies that replace fossil fuels, like nuclear energy.

"Furthermore, nearly half of those surveyed felt that the use of technology such as video conferencing had negative effects on their social connections with colleagues."

I've been working remotely for over a decade and I agree with this. If you are single and get all of your social connections from work, you will feel lonely and remote work might not be for you.

I have a family and get to spend more time with my daughter and I go to local meetups regularly to maintain a social life/meet new people.

Remote work also allowed me to travel the world and meet people from all over the place.

"U.S. abuses and provocations, (Iran?)"

I don't consider getting our drone bombed out of the sky and backing down from a missile strike a 'provocation'. It's much better than our previous administration's idea, which is to give them money to go away and hope they don't use it on nuclear weapons against us.

"The U.S. doesn't really care about human rights, or its own abuse of them"

Sure it does. There are stories every month about people in our military getting prosecuted for abuses. I don't think I've heard one story about this happening in China or Saudi Arabia.

"so you'd be voting for posturing"

It's not all or nothing. Nothing the US is doing even compares to the horrors of China. It's good to have a candidate against this.

I seriously doubt this will ever happen. Trump is the only president that would even broach the idea of punishing China. If a Democrat gets into office in 2020, it will be business as usual and the problems will be kicked down the road, like they have been with Iran.

"especially considering that there was no class system when people were painting caves in Chauvet, nor was there one for the 20,000 years after then"

You're right. The strongest/most aggressive person won. While there was no class systems, there was most likely considerably more bloodshed. I don't think we want to go back to a world like this.

"Capitalism is even more short lived."

I sure hope not. Forced egalitarian systems usually end up with everyone poor and a few wealthy people in government. I have this theory that the people suggesting these sorts of changes either think they are going to be at the top or just hate their life and want to watch the world burn.

While capitalism has its flaws, I don't really think any other system comes even close to pulling so many people out of poverty.

"if we are carpenters turning $150 of wood and material into $200 every hour, we keep our created wealth as wages in the beginning of the day, at the end of the day we are working only for the heir."

Nothing is stopping you from advertising your services and charging what you think you deserve for your services and keeping all the profits. That's capitalism for you.

"We work and create wealth, they expropriate surplus labor time from us"

You may be creating value, but wealth isn't comprised of just work. You act as if most companies are providing no value on top of your work, which just isn't the case.

Yes, yes he did. He made an existing idea better, which is why we know his name today and attribute him to the invention.

Blatant gender bias is not the way to reduce gender bias.

"There's enough wrong with the current financial system to make it worth trying new things even if they don't work out"

Is it really though when 'not working out' means that someone loses their entire life savings?

All of these cryptocurrency experiments eventually point out the reason centralized banks were invented in the first place. Usually through major thefts and loss of assets.

Cocaine was also 'medicine' and was regularly prescribed as such.

This was an American and not ethnically Chinese.

I have also met a few extremely left-leaning/socialist Americans that were part of my meetup group a few years back that loved China's system and praised it as better than the US in every way. All concerns about brutality, taking away rights, and an authoritarian regime were waved off as something beneficial and required to maintain a good society.

About 20 years ago, I worked for a computer store that regularly hired Chinese immigrants, because the owner was himself Chinese. One woman would not even allow me to mention the Chinese government in front of her. She was afraid that they were somehow listening to her and that her family back home would be punished. She had been in the US for at least 8 or 9 years at this point.

I'm glad the realities of the oppressive Chinese government are finally coming to light. 10 years ago, I remember having discussions with a friend about China (an American) and he was convinced that the oppression just wasn't happening and all a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Aside from the blatant bigotry in this article toward the bottom, the article is correct. Most people need rules and if you are too lenient, you will have people abusing them.

I've been studying multiple Chinese dialects over the years and I think the one thing I want in a language learning application is a direct path to success.

I start on lesson A and continue to lesson Z. Too many are just a collection of random words and phrases.

This is the direct result of 20+ years of piracy. Most companies realized they not only didn't want to have to deal with having to re-create serial number generation systems every 6 months, but also the attorney fees involved in chasing bigger organizations making money on it.

SaaS is a great solution: a more steady and reliable income stream and no piracy concerns.

"Startups founded by all-female teams, despite efforts to level the playing field for female entrepreneurs, raised just 2.2% of venture capital investment in 2018."

I find these sort of statistics misleading. Why were the others unable to raise venture capital?

This is ridiculous. Universities duped students into over-paying for essentially worthless degrees. Now, the taxpayers get to foot the bill and the Universities pocketed the money.

What we really need is a complete reform of the student loan system.

"I loved driving when I did the two hour prime deliveries. But as they hired on more people, it became harder to get work. I had to pay to get someone to get me shifts,"

This will always happen. As something becomes more popular, the supply of drivers increases, the demand decreases, and it becomes more difficult to make money as easily. This is natural to any market.

In 1998, you could make over 6-figures if you knew simple HTML and could throw a website together. Because there was a rush of people learning HTML, you now need to have a much bigger skill set to make that wage.

Driving is not that difficult. Anyone with a license and a good record can do it, which qualifies the majority of adults in the US. I wouldn't expect this job to pay that much.

The only reason Facebook is doing this is so they can track your purchases and mine even more of your data.

This reminds me of what WeChat is doing in China, where most purchases are made and tracked by the government from this app. I don't even know if you can use cash there anymore.

With the amount of information Zuckerberg has on the US population, he shouldn't ever be allowed to run for president while still running Facebook.

"I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to society"

The whole idea of open source is to share your code with the world without expecting payment. These developers can just as easily release a commercial app with appropriate licensing.

"Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy."

Once someone gets used to free, they will be shocked when you decode to give them a bill one day. In some sense, the open source community has devalued their own worth by giving software away for free for decades.

It's a bit like the copyright infringement discussions I see so often on HN: Most of these companies would have never paid for open source in the first place, so we shouldn't really consider it a loss of money/revenue.

The parent was mentioning telling entrepreneurs this advice, who are interested in starting a business and making money.

"Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money."

It's not. But you will only really ever get to work on what you want when you are making enough money to quit your day job.

Contributing to open source can be a great experience. It can also be very taxing, especially when you have a family/other obligations outside of work.

"literally all products have a value so if you price it right then people will pay for it"

All products do have a value. However, you need to compete against easy and free with piracy...which is virtually impossible to win and unfair..especially if you aren't the person that created the product in the first place.

It's probably because of the work culture. Many people won't leave work at the end of the day until the boss leaves.

"You are making an unsubstantiated assumption that the cost of complying with regulations is higher than the overhead of costs that come with running an illegal drug manufacturing/selling operation."

The proof is the cost of legal weed, which is sometimes double the cost of the black market prices, due to regulations and taxes.

"Also, your point was proven factually wrong, as pot is way cheaper in legal states and is way safer, thanks to regulations."

Safer? Maybe. Cheaper? Hardly. You have provided zero proof and your arguments just don't make a lot of sense.

"Which is what they got. But a lot of places, primarily right-leaning, chose to simply continue banning pot stores and deliveries within their jurisdictions."

Yeah, well, this isn't what we're talking about. Left-leaning people wanted pot legalized and regulated and didn't seem to grasp that this means an increase in prices.

"Of course, reality doesn't quite work that way. Black market sales are still pretty strong in right-leaning parts of CA. The pot sales are thus still happening there, but they aren't seeing the tax revenues that their more liberal counterparts are seeing."

As stated in the articles I linked to, the black market is thriving in many parts of CA..it has nothing to do with right-leaning areas.

"If you provide people with easy, convenient, legal methods to consume the content in a way that works for them, for a price they find reasonable, then they overwhelmingly won't resort to illegal means."

I disagree. Music is cheaper and easier to buy than ever with things like iTunes and the various streaming services and music piracy is still rampant.

Bars have very slim margins and owners will most likely never pay for these these streams, regardless of price, if they can easily get away with it.

Left leaning people want more government regulation and then expect pot legalization with no regulations. Reality doesn't quite work this way.

One of the arguments was that it would being in all sorts of tax dollars that could be used for great things. Tax Dollars=more expensive pot. So from this perspective, it worked as intended, even though many of the supports may not have actually thought it through.

My argument may be 'all over the place', but you seemed to have followed it pretty well.

"How exactly would legalization hurt Mexico? Look at Portugal to see how we should all move towards dealing with drugs and addiction as a health problem instead of a criminal problem."

Portugal didn't have cartels running entire sections of the country. Drugs may be part of the problem with Mexico, but the cartels are too powerful and legalizing them will not solve the corruption problem..and the violence will continue.

"The violence in the 1930s WAS caused by the prohibition, sure it had lasting effects but ending prohibition was still the right move."

It was. But we had a corruption problem as well. Criminals don't just go away overnight. There are plenty of other ways to make money, once you have money, power, and influence. Legalizing drugs will not solve the corruption problem in Mexico.

"Can you cite the rise of black market marijuana in California? The market is doing well and bringing in good tax revenue in every state I've read about."

A simple google search:

https://reason.com/video/californias-new-recreational-mariju...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-crac...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurphy/2019/04/04/cannabis...

"As for the opioid crisis, the issue wasn't that people one day decided they wanted to get hooked on them. The issue was they had pain or were recovering from a surgery and were being prescribed highly addictive medication that was being pushed by pharmaceutical companies without proper warning or care. Marijuana could have been given in these cases and it without the same problems of addiction."

Who decides to get hooked on anything? Some people get addicted to things faster than others. No matter how many warnings you give someone, it will happen...and the company will get sued for millions of dollars.

The cigarette companies are a good example of this. Cigarettes have been know to cause cancer for 50+ years. Yet, we will have people smoking, getting cancer, and suing these companies for millions of dollars.

"but it has turned large swaths of Mexico, particularly, into war zones"

Legalizing drugs will not fix the problem. The cartels run the government now. Do you actually think they will just pick up their things and go home? The violence will continue and they will move onto the next, illegal, lucrative product to sell.

The US in the 1930s had the same problem. It was only stopped by stamping out corruption and outright the murdering of criminals. I don't see Mexico having even a small handle on corruption in the next 50 years.

The Opioid crisis is going on right now..and this is with legal drugs. Drug companies are being sued for millions and millions of dollars.

From one side, I'm told legal adults should be able to do what they want with their bodies. From the other, when bad things happen..like addiction, I'm told it's the fault of the company that made and sold the drugs. This doesn't make any real sense if we are trying to legalize drugs. It will only increase costs as the result of liability insurance and other risks that are now involved.

Legalizing MJ in California is turning into a failure. The problem is that companies that sell legal drugs need to pay taxes and go through many more regulations than the guy down the street selling it. The end result is higher costs for legal drugs.

Legal drug companies selling MJ are being put out of business because the black market is thriving as a result of lower costs and better availability (which will always happen with black markets). The legal market is only helping the black market because there are many people that are using MJ now that otherwise wouldn't have when it was illegal.

When the legalization of MJ was proposed, the proponents (including many people here on HN) said that there would be no black market after it was legalized. This never made sense to me and now I'm being proven correct. The black market is not only there, it's thriving.