Generally speaking, the statement “Tankies made the X face the wall” is true for all X. Anarchists, monarchists, fascists, capitalists, Mensheviks, Jews, Doctors, poets, authors, musicians, peasants, soldiers, factory workers, Marxists, Bolsheviks, wives and children of all of the above, and eventually even Stalinists.
I feel like libertarians would love the concept of FOSS and decentralization, and I don’t think anyone would argue they skew left.
Yup, there has always been a large libertarian contingent in the OSS community.
Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they’re Marxists. They’re also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.
I don’t know why, in these discussions, “it’s all the fault of corporations!” is treated as though it was a serious argument.
Corporations do one thing: they give us what we want. What we demand, a lot of the time. The fundamental problem is us, corporations are just the abstraction we use to fulfill our needs and desires. Before there were companies, people fought and scrambled for wealth and then displayed it as lavishly as possible, it’s just that the means of acquiring and then using that wealth were different. Read up on Romans hosting banquets where slave boys were fed to eels for entertainment while guests fed on flamingos stuffed with hippo brains with a garnish of tiger testicles or whatever, or the Chinese or Indian or Mesoamerican equivalent, and then explain again how all our problems are due to modern corporations.
Haha, that escalated quickly. “You don’t want a one-time forgiveness of student loans for a particular batch of students which does nothing to solve the systemic issues leading to skyrocketing education costs? Clearly you just hate students and want to kill them and probably eat them!!&!&”
Let me guess: you have a student loan. Well, I’d be okay with forgiving it, after we take care of the core problems so we don’t end up right back here again in 15-20 more years. And I’d be willing to bet than by that time, after your loan is forgiven and you start stacking cash, you’ll suddenly see the big picture and be firmly on the other side of the issue. You don’t strike me as a terribly warm and empathetic person.
You decided that the financial expense of saving a life is worth condemning a patient to death
Yes. And if you have $10 in your pocket, you prioritized your own well-being over people dying from hunger, war or disease. If you drive any car other than a Mercedes Benz C Class (apparently the safest car ATM) then you prioritized other factors (cost, style, whatever) over your own safety. Oh what, you “can’t afford” a C Class? Don’t tell me you’re prioritizing other things (having a home bigger than the back seat of a Mercedes Benz C Class, eating good food, wearing something other than sack cloth) over your own safety? Statistically, you’re condemning yourself to a shorter life expectancy by misallocating your resources!
But really, by your logic, what you should be doing is selling your house, your car, your shoes and whatever you typed this message on, and donating all the proceeds to the GoFundMe for John Doe in Birmingham Alabama, so I guess that’s beside the point.
We live in a real world. Suggesting that we can never compromise our principles by allowing any person to die from a fatal disease is just ridiculously naive. And taking a stand on your silly and unrealistic principles to conceal the fact that you just really want a cash handout is sleezy as hell.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
I’m not.
But whether you are or not, I’m not interested in debating with you.
Then you definitely don’t have to reply.
Sure, once it becomes clear that students being debt-free on graduation is a benefit to society, I’m sure voters will scramble to wipe out student debt! That’s why baby boomers, who graduated with very little debt, are such staunch opponents of heavy student loans! /s
Once the pressure is off millennials and gen z, you’ll be able to watch the issue drop right out of public discourse. The focus will shift to housing costs, or health care, or some other topic that directly affects them. That’s just how politics works, especially in the US, where the constant gridlock in congress means that things only get done in a crisis. If you think we young people are just better than the boomers, and we wouldn’t forget to go back and fix the root causes even though we’re not immediately affected anymore…you’re in for disappointment.
If the goal is to help young people graduate with less debt, randomly forgiving large loans has got to be the worst possible approach. That only encourages educational costs to rise, and encourages students to take on ridiculous debts, and thus ends up transferring taxpayer money directly to schools and banks–and the more outrageous the loans and charges of those schools & banks, the more taxpayer money they get. That is legitimately a crazy way to solve the problem! As I said, it’s like giving a drug addict a bunch of heroin. Surely these businesses won’t want even more money, right?
So what do you do instead? Well, just off the top of my head: cap student loans. That’s what Canada does. I applied for a student loan when I went to school there, and I didn’t get to pick an amount. Based on where I was living and the school I was planning to go to, the government just said: “Okay, here’s $N”. It wasn’t that much, something like $6k per term (in the late 00’s).
Since students in that case won’t have access to arbitrary bags of cash, schools that actually want students will have to, you know, lower prices and compete. So my tuition was something like $4-5k per year, not $20k or $80k. I graduated with something like $50k in debt, which I paid off in a few years.
That would be a reasonable first step. Do that first, while you’ve got the political support, and then forgive student loans. Don’t do that first!
Why on earth do you think I’m arguing in bad faith? What do you think my real beliefs & agenda are? Do you know what arguing in bad faith means?
“Sorry about your cancer. We have to let you die so maybe cancer researchers will be motivated to try harder for a permanent cure.”
If the US poured it’s full resources into saving John Doe from Birmingham Alabama, who has cancer, they could probably do it. Of course, then those resources (cash, equipment, researchers & doctors) couldn’t be used to help other people, or to perform research towards an eventual cure for everybody. It would be a bad use of resources, right?
You don’t let John Doe die because you want his death to motivate researchers. But you only have a certain amount of resources, and you have to allocate them in a way that makes sense, and pouring everything into a temporary solution that only affect this one dude (or one batch of student loan recipients) at the cost of a long-term, permanent solution to the root causes of the issue is just…a bad idea.
Imagine if researchers said: We’re working on a cure for cancer, and in the process we’ve generated a bunch of unobtanium. We can use it as a one-time cure for a bunch of current cancer patients, or we can use it to continue further research towards a permanent, universally-available cure. Obviously, if we use it all up now, we’ll be back to square one and have to start generating it again before we can work on a long-term cure. Which would you pick?
“Unobtanium” is political will. If we just do a round of bailouts for current loan-holders instead of addressing the root cause of spiraling education costs, we’re just kicking the can down the road. The pressure will be off, a whole generation of 20- and 30-somethings will lose interest in the issue, and it’ll fall off the political radar for another few decades, by which time GenZ+ will be well and truly fucked, since educational costs are only going up and up.
The absolute worst way to address rising education costs is to encourage a bunch of students to take ridiculously large loans and then wipe them off the books. That means: 1) schools can raise prices to the roof because they know students have access to mountains of cash from loans, and 2) students won’t hesitate to take the loans because they’ll probably just be forgiven eventually. Probably. Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be a millstone around their neck for the rest of their lives…but hey, what choice do they have, that’s just what school costs (because governments make sure students have all the money they need for a bidding war to get in).
So it amounts to just transferring huge piles of taxpayer money directly to overpriced schools and predatory banks, with no plan to stem the flow. It’s like trying to help your drug-addicted friend recover with a one-time gift of a brick of heroin. They’ll feel great for a while, and they’ll love you for it while it lasts, but it’s only going to make the problem much worse in the long run.
This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.
At the same time… People are pretty dumb.
Oh sure, the religious people out there whose deeply-held beliefs don’t affect the way they think or feel or interact with other people are fine! It’s just those people who read the book they believe was composed by God Almighty Himself as a manual for human behavior and let it actually affect their behavior (and votes) that are the problem.
Just for fun, you should take a map of religious belief in the US by region, and overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US, and note the overlap. I think you’ll discover that large coastal urban centers (where religious belief is lowest) are not hotbeds of white supremacism.
I think you’re confusing a bunch of online trolls who pick opinions specifically to get a rise, with real, actual people in the wild.
Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can’t marry!
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences…
Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.
I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.
And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.
Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.
My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”
TBH, I think people are much nicer face-to-face. It’s cathartic to shit on somebody else’s hard work online, but it’d be too awkward in person, so people tend to just be nice.
I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.
In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”
Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”
Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”
There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.
“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”