Was it also sponsored by the “I want my kids to have a better life than me” crew who then complains about kids having it too easy these days?
I want them to have it better and easier. But an easier life, not just an easy childhood that doesn’t prepare them for their inevitable crushing adulthood.
I want the opposite tbh, kids just don’t appreciate it. Send them to the mines first, and then give them an easy adulthood.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I’d be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they’re given by adults, they understand early on they’ve been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
And what a righteous 15 years of uneducated adulthood it’ll be before they die of black lung.
The ones that survive will have it good. It’s like in the movie 300 when they send their kids into the forest. The mines is how you separate the wheat from the chaff
Chaff is responsible for all the faults in society. We need a wheats only country.
better and easy are not the same thing
You man as in expensive and more difficult aren’t the same thing?
I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They’re just there for the paper that’ll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn’t care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn’t fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids’ problem
While I agree in theory, I’m not really sure there’s much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately “lower their standards” (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can’t legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can’t expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we’re kind of at an impasse.
That’s why the only way forward that anyone’s figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
It also reinforces the class system. ‘elite’ employers won’t even look at you if you don’t come from an ivy or a top 5/10 school.
and there are fewer and fewer of these ‘elite’ jobs to go around, hence the paranoia among the upper middle classes that their children will have zero future if they don’t get into an ivy.
There is a lot that can be done in practice. One, employers are asking for degrees because they can. If you lower the number of graduates and they can’t get them without higher pay, they will stop. Two, you could put a price on the degree, e.g. higher minimum wage for positions requiring a degree to make employers pay for the extra education.
So the higher minimum wage is already a thing in some countries (e.g. Germany, where degrees are also mostly free) and there is still the trend of many more ppl. studying.
In general, our world is getting more complicated and we live longer. So i dont really see the problem of more education?
More education is a balance of costs and benefits. There is no harm in even a supermarket cashier having a collage degree. God knows our democracies could use more educated voters. But in many professions, it is not worth the cost. The same knowledge could be gained by a few months of on the job training. If employers are really willing to pay more for those degrees like in Germany than that is fine. But I am pretty sure in some places, people are asking for degrees not because they are needed (worth the cost), but because people with degrees are available cheaply.
After all, if the degrees were worth their price to employers, and the employers paid for them adequately, student loans wouldn’t be an issue.
I agree, but there is things we can move towards, but some are more… radical solutions.
I think the Swiss do something where after a certain point in the education pipeline (Age 16?) they decide either university or vocational school.
I think the ratio is 20-80.
If the decision is made for you (via being evaluated by the institutions in charge of the students) it definitely would be filled with bribes and scandals where the rich try to subvert it.
But if that wasn’t a problem I think it would definitely help university degrees “matter” again and it would be more feasible to make free for those who pursue it.
Again this requires a whole restructuring-- and would not see results for atleast a generation-- and red-lining would potentially have very visible effects on this depending on how its done.
Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
What makes you think they aren’t already?
The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn’t really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn’t continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem… that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same “We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years”. Same as most “Banning guns won’t stop gun violence” people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
At no point does the comment say your government shouldn’t pay off loans. It sounds more like they want the perfect and the good.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to “should we forgive student loans” are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It’s a B.
In conversations I find it’s best to operate with a positive view of the person I’m talking to. Rather than assuming intent, I go with what they’ve said and hope for the best until I know otherwise.
You assumed Screen_Shatter disagreed with loan forgiveness, even though they didn’t say that in their comment. Happily, the Screen_Shatter replied to you, and they agreed with it! It turns out you have something in common! Just because they have other ideas doesn’t mean they disagree on this one.
Assuming Screen_Shatter disagreed was a mistake and it made the conversation less pleasant. Just like telling someone:
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and …
Lemmy is a small community. Assume the best about folks on here and help make it more welcoming. Hopefully it’ll grow.
Yeah. I prefer to operate under the assumption that people are at least trying to have a conversation. Rather than just walking around spewing non sequitors. If someone feels they were misinterpreted, they can reply and clarify… rather than get angry that people interpreted what they wrote rather than what they were thinking. That is, again, how you have a conversation.
Lemmy is a small community.
STRONG disagree. Lemmy is a small (for the modern internet) userbase. Not a community. A community is one where you regularly get to know others and… communicate. Lemmy, like basically all modern social media, is people shouting into a void. Hell, Lemmy is on the worse end of that since so many of us came from reddit where all that matters is looking for keywords and writing the right canned/meme response to get the most updoots.
Think about it this way: How often have you actually interacted with someone and thought “I want to get to know that person better” or even “Hey, it is so and so. I wonder how the event they were talking about went?”. I personally have a few new internet friends from Mastodon funny enough. But Lemmy? We reddit up in here.
And… you know a great way to never make those connections? By assuming nobody is communicating or responding to anyone else and considering every comment to be made in a void.
I’ll also refrain from pointing out the difference between clarifying intent and doubling down or how often chuds have used this very same “assume the best of everyone” to spread hate over the decades of the modern internet.
Same as most “Banning guns won’t stop gun violence” people.
This one doesn’t fit your argument. It might affect gun violence, but you’re ignoring the fact that people have access to a ton of ways of killing others.
The main driver of violent crime is poverty and income inequality. The solution is to tax the rich, give everyone fair wages, provide universal healthcare, properly fund schools, etc. All things that are already part of the core liberals stance, and none of those involve introducing unpopular legislation that stomps all over constitutional rights.
But heaven forbid we talk about actually fixing the root causes of violent crime. No, some people just want to ban guns to own the conservatives, and get mad when anyone pokes holes in the plan.
Being pro-gun control is the liberal equivalent of being “pro-life”.
I think the comic strip in the OP was already a sufficient example of a bad faith argument but thanks for adding another one, I guess?
Not really. You can have a huge range of levels of control and regulation on guns. You can’t really have anything between life and not life.
2nd Amendment is pretty clear: shall not be infringed
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn’t an infringement on your right to own a gun. it just makes it so you have a gun that can’t shoot as fast or as much. or do you think automatic weapons should be purchasable? what about heavy weapons like autocannons? should i be able to throw a .50 BMG on the back of my pickup and drive around with it?
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a “well-armed and regulated militia”
Don’t get me wrong, I own guns, I like guns, I believe that guns can be owned safely, and I also believe that there should be more controls on who owns guns and what kinds of guns they own under which circumstances.
I feel like hunting equipment and 22s and stuff like that, semi-automatic handguns, perfectly fine for home ownership, home defense, etc…
But sniper rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers and everything above that basic home gun ownership tier should be placed in a sort of library-type militia system where people can join that militia, be trained in its proper and effective use, and be like a volunteer reserve national guard-type thing.
Kind of like we have volunteer fire departments where tax payers and donations provide them with the tools, but they go through the training so that they can back up the actual paid fire department.
Of course, we should have a gun-owner license.
A licensing system where you have to attend a basic safety course, possibly register for some sort of gun-owner insurance to pay for possible injuries to other people through negligent gun ownership usage, things like that would massively increase the safety factor of guns and massively increase the number of people that are qualified to use a gun in case of emergency and have the training needed to do so effectively.
Further, it’s not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they’re used in committing a crime, the weapon itself can help identify the criminal that committed a crime with the weapon, even if they stole the weapon from you to commit the crime.
I’m all for gun ownership. I just want more responsibility, more accountability, and more maturity about it.
It’s not really cool that any 18-year-old can pop down to a local Walmart and get enough ammunition to blow away a supermarket full of children.
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a “well-armed and regulated militia”
Except that’s not the case. Here is the full text:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If you go through writings from that era you’ll notice that while the vocabulary changes (I’ll get to that), the grammar is virtually identical to modern English.
If you reread the amendment with that in mind, you’ll notice that the first clause doesn’t actually say anything actionable. It’s just an explanation. Isolating the second clause of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” doesn’t change the meaning of what’s being said.
Now, why did the Framers decide to include an explanation into the 2nd Amendment, but not the others? That’s hard to say. But I can at least expand on the context of the first clause.
Remembered how I said that vocabulary has changed? That’s unfortunately what happened with the first clause a bit At the time, the term “regulated” actually referred to being trained and equipped.
The term “militia” has also been distorted over time in common vernacular. What most people commonly think of as a “militia” like the National Guard is more precisely called an “organized militia”. In contrast, an “unorganized militia” refers to all able-bodied men of military age, at the time considered to be ages 16-45. Basically anyone that could be drafted in war.
This is important when you consider US military doctrine up until WWII. In times of peace, the US Army kept a small corp of professional officers, with the intent to draft men into the Army as needed whenever war is declared. Then once war was over, all the drafted men were sent back and the Army was shrunk back down.
This doctrine present a major logistics problem: when war breaks out, you need a lot of fighting men in a short amount of time. To alleviate this problem, you want the draftees (aka the unorganized militia) to already have much of the skills and equipment needed to fight, with one of these critical skills being marksmanship. Hence why the Framers found it necessary to national defense for the populous to be able to have their own weapons.
To change gears, there’s another argument I want to make: gutting and/or removing one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights sets a dangerous precedent. While the 21st amendment exists to nullify the 18th, we’ve never done that to any of the original 10 amendments. If the 2nd is abolished, why why not abolish the 4th, or the 5th, or even the 1st? That’s a dangerous precedent.
And while there’s the stereotypical argument of “you can’t take on jets and tanks with AR15’s”, the US lost Vietnam and Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq too. And that’s with the coffers and supply lines protected by an entire ocean. While a civil war would be horrifying, having that proverbial nuclear button pressures the government into somewhat caring what the populous thinks.
Further, it’s not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they’re used in committing a crime
Unfortunately, with the particular “administration” in charge at the moment I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them having a list of who has weapons. That’d make it easier for them to go after potential armed resistance early, allowing them to go full authoritarian.
Honestly, it’s in our best bet to stop pushing for gun control. That’d get rid of one of the big reasons that more moderate conservatives don’t vote for Democrats. Especially since we could instead put that effort into education, healthcare, labor rights, etc. which would do a much better job of reducing violent crime while making everyone’s lives better. There’s only so much political capital that a candidate and party can have, and it’s best spent where it would do the most good.
I’m not in favor of abolishing any rights accorded to the people by the Constitution.
If anything, I feel like we should have more rights and that the government itself should have fewer rights.
That being said, I also believe that we should open the doors and allow more people to have guns, but we should also attach educational requirements, location requirements, insurance requirements, and third-party checks on who has what gun when because, as you know the unbelievable spate of school shootings has shown, irresponsible gun ownership is one of the primary causes of death in what should be the richest and safest country in the world.
Implementing these checks would not infringe upon the rights of gun owners, it would expand them, it would allow bump stocks, silencers, fully automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, landmines, tanks, surface-to-air missiles…
I literally could not give the first fuck over who has what weaponry as long as there is a reasonable, sane, and balanced check on how that weaponry can be used, and who has oversight on it.
The bigger issue is that we have irresponsible gun ownership and because of one clause in the Bill of Rights and how it is interpreted, these continued escalations of murders and travesties are happening so often that a school shooting is barely even front page news at this point.
That is incredibly terrifying, and sad.
We should do something about it because we are a sane society, and one of the best things that we can do about it is to institute licensing, registration, insurance, education, and taking weaponry above the level of self-defense and placing them in places where people can responsibly monitor their access, where they can actually be used and enjoyed for what they are, but they are not casually lying around unguarded by negligent parents and made available to disgruntled teenagers.
Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you’re a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I’m hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It’s ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in “Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field.”
The solution, as always, is a land value tax and UBI. Don’t need to fret over needing an education to live comfortably if you can already afford and place to live and food.
I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of “fuck you; got mine.”
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we’d still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford.
How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That’s why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But… if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount… well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else’s. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are ‘below’ him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He’s a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn’t sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are ‘no good jobs’. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is ‘below’ them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.
We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.
Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a world that’s less harsh to people who do so!
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.
I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that’s setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!
For me, I do kind of think that if someone paid and then forgiveness happened, they ought to be at least partially compensated if they have any history of being low income. They could have put their loan payments into something else but they didn’t so they’d kind of end up screwed over by their slavishly responsible bill paying.
That said: its stupid to not want broad student loan forgiveness because the student loan crisis is literally damaging the economy. Its hurting everyone, even people who already paid their loans off.
I’m somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That’s basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower’s possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
I, somewhat, feel you. My hang up is federal loans are often s pittance
Maybe my FAFSA has the wrong code(at this point, for my oldest). Maybe I should have lied about my assets? I haven’t done my research, but it did not seem like my lack of home or non-beater factor in
Debt itself has a history of forgiveness. Western Societies could benefit from being more forgiving imo. 30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal, but thats a lot of credit debt today.
30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal
Are you talking of a specific instance? Because, we do have anti-usery laws.
We also have anti trust laws, but yet we have tech monopoliies and an FCC thats done nothing for a decade
That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
“If they cure cancer after I beat the shit out of it, I’ll have to beat it up again and possibly kill it this time. Who the fuck cured the twat of the injuries I gave him anyway? I thought we hated cancer?”
Read all the comments🧵. Nobody mentioned that higher education was free in the 🇺🇲 until a racist made it costly for colors to attend.
Changed the link, since folks had difficulty trickling to the sources.🥁
made it costly for colors to attend
Are you sure that’s the right link? The Wikipedia page talks about a law that mandates a permit for carrying firearms.
changed the link so if folks want to verify sources they can.
Are you sure you linked the right bill? The bill in uour second link is about public carrying of firearms in California.
Refresh🧵(🔄). Even explained why.
Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford, that is on you.
You don’t need to cure cancer, you need to be able to prevent it in the first place.
Ofc this is following the metaphor, for actual cancer you need both.
For student loans you need to fix the system, higher education in Europe is free, but it really isn’t, you pay for your education over your lifetime by earning more money with your higher education and thus paying more in taxes and social security.
Ofc it’s not a perfect system, but much better than having young idiots be purposely exposed to predatory lending.
Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
Yeah I don’t think this covers the situation as much as it’s a nice feel good story.
Imagine for a second you are relatively poor, you go to a state school or community college in order to afford it. You have loans, but they are small.
Now imagine you’re upper middle class, you go to a private or out of state school and take loans out for a much much larger amount than the other person, with the expectation that you’re getting more value for your money (let’s ignore the labyrinth there for a second – this is something many people believe and believing it, for some, makes it true).
Now, both loans are forgiven
Youve succeeded in making the rich richer, giving them both the higher valued education and all of their money back.
Or imagine you’re that poor student but you’re smart: you got a grant or scholarship making your loans nonexistent, but only if you go to the state school.
Once again, forgiving loans makes the already wealthy person significantly more wealthy and does nothing to benefit the poorer person.
Yes, of course, there’s a wide range of reasons a person might go down either route, and I’m absolutely certain there are many millions of people who have gotten loans way above their wealth in order to go to a better school and jump out of poverty (or whatever). This comic ignores the nuance.
In the cancer analogy, this would be a poor person dying or otherwise experiencing terrible health problems because they couldn’t get the care they needed, then when a cure is developed, only administering it to the people who could afford care to begin with (ie american health care)
Did you voluntarily give yourself cancer for odds at a better and less laborous job?
Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
Not at all, but loan forgiveness wasn’t mentioned in the comic. It’s just putting a bandaid on a capitalized educational system that should not be for making money but rather a societal investment into our betterment. Id keep my loans I have left and vote for free education any day of the week if we had the option. (Of course I wouldn’t say no to both) But I think some people were trying to use loan forgiveness to breach the doors of free education.
