thatjsguy

Do you run out of toilet paper often?

So who was losing 20 years ago when you could pay for school with a summer job?

But who sets the price of tuition? The Boards of Regents/Governors/Trustees. Tuition used to be cheap _even at brand-name schools_.

Absolutely, but if we have to deal with the burden while ensuring future students don’t have to suffer (because let’s face it: short of Jesus Christ coming back and demanding it, I don’t see private loan forgiveness in our future), I’d rather do that. I just want SOMEONE to have a break. It doesn’t have to be me.

So I dated a 41-year-old. He went to school about 15 years before I did. Know how much student loan debt he has? Zero. Zilch. Nada. In the amount of time it takes to reach the age necessary to acquire a learner’s permit, we inflated the cost of education into the stratosphere.

Education used to be affordable. It is absolutely not impossible to go back. I’m curious to know how long you think education has been this unaffordable, because it’s a pretty new phenomenon. I’m therefore confused why it’s so hard to imagine a world where education is reasonably-priced.

Taxation has been around forever. Society gets to vote and decide how to divide up shared resources. I’m perfectly fine with tax dollars going to education (coupled with drastically-reduced tuition, like it used to be a short couple decades ago). I’m curious why everyone thinks it’s so impossible to have affordable education, when not even a generation ago we actually had it in the US.

What if we just like... paid for school with taxes like literally every other country? (Trust me, it shouldn’t cost as much as it does to get a degree. I promise it can be and, in fact, used to be affordable.)

The electorate will do what it wants. If people keep electing terrible reps, term limits don’t stop that, it just stops that one particular bad rep and replaces them with another. Similarly, we have some awesome Michigan House members who would be fantastic again, but they’re term-limited and have to run for something else to continue to serve. It’s sad.

Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. I’m sorry you had to pay off your loans. I’m paying about $100,000 myself. But even if I didn’t get amnesty, I’d rather not have one more graduate who, like me, has sincerely considered whether simply being dead would be easier to deal with. And there are a lot of people like that. I’d rather be in debt forever if it means that subsequent multitudes can be free of the burden I carry. At least someone gets some relief.

We did this in Michigan. It doesn’t work. It’s an attractive platform item, but what ends up happening is lots of turnover means it’s easier for lobbyists to sway candidates. You also just lose institutional knowledge. And guess what? We have term limits and an entirely new governor still poisoned an entire town full of kids.

Term limits don’t work.

Missing the point? My point is that a little trash on a riverbank pales in comparison to the large-scale environment destruction being committed every day by giant companies. Provide the homeless with food and shelter instead of worrying about some minimal pollution.

I mean, I’m angry at a lot of people, legislators included. There’s plenty of anger to around..

People are afraid of rightwing ideologues on the Supreme Court because it means that certain cases might be reasoned from a point of view that is based less on sound legal philosophy and more on personal beliefs from the 1800s.

I live in Michigan, where PFAS are being found in water supplies all over the state. Companies did and still do dump poisonous chemicals into the environment, and day by day certain alphabet soup agencies give them more and more license to do so. We can talk about some garbage along a river bank after we prosecute large companies for knowingly poisoning entire swaths of land and bodies of water for decades, considering the scale on which they can harm people and the resources they have to avoid doing so.

It’s not, but this argument comes up for absolutely everything Scandinavian countries do: universal healthcare? America’s too big. Prison reform? America’s too big. Not treating poor people like garbage? America’s too big. Oftentimes there isn’t even any reasoning behind why America’s size would be a problem, which is a good clue that the argument is bunkum.

I’m totally fine eating meat, but readily admit that I could never actually butcher an animal (and I don’t think that’s inconsistent). Anyway, how long do hens live? Could you let them wander around as pets?

Plenty of people feel the pain, but do you really think this Congress gives two shits about regular people?

Internment camps are a very real and valid reason to be afraid of China...

Huge citation needed, if for no other reason than this is consistently used to justify cutting welfare programs for people who actually can’t afford things like health insurance or food. “The poor can’t manage money” has been a popular method of keeping people poor for hundreds of years.

Who said you can’t do that with pen and paper?

Prove it.

I truly hope people treat you better than you would like to treat other people.

...why would you give them 10% equity?

Because they’re taking on a gigantic risk too?

We the People? This is why voting is important, but I’m afraid that even if everyone participated, most people still condone treating prisoners like crap. “Othering” really helps justify it in people’s minds: “oh, it’s fine to treat them poorly because they’re monsters, and everyone knows only Bad People go to prison”. Never mind that a lot of prisons are stuffed full of nonviolent drug offenders whose only crime was possessing a plant and maybe being the wrong skin color.

We have a long way to go. Treating our inmates better requires Americans to have some semblance of compassion, and considering how we can’t even agree that everyone should be able to see a doctor and not die or go bankrupt from an infection, I have sincere doubts that we will ever make things better for prisoners in our lifetimes.

No? It just means they can access it. Encryption turns plaintext into ciphertext; it says nothing about the security thereof. I can ROT13 encrypt a message. Just because you can easily use cryptanalysis and read my message doesn’t make it any less encrypted.

As someone who has administrated both, I’d rather manage 10 Postgres instances than one Jenkins box. No question.

Edit: I should expound. Jenkins seems like it has a lot of clunky moving parts. It all works, and I’d rather use it than anything else, but it’s kind of like IKEA furniture: you use it because you have to, not necessarily because you want to.

It’s also incredibly difficult to automate. I can configure Postgres with a config file or two and easily use Ansible to get the exact same instance every time. Jenkins has to be dragged into Automation Alley kicking and screaming. I partially blame this on the fact that Jenkins has nontrivial amounts of configuration that’s done via GUI. I approach a long-running Jenkins instance with the same fear and dread I approach a Windows box that hasn’t been restarted in six months. I.e. the box is now a snowflake and trying to make it reproducible and automated is going to be a bad time.

I could go on, but as a devops critter, Postgres wins every time.

To be fair, I don’t think this is intentionally bad privacy-wise. I think that, uh, a lot of the JavaScript set doesn’t actually know how to write code that doesn’t involve uploading shit to websites. When all you have is a hammer...

I don’t know. I mean, the gesture is clear, but at the end of the day, all you’ve done is spent a lot of money to send them a delicious (if admittedly risqué) chocolate treat!

Good. Either all religions are fine in public space, or none of them are.

I visited a few years ago. Never again. Coming out of our BART station was like stepping into some third-world nation (no offense to third-world nations): garbage everywhere, homeless people struggling to live, cops carefully watching for gang violence to break out. Meanwhile, a block away, someone was getting a $50 basic men’s haircut.

I once walked down Mission St and for blocks the whole thing was like some kind of homeless bazaar. Two women were fighting at one point, and I passed a gentleman in a doorway who I’m pretty sure was dead (he eventually moved, but he was skin and bones..)

Something is terribly, terribly wrong in the Bay Area, and I’m unfortunately not surprised that it continues to get worse. I refuse to ever go back.