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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • There’s a lot to be said for community college transfers, testing out of credits etc from a purchaser perspective. While that can help individual students I don’t think it addresses larger problems about rising costs in the academic sector and the fact that high costs make planning and attending colleges a high cost, moderate risk proposition.

    For instance, an ideal college system would reduce need for corporations to request h1b visas

    The level of bureacracy (both for students and institutions) required to maintain so many grant and voucher systems including secondary bureacratic patchworks like H1b visas could all be drastically reduced by subsidizing college tuiton prices across the board to the point where college costs were less of a financial burden.

    One might argue that eliminating tuition costs entirely would pay for itself in reduced bureacratic burden across the government and would make it easier for corporations to retrain employees rather than importing them.


  • Like if you look at how most billionaires since the 80s came into being its almost entirely one strategy:

    1. start with a decent pile of money

    2. Put the money pile on a stock market bet

    3. Manipulate the stock price by lying, cheating, stealing or making a popular product.

    Elon musk is some kind of idiot-savant in manipulating stock prices and then diverting a maximal amount of money away from material product creation. His “money taken” to “physical product created” ratio is just modestly better than elizabeth holmes.

    There is a larger discussion to be had of whether we should allow society to give people that level of power because they’re good at marketing and backroom dealing. Especially since the entire reason we created the entire stock market system was in theory to build more popular products, not to reward skilled stock market manipulators.

    Its sort of salt in the wound that the material value of most of elon’s companies and products are largely dwarfed by the amount of money musk has been awarded by the government.

    Society would probably have been better served by spinning up state owned electric car factories and state owned satellite delivery systems because we could have gotten all the same benefits for a fraction of the price we paid for it and are continuing to pay for.


  • Realistically though, lets set aside unions as they are at best irrelevant to any real discussion of education and at worst simply the subject of cold war hyperfixation and irrational fear.

    What is a real cost saving measure that could be brought to education?

    Technology fees, subscriptions and infrastruction are, for instance, a major cost burden that has arisen in the last 40 years during the course of time where educational costs have skyrocketed. Why don’t I ever see conservatives talking about reducing educational technology costs?

    There is a similar problem with legal and administrative costs as well.


  • What monetary evidence have you seen that makes you think unions are the most expensive barrier to education?

    All the evidence I’ve seen has shown education costs have outpaced even CEO/administrative pay (one of the highest rising costs in society, dwarfing even housing inflation.)

    Chalking it up to unions and union workers (whose pay is often rising at inflation rates or below) seems a bit absurd.

    To use a metaphor its like saying we should address a sinking ship by opening an umbrella on the roof to deflect rain instead of finding and sealing the actual holes. Maybe the rain adds to the water but shouldn’t we be discussing the hole first: rising cost of living and administrative costs.

    The hyperfixation on eliminating unions while ignoring real problems and costs seems less like ‘conservative fiscal responsibility’ and more like ‘2011 Scott Walker corruption ideology’



  • You understood “open borders” is subject to wildly different interpretations yet you still used it because it represents what you want to convey the best: Your personal feelings.

    There’s no way to measure the following as they are weasel words for people’s feelings because they represent goals or thresholds nobody agrees on and people can always say they’re upset about them regardless of measurable outcomes.

    • border patrol ‘adequacy’
    • ‘openness’ of borders
    • ‘mass migration’

    There’s way to measure:

    • legal immigration numbers
    • misdemeanor border crossings
    • costs and results of border enforcement
    • asylum seekers and rejection rates
    • tourist crossings
    • visa types and issues
    • immigration quotas
    • visa and tourist overstays
    • enforcement actions

    Which measurable outcomes are you actually upset about?




  • Excuse me but could you explain what an “open border policy” even is? Are you talking about visas for skilled labor? Is this something to do with migrant seasonal labor? Refugee programs?

    What the fuck are you even talking about? There’s not a single goddamn country in the world that meets the criteria for some definitions of “open borders” and other defitions are met by every single country on earth.

    Supporting or not supporting “open borders” is not a political stance because there’s no meaning to the words, its nonsense.


  • I mean the problem with your critique is its dishonest: prominent right wingers like elon musk promote white genocide conspiricies. Every one of those fake ass conspiricies I mentioned has been stated by a prominent republican.

    In order to “balance the scales” you have to embark on campaign of finding like online commenters or drunk kids on the street to get the same level of insanity of belief on the left. Then you have to pretend like actual prominent people are saying these things on the left. Which they aren’t.

    All you’re doing is saying that you are willing to argue against reality in order to pander to liars and comfort them.