lobby Congress and your local state legislatures to stop cutting funding every chance they get. Fight against privatization and protect teachers Unions so good teachers don't get laid off just because their older and their pay's a bit higher. Demand equal funding for public schools. We spend a lot per student if you look at the average but that funding is incredibly disproportionately allocated thanks to how we use property taxes to fund schools.
was stuff like telling voters they couldn't vote or had to vote on a Wednesday or any one of a number of common voter suppression techniques that work great during a close election. The $250 would go to counter that misinformation campaign and help states get out the vote.
Of course the people who voted this down don't want that because they don't want the 'wrong' people voting.
a bit more gun regulation it's anything but fashionable to hate guns on/.. Nerds love guns. I'm not going to waste time arguing whybut believe you me,/.ers love their guns.
On a side note, there's plenty of people who legitimately fear for their lives, can't or won't handle a gun (or don't want one in the house with their children) but would like very much to keep their abusive ex spouses away from guns. Several of them get killed every year because it's damn near impossible to keep (perfectly legal) guns away from them. Meanwhile an angry, usually testosterone filled man (though occasionally crazy woman) spends the rest of their lives in jail because it's so quick and easy to made a life changing mistake.
I'm just saying we could do with a bit more regulation.
has a cafeteria. Companies put them in because they get you to work through your lunch in exchange for some food (and sometimes not even that, the places I worked just had cheap food, it wasn't free). This'll get shot down. These guys are just fishing for campaign contributions. The restaurants will get outbid by the the mega corps.
turned on? Last I checked EVs get better range without those, and I could see some truck drivers getting screwed by their driver managers into driving without heat or AC to push range...
Which if you ask me kind of lets the cat out of the bag on the NRA's purpose. They're not a gun rights lobby, they're a gun manufacturers lobby. And I don't see them taking kindly to the prospect of just anyone being able to manufacture their own firearms. Yeah, yeah, I know, you can barely shoot 5 rounds before it's ready for the junk heap. But give it 20 years and we'll see. And industry lobbies definitely think long term.
GP's point was that very, very few degrees are useless. We're handing out plenty of STEM degrees. My kid's in nursing right now and she had to fight tooth and nail for a spot in her 300 level courses because there's only space for about half of the qualified applicants in any given year.
Face it, we're underfunding the schools so we could give tax cuts to billionaires (and so those same billionaires can bring in H1-Bs to replace us after claiming there's a shortage of qualifed applicants). As for the loans, those are a symptom of rising tuition brought on by underfunded schools. Not the cause. And you better f'in believe my kid cares about the debt she's accumulating. But what the hell else was she supposed to do? It's all I can do to buy her books, food, healthcare, transportation and everything else needed to keep a young person alive until they can work.
Tuition prices were and always have been restrained by government subsidies. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying so they can go back to the trough for more tax cuts and more H1-Bs. You've been had, and when your kids hit college (assuming you have 'em, statistically you probably do) you're gonna find that out the hard way.
I've got a kid in college right now and you can take your lower standards and stuff it. Getting _in_ isn't so hard. Getting into your 300 level courses is damn near impossible. She barely squeaked in with a 4.0, a few summers of volunteering and a specialty program she did to prep her for the classes. Her workload is nuts. She takes summer _and_ winter courses to cover gen-ed requirements because they loader her with 5-6 full time classes for her major during the year proper.
And this is just a continuation of what she did in high school.
I don't know how anyone could make it in college and work unless they were one of those freaks that gets by on 4 hours sleep no prob. They work the kids like dogs these days. They have too. Thanks to outsourcing H1-Bs College is a requirement for an entry level job now. There's too many qualified applicants for the 300 level courses. Got to weed them out somehow. You could jack up the price more but colleges don't do that because they non-profit. The goal is to educate, not to make money.
should any of those rural counties wish to create their own broadband services Comcast will be happy to send in lawyers to point out that there are state laws explicitly prohibiting municipal broadband services in there area. I mean, "abandoned" implies they'd be left alone...
of such things getting fired. She doesn't live out of her car because she's a little off, she's doing it because she doesn't make enough money to afford a place to live.
People don't expect to be treated this way by a company as large as Amazon in America. You've got it pounded into your skull from birth this is the greatest country on planet earth from day 1. Nobody wants to believe that somebody in America could be taken advantage of to the point where they can't eat, can't afford a place to lay their head and repeatedly injure themselves. I mean... you didn't, did you?
given the productivity raises we've continually had in America. Productivity has doubled in 40 years yet real wages are down 14%. It used to be that as productivity went up pay and standards of living did. Americans should be making _more_ not less, but inflation takes 3-4% right off the bat. It's not surprising that educators would know enough to see this and demand a 3-4% raise to keep pace with inflation.
What _is_ surprising is that labor has gotten so weak that it can no longer demand that as the pie gets bigger they get a share of it. Hell, there was just a new story about how the 1% have finally have as much of the pie as they did right before the Great Depression. That's not a coincidence. We're heading for something nasty if we don't turn back...
that linking to a chart that shows the cost of education climbing doesn't prove anything. I suspect you did that to add credibility to your arguments and make it seem you were citing mathematical statistics that proved your point. That chart literally proves nothing except that costs have gone up. But they don't show _why_ those costs have gone up. The reason, as I mentioned, is that we were hiding the true costs with government subsidies so that people other than the very rich could benefit from a college education.
in the 80s? The spikes didn't happen until the late 90s/early 2000s. I know, because I just missed it and read multiple articles about it in my college's newspaper. Articles written with the full backing of the college's economics department doing research to show what was going to happen when the federal funding cuts that were being proposed started hitting. I remember reading how in 20 years tuition would top $12-$16k for a public university. And here we are 20 years later, I've got a kid in college and sure enough her tuition is $16k (3rd year nursing program).
Again, supply and demand go out the window when government subsidies get involved. There are times when this is a bad thing. Education is not one of those times. We are seeing the effects of what happens when the government pulls back from funding education. It's not that the cost is rising any more than usual. Educating children and young adults was _always_ this expensive. That's why until the government stepped in only the very wealthy went to school. We're going back to those days.
I cover this elsewhere on this thread, but it was cuts to federal subsidies that raised tuition, not loans. Public colleges do _not_ operate in a supply/demand model. They're non profit. And no, the dean's salaries didn't go up that much (football coaches did, but they bring in enough money to pay for it even though none of that goes to players).
Anyone who says loans increase tuition at public non-profit Universities is lying to you to change the narrative and create a straw man to divert attention away from the raiding of the public commons that's been going on for 40+ years.
this is a false narrative used to justify cutting funding. It's a straw man.
The loans were the result of out of control tuition increases. Those increases started when federal funding was slashed. That started with Reagan, continued with Clinton and didn't get any better under Obama.
We were _heavily_ subsidizing colleges to keep tuition low because mega corporations needed trained American workers. Outsourcing and H1-Bs eliminated that need and when that happened they cut funding. We could have stood up to them and kept taxing them to pay for schools but we didn't.
When I was in school. The right wing in America said it would be fine and the kids would just take responsibility and work their way through college like they did (ignoring that they all had higher wages adjusted for inflation and 1/5th the tuition). What drives me nuts is we all knew this was coming and just said fuck it. And all we got for it was some paltry tax cuts that expire.
They've been trained to be, especially the military. How else do you get somebody to rush a machine gun nest. Once their lives and their families lives are threatened by food insecurity they'll cheerfully oppress you. People change when they can't eat.
because it's a completely false sense of security. Fascists couldn't care less about your semi or even full auto rifles. By the time you're at the point where you're considering violence as a solution to Fascism it's much too late. They'll have seized control of the army and the food supply and the army will do what they're told like they always have so long as they've got pay and food. And you will not win against an organized army, let alone a modern one with the backing of the state.
And don't point out the Taliban. We're letting them have that 40%. We got the important parts (the oil pipeline we wanted).
If you want to prevent fascism you need to strip them of their favorite tool for seizing power: poverty. Seriously, look at every single fascist dictatorship and they all started with desperate poverty and an aristocracy that was abusing the working class.
and the only question becomes do we want to regulate encryption like we do firearms. Of course it's not a 1 to 1 comparison. I can't kill someone with ones and zeros. But the point stands. At some point we have to decide what we want to and do not want to regulate and how much.
Also, we absolutely regulate what you can personally manufacture. You can't make a full auto rifle or the parts to convert a semi-auto.
Slashdot Mirror
lobby Congress and your local state legislatures to stop cutting funding every chance they get. Fight against privatization and protect teachers Unions so good teachers don't get laid off just because their older and their pay's a bit higher. Demand equal funding for public schools. We spend a lot per student if you look at the average but that funding is incredibly disproportionately allocated thanks to how we use property taxes to fund schools.
Education, like heathcare, is a right.
was stuff like telling voters they couldn't vote or had to vote on a Wednesday or any one of a number of common voter suppression techniques that work great during a close election. The $250 would go to counter that misinformation campaign and help states get out the vote.
Of course the people who voted this down don't want that because they don't want the 'wrong' people voting.
wasn't there a line about the best way to win elections to be the one that counts the votes.
a bit more gun regulation it's anything but fashionable to hate guns on /.. Nerds love guns. I'm not going to waste time arguing whybut believe you me, /.ers love their guns.
On a side note, there's plenty of people who legitimately fear for their lives, can't or won't handle a gun (or don't want one in the house with their children) but would like very much to keep their abusive ex spouses away from guns. Several of them get killed every year because it's damn near impossible to keep (perfectly legal) guns away from them. Meanwhile an angry, usually testosterone filled man (though occasionally crazy woman) spends the rest of their lives in jail because it's so quick and easy to made a life changing mistake.
I'm just saying we could do with a bit more regulation.
has a cafeteria. Companies put them in because they get you to work through your lunch in exchange for some food (and sometimes not even that, the places I worked just had cheap food, it wasn't free). This'll get shot down. These guys are just fishing for campaign contributions. The restaurants will get outbid by the the mega corps.
turned on? Last I checked EVs get better range without those, and I could see some truck drivers getting screwed by their driver managers into driving without heat or AC to push range...
Which if you ask me kind of lets the cat out of the bag on the NRA's purpose. They're not a gun rights lobby, they're a gun manufacturers lobby. And I don't see them taking kindly to the prospect of just anyone being able to manufacture their own firearms. Yeah, yeah, I know, you can barely shoot 5 rounds before it's ready for the junk heap. But give it 20 years and we'll see. And industry lobbies definitely think long term.
Woosh again!
GP's point was that very, very few degrees are useless. We're handing out plenty of STEM degrees. My kid's in nursing right now and she had to fight tooth and nail for a spot in her 300 level courses because there's only space for about half of the qualified applicants in any given year.
Face it, we're underfunding the schools so we could give tax cuts to billionaires (and so those same billionaires can bring in H1-Bs to replace us after claiming there's a shortage of qualifed applicants). As for the loans, those are a symptom of rising tuition brought on by underfunded schools. Not the cause. And you better f'in believe my kid cares about the debt she's accumulating. But what the hell else was she supposed to do? It's all I can do to buy her books, food, healthcare, transportation and everything else needed to keep a young person alive until they can work.
Tuition prices were and always have been restrained by government subsidies. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying so they can go back to the trough for more tax cuts and more H1-Bs. You've been had, and when your kids hit college (assuming you have 'em, statistically you probably do) you're gonna find that out the hard way.
I've got a kid in college right now and you can take your lower standards and stuff it. Getting _in_ isn't so hard. Getting into your 300 level courses is damn near impossible. She barely squeaked in with a 4.0, a few summers of volunteering and a specialty program she did to prep her for the classes. Her workload is nuts. She takes summer _and_ winter courses to cover gen-ed requirements because they loader her with 5-6 full time classes for her major during the year proper.
And this is just a continuation of what she did in high school.
I don't know how anyone could make it in college and work unless they were one of those freaks that gets by on 4 hours sleep no prob. They work the kids like dogs these days. They have too. Thanks to outsourcing H1-Bs College is a requirement for an entry level job now. There's too many qualified applicants for the 300 level courses. Got to weed them out somehow. You could jack up the price more but colleges don't do that because they non-profit. The goal is to educate, not to make money.
should any of those rural counties wish to create their own broadband services Comcast will be happy to send in lawyers to point out that there are state laws explicitly prohibiting municipal broadband services in there area. I mean, "abandoned" implies they'd be left alone...
of such things getting fired. She doesn't live out of her car because she's a little off, she's doing it because she doesn't make enough money to afford a place to live.
People don't expect to be treated this way by a company as large as Amazon in America. You've got it pounded into your skull from birth this is the greatest country on planet earth from day 1. Nobody wants to believe that somebody in America could be taken advantage of to the point where they can't eat, can't afford a place to lay their head and repeatedly injure themselves. I mean... you didn't, did you?
I mean, at some point occam's razor rings true.
given the productivity raises we've continually had in America. Productivity has doubled in 40 years yet real wages are down 14%. It used to be that as productivity went up pay and standards of living did. Americans should be making _more_ not less, but inflation takes 3-4% right off the bat. It's not surprising that educators would know enough to see this and demand a 3-4% raise to keep pace with inflation.
What _is_ surprising is that labor has gotten so weak that it can no longer demand that as the pie gets bigger they get a share of it. Hell, there was just a new story about how the 1% have finally have as much of the pie as they did right before the Great Depression. That's not a coincidence. We're heading for something nasty if we don't turn back...
By the government. You're massively underestimating just how much of our education system is paid for by the Fed.
that linking to a chart that shows the cost of education climbing doesn't prove anything. I suspect you did that to add credibility to your arguments and make it seem you were citing mathematical statistics that proved your point. That chart literally proves nothing except that costs have gone up. But they don't show _why_ those costs have gone up. The reason, as I mentioned, is that we were hiding the true costs with government subsidies so that people other than the very rich could benefit from a college education.
in the 80s? The spikes didn't happen until the late 90s/early 2000s. I know, because I just missed it and read multiple articles about it in my college's newspaper. Articles written with the full backing of the college's economics department doing research to show what was going to happen when the federal funding cuts that were being proposed started hitting. I remember reading how in 20 years tuition would top $12-$16k for a public university. And here we are 20 years later, I've got a kid in college and sure enough her tuition is $16k (3rd year nursing program).
Again, supply and demand go out the window when government subsidies get involved. There are times when this is a bad thing. Education is not one of those times. We are seeing the effects of what happens when the government pulls back from funding education. It's not that the cost is rising any more than usual. Educating children and young adults was _always_ this expensive. That's why until the government stepped in only the very wealthy went to school. We're going back to those days.
it's been shown that time and energy spent worrying about money massively impacts productivity.
I cover this elsewhere on this thread, but it was cuts to federal subsidies that raised tuition, not loans. Public colleges do _not_ operate in a supply/demand model. They're non profit. And no, the dean's salaries didn't go up that much (football coaches did, but they bring in enough money to pay for it even though none of that goes to players).
Anyone who says loans increase tuition at public non-profit Universities is lying to you to change the narrative and create a straw man to divert attention away from the raiding of the public commons that's been going on for 40+ years.
this is a false narrative used to justify cutting funding. It's a straw man.
The loans were the result of out of control tuition increases. Those increases started when federal funding was slashed. That started with Reagan, continued with Clinton and didn't get any better under Obama.
We were _heavily_ subsidizing colleges to keep tuition low because mega corporations needed trained American workers. Outsourcing and H1-Bs eliminated that need and when that happened they cut funding. We could have stood up to them and kept taxing them to pay for schools but we didn't.
never seem to expire. Or how 80% of the cuts go to the 1%.
When I was in school. The right wing in America said it would be fine and the kids would just take responsibility and work their way through college like they did (ignoring that they all had higher wages adjusted for inflation and 1/5th the tuition). What drives me nuts is we all knew this was coming and just said fuck it. And all we got for it was some paltry tax cuts that expire.
They've been trained to be, especially the military. How else do you get somebody to rush a machine gun nest. Once their lives and their families lives are threatened by food insecurity they'll cheerfully oppress you. People change when they can't eat.
because it's a completely false sense of security. Fascists couldn't care less about your semi or even full auto rifles. By the time you're at the point where you're considering violence as a solution to Fascism it's much too late. They'll have seized control of the army and the food supply and the army will do what they're told like they always have so long as they've got pay and food. And you will not win against an organized army, let alone a modern one with the backing of the state.
And don't point out the Taliban. We're letting them have that 40%. We got the important parts (the oil pipeline we wanted).
If you want to prevent fascism you need to strip them of their favorite tool for seizing power: poverty. Seriously, look at every single fascist dictatorship and they all started with desperate poverty and an aristocracy that was abusing the working class.
and the only question becomes do we want to regulate encryption like we do firearms. Of course it's not a 1 to 1 comparison. I can't kill someone with ones and zeros. But the point stands. At some point we have to decide what we want to and do not want to regulate and how much.
Also, we absolutely regulate what you can personally manufacture. You can't make a full auto rifle or the parts to convert a semi-auto.
As far as I know you can't manufacture the parts needed to turn a semi auto into full auto even though it's trivial to do so.