Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.
> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
That's bad and a central part of the problem.
I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.
The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.
> > a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
> That's bad and a central part of the problem.
Why? Or to ask in a different way, how could it not be?
For nearly all regular working people, there is nothing they will ever buy that costs more in labor and materials than a home. So of course it will be the most expensive purchase most people ever make. How could it not be?
The US has so much excess capacity in farmland that we do absurd things with our excess corn and soybeans. We refine soybeans into ethanol to put into our gasoline. We feed corn to cows which kills them in fairly short order, but we just slaughter them before they die from the diet. We put high fructose corn syrup into everything. We use corn and soy derivatives for random industrial and chemical feedstock.
Data centers won't take up even .0001% of farm land, and "food production" wouldn't be meaningfully impacted unless we lost many, many orders of magnitude more land than that. This is panic about a rain drop in the ocean.
> We refine soybeans into ethanol [...]. We feed corn to cows [...]
Did you mix them? Soybeans have a lot of protein that is good to grow muscle in cows. Corn is mostly starch that is cheaper than protein and starch is made of sugar that is easy to split in ethanol.
Also, there are more productive and less productive farms. Here in Argentina some of them operate only when the price of soybean or corn is high.
There are a lot of misunderstandings in this post. I'll try to explain a few of them, which maybe can help realign your whole understanding.
For starters, American insurance has a "maximum out-of-pocket" amount, which means the maximum you can possibly pay for healthcare costs. My plan, from just a regular unknown company doing boring things, has a maximum out of pocket of $5k for an individual. So there's no scenario where I'd ever benefit from spending "a couple tens of thousands of dollars" because even if I spend the whole year in an ICU bed at a cost of millions of dollars to the hospital, I only pay $5,000.
Also, "a lot of people either bankrupt themselves, and end up paying much more than that" doesn't make sense. Declaring bankruptcy means you don't pay the debt, you wouldn't pay a lot AND declare bankruptcy. You'd see the amount was too much to pay, declare bankruptcy, and have the debt wiped out.
Keep in mind that millions of Americans have essentially no assets that aren't protected in a bankruptcy (car, home and retirement accounts are generally safe). It's not like millionaires are going bankrupt from medical costs, it's people who had nothing to begin with declaring bankruptcy when they got hurt while uninsured and going back to zero (instead of negative).
The real problem of the US system isn't the subsidies for the poor, it's the opaque, convoluted billing system between insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and providers. Billions of dollars are siphoned out of the system as profit to insurers and hundreds of millions are wasted on salaries for the bureaucracy of managing the billing system.
> Declaring bankruptcy means you don't pay the debt, you wouldn't pay a lot AND declare bankruptcy. You'd see the amount was too much to pay, declare bankruptcy, and have the debt wiped out.
Bankruptcy isn't a magic get out of debt button. First you have to prove your inability to pay, which generally means not having much in the way of assets. So you probably have to spend a significant amount of money on the debt before bankruptcy is even an option. Then once you have successfully declared bankruptcy it means, aside from a few classes of protected assets (e.x. your primary residence if your sufficiently lucky to be a homeowner) your creditors get to divy up what you have left amongst themselves. THEN the debt is wiped away. It's a last resort that keeps every penny you earn for the rest of your life from going to creditors, not a way to walk away with your assets and lifestyle intact.
I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.
Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.
There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.
I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.
>I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed
That already exists. They're called onion sites. What we really need is something that performs about as well as the current Internet, but is stronger against deplatforming: decentralized DNS. It doesn't even need to give memorable names like DNS does, it just needs to be a second, stable addressing layer on top of IP so clients can always find the server.
Unfortunately three letter agencies are going after exit node operators and threatening them in pretty fucked up ways. I think there's also likely some issues with very wide spread use of government owned nodes to be able to deanonymize people
>Decentralization just puts people that run servers as middle men to further impose a censorship agenda with ActivityPub.
Name lookup is not like a social media feed. If a server is censoring, say, TPB, it's plainly obvious, because you'll go to the IP and not get the content you expected. Just move on to the next server on the list until you find one with the up-to-date information.
>Whatever it is it needs to be distributed like BitTorrent.
DNS is already a distributed system like BitTorrent. When you publish an IP update you do it to a single node, which then propagates through the network. The deplatforming problem of DNS is that name assignment is something only central authorities can grant and revoke.
It also makes it very difficult to censor. There is 1 YouTube and thousands of ActivityPub servers and relays that would happily carry all posts through the fediverse regardless if they seize one or two hosts. There are other options as well - that was a bit my point that Medium/X/Bluesky/YouTube - these are designed to harvest engagement in exchange for content. They’re not good for news and certainly not good as an archive.
In theory yes, but in practice, most of the traffic will gravitate to popular servers and the popular ones will be targeted by people that want to censor content and force the gatekeepers to silence content. The ones that don't play along wont matter because they are not that visible.
Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
reply