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Makeitstop

@ Makeitstop @lemmy.world

Posts
3
Comments
341
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • Does this mean humans are the same species as vulcans, klingons, romulans, betazoids, trill, ocampa, and ktarians?

  • The College Backlash Is a Mirage

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  • So the average college graduate does better than the average non-college graduate if they end up with similar work histories.

    OK, but those who start and don't finish end up in debt without the benefits. So you need to factor in the chance of not completing college and the associated drawbacks and factor that into the cost benefit analysis for deciding to start college. Otherwise the argument is about as valid as saying that playing the lottery makes financial sense given the amount of money that goes to the average lottery winner.

    Second, the average outcome isn't the only metric that matters. The average person who pays for most kinds of insurance will get less out of it than they pay in, that doesn't mean that it's always a better idea to be uninsured. Hell, the average player in a Russian roulette game turns out fine. Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of thinking that tends to dominate conversations around college and particularly student loans. If the majority are better off after college, great. But if have to drop out due to forces beyond your control, or the degree you pursue suddenly becomes less valuable because of an unforeseen shift in the economy, you can still end up buried to your eyeballs in debt with nothing to show for it.

    Third, even if you make enough additional income to mathematically offset the debts you accumulate in college, you can't get back the lost time. Many people have to delay major milestones in life because they're weighed down by debts on top of all the other brutal economic realities out there. Good luck buying a house. Hope you weren't too eager to have kids.

    Fourth, college might be a better option than not going to college, but it can still seem bad when both options are shitty due to an economy that exists to enrich billionaires.

    I'm not saying it's a mistake to go to college. I just think the article is glossing over the very real problems that come from our atrocious student loan policies, and that perhaps some of the pessimism around college is a symptom of the economy as a whole being rigged against us.

  • Senate to vote next week to block Trump’s military action against Venezuela

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  • In some states you have to be registered as a member of a party to vote in their primaries. In states with open primaries you can vote in primaries without registering as a party member, but they still typically have party affiliation as an option on the form.

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  • And the microorganisms. He's gonna need an eternity if he has to go through one by one.

  • M 9. Gotcha

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  • Z'ha'dum

  • M 9. Gotcha

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  • Starbug from Red Dwarf is top left. The Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy is beneath that. Slave 1 (Boba Fett's ship) is the top right. Not sure about the bottom right, my best guess is Samus Aran's gunship from Metroid.

  • Trump to POLITICO: Midterm elections will be about ‘pricing’

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  • And let's not forget the student loans that are being forced onto worse repayment plans, and brutal collections for anyone who can't keep up. Because the only thing the department of education does that they actually support is keep people weighed down by crippling debts.

  • The ‘Trump-class’ battleship faces a large obstacle in its way: Reality

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  • Honestly, if I was some admiral trying to protect a bunch of R&D projects in development from Trump, I'd probably wrap as many of them as I could into a pitch for a big battleship with his name on it then spend the entire budget on the technologies that are supposedly going into the ship. Put basically no effort into the ship itself, just show him concept art and maybe send him a model or something to make him think progress is being made.

  • In a triple-feature including Die Hard and The Long Kiss Goodnight

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  • He's almost too charismatic. You can't help but be like "yeah, he's right, maybe Christmas is a humbug..."

  • Modern world

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  • Does he live in the mall then?

  • Christmas Eve jazz concert at Kennedy Center canceled after Trump name added to building

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  • Even his handpicked board didn't all go along with it. One of them is suing over this, and said their mic was muted so that there couldn't be any objections.

  • Christmas Eve jazz concert at Kennedy Center canceled after Trump name added to building

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  • The only thing that should be named after Trump is a maximum security prison that houses every scumbag in this administration along with their accomplices.

  • Democrat Warns Attorney General Pam Bondi Could Face Prosecution If Epstein Files Aren’t Fully Released By Deadline

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  • If only I'd posted more than one sentence, maybe I could have addressed the issue of impeachment... even though the comment I was responding to specifically mentioned the legal system, and the point I was making was about how no legal safety mechanism can function when the people in charge of it are corrupt, which is a problem when the people at the top in all the branches of government are corrupt.

  • Democrat Warns Attorney General Pam Bondi Could Face Prosecution If Epstein Files Aren’t Fully Released By Deadline

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  • So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.

    The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.

    I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.

    The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.

    Legislation doesn't have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.

    And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don't hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn't matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.

    How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.

    Law should be politically impartial.

    Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).

    As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn't the law that's at fault.

  • Democrat Warns Attorney General Pam Bondi Could Face Prosecution If Epstein Files Aren’t Fully Released By Deadline

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  • The problem is that you have a majority on the Supreme Court that are blatantly abusing their power and ignoring the law when it advances their side's agenda, including just declaring the president to be above the law.

    This would be the kind of thing that should lead to impeachment, but that requires a supermajority in the senate (because you don't want whichever party has a majority to be able to easily abuse the impeachment process) but that won't happen because every single republican with even a hint of integrity has been pushed out by Trump over the past decade. And even if there were Republicans that weren't entirely corrupt, dismantling your own Supreme Court majority would be a tough sell politically. And even if they did remove the existing justices, it would just mean that Trump would get to appoint new ones that would be much worse and with many more years ahead of them.

    And with Trump filling the executive branch with the worst scumbags he can find, chosen specifically for their willingness to be loyal sycophants who won't let ethics or laws get in the way of doing his bidding, you aren't going to get any help there. Again, this is exactly why the senate has to approve appointments but they are also scumbags right now. And for the same reason, the impeachment that should be happening for basically every member of this administration are not coming.

    All that being said, there is resistance coming from both the executive and judicial branches. This administration has been firing people illegally in part because it can't get them to do the illegal shit they want them to do. And those illegal actions and the related illegal firings have been taken to court and the administration has lost nearly 95% off the time. Sometimes the Supreme Court has stepped in to bail them out, but in most cases the ruling stands and the administration has eventually complied.

    All of which is to say that, while there are many flaws both big and small in the American system, it isn't the system itself that is at fault here, it's the elected officials and the corrupt assholes they appointed. There is no system that will work when every branch of government is in the hands of people who ignore their ethical and legal obligations.

  • Judge denies request to temporarily block construction of White House ballroom

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  • They already demolished it, so a temporary restraining order wouldn't fix that. Anything they start to build can be destroyed later, so that wouldn't be irreparable.

  • AOC leads JD Vance for first time in 2028 election matchup: poll

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  • I really want him to think he's going to run again so that he'll undermine anyone else that tries to run. And then he can croak or something after ruining the primaries and getting his followers to hate any would be successor.

  • Pornhub saw a 22.4% increase in Linux traffic over 2025

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  • That's what he's doing.

  • TIL: A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus

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