211–220 of 374 posts
"nearly 1.3 million borrowers — were not in default, but were either severely delinquent or not paying their loans." I wonder what "in default" means if it does not mean "severely delinquent or not paying their loans". I did not see any explanation in the article.
It's a damn shame we've let this crisis reach this scale. Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt, our inauguration, and so on, we've been essentially frozen for most of my life as politicians concern themselves more so with existential power struggle. The right wants to bring us back to the gilded age, the left makes headlines but is barely relevant, and the center is trying to squeeze bandaid solutions whil…
I often wonder how many problems would be fixed by adding a 2 term limit to the House and Senate.
Term limits is the last of your problems
It's a damn shame we've let this crisis reach this scale. Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt, our inauguration, and so on, we've been essentially frozen for most of my life as politicians concern themselves more so with existential power struggle. The right wants to bring us back to the gilded age, the left makes headlines but is barely relevant, and the center is trying to squeeze bandaid solutions whil…
I often wonder how many problems would be fixed by adding a 2 term limit to the House and Senate.
The only “problem” solved would be that of occasionally having people that are even nominally accountable to the electorate who have the experience and skills in the system and the personal powerbase to standup to the permanent class of lobbyists and other unaccountable, interested experts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder how many problems could have been avoided if we required 2/3 majority. Byzantine generals have to work together.
That is the case for some legislation, such as when is necessary to override a presidential veto. Requiring it for all legislation would pretty much lead to a standstill, or worse - peddling to the special interests of a small coalition (this is my opinion).
I'd assert that things that need to change would have broad support, and that change would happen. Stuff without broad support, well, maybe that's not as important as we think it is.
i mean, sure. the American reinvestment act wouldn't have passed - and a bunch of the other stimulus packages. Of course, glass steagall wouldn't have been repealed in the first place.
I think if you want anything to be resistant to byzantine failure, it's making laws. shrug. They didn't ask me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt," There's an interesting parallel with the cost of healthcare. Increases in costs for both seem to outstrip inflation year over year. And there's lots of of people making lots of money in both sectors. And yet nobody in either sector seems to be able to say exactly why the costs are increasing at the untenable rates they are. The only thing Washington ever seems to do…
Hm...housing, healthcare, college, pharma are all heavily regulated and are subsidized by the government in one way or another. All are outpacing inflation by a very significant margin, for dubious gains in utility. Anyone else seeing a trend here?
Perspective (anecdote) from a high school student: There is a real push for college. It's an unstated assumption that you're going to go, and the topic of debt seems to be passively avoided ("Don't worry, it'll all work out!"). We receive a grade for the college application process, so you can't not apply. College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgemen…
There is a high school class dedicated to applying to college, with the “final project” being that you applied somewhere? Wow... this is surprising to me! Can you apply to any school, including trade schools for, say, welding?
Perspective (anecdote) from a high school student: There is a real push for college. It's an unstated assumption that you're going to go, and the topic of debt seems to be passively avoided ("Don't worry, it'll all work out!"). We receive a grade for the college application process, so you can't not apply. College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgemen…
There is a high school class dedicated to applying to college, with the “final project” being that you applied somewhere? Wow... this is surprising to me! Can you apply to any school, including trade schools for, say, welding?
For my particular high school, the class was called Avid (https://www.avid.org). It's a college-preparatory class you may take all four years, with junior year being the year the class focuses on, amongst other things, studying for the SAT/ACT, applying to colleges, etc. My high school's Avid program mostly consisted of low-income, first-generation Hispanic students.
Going on a tangent, it's interesting to think about. Today, I came across an old friend from the same high school, same graduation, and from that same program working at Target full-time. He's Hispanic, low-income, and first-generation. He mentioned school ended not working out for him. I have another old but closer friend from the same high school and same graduation year but not from that program - he's American, middle-class, and not a first-generation student. He graduated from UC Berkeley last December and just started working at a finance company in San Francisco making roughly 85k/year. It's interesting in a way where I'm thinking about what heavily affected their lives to lead to both their different outcomes and the possible ways there are to bridge that gap, at least from the perspective of the old friend working at Target.
The program's site states the success rate of the program itself is high but from mere observation of old friends from that program, I unfortunately don't think that's the case. But above all, it reminds of this note written by and from Jordan Peterson's new book where he talks about lobsters in the first chapter: "to those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away." It seems to me then that if one wants to get out of, say of a generational low-income family, that person must be do something drastic: deliberate practice, a shift in perspective, etc. But first, they must be aware of this and that's the tough part, I think.
Perspective (anecdote) from a high school student: There is a real push for college. It's an unstated assumption that you're going to go, and the topic of debt seems to be passively avoided ("Don't worry, it'll all work out!"). We receive a grade for the college application process, so you can't not apply. College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgemen…
Do you mind if I ask what state you're in? My high school made people write down colleges to send their ACT scores to, but I remember the confusion as some neither knew what to write nor were offered guidance afterwards.
As an aside, the push is so strong I ended up leaving high school (after 10th grade) to attend college early at one of our early-entrance-to-college programs that effectively is a building full of high schoolers going to college (and, e.g. being locked in the building at 8pm each night, not being allowed to have a car, etc) and getting backfilled highschool credit for classes also -- you get your high school diploma alongside an associates degree.
It's a massive push, and the assumption is generally a mix of "everyone needs to go to college or you won't find a job" and "you can get a job without college but all those jobs suck and you'll wish you went to college but by then it will be too late". After years of having it hammered into you, kids finally listen. That, and mandatory college applications being part of your class grades (sometimes as early as 8th/9th grade depending on your classes), as well as the school requiring you to send your ACT scores to colleges.
Edit: this was around 10 years ago for me -- my highschool graduation date was 2010 (even though I had been in college for 2 years by then).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder how many problems would be fixed by adding a 2 term limit to the House and Senate.
I often wonder how many problems could have been avoided if we required 2/3 majority. Byzantine generals have to work together.
California used, until recently, to have such a supermajority requirement for the budget—not all legislation, just the one piece of legislation that is an annual must-pass.
It was the primary source of perennial budget crisis, and, it let a unified minority party that held it's unity (usually Republicans, because they usually were in the minority and almost always more unified in the state than Democrats) to dictate terms so long as they were more willing than the majority to hold the state hostage.
Plus, conversely, it also makes the majority party less accountable, because they can always blame the intransigence of the minority and the disastrous consequences of not reaching some deal for the actual contents of whatever deal is reached. A supermajority doesn't mean everyone owns the results, it means no one does.