after the need-based scholarships that I got

Dude…

You quite literally benefited from a fund of money set aside to help you go to college and you are okay with pulling the ladder up behind you.

You didn’t need student loan forgiveness because you got a scholarship. I feel the most logical perspective would be that we shouldn’t be gatekeeping passionate individuals from continuing their educational journey.

College should be free for anyone to go to. College students are adding more dollars to our economy for each dollar that we spend on their education. For higher level degrees, the benefits to our economy could be even greater for each individual.

Take the example of a doctor, if we paid for more doctors’ educations then we could have more specialists available for complex surgeries, potentially extending lives and raising the quality of life for many individuals. Saved lives also means that there are more people contributing to the economy as well.

When the makers of a game don’t setup rules or enforce them, then the game can suck because of how unbalanced it can get.

The issue at the end of the day is with the game makers (politicians) not making the game fair and fun. Elements could be added to balance the game, such as cash being distributed each time you pass GO (a monthly Universal Basic Income[UBI]) and setting lower costs the on the property you want to rent. More properties could even be added to the board to help lower the cost of owning a property.

The game in theory could have some interesting elements, such as innovation and competition fueling creativity. But when the game makers totally removed themselves from a judging role, those interesting features completely disappeared due to the big players being allowed to swallow up all the competition.

The big players’ greed also fuels the game to be worse for everyone, including themselves. Incentives to create the lowest priced products sounds great on paper. However, when the greed from the big players has caused the majority of players to not be able to afford even their cheapest products, then suddenly those big players start cutting corners. More and more. Until they are providing their customers with actual garbage and they might even call it ‘food’ too!

Contrast this with if people were actually getting a base amount of money (thanks to UBI) and those same people could afford to not just have the worst/cheapest versions of everything. Suddenly, the scale can be flipped to be a race geared around providing the best and highest quality goods and services. Rules can be enforced to punish wasteful, unsustainable, and unethical business practices as well, since people aren’t dependent on everything being a race to the bottom.

Only if you agree that it’s what you want, because I could if you want that. But I don’t have to if that’s not what you’re feeling right now.

-Also me saying exactly this about dinner.

That’s a brand of thought I could subscribe more to, thank you for sharing your perspective.

In the US at least, I think it’s possible at the local and state levels, but land and money have most of the power. To me, it feels like many leaders pushed the goals back because we were relatively close to being able to implement the progressive changes federally, but it’s become clear that’s still a ways away.

Those progressive changes can still happen in blue states, and I feel the will is there to elect progressives. States just need to be willing to go into debt to bring forward those progressive programs now.

Idk, even still after all these years, I find there are still moments that make me happy to be alive and think that it’s awesome to be alive, to have experienced things that were dear to me. Living in a place with others that still care about positive progress gives me a reason to do a little better each day.

I do think about how much greater life could be if love was what guided policy rather than the accumulation of wealth that’s worth nothing to us when we die.

I feel that no matter what you do, there will always be some level of suffering by something.

Unless you’re entirely lab growing all of your food in some sterile environment, but then it’s a matter of how you’re sourcing energy and disposing of waste to prevent harming creatures. I believe we’re still a ways off from entirely lab grown foods being a sustainable/economically viable option for most people as well.

Transportation of any kind will lead to the deaths of animals and insects. Even if you’re not operating a vehicle.

Personally, I feel that drawing the line at insects being non-vegan is a bit arbitrary, since at that point why is plant suffering not taken into account? Plants are multicellular organisms that respond to stimuli. They are living organisms, they reproduce, and they have a form of respiration.

I’m not vegan but I like to live based on harm reduction where I can. I’m thankful to the organisms that are helping to fuel me and it is for that reason I try my best to avoid being wasteful. I’m from a family that has hunted for food and we always made sure that no parts went to waste from an animal’s sacrifice. We also only ever went for as much as we needed, not the maximum allowed.

Teaching them about logical fallacies and how to spot them may be the best defense against these types of personalities imo. Many influencers that you’re concerned about try to prey upon these fallacies, so teaching your kids to spot them can help them to realize those people are full of shit.

Curating their content a bit to include more people you want them to be like can help as well, at least then they can have good people to look up to.

If your kids think you have their best interests in mind, I feel they’re less likely to push back and more likely to respect the boundaries you put down.

Severance goes so hard, every episode is like a movie level of quality

It’s not the solution, but one of many I would say and an important one at that.

Also, the UK uses First Past the Post for the House of Commons, mayoral elections in England, Police and Crime Commissioner elections and local councils.

They use Alternative Voting systems for some of their elections for like the chair of committees in the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker.

The system needs to change for it to not be a bifurcation, for all practical purposes. The system of voting needs to be changed from First Past the Post to be something like Ranked Robin voting, STAR voting, or Score voting. All of those are my preferred alternatives, but Ranked Choice is still solid over First Past the Post as well.

A different voting system enables third parties to hold real power and to grow in influence.

Oh for sure, there are a lot of different areas in education that need to be changed. We need to go back to teaching people how to think rather than prepping them to just memorize for the test. That’s not even mentioning the issue that AI can have on the learning processes.

If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to vote. I think if everyone was guaranteed free access to both a high school and college education, along with all food and living costs covered for anyone studying, then I could see having at least any associates level degree being an okay barrier of entry to voting.

However, such a thing would need to be protected by some unremovable barriers. For instance, education would need to continue receiving appropriate funding, food and other living costs such as renting a room would need to be covered even as the cost for these things change. People with disabilities would need to receive proper accommodations.

A caveat I’ll add is that there would need to be more community colleges built and much more funding for pre-K thru 12th grade as well.

They really got to make this more well known. The top search results didn’t list those apps either for being PieFed integrated.

What???

Wow, I’m surprised that’s not the top Google result or App Store result for PieFed.

I wrote my comment on the Voyager app too lmao.

I’d be inclined to check it out but it looks like they don’t have a mobile app I can use. Lemmy at least has a few different feature robust apps you can use to access Lemmy. I might check it out when I’m on desktop, but that would be a fraction of the amount of time I spend online.