For real, as a person who had to sift through entry-level candidates for menial off-shore positions on occasion, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys holds true in pretty much any country
Throughout my already 20 year IT career, I can't even count how many times I've come across extremely paranoid explanations, often in the verge of insanity, of regular computer behavior like basic non obvious algos or glitches. From people otherwise normal. What is interesting, almost never I could change person's mind, once toxic explanation is in.
Recently, with all that internet marketing and real surveillance tech, this worsened a lot. Some humans are just wired differently.
This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth.
On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speeds").
On the other hand, we use sensationalism to dismiss accurate reports ("You said your radar showed extremely high velocity, therefore what are you reporting, a UFO?").
The new approach seems best: report, collect, and analyze the data, and see where it goes.
You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?
If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismissed reports as fanciful?
The fact is that any contact in a military range, where militarily valuable radar and signal emissions abound, is a threat to national security.
Gear is going to malfunction and throw off a non-zero number of false positives. But any contact is important enough that it at least deserves to have a report taken and logged on it.
You're talking about a different interpretation of the word "UFO" than I used above. Ever since those reports came out some years ago of pilots reporting UFOs, the implication has been very strong that "UFO" doesn't just mean "here's something that showed up on the sensors that we don't know what it is".
Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.
The current furore, from the more reasonable heads in Congress, is that the military has historically not done that.
They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with investigations (afaik, only the Navy had an office, and it was ~3 bodies with other duties), & (c) no periodic review.
They essentially ignored it as a potential problem. So Indiana Jones, "top men" type stuff.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public debate is "aliens", because media and idiots. But there's a serious underlying problem.
Sorry for the pedantry, but if they are flying around in the earth's atmosphere then they are not "spaceships" even if they are being operated by extraterrestrials. Likewise, NASA's Mars Helicopter is not a spacesheep even though it is operated by extramartians. I think it's good to get that terminology right so as not to confuse naive readers into assuming that the things that are putatively observed as UFOs crossed space to get here: they may have been constructed on earth by aliens that arrived 500 years ago, or whatever.
My personal guess is that there probably are extraterrestrials on the earth observing us but they are competently remaining hidded and have nothing to do with any UFO observation by a human. Of course I don't have any good evidence for that: it's just a hunch.
>Sorry for the pedantry, but if they are flying around in the earth's atmosphere then they are not "spaceships" even if they are being operated by extraterrestrials.
I'll see your pedantry and raise you my own pedantry. The fact that a hypothetical craft flies around in an atmosphere does not imply that it's not a spaceship. A vessel could conceivably be capable of flying through some fluid at one time and through the vacuum of space at another, and would thus be called a spaceship. For example, the Space Shuttle was a spaceship even when it was operating under aerodynamic forces. Since we're talking about alien ships, they would have to be alien spaceships, because otherwise we would have to accept that these aliens have the necessary infrastructure and facilities to land their spaceships somewhere (some kind of alien spaceport on Earth?), disembark, and board their alien aircraft to fly around Earth's atmosphere, which is an even more ridiculous idea.
In my experience the only people using the word “alien” are people like you: the dismissers. My belief is that there is something strange going on, but we do not know what.
Getting some people to even admit that much is a struggle, even after 70+ years of it happening.
To me, just saying that it's something "strange" would be a hard sell, because I would have to agree that it's definitely nothing mundane shot such that I can't recognize it for what it is. I could agree that we don't know what some of these things are, as long our degree of ignorance is properly bounded. I don't think there's equal chance that they're, say, bigfoots on hoverboards or birds. "Look, this thing here looks like it might be some kind of secret Chinese UAV because it moves like human aircraft move but is too small to fit a person" is something that I think is worth looking into. "This looks like it could be a tear in spacetime" isn't. Nor is "we have no idea whatsoever what this is".
We went from UFO to UAP and it feels like the former has become a dysphemism (forgive me, it’s my first time using the word) or a pejorative. And now here you are going straight for the”A” word :D
> You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted.
Why? It costs almost nothing to just collect data. How do you know they're not witnessing advanced tech from another nation? Or maybe it's a pervasive flaw in our sensors. Seems like those are both well within the military's mandate. Even if it's just an interesting new physical phenomenon, it would be great to have some evidence.
Mostly "Someone did it on purpose". Usually person they don't like, or rival department, or government, overall situation ranging from light computer illiteracy to full blown X-Files scenario.
For only your personal use sure. If you run stack for more than couple users you will sooner or later hit problems not with software itself but with outer world.
We live in a global era. Any novel system should assume that it may in future be operated cross-border, distributed, etc. or used in combination with such systems. Many countries even have multiple timezones internally. Given such a circumstance, any use of local timezones is by definition a presentation layer concern. Not recognizing this at design time is a surefire way to create needless technical debt with zero functional benefit.
Basically you go to several dentists and chose the conservative one - it is not that hard. Yeah, most of them are in so so neighbouhoods and have outdated equipment, but you wanted to have less intervention in any case, right?
Greatest works of literature are great now because they survived long enough for some reason. The longer the better. So undiscovered - yes, great - no.
Given how many works survived simply due to dumb luck rather than deliberate preservation, I'm not convinced what we have is the "greatest hits" list. Consider how much of early silent film has been lost. Sure, based on contemporary accounts we have many of the most popular works, but the completeness drops off very sharply. Consider the filmography of Mary Pickford, an early superstar, whose filmography is considered "largely complete":
Take a look at how many of the films have "lost" in the rightmost column. Several dozen films from the middle of her career are completely lost, and that's despite efforts that Pickford herself made to track many of them down.
Now, film had special factors that accelerated these losses from spontaneous combustion when stored improperly, to recycling for the silver content, changing technology and fashion, to being considered ephemeral in the first place. But some of these amenities have0 by their parallels for the written word, and a much longer period of time for the works to be lost.
In some sense that's tautological. We know some publications exist that others thought were great works, but those have been lost, so we cannot now say they are great works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work
> for some reason
Had the fire at Ashburnham House burned the sole copy of the Nowell Codex, we would not now have Beowulf.
Had Max Brod followed Kafka wishes, we would not now have The Trial.
So the "reason" can be happenstance, and not due to how we currently regard its place in literature.
The question then is, what other works might we now regard as "great", but for happenstance. Some may even still be available, and simply unread for centuries, waiting to be rediscovered.
I ended up working 60 hour weeks to not take out student loans. People talk about having a good time at college but all I remember is getting up at 4am to go to my first job, doing class all day and working my second job until 10pm. No spring breaks and no summers or holidays because I could work those hours to stay out of debt. It is hard to have much sympathy for people asking for student loan forgiveness.
On the plus side I ended up graduating with $20 and no debt.
I worked full time thru college for bad pay and still needed 30k in student loans to make it out with my degree. I went to a state school, nothing fancy.
I hardly ever had fun in college, it was awful. The working world is waaaaaaay better for me.
Not everyone who has loan debt just partied away on borrowed cash.
You're absolutely correct. The people in my life who are the most vocal about loan forgiveness treated their time at university like a party, but that is not a representative sample.
I agree. I also remember working Friday/Saturday nights in the lab (as that was the only time I got to work on my projects), while everybody went out clubbing.
And we're definitely in a spot right now where folks that can pay off their loan are holding off in case the US forgives all loans or something. A perverse incentive that is going to boost the number of student loans that are not paid off.
Not just that, but with interest rates at zero and inflation at 8.5% per year (and growing!) it is incredibly stupid to pay even a single penny of federal loan debt early, unless you have a really good need to polish your credit score.
Federal student loan debts are getting cheaper by the minute, why pay more now?
This attitude, as stated, is one of the fundamental evils, I think (the implication being "If I can't have it, nobody can", or, in this case, "If I didn't get it when it was relevant to me, nobody can"). In this case, the core grievance is valid ("I think there's a better way to address the problem"), but this expression of it makes the problem into the super common "us vs them" where "them" is defined by the terrible cultural obsession with the concept of "deserved" punishment and personal responsibility in an unqualified, absolutist manner ("He committed a crime, he deserves anything that happens", "He failed to pay a loan, he deserves anything that happens", "She had sex, she deserves anything that happens", etc).
The way you present the problem is inaccurate to me. It's not "I can't have it so nobody can" or "I couldn't have it back then, so nobody should have it now.".
It is: "At the time, these were the rules, I ran the numbers, was responsible and ended up limiting my opportunities. Others, who were not responsible, now not only have more opportunities thanks to their degree but will also end up not paying for it".
I'm sorry, but to me it feels extremely unfair that people who frivolously took loans will now end up being ahead of people who - at the same time - decided to be more financially responsible. You can't retroactively change the rules and expect people to take it quietly.
The problem is made even worse because in the case of student loans, there is nothing to repossess.
This has nothing to do with changing the rules now.
>The reality is that rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior
You are confusing a societal failure with a moral one: we have failed as a society by forcing those that pursue higher education to bear the entire cost of that education and we have failed to guarantee a role for those people in our society that pays well enough to pay off an inflated loan for that cost.
These are not individual moral failures. Everyone that is not able to pay off their student loans is not a bad person. Student loans are a bad system for educating people. They were introduced when higher education was desegregated and opened to women. When the white men at the reigns of the government no longer saw fit to fund public higher education for people that were not white men.
Once again this is not the issue, either my post was unclear or you didn't read it carefully.
I definitely do want the system to be fixed for future generations to not go through this. I do not want past generations to get a free pass. Loan forgiveness does nothing for future generations of students.
>Loan forgiveness does nothing for future generations of students.
Loan forgiveness unlocks the spending potential of an entire generation. People have been holding off on buying their first home or having their first child because of the burden of their loans.
Rewarding people who have worked for decades to climb out of that situation by lifting those who didn't do the same to the same financial position doesn't exactly encourage upward mobility, either.
People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before: that is, they have no student loan debt.
People in the US are not punished for being financially responsible. They are rewarded for taking risks, but not punished for being responsible. Very different.
> People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before: that is, they have no student loan debt.
You're missing the point, either deliberately or on accident.
(Prefacing this with: we should keep and honor the terms of the existing PSLF program that students relied on when taking on debt.) There's no particular reason people with current loan debt, but ineligible for PSLF, should get a wealth transfer from other taxpayers with similar income, net worth, and expenses -- but no current student loan debt.
> People in the US are not punished for being financially responsible. They are rewarded for taking risks, but not punished for being responsible.
In fact, a hypothetical student debt forgiveness event like GP was discussing would punish those who responsibly paid off their student debts relative to similar-earning classmates who did not.
>In fact, a hypothetical student debt forgiveness event like GP was discussing would punish those who responsibly paid off their student debts relative to similar-earning classmates who did not.
Punish how? This word keeps being used but it does not fit any definition of punish I'm familiar with. I'm not being obtuse.
Some background of where I'm coming from: Worked 40+hrs/week for $7.25 to $10/hr from 2005 to 2009 to get a four year degree from a state school. Graduated with $35,000 in student loan debt myself and about $20,000 in debt through Parent Plus loans. My parents sent me some money for rent on occasion, but overall -- that's how I di it.
I also paid off all my student loans, and my parent plus loans.
If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....
I am not punished by this. At all. It has no impact on my life whatsoever. I made the best choice I could make with my circumstances, and I paid off my loans because at the time that was the best way to secure my future. The day before the party-guy got his $100k write-off and the day after, I wake up in the same house, with the same car, with the same job, with the same spouse. My life doesn't change at all.
> If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....
> I am not punished by this.
Imagine a fair and equitable spending program that distributed $100k to everyone. It's fair, and people with debt could use it to pay off their loans (you could even require it to be used to pay off student loans first). If your goal is to help people with loans pay off their debts, it is an effective program. It's also obviously fair.
Then, tax 100% of the distribution for people without student loan balances. This is the step that imposes a punitive expense, relative to a fair program, on people without student loans.
That's what these proposals look like. There's no particular reason recent college students as a group should be the sole recipients of a wealth transfer.
They are not, though. You wrote your comment as though every proposal is necessarily a tax on everyone that does not have student loans.
This is an entirely made up claim. A hypothetical strawman useful to only those that seek to victimize themselves when this topic comes up. Student debt is a contractual arrangement between the government and the borrower. It can simply be ended. The government has the power to do that without imposing a tax on everyone else.
> The government can simply write off the student debt
And now those people have 1.75 trillion dollars more to spend on the economy instead of paying debts which creates inflation which is effectively a tax on everyone with cash and bonds. There is no free lunch with the economy, just distortions.
If student spending inflates the economy to the point where there is significant impact on the dollar, what you are saying is we NEED this generation debt-burdened so the rest of us can live decently. If that is true we never really had a functional economy in the first place.
We need to grapple with that truth instead of perpetuating this suffering.
Congratulations, you will eventually own a house and car. I'm sure you paid quite a handsome price on that house to ensure the people formerly living in it could live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives. What will your peers own when they pay off their student loans?
Banks deemed you creditworthy because you make enough to pay these loans off. We're currently discussing the people that don't make enough to pay their student loans off.
Do you think they should be forever renters? Carless in public transportation deserts?
A functional economy allows people to thrive by participating in it. It is not dependent on an artificially created underclass of people in debt to purchase no asset.
> We're currently discussing the people that don't make enough to pay their student loans off.
If we are only discussing just those people, then I think it is a different story. I could get behind a x% of income over y% of years and if it not paid off in the end it is cancelled deal.
However, usually when I see people talking about cancelling student debt they mean wiping the slate clean for everyone even those who just graduated that can pay.
What type of student loan cancellation program are you thinking we should implement?
"People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before"
Not:
"People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation as those whose loans were forgiven"
You may have a valid point about why it's bad that the two people are in different situations (if you elaborate), but the parent did not say that the two people are in the same situation.
Correct - both people in your scenario end up having no student loan debt.
But Person A, who paid their $30k loan in full, now has $30k less to spend on a home, a car, savings, etc.
Person B, who did not pay their $30k, now has effectively $30k more in buying power either immediately or spread across what would otherwise have been their repayment timeline.
Person A's responsibility for their obligation has set them back $30k, while Person B's lack of responsibility for making payments has put them ahead $30k. Maybe we shouldn't call it a direct punishment, but they're certainly coming out of the scenario worse off than their counterpart.
>Maybe we shouldn't call it a direct punishment, but they're certainly coming out of the scenario worse off than their counterpart.
It's hard for me not to sound flippant when I say this, but -- this is life. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has the means to pay off their student loans themselves practically won the lottery and they should be thankful they're not totally fucked like those who need the forgiveness.
There's an ugly, underlying impression I get from this discussion that is oddly reminiscent of the "welfare queen" stereotype.
>As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has the means to pay off their student loans themselves practically won the lottery and they should be thankful they're not totally fucked like those who need the forgiveness.
Let me share my personal experience with you so I can try to shed some light on our varying interpretations of what "won the lottery" means. I went to college full-time, four days a week, and was a commuter. I was responsible for my entire car payment, my parking pass, my books/material, and for taking out a loan for tuition. I took it upon myself to get a part-time job while continuing to study and go to class for four and a half years. I then got a full-time job upon graduating and lived very frugally for two years with a huge chunk of my paychecks going towards paying off my car and student loans. The thought of paying interest killed me, and I did everything in my power to put every penny I could afford towards paying down my debt. I didn't go on vacations, didn't spend money frivolously on a new iPhone every year, didn't buy anything that wasn't necessary until my obligations were fulfilled.
Now let's revisit Person B (and to be clear, I personally know a Person B who's a close friend of mine who fits this description). They did not consistently work in college, but partied, went to festivals, took vacations, had a much easier schedule not having to factor in a job. They then graduate just like me. They have a few hundred dollars more every month that can go towards more vacations than I had the option to take, a more expensive car that I could not afford to buy, and more discretionary spending power than I had during that time. They work a job now, but have yet to begin repaying their loans yet (I understand the pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime situation, but even so, there's a grace period after graduating where you aren't forced to pay). And even when payments resume, they will likely pay the bare minimum each month because they now have the prospect of having that debt potentially forgiven in its entirety.
How do you tell me with a straight face that I won the lottery, and that Person B is actually the one who is "fucked" (as you so eloquently put it) and needs the forgiveness?
Well, that is a fair point. I think the US Government should give me 1 billion dollars. This actually is a Pareto-optimal action too, since I will then have 1 billion dollars and the rest of you will be no worse off. In fact, you will be exactly the same amount off as before.
How about the govt just obey the terms of the agreement they made? This program has been on the books since 2007. Anyone who didn’t use it made their own decision.
It is a case of "me me me" indeed. This is why people support canceling existing loans instead of changing the college tuition/loan system. They don't want to fix things for future generations, they want to fix their own problem with their own student loan and move on.
