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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I grew up in a big city so I didn’t learn to drive until I was 23, and once I did, I realized how much I had been missing. A car with a full tank of gas really does feel like freedom to me, so I enjoy having a car that is good at being a car. I’m not particularly interested in aftermarket modifications, but I am willing to pay more for a car that is fast, handles well, and looks good.


  • Having nice things is a display of wealth and status, but which nice things a person chooses to have still depends on what they enjoy and how they want to express themselves. Even among car enthusiasts, which sort of car one is enthusiastic about varies a lot. I know a guy who has a luxury SUV which is extremely comfortable. I, on the other hand, had a car which could go around corners really fast. Whenever my passengers bounced around as the car went over a bump, I would tell them “I paid extra for that stiff suspension.”




  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHow it feels
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    9 days ago

    I think my experience proves that succeeding without student loan forgiveness is possible, even in difficult circumstances, and that’s why I think the problem isn’t student loans.

    Which family you’re born into is luck, and so is innate talent, but how hard you work in high school and which major you choose in college are deliberate decisions.


  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHow it feels
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    9 days ago

    It’s not just luck. Most people I know who started out poor are immigrants whose families worked extremely hard for their sake, and who worked extremely hard in school themselves so that they could get accepted into colleges that offered them favorable terms. There they majored in well-paid fields like finance, law, medicine, or engineering, and afterwards they were able to pay off their debts without issue and live upper-middle-class lifestyles.

    It’s a lot harder for people whose well-to-do parents refuse to help, but eventually those people do become eligible for financial aid without counting their parents’ income (easiest to do by either waiting until age 24 or getting married) and that financial aid will be quite large if they’re poor. As I’ve said, my family wasn’t poor by the time I went to college and my financial aid still covered 2/3 of the cost.




  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHow it feels
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    9 days ago

    Cause it not like the loans are predatory or anything.

    I’ve met people who foolishly took out six-digit loans to go to college and I agree that those loans ought to have been denied to them, but most people I know went to relatively low-cost public universities or to the private universities that gave them generous need-based scholarships. My own family wasn’t poor by the time I went to college and my education at a prestigious private university cost a total of about $45,000 (in 2006) after the need-based scholarships that I got. Some of that was paid for by loans and I don’t feel that those loans were predatory.

    Cause its not like the prices keep going up cause the loans keep giving more and more.

    That’s an argument for the government to help college students less, not to help them more.


  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHow it feels
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    9 days ago

    The Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2023. Biden v. Nebraska, one of the many recent 6-3 decisions.

    After first establishing that at least Missouri had Article III standing to challenge the debt forgiveness program, Roberts held that the statutory grant of authority to the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” loan terms could not be extended to the student loan forgiveness program, and that debt cancellation of this scale required clear congressional authorization and fell under the major questions doctrine.

    If only those same six judges were as willing to (properly, IMO) limit Presidential authority now that their guy is in office…







  • I don’t think Garfield or anyone is going to change an adult’s well-established sexual orientation, but the idea that children growing up in a society that normalizes homosexual attraction will be more likely to develop inclinations that otherwise would have been suppressed seems reasonable to me. It’s supported both by the prevalence of what we would call bisexuality in certain cultures and by my own personal experience - I distinctly recall being young and trying to decide whether an attractive character in a picture was a flat-chested woman (and therefore OK) or a long-haired man (and therefore not OK). I had internalized social expectations before I even knew what the differences between men and women were and so from that point my sexuality developed to be strictly heterosexual, but I think that I might have become bisexual if those social expectations had not been taught to me before that formative time.


  • You might want to read more about corporate personhood. It doesn’t mean that the corporation is considered by the law to be a person, or that whoever or whatever performs the duties of the CEO is by definition a person. It means that a corporation, despite not being a person, has certain rights usually associated with people. For example, a person can own property or be sued. A cat cannot own property or be sued. A corporation is like a person rather than a cat in that it can also own property or be sued. There’s debate about exactly which rights should be granted to corporations, but the idea that a corporation has at least some minimal set of rights is centuries old and an essential part of the very definition of what a corporation is.