This attitude annoys me so much. I also paid off my loans. I dropped out of grad school because I didn’t think my income with the degree could pay for itself anymore and I did the math. I realized the jobs I had been doing to pay for school had become a more sustainable career than the one I was educating myself for.
That being said, the undergrad made a difference and I’m glad I finished that one.
The loans of the era were abysmal and predatory. I didn’t qualify for help because the failsafes for my age and gender hadn’t been added. I was also uninsurable.
My whole life was worse because of these factors although they may seem privileged and superficial to some.
But like every choice in life flows out from these options: where to stay and how to pay for it.
I say all this because it is these very experiences that made me want to make sure this doesn’t happen to more people.
I definitely got out good. I don’t feel like I was “victimized” by people getting bailed out. I feel like I did the right thing to bail out of a degree I was questioning and a debt I suspected was a bad deal. I feel like the loans were shitty during that time and if anything I feel taken advantage of a little in that way… but nothing else.
Statistically most of the homeless youth one sees around “graduated” out a place to stay into… that.
Even though I paid my loans off - college was more affordable then. And my loans were at a 2% ? Interest rate directly with the government. Not privatized and through the roof on interest and penalties.
It wasn’t easy- but it wasn’t like today’s bullshit loans.
With almost all votes counted, it’s possible now to start legitimately analyzing what occurred on election day (and to correct earlier hot takes made in haste and without full information). There will still be a lot to learn, but basic facts are emerging. Here I want to focus on the seven swing states and the presidential versus senate totals.
Notably, while Kamala Harris was losing all seven to Donald Trump in the presidential vote, Democratic senators won election or re-election in 4 of the 5 swing states where a Senate election took place (WI, MI, AZ, NV). This is very unusual for recent political history — the vast majority of the time, the Presidential and Senate vote winners are from the same party. This has led to speculation about split tickets and more than a few questions about how stupid one had to be to vote for Trump for President and for a Democratic senator.
…
These numbers tell us two things. The first is that Harris’ campaign had a huge impact in the 7 swing states where it was focused. If the national totals are our baseline, then Harris’ campaign pulled her nearly even with Biden in the swing states, compared to an 8% dropoff across the rest of the board.
then comes a lot of analysis of <presidential candidate numbers> - <senate D/R same state>. Which is meant to characterize the shift in general attitude. In summary, it came down to relatively small numbers across all swing states, with this depressing summary quote:
As we all know, the election was incredibly close; Harris lost by a combined total of just under 230,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, out of almost 15,900,000 cast in those states (less than 1.5%). Meaning that once again, several hundred thousand angry Midwesterners have decided the fate of the nation — and in large measure, the world — over the next four year.
they also tell us that even if Harris had matched Biden’s numbers it wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome. The T24-T20 column shows how Trump’s 2024 votes compare to his 2020 totals. Trump got over a million more votes across the swing states in 2024 than he did 4 years earlier. The final column shows how Biden’s 2020 totals compare to Trump’s 2024 votes. Note that Joe Biden 2020 would have lost every single one of the swing states to Trump 2024, exactly as Kamala Harris did.
…just a couple hundred thousand low information misogynists did us all in. @#$!!
My bright spark of a daughter observed something this evening.
She hypothesized that some of the appeal of nostalgia may be due to the lack of uncertainty with the past. We know what happened.† Although the past may have been awful at the time, pick from many reasons, the one thing it lacks today is fear about what comes next. We know things “worked out”‡ so bygone days somehow seem more benevolent.
† Mathematically speaking, I mean. Yes, if this was true in a human sense, we wouldn’t have historians. ‡ Except where things didn’t work out, but those people are conveniently not here to make nostalgic observations.
I finally got a chance to read this, and I’m very glad I did. It seems very much on point in explaining what’s going on with voters. If I had to criticize the essay, I’d say it’s a little too dry and unemotional; it doesn’t get into just how angry and upset people are with what’s been going on the last few decades. Other than that, it’s great.
I said something similar to my parents a decade or two ago. I grew up in Northern Canada, next to a radar base meant to detect Soviet missiles and bombers approaching over the north pole. We were absolutely a target, and when Reagan got elected things got tense.
Then one day in the 00s, my mom said something like “Things feel so much more dangerous now.” I was surprised, because every morning since 1990 I’ve been relived that at least we don’t have Instant Apocalypse on the menu of foreseeable possibilities. I reminded her where we lived and what that meant, and the only reason our past feels safe now is because, as it turned out, nobody used nukes after WWII. But we didn’t know that back then. We had no idea how that chapter would end, and my money was solidly on The Other Way. The dream of one day buying calendars with years starting with “2” seemed laughably naive to me back then.
But when I remember those days, I don’t feel the everyday stress I feel now. It feels safer in my memory. Survivor’s bias?
The media, even the less bad media, always jump at the chance to present the left is as bad as the right (bothsiderism is a real blight on society). This is a pretty subtle case of that, but it annoys me nonetheless. The current political cartoon in The Guardian shows both trump and Biden taking a dump in the scales of justice. If for one microsecond anyone beyond a fox"news" deluded moron thought that Biden had corrupt activity even marginally equal to the ever-growing mountain of trump corruption their sanity should be questioned.
(this cartoon set-up would even allow trump’s side of the scale to be weighed down lower than Biden’s, but noooOOo, they’re dead level -sigh-)
I was looking for an ironic meme on the theme of school fights that wasn’t some creepy archived video of actual fights … And I was like “oh a song this will be ironic.”
