Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

Greed is never satiated.

After exports start, they will have established the basis that their product is not a threat to national security. This will give them all the leverage they need to file a suit against the US government.

No because greed is never satiated.

Yeah, they are but not in the way you think. They don't really back up your claims, I mean this is the strongest claim in all of them and depending on the meaning of "drastic" it's not an automatic given that reducing the size of cattle herds and operations is a bad thing at all.

Considering the externalizes beef should probably cost more than it does in my opinion. Why would a decrease in beef consumption be a bad thing at all? A higher floor price on beef means we could regulate out some of those worst types of operations, they only exist to hit the cheapest costs.

In a similar vein I can't help but feel the argument over climate change for 30 years has been just a variation of this:

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

Gyre is a more official name for the Pacific Garbage patch, as there are presumably few kids in it

Not really IMO, moderation is broken by design at best

You brought up amenities

I agree, that's not a college specific issue though, it effects every aspect of our economy and college costs have way way way outpaced inflation over other sectors the last 50 years. Something else is happening. I was mainly using it as a parallel in that they both suffer from the same fundamental economic problem (how can you have market forces for something people *have* to have. You can't, it requires intervention)

Agree, these are all inter-related though, but again, not college specific. This increases drag on the entire economy.

Oh yeah, well not now obviously. But like healthcare it will probably have to happen eventually, there's nowhere else to go. We have to eventually accept these things. Right now, again like healthcare, we already subsidize it to the tune of billions if not trillions. We just do it in an entirely ass-backward way because we've been infected with Chicago-school economics ghouls for 50 years and we do economically illiterate things like private health-insurance and 6-figure unsecured loans for 18 year olds.

Crossed wires maybe, it read like "i dont think these things are problems at all".

See I think we have to operate with a little bit of courtesy to at least hear them out and not someones caricature of their positions. I mean lets even look through your links for these unstated meanings;

The first, with cattles, the only change called for is "It asked for the removal of livestock from public lands that are Herd Management Areas (HMAs). " I don't think that's objectionable.

The article about steel is about those very technologies to reduce impact and the government investment into them; I would say exactly what we should be doing!

The article about mining was two groups, first nations who objected to rules about their land and environmental about species protection. Ok, maybe a bit too nosy. But oh wait, it didn't mean jack shit in the end because the bill in Canada passed anyway.

The only prescription the car article makes is more autonomous vehicles and better urban planning. Nothing at all objectionable to me. It may not feel nice as a car owner to read all the ways the culture harms us but that doesn't make it not true.

So where's the green washing rent seeking that requires the harshest possible outlook?

Oh I can't expect you to care, I wouldn't if it were me, this is just the internet so reputation is both meaningless and also all that matters here.

From where I stand I have a bunch of environmentalists who acknowledge the problems but have what I feel might sometimes have overly onerous solutions but opposite them are folks who won't even say the problems exist and promote things that would make it worse. I can work with one of these.

This is a fundamental problem with the business model then.

So it's somewhat pointless if neither of us can be specific. Are you saying there are no amenities to be cut?

If we are calling those "amenities" then we have a definition problem. Put all those things together and you have "a campus". Talking about things besides those.

Did you look at the list though? We are more expensive by a long shot than similarly developed nations. Same problem with healthcare, nations with similar GDP/capita and we spend far and and away more per-capita. So something is fundamentally broken in our higher education system. My opinion it's the same thing, we expect it to operate like a market but refuse to acknowledge how we've created a wildly distorted market.

To be fair I did forget the key aspect of my plan: community colleges at that point are subsidized education, IE, government supported and basically we would do away with most of the federal loan programs.

I don't have a perfect plan either but we can't have a discussion about the value proposition of college in the US without discussing the costs because the costs are out of control.

Again, just like health care, if most Americans could keep everything about the healthcare in America but the cost per-capita was $7k like Finland, Australia, France, Canada, etc instead of close to $15k then we are having a much much different discussion. Gotta solve that first, it's pretty much the primary issue.

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

"Et tu"

Cool.

You realize why this is frustrating right, because earlier you claimed "I do not, because most of such claims presuppose that the environment is static and pristine." in regards to those claims, now everything is much more nuanced...

But we can't give that nuance to environmental groups or their issues of course, we have to paint those with a big broad brush and your strawman of them makes you seem like a run-of-the-mill science denier. Again, quite bad faith to just claim they "want to get rid of all cattle, steel and cars" to paraphrase up your earlier point.

Some from all of those but a lot comes from #2 where admin costs have outpaced teaching costs in both total expenditure and rate of increase.

We can say amenities will keep students away but you'd have to show me what we're cutting and is that worth the high tuition (which also keep students away) and the value proposition (also keeps students away)

https://www.usnews.com/educati...

Also to say it's incredulous to say the US can reduce the cost of school would imply that the costs are the same in the rest of the world but much like healthcare the USA is far out in front there, something is wrong with our system here:

https://educationdata.org/aver...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

I have always favored a plan that gives more options for community colleges to give bachelors and also expansion of trade schools (and treating them the same)

Much like health care it's a distorted market with no controlling force on price, particularly as it's gone from optional to required in society. Much like the rest of the world the US chooses to have the state be hands off, leave it to "the market" and then wonder why prices explode. It's a very "America-coded" problem.

Bingo.
I asked a friend who started enthusiastically using AI for coding, used it happily for various business bits of writing, summaries, etc.

So I asked him if he had to give up one tool: "AI" (all of them) or "The spreadsheet", he thought for about 10 seconds and said, "AI" for sure: you're in and out of Excel all day long.