Andrew Rivas

Agreed. Nothing is actually the Trolley Problem, it’s just a thought experiment that deliberately ignores context. Thus - its overuse

A better recent example of the trolley problem in action is the use of ventilators in the summer of 2020 - there were more critical patients with COVID than available ventilators. How do the doctors triage?

(I agree the thought experiment is overused and rejecting the premise is usually correct)

Saudi money is always a Faustian bargain

Beat me by 38 seconds!

Yes and no

Just use your words to express those big feelings. I believe in you!

One could say “higher education should be government-funded and free at the point of service” or “there should be a universal basic income that allows people to pursue education as they desire” or any number of other things that don’t elide the systematic exclusion up until the 1960s or so

Again, OP could have said something other than what they did say, that things were better “for hundreds of years”.

Over 60% of recent high school graduates in the US attend college (yes it’s incredibly expensive), certainly nothing close to the gatekeeping 100+ years ago

??? Where are you getting lobster tail for $1 a pound? I’m in SF and it’s about $35 a pound when buying by the case

I genuinely don’t understand the backlash to his comments: it’s a fact that ballet and opera are declining in popularity. The Met Opera needed a bailout from Saudi Arabia to remain solvent. Similarly, more than half of the top 150 ballet companies in the US were running a deficit in fiscal 2023

Never too young to introduce the next generation to Captain Kirk!

Taxes on the Rich Were Not That Much Higher in the 1950s Despite high marginal income tax rates, the top 1% of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42% of their income in taxes. See more about taxes on the rich.

Higher marginal tax rates for sure, but only slightly higher effective tax rates (and the top tax rate in Ike’s era was a smaller segment of the population than the equivalent today). taxfoundation.org/data/all/fed...

This is an unpopular take these days, but is 100% correct. Our tax system is already more progressive than most of Europe (by some measures, California is the most progressive tax system in the world)

Make Academia Great Again

Did you defend your thesis with “you know what I meant”?

Nobody is obliged to do anything on this website, but I’m certainly going to point out that the system of higher education OP is yearning to return to excluded people like me.

There is no way to know how many of those 10k likes were aware of the history of higher education, both in the US and abroad, and how the GI Bill changed it in the US. And yes, words matter, truth matters, and history matters, ESPECIALLY in discussions around the value of academia.

Sigh. No they didn’t. bsky.app/profile/star...

Then OP should have said this instead of the RETVRN take. Surely a discussion on the value and purpose of higher education should be historically accurate at a minimum!

??? Foreclosures are near the lowest they’ve been since FRED started tracking

Yes it is.

The scenario OP is describing was when the university system almost exclusively catered to wealthy white men. There is a false nostalgia of higher education that elides the systematic exclusion of working class men, women, and minorities, prior to serving as an engine of social mobility

I don’t think the OP intended it this way, but this is just another framing of “only the wealthy should attend university”

Immigration INCREASES the cost of housing as you are increasing the demand for housing when you have more people in the region (see: Canada).

Most of the other items you have called out are part of local regulations which you previously described as a step too far for federal regulation

The other issue is that if you’re trying to lower the cost of housing, but you refuse to ease mortgage standards or liberalize zoning, there’s really not much else you can do that will make much of a difference.

Unfortunately, the Senate cut out most of the zoning pre-emption from the House version that would have overridden local restrictions on housing, so it looks like the main impacts are the ADU polices and the restriction on corporations from building new homes

(You’re thinking of Blackstone)

Yes, which is why I wrote “mostly driven by asylum seekers” and not some other false statement like “entirely driven by asylum seekers”.

Homelessness is a major problem that we need to address, no question

The main driver of the *increase* is what I wrote.

No. About 2/3 of the homeless are sheltered.

Please read the rest of the study so you can understand it is not exclusively about the 4 major cities.

No, I am confident my previous statement is supported by the study:

Asylum seekers and the rise in homelessness Data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) show an unprecedented 43 percent increase in the number of people residing in homeless…

The homelessness increase is mostly driven by asylum seekers, a major problem that we must address, but unrelated to economic conditions in the US. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

No:

The median household income in the US was $84k in 2024, the highest ever even adjusting for inflation.

Less than 1.1% of workers make minimum wage, the lowest percentage ever.

We can still do more for the lowest income families, but lying about things being historically great helps no one