Sure! So for starters, I’m going to guess our working definitions of inflation are a little different. Inflation, in the general sense, refers to an expansion. When you inflate a balloon, it is expanding because the supply of air increases. This expansion can cause a rise (if it’s helium), but the rise and the inflation are separate things. Likewise, if the supply of money increases, that would refer to an inflation or expansion of the currency, and the prices would rise in response, because greater supply of something makes it less valuable. They’re linked, for sure, but not the same conceptual thing.

I understand if you don’t want to accept that into your nomenclature but I do find it’s the more workable - and historically consistent, for that matter - definition of the word. Just as long as you understand how I use the word is all :)

So, to the loans. There’s a few ways to get a loan, let’s say you sign a deal with Sallie Mae. To keep it simple, let’s say they have $100,000 to give, so that’s the loan you get. Under normal circumstances, you would get your education, and then sometime later pay it back by your own means, after interest has accumulated. So, let’s say you pay $180,000 back in total, so $80,000 in interest. Technically, you paid $80,000 for SLM to pay $100,000 on your behalf, and you got you education in the process. SLM makes a big profit, you get educated for cheaper, and the school still gets their tuition fees. This benefits the shareholders of SLM who then have more revenue to participate more in the economy.

These numbers may seem idealistic to you, depending on where you’re from, who you sign with, etc… I’ll address that in a sec, but they’re not real numbers anyway haha. The important part to point out about this process is that the additional $80,000 comes from a private individual - meaning it most likely came from the supply of money that already exists amongst the general public (you worked for it). Same goes for the loaned money in this case, and as it’s payed off all that revenue is recirculated in the process

Now let’s say, for whatever reason, you don’t or can’t pay it off at all. So, you’re given $100,000 and ten years later they’re expecting $180,000 back. If the government decides on SLM’s behalf to forgive your loan, then it has effectively taken $180,000 of revenue away from the organization. Not only do I find this wrong personally (I don’t think the government should interfere with business like that), and that I’m pretty sure it would be massively illegal, but it would also certainly put that organization out of business if it’s done at scale, which means that service disappears for everyone else. But, like I said, I’m certain this isn’t how they’d do it, and that’s probably why.

What has to happen is for the government to pay it off themselves. Given that America’s national debt is still trending up (last i checked anyway), I would say it does not have the spare funds to pay off student’s loans. The way America solves that problem these days is the federal reserve generates more money, which means that forgiving $180,000 in debt will directly inflate the currency by $180,000. That’s not a lot by itself, but I think Biden’s forgiving billions of dollars altogether, which means the supply of American dollars will inflate by billions, which will greatly decrease its value. This, of course, means that the students whose loans were just forgiven will have way less buying power.

This basically means that the entire working class, including those who had their loans forgiven, will have way less buying power, struggle to build savings, and have less means to move themselves up economically. Having such a large portion of the consumer market struggling to get by will hurt businesses, more loans given, more loans forgiven… The only potential winner is a nefarious government who just gained greater control over its population. The reason I say nefarious is because a non-nefarious government would see no advantage here.

TL;DR: forgiving billions of dollars inflates the currency by billions of dollars which totally fucks over the people it was trying to help.

As for what the government can do, is perhaps institute laws that reduce or cap interest on student loans, but I think that already exists (it does where I live anyway). That would help out those who’ve been exploited by high interest student loans (or prevent it).

But, the best way to solve the student loan crises is a massive cultural shift in how we approach education. I don’t think art school should be worth as much as it costs, but people are willing to pay for it so it’ll never change. I think a lot of people go to school out of a sort of obligation, or an assumption that it’ll lead somewhere good, without considering what a massive investment it is. People don’t really see it as an investment, but it is. If you’re thinking about going to school, you have to be able to judge whether or not it’ll be worth it, just like every other big risky investment. If you’re gonna pay that much to go to school, you better have the money and really want to go to school or expect to make returns on the investment.

The NEXT best way to solve it is to have a strong enough economy that those who do get fucked over (generally, not just by loans) or make mistakes can easily recover and make up for it if they try to. That’s the only factor the government is actually responsible for, and I would say forgiving loans actively works against it. So, as far as the government is concerned, it should be in its best interest to never forgive loans.

I’m sorry, I know this is a long comment, but there plenty of historical example of good and bad debt relief efforts. We have so much to learn from!

• Julius Caesar instituted reforms that reduced interest owed on outstanding debts. He also personally provided relief in extreme cases. Yet, when debt cancellation came up in the senate, he strongly opposed the method. So much so, that he personally took out such a massive loan the he became the most indebted man in Rome, and thus the primary benefactor for such a bill that was meant to help the common folk. Suddenly it wasn’t such a popular idea anymore lol. Since he did so much to help Rome economically, I think I’ll trust his judgement on that one.

• Okay not exactly a debt forgiveness example but it’s worth mentioning that the emperor Aurelian literally SOLVED inflation by physically stopping all currency printing operations within reach of the political power base. One of the only times in history that’s been achieved.

• Diocletian’s reign began less than ten years later and was incredibly heavy handed in his economic reforms, including debt cancellation efforts, and also happened to rule over one of the greatest inflationary periods in history. Just ten years later. Granted, that was way more than just the debt cancellation.

• King Henry III was fiscally irresponsible and reigned over a time of economic hardship. Many of his Baron’s were indebted to Jewish money-lenders, so he just issue the Statute of Jewry and cancelled a ton of debt at the expensive at the cost of economic hardship for the Jewish community.

I could go on but I don’t feel like typing this comment anymore lol

Has anyone ever told you why they think it’s a bad idea to cancel debt that wasn’t just about unfairness that other people get stuff? Because honestly, I hear that argument straw manned on the left way more often than I hear it used on the right, and I feel that those who support this decision and condescend on those who don’t haven’t actually heard the more legitimate concerns with it.

Simply put, this - in my opinion and most economists - is a horribly irresponsible economic decision that will genuinely cause real problems. If you’re interested in hearing why, I’d love to explain my stance from it, as long as you know that it comes from a place of genuine concern for everyone including students with debt

The weird thing is I get cover art and hardware transcoding with Emby but I’ve never paid. I know it has it because 4k playback was lagging until I enabled it 🤷‍♂️ and it would be weird to imagine emby without cover art of any kind. Doesn’t every media app just scrape by title? Is this referring to something else?

I also use the native emby app on my phone, I think my smart TV has it too, unpaid. Man, I’m really confused about their paid features lol everything I think would be needed seems to be in native Emby as well. So weird.

Good to know though, I could see downloading for offline use being very useful for travel and stuff.

Emby or Jellyfin?

I feel like your interpretation of my comment is really off. I’ve never had issues with paywalls, and the reason I said the ad thing was my only gripe was because I thought I didn’t have to explicitly say it wasn’t a big deal. I haven’t had any problems that make me feel like I owe it to myself to find something better, because my Emby experience has been great.

The point of my comment is that I’m curious what I’m missing out on, since people’s problems with Emby don’t really line up with my experience.

I keep hearing this, but my emby server has been running strong for a few years now without issue. My only gripe with it is the emby premiere ads that take up a lot of home screen space, but I got rid of it with custom CSS that you can put in emby settings, doesn’t even show up on the phone app anymore.

I’ve heard Jellyfin implemented features that emby puts behind a paywall too, but I’m not sure what. Care to fill me in on what I’m missing?

What a weird question. No one specifically owns and dictates the feminist movement, and op didn’t imply that there was. The answer you’re demanding is at the core of cultural movements evolve, which is an incredibly complicated topic and I think it’s kind of shitty to ask this pose this question like some obvious truth they’re missing or something.

Modern feminist culture is incredibly poisonous, because its values were gradually eroded from bad actors. The people who dictate movements are simply the more passionate and convincing people that choose to try to. If a movement happens to have pretty vague ideas about its goals, it’s actually very easy to undermine its greater purpose to more nefarious specific goals. Or rather, it’s hard to keep from happening, because often the more selfish and destructive people are the ones who seem most passionate.

This was my experience with micro usb, and everyone seemed to agree they were total shit. As for USB-C, I’ve never even heard of someone having trouble with the actual cord. Generally the issue is that there is lint or something in the charge port. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a USB-C cord, to my memory.

In short, check for lint, and if that’s not the issue then yeah it really might be your phone. Mind if I ask what kind of phone you have?

I took a look at your comments purely because his reply made me curious. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your comments. The only downvoted comment of yours I saw was that Trudeau has the worst approval rating ever, which is a matter of record, not opinion.

It’s not on you, you’re fine. I’ve had a similar experience here, people just don’t seem to be able to take disagreement as anything less than personal

That’s interesting, when I look online, most people seem to think all gun owners are totally careless. I say it because I’ve lived in that culture before, everyone where I’m from has their hunter’s safety training and I’ve never been out shooting with anybody did it carelessly.

Is this your impression of friends/acquaintances of yours that shoot or have you taken part as well and seen it first hand?

Not sure what op meant, but there’s a lot of angles that I can see it being true. Having a shooting range on personal property is very different in rural Arizona than places with higher population density. The risk is objectively not as large. The space makes it unlikely to hit anything you wouldn’t want to target, and it’s very ingrained in gun culture to be smart about what direction you fire.

They may have also been referring to accepted risk vs freedoms. Gun people understand that there’s a risk to owning guns, but it’s an acceptable risk because they value guns, much like how people understand the risk of traveling by vehicle yet still choose to.

had a famine in the 30s during the horribly botched collectivization of agriculture

which implies that non-collectivized agriculture was doing a good job considering the significant upswing in the 20s. After the civil war, non-collectivized farms were doing a good job.

All in all, you’re frustratingly bad at arguing anything coherent, and it’s clear you don’t actually care about proper definitions.

This response makes me think you didn’t really read my comment very closely considering I literally explain the etymology of the word “public”. Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and there’s good reason to consider that state ownership given the history of the word and its use over time. I don’t think I’m incoherent, I just think you don’t understand, otherwise you’d actually address my comment instead of restating your position and implying I’m stupid for not agreeing. I honest to god do recommend taking my comment a bit more seriously and rereading it. Really try to look at what I’m telling you, and if you disagree, I’d love to see you actually point out what’s wrong with my comment.

You’re never going to convince me I’m out of line here unless I can tell from your response you actually took in what I was saying, because honestly, you really didn’t have to read much of what I said to generate the response you made.

I wasn’t referring to 30s and 70s as time periods, but the actual life expectancies.

Oh, I must have assumed you meant otherwise because the USSR never reached that high of a life expectancy. They peaked in 1970 at 68 years old, at which point it trended down again. Russians never reached a life expectancy of 70 until 2015. You should also consider how volatile that graph has been in general, it simply isn’t good for a state to have that much influence over the life expectancy of all of its people.

That little bump in 1985-1990 correlates with the reign of Gorbachev. He implemented policy that gave more autonomy to enterprises (less state control), and allowed for foreign trade (opening the market, again less state control). This included giving way more autonomy to the collectivized farms, as well as allowing for private farms for both personal use and for sale on the market - in other words, he de-collectivized. Given that the central authority in the USSR was the state, you could also say the central authority has less control, and thus they decentralized.

Compare this the the US life expectancy of time. It’s much less volatile for one thing, it’s a very steady incline. They also actually did reach a life expectancy of 70 by 1970, they had it by 1965 in fact.

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Honestly, we totally agree on quite a bit here. We obviously both don’t advocate for Stalin himself, and we totally agree decentralization is a good thing. It’s just strange to me that in the case of the USSR you don’t see how the act of decentralization was literally being less strict on collective control and more lenient on private control - in other words, being less strict on socialist policy and being a little more lenient on private ownership.

it’s also important to acknowledge that many parts of the USSR did work

It’s also important to acknowledge which parts worked, it’s also important to acknowledge why they worked. When farmers were given private ownership, they had more freedom of choice in how to manage it, which is really important to have on farms for a myriad of reasons I can get into if you want. But in any case, they were better able to feed themselves as well as bring more product to market. Surplus on food and freedom of distribution means less hunger.

However, this cannot be meaningfully achieved in a top-down system like Capitalism.

Take farming as an example since it’s on topic. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. In 1985-1990 USSR most privately owned farms were small scale and personally managed. What’s more top down, a guy owning a plot of land and doing what he wants with it, or being assigned to work a plot by the regional agriculture authority, who answers to the ministry of agriculture, who answered to the council of ministers, who answered to the Communist Party leadership?

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Private Property Rights require a state while public property does not

Public Property: something owned by the city, town, or state.

I understand that the line is blurry on whether public means “of the state” or “of the people”. For example, the Romans saw the state to be in service of the people, so “public works” were state works for the people. They also saw the republic as a government of the people, so state projects were of the people either way you take it. This is exactly the same in our democracy, public spaces are managed by the state, on behalf of the people, but the democratic state is also a government of the people, so it’s effectively redundant in the modern context.

In any case, I don’t exactly think the distinction matters. As soon as a large group of people (the public) see the need to come together and make decisions and how to manage certain things and/or how to cooperate to get something done, a government is formed. When the Romans did this, they literally didn’t have a distinctive word for it, which is why they basically just called it the “public thing”, the group that handled public decision making. The nature of the Roman “public thing” swayed in and out of meaning of for the people, by the people, in service of the people, in command of the people, and it was never exclusive to one of those things.

Private property demonstrably does not require a state to exist, because that’s not always how property rights are handled. In this early period of Rome, the state could purchase and grant rights, but so could private citizens. If the people of Rome wanted a plot of land to themselves, the legal way to do so would be through a legitimate exchange with a private owner. Property rights are granted by whoever holds the property rights, private or public. Modern nations technically own the land they claim, which is why they grant access.

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The far more important distinction are the things that which the people don’t decide need collective cooperation. That’s what we call “private”. To be privately controlled, you can’t be under the control of the collective or the control of the state, which is precisely why “private” is the antithesis of “public”. In the context of Rome, centralization would be to make it part of the “public thing”. So, if the people and senate of Rome decided to bring the whole market under the control of the people the way they did the army and roads, they would have been both centralizing control of the market and technically socialist, as the means of production would been publicly controlled. The USSR was socialist for exactly that reason.

I didn’t say the workers decided things, I said they had a right to, and then alluded to the diplomatic issues that creates… In fact, I heavily implied they can’t realistically make decisions when I said the group decides things on their behalf.

Central Planned Economy: an economy where decisions on what to produce, how to produce and for whom are taken by the government in a centrally managed bureaucracy.

In socialism, the market is controlled by the state. This fits the definition of central planning perfectly.

In capitalism, the market is not controlled by a centralized bureaucracy.

Okay I see what you mean. You agree attempted, but never achieved, I see that now. I’m sorry for misconstruing your argument, but I still take issue with your assertion that things got drastically better. That’s a big red flag to me and tends to be a sign that someone is having a big misunderstanding.

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The Soviet Union doubled life expectancy from the mid 30s to the mid 70s

While true, it is essentially a lie by omission to leave out other key details. For one thing, if you think about it, what kind of conditions would one have to be in initially to make doubling the life expectancy even possible?

The Russians were in horribly dire straits. Life expectancy fell from 37 to 32 from 1930-1935. The chief cause was forced collectivization of farming by Stalin. Privately owned farms were confiscated by the state, and were horribly mismanaged which resulted in famine. Socialist policy directly caused that famine.

Life expectancy started going up again in 1935 after they relaxed grain procurement quotas, decentralized, and opened up private plots. This is the scaling back of socialist policy, and the implementation of capitalist policy. Capitalism policy is to thank for stopping the famine.

had constant GDP growth until it liberalized and collapsed

The US has had exponential growth, rather than linear, along with many of its allies. Russia also supplies a large percentage of the world’s oil, you’d have to make fucking up an art to make your GDP go down with a supply like that.

guaranteed free Healthcare and education,

Both were an improvement considering I don’t think much was their for either before, so I’ll give ya that.

and had mass housing initiatives

These came in response to a housing crisis caused by inadequate supply of houses when the USSR nationalized it under the Central Board of Architecture. The housing initiatives did help, but the housing problem was never solved, and it was a problem created by them.

It had far lower wealth inequality than before or after its existence

Because he killed the rich people, and no one had anything. Equality is not an intrinsically good quality, especially when it means everybody is equally impoverished.

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I guess this is why I find the observation that communism has never existed pretty naive. Socialism, in its most honest representation, is really the state ownership of the means of production. The way Stalin held ownership in common, was to collectivize it under the state that all citizens are part of. If we are trying to achieve a stateless society, then holding ownership in common is an antithetical goal. Every step the USSR took away from common ownership was a step towards private ownership, and therefor a step towards capitalism.

Socialism means workers collectively own the means of production, and it isn’t synonymous with central planning.

This can only be true if you stop thinking at the end of the sentence, without reading into any of the implications, or any circumstantial cause and effect.

If the workers collectively own everything, then that means that every worker has just as much right as anyone else to make decisions on how the process plays out. This means that the group has to come up with a way to make decisions. Since the group has to make a decision, and everybody has a right to make decisions, the group is effectively making decisions on behalf of those in the group.

If the workers collectively own everything, then that means they have to work together and organize to get things done. This means that the group has to come up with a way to organize. This means that the group will be deciding on behalf of those in the group what work is done by who.

If the workers collectively own everything, that means the workers have to decide what rules or laws to follow, and how to enforce them. So now the group has to decide by what convention it’ll hold its members accountable. If it wants to hold members accountable, it implicitly has the power to do so.

A group with decision making power that enforces law among its members is a central authority.

A central authority with power over the market and all decision making is central planning.

Your description of capitalism legitimately sounds like mental gymnastics. You can call anything centralized if you reduce the context to only itself. That is dishonest, the context here is the market. If a market is centrally planned, then all aspects of the market need to be centrally planned by the same unit. That’s what central planning means. A disunited group of private entities all planning things for themselves is absolutely not an example of central planning.

Heracles

Sure, and capitalism has never existed either, only specific forms of libertarian-constitutionalism 🤷‍♂️

Now, if you can see how silly what I just typed is, you should be able to see how silly it is to claim communism has never been tried. You say yourself that Marxist-Leninism is a communist ideology, so if it’s being attempted, then it’s valid to say a form of communism is being attempted.

Do you consider drastically improving upon previous conditions to be a miserable failure?

All of the citation needed. Don’t make the mistake of including the goals of outcome as part of the definition, that’s just cheating. Op obviously rejects the idea that it makes things better, you can’t just assume it a priori.

You’re right people are responsible for things, you’re right that that’s obvious. In fact, it’s so obvious, it’s wrong of you to imply that my point suggested otherwise, because it obviously doesn’t. Your sentiment supports my comment, people are responsible for things, so if you have a problem with something, and you feel the need to blame someone for it, you should actually blame the right person. “The rich” are not a group of people united out of a common goal, and include all sorts of political and cultural sentiments, many of which you would support. Moreover, the post makes no suggestion as to what problems they’re talking about anyway, so you kinda just have to already believe “rich people” in general are the people responsible for any general set of problems you choose to believe. If you don’t see the flaw in this thinking, you’ve got a serious problem with political vitriol, and you need to stop blindly circle jerking everything you see on lemmy.

The sad thing is, I know you’d agree with me if I said the exact same thing in a thread blaming socialists or Marxists or something. My opinion that you shouldn’t blame general problems on a general group of people for the sake of hating on them doesn’t change based on context.

Anytime you’re told that group A is responsible for your problems rather than group B, you’re being lied to. Including this post