so, should abolishing student loan payments be mean-tested?

no - that's not an argument i've ever made, i don't think. but, i have argued that it should be institution-specific, and i'm going to repeat as to why.

what are you doing when you talk about relieving student loan debt? are you talking about a one time wiping of the debt? or are you hoping for systemic, structural change?

i posted this in june of 2019:

jun 24, 2019

if you're going to wipe out student debt in the united states, it should be limited to people that attended public institutions.

income is perhaps not the most relevant factor, but i would oppose a bill that wipes out student debt for private institutions.

15:49  

there are only around 20 private universities in canada, and almost all of them are religious in focus. 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/education/canadian-university-report/article-why-there-are-only-a-few-private-universities-in-canada/

 15:58  

again: i'm not a muslim. i don't have a moral problem with usury. i'm not going to support an anti-debt bill for the sake of it. if consenting adults want to sign an agreement, it's up to the courts to regulate it, and that goes equally well for everything else that muslims don't like: divorce, child support, mortgages, pay day loans and student loan debt, too.

so, if the government wants to step in and cancel a debt that was taken out by citizens to attend an institution that is public in scope, that is a question of democratic oversight. if there is support for this, it is up to the people to enact it.

but, for a government to cancel a debt held between a private citizen and a private institution, even if it is acting as an intermediary in the loan, would be overstepping it's bounds and interfering in a process that should be determined via the rules of contract law and regulated by the courts - an area of law that is far more flexible than classical liberals would have you believe.

my position is actually that the government didn't do it's due diligence in researching my background before it gave me the money, and the loan should be declared a gift for that reason. if a banking institution doesn't do it's due diligence, it has no right to expectation; that is, the courts have determined long ago that if the bankers give money to people they had no reasonable expectation would be able to repay the loan, then the debt can be declared null and void. consent requires competency. i could very well argue this in court, one day. for now, i just ignore the loan collectors.

but, the point is that the issue of private debt is not up for the government to regulate, but up to the courts to deal with. public debt is a different issue - that is a question of the public will.

16:16  

another way to articulate what i'm saying is this: i would be opposed to bailing out the banks on private student loan debt.

and, let's be clear what a student loan forgiveness really is: it's a (ed: bank) bailout.

16:39 

jun 26, 2019

so, with the debt thing, to clarify.

the goal should be as follows:

1) public universities should be subsidized entirely by taxpayers.

2) it should be hard to get into these schools, and they should regulate their supply of professionals based on what statistics regarding market demand exists for them that government can conjure up. so, free university shouldn't mean an influx of fine arts grads, but should also mean a more centralized production of professional workers.

3) private universities should eventually be phased out.

so, the reason you leave the private school debt in place is because you're ultimately trying to nationalize these schools. universal debt relief doesn't make sense in the broader context of this, unless it comes with a total socialization of education, which nobody is currently talking about. but, in the end, it's that socialization that you really want, and what the policy ought to be angling for.

if you set up a system where one type of schooling is "free" and the other one isn't, the expectation should be that the best students will gravitate to the least expensive option, so long as it is just as good, leaving for profit schools for legacy students of the rich and stupid. that is, you set up the public schools to push the private schools out of the market, over time.

so, i'm not concerned about income as a dividing line, here. i'm not complaining about giving hand-outs to rich kids, or pushing for a "progressive" approach over a socialist one. what i'm doing is pointing out that the universality doesn't make sense so long as the market continues to function, and that if you're going to leave the market in place you should be starving it rather than funding it.

so, go ahead and bail out the public school students, but make it clear to everybody that private school students will receive no such treatment, not now and not ever in the future, either.

21:31 

so, i got my fan and i'm setting it up within minutes. i also got some actual calcium carbonate, which i'm going to use to replace the baking soda i picked up a few weeks ago.

i'll repeat the logic with this: calcium carbonate is basic in solution, so if you're concerned about acid wear on your teeth, it makes sense to swish with it after you eat - not really because of the calcium, but because of the carbonate. it's the same logic as with baking soda, but it's a little less abrasive, meaning you need to give it more time to work.

what about the calcium, though? well, it can't hurt, but calcium carbonate is apparently very insoluble, and when i went through this previously i came to the conclusion that rebuilding hydroxyapatite from calcium & phosphate doesn't seem to really actually be possible - you need to remineralize with the molecule in tact, or it's gone. so, that's probably not going to help much. but, i think it's a better idea than baking soda as an after meal rinse, even if i stick with the baking soda for after coffee rinses. we'll see how it works out...

i got the security guard's report & a response on the request about the conflict, so i have some writing to do tonight...

but, windsor got a lot of snow last night, and this was a vicious, three hour trudge through cold weather and heavy snow banks, the kind i really haven't interacted with since i lived in ottawa. i prepared though. we're talking about:

- two sweaters + heavy grey jacket (+ undershirt)

- two pairs of socks

- two pairs of jeans

- boots

- ski mask

- toque

- hoodie on second sweater

- kombi gloves

people seeing me might imagine i'm wearing a surgical mask under the ski mask; i am not. i just live in canada, and happen to have almost no tolerance to the cold. so, i dress like i'm going skiing when i go to the grocery store this time of year, and that's a constant going back quite a few years.

so, no - i haven't converted to islam (lol.) and i'm not wearing a mask for the virus. i'm just bundled up for the cold weather.

this is what i'm wearing, precisely:

it's sold as a "snowmobile mask", which is pretty canadian, but i bought it explicitly for bicycling in cold weather. hey, try biking anywhere in canada even in november or april. it's cold here, and for much of the year. it's really needed to avoid serious frostbite.

so, no - i'm not happy about the mask laws, and i wouldn't wear a mask if it was warmer out. but, this is how i dress in the winter anyways, so i happen to be kind of floating through...

i'm hoping that the mask laws are gone by mid-march; if not, i'm hoping there's enough of a backlash against mandated mask wearing that i'm not forced to create a conflict when i walk around without one.

for now, it's fucking cold out and i'm dressing for it, full stop.

here's what it was like in windsor, today:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-essex-school-buses-1.5915123

the sidewalks were partly plowed by local citizens only, meaning it was hard to get through long stretches of city property (like going under the freeway). if this was ottawa, it'd have been cleared by 10:00 am - it's nothing, really. but, windsor doesn't have the capacity, and i've noticed this before. it's almost like a yankee city, in that respect.

so, i had to dodge traffic both ways, with a 16" fan in my hands on the way back, while walking around six foot high snowbanks created by incomplete plowing. i thought i'd never have to do that again. hopefully, that was the last time - ever.

i need to clean in here, shower and probably nap - and i have a lot of things to do tomorrow, now that the files are here.

these vector bars are actually unusually good:

- vitamin a, 25%

- b1, 46%

- b2, 25%

- b3, 26%

- b5, 25%

- b6, 25%

- b7, 80%

- b9, 30%

- b12, 25%

- vitamin c, 32%

- vitamin d, 26%

- vitamin e, 21%

- ca, 32%

- p, 26%

- mg, 19%

- fe, 28%

- zn, 33%

- i, 20%

- cl, 3%

- cu, 20%

- mn, 50%

- se, 13%

- mo, 40%\

- na, 5.5%

- k, 6.5%

- k: na - 3.6

it seems to be discontinued.

obviously.

it's actually sort of wrong to call this capitalism, and i don't mean in the real vs really existing sense that you used to hear however many years ago. this system is the exact system that the initial capitalists were trying to overturn! and, what they called it was feudalism. i used to have these debates with these hayekian right-libertarians ten years ago, about what policies would really bring us back to serfdom. but, we're almost there...

for that reason, i acknowledge what hannah appel is saying, and would extrapolate that something like paine or locke might be more useful in the next few decades than something like marx. marx was attempting to reapply liberalism to an economy designed around socialized production, as the basic assumptions underlying liberalism collapsed with the advent of factory work. but, to an extent, the factory is just a different kind of plantation. i've been asking "what's the way to maximize freedom in a post-industrial economy?", and deduced some kind of superproduction, but this isn't the first time somebody has told me we're on a direct course back to feudalism, and then the theory flips over - the left needs to re-embrace liberalism. i'm not so sure...

and, this is what i'm left with regarding debtors' unions - they're no doubt going to be useful to help alleviate suffering, if you hold to the premises underlying the system. should debtors get a new deal? no doubt.

but, what you really want if you're a revolutionary is to abolish the debt, and i'm not sure i see the utility of this type of union for that purpose. rather, i want to suggest pointing to the production of parallel systems. and, in the end, the only solution is ever through democratization of the institutions, and public ownership of the services they offer.

the end result is that you have to support these unions, but you shouldn't be naive about them - they're not a revolutionary tactic, but a stop-gap reformist measure to make things a little bit better. and, they will tend towards conservative tendencies in the end, like unions always do...

in the end, the best thing that can come out of these kinds of things is the seeds for a more revolutionary movement.

but, you have the bombs. so, why not use them to build schools? what else are they good for?

yes - mmt is a pragmatic way to get some actual, concrete, meaningful change on the ground, it's not a revolutionary theory. but, you are the fucking empire. why not be a little pragmatic about it to get your living standards up to the rest of the world?

the talking point from bernie was that every other country in the world has universal health care, and there's just a bit of a reality check here as to why. you might imagine that these concessions were won through broad working class movements, but they actually had more to do with the realities underlying the corporate welfare that is inherently attached to state funded insurance monopolies - and there's actually an argument that the reason that never happened in the united states was because it didn't have to, because the amount of wealth in the period was so immense anyways...

in canada, what is being cynically written off as impossible actually did happen - the conservatives, ndp & liberals all got together and decided to build a system modeled on the british nhs. how did we get the conservatives to vote for universal health care? the reason is that the insurance lobby supported it. for the liberals, it had a lot to do with the auto pact - a 1965 agreement between the united states and canada to consolidate tariffs through the automobile sector. do you know the actual, technical reason that the liberals in canada supported universal health care? it was to support the automotive sector, by downloading health care costs to the state. so, if ford set up a factory in detroit, it would have to pay it's employees health care (ironically because the unions won it), whereas if they set up here in canada, the government would pay for it.

i'm as cynical a person as you'll meet, but the whole fucking world has this stuff; it is only the empire that doesn't. it's bizarre. and, you really shouldn't be cynical about basic rights that the rest of the world has had for decades. if we can figure it out, so can you.

that's not to discount the value of struggle but every other legislature in the world has given it's people access to these services, and you're selling yourself short by discarding it as impossible. that's too much cynicism.

and just to clarify a point - what modern monetary theory is is an argument that the theory that exists today is not reflective of how money is created in real life. so, it's correct that it doesn't change anything - the point is that it doesn't change anything. it just helps us better understand what already is, and how to best utilize it to our advantage.

i run the risk of them breaking something else when i'm out, but it's not habitable down here without air flow.

i opened it up to clean it, hoping it was just jammed, and when i did i realized the screws were loose - somebody had recently taken the device apart. 

there is a black chip attached to the motor, but i can't say for sure why it's there or what it does. it doesn't look like a part of the device, but i don't know for sure.

what i know is that the fan had clearly been dismantled recently and now no longer works.

i had to walk around with a puffer when i was a kid because my mom smoked in the house. the effects of this were permanent - they've never fully resolved, and never will.

it's 2021 and the cops in this city don't believe that second-hand smoke causes asthma.

how did i end up in this fucking hole in the earth?

it seems like the cops put some kind of surveillance chip in my floor fan, and what i'm thinking is that it broke because they're too incompetent to do anything. i've had this pile of broken hardware over the last few years, and it legitimately seems like they keep breaking it accidentally. but, i can't function without it. it's bad enough as it is, but it's just too dry and smoky and disgusting in here to do anything at all without it. i'm just going to cough and hack and wheeze until it's fixed.

they have something at canadian tire, but i have to order it on the internet and wait until tomorrow to pick it up, and i want it now.

so, i was hoping to be in for the rest of the month, but i need to walk across town to the walmart to pick up a fan, instead

ugh.

i haven't had time to eat a real meal in something like 36 hours, but i bought these meal replacement things and they're quick fixes at least. but i'm going to make some fruit before i go...

i'm angry and frustrated and can't even fucking breathe in here at all right now. and, the fucking idiot cops seem to think i'm making a bronchitis diagnosis up - because they are a bunch of loser nicotine addicts, themselves. i hope they all die young....