Raptorpat

I figured that one could still use elevation because it's in that gray area where its more of a private forum than it is a social space, and you're still trying to get that one off the ground.

I removed the two main club links, but I left the weeding one there for now. Is the single link still too disruptive?

If people don't like shortcuts I can get rid of the shortcuts.

It's a reflection that the entire system is broken. It's not the entire fix, it's just simply the most splashy component because it's the most tangible. For the sake of this conversation, I'ma focus on the tangible impacts on those who received loans (setting aside all the other issues, like the lifetime of societal pressure to go to school and promise of class mobility, the lack of financial literacy education in high schools, or the impacts of widely accessible loans on the growth in education costs). Pre-COVID, half of America all had to make our monthly payments like any other loan because we're charged interest (in the range of 5-8%), which is all a normal loan thing. But there are a number non-normal things, or normal things that combine to create a non-normal outcome: Here's the key thing - paying anything less than the amount of interest that accrues for the month means your interest continues to accumulate, and you can't touch your principal until you've paid off all your accrued interest. It seems kind of basic but let's see how it adds up. Unpaid interest that accrued during the schooling period capitalizes and increases the size of the principal, which increases the amount of interest that accumulates. Loans were deferred for people who didn't land a "real" job right out of school, or they payed a minimum-to-zero amount via the basic IBR repayment (obligating you to pay an income-derived amount rather than the default 10-year repayment plan) while they ramped up their career, all while the excess interest accrues. As a person's income increased, the minimum IBR payments increased, however even if the person ever reached the earning capacity anticipated to adhere to the default 10-year payment plan, that doesn't account for all the excess interest that accrued during the deferments or IBR periods. If someone completely fell under water, student loans could not be discharged in bankruptcy. Outside of the specific public sector program (which we all know had its bureaucratic issues), basic IBR loans are forgivable after 25 years' (it might be 20, not sure off the top of my head) worth of on-time monthly payments. For those who think making IBR payments for 25 years is a sufficient way out, the tax code treats the entire forgiven amount as taxable income and the person then owes the IRS - basically starting the entire process over. And just to top it off, the student loan interest tax deduction is capped out at $2,500, but that amount adjusts downward and phases out at certain income thresholds. So given all that, the focus of student loan forgiveness is not the people who aren't making their payments or otherwise cheating the system. The focus of student loan forgiveness is the people who have been dutifully making monthly payments to the best of their income capacity and aren't appreciably touching their principal. People who have paid thousands or tens of thousands of dollars back but their loan balance hasn't changed, or is only getting bigger. Then after scraping by for 25 years, the whole process restarts but with the IRS instead of DOE, and the IRS likes to wear leather. To the extent that student loans obligations ballooned exponentially for an entire generation, that is a societal problem regardless of whether some people have succeeded in paying theirs off through sacrifice or luck, or whether others never needed them in the first place. It affects the macro economy. We've all heard (or lived through) more than enough stories about millennials deferring home ownership, marriage, kids, or whatever consumer demands because of student loan debt. That is a massive social and economic problem. It's no coincidence that home sales and consumer demand skyrocketed with the student loan freeze. (As an aside, to the extent that this pent up demand factors into inflation [when factoring out fuel and food prices due to global instability], it's probably more accurate to say the consumer economy experienced artificially deflated demand for years prior.) So all that said, we turn to solutions to address the structural failures: Blanket forgiveness for existing loan holders under income threshold. To grease the skids, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren slipped a five-year exemption for student loan forgiveness from the income tax. (Ideally this provision is extended or made permanent so that future IBR payors don't have to worry about the 25-year "tax bomb".) Everyone's head about and has an opinion on forgiveness, so there's not much to say here. Structural reforms for the future of the program. The DOE will promulgate a regulatory reform that allegedly does the following (from press release): For undergraduate loans, cut in half the amount that borrowers have to pay each month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income. Raise the amount of income that is considered non-discretionary income and therefore is protected from repayment, guaranteeing that no borrower earning under 225% of the federal poverty level—about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage for a single borrower—will have to make a monthly payment. Forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. The Department of Education estimates that this reform will allow nearly all community college borrowers to be debt-free within 10 years. Cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest, so that unlike other existing income-driven repayment plans, no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low. Not typing it all out, but this and the various other reforms are here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/24/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-student-loan-relief-for-borrowers-who-need-it-most/ Based on the above, I highlighted the bullet that I think will make the most systemic difference to the student loan system. I am 100% biased, and obviously the blanket forgiveness part is in the news due to its extreme tangibility, but I think it's absolutely crazy that the fourth bullet has not trickled into the public discourse.

Does it directly involve the insurrection act? The article says it's the disqualification clause of the 14th amendment, which If anything, it will probably be appealed and will be an interesting test case on it's applicability. The other, unhelpful legal argument is that that the disqualification clause only applies to the OG civil war. If it was appealed in the federal system and SCOTUS went in that direction, that'd be a real shame.

They're just burning off all the gas right at the plant, right across the border from Finland. Idk is that like a triple spite? Spite the EU, spite Finland, spite the habitability of the biosphere.

"... based on the privileged documents"

Tom Cotton complaining about ranked choice voting on Twitter. That's how you know it works.

Are you talking about the pre-invasion war? Or something else?

Action on... ethnic cleansing? I think that's conflating two issues.

To the extent that Ukrainians in the occupied/annexed territories are forcibly relocated and integrated into Russia, yes.

My understanding was that his goal was to fracture NATO prior so that it wouldn't get involved in his plan for regime change and/or annexation. But then it snapped back and clearly did get involved.

To be fair I think it 100% is a proxy war at this point, but I don't think that diminishes the agency of Ukraine.

nothing super-substantive but it appears Ukraine began the Kherson counteroffensive today.

rpgamer raises a fair issue to the extent we'd like to make the format enticing for lapsed users, so maybe it is worth the discussion in toonami-ville

Thanks MD! I apparently had two orders left so was able to lock that in.

The redirects self-delete after 30 days, but probably more applicable is that volunteers can toggle whether the redirect generates. This might be a "keep it off" context.

ANYWAYS Not technically a real 2022 cycle election, but entirely possible that Sarah Palin is so unpopular that the Dem candidate wins the ranked choice special election to finish Don Young's term in Alaska.

I had a follow-up post per rpgamer's suggestion that got wiped when I flipped between tabs (basically that I could envision ways to streamline discussion threads while keeping premieres single), but I was gonna say I had set up this thread in the Toonami club section to hash out internally how you guys want it to be structured to get the most value out of the folder: https://unevenedge.com/topic/58796-toonami-tune-up/

oh man you look so horrible in pink but yeah, I still haven't announced we're formally revamped yet with eblasts and social media posts etc., so if there are kinks to work out let's work'em out.

These are "bipartisan" commissions, not "non-partisan". So they're inherently trying to protect their own and boost their edge. In NY's case, one of the fatal flaws was that each party has equal representation and there was no way to break a deadlock. So the Dems proposed one thing, the GOP proposed another, and then when the two partisan plans were both voted down in the first round, the GOP commissioners just walked away rather than do a required second round of maps. The new process requires two rounds of commission maps before the legislature can do its own thing with a supermajority vote, and because the GOP commissioners left the table, there never was a second round before the legislature drew its own maps. If it sounds built-to-fail, it pretty much was. All that being said, there are a lot of philosophical questions regarding what makes a map good. Should all the districts be maximized to be competitive in the general election? Should districts be maximized to represent communities of interest? Like those are two basic questions, but given our practical realities they lead to completely opposite results.

Yeah it's a mess, and that's without even getting into the built-in implosion of the redistricting commission, where there was no way to break a partisan tie and the GOP representatives (one of which who was planning to run for state Senate himself) just walked away from the table. Almost like it was set up to fail so they could sue when the legislature inevitably stepped in... 🤔🤔

try now