News outlets calling it a "mental health crisis" is just sleigh-of-hand, obscuring the root causes. It's natural to feel more stressed, anxious, or depressed if you're losing hope in life due to inflation, lagging pay, expensive healthcare, sky-high real estate costs, etc. Not to mention the general greedy nickel-and-diming that is present from most corporations, hedge funds, investors -- all of these small cuts and bruises add up to a very wounded animal.
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.
Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving money to special interests (airlines for example) and big businesses in various ways.
Yeah, I just multiplied CARES by 12 to get my number. I'm assuming you don't want to just let all the airline companies crash and burn along with all the restaurants, gyms, etc. Because then after the 12 months are up you find that millions are out of jobs and need another 12 months of rent while they look for new jobs, etc.
This pandemic is getting to all of us, for sure; and, I'm definitely one of the first to notice in myself when I'm being this way, but is there a way this could be reworded so it doesn't have the bite to it that I'm perceiving in it?
I perceive the "I'm assuming you don't want ..." part as incredibly sarcastic and belittling, as though you're putting yourself on a pedestal of knowledge and belittling your fellows having a conversation.
I know I've not been the most polite in many of these conversations; and I need to work on that, too; but, perhaps you haven't noticed it and I wanted to bring it to your attention so you don't snap at people and in conversations that actually matter.
Didn't intend to be sarcastic or biting at all. "I assume you don't want" was meant to mean "I'm assume we (collectively) don't want...". Basically, was just trying to say if we only give people rent money and ignore all businesses/let them crash and burn then that 2.4T will not be enough because now all the people that used to work for the companies that are now gone have no work.
Sorry for the dumb questions, I was just trying to understand the precise architecture and solution here.
So the "local application that generates static files" is the one used by employees of the restaurant when a customer makes an order? Or is that used just for maintenance purposes when changing formats of the orders customers can do. But what I was confused most about was what "polls for orders" meant in this context.
The other thing I was confused about was the generation of "static files for customer ordering". So the application generates these files, which are presumably an html form (and/or corresponding PHP script) and uploads them to the server. And the server's html static pages that are used to order are accessed either locally on the box itself or through another computer on the local network connection (since you mentioned that it can run even when internet is down). Is my understanding correct?
The application is used for everything that happens locally, including taking orders in the restaurant and organizing deliveries.
Polls for orders means it reads the json-file that is appended to via the php-script when a customer makes an order from the web interface and imports new orders into the local database.
The application generates json-files, which are then read by static html files. This makes it easier to test with stub data and allows shipping the html/css to a designer if/when they want something nicer looking.
The html files and generated json data is never used locally.
Despite getting accepted to many top-tier universities (Berkeley, Yale, Rice), I chose to go to an in-state school with a generous scholarship so I could come out of school with very little loans. I sacrificed going to a really great school like Berkeley (and living in California!) so I would save money and not end up in so much debt.
While I fully think that debt is a nondesirable thing to have, and that we do not educate people about debt enough, I don't know if loan forgiveness is the answer. I have personally paid off a close friend's student loans and old medical bills, and guess what? Even after all that she was just as financially irresponsible as before.
As a related situation, I know a few people who come to me asking me for help with rent or medical bills. When I ask them, why don't you have any money, they say it's because their hours were cut, or something else. But when I step back and look at the whole picture, I realize that because they went on an expensive vacation, and went to the bars every other night, and spent lots of money on clothes, that's the real reason they didn't have money. So when they asked me to help pay their rent, they were really asking me to help finance their vacation.
In a similar way, if we (collectively, the taxpayers) pay for the students who can't afford the student loans, we're actually subsidizing whatever the people DID spend their money on, or their choice to go to more expensive schools when less expensive schools are available, perhaps at the cost of those who, like me, chose to save money by going to less expensive schools.
Thanks, nice to have a single person agree with me. That said, I also agree that my personal situation (be it through luck or responsible behavior) now makes it possible for me to be generous to others, and I'm certainly happy to pay extra in taxes, to an extent.
I guess what bothers me is just this sense of entitlement of people that originated from my same social stratum who now argue "the game was rigged" when I never saw evidence of this. (This annoyance of mine BTW does not transfer to disadvantaged folks who did not come from a middle class background... I agree 100% they got a harder lot in life than many of us and are often right to complain.)
Id say the game is rigged from the get go. Between age 18-21 we say that people are not responsible enough to even buy alcohol, but apparently they are responsible enough to sign up for loans that take decades if ever to pay off. Then on top of it weve made the loans impossible to discharge under any circumstances _and_ we have an entire system that tells children their entire life that you go to college or you will have a terrible life. How is any of this not rigging the system?
It isn't that the game is rigged. It is that it assumes rational actors are making wise decisions about their future. Someone who carefully selects a degree that they know will let them pay back their loans is who the system is designed for. There are a lot of people who aren't behaving that way. The numbers are high enough that this isn't just a matter of some people having some hardship. This a large number of people making very poor decisions.
When it comes to society level discussion it seems that it is often assumed that people make irrational decisions. I am not sure that is true. For a lot of people it makes sense to take a chance on something unknown rather than to face likely failure. That is presumably also why they think the game is rigged. Because if you ask the average person who didn't go to college they probably aren't doing particularly well either.
If you look at the debt people are willing to acquire in pursuit of something like a degree in theater, it is hard to say it is rational behavior. They are taking a chance on something unknown rather than facing likely success with a career path that is in demand.
Pretty sure they already have that, when I was in the reserves they would have paid down my student loans if I had ever bothered to fill out the paperwork.
And a lot of (all?) places have programs where they'll forgive student loans if one stays a teacher for 10 years -- which, as an aside, always boggled my mind that you have to go into major debt to get a public teaching job that pays peanuts but people happily do it.
I did the same, and found out that oddly enough my brother who went to a U.C. ended up getting a bonus state grant that slashed his loan burden lower than mine. In effect, he was entitled to a college with a higher cost than mine. We only found this out by comparing the paperwork into college; my brother didn't pick the U.C. knowing this beforehand.
I feel it just sends the wrong message to society if we build these gotchas and loopholes left and right like this to let people make financially bad decisions.
I recently read a NYT opinion piece that very eloquently laid out this idea: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-...
Btw one favorite quote from that NYT article:
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.