Student loans are collected by contracted third-party loan servicing organisations, not the Government.

If you don’t pay, the servicer can initiate legal proceedings against you on their own regardless of what’s happening within the Education Department.

I thought the Oregon Trail was a pretty standard part of US history curriculum.

What is Hygge?

Yes, they’re similar, but from what I’ve heard, most UK building societies are basically the same as or worse than banks in terms of fees, rates, and service quality. In the US, most credit unions will absolutely spank the big banks on at least two of those, if not all three.

Oops, I didn’t see that. My bad. Guess I made a fool of myself here.

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I will start. I’m in the United States.

Credit unions! Nearly half of all Americans are credit union members. They don’t seem to be popular in Europe and Asia. A credit union is a not-for-profit co-operative financial institution that essentially provides all the same services as a bank, except it’s run as a democratic institution with directors elected by the customers instead of as a profit maximisation machine for shareholders.

No, it’s not science. It’s logic based on a few observations. If you don’t observe the same things as I do, you will not come to the same conclusions.

Oh, I understand they are usually human. I just don’t think their viewpoints are worthy of discussion. And you make this judgement every day as well, even if you refuse to admit it. And perhaps you make it on grounds that are less sound.

You can say that. It doesn’t matter though. I am right. You can keep saying “nuh uh” if you want.

No, of course, I cannot. I do not judge what category someone likely falls into based on whether what they say matches nearly word for word a “promoted” viewpoint. In some cases, I mostly agree with what they said but it’s painfully obvious that person didn’t come to that conclusion through their own thinking but is rather just parroting a screenshot of a post on the site formerly known as Twitter.

You have missed the entire point of my comment. If someone is likely to be in categories 2 or 3, I dismiss them if the viewpoint is otherwise not worthy of discussion, which it usually is not. I don’t care if this causes me to misjudge the intentions of some people, because that is inevitable in any probability-based judgement system. What matters is picking what is most likely correct.

I don’t feel that you have the ability to grasp this point and you’re just going to come up with another argument I didn’t make to attack.

No, I am not. I wouldn’t say it if it were made up. Who have I got to convince by making shit up? I am not pushing any viewpoint at all.

I base my assertion on interactions with people on this platform. Whenever someone parrots a point that is promoted this way, they’re almost universally just repeating what some wisecrack said on X that sounds correct enough to not investigate further or think critically about and is agreeable to their worldview.

I will not argue over this. You either accept what I am saying or you don’t, but I don’t give enough of a shit either way to get into an argument.

This is just simplistic and un-nuanced thinking.

The use of bots is not to generate new opinions, it is to make fringe opinions seem more popular than they are. Most (but not all) opinions propagated this way are already worthy of dismissal for other reasons, but when it’s clear that someone is repeating word-for-word a line of dismissable or unsound rhetoric which is also being propagated by those bots, it lends itself to three reasonable conclusions:

1. This person genuinely believes that and was not influenced by the bots to do so, i.e. it is a coincidence
2. This person genuinely believes that but only because they were stupid enough to get absorbed by the bots
3. This person does not genuinely believe that and is acting in bad faith

Only in case 1 is such an opinion worth discussing, but the vast majority of cases will be case 2 or case 3.

That is why it is reasonable to dismiss such opinions despite the possibility that they are genuine, in good faith, and not the product of propaganda. Because the odds that they’re not are vastly greater. Nobody can be certain of anyone’s intentions on the Internet, so rational actors can only play a game of “What is the most likely scenario?”.

Labelling people as bots is not wrong if those people are actually bots

Ubuntu Server, Debian, or Rocky Linux will save you a lot of headaches.

Most software is designed with these major distros in mind and using something more obscure will just cause problems later on when you realise that there are no guides written for it by the software vendor. Fixing broken software gets old really fast especially when it causes your stuff to break when you’re actually trying to use it.

The reason is because it supposedly creates a moral hazard. This is the logic behind pricing for all sorts of medical resources (such as co-pays and deductibles). If there is a nominal cost involved to obtain the resource, then you will be incentivised not to use more than you need. But if it is free or costs too little, then you (and others) may choose to use a lot of the resource, far more than you actually need.

For example, suppose there is a $50 co-pay (a co-pay is essentially a fee) to see the doctor, and you figure you should go once a year for a check-up. In this case, you will not schedule an excessive number of appointments because you know it is not necessary and it will cost you money each time you do. If scheduling doctor’s appointments were free or costs very little, like $1, you may instead choose to schedule two or three appointments per year, because why not? Or maybe you will go see the doctor for every minor cold or stuffy nose. It’s not like it will cost you a significant amount of money. Or so their thinking goes, anyway.

Remember, the $50 you pay isn’t all that it costs. For every $50 you pay, the insurance company is probably paying the doctor $150.

Similarly, suppose a drug costs $100, but the insurance company pays $90, and you have to pay a $10 co-pay. You buy one vial, which is good for one month. The fear is that if the insurance company pays for all $100, since the drug is now free for you, you might decide to get two vials instead, just in case. After all, they’re free for you, right? This means the insurance company has to pay $200 for two vials of the drug but the benefit to you is actually pretty small. Again, this is how insurance companies think.

Now, whether this logic is sound or not, I leave that part up to you.

Edge is the same as Chrome, so no extra testing is needed for that.

We tested for that

Genuinely curious—how?

There is no actual cheese on most of the macaroni, it is just orange-coloured pasta

If you’re developing software for one client who only uses a specific browser, I can see this being okay, but several times I have chosen not to buy things from websites that were broken in Firefox. I don’t bother to check whether they’d work in Chromium, I just buy it elsewhere.

The number of people who act like me probably isn’t large in absolute terms, but how many customers have been lost because of a broken website that you didn’t even know about because they just left without a trace?

This might not apply to you, but it’s some food for thought whenever Web developers decide to be sloppy and not check compatibility for a browser that still has significant market share.