“Have you tried rebranding?”

Brilliant.

But this is another case where they chose not to openly defy the courts.

I suspect this is more likely a backlash from Republicans internal to the administration who are carrying student loan debt, benefiting from Pell Grants, or otherwise finding themselves directly impacted by the program.

Very routine for Trump to announce a thing, have someone in his admin whisper in his ear, reverse his decision, have a different person whisper in his ear, double down, have a third person whisper in his ear, get distracted and let his cabinet secretaries do as they please.

Don’t get excited. You can still guarantee the money entrusted to the DoEd is going to get embezzled, while people who aren’t friendly with the administration will be targeted for harassment and hardship.

Old enough to remember libertarians who were smugly asserting Social Security caused the Iraq War.

Now we’re stuck with the libertarians who smugly assert that the Department of Education causes transgender teenagers.

On paper, sure. But I might argue that the process of accruing paper wealth as a backstop against misfortune and a reserve during retirement is inherently deleterious - forcing people to forego quality of life in the immediate term as a hedge against the future. This is a highly inefficient process for individuals to manage - who carry the whole cost of an incidental risk/exceptionally long life. And it is the whole reason public pensions and public insurance came to exist.

That’s before you get into the moral hazard of certain professions and fortunate individuals being predisposed towards retirement, while others work right up until their dying days.

Imagine if the public sector did this and didn’t limit it to a single development.

We could even build bigger-than-tiny sized units. Maybe include additional amenities like schools and health clinics and food malls in the immediate vicinity. Throw in a rail stop so people can get to the metro center easily. You know… actual urban development.

No idea where we could get money for that, though. Maybe if Canada didn’t exempt 50% of capital gains income from taxation for some reason… But no, that would never work.

Crazy to talk about “cheap housing” and look to the suburbs in the year 2025. That ship sailed decades ago.

That’s before you start pricing in the time-value of an hour or more a workday trapped in traffic.

“The problem with the American economy is too many pocket computers”, I say while sitting on the toilet in the Bigger Bombs factory at Raytheon.

Trying to imagine a universe in which Patrick Stewart won’t talk your ear off about his favorite musical, and the only ones that come to mind involve him wearing a tiny goatee.

I’m not saying we have state-mandated couples

The need to make this clarification should be grounds for divorce.

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source

That’s not how the game is played. You absorb the public losses. But they privatize the gains. Otherwise, there’s no deal.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US.

That’s the goal, yes.

There’s a squishy American centrist block that just gets mad any time there’s any degree of adversity (or just negative news media on their screens) and decides to vote the most reactionary candidate on the ticket in response.

Conveniently, Democrats have been marching to the right in order to sweep up those votes. Expect a lot of “Republicans are turning American into SOVIET RUSSIA! and we need the free market to fight back!” liberal campaigning in 2026.

One bright spot of a big American economic crash would be the correlated plunge in carbon emissions. Those first few months of COVID were fantastic for emissions rates.

I’m seeing quite a bit of “You deserved it” right now. Lots of “Actually, I just avoid buying things, so now the higher prices don’t bother me” cope all over /r/conservative and like-minded reactionary media.

Poverty fetishism, cottage-core influencing, a proliferation of reactionaries in DIY spaces, and always a healthy supply of “we just didn’t go far enough” revanchism has been trending for a while, but its seeing a new renaissance with the looming recession.

Blowback

After WWII, Japan became the first country in Asia to undergo an industrial revolution

After WW2? Industrialization during the 20s/30s was the whole reason they attempted to conqueror the Oceanic island states and the Chinese/Korean/Indochinese mainland.

They then suffered an economic collapse due to unchecked growth and speculative markets and decided to never again speculate on the future and just stick to tried and true methods.

The Japanese Economy was undone by The Plaza Accord and The Louvre Accord, which western nations used to devalue their currency and undermine Japanese export prices. The downturn, followed by a financialized corporate consolidation and expropriation of revenues through foreign investment, permanently crippled the Japanese economy in the aftermath of the 90s Asian recession.

What sets countries like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines apart from China is the domestic control of their industries. Their markets are dominated by private equity and fixated on steady profit margins rather than long term public investments. Consequently, the capital cities are flooded with cash and industrial development while the rural areas are devoid of commerce. There’s no shortage of speculation, but its rooted in the private equity markets and focused largely on fictitious capital - debt instruments and their derivatives - rather than real capital or technology.

Chinese investment in the periphery and its rising tide of middle class wage earners is what propels them into the 21st century. They’re the ones building out new transit lines, new public housing projects, new universities, and blue sky research. The Xi Government is openly hostile to speculative investment, doesn’t bother to bail out failing financial institutions, and focuses primarily on expansion of utilities, trade corridors, and mixed us developments.

Hey now. To my knowledge, Teslas do not fall apart in the rain.

Once again, we are forced to raise the lingering question: Are Italians White?

Ireland is separated from the rest of the continent by ocean.

The Celtic Sea is not an ocean.

I saw so many people play that game with the take-away “Communism in Eastern Europe / Socialist Latin America / China & North Korea was awful! I’m so glad I live in a liberal democracy where I’ve got rights and freedoms, here in <Insert English-speaking Western Country Here>”. Guys with Ron Paul rEVOLution bumper stickers would explain how we need to keep our guns close and never surrender to those liberty-hating leftists, so Papers Please! couldn’t happen here.

And as the years dragged on, the thing I heard over and over again was that liberty was under attack by Secret Communists who were infiltrating our newspapers and TVs and online forums, our college campuses, our office spaces, and our government bureaucracies. And the vector they were using to do it was… illegal immigration. First it was Al Qaeda slipping over the border to do more 9/11s. Then it was the Insidious Chinese with their America-Hating Confucius Centers, doing brainwashing and kidnapping and god knows what else. And at last it was the mobs of Venezuelan biker gangs, Cuban double-agents, and Che Guevera loving Nicaraguan/El Salvadorian/Mexican Ultra-Left Communists, breaking into the US to steal our welfare and ruin our public schools and take over our suburban neighborhoods.

The only way to keep us from living in Papers, Please! was to find these people and root them out. No more Iranian ISIS infiltrators teaching anti-semitism classes at Columbia. No more Woke DEI transgender employees at the State Department. No more speaking Spanish! Or surrender-monkey French! Or the vile tongue of the thieving, cheating, lazy, stupid Han People!

By god, if there was only some way we could find out who was evil and who was good. Some kind of document that only the righteous, God-Fearing, red-blooded American could carry (because if we caught you being a dirtbag leftist we could take it away). We need some kind of identifying document, some permanent record we could use to track the dissidents. Some kind of papers, please!