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dalek (15489)
I know, I just posted a journal a few days ago. I'm not trying to bury anything, just discuss a situation that's arisen recently.
I am a faculty member, and I graduated recently enough to have student loan debt. Biden pledged to forgive $10,000 for every borrower with federal student loans. This saga has been going on for roughly 17 months with no end in sight. If anything, it seems that student debt holders are pawns in a political game. Regardless of the decision, Biden owes student debt holders an answer instead of dragging this out ad infinitum.
I generally support forgiving student loan debt. Pretty much nobody has been paying on federal student loans for the past 2+ years, so forgiving the debt isn't going to exacerbate inflation. It's not going to infuse extra cash into the economy, but it will remove a long term drag on the economy that might help in the future.
Student loan forgiveness should include graduate student debt. In my experience, the terms of graduate assistantships prohibit students from taking other employment, under penalty of revoking the assistantship. I'm aware of efforts to remove tuition waivers from assistantships that aren't funded externally, squeezing graduate students even further. Let's not penalize them further.
With respect to the question of fairness, all Americans benefit from having an educated workforce. Even if you didn't go to college, you benefit from people who did go to college. The portrayal of student debt holders as people who racked up massive debt going to expensive private universities or pursued degrees that some consider worthless is a caricature of student debt holders. I can express a similar question of fairness, asking that if I don't drive, why should I pay taxes for roads? It's a ridiculous proposition because even if I don't drive, I benefit from others being able to drive to work and the goods that are shipped on those roads. The same principle applies to student loans.
I wholeheartedly agree that we need to curb the abuses of student loans and, more generally, with all financial aid. Part of it is reducing the wasteful spending on facilities and administrative bloat. But it's a false dichotomy to say that we need to stop future abuses instead of forgiving student loan debt. We can and should do both.
However, it's not all a problem of wasteful spending by bureaucrats. I just had a student tell me they are taking my class pass/no-pass and intend to fail. I've never had a student directly say that to me before. Because they're taking the course pass/no-pass, failing the class won't lower their GPA. They don't intend to make any attempt to complete any additional coursework in my class, and right now would finish with a 2.5%. They're remaining enrolled so they can continue receiving financial aid. All the student has to do is email me about an academic matter at the end of the semester, and I have to indicate that they continued attending the class all semester when I enter the F grade. The student gets to keep whatever financial aid they're receiving without making any serious effort to complete the course.
Last semester, I had several students who stopped doing any work midway through the semester, then attempted to turn in a single very late assignment right at the end of the semester. It's the same issue, where they make a token effort at the end of the semester to keep their financial aid without making any effort to complete the course. This seems very dishonest to me, and I want these students to have to repay the aid. It's not all administrative abuse, and the behavior I'm describing seems more common than in the past. As an instructor, it's incredibly frustrating to know that students aren't making an honest effort, but they're using my class to get financial aid. In fact, the reason I'm posting the journal is to vent my frustration about this situation. I work hard to prepare good courses and to help students, so I don't like being a pawn in schemes like these.
Let's do a lot more to stop the abuses of financial aid, both by administrators and students. But let's also do the right thing and forgive the student debt for students who worked hard to earn their degrees. We can and should do both.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by owl on Monday June 20 2022, @03:35AM (3 children)
Ok, let's start with that premise
Is your proposal to "do the right thing" meant to also forgive the debt racked up by these "cheaters" who are using you as a pawn to gain student aid?
If yes, then why should the debt racked up by the cheaters be forgiven? That would seem to simply reward them for cheating, which is not a good overall signal to send.
If no, then how do you propose to, in the overall grand scheme of a US Govt "debt forgiveness" initiative, root out and identify these cheaters, so they don't gain "debt forgiveness" while forgiving the debt of those "who worked hard to earn their degrees". Because any kind of "big-government" program like this is very unlikely (given historical evidence from other "big-government" programs) to successfully separate the "cheats" from the "hard workers" -- with the end result that if the program ends up "forgiving debt" we end up forgiving the debt of the cheaters as well -- which wraps back to the "why are we rewarding the cheaters" note above.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Monday June 20 2022, @04:15AM (2 children)
Unfortunately, what's done is done in terms of past abuses. The best we can hope for is to prevent future abuses. Right now, if I give a student an F or an incomplete, I have to enter whether they attended the class the entire time, stopped attending (and the date they stopped), or never attended. But faculty generally don't have records from what happened several semesters ago, and we're not required to keep records that long. There's also not really any mechanism to force bureaucrats to repay the money they wasted raising tuition.
I'm proposing that we cancel a significant portion of student debt, perhaps limiting it to students who actually graduated. At the same time, we implement some common sense measures to limit future abuses. With the above system, if I give a student an F or an I, perhaps I could be asked about the percentage of assignments that the student completed. If that's below a certain threshold, that might be grounds to require the student to repay financial aid. There might also be a system where faculty can flag abuses they see, and the registrar and/or financial aid office would follow up and investigate.
This is anecdotal and a single data point, but I've seen far more suspicious behavior from students in the past 2-3 years than in the past. In 100-level classes, there are always students who just give up and stop attending altogether. Those students earn grades of F. It's suspicious when they just happen to show up for an exam or complete a single missed assignment right at the end of the semester. I've always had a few students in 100-level classes who just don't put forth an effort, but in the spring semester, I noted odd behavior from several students in a class of around 140.
I don't think it's right to punish honest students because of cheaters. I think we should forgive student debt and simultaneously take action to prevent future abuses by students and administrators. Basically, I see it as the past damage is done, but we can fix the system going forward. Basically, I see it as the past damage is done, but we can fix the system going forward. Hopefully that clarifies my position.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @08:36PM
Lets think about these Reaganesque "welfare cheats." Get paid to go to school, never actually attend, whooohooo! Free money! Feds start requiring that you actually attend, so the grifters quickly find out that you only have to show up at the end of the term to not have to re-pay the financial aid. Slightly less "free money", but close enough. But how much money are we talking about?
Secondly, this cheat is a very short run scam. How many semesters of 0.0 GPA before they are put on academic probation, and then suspension? No more free money. Even if they try to change institutions (unless it is a cash-only, for-profit, Betsy DeVos type school), their record will follow them. So either they never intended to attend college at all, or they have just permanently destroyed their chances of doing so. I would not worry, Daleck, about these students scamming the system as much as you should worry about how they are screwing themselves.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @11:33PM
Dalek you abused yourself here in you losing to APK as always https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=49835&page=1&cid=1254772#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] with solid proof he is right hosts files block symbiote C2 servers which is all you really need to do to nullify their communication. Exfiltration isn't possible without orders either. Orders come from C2 servers!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @05:23AM (10 children)
Student debt forgiveness has all those wonderful, squishy feelings. All warm and fuzzy. Loans are evil! Banks are evil! Debt is crushing! Etc. etc. etc. you can fill in the blanks yourself. We've all heard them over the last several years, ranging from how all university tuition should be free (because social benefits) through to various arguments against capitalism (as if that were generally relevant).
In the real world, what would debt cancellation do? It would be a give-away to people who, statistically speaking, are in a good financial position (either current or future). In other words, at least a middle-class bonanza. It wouldn't help much in the barrio because most barrio-dwellers aren't rocking advanced degrees. Sure, we're all aware of the postdoc shivering in a garret, eating cold ramen right from the packet, but it's not as if the career prospects were secret either. Nobody promised them a rose garden, and if they made bad choices - why should the taxpayer bear that burden?
It's really a money-hose aimed at universities. Even the arguments about the benefits of an educated society are misplaced; we're shoving people through various colleges who frankly have no business being there. You've met them; the ones who can successfully parrot whatever was in the literature well enough to pass their courses, but when challenged to demonstrate actual comprehension of the subject can't fit the little mental models together well enough to provide coherent responses. Of course, the university courses have been similarly turned into what should have been in high schools, and we can tell this because of the way that the testing systems work; they very rarely test higher-order thought processes, and are more likely to test regular use of known formulae, or rote memory. ("Write down the proof of Taylor's Theorem. 6 points out of 50.") If universities actually tested at a level that required people to prove their ability to engage in actual analysis as opposed to regurgitation, fewer than 20% of the population would have a hope in hell of getting a degree - but given that the cost of communicating most of that stuff is a room, a blackboard, and a knowledgeable teacher, the costs could also drop like a rock, making the whole loan system redundant. This makes university administrators wake up in a cold sweat, until they realise that unwinding that gravy train would be politically unrealistic, so they lie back down and go to sleep.
Our way out of this mess starts with unwinding it for future students, not past students. If we kill it now, so that it does not, and can not recur then we can debate the wisdom of helping the vanishingly few who genuinely couldn't eat without selling plasma as a result of student loans, but if we don't do that first all we're doing is winking at the students and telling them to rack up those loans because they're going to vanish; it's a moral hazard on par with some of the shenanigans around the subprime mortgage crisis. In fact, we have to do this first, and show that it is working. This is a problem of such magnitude that rolling a solution and forgiveness into one won't cut it - we'd end up with a broken system on a par with pelosicare, unwinding broken bits of crap for years and years afterwards. Saying that everyone else reaps the benefits doesn't wash unless you presume that there is literally no way of cutting the cost of university and that all the people there belong there in the first place - neither of which proposition even passes the laugh test - and that therefore everybody should just pay the cost of college and smile for the camera.
Best case scenario, we could fix some of the more broken elements around how the debt might be discharged in bankruptcies for people far too deeply in debt to crawl their way out. We could get the government thoroughly out of it, making it strictly and only a personal loan that the banks carry strictly on their own balance sheet, even making it non-transferable so that they really have to bear that risk. But we both know that nobody with the power to do anything about it wants to change that, because of two age-old reasons: money, and power.
The government dishes out money by prestidigitation to the universities, which in turn provide credentialling and ideological influence for the government. It's an incestuous relationship, and only the poor saps making terrible financial decisions, or the taxpayers howling on the outside, want to change it. The administrations on either side of the relationship are lying back, smoking, and talking about doing it again while politicians get their photo ops looking very serious while seriously saying that something serious should be done - like the loan forgiveness which will really juice the treadmill all over again.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Monday June 20 2022, @08:05AM (5 children)
I am going to mod you up despite strongly disagreeing with you. I believe opposing views should be heard.
Let me ask you a question: at a state university, who is the customer? The product should be the education that students are supposed to receive. The cost is paid for through a combination of tuition, donations, facilities and administration costs from grants, state funding, and a few other sources. But who is the customer?
If you say that the student is the customer, you effectively turn higher education into a service industry, where faculty and staff exist to serve the students and give them what they want. In many cases, that is less work, lower academic standards, and less challenging content. In that model, students don't learn as much, if at all. It sounds a lot like your criticism that students aren't learning a lot in college. When students don't get what they want, they throw a fit, complain to administrators like they're managers, and demand better customer service. Grade inflation and less educated graduates are the result.
An alternative view is that the student is a consumer, but the real customer is society [insidehighered.com]. In that model, the purpose of higher education is to produce a skilled and educated workforce that produces economic benefits for society. In that model, we shouldn't cut corners with academic standards because it's convenient for students. Doing so would reduce the value of higher education to the true customer. I prefer this model, where faculty educate students and educate them instead of passing them for meeting a very low standard of academic performance.
If society is the customer, then society also has a greater responsibility to pay for the product it receives. In this model, higher education isn't just providing a means for individuals to increase their earning potential, but is receiving economic benefits from an educated workforce.
Which model do you prefer? Do you want an educated workforce, where society is the customer? Or do you want students to be the customer and higher education being reduced essentially to providing credits and diplomas? If society is the customer, then it makes far more sense to forgive debts that students have taken on to receive that education.
I also reject your argument about the earning potential of students. This argument is being championed by Republicans who say that this is a gift to the wealthy. However, these same Republicans in Congress also happily voted for Donald Trump's tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. I do not believe that they are genuinely concerned about not wanting to give benefits to the wealthy. Moreover, many students are encouraged to attend college because it's supposed to be a step along the way to upward mobility in society and increase their earning potential. Instead, these students are prevented from actually achieving the upward mobility because they're stuck with large amounts of debt. In other words, students get the education but not the potential for upward mobility that comes with it.
I wholeheartedly reject that both issues can't be addressed simultaneously. Congress can pass laws requiring the Department of Education to enforce stricter standards on schools where students can receive federal student aid. If a school becomes ineligible for their students to receive federal aid, enrollment will decline significantly, and tuition will dramatically decrease. Schools will have strong incentives to abide by far stricter standards for federal student aid because the alternative is far worse.
I'm going to mod you up because I think your position deserves to be heard. However, I also believe you're dead wrong about this.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @10:43AM
I, strangely enough, agree.
aristarchus
We never had these kinds of problems at Alexandria. One thing that has been going through Higher Ed admin circles a while ago was the "Fifteen to Finish" campaign. Some management genius found a correlation between completing a degree, and pulling a full load (15 credits) each term. But as we all know, correlation, not, etc. Turns out encouraging a full load did nothing, when students were working two jobs, caretaking for children or elder family members, living a life, and trying to go to college. The solution to all these actual problems? Provide students with the means to live while attending school. The real problem is poverty, not lazy part-time students. But, of course, that would cost too much money, and the point of the entire exercise was to increase the efficiency of higher education, by eliminating wasted courses (and thus, students) that never actually count toward a degree.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 20 2022, @11:30AM
Two thumbs up for that.
My 2 cents on student debt forgiveness? Don't expect a whole lot. Every bailout we've seen for the past 30 years has primarily benefitted the banks. The housing bubble? Banks got tons of money, but mortgage holders didn't get to keep their home. Over and over again, the banks make out like bandits, while the little guys are shat on. The end result is, that top .01% of the economic world profits, and little guys continue eating cold ramen noodles.
Funny thing about the various student loan forgiveness programs that I have seen. They seem to work alright if you are in public service. That is, you're a cop, a teacher, or you have a job with a state or federal agency. I've seen nothing targeted at people who never landed a decent-paying job. If you have hundreds of thousands in debt, and you work at McDonald's, you're expected to continue paying, and paying, and paying, despite the fact that you can't even service the interest.
And, of course, if you land a good job that pays 1/4 million or more a year, you don't need any debt forgiveness.
The people who need assistance the most, aren't going to see it, that's the bottom line. The guy at McDonald's might live to see age 120, but he'll be buried still owing hundreds of thousands.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @12:49PM
True.
Germany - no tuition taxes in tertiary education. Finland - where, more often than not, even primary school teachers hold a Master degree in education [hechingerreport.org]
They know what they are doing.
Education should not be an industry, otherwise it becomes "maximize the monetary income with minimal cost" - sliding towards the bottom line of "Gimme yo money, here's yo graduation paper"
Even using the "customer" term is wrong, a better term is "beneficiary", as in "who stands to benefit".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @06:21PM
There are multiple customers and products. There is education, credentials, scholarship, research, entertainment (everything from student orchestras to sports) and ideological force. Each of these factors is valuable to someone. Education is valuable to the students, but isn't unique to universities. You could literally get the same outcome with a library card and dedication. The role of the university is to provide guidance and assistance. On the other hand, many people want the degree without caring what information they received, or how much of it they will retain. This is the credentialling role which is a passkey to a given social level. Credentials are a bad proxy for capability. They're orthogonal to education.
But examine "who is the customer", because different customers have different demands. The government wants trained people to do things like diplomacy and public health. Individual students want desirable jobs, interesting fields, or even to get their parents off their backs, evade the rat race, or look for suitable life partners. Industries want potential employees and research results, would-be academics want careers. This isn't Walmart, where the customer is singular and obvious.
If the student is there to pin a sheepskin to the wall and brag about it, the skills are secondary and your portrayal is accurate, but if the student is there to gain higher order comprehension, you're wrong. You can tell these students in the classroom; the first will ask what's on the test, and the second will challenge the professor. The first finds that the second is wasting time in what should be a smooth ride to graduation, while the second finds that the first is devaluing education. The sausage factory model has taken over because the the university sees that more students means more money, and the institution itself determines the quality of the result (with some handwaving around accreditation). These perverse incentives opened the gates to more students, but they also increased the use of automatable testing strategies which makes it easier to stuff the halls at the expense of testing higher cognitive levels. The story is told in the percentage of the current school leaving generation actually going through university, as opposed to the proportion of the population actually capable of higher order synthesis and analysis. In the USA it's a mismatch of the order of ten percent of the total population. The argument was won by the credentialists because they have the power to implement their decisions, but to paint that as the goal of all students is wrong.
Some in society are interested in credentials. Some are interested in targeted skillsets. Others are interested in upliftment. There isn't unanimity, and we can't ascribe lofty thinking to our turbulent society. Even if you want to think of this as an abstract analysis of what society should want to want, and handwave who gets to decide that, the incentives are not aligned for that.
We have means to pay for what society wants. Taxation springs to mind. However, while it feels nice to dream of a world in which we collaborate to produce excellent education, it is factually a political football because of the incestuous relationships between the power players. The students aren't price makers, they're price takers. They don't dictate the terms as individuals, and barely as a group. The electorate gets effectively no voice in the details. It's a result of administrative decisions made outside the public eye. Nobody in a position of power to dictate standards is actually calling for the higher outcome - if they were, we would have noticed by now. The closest equivalent to what you're suggesting is seen in some other countries such as Germany, in which tertiary education is cheap to the student, provided that the student can pass stringent entrance requirements. Those who can not are denied entrance. However, Germany has also been moving in the direction of adding more financial burdens to the students and slightly opening the doors. This is echoed in some other countries as well. The UK has long been moving in this direction.
A false dichotomy. If society is the only noteworthy beneficiary, the interest in avoiding moral hazards motivates fixing problems first. This would involve socialised costs, but high bars to entry (because why bother paying for those with little prospect of success), quality standards in education and auditing of results. If we're kicking the can of fixing the process down the road, it will fail because the horizon of reform is more distant than that of writing off numbers in a database.
You could argue that the numbers are warped, but here's a report from a noted republican authority:
https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/average-salary-by-education-level/ [northeastern.edu]
OK, I lied. Northeastern isn't a republican authority. They bias against republicans. They might be biased in favour of education, but that's up to you to decide. That same article addresses the question of upward mobility in career and financial terms, so unless you have some countervailing evidence, I think that we can put this one to bed.
They can't be addressed simultaneously because of friction in the implementation. Writing off loans is quick, easy, and irrevocable. If you wanted the remedies as well as the loan forgiveness in the same package, you could make one contingent on the other. On the other hand, the remedies to the abuses that we are seeing are bound to be fought tooth and nail by people with a vested interest in the status quo. Fewer students? Less money, power and influence. Fewer loans? Less money, power and influence. We could even consider alternative structures in which you have a two-tier system, with stringent academic institutions producing a certificate other than a run-of-the-mill degree, paid for by the government, as an addition to the current system, and then removing the loan system for the current institutions. Then you still face the problem that the stringently run institutions are beholden to the government for their entire existence (which historically led to problems such as the '68 student uprisings).
A better approach might be to establish nonprofit associations of scholars, in cooperation with public libraries. That would sort the wheat from the chaff.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @11:31PM
Mod yourself down dalek. APK exterminated you like usual https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=49835&page=1&cid=1254772#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] with solid proof he is right hosts files block symbiote C2 servers which is all you really need to do to nullify their communication. Exfiltration isn't possible without orders either. Orders come from C2 servers!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @03:28PM (3 children)
I actually like Biden's super non-sexy plan to make community college free and I even prefer it over forgiveness of existing debt.
I tend to agree that too much of the benefit goes to people who are already well off and signed up for these loans of their own free will in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @08:39PM (2 children)
That plan doesn't really exist anymore, if it did at all. The best way to prevent any progress is to make the issue polarized and extreme. As soon as the politicians were done trying to get elected, all notion of nuance was lost and it became all or nothing. There are numerous proposals that are somewhere in the middle but all of them are dead on arrival in the current climate.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @08:49PM (1 child)
It got voted down in Congress. I would suggest blaming the legislative branch for legislative failures but apparently that's crazy talk!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @03:02AM
no it didn't https://www.npr.org/2021/10/20/1047609415/white-house-drops-free-community-college-from-its-spending-bill [npr.org]
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday June 20 2022, @11:25AM (9 children)
I graduated from college in 1995, and worked my way through. I got up every day at 3am to deliver newspapers, plus fixed cars on the side and paid cash every semester for tuition and books. Didn't have much of a life outside of work, school and studying. Will I get reimbursed for my efforts?
My youngest graduated a few years ago and is currently working on her PhD. Her Mom and I have helped her out from time-to-time over the years w/ tuition and books. Will we get reimbursed for that too?
If the answers are "no" and "no," then I can't see it happening. Like another commenter said, going to college should be hard to do, both academically and financially.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @11:34AM
that does seem to be the problem. financial barrier is the only true hurdle, as the uni's cannot get enough of all that sweet cash. the academic bar seems go have gone out the window for most institutions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @12:52PM
No. You received the lesson you paid for, sucker. Too bad you learned it too well, it's the crappiest lesson evah.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @05:58PM (6 children)
And you made the $40k it now costs to get that degree with those two side hustles? Or, was it much much cheaper back then?
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday June 20 2022, @06:35PM (5 children)
I was frugal and smart. Got a 2-year degree from community college for $25/credit hour. Transferred to uni where it was $60/ch. If I was short on cash I took only 2 or 3 classes. Summers I did at least one class. For three semesters I did work-study where I made $12/hr. That happened right before graduation so I quit delivering papers then. It took longer (~8 years) but I was debt free when I graduated.
I had a roommate, ate a lot of mac-and-cheese, drove an old beater, and never took any extravagant vacations. I also managed to buy a house while doing all this (foreclosure assumable), got married, and had my first daughter. We didn't have a pot to pee in but when I landed my first job and we moved here I had no trouble getting a loan to buy a house.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @07:05PM (4 children)
That $60 credit now costs $785!
Cost of a College Class or Credit Hour [educationdata.org]
You think you could cover that difference just by being "fugal?"
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @07:09PM (3 children)
Correction: $785 is average across all universities. $390 is average for a public 4-year university.
So you think you could cover that extra $330 per credit hour with frugality alone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @08:47PM
Don't forget that the room, board, fees, and everything else also got much more expensive. That leaves even less money to pay for college.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday June 20 2022, @09:17PM (1 child)
Probably not w/ just frugality, but combined w/ a roommate (or two), and not taking full-time credits, it's certainly possible. Another option is to work and save for a couple of years out of high school and use that savings to get started w/.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @07:39AM
Selling off parts of the room-mate, for transplant or research, cutting down on the bill at the butcher shop. Yeah, I can see a Fleet Street College financing plan here, from the genius of Sweeny Todd! Or, Fliptop Todd. Why did you change your name?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday June 20 2022, @11:32AM (7 children)
Is a possible answer to abolish student loans entirely, provide means-tested grants for students' living expenses, and provide direct state payment of tuition fees? To manage demand, make entry to courses strictly meritocratic (you need to have the grades), and reviewed by examination each year, so if you don't make the grade, your tuition and grants stop. Of course, if the type of course and numbers of places are not determined by the market, then another mechanism would be required to set the number of places for physicians, lawyers, media studies, modern languages, philosophy, mathematics, etc are required, which could well be a political boondoggle.
While good higher education is beneficial to society as a whole, getting into debt for qualifications of doubtful utility is not. That needs to stop.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @01:01PM (4 children)
Grades be damn'd, they have too much of a variance and "standardized national tests" shit, they promote "teaching to the test" instead of delivering knowledge and forming skills.
Better, sit a series of 2-4 admission exams where you demonstrate your proficiency in the main prerequisites for the academic track you chose.
The exams are prepared by the faculties, every year a different set of q to answer/probs to solve, as they will be responsible to bring the admitted students as high as academically possible.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:23AM (3 children)
I think you have some interesting ideas here and are on the right track. About teaching to the test, I think that needs a bit of clarification. I did take a science education course when I was a PhD student, which was pretty much the only formal training I received to be an educator. One of the key ideas in that course was that the best practices for teaching involve a process of 1) identifying learning objectives, 2) developing assessments to determine of those objectives have been met, and then 3) designing the instruction to prepare students to do well on the assessments. In this situation, the instructor is teaching to the test, so to speak. But if the assessments are a good measure of how well the learning objectives have been satisfied, that's not really a problem.
If something is worth learning, there should be an assessment to determine if it's been learned. If it's not worth testing over in some manner, is it worth teaching? In that sense, instructors really should teach to the test. I think the problem you're identifying is that the assessments do a poor job of measuring if the learning objectives are being satisfied. I think you have some interesting ideas about how to improve how we assess student learning. I don't have the answers here, but I think you have good ideas. For that reason, I'm going to spend my last mod point to mod you up.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:52AM (2 children)
There's a hell of a lot more to instructional design than that, once you leave the lower tiers of Bloom's Taxonomy behind. Learning objectives along the lines of "Distinguish between acids and bases" or "List the stages of the life cycle of the cockroach" are fine, but when you reach for things like "Analyse an arbitrary problem in an OpenVMS cluster and prescribe a course of action" you get into deep trouble because you're dealing with the synthesis of multiple sources of information into a model of the situation matching a mental schema that relates to how such a cluster might be organised. Teaching it in an organised way is possible, but testing it is not something that can reliably be automated. It should be typical of undergraduate courses, but it's not.
The baseline should be: if making the test an open book test renders the test pointless, then you failed. If the student cannot be interrogated and held to account for a coherent explanation of the answers given, then you failed. Standard test methods quite simply do not satisfy these criteria, because you're reaching beyond rote memory and standard formulae, and you can't test the inculcation of a mental schema by regular, formulaic answers. If you're not reaching that high, it should be in high school or technical school, not university.
This is a large part of the problem in many university courses; that students are given a wad of data to absorb, and are tested on their absorption but when actual comprehension comes up, they're largely left to themselves. Even application of standard methods is about as far as most tests go.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Tuesday June 21 2022, @03:59AM (1 child)
I absolutely understand the criticisms of limiting students to the lowest two levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Unfortunately, that's really common, particularly in introductory classes. Students grumble a lot when they're challenged, and they often get a sympathetic ear from administrators.
I'm going to give an example that mirrors my current class fairly well. I don't teach computer science, but when I was a computer science major, I took a class on using UNIX operating systems. The computers in the CS department mostly ran Solaris; this was before things transitioned to mostly Linux. For obvious reasons, I don't want to say too much about what I'm actually teaching.
The way I'm teaching my current class is that I have zero exams. There are a couple of very minor assignments that total 5% of the grade. The rest of the class is labs and a project. If this was a class on Linux, my class time would be spent going through examples of how to use various tools and components that are part of a Linux system. The labs involve going through the process I show them in class, but applying that to different situations. The students have to think about how to apply what I show them to situations that are similar, but aren't exactly the same. The project requires students to identify a problem, figure out how to put the tools together to solve that problem, and present their work to me. I expect it to have more depth than the labs, and they have to synthesize a solution to their problem. Some of my labs require a bit of this as well, thinking about how to put the tools together to solve simple problems.
When I say that I'm teaching to the test, I mean that my lecture content doesn't cover extraneous information. If it's worth going over in my lectures, when I'm presenting the material to the students, it means it's going to be part of an assessment. The labs aren't hard, but there's always a part of the lab that requires the students to think and demonstrate the ability to apply the material they've learned in a situation that's a bit different from my lectures. I don't want the labs to be hard, but I want to challenge the students to learn. If I've done things right, the students won't just remember a bunch of different tools, but they'll understand how to apply them and put those tools together to solve more complex problems. I design my assessments to measure exactly this, and I focus my lectures on showing how I'm using these tools and why I'm doing what I'm doing, asking the students to follow along for themselves.
You bet I get some pushback from students who don't like the challenge or who don't want to spend the time working on the labs. As a general rule, students should expect to spend 2-3 hours outside of class working for every hour they spend in class. I had a student grumbling about the workload this semester, but when they told me how much time they were spending outside of class, it was pretty much right in line with that number. The lectures are all recorded, so the students can follow along outside of class. It tells me that some students don't like the effort required to really learn the material. However, I've also had a lot of students who tell me at the end of the semester that they really feel they learned a lot.
Just to be clear, I'm totally advocating against classes that focus on memorization and recall. When I encourage teaching to the test, that's absolutely not what I mean.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:35PM
Congratulations. You're in the 1%.
I'm serious; what you describe is the diametric opposite of what I've seen far and wide, including instructional design and test planning. In fact, the trend seems to be against that with more and more staff balking at even something like the old essay question. It takes too long to evaluate, is too subjective, and with ever-increasing class sizes (COVID-era notwithstanding) is increasingly impractical, so even high end classes go for things that can be done by automated testing or a staff of postgrad TAs.
Until and unless something more like your approach becomes more widespread, it will be effectively impossible to drive the level higher, and given the incentives to avoid that approach we should not expect it to happen unless mandated.
(Score: 2) by dalek on Tuesday June 21 2022, @01:36AM (1 child)
This is an interesting idea. It seems like financial aid would be tied even more closely to grades and academic performance in your scenario. The problem is that in the current environment, this will probably cause more grade inflation. It's completely logical to link academic performance to continued financial support. However, this also means that students will protest more if their grades are unsatisfactory, expecting that they should receive adequate grades even when their performance is subpar. Unfortunately, administrators are likely to side with students because academic accreditation is linked with student retention rate. If students lose their financial aid, the retention rate drops, and the administration will choose the side that keeps their retention rate high.
It sounds great in principle to link accreditation to student retention, on the basis that better instruction should result in students learning more, and therefore receiving better grades. In practice, instructors are encouraged to make their courses less challenging, meaning that students learn less but get higher grades. For something like what you're proposing to work, you need to separate the metrics for student achievement from course grades. That way, instructors are encouraged to maximize student learning so that students perform best on these other metrics. When grades are used as a metric, it inevitably results in grade inflation and watering down of course content. Faculty generally don't want to water down course content and inflate grades, but there certainly is pressure from the administration to lower academic standards.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday June 21 2022, @11:48AM
Thanks for the reply pointing out disadvantages of the approach. I agree that grade inflation is a problem.
The system I described is pretty much how the system in the UK operated before the introduction of student loans. Grade inflation was not a problem, but I don't know how that was managed.
The system changed to improve access to higher education. With the means-tested living-expenses grant system, your parents income was assessed, and a tapering scale applied so that the richer your parents were, the smaller the state grant was until it reached zero. You had to be pretty poor to get a full grant. Tuition fees were paid by the state. Not all parents supported their children's wish to enter higher eduction, either out of choice or necessity; whereas children with willing rich parents had no problems, so it was unfair. Student loans removed that, and increased vastly the amount of tertiary education available.
I feel strongly that the state should pay for tertiary education, rather than loading the risk of failure on individuals, who can get into deep debt and get poor or non-existent qualifications. By spreading the risk across all taxpayers, individuals have a lesser risk to manage, and it is up to clever (presumably well-qualified) people to design a system that achieves the goal of both accessible and useful tertiary education. I don't think a market-based approach works: we have idiocy like huge over-provision of forensic science courses (as a result of entertainment offerings like CSI ), and a lack of engineers. Vocational training is also severely undervalued.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @02:20PM (10 children)
The federal government has been paying that debt. And that probably has made the inflation situation worse (though there are far bigger problems out there today). My take: contractually the federal government is on the hook for all that debt. Print a bunch of money to cancel existing debt (at least most of it, I'm fine with leaving students with a portion of it, like maybe a third) and permanently leave the student loan industry. I'm also fine with the lenders losing a bit of money, but not the whole thing. Think of it as a real world stress test.
Sure, there will be inflation from that, but this is just one of many such growing liabilities that the federal government has created over the past century. In addition, make student loans normal debt again - dischargeable as normal in bankruptcy proceedings.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @03:31PM (9 children)
The Federal Government can only "pay the debt" that it owns. Choosing not to collect a debt is not quite the same as "paying it" but keep on spinning!
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @04:41PM (8 children)
I already gave a counterexample. Another is the Obama-era guaranteed loans for renewable energy like Solyndra.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @06:01PM (7 children)
Ah you mean those loans the earned the American Taxpayer a profit? [npr.org] How terrible of Obama to reduce our tax burden like that!
(Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @07:39PM (6 children)
Sorry, don't buy that happened. There was a lot of money sloshing around then, including massive buyouts of bonds by the Federal Reserve (quantitative easing). Even the very program that was issuing debt, had issued more such guaranteed loans. It would have been trivial to hide losses in the program.
And even if we take the news story at face value, we have an alleged $30 million profit on $34 billion investment over a several year period. That's way below inflation rate and hence, would be a loss.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @08:03PM (1 child)
Translation: khallow is very sorry that this happened, so he refuses to believe it did. In other Words, he rejects reality, and substitutes his own. This is happening more and more with khallow, as reality seems to drift further and further from his right-wing nut-job (Libertarian!) ideology. Poor khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 21 2022, @12:52PM
(Score: 4, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @08:51PM (3 children)
Disregarding objective evidence in favor of your pre-existing beliefs? Yah, big shocker!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:33AM (2 children)
A couple posts down I finish up [soylentnews.org] with:
Seriously, consider the scenario. The program couldn't make a profit in the first place. They also were expecting a large default rate. That was before the sheer incompetence of loaning to Solyndra and several other companies that were already failing at the time the loans were given out. So how did they manage that alleged profit, DeathMonkey?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:35AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @07:42AM
Give us more links, khallow, more "evidence". Your Oblivious Rebuttals will help establish your incredulity!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @03:35PM (3 children)
The very boring answer is that a decision will be announced later in the summer. [wsj.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 20 2022, @08:27PM (2 children)
And if Biden doesn't, if the original poster sets up a gofundme, I'll kick in some money towards the $10E3 that would have been forgiven. While s/he's leading his/her student horses to water but can't make them think, I can still do a little bit to help, right? At least the students with enough horse sense that *are* trying to learn something will benefit from an instructor who's distracted a little less by their student loans.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @08:54PM (1 child)
That sounds like a wonderful idea for a charity.
Sorry if I missed any intended sarcasm!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 20 2022, @10:28PM
Charity, huh? How about if every teacher had an unofficial student loan "tip jar" that concerned parents could drop a few bucks [youtu.be] into at the end of the year as a thank-you for wrangling their
little monstersprecious younglings?Maybe it would encourage some favoritism, but considering how much crap teachers have to deal with, I'm ok with a little bit of returned goodwill toward them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @04:14PM (7 children)
More people lie, cheat, and steal when life is hard. Punishing the inevitable demographic that gets the shit end of the stick just to catch a statistucally insignificant portion of scammers has historically been the wrong approach. Solve the underlying issues, which for the US would be universal healthcare and secondary education.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @04:41PM (6 children)
You can fix that by getting the federal government out of that stuff.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @06:14PM (1 child)
The federal government is "in" Universal Healthcare?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @08:06PM
Obamacare is a classic example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @07:09PM (3 children)
That was tried and failed, is being pushed again now and is failing some more. Get a new routine, gov bad has been naively retarded for a long time.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Monday June 20 2022, @08:11PM (2 children)
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2022, @08:41PM
khallow reading comprehension failure, again! Somebody needs to fail khallow, or teach him how to read.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @08:56PM
Failing one of my math classes was one of the best lessons college taught me.
I graduated with a math/CS degree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @05:32AM (1 child)
... and an economic disaster.
And that's the last time I'm going to call it "forgiveness." What it actually is is "transferring the burden of debt to taxpayers" and it should be called that.
We have tuition inflation in the first place only because college is no longer education, it's an arms race. People heard "a college degree leads to better lifelong earnings!" and so people wanted to go to college. Even students who didn't necessarily care about higher education and didn't want to work in a career requiring it now felt like they "had" to go to college. Suddenly everybody has to go to college. But most people don't end up working in jobs that need a college degree. Most jobs that "require" a college degree don't actually require a college degree. For most college students, all it does is put off proper adulthood by four years. That's not investment, that's luxury.
If the education were actually economically valuable, it would be reflected in the person's ability to pay for their own loans. Doctors and engineers don't need to have their loans paid for by somebody else. To the extent that they, too, are struggling with a high burden - it's because the arms race drove up the price for everybody, both the ones who needed college as well as the ones who never should have been there.
Since demand increased and supply didn't, prices increased. Nobody had the money for those high prices so they borrowed it. Sound familiar? It's exactly the same as the housing bubble. I wonder if this could have anything to do with every lender being desperate to push as many loans as possible because interest rates had been at 0.002% for the past twenty years? Nah, couldn't be.
But if you transfer the loan debt to taxpayers, are you addressing the problem? No, you aren't. You are exacerbating it. Rent is too high in San Francisco, can you solve the problem by giving everyone a $500 a month rent subsidy (paid for by the people who don't live there, naturally)? No, because the problem is the housing shortage. This sort of "solution" never is.
Transferring the burden of debt to the taxpayer doesn't prevent this sort of behavior, it rewards it. I can't say I particularly care whether the abuse is by the students or the faculty, what I care about is that this is a direct transfer of wealth from the public to the abuser. What I find insane is that people on the left cannot recognize that this is exactly the same thing as the 2008 loan bailouts (which, for the record, I didn't support either). Or they don't care, because this time it goes to their people.
Loan burden transference is privileged people telling everyone else "You're not good enough to go to college, but you're good enough to pay for me to go to college." Remember, less than 40% of people attend college - and the people who would receive this benefit, let's say college graduates who are also Millenials - are basically all Democrats (something like 80%).
But here's the part that really jumped out at me and prompted me to write this post.
Those are not the same thing at all. Everyone does benefit from roads, even if they don't drive on them. Your example of "what if I don't drive" is a little off the mark because even if you only bike, use public transit, or even just walk, you still need the roads. But the difference is that roads are fungible. There are lots of roads I don't ever use, even in my own city, but there are lots of other roads I use a lot more than my share. It all evens out.
College is not like this. College is not fungible! It only benefits the person who attended college, and only if they end up in a job that actually needs the degree.
If I go to a doctor, I benefit from her education - albeit indirectly - because the education is necessary for the service I received, which is a little like me benefiting from the roads that I don't use, but the trucks that carry the things I buy do. But I don't benefit at all from her wealth, unless you actually want to advocate trickle-down theory. Now suppose the education was not necessary, because that person is working in retail or something. What benefit do I receive from this? None whatsoever. All I get is the cost. They don't benefit either. Everyone loses when someone attends college and then ends up in a job that didn't need it. Now, why exactly do we want to subsidize situations that are a net cost to everyone?
If you want a road analogy, here's a reasonable one [wikipedia.org].
Higher education just isn't a direct benefit to society. It seems like it ought to be, but it isn't. What is a benefit is jobs that use education to improve productivity. Productivity here doesn't just mean "widgets produced per hour in a factory" but also mostly intangible things like better medical outcomes. But the point is that you get the benefit from the job, and the education is a thing that is necessary along the way. If you want to argue that the benefit of the education is something like "life experience and personal growth," you can pay for your own damn personal growth.
Subsidizing unnecessary education is like subsidizing the production of bolts in the hopes of getting more cars, because cars need a lot of bolts. If you started with a shortage of bolts, great. But if you didn't, all you get is a lot of money wasted on too many bolts. That's what we are already seeing with college education. Too many college educated people, with no jobs to put them in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @02:49PM
Nitpick: roads aren't really fungible. A road from Pittsburgh to Newark can't stand in for a road from Rochester to Buffalo.
You could argue that roads are a clear public good with high positive externalities, but that more or less applies to education as well. What you're pointing out is that there are strong positive personal outcomes of education as well, which can motivate individual expenditures on education and the same isn't quite true of roads.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 01 2022, @02:10PM
YOU ATTACK ME 1ST & yes, you DID below MANY times? Then I annihilate you w/ FACTS that make you EAT YOUR WORDS you SMARMY HYPOCRITE!
Additionally - Where am I WRONG or WAS I WRONG since you state that?
Please, show us! I'd like to know myself
No, I am PUBLICLY HUMILIATING YOU FOR YOUR BULLSHIT! Especially considering you've "had your eye on me" for quite a while it seems, you SNEAKY little fuck.
BELOW HERE in this post's the BS you stated that I quoted BELOW, WHERE YOU ATTACKED ME 1st only to DESTROY YOURSELF for me - thank you, lol!
---
FACT: Hosts work vs. Symbiote C2 server(s) per this line from a MUCH better article than the one used here from bradley13 per "configuration in the binary that used the git[.]bancodobrasil[.]dev domain as its C2 server" from https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/new-linux-threat-symbiote/ [intezer.com]
Oh, really?
OK - Did I block that C&C/C2 controller server in my original posts here https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=49835&page=1&cid=1253504#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] on this BOGUS sockpuppet upmodding yourselves shithole website (which also noted FIREWALLS are invaluable here too, per wildcards (or even IP address use, URL domain/subdomain too in many as well))?
YES I DID!
So, yes, I was correct!
FACT: hosts files block symbiote C2 servers which is all you really need to do to nullify their communication.
FACT: Exfiltration isn't possible without orders either.
FACT: Orders come from C2 servers!
HOW IRONIC!
(Dalek "EXTERMINATED" not only by FACTS from experts in microscopy + on hosts files, but also DALEK'S own WORDS he has to EAT, lol!)
Dalek Your signature's YOUR UNDOING! Dalek EXTERMINATED by APK (again)! No small wonder he got rid of his OLD SIGNATURE of "exterminate", lol - especially after ALL of the below FACTS:
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss hosts files"
Then obviously You're an ALL-TALK mere CHATTERING do-NOTHING & no viable solution offering NO-MIND since I SHOT YOU DOWN doing guess what? Ah, discussing hosts & I easily tore you apart w/ FACTS!
(i.e./e.g. - Paralyzing botnets is EASY if you have the C2 & other servers it uses information - FACT & why security articles post Indicators of Compromise (IOC)).
And what did you say to ME hypocrite?
Do as I say not as I do right dalek?
You are a hypocrite BS artist that CONTRADICTS himself!
I showed real results doctors had on video stating it themselves.
YET All you do is cite MSM VERY FAKE NEWS!
Proven TONS of times to be so in fact along with their "fact checkers" !
I put up what PHD and MDs by the truckload literally let us see (not just YOUR MSM "russia, Russia, RUSSIA" disproven in COURTS vs. Trump very fake news)?
More from your losing attempt @ DEBATING me (you = IGNORANT FOOL in this area of genetics & TOTALLY undereducated in it - whereas by COMPARISON I am not):
THIS IS ALL ABOUT GENETICS!
WHAT IS mRNA after all?
ANSWER = A part of protein synthesis involving mRNA, tRNA, & rRNA for the creation of DNA!
IF RNA single helix strands JOIN improperly into a NEW double-helix DNA (via Guanine, Adenine, Cytosine & Thymine) it creates ERRORS (cancer is 1 possible bad one, mutations another etc.)
See NHEJ below.
dalek - have you taken any genetics coursework?
I have & got A's (as my science elective requirement during my CS degreework)!
1st of all, TONS of vaccines have used poisonous Graphene oxide (or dioxide) as ADJUVANTS over time.
Secondly: ELECTRON MICROSCOPY EXPERT Dr. Young SHOWS POISONOUS GRAPHENE IN VACCINES ALSO:
https://www.brighteon.com/9e58bf44-05e7-4b71-97e5-b243f6cf890c [brighteon.com]
&
https://www.brighteon.com/9fbd7735-b49d-4e31-a146-f67d7eb54d75 [brighteon.com]
GRAPHENE OXIDE's in Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) + AstraZeneca:
https://www.brighteon.com/6d8fcfd7-4811-4e64-90c9-bd5585b59ff5 [brighteon.com]
&
A major cause of myocarditis, clotting, CANCER MALIGNANCY etc.? That's right: GRAPHENE OXIDE.
Graphene Oxide Promotes Cancer Metastasis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31877027/ [nih.gov]
An Israeli study PROVES that the NHEJ (non-homologous end joining) mechanism in your cells is DAMAGED by SPIKE PROTEINS in the death vax & IT IS LINKED TO CANCER per https://naturalnews.com/2021-11-02-covid-vaccines-inhibit-dna-repair-cause-cancer.html [naturalnews.com]
All FROM my +5 upmodded post on COVID killshots (which they HAVE proven to be on TONS of levels) https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=46034&page=1&cid=1197563#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
---
NOW THE "ICING ON THE CAKE" EXPOSING YOU, sockpuppeteer UPMODDING YOURSELF obviously + downmod bombing scumbag - RIGHT FROM YOU once more:
* THANKS FOR SHOWING US YOUR "MODUS OPERANDI" SOCKPUPPETEER troll! Fakename & all for a FAKE like you!
APK
P.S.=> THIS? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" & it always IS vs. hypocrites like you, fakename!
Especially IF my bot program Cyberian Tiger had a "themesong" it would TRULY be (along w/ me as "The LORD of hosts" in a way) UNSTOPPABLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaEG2aWJnZ8 [youtube.com]
"I know what it takes to FOOL THIS TOWN (& get around your blocking my posts), I'll do it till the sun goes down & all thru the night time - I'll put my ARMOR on (hosts files) & show YOU how STRONG I am: I PUT MY ARMOR ON, I show you THAT I AM - unstoppable! I'm a porsche with NO brakes - I'm INVINCIBLE & I win EVERY SINGLE GAME! I'm SO POWERFUL, I don't need batteries to play. I'm SO confident - I'm UNSTOPPABLE today!"
Lastly & perhaps ABOVE ALL ELSE?
It was a REAL PLEASURE seeing THIS website "DANCE" to MY TUNE here with MORE POSTS about me than goes on here in ANY post for weeks on end https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/06/30/0517233 [soylentnews.org] - classic & YES, as many said there? I got what I wanted & IMPOSED MY WILL on you, forcing it, lol - I'm "BIG NEWS" there - no press is bad press, right? More views & replies than ANY POST ON THIS SITE FOR WEEKS! ... apk