So, you have two goals: where to live and what to do.

For where to live - right now I live in Colorado. Colorado has one of the most sensible and competent state governments I’ve encountered. We have universal mail in ballots, decriminalized weed and mushrooms, and don’t waste tons of money building 20 lane highways (relative to other states). But importantly, the state of Colorado provides income-based assistance for purchasing health insurance. You plug in your anticipated income for the year into the state’s website, and it lists insurance plans you can buy at a state-subsidized rate. This year, I am paying $3 per month for health insurance. Plus, the Front Range has a very mild climate that is mostly comfortable most of the year, but you still get all 4 seasons, and we have beautiful mountains and no Mormons.

Wanting to buy a house makes things trickier. As a queer person, you probably want to live where you will feel comfortable and accepted. And as a not-rich person, you will want to live where you can get a job. These two requirements mean you will probably need to live in a metro area, which means owning your own space will be expensive. And the most queer-friendly places are often the most expensive places to live, since prosperity breeds liberalism. So, you probably need to make some money.

Your lack of ability to organize and plan will be a major hindrance here. I would suggest simply moving and picking up some straightforward dumb work to start off with. Just find somewhere you want to live, get any job, and start living a happier life first. I know around here it is easy to get work selling solar, setting up concerts (seasonal), logging (seasonal), or hanging Christmas lights (seasonal). The good thing about these jobs is that they fit your requirement: boss gives you a task, you do that task.

Mid term, I would highly suggest working through the issues you are describing directly. Executive function and people skills are probably the two biggest factors in getting higher pay in literally any field. If you can get those two things to an at least decent level, you could get a job developing software. Or else I have a friend who clears six figures tutoring college students in physics and math.

I think it’s a truism among professional gamblers that playing poker is a hard way to make an easy living.

Not true at all. On the other site you can curate subs so your feed consists entirely of puppies and pottery tips.

Exactly. Markets solve all sorts of problems, big and small.

It’s obvious that this is not the most important underlying cause, as other countries which are less auto oriented are also quite fat.

Why do I need UBI and wages if I can just claim a vacant apartment and be guaranteed power/telecom, of which their are millions nationally?

Because almost all of those homes are vacant for a reason. They are in disrepair, or under renovations, or actively looking for someone to occupy them, etc. Of course, there are some places in rural Kansas which are just vacant - but then, these are already dirt cheap. Iirc, there are some towns which will give you the house for free if you live there for X number of years.

So let’s say anyone can request a residence for free from the government if they would like. What happens? Well, first of all, all vacant housing stock immediately disappears in almost all places because - all things being equal - most people would prefer to live alone, rather than living with their family (when they are an adult) or with roommates. And the government can’t force people to live with someone they don’t like - that’s a political non-starter - so if someone ends up residing in a 5 bedroom house, they can just keep rejecting potential roommates the government sends their way. If your goal was to end homelessness, this market trend will immediately stymie your goal - you will still need to build more housing, which will take more time, and people will still be homeless.

Meanwhile, it becomes agonizingly difficult to move anywhere. Want to move to a new city? Well, you’ll be on a years-long waiting list to find a place to live. If it is a city that a lot of people want to live in, then the waiting list will just perpetually keep getting longer. Want to move out of your parents house? You’ll need to find a friend who already has a place, or get on a years-long waiting list.

What if you have special needs, like you are wheelchair bound? Now you need to wait even longer for a place which is wheelchair accessible. Sure, the government might prioritize such cases - but what about cases that don’t neatly fit in a box? Suppose you have a best friend who needs help looking after their child. You want to help out, but you live on the other side of the city, an hour away. So you can never help your friend as much as you want because of the commute, and their child will be grown by the time you could get a place closer to them.

Markets are good because they force people to make choices that balance their desires against everyone elses, which creates a highly efficient mechanism for rationing scarce resources like housing. So people can live alone if they want, or find roommates to save money if they want. They can spend more to live in a hip neighborhood if they want, or spend less to live in a cheaper neighborhood. They can decide how much they value not walking up stairs every day, and choose to pay more for an apartment with an elevator or on the ground floor.

Y’all need Georgism.

Also, if you meant that a country created some sort of perfect defence against nukes, then every other country would immediately start pouring money into creating their own version, while working on ways of subverting the new technology.

Guess what, I didn’t have friends then

Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

Okay - I’m sorry your nerd muscles were so weak you couldn’t even hold a pencil.

But regardless of your personal shortcomings, these classes exist because they teach useful things, and if we want to tell others who did and did not learn those useful things in this class, we need a way to test that knowledge.

Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway. This is a point of view I have some sympathy towards, but on the whole I don’t think it is right. However, if you do, then why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet? If you know so well what people need to know to be successful and well educated for the next 30 years, and you think you know how they should learn, and you know how you can evaluate their abilities after receiving an education - then why aren’t you doing that and raking in the billions of dollars that go into university education right now?

So go do that. Tell me when you make your first million. But until then, I’m gonna assume that the foundational western liberal education has value, seeing as it has persisted for quite a while. LLMs on the other hand, may very well turn out to be a fad of the summer.

Still better than the typical crap you see on reddit. I hate to say it, but the influx of normal/trashy people is worse than the bots. Gimme someone with enough independent thought to consider themselves a third wave communist or whatever.

I mean, if you take “weird” to mean “abnormal”, then yes, it would be very weird. You will likely be the only person juggling in the park. But weird doesn’t mean bad - just different.

On the other hand, your coworkers probably spend their lunch breaks eating McDonalds and scrolling IG in their cars. Juggling in the park sounds like a way better use of your time.

No you don’t get it. The AI is taking hard working shitposter’s jobs! This is an atrocity!

Those are all very nice ideas, and we’ll see if they pan out in the future. But universities need ways to stop (or, fine, reduce) cheating that can be implemented right now. A class in English literature and composition should test how well you can read and interpret the source material to then express something about it in your own words in a coherent way. This is a useful life skill to have, and students should learn to do it without AI assistance. Giving them a pen and paper and a quiet room to work in has been a good enough method of assessment for at least the last 50 years which is reasonably cost effective.

Yes, there are problems with standardized testing. Yes, you can cheat on a paper test. But the way to improve the evaluation process is to first establish a stable baseline, and then try new things that might work better to see if they actually work better. Not to throw out everything we knew before and haphazardly try every random idea that pops into someone’s head in a panic.

I like this idea, but I also think that we should keep in mind that the time of university staff is expensive, and with the already outlandish cost of education we need to strike a balance

perfect not being the enemy of the good and all that

But there was no necessity to move much of large scale manufacturing over […] rampant consumerism

I mean, I’m not fan of rampant consumerism either, but a lot of manufactured goods legitimately improve quality of life. For example, iPhones are manufactured in China, and the low cost of manufacturing there allows the product to be sold to consumers for a relatively low price (I should also add that a lot of the components in an iPhone are actually manufactured in America because they require a skill that America has a competitive advantage in). If we insisted on keeping these manufacturing jobs in the US, iPhones would be much more expensive and fewer people would be able to afford one, and likely a foreign manufacturer would step in to fill the niche left.

Sure, no country “needs” to offshore jobs - no country really “needs” to do anything. But if America wanted to remain economically competitive while providing a good quality of life to it’s citizens, then those low-skill auto manufacturing jobs that everyone is so whistful about 100% needed to go to lower skill markets.

Most goods are not reasonable to spend government money on as well. That works great for medical goods and food, but not much else.

Those are the goods I would suggest it is important to keep domestic manufacturing capacity for. Also military equipment, but we already do that… too well.

Eeeeeeh… China was rapidly industrializing, and the low skill manufacturing jobs they took were going to leave the US anyway. While ensuring the rights of foreign workers is definitely something I support, it still wouldn’t have stymied the tidal shift in low skill labor to lcol nations.

Ensuring a domestic supply of some goods is definitely important. But tariffs aren’t the answer here - instead, the answer is to support local industries by giving them government contracts to produce their goods, which the government can then use and/or stockpile when we aren’t in a time of crisis.

And anyway, while a great amount of manufacturing labor went overseas in the last century, American has been reclaiming ground recently… with robots.

Basically no matter how you split it, those high paying, low skill manufacturing jobs were never going to stick around for long. That’s just the forward march of technological progress.

Or, ya’know, they could just have students take tests on paper in a lecture hall.

My constant refrain on all the internet relationship advice is “You see that essay you just wrote? Read it to your partner.” And this will resolve the problem in one way or another in 90% of cases.

But then we also get a pretty hard selection bias as internet readers of relationship drama, in that in order for us to even know about the problem (1) it has to cause a significant emotional disturbance for OP, (2) OP has no source of trustworthy, levelheaded advice in their real life - which is already a bad start, (3) they think that the internet is the best place to go - another red flag, (4) they must be self-important enough to think their personal drama would warrant the attention of strangers, (5) the drama must be so juicy that it gets hoards of upvotes and comments so it reaches the front page, (6) it’s probably fake anyway.

So for the 5000 upvote /r/relationshipadvice post “My Trump supporter boyfriend says our free-use sex life should include my 14 year old daughter, but my cousin (her father) disagrees” - the answer is definitely “Yes, you should break up, and also go to therapy, preferably in a mental institution.”