All of us need to unite

However, this debt does not come back with a tangible ownership of anything, such as land

Tangible as land is (Tangy?) it's harder for someone to take your skills and knowledge from you :laugh:

Maybe one day I should really look into the USA's health and education system. It might explain why y'all always so angry all the time.

Just avert your eyes James; I have now worked in both and lets just say we fudged it up real good..........like real good............and I value my skills and knowledge a lot, in fact so much so, that I am more willing to be paid less to pass them on, than to be paid more to make others rich (Grammar aside, never picked up that skill or knowledge : ) ).

JamesSand wrote: Maybe one day I should really look into the USA's health and education system. It might explain why y'all always so angry all the time.

Yeah you should. You'd be pretty angry too if you lost your skilled job that you trained for 10 years on to cheaper workers through a visa loophole and corporate malfeasance, only to be told that you'd lose your healthcare and once that's gone you can't get treatment for your illness and can't get insurance ever again because you have a pre-existing condition. So then you get to choose between dying or dying while you apply for fake job ads that are posted to satisfy the department of labor requirements to get a visa for a cheap worker. And once you realize that you're unemployable, you can go to school at an overpriced public university or a way overpriced private uni. Oh and since you're broke and unemployed, you'll have to borrow $40k to pay for a bachelor's degree. When you finish school you can choose between working at starbucks or walmart, both pay minimum wage and will barely cover your loan payments but only if you skip a few meals each week and live in a high crime neighborhood.

Oh and one more thing: your loans can never be forgiven and never be discharged in bankruptcy. They continue to accrue interest and penalties until you die. When you die, the $40k you borrowed will have ballooned to $400k so they take whatever you had and give it to a collection agency.

Also you won't be getting any retirement. Since you just work part time at a minimum wage job, you don't qualify for social security or disability. Fortunately, you have a pre-existing condition so you won't live long enough anyway. You could flee the US and go to a 3rd world country that needs English teachers and get on their social insurance program, get treated, and live a little longer but due to the unavailability of more advanced medicines, thanks to patents, you'll have to settle for the older generic drugs that have debilitating side-effects.

But wait! There's hope for you! Obama signed the affordable care act so poor people can get treated in the US. You can also get your loans discharged after 30 years if you pay 10% of your $0/year income. If you're lucky, you can move back in with your mom and save on rent. You're so poor that you qualify for food stamps and supplemental nutrition programs for your kids. This should give you enough free time to go join a protest, pop a tent, carry a sign, etc. Someone might give you a few pennies so you'll have hope and change.

Oh nevermind, we rigged the elections so now you will lose your healthcare and face ever-increasing austerity while we create shittier and shittier jobs that pay less and less. You're too old for the military so you can work at a jail full of pot heads and mexican kids. No, sorry, you have bad credit due to your student loans so you'll just have to find gigs on craigslist. As a consolation prize, you have your liberal arts degree which made you just smart enough to know how badly you're taking it in the ass. If that bothers you, just recognize that it's all your fault. You made bad choices in life and must accept the consequences. There's someone somewhere who has it worse so count your blessings. Don't be angry. Just go silently into the night and die a slow death in your section 8 apartment while taking opiods and watching your choice of fox news or msnbc.

Um, you alright man? What went down? So much anger, the system is, has and will be screwed up but I feel that what your saying happens much less than you think.

Doing fine now. I've been through outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, a depression, 1200% increase in health insurance, 1000% increase in tuition, 400% increase in housing, 160% increase in the cost of food, rigged elections, surveillance state, and a decade of unemployment.

I don't have time to research the statistics but it's probably safe to say these things also affect about 95% of US people to one degree or another. Anyway, it is what it is and it ain't what it ain't. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. I probably have 2 more years of US hell and then I can leave. The problem is finding a country that won't fall apart when the US goes up in flames.

To offer the counterpoint...

I am a 37 year old with stage 4 cancer that requires biweekly chemo treatments costing $12,000 a pop. I have $10,000 left of what was $35,000 of student loan debt. I have a liberal arts degree (Communications/Mass Media) that has done nothing for me in my professional life. I've been fired twice and switched careers once. I have two car payments and $250,000 worth of mortgage left to pay off. I live in California where we have some of the highest taxes in the U.S. along with high gas prices and ridiculous cost of living. I didn't vote for Trump and I despise much of what is in his proposed budget and his executive orders. The American Health Care Act is a train wreck that could end up killing me. I'm too old for the military and they wouldn't take me with cancer anyway. In short, I am the American you describe, Whyte Horse.

That said, I am happy to be alive and I am grateful for the opportunity to have a job that I worked very hard to secure. It's a job that provides me with health insurance that keeps me alive and my work pays me enough to afford payments against all of the debt I just mentioned. I write and call my Congressman and Senators when I think they are not voting in my best interest, and I try to stay well informed about what my government is doing and how it will affect me. More to the point, I don't bitch about my life in the most privileged nation in the world, because I know it can be a lot worse. I hate to say it this way, but my lifestyle and my debt and my cancer were not created or taken away by any illegal immigrant coming to California to do work that legal residents refuse to do themselves because it is beneath them. My successes and failures are a result of my choices.

Should the U.S. "go down in flames", it will be because of people too blinded by anger and a sense of entitlement to realize that we're all in this together. White, black, brown, Christian, Muslim, Jedi, male, female, LGBTQ and whatever other acronyms you wish to include... We're all susceptible to the same fear, hate, greed and anger that drives people to do bad things. We're also all susceptible to dying when in close proximity to an explosive. Shrapnel doesn't care if you're rich. It is the people that utilize these weapons for terror that are choosing to deliberately target certain other people, and it is because they feel entitled to do so because they haven't been given what they were promised by their god, their government, or their parents. Perhaps if we were to realize our different looking neighbors have it just as bad and tried to help them, they wouldn't feel the need to blow us up. When we go down in flames, we all go down together.

When we stop worrying about taking what we believe we are entitled to from others and start sharing what we already have, the anxiety that comes with one-upping your neighbor goes away. I know, this is the part where I get called a Socialist or a liberal idiot, and I'm happy to wear that badge if it means I am more concerned about our community helping those most in need rather than just "getting mine."

In the end, it should not matter what we believe. I could care less what their beliefs are, as long as we unite. So many of theories of what's going on, but none of us really have the answers. All I know is, there's bad people in charge and the entire world is involved, not just America, or UK either. So many areas have already been infiltrated.

It all boils down to us. What we are going to do about it. Nothing outside of a world wide revolution will get rid of this threat once and for all.

Senan wrote: To offer the counterpoint...

I am a 37 year old with stage 4 cancer that requires biweekly chemo treatments costing $12,000 a pop. I have $10,000 left of what was $35,000 of student loan debt. I have a liberal arts degree (Communications/Mass Media) that has done nothing for me in my professional life. I've been fired twice and switched careers once. I have two car payments and $250,000 worth of mortgage left to pay off. I live in California where we have some of the highest taxes in the U.S. along with high gas prices and ridiculous cost of living. I didn't vote for Trump and I despise much of what is in his proposed budget and his executive orders. The American Health Care Act is a train wreck that could end up killing me. I'm too old for the military and they wouldn't take me with cancer anyway. In short, I am the American you describe, Whyte Horse.

That said, I am happy to be alive and I am grateful for the opportunity to have a job that I worked very hard to secure. It's a job that provides me with health insurance that keeps me alive and my work pays me enough to afford payments against all of the debt I just mentioned. I write and call my Congressman and Senators when I think they are not voting in my best interest, and I try to stay well informed about what my government is doing and how it will affect me. More to the point, I don't bitch about my life in the most privileged nation in the world, because I know it can be a lot worse. I hate to say it this way, but my lifestyle and my debt and my cancer were not created or taken away by any illegal immigrant coming to California to do work that legal residents refuse to do themselves because it is beneath them. My successes and failures are a result of my choices.

Should the U.S. "go down in flames", it will be because of people too blinded by anger and a sense of entitlement to realize that we're all in this together. White, black, brown, Christian, Muslim, Jedi, male, female, LGBTQ and whatever other acronyms you wish to include... We're all susceptible to the same fear, hate, greed and anger that drives people to do bad things. We're also all susceptible to dying when in close proximity to an explosive. Shrapnel doesn't care if you're rich. It is the people that utilize these weapons for terror that are choosing to deliberately target certain other people, and it is because they feel entitled to do so because they haven't been given what they were promised by their god, their government, or their parents. Perhaps if we were to realize our different looking neighbors have it just as bad and tried to help them, they wouldn't feel the need to blow us up. When we go down in flames, we all go down together.

When we stop worrying about taking what we believe we are entitled to from others and start sharing what we already have, the anxiety that comes with one-upping your neighbor goes away. I know, this is the part where I get called a Socialist or a liberal idiot, and I'm happy to wear that badge if it means I am more concerned about our community helping those most in need rather than just "getting mine."

Sorry to hear you have cancer. May you survive and live a long life. I know Obamacare sucks for middle and upper income people and it's due to corporate greed. If we go back to the pre-existing condition era, I plan to start a distributed autonomous organization which makes meds and sells them to members at cost. Sort of like what costco does with groceries or credit unions do with banking. I'll also look into getting some doctors and hospitals on-board. Eventually just bypass corporate insurers and pharmaceutical companies. Should be pretty easy to deploy in ethereum and will cost a few pennies to get rolling.

A couple of points in what I said;
1. I didn't mention illegal immigrants. I am referring specifically to H1-B and J-1 LEGAL, but fraudulent, immigrants. H1-Bs are the guys who come in and you have to train them as your replacement programmer. The J-1s are typically grad students that get those entry level jobs(for very low wages) at Boeing, universities, etc.
2. When the US goes down in flames, it won't be terrorists or anything like that. It will probably be through austerity, similar to greece or spain. Death by cuts to social services, medicare, food stamps, etc. Throw in some unemployment from automation and you get a real powder keg.
3. Entitlements are a funny word. There is much confusion about the usage of that word. An entitlement is a right to something; for example: life. I am entitled to live. I won't go into the formalities of what it takes to live, but most developed nations agree that people need food, water, shelter, antibiotics, etc to live. This is why we have universal health care in almost every developed nation... also food assistance for the poor, rent assistance for the poor, etc.

Anyway, let's not kid ourselves here. We live in the wealthiest nation on Earth. It's not unreasonable for us to feel entitled to share in the wealth of the nation. There is no reason why people shouldn't have publicly funded higher education, social health insurance, etc. You've got people stealing your resources like oil, trees, gold, etc from where you live and you don't think you're entitled to even a little bit of those profits? Why can't you or I, degreed professional Americans, find a nice job with a decent salary at an American company? They're pumping YOUR oil out of the ground right off the shores where you live and selling it for money. They're taking YOUR trees from the forest and selling the wood for money. They're collecting taxes in YOUR name and spending them. We both know the answer: greed. Yes the greedy people want it all for themselves. There's a big club and you and I aren't in it.

Whyte Horse, I did mean to be sincere as to hoping things were okay. I reread what I wrote and it sounds kinda like I was being a d bag. I feel you on the debt and jobs I got lucky after working many minimum wage jobs (post undergrad) and then doing well for a bit in corporate marketing, I live tight but it gave me a chance to do what I feel, I should be as a career and that's still a long long path right now.

Senan, keep fighting and keep fighting the good fight while you do. Hopefully health will come friend.

To everyone the top three post contain something very interesting. My first observation is this there is in fact no argument here interestingly, we all actually agree from several different perspectives on the same point. The fact is this, Yabuturtle is correct we all do need to unite. The actual question comes this. We each see a different perspective of what is wrong in the US/World at this moment. We know this fact united we stand or divided we fall so what does this mean. So, how do we proceed from here?

In my opinion you cannot unite the innocent under the sword. Here not only do atrocities happen but there is no win scenario there. So, we must look to the other way, we could use the pen to persuade the current leaders and reform. However, we long ago began trading the pen away for conveniences of agreement. So, the 2 primary things we would assume we need to fight the system are in fact tipped in the systems favor. There however, has been one thing the system never can control unless we let them. The birth place of heroes and villains alike, they cannot control how we treat each other, our neighbors, our community. This is how we begin, there is no other way in my opinion. Note please, I do mean start small. In our country the US don't throw away anything useful, probability is someone needs it, yes, in the richest nation. Polite discourse in the streets, the village halls, the state assemblies. Even just general kindness. This is how we can unite people here, some day, the people of the world will see similarly and global unity of the citizenry may be possible though we battle a lot of human nature (IMO) there so that will take a gradual process. In my understanding right now this is the only comprehensible way that does not end in a loss for the innocent in citizenry. It however, is a slow process where each must play their part once they have chosen to try and make the change. It is not our view points and perspectives of the problem that matter, it is the problem itself which is we in fact are not united in the first place. This is only my opinion and suggestion at this very moment. It strikes me that this is right because it is a small but significant part I can play in this beginning. One other thing this is the way with out fear in my opinion. There is a difference between fear and awareness, we should not fear our neighbors only be aware of their actions as we are our own. Maybe this will work maybe it won't but it's a start.

Thanks everyone on this thread it has had a lot of mental food in it for me, even if I am wrong and misguided....

Yes Kobos, but take it a step further. Peer-to-peer technology is one means to an end. Also block-chain tech. There's a bunch of people working on these things but we need more people to use them. Some notable successes are bittorrent, pirate bay, bitcoin, etc. Coming soon are interplanetary file system, openbazaar, bitnation, aragon one, etc. Each one of the techs decentralize something.

You mention kindness, sharing, etc. That's the foundation of open source. The first step, ironically, is to take. Most people do it out of selfishness and then after they see the value, they feel like giving back. So go ahead and take a free copy of linux. Use it. Enable yourself. Then help yourself to millions of dollars worth of free software. Sell your wares on openbazaar and buy from others using bitcoin. It really is simple and possible, but people have to make that change for themselves.