I know many people who travel from place to place in a semi nomadic life and work in the fields here and there. Never really heard any of them complaining about their life. They sure have their problems, but that’s everyone.

In many countries the concept of employment is very feeble and most people just do their things and sell them to other people. They live just fine.

I have a good friend of mine who may be related to this comic. He was a trucker and lost his job in the 2008 crisis. After that he decided he did not want to get a job anymore.

He set up a tent in the woods and lives there. He goes down town to read books every day and people give him some money. He has food, he has his place full of books and with the money he gets he can buy some wine to enjoy the day. Cool guy to be around and have nice chats.

He’s got a good life he enjoys. What should he plan for? If he ever gets sick (and with his lifestyle he really doesn’t get sick) he can go to the hospital and they’ll treat him for free. He’s got more clothes and stuff he may ever need as people just throw stuff away and he collects it. In fact he gifted me clothes, backpacks, pans and other stuff.

I do not think he needs to plan much more to maintain his lifestyle. I mean, some planning is good. I know he took down a few trees as he’s planning to make a teepee to have a better kitchen area. But I don’t think much more planning than that would significantly improve his life.

Unless it’s for salad, I just run them under some water. Same for potatoes.

Time is too short for peeling vegetables.

Fair enough, prioritise people who actually work and do things. They deserve housing before anyone else.

Then also people who do not work and make money off of others people’s work may have a house.

Would not advise Debian to a new user. Old packages and difficulties installing non free software may frustrate people.

I did use Debian as my daily driver and I have it in a few servers, it is a very good system. But to the common user stability is not the priority which should prevail over everything else.

Rented a flat from a family for 3 years. The flat had not been renewed in over 60 years, but I was alright with that. The flat had several problems, they never wanted to fix.

One day the electrical system starts going out over and over again, fuses would burn every few days. I had to tell them that in case of fire they’d be responsible for everything I had in the house before they agreed they should fix the electric system.

Since they were going to fix the electric system, they decided to do a bit more work and change the floor and a few things more. They wanted to increase the rent 50% to account for these improvements; even though that is illegal I accepted, since they were in fact improving the flat.

I had to move out for two months while the works were going on. One week before the end of the works, the flat was really not done yet. I asked several times whether it would be ready, because I’d need to find and accomodation in the meanwhile. I asked for a discount of half a month so that I could cover expenses and because nobody knew when they would actually complete the works.

The day before I was supposed to get back into the flat, they decided that I was posing way too many conditions and kicked me out. They decided to keep the safety deposit because a plastic floor old over 60 years had started cracking. 8 months later, they still have some boxes of stuff which is mine but never have time to meet me to give it back to me.

Time has passed and I still have to go to a lawyer, because I the meanwhile I had a bunch of trouble to solve. I’m sure I can win a trial against them, but even if I do win the trial I’ll have gone through a bunch of trouble just to get my safety deposit back. I’ll be doing it just because they need to fuck off, but still…

Now, most people renting places were I live are exactly like this. It is not big corporations, it people who got one or maybe a few flats on rent.

Professors started writing books for the students to study. Will students get smarter or stop thinking?

So, Gaddafi gave money to Sarcozy so he’d be elected. Then Sarcozy attacked Libya to take out Gaddafi.

That sounds like bad investment. I know they say you should only invest what you’re willing to lose, didn’t think that could include your own life.

Textbooks on any subject are easily retrievable for free. You could previously go to a library, but the internet makes it much easier to retrieve that kind of information.

Why not just free psychological assistance? I don’t think like a forced test is a good way to fix issues. It’s not like the psychologist comes, fixes your brain and then you’re all good.

People need to want to improve their life, the psychologist assists in that process.

Te technology Is not really designed to prevent that, it is designed to be decentralised. Now, email is decentralised but everyone uses Gmail.

Imagine Reddit closes and everyone from there flocks into lemmy. Will small instances stand the influx? Will single maintainers with a small server allow 10 million new users in their instance? Most likely not, either they will limit subscriptions or they’ll close down.

As such the most likely thing to happen is that someone with money opens a big instance which can host all those people. And there, you got Reddit exactly as it was.

On the first part, do not worry; I understand the perspective. I just meant to show how a degree may not be as relevant as other things with my personal experience.

If you want information regarding Spain, feel free to text me. I’m new in Lemmy and never had private messages, but I guess I should get a notification and figure it out.

We clearly misunderstood each other, I did not mean to say in the majority of jobs you need a degree. I was initially just pointing out there is a significant amount of careers in which a degree is in fact required. We do indeed agree on all points as far as I can see.

Now, regarding this supposed privatisation of job opportunities. I am very much aware of the problems with student debt in the US. It is something extremely sad. What is unclear to me is why would this be a privatisation?

I’d rather imagine this leads to further division in social classes i.e. rich people who can afford degrees can access more “palatable” jobs. But I say this without really knowing much of how jobs work now in the US. I’d imagine this would lead to only a small percentage of the US population having a degree, but as far as I can see over 50% of US population has one. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment)

As such I can imagine in the US as well the degree would be treated as something cheap and common. I’d imagine this would lead to many jobs in many sectors favouring people with a degree over people who do not have one. As such I can imagine that paying for education in the US could probably lead to better job opportunities. This would be regardless the fact that a degree is required for a certain job or not. It is unclear to me whether people who had to take debt for a degree and get an unspecialised job are able to pay back the debt.

Now, it is a bit sad to talk about degrees and education only under the aspect of job seeking. A degree is a wonderful way to learn things and improve ones thinking skills. Free education is amazing because of this: we all benefit from everyone around being more informed and able to improve things. Widespread education does significantly improve the lives of everyone in a country, regardless of the fact that what one studies is actually useful for a job or not.

The discussion was about the importance of a degree into finding a job. I hire people to work in research to develop novel drugs. I generally do not care whether they have a degree or not, but the degree does generally come with a level of preparation on the subject and a level of reasoning skills which are not easy to develop without formal training/working in the field. I did some times favor people without a degree over people with a PhD because they felt better candidates to me. Sometimes this is not possible due to bureaucracy. If you prefer, I do not actually hire people; I select people that should be hired with grant money I obtained to conduct certain research jobs.

I don’t know how it works in the US, but to get a job in sales or as a project manager a degree is not required where I live. Candidates with a degree may be favoured by a company, but there is no law enforcing the requirement for a degree. And I do know many people working those jobs without a degree.

Regarding the fact that you don’t need to go to university in Europe. I’m not really sure if I understand, I guess you mean it is not compulsory to attend lectures. I studied in Italy, there this was the case: all lectures were absolutely discretionary and you could finish your degree without attending a single one. That is except experimental stuff, which indeed you’d need to attend. You could theoretically just study from the books and pass all the exams and get your degree. However, lectures are very good for understanding what you’re studying, most people were attending all lectures anyway. The fact that those are optional is useful if some days you can not attend for whatever reason, whether you’re working or busy in some other way. This, however, is not the case throughout Europe. I live in Spain now, where attendance of lectures is compulsory. You do not get a degree unless you attend a specified percentage of the lectures. Many other countries in Europe follow this system.

In some countries in Europe you do not pay to attend university. In others you do have to pay, it’s generally a few thousand euros per year. In most countries you can get scholarships and not have to pay such fees or even get a salary for studying.

I believe we’re just misunderstanding each other. I do agree, for many jobs a degree is not necessary. But for many other jobs it is, or at least some kind of technical training. I believe the amount of jobs who do require some kind of certificate, at least in Europe, is higher than 1%. An electrician will be required a certificate to handle home installations and to ensure he knows what the normative is. A lathe operator will require a certificate which ensures he will not harm himself. A nurse now requires a degree, it used to be just a specific formation. Many other jobs are available who do not require a degree.

I’m not really sure to what you refer to as privatisation of job opportunities.

Ah, shops where I go are not even able to tell whether the beer I’m drinking while shopping is mine or I stole from the shop. Though, they do annoy me when they say I should have left it outside. They do annoy me a lot.

I guess, frankly not much difference. Maybe just less chances of a civil war with Evo.

I’d be amazed if you were the first person testing if those things work. However, I would not be surprised if your specific peripherals do not work as they are supposed to.

If you know someone with a Linux pc it could be easy to test it out.

I love public transport, it is basically the only form of transport I use. I do occasionally drive a car, maybe once or twice a year. That said, I really prefer not to need transport in my day to day life.

I live in a city in Spain. It is an important city, but it is not very large. I walk to work in 20 minutes. From work I walk to the city centre 15 minutes. From the city centre I walk to the woods outside town in 15 minutes. It’s not even worth it to wait for the bus to arrive…

I was in the US with my sister. Didn’t know whether the bus to get us to town would pass as it was already sunsetting (yes, it did pass we later figured out) as the trip was a couple hours long. One guy stops with his big truck towing a boat and picks us up. Apparently he did not figure out we were hitching, he thought we were waiting for the bus and was afraid for us. Apparently the previous day he had taken the bus for the first time in his 65 years of life and that was one of the most traumatizing experiences in his life. He figured we should not go through the same pains he had to go through…

But yes, American public transport is terrible. While travelling I had decided not to rent a car. I ended up having to make friends with people travelling with cars so that I could go around with them.

Much easier than that: just wait for a while and there won’t be no tower anymore.

Either it falls down on its own or people come around to pick a few bricks and stones to build their own house.

There are many other fields that require a degree. Engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology, etc. In some of those fields you can find some jobs which you can do without the degree, but the vast majority do require it.

I hire people and, to be fair, most people with a degree do not qualify as valid for certain jobs. But in that case is lack of knowledge. In my case I’d rather have someone without degree but with a deep knowledge; but those are very hard to find.