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.

So I’ve considered attending these sorts of things for a while. And honestly, I think I’d be a good fit, based on what I’ve read about the sort of people camps look for. I’m cooperative, easygoing, helpful, and I like contributing to common goals. I have more experience in nature/camping than 99% of people and am well versed in LNT. I have a fair bit of experience doing diy projects, and am at least somewhat competent with carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, welding, and building/deconstructing temporary structures. I’m a big wall climber and am rope access certified, and am good at solving problems of moving heavy things where I need them or using leverage and ropes to exert lots of force. And I have the sort of athleticism that lets me do manual labor in the hot sun all day. For all practical purposes, I think I’d be a great addition to most people’s camp.

you’re a participant, an integral part of the experience for everyone else

But this bit is honestly terrifying. Really, I never really “got” the appeal of festivals… you just show up at a place and… look at things? Talk to people? Based on pics and videos I’ve seen of these events, the art looks cool. And the people I’ve met who are burners are cool people. But I feel a kind of existential dread that once the work is done and it is time to “enjoy” the event, I’ll just end up walking around, looking at things, being like “that’s cool”, awkwardly talking to no one or having very shallow, surface level conversations, and being bored.

So I challenge you: convince me that going to one of these events will be a good time.

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

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.

I’m going to die.

That’s it. There’s not much I’m really certain of, but I’m pretty damn certain that I’m going to die.

So I ask myself - how do I want to live my life in light of this fact?

Def all over the business world. It’s more polite than saying “okay, let’s have a 5 minute break from this meeting so everyone can piss and get some more coffee”

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.

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.”

Your name is Punk Rock Sports Fan.

Suppose a local punk band wants to inform people that they will be playing a show. So they print out some posters and hang them around town.

That’s advertising.

They are arguing about market fundamentals, which means at least one of them is actually arguing “capitalism bad”, which is political.

Average Lemmy economist.