News

Student Debt Relief Ping Pong

A large group of old people decide that young people should remain poor. Also, who even needs journalism when you have ZUCC, the debt ceiling gets a popcorn finish, AI may be covering up war crimes and Rome got got.

Endeavorance

Jun 2, 2023 — 3 min read

An Announcement 🎉

I am incredibly excited to finally announce this.

As of today, I am doing content creation full time. Stuff Keeps Happening, along with my gaming content and community (The Astral Campgrounds) will be my primary focus.

I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to take a chance on myself and make stuff for all y'all. I truly hope to find a way to make this work long term with a healthy, balanced approach.

I'll be taking a few weeks to just lay low and will be continuing my normal content schedule, but will eventually be ramping up with more content and projects. So keep an eye out, and thank you!

Love when a panel of old, purchased senators decide that an entire younger generation should just continue being poor

If you've got student loans, I am so very sorry for the absolute whiplash you've been going through.

The US Senate has passed a bill that would undo the student loan relief efforts of the Biden administration.

I want to remind you: Democrats technically hold a majority in the Senate. And the Senate has passed legislation to directly prevent Democrat efforts to relieve student loans. Granted, the voters were all Republicans as well as a couple of Democrats who voted with them.

They cite the usual bullshit around "you took out a loan, now pay it back" etc etc, who gives a shit. Don't freak out yet tho. Biden has already said he'll just veto it, and there's no reality in which the Senate overturns that veto. This bill passing is 100% for political show.

The real deciding factor on student debt relief will be the Supreme Court, which will proooobably choose the dumbest possible outcome.

Who needs journalism anyway?

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is threatening to stop including journalism on their platform in California.

California is tossing around a potential bill which would make it so that companies like Meta, who profit greatly off of aggregating news, would have to share that profit with the publishers. Meta claims that it would instead just be "paying into a slush fund" and so they'd just instead block all the news.

I… I think that's a bluff on Meta's part? That's among the dumbest shit I've read in a while, but also they said the same thing a few years back the last time this concept cropped up.

They literally just want to make money off of the output of news sites without giving those news sites the traffic, so. Fuck 'em.

Debt ceiling? Never heard of it.

After a bunch of back and forth, the US will be raising it's debt ceiling by passing a bill that does virtually nothing to help average citizens of the country while tossing some helpful wins to massive energy companies and billionaires.

Yes: to avert economic disaster due to an impending imaginary number, politicians squabbled for weeks to fuck over their own citizens who have absolutely nothing to do with any of this in the first place.

What a real country.

AI may be accidentally covering up war crimes

Okay this one is WACK. Y'know how like an absurd amount of video and pictures are uploaded to massive social media sites every day? In an effort to combat that, these huge sites have been using AI to identify horrific content and instant-delete it before it even makes its way to a human moderator.

Problem is: what if the video that was deleted was evidence of a war crime? War crimes are egregious, yes. But if someone recorded a video to a platform that was then deleted automatically… woosh. No move evidence.

On this day

On this day in 455, the Sack of Rome began.

The Vandals (like, the group called Vandals, not like, spray paint) invaded Rome for two weeks, pillaging the city and just kinda going bazonkers.

There are conflicting reports as to if this sacking was violent and extreme or more just kinda a chill vibe sorta sacking, but largely it is seen as an early indicator of the fall of the Roman Empire.