The only time going to school isn’t worth it is if you’re already burnt out in your job, genuinely have no time to do it, and make so much money that adding university classes on top of that isn’t worth the effort or time investment. Having said that, if you need the degree to increase your earning potential, even in your 30s or 40s or whatever, then it’s worthwhile despite all the challenges. My mom got her degree in her 30s and massively increased her earning potential and that has paid off over the decades, and I’m currently getting my degree in my 30s to increase my earning potential as well.

There are remote school options where you don’t need to attend classes so those are much easier to fit into your schedule, and much cheaper, places like Western Governors University.

The Shinkansen network in Japan was infamously extremely expensive and during its construction, many Japanese hated it and doubted it would ever amount to much. Today, it is held up as the best public transit system ever created.

Here in Seattle, the Link Light Rail system is also extremely expensive, though this is due to many factors, notably the fact that between the time the project got started and initially set its funding goals, the Covid pandemic happened and massive inflation, both in currency and in raw materials. However, the lines that are finished are extremely nice. The Link system is shaping up to be some of the best in the entire US, and the biggest and most important section hasn’t even opened yet: the world’s first rail line to travel across a floating bridge. Once the bridge section is complete, it will connect the two separate systems on the west and east sides of Lake Washington into one system and allow fast, efficient transit from the east side into downtown Seattle.

Anyway, my point is that just because a system is expensive, doesn’t mean it’s bad. I think you’re just furthering car-centric propaganda and reinforcing the belief that public transit is expensive and therefore bad

Of course I do. Mostly because I avoid communities that I know will be toxic as hell and full of chuds

This seems to be the opposite experience for many who have expressed that they don’t check—they feel entitled to be present and post in every space regardless of any context

Yeah! If women want their own space they should sequester themselves into a backroom with no advertising and an onerous sign-up process requiring an ID check that no one ever sees or hears about but somehow all women will know it exists because they have a psychic sense for those kinds of things

If deplatforming and political action by the ruling class are the main methods to stop this crisis, then none of us had any power to do anything in the first place

It’s no wonder no one takes this seriously: the epidemic of disaffected young men is only a symptom of greater societal issues and can’t effectively be addressed on its own. That’s also what I was getting at with my comment

Stop what? Stop it how? Suddenly make every parent in the US loving, compassionate, and effective at raising their children? Or maybe we could just fix the economy? One of those is bound to work, easy!

What do you mean “next admin”? This is it

You must not hang out around trans people IRL then. Whenever I’m out with my friends, someone usually has to make a comment about or to one of my trans friends, just to be mean I guess? I don’t even understand why people feel so happy making her upset

in this case you would just overwrite the existing row, you wouldn’t use de-duplication because it would do the opposite of what you wanted in that case.

… That’s what I said, you’d just update the row, i.e. replace the existing data, i.e. overwrite what’s already there

Definitionally, the actual identity of the person MUST be unique, otherwise you’re going to somehow return two rows, when you call one, which is functionally impossible given how a DB is designed.

… I don’t think you understand how modern databases are designed

i genuinely cannot think of a single instance where you would want to delete one entry, and replace it with a reference to another

Well, there’s not always a benefit to keeping historical data. Sometimes you only want the most up-to-date information in a particular table or database, so you’d just update the row (replace). It depends on the use case of a given table.

what elon is implying here (remove “duplicate” entries, however that’s supposed to work)

Elon believes that each row in a table should be unique based on the SSN only, so a given SSN should appear only once with the person’s name and details on it. Yes, it’s an extremely dumb idea, but he’s a famously stupid person.

There can be duplicate SSNs due to name changes of an individual, that’s the easiest answer. In general, it’s common to just add a new record in cases where a person’s information changes so you can retain the old record(s) and thus have a history for a person (look up Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)). That’s how the SSA is able to figure out if a person changed their gender, they just look up that information using the same SSN and see if the gender in the new application is different from the old data.

Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs. The best explanation I have for that is that various state departments have their own on-premise databases and their own structure and design that do not necessarily mirror the federal master database. There are likely some databases where the SSN field is setup to accept strings only, since in real life, your SSN on your card actually has dashes, those dashes make the number into a string. If the SSN is stored as a string in a state database, then when it’s brought over to the federal database (assuming the federal db is using a number field instead of text), there can be some data loss, resulting in a NULL.

So you’re saying it was much, much worse than a million, and the federal government took it because it made them look better?