reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course

Quite right. Honestly, even if we could do it now, might be best to wait until after considering who may be in charge during said reforms...

Absolutely agreed, though the problem goes beyond just funding... a lot of countries still have a very small c conservative, traditionalist, Prussian-style education system that focuses on things like rote memorization, date and event-based history education rather than critical historical analysis, etc. These existed before the great defunding and are also an albatross around the neck of education that needs to be reformed away.

Education really just needs a ground-up restructuring and rethinking, and boy is it going to be hard to make people shake up some of their preconceived notions on education.

But yeah, none of that means anything without funding and is counter to some political goals, very true.

It wouldn't be hard to change things for essay-types to still get to shine. We've been moving away from actual home work anyway, for good reason imo (brief aside, I also think homework sends the wrong message for healthy separation between work and life in the working world). Give in class time for handwriting essays, either completed in one session or over the course of some days. In class books or e-readers for research.

If we're being honest here, we all kind of acknowledged already that education has been in dire need of reform for a long time now, we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago... I think AI is highlighting these problems and making them worse more than they are really a root cause.

I agree. A lot of blame that should be squarely laid at the feet of bad distribution of wealth via capitalism, is being put onto technological advances making things more efficient. The fact is, even in a utopian society where every person has access to any material needs they could want, we'd want to be able to produce those things more efficiently to get them into the hands of more people at a lower cost to society as a whole.

If we had a fair system - firms having to be run as worker cooperatives, wealth going into the hands of the working class instead of a few capitalists, etc - none of the Luddite-esque complaints would hold. In this example, yes, cost of clothing would go up if we fairly paid all textile workers and if they owned part of the company they work for. It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than bespoke, hand made clothing requiring one skilled worker tens or hundreds of man hours of work.

And as hard as it is to change that system, I actually think that's easier than trying to put the genie that is technology back in the bottle.

After the country-wide quarantine was lifted here in France, I hoped for a moment that we would capitalize on the remote-work experience to push as much employment as possible out of the cities and suburbs and into rural communities, but that never materialized.

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I personally prefer more rural living, even though that's not an option for me at the moment. There's also something to be said for localized food sources from less monoculture farms.

On the other hand, cities are extremely efficient in delivering services; in a properly designed city, personal transit isn't really needed at all, and each service can just serve many more people.

The currently-employed “more efficient” farming methods are also only possible by continuing to centralize more and more land under single owners

This I don't necessarily agree with, at least not in a capitalistic sense. Fewer entities , maybe, but if these are run as worker cooperatives, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Granted, this is a problem under the current system where fewer entities ain't going to be cooperatives more often than not, but this is a wider problem.

heavy use of fertilizers and mono-culture

This is true, but I can't see how we go back without a population crash. We just can't sustain the current population without modern farming practices, I don't think. I think birth rates are finally slowing down, and I'm actually somewhat optimistic we're, despite some predictions, kind of reaching a natural carrying capacity; but even at our current levels, we'd need a huge shift in society that would push many, many more back to sustenance farming if we had no fertilizers or otherwise modern farming, which I'm not sure is a good thing overall from a human well-being perspective. The current situation is obviously rife with problems as well, I agree with what you're pointing out.

It's certainly a tough nut to crack at any rate.

Trams are some of the most well-liked transit here in Hungary, this is a bit wild to me.

Most of this sounds like local design issue. Trams here are often on separated tracks and so zip through traffic, and are reliable.

Metros are good, but they're for serving longer distance. Trams are easy to hop on and off. Trams cover short to medium trips, metro for trips that take you across the city or nearly, trains for anything longer than that, and buses when nothing else is available.

It really remains true: every accusation a confession.

Please tell us more about US and Trump-era politics, I’m sure the subscribers to /c/europe can’t wait to hear more about your country.

He's drawing a comparison because disaffected rural voters being a major source of the right wing populist shift we've seen in Europe as well is a pretty international problem. We'd be stupid not to look at what's happening in the US and learn some lessons before it's too late.

Pretty much the exact same story played out here in Hungary; declining rural voters experiencing draining coffers and access to services, no political will to do anything about it, and promises to fix it were a big part of what kept Orbán in power so long. And he was a huge thorn in the side of the EU for years.

We can close our ears and pretend we're above these things driving politics in the US if we want... meanwhile AfD has had a historic win. I'd say it's probably in our interest to see how Trump politics took over America to avoid the same fate in Europe considering there are an awful lot of similarities to the conditions that birthed it in an awful lot of European countries.

are you trolling or do you really think that forced relocation of people from rural areas to cities is a serious solution to suggest?

So what's your solution? Many European countries have tried very generous incentives to pull people back to the declining villages, Hungary would give huge loans at zero interest that could be discharged entirely, Italy has tried their own incentive programs, nothing is working. If the solution were simple we'd have done it already.

I don't think forcibly moving people is right, obviously, but trying to reverse the incentives to get people out of villages where it's impossible to practically provide services rather than continue the failed attempt to repopulate them doesn't seem crazy to me.

That's definitely a part of it. When everyone was crapping all over tariffs in general after the Trump tariff debacle, I was arguing from the left that while Trump's trade war tariffs obviously sucked, the idea of tariffs on countries with lower labor conditions in order to make domestic workers with better pay and labor protections competitive is actually sound. If you don't provide any penalty for undercutting labor rights and practices you'll just get outcompeted in a market economy. And it also disincentivizes export countries from undercutting their labor, hopefully improving labor rights there.

Not only do we have undercutting of labor, but there's also the exporting of industries with lots of negative externalities; we crow about reducing mining, or drilling, or lumber production, but we just buy those things from other countries anyway. A lot of those industries tend to be rural by nature as well.

That said, that kind of "race to the bottom" with labor conditions has hit urbanites pretty hard, too; lots of cities that were founded on heavy industry like car or steel production, manufacturing in general... unfettered globalization has hit all lower and middle classes hard.

I think though with rural communities, a big part of it is we've just become so efficient and reduced labor needs so much, especially in industries like farming, that small communities which are much more vulnerable to big population shifts in the first place, just die out. When you go from needing dozens of farmhands per farm, more during harvest, to only a few and a combine... small communities just can't absorb that kind of population shift the way a city that's more diversified can.

So for some of these villages, I just don't think there's any coming back even if we did have strong labor laws and some protectionism for that domestic labor (which we absolutely should). You'd have to purposefully go back to less efficient farming methods, which has some pretty big implications for a population size that's since far outgrown that kind of output. Those villages just aren't coming back in nearly any conceivable circumstance, I think, and there should probably be incentives to move people out of them and let them die out.

Frankly, for those small communities that don't have any prospects for growth, I think some thought should be put into actually helping them along in closing down, moving residents out to more living communities, and rewilding the land they once sat on.

Few things are worse than Weird Al songs stuck in your head.

Just ask Don McLean. Getting an artist to forget their own lyrics on stage in favor of your parody has to be some kind of lifetime achievement for a parody artist.

They do not, stop spreading shit.

Honey, I'm a veteran of the early internet, my first computer was a fucking Tandy. That's why, after I matured a little, I decided seeing this kind of shit wasn't some test of fortitude I was winning and likely it just wasn't doing my mental health any favors.

Sounds like it didn't do you any either.

If you don't think raping an animal likely to death is horrifying, you should really consider what the internet has done to your brain, dude.

I know we're making light of this in the comments, dark humor I get it, no judgment on that note.... but this is actually fucking horrifying. That link is hella staying blue.

I honestly feel like B isn't really logical. In reality, practically, governments simply do grant rights. You can say you've always had a right to a thing, but if you don't in practice, that seems like a hollow claim.

We didn't have any natural right to anything as we were hunter gatherers fighting for survival; we collectively decided some things should be rights and enshrined those in law. Our right to self governance was hard won and the result of our choice... we have the power to establish and maintain rights, they aren't handed down to us by some mysterious force.

This, to me, is more powerful and liberating than the idea we are simply "discovering" some innate right; the latter I think, similar to religiousness, almost definitionally just cedes logical argument in favor of a claim that something just divinely or naturally exists. You can't make an argument a right should exist if you're arguing it already does, but it's totally unrecognized by anyone.

This ultimately is just claiming a thing to be true and hoping you have enough legitimacy for it to be viewed as such; after all, the divine right of kings to rule was exactly the same, a claimed right that simply exists as the natural order of things.

I'm uneasy accepting paradigms that relinquish logical argument and discussion in favor of pleas to a natural order... the latter can be turned against you just as easily as for you, in fact I'd argue they do exactly that more often. The former needs a logical consistency and leaves room for convincing others we should, prescriptively, do a thing rather than claiming it simply exists, descriptively. It directly puts power in our hands to expand rights.

With natural/divine rights, if two groups disagree on a right, there's really no point that can be argued, they simply both believe they have a natural or divine claim to being correct. With granted rights, you have to argue your case on why it should be granted, and there's a point of peaceful resolution to the disagreement.

I've heard some analysis of anti trans types that indicated they're much more upset about men to women transitioners than the reverse because it's an open rejection of the more "powerful" role and how dare you reject your privilege like that.

Can't speak to the veracity of that but it makes sense to me.

But a majority are also skeptical of more EU-wide institutions and expanding the project in general, which is what it's going to take to do that. We can't have our cake and eat it too, here.

Nordics are finally taking a first step towards a combined stock market, which is a good start, but until we get an EU-wide one companies that start to see success are just going to keep jumping ship for US investment capital. Fractured markets, fractured militaries... nobody wants to hand more power to the EU, but they want the EU to be strong enough to be independent of the major powers while still being relevant on the world stage.

You may well be right.

My son is 8 and we live about a 5 minute walk from his school. The entire walk is down a lively pedestrian mall, he has to cross one, narrow, 30kph, crosswalked road that's constantly being crossed by other kids and parents as it's the main route to get to the school from all of the nearby flats. The teacher got visibly agitated and shocked when I suggested the possibility of him walking to or from school by himself and said she vehemently disagrees with it and that she didn't even let her 4th grader walk alone. He has a locked down smart watch he can use to call us if there are any issues.

And I'm not even in the US, I'm in central Europe. These people are honestly kind of batshit insane.

Please rethink keeping it, transformers is sadly often used as a slur against us.

Huh. I've only ever heard it used by my trans friends positively. That said, I'll remove it if you find it offensive, wasn't my intention.

male to female transgenders

That is not what I intended to say, I intended to say "transitioners". This would be how you refer to people who have transitioned in one word, right?

I used "man" and "woman" since this is also inclusive of people who are only socially gender transitioning. Is this not correct?

On the first point, it’s a bit different if someone is saying it about themselves/their people.

Sure. In the context I experienced it, it didn't seem like use of the n-word among black folks or something similar, but it's a) possible I missed that it was and b) obviously, not everyone feels the same in the first place, so just because they liked it doesn't mean everyone is cool with it. Could also be that at the time I heard it used this hadn't been picked up by the bigots yet and they since have ruined it, which wouldn't surprise me, unfortunately....

Either way, noted for future reference, thanks.

On the second, hmm bit trickier. I could see arguments for/against.

My thinking was that while "transgenders" is similar to "blacks" in that it takes a noun and sort of subtly objectifies people, to transition is a verb and so is more akin to saying "swimmers" or "runners". But I can see how some may see this as reductive. "Trans femme" sounds like it does what I was looking for, though, so may as well use that.

If that's less openly offensive I'll keep that as I think this has led to an interesting conversation about language others may be able to learn from as well.

Though again, fair enough on all points and genuinely noted!