Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/17/nothing-in-life-is-truly-fre.html
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Not well reported is the fact that being part of the Amway family, DeVos has flown free her entire life on private jets. Amway today owns at least 13 jets now and by my estimate (from my time there) is that they spend on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year ferrying around family.
Yup. Tells us something about how stuff isn’t free.
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Amway isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s more pernicious. It’s a pyramid scheme. A ponzi scheme just hurts the investors. A pyramid exploits the labor it employs by constant lying about how it works. Investors know they can lose money on a bad investment. College kids expect to be paid for doing a job.
I got suckered by Cutco. All the ads said “easy work, perfect for college students, you don’t have to generate your own leads” Should have raised red flags. But I joined up and ended up owing the company $500 on the demo knife kit. Additionally they absolutely did not generate any leads for anyone, and you were expected to basically pester your family and friends until they hated you in order to make any money. After my first few demos, I decided that I’d rather eat the $500 and walk away from that scam.
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This is one of the many reasons I hate debt. And hate sociopaths. Only a sociopath would be okay with fucking over literally everyone for profit.
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Compare a potential $47 billion to the current defence budget of $600 billion and you get some idea of priorities.
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Cory mentioned it above, but just to reiterate… DeVos is unqualified and corrupt, and I’m glad that was very obvious in her hearings.
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Dissing Russians has become very popular of late. But at least they had revolution. Looks to me that that’s exactly what Americans need.
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Didn’t they have one already? That time a bunch of educated middle class white guys who felt hard done by the controlling interests of obstructionist upper class white guys went off to another piece of ‘uninhabited’ land and started their own country?
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Why? It’ll have no influence on her confirmation.
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Errr, private jets aren’t free. Following this logic, I’ve driven to work every day my entire working life for free.
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Nothing is truly free!!1! Except a healthy, educated, productive society. Somehow the less you invest in that, the more you get!
- Republicans
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As a French colleague of mine told a US team after - despite several lengthy explanations - they couldn’t understand why he would be unavailable in the Summer after his project went live:
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They are if you don’t pay for their purchase, running, or upkeep.
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You are right! I forgot about that one on accounts of it being a patrician revolution against other patricians so they could avoid taxes and keep stealing indigenous lands.
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Im a fan of Bernie but that interview clip was a fail.
Clearly its not in any Republicans interest to vaguely agree anything should be made available for free.
I dont doubt she has very dodgy ideas but she was the one trying to reach out to Bernie!
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$47 billion?! Impossible! Too vast a cost!
What? $380 billion for a jet fighter we don’t need and doesn’t work in the first place? A bargain at twice the price! Which it will be!
That said, I don’t think the free education plan can work. College education in America seems to be a class marker. Certainly, some degrees indicate a proficiency at some sort of skill but quite a lot of them merely show that the holder is of an appropriate background. If anyone can get them, this devalues them, and the upper classes will simply find some other shibboleth, indeed, with unpaid intern work being a prerequisite in a lot of industries, they may have already done.
You are trying to bolt on progressive ideas on a system that’s fundamentally regressive. This hardly ever works. The hell of it is that I can’t even imagine how it might be fixed. It’s amusing to talk about revolutions but the thing about revolutions is that they produce chaos, despair, death, and injustice and then twenty years later or so, if you are lucky, things are better. I am not convinced that the current generation of Americans is willing to pay a price this steep.
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My girlfriend is in a teaching licensure program and one of her professors had everyone turn in a precourse questionnaire, the kind of thing that helps get a feel for the class. One of the questions was, “What do you feel is the single biggest challenge facing public education.” My girlfriend answered briefly: “Betsy DeVos.”
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…and you said they didn’t generate any leads.
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She’s already won the argument: a simple phrase like “Nothing in life is truly free” goes viral, and can be understood by even the dumbest dumb-ass, while “a small speculation fee on stock trades” makes brain hurt for most folks. Of course using that logic, in today’s climate she could have said “you’re ugly and stupid and a communist” and she would have won.
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You perhaps missed the sarcasm? Because I stated that the private jets cost quite a lot. Just paid by the family pyramid scheme.
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