Any surprises you wish you knew about beforehand that you’d care to share? Any bullshit around financial stuff, filing taxes while abroad, etc?

windows… has not had an issue with anything I’ve wanted to do.

Then you should use Windows. It sounds like it works for you.

I offered up a counter-anecdote to your anecdote. I did not mean to invalidate your experience.

That said, I’m triggered by statements like, “Linux isn’t ready,” because they aren’t conducive to productive conversation. A better way to think of it is, “Linux/Windows/<Insert OS here> isn’t for me.” Linux doesn’t have to be for everybody. Likewise for Windows or any other OS. I think it’s great that we have so many choices.

Crazy how different our experiences have been. Over the last decade I’ve hopped from Ubuntu to Mint, Debian, Fedora, Nobara, and currently on Bazzite. Never had an issue connecting to the internet. (shrugs)

Lots of good answers here already. I’ll just add that Jon Stewart recently did a great segment that touches on this. Basically, he says if everything the government does is “OmG nAzIz FaScIsTz TrAiToRz!!!” then people who aren’t already paying attention will continue tuning it out. I forget at which time in the video he gets to this point, but honestly the whole 20-minute video is worth a watch.

making someone else’s tragedy about them

esteem boosts

Interesting take. When someone says they are blessed or grateful for whatever reason (even in the context of another’s tragedy), I see it more as acknowledging how much of our own circumstances are outside of our control, a perfectly normal and healthy thing to recognize and nothing to do with boosting one’s own self esteem.

Looks like we are not going to agree on this, which is okay—I enjoyed the discussion nonetheless. Have a nice day.

Fractional reserve banking does not mean the debt does not exist. The debt very much exists. Nobody takes out a loan and just sits on it. As soon as the loan is created, goods and services are traded. At the end of the day, each party to downstream transactions can go to the bank and withdraw the balance of their account in cash. The fractional reserve system only works as long as not everyone does this at once.

When a borrower becomes insolvent and the loan cannot be repaid, the lender records it on their books as a loss. They cannot just pretend the loan never happened.

Of course, now we’re mixing subjects because OP asked about student loan forgiveness, which would necessarily come out of tax payers’ pockets (not the same as when a lender takes the L because the loan cannot be repaid).

The image is a poor analogy because unlike when someone creates an image or any form of art, when a borrower takes out a loan, the lender records a receivable as an asset and the borrower’s account as an offsetting liability. Once this happens, the loan cannot then just be magically erased—somehow, some way, the lender must be made whole again. In the case of loan forgiveness, it comes out of the tax payers’ pockets. Whether that’s theft or not is a separate topic, and I think another commenter covered it well by comparing it to any other government program or subsidy.