• thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Even if you’re able to make that work on an individual level (never buy a home, don’t get higher education, make sure you don’t need a car), you can’t make it work on a societal level.

    If you want to contribute to supplying houses to people, you need to build the houses before you can sell/rent them (mostly). That means you need to take up a loan to pay for everything involved in building houses. Then you can sell/rent the houses to individuals that don’t want to take up loans. Regardless of whether you personally ever take up a loan, you likely wouldn’t have housing without someone doing it (unless you live on a family farm from waaay back), because the people that built it needed a loan to do so.

    • Emi@ani.social
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      7 days ago

      The only expense for school besides the usual stuff(paper and pencils and such) were textbooks.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Idk about you, but while I was getting my free engineering degree in Norway I still had to pay for rent and food.

        In principle, I could have studied part-time instead of full time, while working some job that doesn’t require a degree, but I don’t see how that would benefit anyone. Regardless, even if you have housing and food covered while studying, you still need money for books, paper, a computer, etc. so either you need a job (which, for a lot of degrees, means you’ll be studying part-time), or you need a loan.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          7 days ago

          You don’t need a loan, you need somewhere to live and food

          Maybe students just get free dorms and a meal plan by default, and we work that into the cost of education and pay for it as a society

          • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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            7 days ago

            I would be all for that. But at that point we’re talking about a restricted form of UBI (which would be nice), and a significant restructuring of how parts of society work.

            I’m saying that the way society works now you need a loan to finance housing and food while studying. I’m also saying that’s not an inherently bad thing, as long as the loans aren’t exploitative. That loan lets you use money that you earn back once you get your degree (given that the system works as it should, which in this case it largely does where I’m from).