Fun Fact: This section of Project 2025 was written by Christopher Miller.
You might know him from such things as “On January 5, Miller issued orders which prohibited deploying D.C. Guard members with weapons, helmets, body armor or riot control agents without his personal approval.”
That dude has a lot of forehead.
“Six Head”
He looks like a cliche bad polititian guy from a 90s thriller movie.
I’m not opposed to a mandatory community service year upon turning 18, where a person who is physically and mentally able is required to spend 12 months PAID to work in a government organized community service program. This can help new adults gain new skills, create contacts, get references, and get off on the right foot financially.
But “military” is definitely not the right direction. IMO
The problem is that just discriminates against lower and middle class people more than anything.
It is work experience that has no meaningful value for a career (especially if EVERYONE has it) that mostly just serves to delay when people start college/trade school/whatever. Which hurts their ability to “hit the ground running” because they need to relearn what little they retained from high school but also impacts lifelong learning rather significantly. Whereas anyone who can pay off a doctor to say they have flat feet or some other non “yucky” issue will skip it.
And also? It is more or less worthless for the military. For anything short of cannon fodder, a year is nowhere near enough time to train someone to be useful. Even room clearing (e.g. Rangers) needs significantly more training to be less likely to shoot friendlies than foes. A lot of the problems in the Ukraine war (on both sides, honestly) can be traced to this. A soldier who can do more than “hold the line” needs significant training.
And while I think a return to having a strong emphasis on civil engineering and infrastructure as public service would be a great idea… without an education that is basically just hard physical labor. So now we have even more kids starting with debilitating injuries before they even begin their “real” career.
Federal service is very broad though. Just consider ask the different Federal Agencies and the roles they fill.
For example, when I was in college I had a 6 month internship with the National Park Service doing trail maintenance for a national park. It serves me no purpose as a resume item but I look back on that time extremely fondly even though it was the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done. It was incredibly physical work with really 10+ miles of hiking every work day. The NPS across the US has an huge budgetary backlog of trail maintenance going back decades.
That all is just an example but I’m sure the NPS could make great use of thousands of young workers to improve our parks. Similarly, I’m sure across the board the Federal Agencies would have a vast multitude of roles for this Federal service, including working for the DoD but in non military roles. Most of the agencies would have vast amounts of work that isn’t covered by their budgets so it just doesn’t get done.
Federal service is very broad though. Just consider ask the different Federal Agencies and the roles they fill.
Exactly this. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs throughout the federal government (and states if we include them) that would be great to have people get exposed to. It would also give people a very real sense that government is not some airy-fairy thing that is just there to be bureaucratic and “steal” your taxes…
And while I think a return to having a strong emphasis on civil engineering and infrastructure as public service would be a great idea… without an education that is basically just hard physical labor. So now we have even more kids starting with debilitating injuries before they even begin their “real” career.
That repeated:
If you think having a bunch of kids who are pissed they aren’t hanging out with their friends or going to American Pie University or whatever and unleashing them on our parks is a good idea… you’ve never worked with teenagers.
If someone wants to serve (as in actually help people, not wear camo and expect a handshake from every person they ever see) then that should be supported. But you aren’t getting any meaningful skilled work out of people in a year of mandatory service. All you are doing is exploiting cheap labor while providing even more ways for the rich to get richer.
Federal service at this level does not make rich people richer. Working for their corporations does and that’s exactly what most people do when they finish school. Corporations even tend to layoff experienced workers and hire new graduates because they are cheaper. Federal service looks this benefits everyone that takes advantage of federal services the agencies provide.
Like I was trying to point out in my example, there is a vast amount of work that federal agencies need done that is not skilled labor. But there is value in exposing young people to a small section of how the federal government operates.
Okay, since it is clear you didn’t actually read anything I wrote, I’ll try one more time and paste exactly where I addressed that
It is work experience that has no meaningful value for a career (especially if EVERYONE has it) that mostly just serves to delay when people start college/trade school/whatever. Which hurts their ability to “hit the ground running” because they need to relearn what little they retained from high school but also impacts lifelong learning rather significantly. Whereas anyone who can pay off a doctor to say they have flat feet or some other non “yucky” issue will skip it.
Yes, being a brand new hire sucks and that means you are on the lowest part of the totem pole when it comes to layoffs.
So the people who graduated college one year early and began accumulating relevant work experience one year earlier? That can make a significant difference. Same with lifetime earnings.
Again, it is great you liked working in a national park. I have a friend who very much loves it too. That isn’t something you draft kids into unless you want them to set forest fires during their smoke breaks or creep on visitors. And it takes a decent amount of training to get someone to the point where they can do anything more meaningful than trash pickup and schlepping supplies to a competent person. And when you know they are going to be gone at the end of the year?
But “I maintained trails for a year” is, at best, character building. And when every single candidate whose parents didn’t buy their way out of it have something similar? It is worthless from a career perspective. Which, again, is how the rich get richer.
Again, if someone wants to take a year off and make the world a better place? There should e a LOT of benefits to doing that. But in a draft format? At best that is someone misunderstanding what they read in a history book.
Other examples might include environmental work or working with kids. It could all be not only team building but helping people develop an appreciation for their society and help work together to keep it running. It could help people see different perspectives by working together with people they wouldn’t normally interact with. For example, IF you spend a summer cleaning litter from local parks, maybe you’ll be less likely to litter
Peace Corp and WPA were both successes, but a portfolio of similar service opportunities is more likely to include something for everyone
Nobody is saying that service is bad.
But having untrained kids straight out of high school interacting with small children? That is a great path to abuse. And is why basically any summer camp will watch the new staff like a hawk and only give them any degree of autonomy in year two or even four of volunteering.
And the idea of “make everyone work retail to learn to not be an asshole to retail workers” is fundamentally flawed. It is not like working retail or picking up trash is a romanticized job in media. If you somehow don’t know it is a shit job then you already lack any empathy and doing a shit job for a year isn’t going to help with that.
And, again, you are missing a key point: People join the Peace Corps as volunteers. Not as a mandatory year of service where the options are to dig ditches or join the military. THAT is the key here. What is being proposed is a mandatory year of service and I keep pointing out how that is of very limited use to anyone and is mostly just “physical labor”.
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I hear your concerns.
And your point, even Medics who have served in combat roles and saved lives on the front line can’t even become civilian paramedics without four additional years of college after they’re done in the military. This is all because nobody’s figured out how to transfer the training that they received in the military over to the civilian world certifications
That is actually an interesting discussion for different reasons, but yeah. But less life threatening stuff (like being a mechanic) transfers a lot faster but also gets into the mess of “why is the army spending all this money to train people who are leaving in June?” and why contracts tend to be for multiple years (chatgpt says 8) with the option to stoploss people until the end of time.
But yeah. Between family and climbing/mountaineering buddies I have had a weirdly large number of conversations with paramedics and various rescue folk.
The big issue there, aside from liability, is that militaries tend to mostly be focused on catastrophic injuries and the idea that you just throw a tourniquet on someone and deal with it later. Cynically speaking, because they are already going to be injured enough from those gunshots that they aren’t likely to ever return to active duty so it doesn’t really matter if they lose a limb.
Whereas paramedics and people doing wilderness rescue ARE increasingly having to deal with catastrophic injuries from gunfire on the regular but are still trained to use tourniquets as a last resort. Because… if you apply a tourniquet correctly you are basically guaranteeing at least long term nerve damage if not losing the limb itself. Its why the idiots who keep tourniquets in their truck (because 'murica) often do more harm than good if they actually know how to use them.
But the good news is that the militaries of the world have increasingly discovered the magic that is hemostatic bandages (e.g. quick clot) with a lot of rank and file troops basically being taught to just shove that anywhere they see a wound and to jam it into the cavity of a gunshot. Yes, there can be complications, but it is about as safe as it gets and it has very comparable statistics to most situations where a tourniquet would be used with significantly less risk of long term injuries from the treatment.
Which is why it is increasingly suggested to pack a few of those in your wilderness first aid kit or even your “I live in America and have good odds of getting shot at the Kroger” kit in your car. Tourniquets are a last resort deal. Hemostatic gauze is a “yolo, just make sure you have gloves on when you pack it in there”.
DISCLAIMER: I am obviously exaggerating a bit and please actually understand whatever medical supplies you keep with you or are likely to be exposed to (i.e. What your friends carry)
I say force everyone to do a year of retail. That’ll do wonders for compassion as a whole.
I have my doubts. In my experience, the absolute worst customers were the ones who wanted to lecture you because ~I used to work in retail.~ I think some people just suck.
They used to work in retail when it wasn’t insane.
That’s like “I used to drink directly from the stream”
Was there ever a time when people were not being told toxic nonsense like “the customer is always right”, which only encouraged the Karens of the world to feel like entitled little assholes who always think they get to talk to the manager?
That is the sad truth.
Assholes are gonna asshole. If someone actually needs to work retail/service industry to know how much it sucks, they don’t have any empathy to begin with. This isn’t like “Wow, being a model or a pro wrestler is awesome” where people learn the reality of needing to maintain your body in a specific form while constantly traveling and being underpaid and so forth. NOTHING glorifies retail/service industry work.
So you mostly just get “Oh, I worked at a supermarket 40 years ago and my favorite thing to do was to walk around the parking lot to find carts. So I am really doing them a favor leaving the cart in the middle of a parking spot in 120F weather”.
I worked a looooong time ago in a service industry job and I got that same thing from the knobs. Here’s the thing though - I tended to not believe those people. If they did, they did it for like a week. That’s my guess.
Haha. I mean, you do have a point there.
I mostly agree. I think having a “do it by age 30” rule or something might be a little better than requiring it at 18 (I graduated high school at 17 and was already in university at 18 so this would have messed things up financially as well as mentally).
I think there would need to be a postponement situation. Not everyone is ready the day they turn 18.
the high school I went to had a mandatory number of hours of community service in order to graduate. It was neat, the kids did a very wide variety of things.
Sounds like a good opportunity.
It was a good school. The things people did all differed depending on their location, money, etc. We had everything from kids who cleaned up trash for the needed hours, kids who volunteered with local emergency services, found work/internships with non-profit organizations, some came up with a project, and not only worked on it themselves, but went out in their communities and organized people to participate to get it done. One the the bigger things I saw was a girl, who was a minor celebrity, got a group of people in her neighborhood together, and built a park and youth center, because there was literally nothing for people under 21 to do in her area other than hang around in the streets. It helped that she was able to hit up some wealthy, much larger, celebrities she was working with, at the time, but hey, she got it done. All the paperwork, certification, etc. It was 3500 hours over the course of the four years.
I’m not opposed to a mandatory community service year upon turning 18, where a person who is physically and mentally able is required to spend 12 months PAID to work in a government organized community service program.
Why do we need mandatory service when we can just offer a good salary in a citizens conversation corps that prioritizes high schoolers in hiring?
That works too. Although good salary is relative, because the average home price in my area is 550k, and you shouldn’t spend more than 25% of your pre-tax income one housing, so the salary would need to be at least 140k to be considered “good”
Although good salary is relative
At one point, way the fuck back in 2008, Obama toyed with the idea of a program to hire college seniors for a 100 hour period of community service that would pay $40/hr. This was pitched as a compromise with the Booker / Clinton “baby bond” proposal that suggested everyone simply get a $2500 bond at birth which would mature to $5000 by the time they were 18.
$40/hr for a kid out of high school in 2008 was fucking phenomenal. So of course the idea never got past white papers.
In my country, if you can’t do the mandatory military service (and yes, being a pacifist is a valid reason I believe), you can do the same amount of time working for a charity and get paid minimum wage. I know a guy who worked for the food bank, but there are other options obviously.
It’s not the perfect program - I’d prefer if you could just immediately choose to do the humanitarian service instead of the military one, rather than having to go through the medical check for the military one first. And I think minimum wage is pretty horrible if you don’t also get provided housing… But overall, I like the idea.
I totally would have done it. I really needed some time on my own.
I think this would make more sense if it were connected to public education somehow. Lots of high schools already require community service hours to graduate, turn that into a program where third and fourth year students spend some time in school and some time doing some kind of public service work. Though It would need to be more of an educational thing than actual paid work.
Cool, but we also take Finland’s law about tuition: it’s illegal to charge it.
No private schools. It’s done wonders for their society because the rich people invest in the same schools as everyone else.
We have private schools. But they just can’t charge tuition.
Honestly asking - how are the private schools funded? From the government? Assuming at the same level as the public schools?
I think most have some sort of foundation behind them funding it. Government and municipalities give them most of the funding I think, part comes from fundraisers and the sort, part from investments. But the schools can’t be run for profit and they can’t make a profit, so they invest the money usually back into running the school or investments.
Thanks!
I bet the no-profit law really wrankles the school owners.
I wish that kind of sensibility would happen in America - but honestly I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
I don’t know, a lot of them are for some ideological reason or need. And I just don’t mean religion but some sort of view about education or some perceived need they saw in education field that the state or municipal government wasn’t filling. Christian schools, Waldorf/Steiner education, international schools, providing education closer to home, filling in a need that the job market has. For those sort of reasons the profit angle might be not a very high on their list but rather they want to fill that need they think exists.
Of course since you can’t run a s school for profit that means there aren’t such schools so those even thinking of profit high on their list wouldn’t apply a permission to run a school to begin with.
Is illegal to charge to be a private tutor?
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It’s not illegal to run a private school but it’s illegal to charge tuition.
Endless War is a Hallmark of Fascism. This will require a large number of cannon fodder.
Ask one of the schmucks advocating for this to be the first to enlist and I bet they’ll have some bullshit excuse as to why they can’t
It very much has the “we must give meaning to life for the idiots who can’t run their own life… and by that we mean we think you aren’t human so just do what we need to be comfortable and dominant ourselves” vibe
Rich kids and those with bone spurs will be exempt.
Require all private schools that wish to have accreditation take a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $11 of federal dollars.
Ok, but also I see this causing populist style attacks on disabled kids too. Especially those with invisible or “minor but valid” disabilities that disqualify.
My school had us all take it at 16.
If you refused you had to go sit in the cafeteria by yourself and weren’t allowed to even study. Just sit there with your eyes open not doing anything for like 4 hours.
Fuck that’s awful. Were you in Idaho or something equally awful?
Pretty much, we’re also talking about right after 9/11.
We had people signing delayed papers as soon as they turned 17 so they’d go to boot immediately after HS graduation.
It was a wild time.
They had us take it in the 90s in my high school but we quickly knew it was worth nothing so everyone tanked it on purpose. We were already weary of standardized testing and knew just what to ask the teachers.
Malicious compliance is always fun but way better in groups.
A bunch of us picked the same letter for every answer so we could compare our scores and test probability.
I went to high school during peace time — that used to be a thing way back when — and I think my school required it for ROTC but maybe it was more of a strong suggestion rather than a requirement.
We also had possibly the worst possible system for military recruiters. You had to choose between the regular P.E. class, weight lifting (if you played a sport), and ROTC. The end result was that ROTC was always like 2% committed future service members (who would have joined the military with or without high school ROTC) and 98% awkward people avoiding sports at all cost. (Or the worst fate of all, 1st hour PE so you were the person who smelled like stanky teen gym clothes in every one of your classes.)
My school had us all take it at 16.
If you refused you had to go sit in the cafeteria by yourself and weren’t allowed to even study. Just sit there with your eyes open not doing anything for like 4 hours.
Every time I hear stories like this, it reminds me of my old high school. As it was the only public school in the city and there were no alternatives, it was damn near impossible to actually get expelled unless you were physically threatening or dealing cocaine in the halls.
They tried punishments like this too for a variety of reasons. Not being ready for gym class, or some hands-on class that requires a uniform. In-school suspension for minor infractions. Dress code violations. Stuff like that. They were happy that most of the kids bothered to show up and not cause problems at all. Kids were gonna sit there with their headphones on, head on a desk, and probably taking a nap. Attempting to tell the kids they couldn’t do that was probably going to be met with a middle finger. What were you gonna do, suspend them? That’s what they wanted in the first place. It was a 3 day vacation to them.
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People here don’t want a real tangible way out of their money problems.
It was a good start for me as well but people on Lemmy really don’t want to hear it.
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My high school made everyone take the asvab. I must have scored well on it because the military was up my ass. I remember uniformed soldiers regularly ringing the bell and asking for me. I had zero interest in joining the armed services, but they kept coming. My mom started answering the door for me; yelling at them to get lost and leave us alone.
bro you’re saying this as a fun anecdote but i’m not from america and this is terrifying
Some additional context:
This was 99-00. There was no war. Both of my grandparents served in ww2 and Korea to gain US citizenship. My dad came up in the Vietnam era when all his friends were getting drafted (aka forced to go to war). He tried to enlist but was blind in one eye, so they didn’t take him. My brother would have enlisted if it weren’t for a really bad skateboarding injury.
If I were good at football, it would have been university coaches knocking on my door. I was good at something the military was interested in, so they tried to recruit me to enlist.
I was 18 on 9/11/01. And my first thought was that Bush would take us to war, I’d get drafted and I needed to plan my escape to Canada. This was scarier than being recruited. I just wanted to play my bass guitar and smoke my marijuana in peace.
Reddit was right. You are being gang stalked by the government.
I didn’t take it and I still had guys showing up at my door, calling me, and in one case a Marine recruiter ran two blocks to talk to me.
Wow, you must have been poor! /s
About face and March :slams door:
We could start the first war fought by dropping rich people from drones!
No wait… dropping rich people on fire from drones. That’s better. We might run out of rich people, but they will run out of rich people first!
We’d need a wide range of rich people munitions if we wanted to fight a war. Armor-piercing rich people, incendiary rich people, cluster rich people, high-explosive rich people. It’ll be quite the endeavor.
Doritos are really flammable. I wonder if we just feed a rich guy Doritos if it will do the trick. But you’re right, that’s just one type. How can we make a rich guy more stiff? Stuff enough for armor piercing. This will take quite a bit of lead pills.
For those not familiar with it, it is an aptitude test that covers a wide range of topics. The results can be informational. Beware if you score well enough to fill a job in the army that is really understaffed, you will never get the recruiters to stop calling.
I had all 3 branches showing up at my house and lying to my face to get me to join after my school made me take it.
You’d think they would realize that lying to someone who scored really high was a bad idea.
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But you could sail the seven seas…
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You can put your mind at ease
Just because you scored high doesn’t mean they did. They are recruiters, after all.
I wonder how low you have to score before the military doesn’t bother to recruit you, because I had to take the ASBAV in high school and I just filled in bubbles at random since I had no interest in dying in Iraq. I still got a high enough score that recruiters kept bothering me for years.
I knew a guy that got a 14, he had to retake it to join the army
Don’t need a high score to be a bullet sponge in the army.
We took it senior year and I really didn’t know about it at the time. I must have flipped some switch because every branch started calling, and a navy recruiter actually came to my house wanting to talk about nuke school. I was like I don’t want to bomb anyone with nukes thank you very much lol.
NPS ‘nuke school’ focuses mainly on shipboard nuclear power plant operation, like nuclear powered subs.
I read that as “nuclear powered studs” and was thinking “about right for navy”
I took it, had an army recruiter show up a year later and asked to speak with me. My mom said I had already enlisted, the guy goes, “Oh, we already got em?”
“No, the Navy did, he left for bootcamp last fall.”
Also had my recruiter step between the Navy MEPS guy and I to tell him to fuck off and find me a job I wanted. He would not let the nuke thing go, and my recruiters already knew I had no interest and backed my other job choices. 😂
I scored high on all fields but one and the recruiter never left me alone for four years, even finding me on Facebook.
“I’m sorry, I had an accident lately. Lost a hand and half my lung, and lost parts of my gray matter. Anyways, what would be my starting rank? General?”
Yep. I got hounded for years and years.
Tell me it’s a draft without telling me it’s a draft
Time for someone in the know to start spreading some “How to fail the ASVAB miserably!” memes.
It isn’t hard…also, they will take you anyway, you would just be a bangbang.
chemical corps needs test subj-er-soldiers.
But also you just don’t need to. I didn’t realize that not everyone took the ASVAB. My public High School administered it to everyone (May have been an opt out option, don’t remember) and I did pretty well. As a result, I was contacted by recruiters two or three times, promptly said I wasn’t interested, and that was the end of it.
I have no idea what the test involves, but if that had been me, me and my friends would have tanked it and made the results useless.
I took it in high school just to have some extra testing under my belt for some reason that made sense at the time. It was probably the easiest test that I’d taken all 4 years. They’re not testing for who can be rocket surgeons, but for people who have practical smarts. There were a couple of questions where you were given a series of 10 connected gears and giving the rotation direction of the first had to predict the last. Yeah, not calculus.
You’d be surprised how many private schools receive federal funding.
But honestly this isn’t the worst thing. As long as it’s interacted with in an honest manner the ASVAB is an excellent career test. So an honest interaction with it would be counselors telling students their results and showing them career paths that line up with those results. To be clear, we’re talking about civilian career paths.
The problem is I don’t hear about it being done that way anymore. (My highschool did exactly the above) I only hear about it being used by recruiters, for recruiting.
When I took my asvab I was surprised when they told me my mechanical aptitude was really good…didn’t know a Phillips from a flat head but wound up as an aircraft mechanic which was fuckin dope!
Oh God, I was an idiot. My recruiter said I qualified for everything. I told him I wanted to be an Airborne Infantryman. He repeated, Everything, could write my own ticket. So I decided… To double down on an Airborne School and Infantry contract. If I could go back in time I’d give that man a beer, slap myself, and forge my own signature on a military intelligence analyst contract. I’d have loved that job, learning languages, embassy postings (travel), and being all up in everyone’s tea. But no 17 year old Maggoty had to be a dumbass.
Lmao, I have similar story but it actually worked out in the end for me. When I signed up for the Air Force I did really well on my ASVAB, but I told my recruiter that I wanted to leave as soon as possible because I just wanted to go already. Well she signed me up for open general, meaning the AF would pick my job for me. So I left for boot camp with no job and was assigned Cyber Security Analyst. Which was super lucky because I could have also been a cook or a cop or something
If it’s to see where you fit, they will put you where you fit.
Dude, you were kissed by Murphy.
I’d have loved that job, learning languages,
Former linguist here… I’d recommend not joining as a linguist on your first enlistment. Go in on something simple: admin, truck driver, something with a short tech school. Then re-enlist as a linguist.
For prior service students in a Cat IV language, Monterey is pretty much a ~2 year, paid vacation. You’ll have free time to attend college classes, take a part time job, or something else that will benefit you in the long run.
For initial entry students, it’s a 2-year, officially condoned and mandated hazing ritual.
Having the right paperworks and acting on said paperwork are two unrelated things in the military.
Especially thanks to the corrupt AF B DeVos
The wars of the future will be between big ass companies using drones, espionage, hacking, assassins, etc. it won’t involve us poor commoners anyway.
Well, we’ll still get blowed up.
Can we do something about making the Selective Service more equitable? Why is it that Men are the only ones that have to register for the draft? We have plenty of women serving in the armed forces, make everyone have to register.
Reagan. Talk to Reagan.
Why not just get rid of Selective Service entirely?
Although we currently have an all-volunteer military, I don’t know that I could say that conscription would never be necessary. Certainly exceedingly unlikely, but not impossible. I understand the potential need for it as a backup plan, it just seems antiquated that we’re still only considering men as potential soldiers.
