If cost is the deterrent, you're going to discriminated poorer people.

If competency is the deterrent (e.g.: here is Switzerland, you get kicked out of med school if you fail 2x an exam in the first 2 years, and get kicked from uni altogether if you keep failing exams after switching to different factulty) you're going to keep the most competent people.

(Though to be honest, people still need to eat, so one should also be able to eventually find a job. But that's an entirely different can of worm which depends much more on how the whole rest of the society is organized (employability of people without Uni degree, vocation schools, and decent wages in most jobs...) and University plays only a minor role here).

Hi!

European here (Switzerland).

The enrollment is free.
You don't automatically get a degree for free just because you enrolled.
Getting a degree actually requires passing an exam.
Exams for highly desirable professions tend to be difficult and highly competitive.

In my case (medicine) obtaining a degree is quite a lot of hard work even if very cheap (tuition isn't completely free here in Switzerland, but ridiculously low compared to US or UK, so roughly similar to free), there are a lot of people failing and dropping out (in Medicine during the first 2 years students are allowed to fail examens 2x maximum before getting kicked out and needing to switch to something else).

Basically there is a selection like everywhere else.
But unlike the US, the students' selection in countries that have cheap or free education isn't based around how much is in the bank accounts of the parent, but instead around how much competency the student themselves show.

Law is an example of a degree that is very difficult to obtain regarding the amount of work during university. There's no over-production of lawyers.

Also, Switzerland has very well-developed vocational schools that are very good at landing you a job in the market at the end.
The largest chunk of the population joins the workforce by going through these. Only a minority go to the Uni instead.
There's no stigma of being un-employable because one didn't get some university-level degree.
If you just wabt to work a desk job in some insurance company or whatever, the vocational school is pefectly adapted.

Lastly, most job are decently paid, including cashiers in shops, etc. There's no shortage of such workers, because it's not some underpaid job that only desperate poor people take.

i.e.: Jobs that let one make a decent living aren't gated by mandatory university.

For you it is a marvel of Direct Democracy.
For us it's just a random Sunday. :-D

(well, actually I don't vote in-person usually, so it's more a "making a detour to the mail-box in front of the City Hall" Friday in my case)

Probably in 5th century BC's Athens: yes, direct voting would have had trouble scaling beyond city-states.

But in the 21st century we have access to better tech than raising hand in town square (Landsgemeinde) and we can scale it to a whole country that speaks 4 dfifferent language officially (Switzerland is not culturally homogenous).

Nowadays, you could probably manage to expand it across whole Europe, but the EU went for representative democracy instead of direct democracy.
(Which is part of the reason why the Swiss population rejected

Again, total population size isn't the major problem nowadays.
It's the voting population having a habit of getting informed of what the current subjects are and being used in getting involved with the decision making process.

The "good" reasons invoked by other countries are pretty dumb actualy.
And mostly boil down to the oligarchy in power not wanting those pesky "general population" citizen meddling with their plan to get even more corporate tax cuts.

OR, you know, you could have a political system where the large chunks of the population can directly address their own needs without need the intermediate of some oligarch sponsored by corporation in the government.
We could call this revolutionary idea "Direct democracy" /s.

There's a country in middle of Europe where we seem to be a bit more immune to far right extremism gaining too much influence. Not only now but also last century, too.
The long tradition of direct democracy might have something to do with it.

But this is probably never going to happen in your USA. Your whole system has evolved to a two-party system with kind of "Winner takes all" with very high stakes, campaigns have insanely high costs, thus both candidate need to be heavily sponsored by corporations, which in turn have zero interests in population-focused politics.

Now the DEA can lie about its actions again .

FTFY

This is not "most police forces", it's the DEA, the biggest bunch of corrupt douchebags on the planet.

Considering it's the DEA, more likely they were just tired of having to pick up their bribes after hours. Much more convenient when they're on the clock.

Good.

Some models are still sold with a 'Bulk Erase' button (many of the original ones were,otherwise cops wouldn't agree to wear them).

Not quite, the EO simply says they're no longer **required**, not to discontinue their usage. Considering that the DEA is probably second only to Customs/Border Patrol for grotesque levels of corruption I think it's obvious what the purpose of turning off the body cams is.

Not quite, the article mentions 58 wallets making more than $10M, 764,000 wallets losing money, but a total of around 2,000,000 wallets buying coins at some point. So there's still a substantial number of "winners" (I use the term lightly)

Development is about to come to a screeching halt as China has started to block sales of materials and components to US weapons companies. Even dual-use materials are getting blocked.

The most expensive military in the history of our planet is now so far behind the curve of military tech that it's doubtful it can catch up, especially since it now relies on foreign suppliers for almost everything. The true climax of the 'Reagan Revolution'.

Except that it's almost certain that the US spy agencies will continue to use their products. Besides, it's an Israeli shell company, management has already mostly abandoned the empty shell and migrated their active customers to some other shell companies leaving the debt behind. Good luck to Meta trying to extract payment from a company with no remaining assets.

- Samsung: you're probably referring to the fact that 3rd party stores on Android-based devices are a mere sideload away?
- Xbox: You're alluding to the developer program, where it's easy to just switch a console into dev mode and upload the stuff you wanted?

- Sony Playstation: That I don't see what you're alluding to. Did Sony re-introduce OtherOS onto the PS5 or something?