No, the argument against seat belt laws is similar to the argument against helmet laws, "If I want to fling myself through the windshield, I should be able to."
I'm posting right now on what is by and large a forum hostile to anti-capitalist thinking; this is the very opposite of me being in an echo chamber.
Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.
Edit: since we asked you to stop using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've been battling up a storm since then, I've banned this account. Because we're serving our capitalist masters, you say? The mask slips, you say? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571118) Nope. It's
just lame and off-topic.
There's no intellectual curiosity in ideological battle—they are two different games. In one the goal is to learn, in the other to smite enemies. Football and chess don't mix, either, and tackling your opponent's bishop is off topic.
Gosh if we can't even agree on what kind of echo chamber we're in, how will we ever manage to make convincing fallacious arguments?
I think the echo chamber AT spoke of was not HN. The point is that in the US there are a plethora of options for low cost high quality educations/degrees which absolutely can help you earn a very decent living. They may not be famous name-brand cliques which guarantee a plush job right after graduating, but it is a fundamental pillar of Americanism that opportunity is there for those willing to put in the time.
The echo chamber you're in is your understanding of 'decent jobs'. No, you don't need to go to university to have a decent job. There are tons of self-made people with no university education, working in the trades or by starting a small business.
This one is easy. People are buying things that they can't afford. Throwing it into a loan and then partying their way through school. Since that worked out so well, then they do that with their car, house, furniture, cell phones, and car rims.
You aren't entitled to 100,000 dollar education.
You aren't entitled to go down to Mexico every spring break.
you aren't entitled to eat pizza and hit the bar every weekend.
You aren't entitled to a college education.
Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.
This line of thinking doesn't make sense. The zero-sympathy-no-exceptions attitude comes from lacking context of the problem, so hopefully I can help.
> You aren't entitled...
While the person you describe probably exists, it's not all 18% of students struggling with payments. I'd just like to say that being aggressive helps nobody.
> Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
Are the people born away from the coasts out of luck then? There are dozens states in the Midwest with cheap tuition, but after graduation there aren't any jobs waiting.
The quality of education is usually poor when professors teach subjects for fields that they've never been a part of.
Students know these things, and feel it's worth taking on debt to get a better education and live somewhere with opportunities.
> Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
I'm assuming you work in tech. Would your employer hire someone in their 30's with no relevant work history? I've worked at two of the large tech companies and two smaller companies, and I know they wouldn't consider it.
Apprenticeships are disappearing - low skill work gets automated now. Medium skill jobs are being outsourced or given to contractors. What you're suggesting isn't realistic.
> I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.
An 18 year old assured by their parents this is the "right" move deserves sympathy when it all blows up in their face 150k down the road.
My Mother told me she would throw me out of the house if I took a job rather than going to graduate school. She also said all the loans I took out for undergrad that she claimed she'd pay she'd stop paying if I got a job rather than going to grad school.
The reality is some parents are so damn convinced that education is the magical key to a good life they'll go to some pretty intense lengths to get you to sign on the dotted line.
Our federal government is $20 trillion dollars in debt. We are trillions more on debt from every level from local to federal. Most of the states are on the verge of bankruptcy, if not bankrupt already (like Illinois). Countless millions who depend on pensions and other promised benefits from states and municipalities are about to be in for a rude surprise. Despite this crushing debt, we continue to spend trillions of dollars to bomb and invade countries around the world.
Blaming entitled kids for our debt-laden society and failed economy is not smart or useful. The truth is that there aren't enough jobs (let alone decent-paying jobs) for 1/4 of the tens of millions of kids who enter college every year. These kids weren't the ones who mismanaged society so that property taxes, mandated healthcare premiums, income taxes, and rents are so high.
>Correlating government debt (which is primarily owed back to it's citizens) to household debt is extremely disingenuous.
That's false for several reasons. First, government debt impacts citizens directly through higher taxes (income, property, sales, and others), fees, deprivation of services, ect. Second, government debt is not primarily owed back to it's citizens. The biggest holder of government debt is the Federal Reserve, which is a collection of private banks. The vast majority of debt not held by the federal reserve is held by banks, financiers, and the ultra-wealthy. Third, working people and those on fixed incomes are crushed by ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), which has been implemented by the FED in an effort to prevent the mountains of debt load on every governmental level from exploding. What it has done instead is prevented people from saving (since artificially low interest rates that don't match the rise in cost of living mean treasuries and savings accounts lose value) and further inflate the riches of the ultra-wealthy who borrow at 0% and buy stocks.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that millions of people who have worked their whole lives for pensions are about to get the shaft and become destitute when states and municipalities are overcome by their crushing debt and default on their payments.
Tho, pointing out how they both are running rampant, ain't that disingenuous, it's merely stating the obvious.
Pretty much the whole world economy is built on debt and creating more of it, that's because there is no such thing as "money" without debt, especially not with the US$ as the de-facto world currency.
In that regard, it's disingenuous to claim the whole problem only boils down to a couple of kids living above their standards, it's way more systemic than that.
You aren't entitled to having a loan repaid if the interest rate is too high.
...or if you loan too much money to someone who won't be able to afford it.
...or if you expect someone in a lower income bracket to pay more than X% of their income.
Common-sense laws that loosened bankruptcy and regulations on repayment amounts would fix student loans, credit cards, bad mortgages, and payday lending. Why do we always blame the person taking out the loan? The lender should have the expertise to know if a person is capable of repayment and should bear the burden of making predatory loans.
1/ Student loans are not dischargeable in bankrupty.
2/ Today, the government IS the lender.
The government has created a system of incentives (even before the student loan industry was nationalized) that encourages lending large amounts of money to anybody by eliminating the risk on the part of student loan lenders.
People can basically never get out of the debt, so you can lend arbitrary sums of money to Feminist Dance Theory majors and other sorts of poor-ROI nonsense.
"Predatory loans" is a misnomer. Predatory government is far more accurate.
What fraction of the 18.8% delinquent loans are held by people like those your describe? If you can't answer that you're only saying these things to disparage others to make yourself feel superior. You might as well have been complaining about avocado toast.
>I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.
Then you're an asshole. Young people with zero real world life experience make poor choices often. Sometimes critically poor choices. It's a part of growing up to fail and the fact that you can't squeeze together an ounce of sympathy for these folks suggest you have a lot of growing up to do yourself.
Just like we know diamonds have no real value, and you shouldn't go into debt to buy an engagement ring or have a big wedding.
But try offering your fiance a $5,000 bond instead of a fancy ring. It doesn't go well.
Social pressure is a real thing, and colleges are taking advantage of all of us by setting up expectations for normal that we just can't afford.
This is why I never really got behind Bernie's free college plan. We don't need the government to help make college free. We need to change why these costs are getting so out of control in the first place.
How are people spending over 50k in the first two years of undergrad? Basically wherever you go the core requirements that first year or two are the same before you pick your major. We need to be leveraging the best teachers and online classes to bring these costs down, especially for your basic "Philosophy 101" class that you are just taking to test the waters.
"These people it's no mystery where they come from.
You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire.
You build egos the size of cathedrals.
Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.
Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor becomes his own god.
Where can you go from there?
As we're scrambling from one deal to the next who's got his eye on the planet?
As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees' honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity
and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare.
It's buy futures, sell futures when there is no future.
We got a runaway train, boy." 'The Devils Advocate'
You are entitled to go on Github, contribute to an open source project widely in use, and start gaining experience for free. Nobody is going to say "oh this guy doesn't have a degree so we won't accept their contribution," although if it sucks you might get some good critique, and can add to the resume that way without a degree and looks impressive to prospective employers.
But you are. We have a right to an education. My parents paid literally $0 for their education, because university was free, in a time with much lower productivity and less wealth. The state could afford it then, so it can certainly afford it now.
This is a space where I think the id theft protection industry misses. A large chunk of the space revolves around the 3 bureaus, but there's a lot more to it than that.
A credit freeze is only effective if the entity using your information actually checks your credit/talks to the bureaus.
Tax fraud, healthcare fraud, shady car dealerships that don't care about your credit, buying a house where the seller 'holds the papers', etc, are all attack vectors that can be used with this sort of information.
