Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

What the article doesnt mention is college debt. I know tons of people who have college debt for degrees that pay absolutely nothing. Its debt they will never escape, and im guessing mom and dad feel guilty about it to some extent.

I came from a poor family, so college wasnt much of an option. My mom and dad had lived their whole lives under check cashing shysters and credit card debt until dad hurt his back and went on disability/heroin. Mom did the best she could at the local truckstop diner where i spent most of my time after school. College was never an option and looking back im glad it wasnt.

I grew up to become a damn good diesel engine tech. not the best, but i walk out of the shop every day feeling like I actually did something meaningful. Some days im even making cut-rate lawyer money. but I see college kids at my local bar, partly because thats an aesthetic for college kids my age, but also because its a necessity. They buy a round of el-cheapo beers and sit in the corner on their phones for an hour. They rarely tip or if they do its some weird math that comes out to screw over the barman, but its hardly their fault.

I bought a Sam Adams for one of these guys who was fired from mcdonalds for showing up to work late just once. He had a masters degree in business management. He came home to see his prius getting repossessed, and decided to just decided to keep on walking past his apartment and down to the local watering hole. His plan was to ride out an eviction and move back in with his folks.

They definitely mention it!

"Those who do not have parental assistance in their 30s, however, continue to be at a disadvantage. “They are grappling with paying off student-loan debt, their savings might not be as strong because of that, and many are taking care of other family members,” said Iimay Ho, 32, the executive director at Resource Generation, an organization that works with people ages 18 to 35 with wealth or class privilege to engage on issues of inequality."

...

"For those without parental cash at the ready, there’s often some kind of debt hangover that holds them back in significant ways. Roger Quesada, 34, calls his $65,000 of student-loan debt to Sallie Mae, which incurs $400 a month in interest payments alone, “a jail sentence.” A lapse in his payments ruined his credit, he said, and has hampered his financial and career aspirations."

And I feel for it, too. Compounding debt instead of compounding interest. Reminds me of a very relevant Onion headline:

"Lazy Poor Person Has Never Earned Passive Income From Stock Dividends A Day In His Life"

https://local.theonion.com/lazy-poor-person-has-never-earned...

> savings might not be as strong because of that,

Is incredibly tone deaf way to describe people living paycheck to paycheck.

Paying off loans doesn't also mean you are also living paycheck-to-paycheck. Even if so, this article is well researched and has sparked good discussion - accusing the author of being tone deaf, with no other contribution or criticism is not very nice.

That seems like a non sequiter. Plenty of people are still paying off student loan debt but hardly living paycheck to paycheck, myself included.

The article, by contrast, has it exactly right. I, for example, have a savings "maximum" that I've identified (for savings other than the ones with significant tax advantages, like IRA contributions), such that whenever I exceed it, that surplus goes towards more quickly paying off student loan debt. So, indeed, while I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, my savings also are not as strong as they would otherwise be.

This is pretty spot-on for me at the moment. Low-mid 30's and I sort of have a "choice" to borrow from my parents to get me by (which would actually be saddling them with more debt - however they are FAR better equipped to deal with it). I'm taking a good hard look at declaring bankruptcy this week as an attempt to break out. It would be less heartbreaking than continuing the feelings of fealty.

I wonder if going bankrupt now (prior to a recession) is a good strategy because it means you will emerge from it sooner than the bulge of others who become bankrupt after the recession. Serious point...

What makes you so sure a recession is coming?

Recessions always come. Timing is of course impossible to predict.

Obviously.

Your comment seemed to imply a recession incoming sooner than later and was wondering if you had a source.

That is a viable option for many types of debt, but some forms of student debt cannot be discharged under bankrtupcty[1]. There is no easy answer here, because the immediate first-order reaction to questions about blanket student loan forgiveness is the inevitable moral hazard angle.

[1] https://qz.com/1367412/1-5-trillion-of-us-student-loan-debt-...

> Compounding debt instead of compounding interest.

I’ve not seen this distinction made before. Can you elaborate?

I think they just meant debts you owe compounding versus debts owed to you compounding (as in savings accounts or treasuries).

Oh, right, I see. Thanks :)

I'm terrible at checking my threads, but yeah! That's what I meant :)

I wish more conversations around student loan debt discussed the outcome difference by major. The income gulf between an engineer and a lit major is massive. The conversation focuses on how bad the economy was when we graduated, but I suspect outcomes would be wildly different if people majored in STEM or business and instead minored in feminist dance theory or French poetry or whatever their passion may have been.

And here is the catch, some of these low-paying studies are also important for society. Culture has a place and a PhD in Contemporary Classical music has its worth in society.

Education is one of the best returns of investment of taxes a society can make to itself, I don't understand how people want to make this into a free market, it doesn't seem to work.

This lateness thing doesn't get enough play. At a salaried level, people are just late all the time, late to work, late to meetings, working from home, leaving early, whatever. If you try any of that on an hourly gig, you get fired immediately (or worse, you're in some byzantine PIP system). Being late doesn't mean you're lazy, it means you forgot your phone or forgot to water your plants. It matters in almost no jobs. We need to come off it a little.

Part of that is from an oversupply of no (or very low) skilled labor. When people are desperate for "jobs" you can afford to be extremely strict and remorseless as an employer. I think this why past generations promoted things like unions and various workers' rights so strongly.

I think the bigger part is the type of jobs. In a career job, you work on your projects at whatever rate you work, so if you come in a little late it only really bites your free time.

If you came in late at a restaurant or hospital, they'd be short staffed and screwed.

At salaried level people aren't doing things that have hard time constraints. when you are delivering pizzas or working as a cashier your punctuality matters a hell of a lot more, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out, which is why if you fuck up once you're fired, it was literally the one thing they told you not to fuck up.

Of course there are extenuating circumstances, and managers should be more relaxed with people who make an effort (e.g. texting ahead that they are running x minutes late). But the vast majority of cases are not like this. Its people making stupid choices and suffering the consequences, I don't have much sympathy for that.

not sure what you're getting downvoted for. when you work in something like retail or food service it matters a lot if you're late. customers are either taking their money elsewhere or your already tired coworkers from the first shift are staying late to cover for you.

Fair, but this really only matters if you're opening, or there's only one person who can do what you do. Like if there are 3 delivery drivers and one's late, pizzas are still getting delivered. I appreciate short staffing and whatever, but someone getting a pizza 15 minutes late isn't an excuse to fire someone, a decision that can have drastic impacts on their health, savings, family, etc. Chronic lateness sure, as long as it's a real job requirement (and by real I mean things go real sideways, lines get long, trucks pile up, whatever, not someone has to wait 15 minutes), but definitely not zero tolerance.

The lengths you have to go to to avoid being late essentially boil down to "always leave 30 minutes before you have to". That's a huge, completely unpaid time sink. If I got "paid" an extra 30 minutes a day, I'd make $10k more a year. And sure hourly workers don't (usually) make as much as I do so their increase would be something like $3k, but that increase probably matters a lot more to them than it would to me.

If I am 15 mins "late" to work nothing happens. I will not even get less work done that day. People might not even notice.

I worked at Target in the fast food restaurant some years ago. If I was late to that, there was simply no one to take orders. It directly impacts the income of the business.

Late once -> fired definitely needs to be fixed, though.

That's a problem of Target's to deal with.

They're saving money by treating humans as perfectly interchangeable cogs.

This is why you have backup staff and don't drive people to the point of maximal efficiency. Because it's inhuman.

But there’s a feedback loop somewhere. Hiring backup staff means there is less to go around which quite possibly means a reduction or stagnation in wages depending on the particulars of the economic system. I wish more of the criticism directed at corporations at least acknowledged this reality—instead it comes off as “well just print more money, duh!”

I'd be more sympathetic if these types of economy of scale savings led to higher quality of life for consumers or workers, but it only really leads to higher quality of life for shareholders. I wish more defense of corporations at least acknowledged this reality--it's not the case (in fact it's very rarely the case) that whatever is good for the company is good for everyone.

This is quite a claim. I can’t imagine an economic system in which investors captured 100% of value. The savings are definitely passed onto the consumers, otherwise the consumers wouldn’t have an incentive to choose this company over their competition. Economies of scale are probably the principal reason quality of life improved so dramatically across the board following the industrial revolution. This seems to prove that economies of scale benefit consumers and employees.

I'm not exactly claiming 100%, but it's close. Until the industrial revolution GDP was very close to flat. It has to be this way to explain why most people lived on subsistence farming for thousands of years: if GDP growth was even 1% we'd have space colonies.

The industrial revolution brought GDP growth, but to a very small number of people. The rest (practically everybody) were plunged into abject misery. This is where anarchism, marxism, communism, socialism, fascism, and so on came from. I mean, one of Henry Ford's famous innovations was paying his workers enough to afford the things they were building. It was a capitalist nightmare.

WWI and the Great Depression unbelievably made things worse, and they led to serious political upheaval throughout the western world. It was only when WWII wiped out the holdings of many of the wealthy that quality of life started to improve at all, and in fact that lead to one of the longest periods of growth and equality in human history. But it really had nothing to do with economies of scale. It had to do with the fact that incomes finally rivaled capital gains from wealth.

The essential difference between that period of expansion and the initial industrial revolution weren't economies of scale. It was that we had political systems that distributed the profits to more than just the business owners. If you don't have those kinds of systems (free markets, progressive taxation, financial regulation, open credit), then it doesn't really matter how efficient your production is, because the benefits are only going to .001% of people. If those people aren't sharing (not exactly something rich people are known for), then quality of life for everyone else won't go up at all. And hey look, that's what happened during the industrial revolution.

Source: basically just read Piketty.

A poor man will steal from a rich man because he has no food.

The individual player may not have a choice - that's why we attempt to influence the system such that these situations don't arise.

I’m not taking issue with influencing the system or any particular economic policy; I’m taking issue with arguments that don’t make basic economic sense. It’s one thing to identify an economic inefficiency in Walmart’s model that could be remedied by paying employees more; it’s quite a different thing to argue that Walmart should raise their wages without explaining where that money will come from.

> it’s quite a different thing to argue that Walmart should raise their wages without explaining where that money will come from

In FY2018, Walmart "generated $28.3 billion in operating cash flow and returned $14.4 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases" [1]. The best study I can find [2] says a hike from $10/hr. to $15/hr. would cost around $5 billion a year.

TL;DR: Walmart could pay workers $30/hr. The money comes from there.

[1]: https://news.walmart.com/2018/02/20/walmart-us-q4-comps1-gre...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-wages-idUSKCN0YW2...

An aside question—

As a high level guess it sounds like you probably didn't grow up in or too near a major city (if truck stops are in play).

Are you still working where you're from? How did you come to find HN?

I know there's a large number of mechanics on here, and it makes complete sense. But I'm curious how all these roads meet, sometimes.

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