"Make government programs work": An issue politicians seem incapable of prioritizing over giving the government dominion over more areas of American life.
150 karma · joined August 31, 2012
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.
"death due to lack of health insurance"
4 results.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I think it is important to ground this broader discussion in actual specifics. I keep hearing all these insane stories of people dying on the streets, which simply doesn't reflect anybody's lived experience.
Of course that's not to say there aren't significant real problems, but the discussion is so hyperbolic and far from reality that it's almost not worth having. This problem underlies both the "universal health care" and the free market absolutists. They're both selling different versions of utopia, which don't exist.
The claim of the "alt-right" is that Western civilization is intimately tied to the white race. Here's a video of Jared Taylor explaining the "alt right": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnDm7OxuU4
It's also worth noting that alt-right wasn't even well-defined until 2016. As it became clearer, plenty of people (including Cernovich) publically denounced and distanced themselves.
None of this is a broader defense of Cernovich, who I maintain is creepy and lacking in substance, but the careless lumping in of mainstream conservatives, nationalists, internet trolls, Pepe the Frog, etc into the "alt-right" bucket is not helpful.
I don't care what you think about the shitposters on r/The_Donald or Mike Cernovich, but they aren't anything close to advocates for the white identity politics advocated by the "alt-right".
To restate your argument: there are sometimes unpredictable health care events that arise for which one cannot negotiate, bargain, and price compare in advance. Therefore, price transparency doesn't work.
The problem is you wouldn't make this argument about any other sort of good (for example, an emergency or home car repair) because you know exactly how markets function in those cases.
The answer is: when there's price transparency, and consumers are incentivized to shop around and demand lower prices, prices come down. This benefits not only yourself, but also consumers who don't want to (or are unable to) perform this role themselves.
This is why you pay cheap prices at the grocery store even if you don't haggle, clip coupons, and so on. This is why "emergency" home and car repair (while it may cost more) does not cost an order of magnitude more than "non-emergency" home or car repair.
Are more recent periods inherently going to have more hurricanes because we now have the capability to detect more hurricanes? How has measurement changed over the past 175 years?
I have dozens of friends and family who are in the top 5% of the US population in terms of math skills who have all tried to play "smart" games with debt and come out as big losers as they continued to play. I'm talking software engineers, dentists, doctors, pharmacists, tenured math professors, and so on.
The problem is not math skills. The problem is not managing deadlines. The problem is that these people are human and are not immune to the pernicious effects of debt. Even you. Even me.
Here are some things you haven't considered or acknowledged:
* How debt influences the choices we make. Would you have bought such an expensive car if you had to pay cash? Statistically, the answer is no. If forced to use cash, might you have opted to buy a less expensive used car? Are you sure you didn't buy thousands of dollars more car in order to "save" a few hundred bucks?
* How managing debt takes over space in our minds. What could you be if you could free up mental capacity for other things?
* How debt warps our perspective and plays to our human weaknesses and short-term desires. Are you sure you're coming out ahead? How do you know?
You can't run an A/B test on yourself, but you can open your eyes and take a look around. It's not pretty out there.
(Except the part about how debt is "how you get rich")
And yet, I'd wager than 90% of people who attempt to replicate your success story would wind up worse off for having tried it.
The problem is that it comes with a huge risk of screwing with your head. And it's very difficult to detect and correct when this is happening.
I've had my success stories playing games with debt too. Gaming low rates, churning credit cards, and so on. I see people around me do the same things all the time.
The only trouble is, the next day these same people are:
* Allowing debt to influence their purchasing decisions (e.g. buying a larger car, a larger house, and so on)
* Trying more sophisticated "experiments", only to get burned
In other words, they scored a minor victory in an inconsequential battle only to lose big later on.
reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ (check out all the links in the sidebar). The advice on this sub is generally much higher quality than r/personalfinance (although less newbie friendly)
See also: Mr. Money Mustache / Dave Ramsey (both seriously tackle the behavior problems that hold us back from success and wealth)
Ignoring the obvious issues with compound interest in reverse, the far more consequential problem is that it fucks with your head in ways that normally require CIA-style brainwashing and mind control.
Debt justifies and rewards your worst impulses, encourages poor, short-term decision making, and alters your frame of reference to a degree that even the smartest, most noble people among us think they can outsmart debt only to wind up losing big.
* Frugality: deeply understanding the things that bring you satisfaction and skipping the rest
* Aggressively saving and investing money
* Building a mastery in personal finance
But becoming a millionaire isn't a math problem. Most people on here are capable of doing so many times over without any great career home run.
However, achieving such a milestone will require you to (on an ongoing basis) look deeply inwards, answer fundamental questions about yourself, and change your life.
At the risk of getting too preachy, most people haven't even figured out what they want and so they default to mainstream consumerism. Such people have little chance of becoming a millionaire (which requires sustained, long-term behavior changes) until they first sort themselves out.
"We can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields."
That's nice. But that's not what Damore argued.
Rather, Damore argued that biology has a significant role in the interests of men and women, not their capabilities. There is a mountain of compelling evidence to support this claim.
See slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/.
You seem to really want him to repent for something. What is it?
Here some quotes from the essay that underscore this distinction:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
> I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
"I'm sorry for telling the truth."?
Google's CEO said: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”
He said no such thing. This is a cruel smear. Google, including its CEO and VP of Diversity & Newspeak, acted like thugs.
And no, this has nothing to do with at-will employment. It has to do with hypocrisy. Google claimed they be open and tolerant, and then they proceeded to directly contradict that ethos by firing Demore and viciously lying about him on the way out the door.
People are arguing that Google is acting like a thug.
> Google management didn't "call him names".
Google's management (including its CEO) did, however, repeatedly lie and misrepresent the essay as justification for their actions.
This was cruel and should not be forgotten.
Arguments #2 and #3 were not made. Argument #1 is utterly uncontroversial.
Please read the essay.