It’s not that simple. I choose to rent even though I have the savings to buy a house because I prefer putting my money in more liquid assets like stocks. People can choose to lease certain categories of assets and “own” others (e.g. public stock).
There are tons of hidden costs with ownership like insurance, property taxes, HOA, repairs/maintenance I don’t have to deal with. Plus the opportunity cost of locking $200k+ in an illiquid asset with high transaction fees to eventually liquidate years later isn’t appealing unless you’re buying a home firstly as a permanent home for raising a family and not as an investment.
There’s no glory in being excited to launch a basic permissions/access panel for end users of an auth product that should’ve shipped on Day 1. Shameful.
Similar thing just happened to freecodecamp. It’s clear Medium is facing pressure from investors to aggressively monetize and it’s rubbing some of their partners the wrong way.
I don’t know which city is worse, SF or LA, but at least in recent weeks/months SF OK’d construction of a new shelter along the Embarcadero despite money and outcries from nearby condo owners.
I still don’t know what the solution is to address the mental health aspect of homelessness. It’s disturbing seeing disheveled people scream at the top of their lungs in the middle of FiDi after work and no one batting an eye.
Isn’t anything you do on a company issued machine or network monitored as is? I think the question is not whether or not your activity is monitored but whether or not you work for an employer who cares that you occasionally browse Facebook, in which case the problem is your employer and not the fact that you’re activity is monitored.
I sometimes wonder what it would take for “yellow vest” type protests to happen in the US.
It seems like there’s a combination of shame in talking about money, in being made to feel personally responsible for being in precarious financial situations (e.g. too much avocado toast!), and relatively easy access to consumer credit to numb things over. Or it’s just the “boiling frog” phenomenon where things get slightly worse every year due to everything getting a little more expensive but never sharply enough that it’d create a mass revolt.
> what it would take for “yellow vest” type protests to happen in the US
The solution is simpler. If 18 to 34 year olds simply voted at the frequencies 45 to 64 year olds did [1], our views would form a block worth pandering to. Running as a candidate reducing pensions and alleviating student debt doesn't work because the former will vote you out of office in greater numbers than the latter will vote you in.
I would make student debt dischargeable through bankruptcy and I would also favor the federal government no longer providing, subsidizing, or guaranteeing student loans.
The "cost" of higher education is a sham; with no incentive to ever reduce costs, the cost will always rise to match incoming revenues. Meanwhile, student loans are a predatory mechanism where teenagers are encouraged to take on tens of kilodollars of undischargeable, unsecured debt. This combination has allowed the cost of higher education to grow out of control, backed by the cheap, subsidized credit of millions of Americans. Very reminiscent of the housing bubble, in fact.
As a parent paying college tuition right now I want to agree, but as a professor I see the other side of it. I teach at the graduate level and despite the high tuition we lose money on every student that we accept. It costs a lot to have faculty spending two hours with each student alone in office hours, plus six hours of class time per week, and countless hours of support virtually 18/7 via email.
My time as faculty is just the tip of the iceberg: the cost of the buildings and grounds, IT costs, academic and administrative support, and the costs to support research, let alone student services and things like admissions, career services, etc.
My father was an engineer that spent his retirement volunteering to teach computer skills to anyone who was interested. I will be retiring in a few years and I plan to follow in his footsteps, however humble my contributions may be. I would love to contribute to a change that would make high quality education available to many more people at a much lower costs, but as a long time participant in MOOCs, I am just not sure they are the way.
American universities spend much more on buildings and resources. The kind of gym and pool we bad in our tiny liberal arts college was way better than any college resources of europe. Even public universities here spend tons on non academic costs. Way more than other countries. Sowell covers this in 'inside American education'.
Alleviating debt and making it easier to pay more expensive loans incentivizes colleges to compete to attract students who can now affors higher price points
It is becoming an arms race. Colleges in the USA build these things to attract potential students. If one colleges has them and the nearby comparable college doesn't then the one without looks worse in comparison.
Your report restricted itself to public universities, which of course are more highly affected by governmental funding decisions. Also your journal has an agenda, so it makes sense it wants to secure more federal funding.
Compare that to the Calc1 course from MIT on EdX as well. The algebra course engages you, helps you think through problems, and offers a customized learning path with a virtual tutor. The MIT course is just lecture and reading materials, it's not interactive, and it doesn't help you to discover the topics on your own in the same way that School Yourself does.
I desperately want to see a focused study program from an entity like EdX that takes a person from algebra to discrete mathematics using the model of School Yourself. I also want to see a similar course path for physics and chemistry.
Being a liberal arts major I wouldn't be where I am in technology today if it wasn't for friends, IRC, and places like EdX. I was willing to literally sift through hundreds of hours of content to get here though. Not everyone has that kind of time or interest, we need to make it easier for everyone to learn.
If we can just have a single platform that really focuses on bringing value to the individual and giving them a strong base to work from piece by piece, then we would have so many more mathematicians, physicists, engineers, programmers, etc.., all without crushing student debt. Imagine the innovation that we could realize!
Why do you think college is 10x more expensive now? Seems like maybe some of those expenses are not materially impacting education quality, unless you think that the generation that got us to the moon was working with absolutely substandard educations.
I have a friend who is an advisor at a Big 10 school. While going through the old papers in her office she found the budget of the school from the late 90s. The school's expenses have doubled in that time. Part of it is certainly the amenities arm race. However, the amount of money they get from the state has only gone up by 50%.
> While going through the old papers in her office she found the budget of the school from the late 90s. The school's expenses have doubled in that time. Part of it is certainly the amenities arm race. However, the amount of money they get from the state has only gone up by 50%.
The implication here is usually that the amount of money they get from the state is insufficient to keep up with costs, therefore universities are forced to raise tuition. I don't think this is true. I suspect universities would raise tuition anyway, and if they got more money from the state, they would just increase their costs even more.
Increase in tuition is almost entirely due to pull back in state funding coupled with increased administrative/executive overhead. Vast majority of increase don't go to faculty. Keep in mind tuition has increased by 3.1% each year on inflation adjusted basis [1]. I don't think faculty paychecks have increased by that rate anywhere close.
At least for subjects like math or programming, I think the right way might be self-study (going through a textbook and solving all exercises) plus an hour of one-on-one time with a teacher every couple days to check progress and resolve questions.
When you say you 'see the other side of it' that suggests that you think the status quo is inevitable. But wasn't tuition much cheaper when you were an undergraduate?
I'm sure they make a killing on undergrads though. I can't imagine losing money when you're paying adjuncts a few grand to teach a class of 60 students.
We do not have many adjuncts so I don’t think we actually lose less money on undergraduates. If it were not for the generosity of alumni and an endowment built over two centuries then I am not sure how we would stay afloat.
> I would make student debt dischargeable through bankruptcy and I would also favor the federal government no longer providing, subsidizing, or guaranteeing student loans.
I completed a Bachelor and Master degrees at a top 50 world-ranked university with an (Australian) government sponsored loan of, by graduation, around $30k USD, that I never would've had a hope of funding privately at that point in my life (or honestly any point after if I had never gotten the degree and hence a high-paying job).
My loan is not dischargeable through bankruptcy, and is repaid as a percentage of taxable income (~10% at the top tier), and not repaid at all if you earn below a threshold a few multiples above the poverty line. The "interest" is actually just inflation as the cash rate from the reserve bank is applied to the outstanding balance at year end. My interest last year was $800 AUD on a $40k AUD balance.
I disagree that the problem is specifically easy access to capital. There is a value in attending university; it creates an educated population which benefits everyone. I believe the core of the problem in the US is the lack of appetite for regulation and government intervention leading to a situation where the government guarantees private capital to fund things that they don't control the cost of. This creates a reason for the lender to discount the risk of the debt (because the government guarantees it by making it undischargeable) leading to capability for borrowers to get bigger loans. Universities quickly cottoned on and billed more for less, and the cycle continues until it (eventually) collapses.
The cost of degrees in Australia are easily regulated as the majority of universities are government institutions. There is one private university but the government loan limits are often not enough to finish a 4 year degree there so in reality only rich kids whose parents wish to buy them business connections attend.
I think it's the government guaranteeing loans to expensive institutions are the problem, not that people are getting degrees. Why remove all government loan assistance? Just stop giving it to people who want to go to private universities.
The argument for student debt not being dischargable is to stop lots of people declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.
You can repossess a house or a car, but you can't repossess a degree.
If there was an option of cancelling a degree (either because of bankruptcy or user disatisfaction) this could perhaps work for vocational degrees or where the degree is 100% signalling.
If some kind of learning took place - how do you give that up?
An idea is to make universities add some skin in the game and personally fund a portion of student loans for their students along with bankruptcy provisions for those loans.
You can think of the whole cosmopolitan urban vs salt-of-the-earth rural aspect of American politics as one example. Or southern identity/culture. “As a veteran who served”/“As a parent”, or the cross-denomination “moral majority”— it’s all based around the idea that your lived experience as something shapes your political perspective and is intrinsically valuable to the political conversation.
And even Occupy: was occupy simply making a statement about economic politics or was it the identity of “the 1%” or “Bankers” vs the rest of Americans? These categories were somewhat arbitrary and basically represented which group you identified with.
That's what I mean by defining the phrase so broadly it becomes useless. You can say, "I am, and I have an identity, therefore my politics is identity politics." However, identity politics is specifically when the tribal motivations exceed and dominate all other motivations. It's similar to how islands are not called bodies of water even though soil contains water.
> However, identity politics is specifically when the tribal motivations exceed and dominate all other motivations.
Then the term "identity politics" shouldn't be applied. But even if we accept that extremely narrow view: there are numerous political segments that are notorious for doing what you describe across the political spectrum. Most notable the rural Scotch-Irish, often criticized for routinely voting against their self-interest and instead choosing to vote for pols who simply provide them cultural validation and do nothing to address their material concerns.
Parent should have been more specific: all politics is identity politics in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. The USA of the Vietnam war no longer exists, and isn't comparable to the USA of today.
In a nation state, politics tend to be divided more on ideological and regional lines, because everyone shares an identity.
This is very weird comment. Are you saying that the USA was not a multi-ethnic/multi-religious state in the 1960s?
In a nation state, politics tend to be divided more on ideological and regional lines, because everyone shares an identity.
There has never been a "nation" where everybody shares an identity in the sense discussed above.
The comment makes sense, but the US isn't best example. Although last century the US was somewhat dominated by one identity (which is now waning and leaving room for others to grow) it has always been multi-ethnic and multi-religious.
A better example would be European nations like Hungary, which have reinforced their national identities in the face of the recent migrant crisis.
We've asked you repeatedly to stop doing ideological flamewar on HN. A crazy number of times actually. Would you please really stop now so we don't have to ban you?
If you define "British origin" to include Irish Protestants, which is reasonable.. But the country was barely 50 years old by the time that cultural hegemony started eroding as German, Dutch, Irish-Catholics, etc poured into the country.
There's even an infamous 1899 political cartoon that asks "Why should I let these freaks cast whole votes when they're only half American?"[1]
The fact is, the US has spent a majority of its existence feeling like there's an immigration and/or integration crisis, starting in the mid-1800s with Irish-Catholics and stretching to the modern day with Latin-American immigrants.
Really? One thing that is starkly contrasted today vs. even 10 years ago.
People used to be able to listen, understand, empathise and compromise with those that they don't agree with. Showing a due amount of respect for people. This has been sorely lost with the tail end of the Millennial generation, and it shouldn't be surprising that nothing of value is being accomplished at all imho.
I may not agree with all politicians, but there are some I feel that I genuinely respect. Those who lean on identitarian tribalism are not in the list.
* Force ever expanding identitarianism view
* Force corporations to align with their views
* Make anti-semetic statements while supporting other religions
* Seek to ignore the foundations of government and the press
* Work to displace government
* Are willing to use physical violence to accomplish their goals
?
This is probably as true today as at any time in the past. What has changed, for the worse, is the definition of "other" identities (those that are not our own).
What did "rural america" mean to "city dwellers" in the 1970s? What does it mean now? I'd guess the definitions most of us carry in our minds have narrowed.
I heard (and take this with a bucket of salt) that the aim of the ruling class is to de-economize politics, and de-politicize the economy. I.e. don't let pesky democracy get in the way of capital.
As long as their is cheap food, cheap gas and television there will be no mass revolt in the US.
Few are willing to risk their life when they ride around in their F150 picking up cheeseburgers, fries and a large drink for <$10 on the way home to watch the game… or whatever. That’s the real power of America that so many underestimate. You can placate 90% of the population with that alone.
Take away any ONE of those things the US will spiral into anarchy in mere weeks.
>
Few are willing to risk their life when they ride around in their F150 picking up cheeseburgers, fries and a large drink for <$10 on the way home to watch the game… or whatever. That’s the real power of America that so many underestimate. You can placate 90% of the population with that alone.
And no wonder. It's the lifestyle that billions of people in countries other than US can only dream of. A lot of them are risking their lifes to be able to live this dream.
And narcotics and antidepressants to handle chronic pain and PTSD. Having spent the last month on the West Coast I have started to think these might have a real dampening effect on violence potential.
Definitely a culture & behaviour mix that keeps people from acting in their best interest. Might be that the current offline/online social platforms don't allow what's needed to occur. Friends might talk about being tight on finances for a day but what else will come of it?
It took me into my late 20s to realize that I had a traumatic childhood. The thing is I did not grow up in a poor or abusive household. I grew up in an upper middle class family that looked extremely normal, and for a long time believed it myself, until I started wondering why I had since jr high felt acutely depressed, empty, and unable to hold on to meaningful relationships. Only a few years ago did I realize that both my parents were emotionally neglectful and did not validate my emotions at all growing up, and did not act or behave in a way that seemed like they were even aware that emotional care and validation of their child is at the core of good parenting, and not just feeding them and putting a roof over their head.
It explained a lot about how I act today, and why I became very independent at an early age. I continue to struggle with feelings of emptiness, depersonalization, emotional numbness. It sucks to feel like you cannot escape your childhood even as a grown adult.
There was that running Bill Cosby joke in our house: "I brought you into this world, I'll take you out, and make another one just like you." It sucks, having to figure out how to validate emotions yourself and find intrinsic value in yourself at a young age. It sucks realizing your old man is using you for the butt of a joke as a 10 year old.
But I can never bring myself to say "I am the victim of childhood trauma" when friends of mine were sexually abused by their fathers, or other friends were violently beaten by an uncle or a sibling. I didn't get the emotional support I felt I needed, but that is way different than being actively traumatized by a malicious adult.
>It sucks to feel like you cannot escape your childhood even as a grown adult.
It does, it really does. I used to deal with that a lot. This is a hugely unpopular opinion but I needed to hear it to move on and finally be whole: as long as you frame things the way it seems like you're framing them, namely: "it's my parents' fault that I'm unhappy as an adult," you'll never be able to 'escape' your childhood.
Trying to escape didn't work for me. The only thing that made me feel whole was acknowledging the past, accepting that my parents are humans trying their best, or suffering from huge amounts of stress, and it may have been tough for me at the time, and moving the hell on from it.
Said another way: there's no Karmatic Force that is going to reward me when I die because I silently suffered from emotional pain. So I might as well figure out how to put this behind me and live the best life I can, since God isn't going to give me a primo seat in heaven just cause mommy and daddy didn't love me enough down here in the pits.
I'm not trying to minimize what you're feeling or the pain this brings or how difficult it is to be whole after this. I've just found that perspective helped me tremendously in this situation.
I relate to this story personally. Wish you the best, and here are some resources that have helped me:
- after many failed attempts doing CBT and mindfulness based therapy, doing psychodynamic psychotherapy with a therapist who takes relationships and trauma seriously
- "Complex PTSD: From surviving to Thriving" (Pete Walker)
- "The Tao of Fully Feeling" (Pete Walker)
- "Treating Adult Survivors of Emotional Abuse and Neglect" (Hopper/Grossman/Spinazzola/Zucker)
- "Adult children of emotionally immature parents" (Gibson)
Would also recommend Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk's lengthy tome, "The Body Keeps The Score". Been recommended on HN several times before (including once by me, I think).
Haven't checked out some of these other titles (only know of pete walker, loving "From Surviving To Thriving"), thanks. Do you know about EMDR? Worth looking into, IMO.
> Only a few years ago did I realize that both my parents were emotionally neglectful and did not validate my emotions at all growing up, and did not act or behave in a way that seemed like they were even aware that emotional care and validation of their child is at the core of good parenting, and not just feeding them and putting a roof over their head.
That's something I only vaguely became aware of in my 30's. I still have a hard time realizing that a roof and food is enough to raise robots but not a human being.
How are you coping with it now that you are aware of it ?
Your description is very similar to the refrigerator mother theory [1]. Genetic predispositions may be a factor in both your parents' behavior and your symptoms.
That "refrigerator" theory didn't posit anything on the same scale as actual narcissistic abuse, though. Narcissistic/psychopathic abuse doesn't feel like a refrigerator, it feels like a dumpster fire that's constantly being blamed on you, often in the most persistent and verbally abusive ways you could imagine. And since we're specifically discussing changes in what we expect and how we relate to others, adverse effects are far more likely than wrt. a disorder involving perception and general cognitive development, as with autism.
There are tons of hidden costs with ownership like insurance, property taxes, HOA, repairs/maintenance I don’t have to deal with. Plus the opportunity cost of locking $200k+ in an illiquid asset with high transaction fees to eventually liquidate years later isn’t appealing unless you’re buying a home firstly as a permanent home for raising a family and not as an investment.