The pension are presumably insured to cover their negligence and liabilities...including failure to properly notice employers/members of the fund in breach of their duty to do so, which resulted in damages. Otherwise it comes directly from the pension (which isn't just a fund made up of employer contributions, it is a business entity that takes fees from the fund itself)
>If the pension didn't do their duty to warn businesses of the deficit in 2005, it should be on their heads to fund the deficit
The irony is the Pension claimed they couldn't notice the employers at the time (which would have given the opportunity to buy out for 1 Euro) because they would have had to research the contact info for thousands of employers...yet the Pension seems to have no problem doing the research now and noticing these employers of their Million+ Euro liabilities.
The real irony is that the UK government has just killed the pensions of an entire generation of older women by raising the retirement age without notice.
So going after small businesses to enforce an onerous rule change is entirely hypocritical.
I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.
I know its unfair and maybe even disparaging, especially my suggestion they would seed their own thing with bots...but the reality is the social network/SV startup well has been poisoned and so it would be my (our) own fault not to approach these things with a ton of skepticism.
>Today, a new social app is launching. Called Friended...Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors...
>OK, so when the reporter specifically asks him if he'd drink the water in front of him, what's his least bad option?
Probably to laugh and say instead of "trying the water" he will see the water is sent to a lab for proper scientific testing and the results published to the public.
>If your best answer is "We are adding diversity to the marketplace", then you're probably doomed. If you aren't better in some way (faster, cheaper, better tech, etc...)
We have seen it over and over in tech though...some small time founder starts something and then a VC back startup eats their lunch and takes the market (of course rewriting history along the way to say they invented/disrupted the market).
The sad truth is the answer to why a customer will choose us over established competitor is because...VC capital/your money. We will use VC capital/your money to out spend/out market our competitor because they can only grow as fast as their revenue, whereas we can artificially grow using your VC money, even to the point we can subsidize the price of our widget which the established competitor can't, we will grow our market share, even if at a loss because at any time we can "flip the switch and its all profit."
That's a completely valid reason. If the competition is underserving the market and you think you can outgrow them because you have an aggressive growth plan then that's something.
>still the largest and most successful company to come out of SF this decade.
That's a lot less reflective of UBER and more reflective of the type of startups SV is trying to take public. Look at any other SV Unicorn that IPO'd...take Twitter that IPO'd in 2013, it turned a profit one year since going public.
Employees at least get paid, knowledge workers sign over their intellectual property in exchange for a salary. There is no concept of data ownership, but there could be something similar. Imagine companies having to license your data and pay you a stipend or the like.
However, the reality is big tech needs customer data, customer data does not need big tech. So where is the negotiation? How is it possible big tech can pay the same (i.e. service rendered) to all users, where users data is not of equal value?
>I don't disagree with you, but I'll note that the non-dischargeable terms of medical and student loan debt in the USA essentially do that already
As a preliminary matter this is false...student loans are dischargable in bankruptcy, they are just treated differently than other debt. However, there is a reason everyone thinks student loans aren't dischargable and the myth persists...
>the incentive structure of "we don't make money unless our education helps you do so" seems like an order of magnitude better than the alternative.
Not when the real alternative is student loan forgiveness and free tuition moving forward. The issue is framing the problem as student loans for life or a financier owning a % of your labor for life, when there are other models.
Regarding student loans, yes, you are technically correct that they are dischargable in bankruptcy. However, the standard for federal student loans is that the borrower must be in a situation where there’s literally no hope of ever paying them back in order to qualify. This makes them _de facto_ nondischargable.
Private loans, IIRC, are dischargable with a lower standard, but it escapes me what the standard actually is.
I have gotten student loans ($100k+) discharged for clients.
My experience is most people who say student loans are not dischargable have never gone through bankruptcy and have no idea what the process is to discharge regular debts nor student loans. This is true of even some lawyers, who are more than happy to take your fee, but don't know what they are actually doing.
I don't want to make it about politics or a politician, but you can search for their campaign platform proposal for additional details. As far as I know there is only one candidate running on this platform of student loan forgiveness, so it should come up quickly in a search.
It's great to have a presidential candidate that is running on this platform (and I think I know which one you're talking about), but I'm more interested in whether the broad coalition in congress exists, or whether it's being formed. There are a few members of congress I can think of, but not in remotely the size necessary to pull this off.
>I'm more interested in whether the broad coalition in congress exists
Seeing as no "mainstream" political party candidate is running on this platform, I think the answer is no. Of course, I would probably say the same of any campaign issue any mainstream candidate is running on due current political climate of our 2 party system.
Whats interesting is if this candidate won the election, perhaps the 2 parties would have no choice but to concede the issue, if for nothing else to realign themselves with their own constituents and win back their votes. Then again maybe we can extend the market saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" to politics "political parties can remain irrational longer than you can vote."
Glumly inclined to agree with the latter half of your analogy there, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is to "political parties can remain irrational longer than you can vote." On the other hand, there's power in numbers, and I keep wondering if some kind of equivalent to crowdfunding will emerge for lobbying and/or local politics. So much of the visibility seems to be at the national level, but a ton of the clout in terms of how things get done occurs on the city, township, county and state level. On one hand, that makes it a combinatoric explosion of complexity, in that you have 1:N:N:N just to get up to the state level, but it also lowers the boundary towards critical mass significantly. What's interesting here is that it looks like this has already been happening; at least from my end, I saw a significant amount of this sort of activity in the 2018 midterms. To some, it looked a little bit like a referendum. My question is how much further is needed for the critical mass to be achieved? Is it predicated on a generational shift?
Vote for Bernie if you want these things to happen. We can literally discharge all existing student debt by rolling back Trump’s ridiculous tax cuts for the wealthy. Tuition can be funded the same way going forward.
It used to be society wanted people to have an education and that people with degrees would get higher paying jobs which resulted in a net benefit to society through higher taxes.
Now education is just looked at as a way to in debt young people for the rest of their lives. Because 1M people default on their student loans every year and the bubble is on the verge of popping, the parasites are looking to own 10% of every dollar you make to finance your education.
The problem isn't that an API doesn't exist to automatically debit 10% from the people you own, the problem is an education doesn't get you a job anymore, much less a high paying job.
Instead of owning peoples labor via API, why not consider the 1 Presidential candidate who is campaigning to forgive all existing student debt and make college free moving forward by god forbid...taxing the same banks the taxpayers bailed out from bankruptcy just 10 years ago.
A world where algorithms trash your CV if it doesn't have the phrase "B.A." or "B.S,", and where the cost of that keyword is an irrevocable tithe on 10% of your human output.
At first you mention how higher education doesn't get you a good job anymore, but then you mention support for a candidate who will make college free. Don't you see the contradiction here? The reason college graduates have difficulty finding good jobs compared to the past is because so many people have a degree. Even if you forgive all of the student loans and make college free, people still won't find jobs based on college. College might not even get you anywhere because it'll become a default requirement for every job. There will be some other criteria used instead and somebody's probably going to make money off of that too.
There just aren't enough jobs that require the qualifications of English literature majors or similar.
>Even if you forgive all of the student loans and make college free, people still won't find jobs based on college.
Having educated unemployed people is bad yes, but its an infinite improvement on millions of educated unemployed people saddled with debt they will never in their life times be able to pay off.
a Job isn't the only benefit of an education...an education is a benefit in and of itself. Society benefits from having an educated public. Society does not benefit from being in debt.
Your logic is as follows: if college degree doesn't get a job, then don't go to college.
Your logic breaks down because not going to college isn't going to get you a job either.
"The problem isn't that an API doesn't exist to automatically debit 10% from the people you own, the problem is an education doesn't get you a job anymore, much less a high paying job."
In classical education if you don't get a high paying job it's your problem not the university's because they've already been paid. The whole idea behind this change is to shift some of that risk of un/underemployment to the university. So if the university isn't able to get you the high paying job they promised that's their problem too(b/c they don't get paid).
>In classical education if you don't get a high paying job it's your problem not the university's because they've already been paid.
I don't think that "classical education", in classical education students were able to get part time jobs and pay their own way through school...there we no such things as student loans.
This concept of having to sell off parts of your future productivity at the ripe age of 17-18 is only being conceived because the federal government student loan guarantees and runaway artificial tuition costs supported have already imploded.
Nevertheless, these programs are not paid for/proposed by the universities themselves, but by investors...no matter what the college/university gets paid upfront, and they have no skin in the game.
>The problem isn't that an API doesn't exist to automatically debit 10% from the people you own
Something's just really wrong about that statement. It saddens me. Didn't we fight a war to put an end to stuff like this?
Also, a president is not going to wave a magic wand and fix this system. If you want to support that candidate, by all means do so, it's one of the habits of healthy hearts and minds in a democracy. Just realize going in what's actually possible and what's political marketing. Fixing this is going to take a lot more work on everyone's part than simply casting a vote.
Finally, the wealthy should pay more. No argument from me on that one. Having said that, there is a game theoretical optimum on how much you should tax each person in a society. We don't want to get carried away with taxing anyone for political reasons. Liberals do that with anything that will disproportionately stick it to bankers, and conservatives have done that with anything that will disproportionately stick it to blacks. (The recent Reductio Ad Absurdum of conservatives demanding that college athletes pay taxes on scholarships is an example I'm guessing you might appreciate of how political targeting can get just a bit ridiculous.)
>Just realize going in what's actually possible and what's political marketing. Fixing this is going to take a lot more work on everyone's part than simply casting a vote.
You're not wrong, but at the same token why are Presidential candidates always speaking about things like: taxes; immigration; same sex marriage; healthcare?
The President doesn't control any of those things, doesn't have those powers...that's all the legislature.
While it may be just marketing for a candidate to say they will forgive existing students loans and provide for free education paid for by taxing the banks on what are currently tax free transactions...if that candidate wins, the 2 political parties will begin listening to voters and do what it takes to win their votes back.
