Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
It honestly took me a while to figure out why people were criticizing him. I read his remarks as a positive and didn't realize he thinks having a work-life balance is a bad thing. Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired. "You work, I live. Things are balanced."
I'd suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.
I’m on a business junket to [Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Jackson Hole, wherever] where I will [ski, drink, go to the beach, take a fishing boat, whatever] at an all-expensed resort or hotel, and have a couple meetings or attend a business conference, too. I’ll take a private jet and be there for a week. Everything is a business write-off. I’m getting paid while I’m doing this.
Next month will be another business trip.
Vs
Some family saved for years to visit Jackson Hole, take a hike, go fly fishing, and stay at a modest hotel or camp out. They’re not getting paid, everything is out of pocket, and they can’t write any of it off.
There’s a huge difference in not just pay but how their lives are structured financially. Tons more opportunities to write off and business expense things vs a normal person where everything is out of their personal money.
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there's almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could "afford" pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just "forgive" all student loan debt, you'll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you're going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
A hard cap on public university tuition tracking inflation
Student loans need to go back to being forgiven as a part of bankruptcy.
A long-term plan to make public universities "free"
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they're done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It's often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that's already happening.
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Debt forgiveness is just for people who don't want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn't pay.
Curing diabetes will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Insuline is just for people who want to eat candy all day because they hate themselves
/S
Ps: it's hilarious how quickly you showed the true colours you pretended to hide in your first post
I'm genuinely confused by this?
I know CompSci and engineering majors that are having trouble with loans and are you saying that they should have tried a more profitable degree... What?
Normally we call that 'victim blaming'; even when the victimization is financial by the univer$ity.
I get you have this "do the crime, do the time" thing for people choosing to spend on education; but aside from multi-decade reform plan that isn't even as marketable to voters as "let's just consolidate healthcare and save money", what do we have that'll help people avoid the looming debt trap that has such a chilling effect on others entering post-secondary education?
You do NOT get a choice about getting an education in a vast, vast majority of life paths in the developed world.
I know a lot of people and exactly two of them are working in the field they got degrees in. You cannot always control the direction of your life, anything from medical issues to family emergencies to economics in your region can profoundly impact your chances of landing a career in your chosen study field, or even just getting a simple job that can pay back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as the interest snowballs.
The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems "fuck you, got mine" and I'm done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I'm sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.
I'm sorry you can't handle when someone disagrees with you. I'm not abandoning human decency when I say things like "university should be free" and "if anything all education loans should be refinanced with a interest rate ceiling". You are a coward.
And I'm saying they were coerced into it because of the poor handling of public funding for universities thus making it the governments fault that sometimes people got fucked by loans no matter what degree they got.
To advocate for fixing a systemic problem and not also advocate for fixing what the systemic problem has caused is weird. Fixing these issues aren't exclusive like you seem to think they are.
No one was coerced to do anything. Cheaper options were available at state schools, community colleges and boot camps. Many people instead chose debt and more expensive schools instead.
If we're going to drop a trillion we really don't have on something, I'd prefer to build for the future while you don't want to pay your bills.
Not all loans were predatory, some people just made dumb choices all on their own. If anything there should be a reasonable limit on the interest rates and the loans should be refinanced.
And, as for why not both, we actually can't afford either. Investing for the future is a better deal for society than fixing people's personal mistakes.
What do you mean we can't afford either? Are you telling me that somehow all other developed countries are able to afford free or cheap higher education but somehow the US cannot? We could also slowly start to cancel current student debt. Sure, it is at $1.77 trillion right now but that does not have to be wiped away all at once. Prioritize getting rid of predatory loans, then those those with financial hardship, then go from there.
If your "taxes" go up by $7 but your health insurance costs go down by $10, why the hell would you care? There are several more dollars in your pocket. Or if you are concerned about tax amount, let's rename current health insurance fees to taxes and we can simply market Medicare for All as a massive tax cut that increases service.
But...if you think free public university is a good thing...isn't not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying "folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it's legal Federally"? IMHO people shouldn't have these loans in the first place.
If we can't afford loan forgiveness, we can't afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
it would be worse actually, it would be the equivalent of federally legalizing weed, but then doing nothing for all the existing weed charges and just letting them roll out their time.
It's also important for dumb choices to have consequences. The systemic racism that brought the majority of the marijuana convictions is not even close in comparison to someone who borrowed money to get a degree that was never going to make a decent income.
State universities, community colleges, boot camps and inexpensive online universities exist. Not to mention trade schools and entrepreneurship. No one was forced to take on an insane amount of debt. They chose it.
FWIW, the system is fucked for people that have degrees right now too. The job market is super competitive and a lot of educated people are struggling to find work.
We should plan for the future rather than pay the bills you don't feel like paying.
Community colleges are more manageable, but most of those jobs don't value them much more than no degree. Same with online.
Boot camps are obscenely expensive, and so many are so absurdly bad that having a boot camp on your resume might lower your chances of getting a job.
Everyone who took on that debt was told, by effectively every authority figure they ever interacted with, plus the objective reality of the real world, that success was borderline impossible without a college degree. The system is bad for people with degrees for literally the same reason. Because the system is fucked and told everyone, regardless of ability of inclination, that a college degree was mandatory to even theoretically have a chance of success.
The assumption that you should only do things that are profitable is faulty. I don't want to live in a world where that's true, and if you thought about it longer you probably also don't. Assuming you like books, art, music, culture, etc.
So free University only for majors you deem worthy? Or only for profit minded disciplines? MBAs yes, but art history no?
Besides, economic desperation makes people make poor choices, and I'd wager that most people taking on debt for education don't consider it a poor choice. Often higher education is key to economic success, but given tumultuous economic conditions in the past decades....things haven't panned out for everyone, which makes those decisions look worse in hindsight.
You can't claim everyone with student loan debt has it because they're a worthless hippie art student. The increase in the number of bachelor's degrees made it more competitive to get jobs requiring those degrees, meaning people need to get them just to compete...so people wind up shackled with debt.
It's free to be sympathetic to people who are in a tough situation, even if they bear some responsibility for it. We all do.
You're not explaining why you think that, beyond wanting to punish people for taking out loans.
Your position is inconsistent, because you're arguing they shouldn't have needed to take out those loans.
Again: you're saying people made mistakes, but I don't think that's precisely the case. The majority of student debt isn't because of people going to incredibly expensive schools for useless majors, you know.
I don't want to punish anyone, I just think free university is a better investment for the future. Debt relief only removes the consequences for the choices some people made, while free university is for everyone.