Grading Debates

[redandguilty]

I don't care what some crotchety old goon claims: there is no 18-year-old kid on the planet smart enough to understand what sort of burden they are taking on when they take out student loans, nevermind the fact that from day one they're constantly being told to stress education and go to college. even if some child prodigy tried to step back at age 17 and decide if attending college was worth it, there's so much misinformation out there being pushed on them about their job prospects, potential salary, etc., that they wouldn't succeed.

None on the planet? BS. Maybe understanding the scale of what they are getting into is too high a bar to expect every 18-year-old to get over, but you really think no 18-year-olds are smart enough? My initial reaction was focused on the fact that there are 18-year-olds that understand how interest accumulates, but looking at the 2nd half of your post, it looks like you are speaking more broadly.

I guess it's a fair question. So how old do you think people need to be before they should be responsible for their life decisions? Maybe we need to raise the age people can be allowed into the military or buy a house. I think 18 is fine. The fact that some people are never mature enough to make good decisions doesn't mean everyone else should be prevented from making adult decisions until some older age.

 

[Michchamp]

... but you really think no 18-year-olds are smart enough?
...

hyperbole1. an obvious and intentional exaggeration.
2. an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as ?She?s as big as a house.? Cf. litotes. ? hyperbolic, adj.

 

[Michchamp]

None on the planet? BS. Maybe understanding the scale of what they are getting into is too high a bar to expect every 18-year-old to get over, but you really think no 18-year-olds are smart enough? My initial reaction was focused on the fact that there are 18-year-olds that understand how interest accumulates, but looking at the 2nd half of your post, it looks like you are speaking more broadly.

I guess it's a fair question. So how old do you think people need to be before they should be responsible for their life decisions? Maybe we need to raise the age people can be allowed into the military or buy a house. I think 18 is fine. The fact that some people are never mature enough to make good decisions doesn't mean everyone else should be prevented from making adult decisions until some older age.

I don't think the age needs to be raised, per se. I think that someone (government since no one esle will do it) needs to be more forceful in advocating for the rights of its citizens.

you look at the mortgage crisis, and you have two stories:
1. propagated by the mortgage industry, and rubes like zyxt that believe whatever the media tells them, it was THE PEOPLE's fault for taking out mortgages they couldn't afford, because they were greedy, irresponsible, lazy, or just plain bad. And if you were to get the mortgage industry's spin through Fox, or Rush Limbaugh, you would get the added bit that a lot of those people were minorities (wink, wink), and you know what THAT means...

2. there was a lot of fraud committed by mortgage originators here, both outright: by lying on forms to ensure unqualified applicants were approved, AND by misleading applicants for ARMs on what they would expect to pay after the teaser rates ended, and more systemic fraud, by claiming that home prices could only go up indefinitely and anyone could just sell and get out whenever they needed to.

and that all was enabled by the incentives given to mortgage originators to issue as many as possible while not having to be accountable for that, since the obligations to hold and collect payment on the mortgages were bundled into CDOs and sold to banks, pension funds, etc. etc.

the whole system stinks and needs to be reformed and overseen by an agency that would police the sorts of abuses that occurred to ensure they don't happen again and create the sort of devastating collapse that vaporized something like a trillion dollars or more of real estate values held by people.

 

[Michchamp]

...

2. there was a lot of fraud committed by mortgage originators here, both outright: by lying on forms to ensure unqualified applicants were approved, AND by misleading applicants for ARMs on what they would expect to pay after the teaser rates ended, and more systemic fraud, by claiming that home prices could only go up indefinitely and anyone could just sell and get out whenever they needed to.

and that all was enabled by the incentives given to mortgage originators to issue as many as possible while not having to be accountable for that, since the obligations to hold and collect payment on the mortgages were bundled into CDOs and sold to banks, pension funds, etc. etc.

the whole system stinks and needs to be reformed and overseen by an agency that would police the sorts of abuses that occurred to ensure they don't happen again and create the sort of devastating collapse that vaporized something like a trillion dollars or more of real estate values held by people.

a similar thing has occurred in the for-profit college sector. PBS Frontline covered this a bit in a special. unlike the banks, the for-profit colleges weren't powerful enough to quite defeat any reform.

it was a pretty simple scam: rent a building, think up a name "International University of Chicago,"
"University of Phoenix," or go with a former president that doesn't already have a school named for him: "Roosevelt University." hire a handful of unemployed recent college grads to "teach" for peanuts and find enough unscrupulous former university administrators to run it. whatever the max amount of federally backed student loans your students could get... that's where you set tuition. collect your $18,500/semester per pupil or whatever, minimize your expenses (easy to do when you have no real standards to live up to) and voila.

the Obama administration and congress successfully passed a number of measures intended to tie a school's ability to qualify its students for Dept of Ed loans to the actual performance of those students in the real world.

recently Kaplan or the univ of phoenix or one of those other shyster groups just had to close a ton of schools because they couldn't continue to feed at the trough. Good for America... bad for shysters.

it really didn't add up... $20,000 year in tuition for some ridiculously named commuter school? you could attend a real community college for less, and even most actual 4-year universities!

 

[redandguilty]

hyperbole1. an obvious and intentional exaggeration.
2. an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as ?She?s as big as a house.? Cf. litotes. ? hyperbolic, adj.

18-year-olds, can, and should be able to understand interest, in general. My argument does not hang on disproving the literal interpretation of your statement. Guess I shouldn't have bolded 'no' or quoted you. I disagree with what you meant, not the literal interpretation of what you said.

 

[redandguilty]

I don't think the age needs to be raised, per se. I think that someone (government since no one esle will do it) needs to be more forceful in advocating for the rights of its citizens.

you look at the mortgage crisis, and you have two stories:
1. propagated by the mortgage industry, and rubes like zyxt that believe whatever the media tells them, it was THE PEOPLE's fault for taking out mortgages they couldn't afford, because they were greedy, irresponsible, lazy, or just plain bad. And if you were to get the mortgage industry's spin through Fox, or Rush Limbaugh, you would get the added bit that a lot of those people were minorities (wink, wink), and you know what THAT means...

2. there was a lot of fraud committed by mortgage originators here, both outright: by lying on forms to ensure unqualified applicants were approved, AND by misleading applicants for ARMs on what they would expect to pay after the teaser rates ended, and more systemic fraud, by claiming that home prices could only go up indefinitely and anyone could just sell and get out whenever they needed to.

and that all was enabled by the incentives given to mortgage originators to issue as many as possible while not having to be accountable for that, since the obligations to hold and collect payment on the mortgages were bundled into CDOs and sold to banks, pension funds, etc. etc.

the whole system stinks and needs to be reformed and overseen by an agency that would police the sorts of abuses that occurred to ensure they don't happen again and create the sort of devastating collapse that vaporized something like a trillion dollars or more of real estate values held by people.

I'm convinced that people make these bad decisions, in large proportion, not because they are lied to (although sometimes they are), not because they can't understand the consequences, but because they think there is safety in numbers and everyone is doing it. They know temporary-low-rate, ballooning mortgages are a bad idea, but that thought is overridden by the idea that everyone is doing it so it must work out somehow.

 

[Michchamp]

I'm convinced that people make these bad decisions, in large proportion, not because they are lied to (although sometimes they are), not because they can't understand the consequences, but because they think there is safety in numbers and everyone is doing it. They know temporary-low-rate, ballooning mortgages are a bad idea, but that thought is overridden by the idea that everyone is doing it so it must work out somehow.

okay, so what would be your solution to that? or are you just a fatalist who accepts that humanity is forever doomed to these sort of boom & bust cycles, feasts and famines, until a meteor or comet pulverizes the earth, since we keep cranking out uneducated, unthinking saps by the million ever couple weeks or so...

 

[tinselwolverine]

okay, so what would be your solution to that? or are you just a fatalist who accepts that humanity is forever doomed to these sort of boom & bust cycles, feasts and famines, until a meteor or comet pulverizes the earth, since we keep cranking out uneducated, unthinking saps by the million ever couple weeks or so...

Well, I don't know about Red, but that's pretty much the way I"VE come to view it, anyway...

 

[redandguilty]

okay, so what would be your solution to that? or are you just a fatalist who accepts that humanity is forever doomed to these sort of boom & bust cycles, feasts and famines, until a meteor or comet pulverizes the earth, since we keep cranking out uneducated, unthinking saps by the million ever couple weeks or so...

Malthus makes a good argument (and so does Mike Judge), but no, I think we're an efficiency factor of 4-10 shy of having enough for everyone there's ever going to be on Earth (because people in developed nations stop having so many babies) and we'll get there in the next 40-80 years (which might be painful). I haven't really though about the economics of what happens when we go interplanetary...or intergalactic-planetary.

Once there's enough for everyone we're going to have to come up with a new type of economy. I'm not sure how it will (or should) work.

...but a solution to the specific problem? Nope. We love to stick with the herd. I can't stop people from eating too much McDonalds or signing up for bad loans or spending 4 years in college studying things that won't lead to a job when they aren't prepared to sacrifice for whatever field they pursued. If corporations can make it popular with incentives, they can take away the incentives later and people will keep doing the popular thing. I do support education/information. Regulations making loan forms easier to read and calories more noticeable on menus are good things. Highschool classes (entire, hour a day for a semester classes) for juniors that describe fields, work duties, current salaries and trends and job prospects might be a good idea.

 

[redandguilty]

For the record, I'm no candidate to fix the problem because I do the same thing. The first home loan I signed, I took it upon myself to mostly read most of it and I comforted myself with the idea that I was probably being more thorough than most people. I did that with a home mortgage! The largest amount of money I had ever borrowed, 100 pages of legal jargon that doesn't always mean exactly (or remotely) what I think it means...and I thought a few hours of my own analysis was sufficient.

I was just going with the flow.

Someone recently told me I don't actually own the copies of the ebooks I've bought too.

 

[Michchamp]

For the record, I'm no candidate to fix the problem because I do the same thing. The first home loan I signed, I took it upon myself to mostly read most of it and I comforted myself with the idea that I was probably being more thorough than most people. I did that with a home mortgage! The largest amount of money I had ever borrowed, 100 pages of legal jargon that doesn't always mean exactly (or remotely) what I think it means...and I thought a few hours of my own analysis was sufficient.

I was just going with the flow.

Someone recently told me I don't actually own the copies of the ebooks I've bought too.

no, you only have a license to read them on your e-reader, and that license may be limited to that specific reader, or one (1) reader that you own.

as they taught us in law school, "think of property rights as a bundle of sticks..."

 

[redandguilty]

no, you only have a license to read them on your e-reader, and that license may be limited to that specific reader, or one (1) reader that you own.

as they taught us in law school, "think of property rights as a bundle of sticks..."

Amazon can apparently delete stuff off your Kindle. What violates the license? I don't know, I just bought licences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=0

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/amazon-kindle-deleted-remotely-ebooks-drm_n_2001952.html

 

[Michchamp]

Amazon can apparently delete stuff off your Kindle. What violates the license? I don't know, I just bought licences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=0

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/amazon-kindle-deleted-remotely-ebooks-drm_n_2001952.html

look at the terms of use, or the terms that come with the purchase. somewhere it should say "XYZ grants you a license to do ABC..." ABC is the scope of permissible uses.

the license may be "revocable" and "non-transferable" meaning they can terminate it wheves, and you can't sell it or give it to other people. alternatively, they may spell out exactly when the license is terminated.

not sure how they have the technical capability to delete stuff from your kindle without you knowing about it. KA-RAZY!