Lurker > Zanzenburger

NightingaleMD posted...

I mean

maybe I'm just getting old, but I agree. It's unethical to take out loans with even a thought that you won't have any responsibility for them

Maybe I should ask for my mortgage to be forgiven too? Or free air travel and meals everywhere I go? Why pay for anything ever?

It sucks paying loans. It does. But it's a part of being a responsible human. There are a bazillion trade jobs that pay super well right now, literally no one NEEDS college.

You know what's the difference between student loans and a mortgage (or any other debt)?

You can discharge a mortgage in a bankruptcy. You can get rid of car loans, credit card debt, medical debt, and wage garnishing judgments by filing bankruptcy. That's because bankruptcy (both Ch. 7 and Ch. 13) were created to protect consumers that got in way over their heads and need a fresh start.

Guess what isn't discharged in a bankruptcy? Student loan debt.

So not only is taking in a student loan infinitely easier than getting a mortgage or a car loan (seriously, I work with high school and college students and they can get a $40k student loan with no credit but struggle to get a $10k car loan), but it's virtually impossible to get it discharged in any way, shape, or form.

Add to that the fact that student loan interests are, on average, higher than car loan interests and much higher than mortgage interest, causing compounding interest that builds up much faster than you can pay off.

Add to that the fact that at least a mortgage gets you a house that appreciates in value, and a car loan at least gets you a physical car you can use day-to-day. Student loan debt only gets you a piece of paper, if you finish, that says you can maybe get a job one day. There is no collateral tied to that loan. It's essentially unsecured like credit card debt but not dischargeable like credit card debt.

Add to that the fact that these loans are primarily directed at 16-18 year olds, many first-generation students who receive no financial advice from their parents (because they never had to get student loan debt), and do not get financial advice from their schools (because it's more important they learn trigonometry and calculus than the basics of budgeting and finance), while being told that they have to go to college.

Student loan debt is a MASSIVE issue for all the reasons stated above. People who compare student loan debt to other debts are either not aware of these differences or are being disingenuous. Someone can easily say "well I have to pay my mortgage" without acknowledging the fact that they do have a lifeline through bankruptcy if they one day couldn't pay it, as millions of Americans (as well as millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs) have done. If student loan debt were dischargeable with bankruptcy, you can bet that we wouldn't have the same number of problems we have now.

Mezcla posted...

dealers are taking advantage of the subscription mindset many people have cuz of netflix, etc.

"its only 500 a month!" "Oh i can do that oh boy!"
meanwhile the car is 50,000k and you're paying 7% interest on the loan.

Yeah, this pissed me off when I went to replace my car that was totaled.

I was specifically looking for a car in a certain price range, something less than $16k. But the dealer kept going back to how much I wanted my monthly payment to be.

I told him I didn't give a crap about the monthly payment. I had a budget to pay off my car in three years and I'd make that work. He kept telling me that a low monthly payment can get me a much better car than my current strategy.

I'm like bub, I don't want to pay $250 a month for eight years for an overly-fancy car that I just drive to work every day. I'd rather a larger monthly payment that I can pay the car off faster.

I literally paid my car off two years after I bought it. I hate being in debt.

Metroid: Other M

I was wondering why that title sounded familiar. Then I remembered that the girl who plays Mary is a friend of mine I went to school with. She was posting all about this show on Facebook back when season 1 was filming.

It looked like a decent project.

I agree with this. A friend of mine just had her father pass away last week who was in hospice care. Everyone was of course consoling her and feeling sorry for her loss. She said that it sounds harsh, but she was glad that he passed away. He wasn't really fully there anymore and was just existing to exist. Had he not passed away when he did, he was headed to weeks, possibly months, of pain and a worsening condition (he had Alzheimer's). She had already made her peace with him before he got into this state and said that all that was happening was prolonging the inevitable (plus it was costing them about $10 grand a month to have the 24/7 hospice nurse, which was decimating their finances).

It seems that there really isn't any real plan in place for people when they get to that point other than just wait for them to deteriorate and die.

I can attest to the workload being a killer. I took just one intro engineering class as part of my meteorology degree (a requirement that was removed a year after I graduated lol), and that class alone took like 80% of my time that semester. Even my upper-level meteorology classes that included thermodynamics and stuff didn't take me that long to work the problems I had to do.

I can only imagine an engineering student having 3-4 of those types of classes each semester.

ApherosyLove posted...

Fire Pepper in a tanktop though.

This needs to be brought up more.

That was more hot than it had any right to be.

DrizztLink posted...

Maybe "accelerated?"

Advanced Placement already exists.

At the elementary level? I know it does in high school.

But accelerated could work too.

The controls become inverted (or uninverted) for this level only due to magic or status or whatever.

YoungMutual posted...

I fail to see what "convenience" wireless headphones offer? You have to keep charging, syncing and configure them instead of just grab them and plug them into the hole whenever you need them.

"Hey I'm going out but I can't use them because I forgot to charge them" f that

Generally speaking I agree with you. My wireless earbuds like to unsync with my phone at random times, and sometimes bugs out where it has a full charge but the phone does not register it as so. I have to resync it for it to be read correctly.

Though as a runner, wireless beat wired any time. With wired headphones, I always had to watch out for the placement of the cord. I would occasionally catch it and pull it off the music player. Now I can just put my phone anywhere and not have to worry about it.

But if I wasn't a runner I don't know if wireless would be worth it for me.

Southernfatman posted...

It's more like we were gifted as kids, which gave people the impression we were super smart when we were just better at learning the early stuff and that pressure and the feeling we let people down crushes us mentally and makes us feel like failures. Or at least that's how it is for me.

This.

I do have several facebook friends who constantly share memes about what it's like to be a failure as an adult after being a former gifted kid growing up.

The problem is that these people are trying to take two different sets of standards and comparing them to each other.

Being a gifted kid simply meant you were at a math or reading level higher than your grade in school (a grade which is determined by your age, not by any sort of realistic mental capacity). One you are in high school, being gifted loses its value as you can be a 10th grader and be taking basic algebra or calculus depending on your skill level. There is no "expected" level of math, just what you tested into and what prerequisites you have. This also continues in college.

Outside of school, there are no math or reading tests. You get judged in society by your career, your wealth, your appearance, things that weren't as important when you were a child. Being good at math does not necessarily translate to these things. But a gifted child will hear "gifted" and assume they were better at most things than most people when that is just not necessarily true. Then they learn the truth as an adult and their world falls apart.

EDIT: Let me add to this that the issue comes with the term "gifted". If we just changed the term to "advanced placement" I think we wouldn't see this kind of problem pop up as often.

GALA462 posted...

Delivering is the job isn't it?

They are talking about the corporate employees like engineers, accountants, and management.

The hell? I went to school in the early 90s and that's how I learned the song (the supposedly "changed" way). Did everyone else really grow up with lmnop?

Granted, mine was still slightly different than that video.

Ours went like this:
ABCD, EFG
HIJK, LMN
OPQ, RST
UVW, XYZ

The video shared in the OP does something really weird from O-W that slows down the pacing of the song. The way I learned it feels more natural imo.

This is actually pretty cool.

Not true, it is just a sales pitch.

Most phones do have adapters you can buy separately that lets you use the charging port as a headphone jack. I use it to connect my phone to my car for music since the car doesn't have Bluetooth.

I think that was retconned after Season 1.

bigtiggie23 posted...

I found it funny how J-Law's character couldn't get over Jim Brass charging her for snacks that were free.

This got the biggest laughs from me. Everytime she was talking about it you were made to believe it was going to be something much more serious.

Also that ending was depressing, frustrating, and frightening how accurate that might be.

Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch has a music rhythm game mode very similar in style to Guitar Hero if you are into that. It has tracks from a few Nintendo games.

Antifar posted...

Update:
https://twitter.com/jonlemire/status/1473703761856061445?s=21

This is good news for those of us in the Public Service forgiveness program. Each month of delayed payments counts as a paid month towards our 10 year forgiveness schedule. So just means a few more months closer to forgiveness.

krazychao5 posted...

yeah, idk...how would everyone feel if they allowed him to leave and the tornado strikes his vehicle? how can you know beforehand that you'd get home before it strikes? who'd even know the tornado would hit the warehouse?

Most companies don't let employees leave for this very reason. If they send employees home during a tornado warning and they get killed in transport, the company could be held liable for their lives because they allowed them to leave during work hours.

My employer did the same thing when we ran out of power and were under a tornado watch. We were all sitting in the dark with no access to our computers and we get a mass text saying no one is allowed to leave until the storm passes over us. This was explained to me later by an attorney why it was done that way.

Still horrible that the decision is a legal one vs. a moral one (company doesn't want to get sued for negligence) but this isn't unique to Amazon.

Legally, it is not sexual harassment on its own (unless it is just one instance of a larger pattern of behavior).

This is, however, very creepy and socially unacceptable, whether the recipient of the stare is a man or a woman. With women, there is also the added stress of safety when stared at by a man, as the implication is that a creep who is not socially-adjusted enough to realize that staring is rude and off-putting is also more likely to advance to other forms of inappropriate behavior with women.

EyeWontBeFooled posted...

Was it @Zanzenburger ?

Lolwat

insomniacRA posted...

Just out of curiosity, what kind of jobs can allow you to obtain more than the average population? The average doctor probably earns barely above the median salary. Are countries like mainland china and areas in Central America, allow stock trading or some type of investing? Is that how the average person is able to obtain a surplus? It just blows my mind, please educate me more.

A lot of them own large export companies. In both of those regions, exports are big business. Anything from clothing, fruit, to minerals are very profitable.

Another is tourism. Depending on location many people own companies that make killings through tourism, like cruises, hotels, and believe it or not "voluntourism", which is a fancy word for companies that charge churches fees for going on mission trips to their countries.

I worked for a university that recruited tons of international students.

Most of the students simply come from rich families. There are very few scholarships that pay for international student expenses. Their own countries don't tend to offer them and the US certainly doesn't. These students self-pay.

We tend to see the upper-level income families that bring their students over here. In every country, no matter how poor, you will have families that have more than others.

For example, we get a lot of students from Central and South America. My own family is from Central America and I know how poor those countries are. But certain cities have people with surplus that can afford the international education.

Another thing I've noticed is that international students are more likely to pay ahead 1, 2, or even 4 years of education. Their families have that much money that they can afford to do so. By doing so, they also get significant discounts as it's guaranteed money for the schools.