"But today, in a period when employment and earnings are vastly better than what they were in 2010, the delinquency rate for student loans is more than 11 percent..."
Scott has some really weird alt-right tendencies that make me pretty nervous.
Rationalizing xenophobia as doing what's best for America (with absolutely no evidence to back up his actions) isn't, 'wanting to be right'. I mean, you can demonstrably show that immigration to the US has done this country a lot of good.
Trump's entire platform is completely devoid of evidence-based decision making and is much closer to that of a temperamental child who wants to just go with his gut at every turn.
In the extremely unlikely event that CA actually attempts to secede from the States, I'd say there is a non-zero chance that WA and OR will probably come with.
That ends up being about $3,000B of GDP lost, and more importantly, it means that the US no longer has a west coast. The implications of all that go well beyond that as well. I think there is a very real chance that a second civil war would break out as a result. The States wouldn't want to lose the West Coast and it seems super unlikely that they'll just let it happen without some kind of intervention.
All this is contingent on CA actually making a move to leave the Union though, which by itself is very unlikely.
I guess we said that about Trump presidency a year ago as well, but here we are...
If you think 'millions' of parents have that kind of wealth, you are sorely ill-informed of what the socio-economic state of the country is.
What irks me, like I said before, is that so much of this is attributed to 'individual decisions' and 'responsibility', and no doubt a non-zero amount of one's 'success' is determined by these things, but the political agenda I push is one of rationalism.
Consider this: Imagine a olympic athlete -- This person has been training since a very young age, has had private lessons and has competed all around the nation in top teams. Some would say this person is truly 1 in a million because of the talent they demonstrate, but I ask you, "how many people have the resources to even realize that kind of potential?"
The lessons, the travel, the time parents need to take to ship their kids to these things and competitions. The costs of coaching and training. These things are all very expensive in terms of raw money and time. To say that everyone has access to them, or even 'a lot' people have access to them is mistaken. The truth is, that only families with wealth have access to the kinds of resources that give a person the best chance at being a world class athlete.
This applies to nearly every aspect of life -- Whether it's a sport, or career, or an extracurricular in some other field, if your family has the resources to commit to your success (time, money, connections, 'i know a guy who...), then you are more likely to succeed there.
There is a comic here that explains the idea much better than I ever could:
The family's achievements are 'having lots of generational wealth'.
If you are suggesting that having a lot of money growing up, whether or not you have direct access to it, isn't a Very Big Deal, then I will gladly present you an endless body of research that suggests otherwise.
Edit: Just to be totally clear, the biggest determinant in financial success for an individual is their parent's wealth. This isn't an opinion -- This is a well-studied fact. It is of critical importance to understand that the way my mind works is one that is based on evidence and study. I do not sacrifice my research rationale at the alter of bootstraps.
> actually, I think a lot of the points he makes about raising kids are applicable to less-fortunate families. Doing chores, their approach to schooling, food, family vacations, community service, backpacking and camping and in general self discipline do not require having lots of money. It just requires that parents be attentive.
What?
In what world do Vacations and Backpacking and Camping require little to no money? Those are expensive activities in both time and raw cash. When you don't have a lot of money, food is also not something you get to be picky about because you don't have a choice -- You can eat what's on the table or you can literally starve. That is the real circumstance for people living below the poverty line in this country of which there are plenty (http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html).
What bugs me is there are a non trivial number of people, yourself included, who are entirely blind to the circumstances of the poor and struggling. These are the people who insist that if you 'just work hard' you can make it, or that education is some kind of great equalizer. These are the people who also generally have a lot of influence in politics, both locally and otherwise, and proceed to campaign against what little social safety net we have because they couldn't be bothered to give up a fraction of their disposable income so millions of people could have food to eat and running water.
The entire piece is structured as a piece to inform. It's not written as a piece to entertain -- That structure would include things like anecdotes, stories, little events that happened that reinforce or express a point, e.g. "This one time Sam really did a bad job fixing his car and...".
The piece is clearly a piece to inform. Yes, he acknowledges his affluence at the very beginning, but that doesn't mean he's aware of what a 'normal' income is and the problems and struggles that entails or his circumstance is wildly different than that of the average family.
It's great that a wealthy family tries to instill good values into their kids, but the idea that this kind of model could translate to everyone is a prime example of socio-economic ignorance.
The thing that actually sets kids up to succeed are a stable home life and financial security as a family. 'Doing Chores' and focusing on education and extracurriculars is nice, but there are a couple really important things:
Being able to focus on education and being able to encourage your kids to do extracurriculars is a privilege that is borne from money in the first place. If you can't afford extracurriculars and the various expenses they incur, or you don't have time to monitor and enforce a 'no TV/Computer/Games' time because you have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, then I guess you make a sacrifice there. If you don't live in a neighborhood when your kids can safely go outside unsupervised, then that's a sacrifice there. In a lot of places, community support services don't exist.
This shit right here:
"When the kids turned 16, we bought each a car....Here are the repair manuals. Tools are in the garage. I will pay for every part, but will not pay for LABOR.”
A garage, a manual, tools, any kind of car, the parts. This is a ton of money for one kid, let alone several. To think that this somehow teaches anyone a lesson about the real world is the definition of socioeconomic privilege. That is an entirely insurmountable expense for most people.
This entire article is just that though: It's a wealthy baby-boomer piece written from the stance of someone who's never wanted or struggled for anything. Their idea that you can project their methods onto other kids is unbelievably ignorant of the economic climate of working class America and is so disconnected from the real world as to be painful to read.
You want to raise kids that can pay for college by themselves? Be wealthy in the first place and reap all the implicit rewards that come with it.
> Do you just blindly take whatever the doctor prescribes to you without doing your own research?
Yes. I'm do not have a medical background and at best, I could gain a surface-level understanding of the drug, which is not useful to determine which drug(s) are best for me.
> How do you know your doctor is an expert?
They went to 10 years of school and several years of residency to do doctor things. These things are also regulated by several boards which have the power to revoke medical licenses if doctors suck.
For nearly all the products I buy, I'm definitely 'dumb'. I have a narrow expertise that gives me insight into a narrow set of consumer products where I can effectively evaluate product quality and value. For nearly everything else, I'm 'dumb'.
If you show me a rack of food product, I probably can't identify which is the best for a particular person given a set of goals. I probably can't even tell you which ones are 'bad' or 'good', because I don't really know. While food is but one subject, this applies to nearly everything I purchase. Which plastics are the best for a given task? What ingredients in a shampoo would actually give me results I want? What kind of bed or bedding is the best for my comfort? To all these questions: I have no idea. I'm at the mercy of google or a salesman, the latter which has a different motive than me which immediately calls that in to suspicion.
I'd be a fool to say I'm an all-knowing consumer, but so would anyone. Most people don't know what the need. They know what problem they want to solve, but they have no idea what the best product or solution is to solve said problem. Acknowledging this, we can easily see why when it comes to our health, it's probably best to see some regulation lest people do what they do best: make really dumb choices.
That's not at all true, and that level of ignorance is actually quite dangerous.
Scientists in no field are punished for disagreement. Even in really fringe science, disagreement is not only well-funded, but encouraged. A great example is String Theory: It has a lot of supporters and a lot of people saying it's untestable bunk, but research for both sides continues.. Consensuses happen when there is sufficient data to collapse to a consensus, not because 'funding'. Disagreements are extremely common in research and suggesting that the overwhelming consensus on the state of climate change is somehow a conspiracy or due to research pressures (that don't seem to exist anywhere else...) is complete garbage.
The science behind nutrition health is extremely complicated and expecting it to remain constant represent a total misunderstanding of how nutrition research is done and how results are determined.
> The history of medical reversals -- and in this case, nutrition reversal -- shows that the government isn't magic.
What it shows is that nutrition science is hardly 'solved' and you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher in the field suggest otherwise.
> A whole raft of restrictions could be converted to warnings and recommendations, freeing up industry to innovate and consumers to take a little more responsibility for themselves.
The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need. Alternative medicine skirts very cleanly around FDA regulation by not making any medical claims on it's product. They still market their product as a solution for various diseases and conditions, but they never make a formal claim. It's a $30,000,000,000 industry of people buying stuff that does nothing, or worse yet, can cause potential harm. To suggest their is no value in regulation of the drug markets is to suggest that people's health has no value. The defense of, 'well, people are responsible for their own decisions' doesn't hold any water when we know that the direct consequences of that mentality can be measured in literally tens of billions of dollars.
Carbohydrates are not a bad thing and are indeed an important part of health. The current suggested diet doesn't say, 'bread'. It specifically calls out Whole Grains, which a great deal of evidence suggests are a Good Thing. Suggesting that grains, or even carbs, are somehow worse than literal fat is misleading at best, and delusional at it's worst.
The problem I foresee with Thunderbolt 3 is that it's serving a use that few people need at a price that no one wants to pay. The price-point issues might disappear with the USB-C compatibility, but even then, the only time I can ever foresee me actually reaching for Thunderbolt is for a display when DP 1.3 isn't an option or when huge data xfers were commonplace.
Unless it competes on price point with USB, I can't see this being any more popular than previous iterations of the protocol.
Maybe that'd change some if Intel actually put it on the enthusiast chipsets, but even then, I think the price point is a pretty big turnoff.
I was going to write this up as well. Also, you can probably extrapolate as far as, 'Most people's politics don't make sense.'
The general electorate is extremely uninformed and disinterested in the details of policy creation and enforcement. It's not a Millennials problem. It's an everyone problem.
Might wanna check your crystal ball on that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...