> I will not comment on motives, but DOGE absolutely shredded the safeguards and firewalls that were created to protect privacy and prevent dangerous and unlawful aggregations of sensitive personal data.
Here's one example. Have you not been following DOGE? You do come off like you're disingenuously concern trolling over something you don't agree with politically.
> You do come off like you're disingenuously concern trolling over something you don't agree with politically.
Beyond mere political alignment, lots of actual DOGE boys were recruited (or volunteered) from the valley, and hang around HN. Don't be surprised by intentional muddying of the waters. There are bunch of people invested in managing the reputation of DOGE, so their association with it doesn't become a stain on theirs.
If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.
This is extremely regressive and means that lower income people will be forced to shed their assets every year to avoid paying this unrealized gains tax. This means they will NEVER get the chance to accumulate generational wealth by holding onto stocks or other assets that have the capability of increasing tremendously like real estate.
It means they will need to sell their assets in order to pay this tax and only rich people will be able to afford holding onto assets long enough to become very rich.
It’s stupid, regressive and the Netherlands will learn a great lesson. The other thing that makes me laugh is that no other taxes are going down so this is a straight up tax hike on top of every other the Dutch pay.
"Adjusted for inflation" concept is broken in this instance.
One of the reasons why inflation is so high is because college costs have skyrocketed, so citing that they have increased after taking into inflation is like circular logic.
Banks lent an unlimited amount of money to students because they knew they couldn't discharge the debt in bankruptcy, and the schools jacked up prices because they knew students had the money. College costs more than doubled in a 10 years period but the services or even the number of students enrolled didn't even get without a ballpark of doubling. They just enriched themselves off student loans.
The only way to fix this is to let student loans be dischargeable from bankruptcy again, and let banks and colleges take the fall. Right now it's another instance of us peons playing a game of "heads you win, tails i lose."
Probably not at all since the RAM on Apple’s chips is on die, meaning they manufacture it themselves with the chip. They’re not beholden to RAM manufacturer pricing. Arguably they could raise prices just because RAM has gotten more expensive and they want to match, but I doubt it given the crazy high margins they already charge for it.
When I went to university, my minimum wage summer job could pay for tuition and dorm fees for the entire year. The price is up over 20x since then, and in some colleges it's even higher. It's because of the predatory student loans allowed universities to charge whatever prices they wanted and they knew that students would get the loans to pay for them. It's sickening.
First we must stipulate that the price you pay is not the tuition price. I went to a school that was #1 in tuition when I attended and I paid less than state school -- not because of loans but because of grants the school gave me.
Look at the history: in the 20th century, there was a general understanding that public education was a good thing. My grandmother born in the 20s only graduated middle school. My parents born in the 50s graduated high school and went to a little community college. By the time I was in school in the 90s, it was expected that pretty much everyone who could, should go to college. All of my peers went to college. None of my parents' peers did.
What happened due to this was there were too many students and not enough schools. This caused tuitions to rise. So they built more schools, but that doesn't really solve the problem because as the schools become more popular, the land they are built on and housing around them starts to increase in cost. Schools can't do much about this, but they do have to raise their tuition in response. Schools are in nice areas and attract a lot of high-net-worth professionals. You build a school somewhere and soon you need a hospital, some high tech jobs, a sports team, music venues, public transportation, lawyers, patent attorneys, day cares, and then eventually even more schools. So there's a pretty normal supply/demand issue going on that causes tuition to rise naturally before we even talk about student loans. See: Merced CA over the last 10 years after UC Merced was built there. It went from a Central Valley backwater to a really nice place to live and raise a family. So schools aren't really even schools anymore, they are more like small cities.
What about those sky high sticker prices? Are they that high because schools are confident the government will foot the bill? At the middle tier, yes. These are the schools that are not getting the best students, or the richest students, but they still have to pay competitive salaries for teachers, they still have to pay market rate for land, they have to pay for all the site licenses to Google and Microsoft and Mathworks and Elsevier and Jstor etc... and they still have to deal with the economic reality of being a non profit entity with a public service mission. But not for student loans, those schools would not exist, which would mean higher tuition at the remaining schools.
But, loans to mid tier schools are not the reason Stanford can charge $60k a year. Elite school can charge that, because plenty of rich people are willing to pay full sticker price to send their little bundle of joy to those brand name schools. So that's what elite schools do, they set their price at the level those rich people are willing to pay, and that sticker price keeps going up and up because that elite population keeps getting richer and richer.
The elite institutions set the ceiling, the community colleges set the floor, and then all the in-between state schools, private SLACS, off-ivies, price themselves in the middle. If student loans went away tomorrow, the lower tier schools would suffer most, but the upper tier schools would just admit more rich families and charge them more. Maybe there's not enough to spread between them, maybe they have to close some departments and hire fewer professors, but you wouldn't see tuition fall unless the rich couldn't pay it anymore.
What about those sky high sticker prices? Are they that high because schools are confident the government will foot the bill?
Thanks to Nancy Mae, yes. They will get their loans unless their students die. And mortality rates aren't a huge worry for what are mostly fledgling 22 year olds trying to make a career for themselves. For the US you may as well add "school loans" onto "death and taxes".
You seem to imply inelestic demand (never mind that this is in fact starting to be more elestic now, so there was in fact a limit), but forget the government allowed this. Giving any other 18YO a loan like this would be suicide without an exact plan.
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism.
Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.
That’s exactly and inherently what capitalism is. Rate of return on capital is higher than rate of return on labor. The people with capital continue to pull ahead. And in America, we now decided to compound this by not taxing and undertaking capital. Which then allows those with capital to transfer some of their capital to political power that then accrues even more advantage to capital owners
When capital is vastly more valued than labor then its an asset bubble that will pop. Labor is the actual economy, capital is a make believe economy, when corrections happens its that capital loses all their bubble money not that labor catches up to that imaginary world.
Do you have any actual evidence of this?