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.
maybe he just hated his family
CEOs sometimes think like this, but they seem to forget how much more they are paid when it comes up.
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.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
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:
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.
whoosh
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
100%
PS: Huh?
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?
I’m saying people made choices.
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.
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?
We have inflation for that. Wages will eventually go up.
And there was no crime here.
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.
You absolutely have a choice.
Clearly there should be debt forgiveness for people with medical issues. Otherwise people should think ahead.
And I started all of this by saying that university should be free. I’m not the enemy here. You signed an agreement to pay those bills, now do it.
This is true.
This is utter garbage. Judgemental much? Maybe your own experiences and feelings aren’t the same for everyone.
I do not have a degree. Still here and happy. Make better choices.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
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.
Yes, we can’t afford it, because we chose to spend all of our money on the military.
This sounds like we could afford it, we just need to take that money back from the military…
Yes, but also, America. It’s not that I don’t want these things, I just think they’re politically impossible.
We could switch to Medicare for All and save a couple hundred billion a year to do it.
Overall, not without raising taxes though. The money just doesn’t stop getting spent by people and appear in the government budget without it.
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.
The marijuana comparison is not even close to the same thing.
In terms of harm done, no. Principle? Yeah? It’s best to stop further harm, but undoing past harms as well is even better.
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.
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.
People shouldn’t choose to take on debt that they can’t afford and free education will still get me all of that culture.
Except the system is so fucked that even terrible low paying jobs routinely ignore applicants without degrees.
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.
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.
No, free university for whatever. It’s simply a better investment than fixing people’s past mistakes.
Doing illegal drugs is at least as dumb a choice as getting into debt to get an education.
When drugs wear off, you are good to go…
Student debt is life changing if you can’t get a job to pay them back
Well, when you say it like that, I can only believ— wait a minute. Show me the receipts. The ‘missing middle’ is real.