I find it hard to blame the young ambitious teenager and much easier to blame the grown-ass adults in supervisory roles who apparently can't cite a single violation by name and later violently steal a kid's phone.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
I’m actually pretty tired of young ambitious assholes who build themselves off of other people’s misery, and I choose to not celebrate it. That said, the university overreacted.
In the US, student loan interest rates tend to be close to market (which I find despicable) and there is no automatic forgiveness. In fact, student loan debt has extra rules in the US making it difficult to get discharged in bankruptcy, so even that route doesn't work for a lot of people.
Same reason I can't easily start an AT&T/Verizon competitor.
Doesn't mean their pricing is that reasonable, or that funding education should be run this way in the first place. It just means there are big barriers to entry, often established by the existing players to protect their margins. The Fed rate for student loans should be lower.
Finding investors willing to take less than 5% return (after paying for overhead and uncollectable loans being written off due to death/injury/ability to pay/etc) would probably be the primary one. You would likely be offering more or less the same or worse rate as I could get on a 10 or 30 year federal bond with more risk associated with it.
I know I’d be completely uninterested in such an investment pitch. It would work better as a charity ask for me.
> Finding investors willing to take less than 5% return
If it’s safe I can leverage it.
> get on a 10 or 30 year federal bond with more risk associated with it
5% is 10 bps over the 20 year. Not a lot. But I picked a round number. Point is why couldn’t it be undercut? If it can’t, easily, it’s correctly priced.
Loans to private persons are very unsafe, for example they can move abroad and just stop paying as the article is talking about. Every person doing that raises interest for everyone else.
That is what taking a loan is, you are able to do it, its how you afford your homes etc. The bank is the essential guarantor in that transaction, without the bank the person you buy the home from doesn't trust you enough but the bank has that trust.
So essentially governments build trust with banks so those banks can issue fiat currency. Then those banks build trust with people like you so you can use the bank to issue fiat currency. Its the same system, bank pay interest to central bank for doing that and you pay interest to the bank.
If you mean why you can't get money from the central bank? Its just that you haven't built trust with them. But you can do so indirectly by taking a loan from your local bank, and that trusted middleman takes a fee for it.
Had to look it up, it is 2.3% for 2026 which is a bit below the Euribor 1 year rate. Between 2017 and 2022 it was 0%.
Loan forgiveness happens after 35 years so for most academics that is about 10 years before retirement. Forgiveness also happens upon death.
Bankruptcy is a bit different here. We have a program where someone manages your finances for about three years, and after that most remaining debt is forgiven. However, student debt is an exception, that one stays
Comforting I'm sure. But it wasn't always that way:
"Six years after the death of Christopher Bryski, a 23-year-old student at Rutgers University, Key Bank has agreed to forgive his student loan. But Bryski's family is not stopping there: It's now fighting to change the laws in the hope of sparing others the trauma it endured as lenders continued to hound it for payment on its dead son's debts."
And it might not be mandatory:
"But it is guidance, not law, and it does not cover creditors collecting their own debts, as they are not covered by the FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act)," she said.
There was the strike that massacred a school, which was the result of DOGE cuts. There was the double-strike on the bridge the other day, for no apparent reason other than to kill first responders. I'm sure there have been other instances of the US causing unjustifiable harm, but those are the two big ones that come to mind. Meanwhile, Israel has been doing pretty much whatever the fuck it wants, razing neighborhoods, bombing medical facilities and schools by the dozen, assassinating moderate leadership, and on and on.
Via the NYT:
Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and a key government figure overseeing the war, took to social media to mock the Trump administration as U.S. forces searched for a missing American airman from a downed fighter plane. “This brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’”he said in a post on X. “Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”
We don't know what downed it yet, so it's hard to say. Iran is hiding and rationing their offensive munitions, we know that, so it's not surprising when the number of drone and missile attacks spikes after weeks of bombing. That's part of the plan. But the ability to take down a US fighter jet is not something they are rationing- it's likely at the edge of their capabilities and they got lucky. If they could be knocking down more, they would be.
That's not a concern it's a reality. Iran is not shut-off or blockaded to any meaningful degree. It has tons of unmolested border crossings and Caspian sea access, and maintains full control within it's own borders (minus the parts that have been blown up).
Also ships are still transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from Iranian ports taking goods in from China, with who knows what on board. They are also exporting more oil now than they were before the war.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
Even the Philippines, a US ally, has struck a deal with Iran for safe passage. Meanwhile, Oman is working with Iran on a toll scheme. There's an emerging chance that no US-flagged vessel crosses the Straight of Hormuz again in our lifetimes (except maybe for a retreating 5th fleet).
The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.
> a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan
And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.
I mention this because:
1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.
2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)
3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.
It’s done some pretty decent ones as well. Western Europe including West Germany, Japan, arguably South Korea although they went through a period of dictatorship, but all are staunch US allies. There have been failures too for sure. Over all of I was going to be invaded by somebody, with America at least there’s a chance it might be a least worst option.
Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.
My Iranian ex colleague shares very interesting opinion. They trained during his army time to blow everything in the region up. So if things escalate badly the oil and gas importing countries will stay with a fraction of needed oil and gas for years. There is no backup infrastructure anywhere in the world. It will take years to rebuild the infrastructure. It will destroy world’s economy better than nukes.
Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran.
And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.
When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.
The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.
The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.
Years ago I tried to book a train from San Francisco to Chicago as part of a trip I had planned but found it to be more expensive and, more significantly, a multi-day journey instead of a few hours. If you happen to be an American living near one of the useful passenger rail lines, and desire to go to one of the few destinations it can take you to quickly and affordably, more power to you. But most Americans live nowhere near a useful rail system.
I guess so. We took the girls when they were young to Omaha a few times from the Bay Area. I wasn't even sure passenger trains would be around when they were adults so wanted to give them that experience. I took a train between Kansas City and Chicago as a kid and found it magical.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
The second the first bomb hit, the Republican Guard went from a standing military force to a guerrilla army, similar in a lot of ways to what the US faced in Iraq, just vastly better-trained and better-equipped. The US couldn't subdue Iraq with hordes of troops on the ground for years, so why would anyone imagine an air-only campaign would have better results against a stronger and larger opponent?
Take China for an example. No one knows China's true military capabilities, because they're rapidly evolving and because they virtually never use them. If there's an element of surprise to be had, they have it. But that cut's both ways, because China itself doesn't have experience exercising those capabilities. The learning curve could be noticeable. Meanwhile, no one doubts the ability of the US military to execute.
China uses wars like these to test their equipment for example the s300 knockoffs. These were not effective in Iran nor in Pakistan. I am sure the Chinese have made a note of that and debugging the failure.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
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