• TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn’t have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don’t whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not ‘unfair and cruel’ because you made bad choices.

    this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because ‘it’s not your fault’. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else’s. But by a lot of lemmy logic it’s the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.

    personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i’d have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn’t what I ‘truly’ wanted.

    But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can’t afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it’s cool be a bicycle hipster and ‘uncool’ to work a computer programming job.

    Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.

    If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.

    your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something… there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.

    • bizarroland@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      I feel like that’s an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don’t really think it’s appropriate.

      It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don’t want to pay their student loans.

      I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn’t take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.

      • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        i’m not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.

        but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?

        FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I’m not talking analogies here, I’m talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many ‘assistance’ programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.

        and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people… don’t need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.

        • bizarroland@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Eh, you can’t let the bastards drag you down.

          I know there’s a lot of bastards out there. I’m related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.

          That doesn’t mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.

          These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.

          I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.

          Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.

          It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.

          I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.

          Do you disagree with either of those two premises?