Stars for this. You set up a system that makes debt almost obligatory for anyone who wants an education, then you blame those people for taking it on. For fuck's sake.

simple, perfect, I love it. Using it, will claim it as my own.

Nailed it.

"Housing prices". Huh. What a strange world these people live in.

I know a couple freshly married people with an easy K student loan debt at least, Kish Credit Card debt (mostly from their wedding and crappy honeymoons), see their sub-poverty no-benefit no-healthcare jobs... and watch as they talk about buying a house. A freaking house. Just sit there slack-jawed as we all eat peanut butter and crackers because going out to Mcdonald's would break all our budgets for the current financial quarter.

The best I know is a freshly married couple who are renting a condo, next door to a convicted child molester we used to go to school with. Of course, they had a "shotgun marriage" - the girl was about to get dumped off her parent's medical insurance, so she needed to get married by the end of the month in order to stay on her plan - and they had to cancel the timeshare they "bought" four years ago, but all in all it's working out pretty well for them. Mostly cuz the wife's rich parents paid for her Masters degree (which, as a homemaker, she isn't using) and the husband dropped out of his Associates program while the debt was still merely in the quad-digits.

My husband got a full ride to college; even though he was an unenthusiastic student, he killed it on the SATs, and that was enough. But he found college boring, and dropped out in favor of working for an internet start-up. He learned a few programming languages on the job. When the bubble burst, he freelanced for a bit, then traded up for a cushy job as a cog in a big multinational, where he is literally so indispensable that he's called on his vacation days to work for an hour or two from home/the hotel/poolside/etc., thus disqualifying that day as a vacation day. He never runs out of vacation days, but is never really on vacation when he uses them; it's odd.

He's literally doing better than every single one of our friends with college degree, save the one who earned a doctorate in a STEM field and now perfects light bulb filaments for 6 figures a year.

What strikes me the most about this argument is that both sides seem to be assuming that we even have a choice in the first place.

Of course, this is Britain, so by "their parent's standards of living", they of course mean "owning a bicycle, three potted plants, and a cramped little flat in a neighborhood with no Pakis".

We live in a world that was built for consumption. Those who built it that way think any other method of living is ludicrous.

We have the means to make that decrease (like telecommuting) but the old guard can't stand the idea of people not being in an office "at work" because that's how they did it.

If they are finally convinced to let you do your job from home, generally they think you should be paid less, even though you're saving them money on office space and probably a computer/internet connection.

Dammit, as an American I only have one house plant, no bicycle, and my neighbors aren't cultured enough to be niggers, sorry, Pakis, which is nigger for people from Pakistan.

I have a spider plant, though, so I think I might be able to turn it into three plants?

You're talking as if somehow consumption is the means by which the collapse of society will come about, as opposed to some other sociological degradation.

Fuck that conservational bullshit, if we're speaking in terms of inevitability, there is no reason to stop consuming at the rate we currently are.

Why stop?

If anything the hastening the collapse of society will mean natural selection will re-assert itself and we'll be rid of all this commie horseshit once and for all.


Sounds like a win-win to me.

Hahaha Burnov thinks it knows what it's talking about instead of dribbling shit everywhere.

@ Burnov. Please read 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to _Fail_or_Succeed

I believe you would find it very interesting. Its a great read aswell!

My father is a college professor. I may not have gone to the best school (it's actually a highly respected, top 100 university but that doesn't mean shit - it was a joke and I literally only studies one evening the entire time I was there and still graduated cum laude - most universities are pretty much first term freshman mills - that's where the money comes from, and everything after that is about maintaining a good enough reputation that they'll keep pulling in the first term freshmen; but that's a whole other issue and I've already digressed too much) but it was basically free, and that's pretty much the single most important factor in my life being OK.

Plus in the 90s you could go to a private high school (genuinely academically good, not a prep school) for four years for less than the cost of one year's tuition, so I got a pretty solid liberal arts education before I even got in to college. I was extremely lucky and I'm extremely thankful for it.The thing that sucks is that my experience should and could easily be the baseline for North America.

I hope you're being sarcastic.

I hope you aren't.

I'd post about how I'm doing great, but honestly, I don't think enough people remember me for any real amount of outrage.

Ok I'll bite. Which one is the privileged asshole? I'll assume it's the smug jagoff in this video who doesn't want to work for success but be handed it.