Economy Stock Market Has Worst Week Since 2008

Nicky's worst account since 2008!
SpicyPrestigiousGavial-max-1mb.gif
 
Well up 1000
is this Obama’s rebound
Or trumps bubble
This is called volatility and it’s not good for pension/401K. Day traders will either shit the bed or make out like dogs if they have a sensible strategy.
 
Yeah, I guess fitbit being an early mover allowed it to stay alive. Plus contract manufacturing keeps their overhead reasonable, maybe?
Yeah snap isn't going anywhere good. Doesn't have any growth and no real way to make a real profit. Facebook is evil, but it prints money

I believe fitbit sells targeted ad data for their website too.
 
What the hell is going on with the market? Is this a dead cat bounce?
 
I love/hate they call it a “market correction” my ass. It’s fuck the average person who only cares about the market while waiting to retire.

Looks like an inverted head & shoulders.
 
I believe fitbit sells targeted ad data for their website too.
True I think you're right. They'll limp along with that. Apple came in a d took their lunch. It's amazing how even having the first mover advantage wasnt much for them .
Wonder what will happen to trading watch makers like Casio ?
 
What the hell is going on with the market? Is this a dead cat bounce?
A thousand? Not a dead cat there. Probably bargain hunters. Forward PE rations around 12, or they were, which is a low we haven't seen for years. I bought in Xmas eve
 
Times like this show you that Trump is a complete fucking boob of the highest order.

He’s now furious at the head of the FED, Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates too quickly. You know the guy he picked.

You know who wouldn’t have done this? Janet Yellen, who was “too short and didn’t look the part” as Donald Trump said. So she was replaced with This stooge who is now on trumps most hated list like everyone else he puts into positions.

That’s why Donny loves Betsy Devos, she’s both corrupt and incompetent. The perfect mix.

More proof Trump is a fucking moron of epic proportions And his diehards are even dumber.
 
I'm sure if your Kenyan Messiah was running things you would find all sorts of ways in which it was good.
 
Sorry, but that's a very contrived and frankly terrible analysis of the situaiton. Everything you're saying here is just based on your feelings about people being "entitled" and wanting "free stuff". Same old boring argument with no substance. I was looking for strong subtantive arguments against it that would outweigh the cons and all you've given me is fluff and empty rhetoric. You calling it "stupid" out of hand reflects very poorly on you. Let me go through my reasoning for why I think making higher education tuition free would be a vast benefit to society, why it should be implemented and why it is needed.

1. Improving workforce flexibility and raising capital.
First of all, there's no entitlement going on here. At large, society will benefit by increasing the flexibility of the workforce and the students who later join the workforce will pay into that society themselves making up for the costs. Education is an investment and one that by all accounts has a net economic benefit.

"Among the report's other findings:
Investments in education pay off handsomely for both individuals and taxpayers. The net present value of a college education — the benefit in today's dollars after costs and discounting for future inflation — is over $380,000 for U.S. men and nearly $240,000 for U.S. women, the report found."

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-falls-behind-in-college-competition-oecd-2014-9?r=US&IR=T&IR=T

Investing in high education mobility and high workforce flexibility is exactly what we do here in Denmark, and is part of the reason why we have a healthy and adaptable economy.

"Denmark is the most egalitarian country in the world, but in December 2014, Forbes (once again) ranked Denmark as the best country in the world to do business. (The U.S. ranking was 18th.) The country’s formula for growth is a high level of workforce skills and extensive cooperation among employers and workers to support labor market flexibility." ... "This is why Denmark has one of the highest rates of participation in adult education and training in the world. Rapid technological change makes it important for all adults to be able to upgrade their skills flexibly and throughout their working lives. This is not big brother socialism. This is really smart capitalism."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...the-most-business-friendly-country-whos-right

So with paid tuition we consistently outrank the US by a big margin on both Forbes list and the Economy Freedom Index. Do you know which country ranked #2 this year? Sweden. It's almost as "free stuff" is a deliberately misleading and reductionist insult disguised a real argument. This has nothing to do with "free stuff" and "socialism", it has to do with common sense.


2. Reversing the alarming increase in student debt and tuition costs.
I have already posted the statistics about how student debt and tuition costs have increased exponentially in the last decade. It's at 1,5$ Trillion this year and rising which is absolutely insane.

"Student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category - behind only mortgage debt - and higher than both credit cards and auto loans."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/13/student-loan-debt-statistics-2018/#4f126e0d7310

Default rates are also rising very rapidly, which is a big cause for concern.

"It’s a sum so astronomical that education researchers characterize this as a time of crisis—one that will only worsen without governmental and institutional intervention. In January of this year, Judith Scott-Clayton of Columbia University’s Teachers College wrote in a Brookings Institute report that “the looming student loan default rise is worse than we thought.” Based on the most recent trends, it seems likely that by 2023, about 40% of borrowers may default on their student loans, amounting to about $560 billion in unpaid debt" ... "At the same time, we’re only just beginning to understand the lasting effects of student debt. Because the typical life of a student loan is 10 years, conventional wisdom has long held that education debt isn’t really a burden for people in their mid-30s and beyond. Not anymore."
https://qz.com/1367412/1-5-trillion-of-us-student-loan-debt-has-transformed-the-american-dream/

You said you were well aware so therefor it should come to no suprise to you that no other iniatives put forth at this time will hault this process. There is simply no end in sight and the consequences will be quite devastating for the economy as soon as the recession hits, which it will. Tuition free college would put a stop to this trend. Another solution, along with free tuition, would be to cancel all student debt. That sounds radical on it's head, but $1,5 Trillion in tax cuts by the Trump administration did absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of the GDP, however a study from the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College calculated that canceling student debt would boost GDP by as much as $108 billion a year, because families would be able to spend the the money that would otherwise be paid every month.

"The authors find that cancellation would have a meaningful stimulus effect, characterized by greater economic activity as measured by GDP and employment, with only moderate effects on the federal budget deficit, interest rates, and inflation (while state budgets improve). These results suggest that policies like student debt cancellation can be a viable part of a needed reorientation of US higher education policy."
http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/the-macroeconomic-effects-of-student-debt-cancellation

This is not part of the argument for tuition free college, but it's worth thinking about.


3. Reducing crime, social inequality and poverty rates.
The criminological research demonstrates irrefutable evidence of the inverse relationship between education, crime and poverty. The more educated a population or area is, the lower the violent crime. Higher graduation rates increases public safety AND increases enonomic net income. Actually, it's quite surprising how much capital and safe there is to gain.

"The nation could save as much as $18.5 billion in annual crime costs if the high school male graduation rate increased by only 5 percentage points, a 2013 report from the Alliance for Excellent Education finds." ... "In addition to examining total crime savings, the report projects the number of individual crimes that could be prevented by increasing the male high school graduation rate by 5 percentage points, and finds that such an increase would decrease overall annual incidences of assault by nearly 60,000; larceny by more than 37,000; motor vehicle theft by more than 31,000; and burglaries by more than 17,000. It would also prevent nearly 1,300 murders, more than 3,800 occurrences of rape, and more than 1,500 robberies."
https://all4ed.org/press/crime-rates-linked-to-educational-attainment-new-alliance-report-finds/

At one end you'd save money by more people getting higher education, better jobs and paying into the system and at the other end less costs in sentencing. More good news is that some studies have shown that, while graduation rates are obviously a better goal, you don't even need to increase educational outcomes in order for it to be effective in reducing crime, especially in the at risk population.

"Lastly, education-based policies need not increase educational attainment to reduce crime. Studies on school choice lotteries (Cullen et al. 2006; Deming forthcoming) suggest that providing disadvantaged urban youth with better schools can substantially reduce juvenile and adult crime, even if it has little effect on traditional education outcomes."
https://economics.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/1439/1439011_49-55_research_lochner.pdf

This is another reason why the prison system should be reformed and improve education for both youth adult offenders as the evidence is overwhelmning. Unfortunately, but very predictably, it has been going in the opposite direction.

"Despite this evidence of their extraordinary effectiveness, educational programs in correctional facilities have in many cases been completely eliminated. As of 2008, more than 1.6 million individuals were housed in adult correctional facilities in the United States, and at least 99,682 juveniles are in custody. The majority of these individuals will be released into communities unskilled, undereducated, and highly likely to become reinvolved in criminal activity. With so many ex-offenders returning to prison, it would seem clear that the punitive, incarceration-based approach to crime prevention has not worked as a basis for criminal justice policy in America"
https://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/crime/education-and-crime/4/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3592774?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

We're getting sidetracked though. Moving on. Having tuition free higher education grealy benefit especially low income families and social equilibrium. Whit would perhaps in part lend to the solution of the rising income and power inequality.

"The lack of educational mobility has serious implications for individuals and society, he noted. Higher education levels are associated not just with higher earnings, but also with better health, more community engagement and more trust in governments, institutions and other people. Raising educational attainment is not only giving countries more income but it is also creating a greater degree of social cohesion," Schleicher said.""
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-falls-behind-in-college-competition-oecd-2014-9

"Only 1 in 2 high school graduates from low-income families attends college, and many say they choose not to enroll because they don’t believe they can afford it. And they are right. Every year, low-income students file their FAFSAs only to learn that they will get insufficient support. That’s because programs like the Pell grant that are targeted to the poor have been underfunded for decades. And that underfunding looks to get worse. The Pell and parallel state need-based grant programs lack the political constituency to demand funding that aligns with their goals."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rse-low-income-students-win-with-free-tuition


4. It's affordable and cost effective.
Bernie Sander introduced a bill last year to make all public 4-year college and universities tuition free for households making $125.000 a year or less and make cummunity college tuition free for all income levels. Included in the bill was cutting student debt interest rates in half by letting them refinance their debt. This program was estimated to cost the government $47 billion each year, to cover 66% of the estimated $70 billion each year. The rest, 33%, would be paid by the state.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/colle...ree-college-for-all-plan-would-cost/37430393/

$70 billion a year is the entire cost estimation. That is an extremely low cost considering the benefits.

To summarize:
You could increase workforce flexibility, reverse trend of student loan debt, better prepare for the recession, combat the issue of negative socioeconomics inheritance, lower crime rates, poverty and lower jail sentences which would all save the taxpayers money. All this at a yearly cost that could have already been paid 22 times over, or for the next 22 years, by the first Trump tax cuts alone! This is the astounding thing. Btw, I don't see you being outraged about the "entitlement" and "free stuff" that the stock buybacks from the tax cuts had as a primary effect.

Your speculation about a few professors leaving the country, which is barely plausable enough to be concerned about, doesn't outweigh the pros listed nor does it even address the argument. Part of the reason why Obamacare increased premiums as much as it did was because the insurancy companies found a way to cut their losses and put the burden on the consumer, as they always do. It was a bad program to begin with and one that was absolutely gutted on the floor by the Republicans many times over before an even more crappy version was passed in congress. Again, that is besides the point and has no barring on the proposal I'm arguing for. If you want to do this whole thing for Universal Health care we can, although it's very time consuming. Let's first focus on the topic at hand.

So, while there are moral and philosphical arguments to be made for providing every citizen with equal opportunity, there is no need for humanism to see how this would benefit America and the American people.
Predictably vapid response. Thought I would first hone in on the ignorance inherent to your response with this line highlighted in red near the end.

First, you're wrong, I have demonstrated frustration at the ineffectiveness of the stock buybacks, and the fact it only helps the class of people most who need it least; however, second, and much more important is to highlight your astounding lack of comprehension. Stock buybacks aren't "free stuff" or "entitlement". Stock buybacks are when businesses, through their hard labor earning revenue, use that revenue to buy back a greater portion of their publicly traded companies. Nothing there is gained for free. It isn't purchased with another person's money. Nobody is whining that the going market rate for their shares is too high, and needs to be artificially reduced with government subsidy. How could anyone take anything you say seriously when you can't even comprehend concepts as rudimentary as these?

I can discern from this you don't have the faculties to unpack the acquired knowledge ingrained in my post, and I'm not surprised that you aren't accustomed to dealing with this, but that's okay, I'll slow down, and "really spell out" the concepts I tried imparting to you.

(1) The #1 cost for college and universities is staff salary and benefits. During the past few decades, the average payroll has skyrocketed due to academic capitalism with phenomena like professor poaching I highlighted in that post (you never addressed this). As you can see even in the most recent year their salaries are outpacing this inflation that has you so alarmed-- so why not professor salaries? Again, when you have a class of people who almost wholly produce no direct material value there is cause to be concerned that they are being overpaid. Bringing down the cost of tuition entails bringing down the primary cost that constitutes it. You offered zero proposals or solutions. You just want to make it "free" which is another way of saying you want taxpayers to continue footing this uncontrolled, growing cost.

(2) Look at your OECD figures from the Business Insider article. As I pointed out to you, the value of a college education has declined concomitantly with the very statistic cited in that article; 33% of Americans were college graduates in 1995, while 39% were in 2012, and yet the average value of the American college education is declining while our wealth disparity gap is widening. Ergo, while you can tout the most basic correlations such as the relationship between a more educated populace and higher median earnings on a global scale, a more specific correlation within the American educational system is that more college graduates isn't translating to higher median purchasing power, or a more robust middle class. This is easily observed by what I already mentioned which was the truth the average value of the college education is declining, and has been for over a decade (this article from 2008):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121623686919059307

(3) Meanwhile, the cost of education has simultaneously increased 400% over the past three decades:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/college-bubble-ends/534915/
*Note: Understand The Atlantic is a famously left-leaning thought paper (not radically liberal).
The Atlantic said:
For the past few decades, the unstoppable increase in college tuition has been a fact of life, like death and taxes. The sticker price of American college increased nearly 400 percent in the last 30 years, while median household income growth was relatively flat. Student debt soared to more than $1 trillion, the result of loans to cover the difference.

Several people—with varying degrees of expertise in higher-ed economics—have predicted that it’s all a bubble, destined to burst. Now after decades of expansion, just about every meaningful statistic—including the number of college students, the growth of tuition costs, and even the total number of colleges—is going down, or at least growing more slowly.

First, the annual growth rate of college tuition is at its lowest rate on record. Second, the annual growth rate of student debt is lower than any time in the last decade. Third, the number of college enrollees has declined for five consecutive years. Fourth, the college premium—the extra income one should expect from getting a bachelor’s degree—is higher than it was in the 1990s, but it's stopped growing this century for young workers. Altogether, the numbers paint a clear picture: The higher-education market is not bursting, like a popped soap bubble; but it is leaking, like a pierced balloon.

What’s going on? The explanation is a little bit of weak demand, a little bit of over-supply, a big crackdown on for-profit colleges, and, perhaps, a subtle shift in culture.

1. The college pipeline is drying up.

Data: Education Department
The United States is running out of teenagers.

For two decades, college enrollment grew and grew, bolstered by the coming-of-age of the enormous Millennial generation. But today, the number of young people going to college is in decline. It’s not that today’s teenagers hate higher education; the share of recent high school graduates going on to college has barely budged. Instead, there are simply fewer recent high school grads overall, due to declining birth rates. More than half of colleges and universities say their number of students has declined.

2. There are too many colleges.

Data: Education Department
In the last three decades, higher education has been one of the economy’s most unstoppable growth sectors. In booms and busts alike, the number of two- and four-year colleges kept rising, increasing by more than 30 percent between 1990 and 2010, according to the Education Department.

But now, schools are closing. The number of colleges in the U.S. has fallen for four straight years, and the rate of decline is accelerating, as you can see in the graph above. (The graph measures institutions that give out federal aid, which is a useful proxy.) For decades, population growth after World War II fed the demand for new colleges. But with a relatively strong economy, combined with political and social pressure to restrain tuition growth, colleges are finding it hard to attract students at an ever-rising price point. Last year was the worst year for school closings this century.

What’s more, with fewer teens going to school, colleges are losing their pricing power and offering discounts to fill the beds and lecture seats. Hundreds of thousands of adults returned to school during and immediately after the Great Recession, using the downtime to buff up on skills to serve them during the recovery. But now adults are working more and studying less. The New York Times reports that at some colleges—particularly small, private nonprofit schools—the discounts are “so deep that, while their sticker prices appear to be rising ahead of the inflation rate, the schools are actually seeing their net tuition revenue decline.”

3. The bubble that’s popping isn’t American colleges, overall—it’s for-profit colleges.

Enrollment at for-profit institutions quadrupled in the first decade of this century, to 1.7 million, at one point accounting for 10 percent of US college students. But they were targeted by education advocates and the Obama administration for their low graduation rates and high student debt and defaults. These schools, some of which ran downright scummy businesses to collect government aid without providing much of an education, often catered to adults trying to update their skills in a fallow economy. So in the last few years, they have faced a double-whammy: a healthy job market took away their student demand, and a federal-government crackdown took away their business.

The for-profit implosion has been as dramatic as its rise. Between the 2010 peak and 2015, enrollment at private for-profit colleges decreased by about 40 percent, or 600,000 annual students. (In the same period, enrollment at public colleges and universities only decreased by 4 percent.) Federal loans for undergraduates attending for-profit colleges have also declined by 40 percent. The business model of gobbling up federal money in exchange for delivering a worthless education is drying up. That’s a positive development that is playing an outsized role in negative headlines about American higher ed. After all, research has shown that graduates of for-profit schools see no average benefit in the labor market.

What’s the implication for the next generation of college students? It’s possible that we’re seeing a brief, perfect storm with three driving factors—a dearth of teenagers, a growing economy, and the quick implosion of for-profit colleges. These are all measurable forces. But it’s also possible that something less quantifiable has changed—for example, that families have become savvier higher-ed shoppers, or that years of public outcry about tuition costs and student debt have encouraged more public universities to rein in their costs.

I’m most interested in how universities use these fallow years to experiment with technology and new ways of delivering education at a cheaper price. For years, colleges and universities were charmed beneficiaries of both demography, with climbing teenage populations, and economics, with a weak economy with growing needs for skilled workers. It’s a truism in economics that most technological change in any industry takes place not during the boom times, but during the downturns, when firms have to be clever to survive. Let’s see if American colleges are smart enough to adapt to the new normal.
 
Another by The Atlantic-- what's college good for?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/

So, when you ask me, "what is your plan for bringing down costs?" My answer is a simple one.

NOTHING.

No, really, that's a perfectly fine solution. It's that or, as I have suggested, we remedy the deteriorating standards of our education.

You can see above that the market is already beginning to correct itself. People are realizing that we are producing too many college graduates in what has become a capitalist Ponzi scheme where we import our laborers to fill the jobs so many of these native teenagers should be doing themselves. You Swedes have only begun to learn what a remarkable stress this presents to the overall system, as well as the native class and its wealth spread, but you have much, much, much more to learn. The illegal immigrants from our Southwest border are functioning as caulk to stem the bleeding from this pierced balloon, but the root cause goes on unaddressed.

Finally, we are beginning to witness a market correction as people realize that college doesn't produce a magical cornucopia of wealthy livelihoods as your errant argument rooted in broad correlations like college graduate rates and median salaries has suggested. The marketplace doesn't care about or answer to abstract pie charts. It bears out the reality of employee value and profit in the specfic. Thus, as I stated, one of the major market driving forces behind this surfeit in supply has been the attitude that "every kid needs to go to college". No, they don't. Every kid doesn't need to go to college. Every kid needs to maximize his value. That may or may not call for a path through higher education.

(4) Often, it doesn't, especially when higher education is turning out useless kids without real value because they haven't learned anything. That's why the market is slowly waking up and correcting this attitude hellbent on producing an oversupply of colleges and kids with college diplomas. Observe a welcome trend accompanying this welcome development:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news...-humanities-majors-gains-liberal-arts-degrees
Humanities majors are finally on the decline; well, except in those 2-years and community collleges that Bernie wants to fund that already possess our least talented (and often least motivated) students. Nevertheless, it's a welcome change.

Unfortunately, even less robust and more useless fields like "Communications" are proportionately on the rise among humanities. This is the major that has famously played host to professional athletes over the years who needed a safe space where they could get a passing grade so they could make the university a bundle of cash at the field house. Until that is corrected the average American diplomas will struggle to gain value; especially within the humanities division.

We are also seeing a higher proportion of diplomas awarded by public institutions than private institutions. That should make a wannabe socialist Swede happy, shouldn't it? That is, of course, unless he stops to realize that our average diploma was more valuable when it was more likely to be from a private institution three decades ago. Turns out...public schools don't turn out the P4P earners that private institutions do. Nonetheless, both have their place. It's simply that the public schools should be limited. We don't need every college to be free.

(5) I'm speaking to standards. Know why simply graduating more people from college isn't a magical prescription to increase their value, or more philosophically, to increase their population's actual education level? Standards. If you lower the standards going forward, then have you really gotten more educated? Not really. You could retroactively impose the weakened standards, and what you had before was actually more educated than what you have now.

This is observed the major decline in the average American student's performance at the secondary level:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/

Despite that our children are more educated than any previous generation [#2] this "higher level of education" doesn't mean much-- their proficiency in objective metrics has plummeted at their respective grade levels:
https://edreform.com/2016/04/a-majority-of-u-s-12th-graders-lack-proficiency/
Kids coming out of most public high schools in the 1950's used to have at least 2-3 years in Latin.

This has been a long and slow erosion of standards in schools because we're too scared to tell people, "Hey! It's not me, the teacher, or my misapprehension of a 'learning disability', or a misunderstanding of your snowflake kid's ephemeral genius-- your kid is failing because he's a dunce who won't study", and "No, he shouldn't go to college...he should head to the lumber mill."


(6) Ironically, notice that Education was one of the hardest hit humanities above while Communication was soaring? Well, as the demand for these "more educated" idiots increases in our workforce, it's areas like Education that actually are growing the fastest and require more workers:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/1-changes-in-the-american-workplace/

Again, why the disconnect between what we are producing and what we need? You want us to spend all this taxpayer money, send a billion more kids to school, and for what? So that our public universities continue to remove the most meaningful and useful curriculum to spare these little snowflakes' feelings? This is literally happening at institutions across the country including in my own state's public system:
https://edsource.org/2017/cal-state...-requirement-allows-other-math-courses/585595
Michigan is another:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/06/michigan-state-drops-college-algebra-requirement

Furthermore, I'm not even talking about GenEd within the college curriculum itself. Some colleges are banishing standardized testing like the SAT/ACT from their admissions officers, and some are actually moving to remove math and science proficiency from both admissions & graduation criteria altogether so that no imbecile anywhere has to feel the sting of being told "you're wrong" objectively and definitively:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-chicago-sat-act-20180614-story.html

I would love to boast the education rates that your Scandinavian countries, or some of the southeast Asian countries like Japan and South Korea boast, but that isn't the disease within American academia. The disease is our soft gloves approach. We aren't producing students who are actually educated, and often we aren't producing the ones educated in what our market needs.

So what is the value in making more? We need to make our colleges more efficient, and we need them to do a better job of producing workers skilled in disciplines that will actually yield them employment.

BTW, I fully supported Obama's student loan debt forgiveness policy, and supported the judge who ordered Devos in that lawsuit into implementing it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfr...evos-to-forgive-150-million-of-student-loans/
Student Loan Forgiveness: Criteria
According to the Education Department, to qualify for automatic closed school discharge, a borrower must meet the following criteria:
  • was enrolled when the school closed; or
  • withdrew not more than 120 days before the school closed; or
  • if approved by the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), withdrew more than 120 days before the school closed; and
  • did not enroll at another Title IV-eligible school within three years of the date the borrower’s prior school closed.
Real conservatives, not Trumptilians, have no problem with rational solutions like that.

Finally, don't talk to me about Bernie three-houses Sanders. He and his socialist ilk, Ocasio-Cortez, are so overwhelmed by basic facts and figures they believe the DoD has enough spare cash just lying on the floor it could fund their health care travesties:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...e-for-all-could-be-paid-for-by-pentagon-waste
For the better of the country I think those two should be forced to take a 101 class in Microsoft Excel and accounting.

Shitting out 10 million words isn't like breathing for me. I suspect you weren't prepared for this. Oh, and the timing of this couldn't be more perfect to the correct the "sophistry" being regurgitated by a bunch of wannabe McGoverns in here:
Dow soars more than 1,050 points, its biggest point gain in history, recovering from days of losses
Pay attention to the fundamentals. They'll treat you better.
 
i just made $50 in 5 minutes on zuck. i know it is peanuts but i will take scalps like this. they add up.


Screenshot_20181228-140720.png
 
i just made $50 in 5 minutes on zuck. i know it is peanuts but i will take scalps like this. they add up.


Screenshot_20181228-140720.png
Playing a dangerous game with FB; I'm playing against Snap despite their boom today. I got out of my Tesla short on the open with his new "oversight" directors announcement of Larry Ellison and a Black Female HR specialist. Should have just bought into it but I didn't have the liquidity to feel confident :(.
 
Playing a dangerous game with FB; I'm playing against Snap despite their boom today. I got out of my Tesla short on the open with his new "oversight" directors announcement of Larry Ellison and a Black Female HR specialist. Should have just bought into it but I didn't have the liquidity to feel confident :(.

I was telling my buddy earlier this week that I was looking at Snap and he said not to. It is up 20% or so on the week. It ain't coming back but it will kick around and have its pops.

Facebook is undervalued. And yeah, day trading volatile stock options is indeed a dangerous game.

$
 
The Zionist state is bafflingly overt in it's racism.

I would give very steep odds against him actually being Jewish. Jewish persons generally aren't so enamored with ethnonationalism and scientific racism. Considering I've never heard him claim to be such until very recently, I would venture to guess that he's just using the claim to hedge against criticism.
 
Also, how in the FUCK is SnapChat still gaining ground?

It's the worst. Slow, glitchy, and unexciting.

I guess it makes sense being popular with high school-aged kids, though, since you can send pictures and do funny shit during class.
 
Predictably vapid response. Thought I would first hone in on the ignorance inherent to your response with this line highlighted in red near the end.

First, you're wrong, I have demonstrated frustration at the ineffectiveness of the stock buybacks, and the fact it only helps the class of people most who need it least; however, second, and much more important is to highlight your astounding lack of comprehension. Stock buybacks aren't "free stuff" or "entitlement". Stock buybacks are when businesses, through their hard labor earning revenue, use that revenue to buy back a greater portion of their publicly traded companies. Nothing there is gained for free. It isn't purchased with another person's money. Nobody is whining that the going market rate for their shares is too high, and needs to be artificially reduced with government subsidy. How could anyone take anything you say seriously when you can't even comprehend concepts as rudimentary as these?

I can discern from this you don't have the faculties to unpack the acquired knowledge ingrained in my post, and I'm not surprised that you aren't accustomed to dealing with this, but that's okay, I'll slow down, and "really spell out" the concepts I tried imparting to you.

(1) The #1 cost for college and universities is staff salary and benefits. During the past few decades, the average payroll has skyrocketed due to academic capitalism with phenomena like professor poaching I highlighted in that post (you never addressed this). As you can see even in the most recent year their salaries are outpacing this inflation that has you so alarmed-- so why not professor salaries? Again, when you have a class of people who almost wholly produce no direct material value there is cause to be concerned that they are being overpaid. Bringing down the cost of tuition entails bringing down the primary cost that constitutes it. You offered zero proposals or solutions. You just want to make it "free" which is another way of saying you want taxpayers to continue footing this uncontrolled, growing cost.

(2) Look at your OECD figures from the Business Insider article. As I pointed out to you, the value of a college education has declined concomitantly with the very statistic cited in that article; 33% of Americans were college graduates in 1995, while 39% were in 2012, and yet the average value of the American college education is declining while our wealth disparity gap is widening. Ergo, while you can tout the most basic correlations such as the relationship between a more educated populace and higher median earnings on a global scale, a more specific correlation within the American educational system is that more college graduates isn't translating to higher median purchasing power, or a more robust middle class. This is easily observed by what I already mentioned which was the truth the average value of the college education is declining, and has been for over a decade (this article from 2008):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121623686919059307

(3) Meanwhile, the cost of education has simultaneously increased 400% over the past three decades:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/college-bubble-ends/534915/
*Note: Understand The Atlantic is a famously left-leaning thought paper (not radically liberal).
Another by The Atlantic-- what's college good for?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/

So, when you ask me, "what is your plan for bringing down costs?" My answer is a simple one.

NOTHING.

No, really, that's a perfectly fine solution. It's that or, as I have suggested, we remedy the deteriorating standards of our education.

You can see above that the market is already beginning to correct itself. People are realizing that we are producing too many college graduates in what has become a capitalist Ponzi scheme where we import our laborers to fill the jobs so many of these native teenagers should be doing themselves. You Swedes have only begun to learn what a remarkable stress this presents to the overall system, as well as the native class and its wealth spread, but you have much, much, much more to learn. The illegal immigrants from our Southwest border are functioning as caulk to stem the bleeding from this pierced balloon, but the root cause goes on unaddressed.

Finally, we are beginning to witness a market correction as people realize that college doesn't produce a magical cornucopia of wealthy livelihoods as your errant argument rooted in broad correlations like college graduate rates and median salaries has suggested. The marketplace doesn't care about or answer to abstract pie charts. It bears out the reality of employee value and profit in the specfic. Thus, as I stated, one of the major market driving forces behind this surfeit in supply has been the attitude that "every kid needs to go to college". No, they don't. Every kid doesn't need to go to college. Every kid needs to maximize his value. That may or may not call for a path through higher education.

(4) Often, it doesn't, especially when higher education is turning out useless kids without real value because they haven't learned anything. That's why the market is slowly waking up and correcting this attitude hellbent on producing an oversupply of colleges and kids with college diplomas. Observe a welcome trend accompanying this welcome development:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news...-humanities-majors-gains-liberal-arts-degrees
Humanities majors are finally on the decline; well, except in those 2-years and community collleges that Bernie wants to fund that already possess our least talented (and often least motivated) students. Nevertheless, it's a welcome change.

Unfortunately, even less robust and more useless fields like "Communications" are proportionately on the rise among humanities. This is the major that has famously played host to professional athletes over the years who needed a safe space where they could get a passing grade so they could make the university a bundle of cash at the field house. Until that is corrected the average American diplomas will struggle to gain value; especially within the humanities division.

We are also seeing a higher proportion of diplomas awarded by public institutions than private institutions. That should make a wannabe socialist Swede happy, shouldn't it? That is, of course, unless he stops to realize that our average diploma was more valuable when it was more likely to be from a private institution three decades ago. Turns out...public schools don't turn out the P4P earners that private institutions do. Nonetheless, both have their place. It's simply that the public schools should be limited. We don't need every college to be free.

(5) I'm speaking to standards. Know why simply graduating more people from college isn't a magical prescription to increase their value, or more philosophically, to increase their population's actual education level? Standards. If you lower the standards going forward, then have you really gotten more educated? Not really. You could retroactively impose the weakened standards, and what you had before was actually more educated than what you have now.

This is observed the major decline in the average American student's performance at the secondary level:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/

Despite that our children are more educated than any previous generation [#2] this "higher level of education" doesn't mean much-- their proficiency in objective metrics has plummeted at their respective grade levels:
https://edreform.com/2016/04/a-majority-of-u-s-12th-graders-lack-proficiency/
Kids coming out of most public high schools in the 1950's used to have at least 2-3 years in Latin.

This has been a long and slow erosion of standards in schools because we're too scared to tell people, "Hey! It's not me, the teacher, or my misapprehension of a 'learning disability', or a misunderstanding of your snowflake kid's ephemeral genius-- your kid is failing because he's a dunce who won't study", and "No, he shouldn't go to college...he should head to the lumber mill."


(6) Ironically, notice that Education was one of the hardest hit humanities above while Communication was soaring? Well, as the demand for these "more educated" idiots increases in our workforce, it's areas like Education that actually are growing the fastest and require more workers:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/1-changes-in-the-american-workplace/

Again, why the disconnect between what we are producing and what we need? You want us to spend all this taxpayer money, send a billion more kids to school, and for what? So that our public universities continue to remove the most meaningful and useful curriculum to spare these little snowflakes' feelings? This is literally happening at institutions across the country including in my own state's public system:
https://edsource.org/2017/cal-state...-requirement-allows-other-math-courses/585595
Michigan is another:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/06/michigan-state-drops-college-algebra-requirement

Furthermore, I'm not even talking about GenEd within the college curriculum itself. Some colleges are banishing standardized testing like the SAT/ACT from their admissions officers, and some are actually moving to remove math and science proficiency from both admissions & graduation criteria altogether so that no imbecile anywhere has to feel the sting of being told "you're wrong" objectively and definitively:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-chicago-sat-act-20180614-story.html

I would love to boast the education rates that your Scandinavian countries, or some of the southeast Asian countries like Japan and South Korea boast, but that isn't the disease within American academia. The disease is our soft gloves approach. We aren't producing students who are actually educated, and often we aren't producing the ones educated in what our market needs.

So what is the value in making more? We need to make our colleges more efficient, and we need them to do a better job of producing workers skilled in disciplines that will actually yield them employment.

BTW, I fully supported Obama's student loan debt forgiveness policy, and supported the judge who ordered Devos in that lawsuit into implementing it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfr...evos-to-forgive-150-million-of-student-loans/

Real conservatives, not Trumptilians, have no problem with rational solutions like that.

Finally, don't talk to me about Bernie three-houses Sanders. He and his socialist ilk, Ocasio-Cortez, are so overwhelmed by basic facts and figures they believe the DoD has enough spare cash just lying on the floor it could fund their health care travesties:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...e-for-all-could-be-paid-for-by-pentagon-waste
For the better of the country I think those two should be forced to take a 101 class in Microsoft Excel and accounting.

Shitting out 10 million words isn't like breathing for me. I suspect you weren't prepared for this. Oh, and the timing of this couldn't be more perfect to the correct the "sophistry" being regurgitated by a bunch of wannabe McGoverns in here:
Dow soars more than 1,050 points, its biggest point gain in history, recovering from days of losses
Pay attention to the fundamentals. They'll treat you better.
I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around what exactly it is you’re arguing. You call my reply vapid yet you did not substantively address any of the supported claims in it. I made a case for how making college tuition free would improve the economy and society in a few very distinct ways, but you disagree.

As far as I can tell, and it’s very hard to decipher, you’re arguing the following (correct me if I’m wrong):

1. More people are having college degrees, but that hadn’t stopped inequality of wealth between the middle class and the top
2. College degrees are worth less than they used to be (implying they are not worth getting)
3. Teachers will leave if college becomes tuition free (you don’t explain why that is)
4. Rising costs of tuition are to be blamed on faculty salaries and benefits
5. Education outcomes are getting worse
6. We should do nothing and let me market correct itself

Almost all of your claims are descriptive, and you make no prescriptive ones besides “doing nothing” which is the real problem here. With that said, I will try to address your points and why I don’t think they are accurate.

The Atlantic article you cite for the 400% increase in college tuition outlines some important factors for that increase, which are less college graduates, more colleges and an increase in for-profit colleges. At least two of those three supports the argument for tuition free college. In fact, it says that over half of colleges are experiencing a decline in graduates. You also mention that most spending is used on faculty and staff. Topuniversities specificly mentions Harvard, but we would need more numbers of the broader details, and as we already know, there's much more than just faculty expenses that plays into it. However if the cost of Sanders plan of tuition free college is your concern, then it’s already been established that the program would cost $70 billion a year, which again is 1/22th of the Trump tax cuts. What’s going on now is a price hike based that is essentially leaving the students with the bill and the economy at risk long term. Obviously private schools would still exist with tuition free college legislation, if that is what someone would want. Many countries around the world are already doing this, including Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Slovenia, Austria and more. Btw, most have better education outcomes than the US, so you cannot argue that tuition free college legislation de facto lowers education outcomes.

One of your main claims is that the value of a college education is falling. I’ll be willing to grant you that the value of a college degree might have declined since the 80’s and 90’s but there is a distinction that is of utmost importance to make about a decline in value, and not being valuable. Is still valuable, and much more valuable than not having one. So if your argument is that “college education is useless" then you're way off base. Also, let's just get this out of the way. Education level correlate with higher earnings and lower unemployment in all the data available. I know the difference between correlation and causation, but you simply cannot handwave this just because you feel like it.

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https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/...2017-01-03/education-income-and-wealth_SE.pdf

You make a cursery remark about the absolute number of college degrees going up from 33% in 1995 to 38% in 2012, yet that wealth inequality has still risen in that period. Here you’re insinuating that an increase in education doesn’t help curb the inequality, however you fail to realise two primary factors. The first is that while the absolute number might have risen marginally (and has begun to decline again as per the Atlantic article), the relative requirement of a college degree in most fields of work have increased more. So the NEED for secondary higher education has risen higher than the rate of graduation. Secondly, there is a gap between poor and wealthy in college education, and low income families have declined in relative college education rates.

“Whether or not we believe that higher education is a civil right, an essential element of a full democratic society, or a fundamental requirement for achieving the American dream,11 this Indicators Report shows that higher education opportunity and outcomes remain highly inequitable across family income groups. Moreover, on many indicators, gaps are larger now than in the past. The disinvestment of state funds for public colleges and universities since the 1980s and the declining value of federal student grant aid have aided in the creation of a higher education system that is stained with inequality.”
http://pellinstitute.org/downloads/...ty_in_the_US_2017_Historical_Trend_Report.pdf

“This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children’s wealth backgrounds, although the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today’s children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.”
http://fabianpfeffer.com/wp-content/uploads/Pfeffer2018.pdf

“American society reflects considerable class immobility, much of which may be explained by the wide gaps in college completion rates between economically advantaged and disadvantaged groups of students. First, we discuss the factors that lead to unequal college completion rates and introduce assets as an explanation often ignored by stratification scholars. We then discuss how a legacy of wealth inequality has led to wealthy students having an advantage at the financial aid bargaining table over low-income and minority students.”
https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=50314

Misrepresenting my argument shows a lack of integrity. What needs to be addressed is the disparity between high and low income families and access to education, besides student debt which is a main factor in higher interest rates and lower long term wealth. Even with that, as I said, it’s only a small part of the puzzle. There are so many factors that goes into the wealth inequality, and that is why this was only one of the many suggestions I put forth. No one is actually arguing it'll fix the issue on its own, but it will definitely help bring the low income families into the middle class and make it stronger.

Looking further, the changing economic landscape demands more higher education graduates. Georgetown University put out a report in that regard and here are some of their key findings about which changes will occur by 2020. I will let it speak for itself:

“By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the economy will require postsecondary education and training beyond high school.”
“The United States will fall short by 5 million workers with postsecondary education—at the current production rate—by 2020.”

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Recovery2020.ES_.Web_.pdf

Your rant about how having more people graduate from college is a “Ponzi scheme” and that us “Swedes” have only just begun to feel the consequences of importing immigrants for labor jobs that teenagers should be doing is pretty remarkably ignorant. It shows a clear lack of understand of Scandinavian politics, and also, I’m Danish not Swedish. It’s two different countries. It's also an entirely different tangent of points not relevant to the conversation at hand. The rest about “socialism”, humanism and communication and so on is just straight up fluff and so emotionally driven that is not even worth responding to. None of contemporary society would exist without humanism, art and social sciences. There is more to this world than being a drone.

What I most agree with is your argument about standards and how basic education is suffering in the US. There is a very interesting discussion to be had here, but unfortunately your take on is plagued by ideology and quite frankly somewhat vacuous. It's also a seperate point to whether or not tuition becomes free, but that's been the trend here. If that was a given, then by your logic the inverse should be true as well and exploding tuition fees and the increase in for-profit schools wouldn’t coincide with worse comparative outcomes. However, most of those outcomes are measured on 4-8th graders so it’s a tad different as soon as you reach college, bachelor and PhD levels. That's starting to put it into context but that is another topic of discussion that would require a long time to unpack.

So to revisit your initial points, which I think it's fair to say that I have addressed.

1. More people have been getting college degrees, but the trend has either stagnated or declined. Inequality of access to education is still a major issue and one that tuition free college would help amend. This alone will not solve wealth disparity, but it will be a piece of the puzzle and bring more low income families into the middle class.

2. College degrees are worth less than they used to be yes, but they are increasingly important to get in the changing economic landscape and will be a requirement for 65% of the workforce in 2020. Having higher education also correlates with higher median income and lower unemployment.

3. There's no data to back up that education will suffer and staff move to other countries if colleges become tuition free (obviously there will still be private colleges, like Harvard).

4. Rising costs is based on a mixture of factors, including faculty salaries and benefits, for profit colleges, less government funding, more colleges and expenditure on research and development. Making college tuition free is extremely affordable and would shift the burden from the students themselves, haulting the alarming increase in student debt. Something absolutely has to be done about it.

5. Education outcomes in the US have been getting worse over time in certain age groups, but that cannot be attributed to tuition free college. If anything, the decrease in government grants and increase in for profit colleges, along with rising costs, haven't had a positive impact. I am not attributing it to that, but I'm saying that it's much more complicated and points to trends in society as a whole.

6. Doing nothing is not very smart to say the least.
 
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