Many posts here express dismay at Airbnb's selective disregard for the law.
Companies often ignore laws when it is expected to be profitable. It's a simple matter of risk management. And it is a straightforward consequence of our economic and legal system.
Then we should change the equation. Maybe if we started prosecuting executives that break the law instead of just fining the companies, we would start having companies that follow the law.
That's obvious and well known. Perhaps I should have phrased it as "their ethics towards their customers". Better now? I'm not discussing any of the laws involved.
> I'm two years before heading off to university, but I have no motivation to learn the things that are being taught at college.
Personally, that was a really tough time for me in my life.
> I chose to study the subjects that I thought I would enjoy, but sadly this isn't true.
That happened to me too.
> I'm assuming that if I had made other choices for subjects, I'd be in a similar problem.
Maybe; it's hard to know where other paths would have led.
> Maths is one of the subjects I'm studying, and although I enjoy maths itself, I'm not enjoying what I learn in school.
I had that same experience. That's why I studied maths on my own, outside of school (I consider programming a subset of maths.)
> I can't be motivated to put the work in, so that I can get good results at the end of the year.
Same thing happened to me.
> I spend my free time programming or researching instead,
That's also what I did. Studying philosophy also helped alot :-)
> but I can't continue doing this if I want to get the A-levels I need to enter a half-decent university.
I found my high school to be very oppressive, so instead I went on academic strike and programmed for fun. I almost flunked out of high school, and only got into one university that has a tradition of accepting everyone.
It was all for the best. I'm not saying you should do that. But, it was the path I needed to take. You can live a wonderful life regardless of what academic success you achieve or fail to achieve.
Older people have a bad habit of advising younger people they need to do very specific actions in order to achieve very specific goals.
In this ancient tradition, I will now offer you very specific advice ;-)
(1) Ask yourself: do you desire the goals you are told to desire. What are your goals? What do you actually want from life?
(2) Once you have your goals in mind, your advisors will usually be conservative. That is, their advice usually describes one path to your goal --- not the only path. For example, if you want to go to a half-decent university and an advisor tells you, "you should try to get straight A's" --- then your advisor is being conservative. Yes, if you get straight A's it will be easier to get into a half-decent university. But it's not the only way. Furthermore, younger people are often more creative in finding ways to sidestep tradition.
(3) Ask for lots of advice, but only listen to advice skeptically.
> Are there any ways by which I could motivate myself to study more?
I would caution against trying to coerce yourself into being more motivated. Follow your own path. When people give you advice it's up to you to take it or leave it. Even this advice.
The interesting cases are pieces which cite a large number of verifiable truths, but then skew specific bits. I think I referenced my Karen Hudes rebuttal on this post already, if not, it's in HN's search from a few weeks back.
Ruppert's another case. His history's solid. His conclusions a bit shakier (at least for the timeline).
I am disappointed by the shallow analysis of the article. It doesn't consider the monopsonistic effects that would result from 100% government-paid education.
Isn't public K-12 school paid by the government (i.e. taxes)? How would the effects be different, including the role of private schools, compared to the collegiate level?
If the government paid for all education, then education would be adapted to suit political / corporate desires (they are the customers in the transaction).
For example, the politicians who control Texas education ensure that all Texas textbooks are ``politically correct.'' Aka censorship. That's what happens when politicians control education.
The pedigree required to work at Starbucks goes up, indeed. Half of my friends with degrees do not have jobs in their respective fields.
Easy federal loans got them into an upside down situation from which they may never recover.
I got paid to go to a public university through scholarship, with money on top of free housing and tuition. I could have paid for college, or probably convinced someone to give me a loan given my career track.
There's way too many people who are destroying value by attending college right now, and the bubble will pop. 12 years to get an art history PHD and manage a gas station is not an efficient use of time or work energy.
(1) America's elite creates a housing bubble
(2) America's elite forecloses on the residents
(3) America's elite buys the houses at low cost, then rents them back to the residents.
While I'm not going to suggest anything conspiratorial, when I first thought about the 'easy mortagages' trend and the fact that the property itself was the collateral, the perverse incentives involved seemed so obvious that I assumed there must be a large mitigating factor I wasn't aware of.
One thing I don't fully understand, why don't the lenders themselves auction of the properties rather than keeping and profiting off the foreclosed properties themselves?
(1b) American taxpayers bailout insolvent securities firms whose whole business is supposedly predicated on competent risk assessment as a core skill yet totally ignored best practices to threaten the entire economy.
(1c) Pays themselves handsome commissions.
(3 addendum) buys the houses at a low cost made so by the bubble they created _with the bailout money of the taxpayers!!!!!_
(4b) destroys communities, defunds schools, further atomizes and disorganizes the modern American society
I think the disconnect between the author and you is that the author has empathy for impoverished people.
Try to understand their plight. They are born poor and die poor. Why? Because they were unlucky enough to be born poor. You were lucky to be born into a family that could afford servants.
Poverty is relative, the servants who worked at my home were paid close if not more than median income India.
The daughter of both cleaner and the cook, went and graduated from a degree college. Guess what my mother who works for an Airline in India as a manager makes less 7.5 dollars per hour.
The word servant conjures a completely wrong image. The difference is not in empathy, its in understanding of economic conditions. India with its excess population, allows cheap labor, not utilizing it is idiotic.
The moral of the article is "it's wrong to exploit the impoverished." It's easy to apply that moral to other cultures and societies, but difficult to apply to one's own.
Indians deny injustice when it gives them servants just like Westerners deny injustice when it gives them iPhones.
Companies often ignore laws when it is expected to be profitable. It's a simple matter of risk management. And it is a straightforward consequence of our economic and legal system.
See this 2012 article "Should Companies Obey the Law If Breaking It Is More Profitable?" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companie...