171–180 of 370 posts
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If the dealer is buying at 80% and selling at 110% of some number then surely that means that number is not actually fair market value?
I am disputing the existence of that number. If two parties enter into an agreement to exchange X for Y, and no one has a gun to their head, then the market value of X is Y at that time for that party, and the market value of Y is X at that time for that party.
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It’s non-dischargeable so that it can be offered to people with no collateral and who are otherwise entirely un-creditworthy. Not surprisingly, this results in high delinquency rates! The alternative is most people wouldn’t qualify for this level of debt, you would more highly subsidize cheaper public education, and private universities would have to rely entirely on endowments to provide financial aid to people who…
> if you were to limit the amount of educational debt someone could take on — for example by only making the first $20k non-dischargeable. It would fix the delinquency problem, drastically lower the total annual student loan rate, and cause private tuition prices overall to decline, but it would be called institutional racism. The solution to structural racism is more scholarship money, not more debt. Pell and Social…
“When the economy slowed, defaults went up across income spectrums. But while the chance of a low-income borrower defaulting increased from 6 percent pre-crisis to 12 percent post-crisis, the chance of a high-income borrower defaulting went from almost zero to around 5 or 6 percent. And the latter group was defaulting on bigger loans.” [1]
I think the homeownership rate over time also tells a story, but perhaps this is dwarfed by the rate of sales and the collapse of prices causing ~25% of houses to actually be underwater.
However if you look at Mortgage Origination by Risk Score over time [2] and Debt-to-Income ratio over time [3] there is truth to the claim that the overall portfolio of homeowners also changed in the lead up to the crisis.
[1] - https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/rethinking-how...
[2] - https://infogram.com/1pwez02vj1mld0fvlzvmn3r1k9s9y7x5zgp
[3] - https://infogram.com/1pk6ve560vyl93c97kvpwy5dymt3kz1rd5g
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Why is "do a coding bootcamp" the common refrain from tech workers trying to help non-tech people?
Because the barrier to entry is still quite low. While maybe not "Anyone who could spell HTML could get a job" low, as said in another comment here, it's still so low that I'd wager a decently clever person with a good 3 month bootcamp can get a _entry-level_ job.
I'm not sure the author's suggestion that potential students be diverted to trades/coding bootcampts etc., will solve too much, and instead may simply shift the problem into those trade industries as well. Somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000 students earn a bachelors degree each year. Let's say 25% of students should be diverted into trade schools instead. That will mean an additional 500,000 student per year ente…
That is not so bad to depress some of those wages, my plumber is making $2k/Day. I don't know too many people making that kind of money even in tech, let alone other disciplines!
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It's a good question: you can see a fairly granular breakdown of the workforce by industry [here]( https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm ). There are about 5.1 million people working in "Computer and mathematical occupations", the majority of whom are developers.
I created a tree map out of it: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/americans.html Previously, one with all Germans: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/Germany.html
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So marginal incremental improvement in drive-train technology and electronic doodads? That's how I read that list you gave me. Cars these days don't age any better than cars from 20yr ago or the more modern cars of the 90s. I guess anti-corrosion has improved but it hasn't improved by that much. You still have plenty of vehicles that repeatedly rust out in some spot because the salt gets flung there and the surface c…
Average age of cars on the road is 11 years vs 8 years in the 90s...which means cars are on average lasting 37.5% longer than 20 years ago. And that might be a lagging indicator.
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But how long are those visas good for? If it's multiple years, then we really need to count how many active H1Bs there are, not the number issued yearly. I just Googled and found this article: https://qz.com/949589/the-h-1b-visa-cap-tells-you-very-littl... ... which indicates that about 500,000 H1B visas are currently valid. If those were to all go to tech workers, that would be about 1/7 of all software developers,…
There are a lot more technical jobs that require a degree than 3m software developers. There are dozens of different types of engineering and scientific domains apart from software development.
Honestly I think even the quoted 85,000 number would be enough to move the needle, but 250,000 certainly would be.
Just a couple of "thought experiments"... if there are 3M software developers with on average a 20 year career, about 150,000 would be entering the workforce at any given time. If it's true that H1Bs compete with entry level workers for jobs, 85,000 visas would certainly have a felt impact.
Also, about why I think even 85,000 would affect the entire market... even a relatively small amount of additional workforce can shift the balance of market forces significantly. Again, as a thought experiment, let's say there are 100,000 jobs for software engineers and those software engineers are worth $200,000 to the companies that employ them. For simplicity, let's say additional software engineers beyond 100,000 are absolutely worthless to the company. Assuming we have 95,000 software engineers looking for jobs, they find themselves highly in demand and able to negotiate from a strong position for high salary, benefits, and so on. If we add another 10,000 engineers somehow, from any source (including increases in the local training of engineers), suddenly there are more engineers than the market demands, and a race to the bottom could begin (assuming all engineers were equal). Obviously there is also a skill distribution so the most highly skilled engineers would be less affected than those less skilled, but as you get closer to the bottom of the distribution, you'd be more affected by the changes to negotiating power even if you're more skilled than some of the new entrants.
Obviously the above is not a rigorous analysis, which could and should be done, but is just a thought experiment to show that it's POSSIBLE that a small number of new entrants could affect the market.
See also https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macr...
If anyone knows of good resources for estimating the supply/demand curves for software engineers, I'd be interested in reading them.
One thing that I noticed in this article and charts was the unprecedented growth of auto loans. They too have skyrocketed. That seems like another "bubble" waiting to happen.
And now I’m wondering if the same dynamic is happening in education: schools increase tuition because govt-subsidized loans are easily accessible.
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I don’t understand your use of the term “fair market value” in quotes, implying that it’s not the actual market value. If the seller and buyer are not under duress while selling and buying, why is the dealer not buying and selling at the market value?
Typically because there is an education and need asymmetry between the buyer and seller in a lot of these cases. If the car is maybe worth $3K cash, but a dealer can lease it to someone for $4K by requiring no money down but high interest rates on the loan/monthly payments, where does one say the "market value" is? The dealer is getting $4K (or more in the cases where they repossess the car and re-lease it) because t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how long are those visas good for? If it's multiple years, then we really need to count how many active H1Bs there are, not the number issued yearly. I just Googled and found this article: https://qz.com/949589/the-h-1b-visa-cap-tells-you-very-littl... ... which indicates that about 500,000 H1B visas are currently valid. If those were to all go to tech workers, that would be about 1/7 of all software developers,…
There are a lot more technical jobs that require a degree than 3m software developers. There are dozens of different types of engineering and scientific domains apart from software development.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/h1b-visa-issue-explained-m...