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i can't tell if you actually think it is simple or not. you and your mother are fortunate for that professional class lawyer who worked pro-bono for no material

i can't tell if you actually think it is simple or not. you and your mother are fortunate for that professional class lawyer who worked pro-bono for no material gain whatsoever.

fzeroracer 8y ago
My point was that none of it was simple. There are many other poor Americans that have had issues pop up like this but are unable to afford or find lawyers to represent them in court. You're absolutely correct that we're lucky that not only did we win the suit but that the lawyer took on the case. Other people aren't as lucky.
- darawk 8y ago
  Is there a reason you couldn't simply have taken out a student loan?
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    I absolutely could've. My college offered student loans to me as a means of paying for my education but if I had $0 to my name upon hitting 18, my life would've been radically different. As I mentioned in another comment a lot of that money went towards helping my family with FAFSA supplementing my school costs. I was effectively responsible for supporting my entire family and given my other health/mental issues at the time I don't know if I would've survived a full time job as well. Suffice to say dealing with a lot of these issues as a kid leaves your outlook fairly bleak without ways of helping yourself. If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt. In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
    - darawk 8y ago
      Right, but had you graduated with that debt, you would have been able to pay it off due to the salary you'd earn with your CS degree, right?
      - girvo 8y ago
        Thus putting him even further behind in the rat-race, where those who weren’t forced into debt due to their poor choice of birth parents (sarcasm, obviously) and circumstance.
        ericd 8y ago
        Do you think the system should be structured so that no one is ever behind anyone else in the "rat race"?
        michaelscott 8y ago
        From the starting point? Absolutely. That's essentially equality of opportunity in a nutshell. What you do with what you've got from a relatively equal starting point is up to you.
        darawk 8y ago
        Some people have higher IQs than other people. Should we equalize that, too?
        ericd 8y ago
        So you'd advocate for eliminating inheritance, free association between people, the choice of where to live, etc? And if you wanted to get more extreme, as a sibling mentions, eliminate heritable differences? Or do you just mean things like free education for all?
      - fzeroracer 8y ago
        It's hard for me to say what would've happened as we drift further and further off into a pretty different hypothetical life but for reference it took me quite a long time post-grad to find a software job. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of looking, but rather that I lived in an area without many opportunities which meant that I would need to be relocated in order to kickstart my career. Eventually I landed on a great company that was willing to do that, but it was a difficult search as an entry-level developer. Would I have been able to pay off my debt? In 5-10 years maybe. That's still a large burden for people to bear, and we're in one of the better paying careers.

i can't tell if you actually think it is simple or not. you and your mother are fortunate for that professional class lawyer who worked pro-bono for no material gain whatsoever.

fzeroracer 8y ago

My point was that none of it was simple. There are many other poor Americans that have had issues pop up like this but are unable to afford or find lawyers to represent them in court. You're absolutely correct that we're lucky that not only did we win the suit but that the lawyer took on the case. Other people aren't as lucky.

darawk 8y ago
Is there a reason you couldn't simply have taken out a student loan?
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  I absolutely could've. My college offered student loans to me as a means of paying for my education but if I had $0 to my name upon hitting 18, my life would've been radically different. As I mentioned in another comment a lot of that money went towards helping my family with FAFSA supplementing my school costs. I was effectively responsible for supporting my entire family and given my other health/mental issues at the time I don't know if I would've survived a full time job as well. Suffice to say dealing with a lot of these issues as a kid leaves your outlook fairly bleak without ways of helping yourself. If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt. In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
  - darawk 8y ago
    Right, but had you graduated with that debt, you would have been able to pay it off due to the salary you'd earn with your CS degree, right?
    - girvo 8y ago
      Thus putting him even further behind in the rat-race, where those who weren’t forced into debt due to their poor choice of birth parents (sarcasm, obviously) and circumstance.
      - ericd 8y ago
        Do you think the system should be structured so that no one is ever behind anyone else in the "rat race"?
        michaelscott 8y ago
        From the starting point? Absolutely. That's essentially equality of opportunity in a nutshell. What you do with what you've got from a relatively equal starting point is up to you.
        darawk 8y ago
        Some people have higher IQs than other people. Should we equalize that, too?
        ericd 8y ago
        So you'd advocate for eliminating inheritance, free association between people, the choice of where to live, etc? And if you wanted to get more extreme, as a sibling mentions, eliminate heritable differences? Or do you just mean things like free education for all?
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      It's hard for me to say what would've happened as we drift further and further off into a pretty different hypothetical life but for reference it took me quite a long time post-grad to find a software job. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of looking, but rather that I lived in an area without many opportunities which meant that I would need to be relocated in order to kickstart my career. Eventually I landed on a great company that was willing to do that, but it was a difficult search as an entry-level developer. Would I have been able to pay off my debt? In 5-10 years maybe. That's still a large burden for people to bear, and we're in one of the better paying careers.