throwaway_law

The pension are presumably insured to cover their negligence and liabilities...including failure to properly notice employers/members of the fund in breach of their duty to do so, which resulted in damages. Otherwise it comes directly from the pension (which isn't just a fund made up of employer contributions, it is a business entity that takes fees from the fund itself)

>If the pension didn't do their duty to warn businesses of the deficit in 2005, it should be on their heads to fund the deficit

The irony is the Pension claimed they couldn't notice the employers at the time (which would have given the opportunity to buy out for 1 Euro) because they would have had to research the contact info for thousands of employers...yet the Pension seems to have no problem doing the research now and noticing these employers of their Million+ Euro liabilities.

a Job isn't the only benefit of an education...an education is a benefit in and of itself. Society benefits from having an educated public. Society does not benefit from being in debt.

Your logic is as follows: if college degree doesn't get a job, then don't go to college.

Your logic breaks down because not going to college isn't going to get you a job either.

>Even if you forgive all of the student loans and make college free, people still won't find jobs based on college.

Having educated unemployed people is bad yes, but its an infinite improvement on millions of educated unemployed people saddled with debt they will never in their life times be able to pay off.

I know its unfair and maybe even disparaging, especially my suggestion they would seed their own thing with bots...but the reality is the social network/SV startup well has been poisoned and so it would be my (our) own fault not to approach these things with a ton of skepticism.

>Today, a new social app is launching. Called Friended...Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors...

That is what it is all about.

>They're selling people a solution to loneliness.

I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.

>OK, so when the reporter specifically asks him if he'd drink the water in front of him, what's his least bad option?

Probably to laugh and say instead of "trying the water" he will see the water is sent to a lab for proper scientific testing and the results published to the public.

>If your best answer is "We are adding diversity to the marketplace", then you're probably doomed. If you aren't better in some way (faster, cheaper, better tech, etc...)

We have seen it over and over in tech though...some small time founder starts something and then a VC back startup eats their lunch and takes the market (of course rewriting history along the way to say they invented/disrupted the market).

The sad truth is the answer to why a customer will choose us over established competitor is because...VC capital/your money. We will use VC capital/your money to out spend/out market our competitor because they can only grow as fast as their revenue, whereas we can artificially grow using your VC money, even to the point we can subsidize the price of our widget which the established competitor can't, we will grow our market share, even if at a loss because at any time we can "flip the switch and its all profit."

>still the largest and most successful company to come out of SF this decade.

That's a lot less reflective of UBER and more reflective of the type of startups SV is trying to take public. Look at any other SV Unicorn that IPO'd...take Twitter that IPO'd in 2013, it turned a profit one year since going public.

>This makes them _de facto_ nondischargable.

I have gotten student loans ($100k+) discharged for clients.

My experience is most people who say student loans are not dischargable have never gone through bankruptcy and have no idea what the process is to discharge regular debts nor student loans. This is true of even some lawyers, who are more than happy to take your fee, but don't know what they are actually doing.

Yes, that is the big tech talking point.

However, the reality is big tech needs customer data, customer data does not need big tech.

Generating wealth from employees, has nothing to do with generating wealth from customer data.

If what is of value is customer data, customers can and should own and control the entity generating the monetary value from their own data.

Although a tangent, its impossible to read this and not ask:

Why aren't all the big tech companies generating revenue from customer data...customer owned?

>In classical education if you don't get a high paying job it's your problem not the university's because they've already been paid.

I don't think that "classical education", in classical education students were able to get part time jobs and pay their own way through school...there we no such things as student loans.

This concept of having to sell off parts of your future productivity at the ripe age of 17-18 is only being conceived because the federal government student loan guarantees and runaway artificial tuition costs supported have already imploded.

Nevertheless, these programs are not paid for/proposed by the universities themselves, but by investors...no matter what the college/university gets paid upfront, and they have no skin in the game.

>I'm more interested in whether the broad coalition in congress exists

Seeing as no "mainstream" political party candidate is running on this platform, I think the answer is no. Of course, I would probably say the same of any campaign issue any mainstream candidate is running on due current political climate of our 2 party system.

Whats interesting is if this candidate won the election, perhaps the 2 parties would have no choice but to concede the issue, if for nothing else to realign themselves with their own constituents and win back their votes. Then again maybe we can extend the market saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" to politics "political parties can remain irrational longer than you can vote."