Many corporations pay so low that people have to be on assistance even though they are gainfully employed. Thus, corporations off-load their costs onto the American taxpayer. This is also true for some people in the US military.
What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that.
I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impossible to get into these schools so why bother. He started the conversation tonight with "I don't think I want to go to MIT anymore." Which broke my heart a little bit - not because I care whether he goes to MIT - but because it you could see his expectations being crushed by reality.
This is the system that we have built for higher education in the United States, and it's incredibly f*cked up.
I don’t know that this is a problem specifically of the US or higher education, just humans. Humans want to have the best, to be the best. There’s only so many “bests”. When competing with millions or billions of other people, the odds you are the best are very low indeed.
I think it was less painful pre-internet, pre-globalization, where you only had to be the best in your town, or your state, and that was pretty dang impressive. Now if you aren’t the best in the world what even are you?
Yes agreed - the internationalization of the college application process has changed everything. The other factor is that when you have such competitiveness, you start seeing a professionalization of the process - so admissions consultants, high-end tutoring.
Simple: he's crushed because he had a dream of going there - he wasn't framing it as "I'm better than everyone else." As I mentioned, it is his dream running into reality. So saying "not being in the 0.1% as a teenager is tacky" is not the right framing because he wasn't thinking about it that way - he just had a dream and now realizes how difficult (and unlikely) it is.
"Second, I also don't get how people trust strangers with intimate details of their thought life."
Pretty simple: legal barriers to revealing that information creates an open space for discussing those thoughts that you don't feel comfortable revealing to friends or family.
That's what I don't get, you have such grear confidence in legal barriers but keep in mind, your therapist also has assistants/staff sometimes, they take notes that could get leaked/stolem, they could get hacked if it is digitally stored,etc...
I mean, some shit I wouldn't even dare speak out loud anywhere near a smartphone or network connected device. These days, you say the wrong thing and they'll put you in a 72hr psych hold and ruin your life (having to explain that to your work/spouse!).
Beyond that, these people are experts at manipulation (to an end they consider good), they could take that information and get you to think in a way that is undesirable to you.it could be life changing but it that change does not have to be positive. Your putting your faith in a lot if humans and a lot of processes and checks working right.
He got the payout of $480m as a settlement for stepping down. But he also got a $1b when Softbank bought out shareholders:
"Neumann led WeWork to a failed attempt at an initial public offering in 2019 and was ousted shortly afterward. As part of the original bailout effort, SoftBank had agreed to buy $3 billion in stock from WeWork investors, including close to $1 billion from Neumann."
VCs talk a game about being ethical, but let's be real - if it works they probably don't care. Uber is a great example of this - the rules can be bent to serve the purpose.
I think that if you have free/easy money, with low risk of a meaningful downside (e.g. going to jail), and there is increasing competition from other VCs with access to the same money, then you greatly increase the risks you're willing to take. It's a game of homeruns, not singles.
So to answer your question, I think this is way they think: "If this goes wrong, I don't have any real personal skin in the game, and there are a bunch of smart people at other firms that are putting their money in. I better be in because if I don't allocate this capital it goes away. And if I miss a big one, that's worse than losing."
And, while FOMO is often presented as an anti-pattern, another way of framing the same thing is that if everyone else thinks X is the hottest thing since sliced bread and I'm skeptical... Who am I to be so certain that I'm the smartest guy in the room?
Add the complexities of timing. In fact, even if you thought crypto (or various stocks) was bullocks, you could have made a whole lot of money if you got in and out at the right time.
I like the idea of there being some requirement on student spending for these educational institutions to maintain their tax-free status. Not dissimilar from requiring insurance plans to spend a set percentage (say 85%) on healthcare vs. administration. Having said that, I'd want to game it out to see how the institutions would react and what it would do to prices.
The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.
