Rougarou

Personal story: I had the opportunity to take a partial scholarship and have my parents pay the delta, for Texas Tech University undergrad business school debt free. I declined and opted to take out about $50k in student loans to attend our fine school, not in the business school. Which was right? I honestly do not know to this day. I don't believe I learned more or better things academically at UT then I would have at TTU despite our ribbing and poking fun. I do think there is value in being in community with generally a smarter and ambitious set of people for networking and social-learning and things like that. It's hard to judge, but likely I would say I probably made the imprudent decision and it just worked out. But really, is $50k really a big deal when you get a good job and do well, etc. I mean how many of us have $50k vehicles sitting in our driveway we pay off over 5 or 6 years? Why not with education? That said, you should run your education as an investment or a business. You should have a plan or a roadmap to where you can show profit. If you can't map out how you are going to pay back debt and be earning a good living based off the loan/investment you are making, then you shouldn't do it. Even if it's not perfect. We like to bandy around the English Lit and Theatre Dance majors of the world (and by the way, I couldn't even get an A in TD301 or whatever the "blow off" theatre class was at UT-- that class was a) not easy and b) actually super interesting), but if you can take your major and map out an entry level job and ideal career path within some bounds of sanity and reason, then let your freak flag fly! There absolutely is a difference as mentioned when talking about elite institutions and the pipeline to jobs making real money that are worth the cost of investment, but they are so niche and slim it's not worth discussing. A better use of time has been those who have rightly exposed the crux of the matter: poor people who take out a ton of money to finance a degree from a worthless, for-profit/online school whose job prospects remain pretty much the exact same regardless of whether they would have taken out the loans or not. In that sense, their debt to income ratio has been drastically and negatively impacted with no gain outside of a theoretical one. The problem being, not that they didn't hold a degree, that they don't have soft skills or communication skills or hygienic skills (non-STEM lol), that could get them a salaried job with a career ascension path. They would have been better off going to a finishing school.

Yup.

Maybe I'm just upset right now and need some time, but I'm writing in Yang. I think I just need some time. #YangGang4Lyfe

What is mostly fascinating about this bubble is that you have to assume there are a lot of people who have the means or ability to pay down or at least some of their debt who aren't because they are just going to wait out (and hope) that they are just written off and forgiven. I can see how that would anger and upset a lot of people who sacrificed and skrimped and saved and made a priority to pay back their student debt. I think if we do a forgiveness program we are also going to have to implement a "reward program" and actually give a rebate or refund to those who did pay off their loans or else there will be lots of righteous indignation. I see it asked a lot on finance and business forums, "Do I take the State School MBA for 25k (or free) or do I take the M7 MBA for $250k debt?" and I think in established and benchmarked careers like IB, PE, consulting, etc. if you can show a plan to pay back that 250k and your marginal gains from joining a big bank and making a million bucks because you went to Stanford or Harvard or MIT is better than going to UGA or UT or whatever and make $250k. My buddy had his heart set on going to Vanderbilt and he got in. He got a free ride to UGA as part of their state program they have if you are a resident. His parents forced him to go to UGA rather than pay out of state at Vandy. That is the kind of parenting and guidance that needs to be given, on the individual level. 15 years removed he laughs at how stupid he almost was; we need more laughing at foolishness in hindsight rather than being sad about regret.

Contain yo'self! I'm a Yang Gang'er and am pretty depressed that he doesn't have a real shot.

Don't mind Johnny, he's just drunk is all. I tell you boys even I'm worried when Johnny runs this outfit, God have mercy!

Beto is more hispanic than Cruz! I think Latinx people would freak out over that, but that's the perceptions from the white people in the South.

All I am saying is if you think strat and management consulting guys are bad, wait until you hear about these guys up in New York called bankers! In all seriousness, here is a good article about the modern state of Private Equity which is worth the read: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-03/how-private-equity-works-and-took-over-everything

Hardie board, which i understand is cement?

You are right, of course, but I really just wanted to meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/some-of-you-were-never

Some of you have never had jobs where you are on calls literally all day and have to do things and be in public while on these calls and it really shows.

Speaking of TI, and to tie a post back to the OP again and get the discussion back on track, I had a friend who worked with them in the early 90’s and he was tapped for their leadership rotation program. They Invested in him and sent him to get his MBA, and taught him the business. He made his first million through stock accrued throughout the 90’s but even still he capped out at VP of something or another in yet another version of “up or out”. Those leadership programs start with, say 100 guys in a cohort and you end up with a handful after half a dozen years. Something like that. So even in old school big companies it’s not the janitor or mailroom guy being tapped for these internal promotions and programs but the young rockstars. Organizations aren’t really investing in people like that anymore which a) hurts loyalty but also b) even when they are it’s not a very attractive option for people when being mobile and transient in your career is a way to short circuit very lucrative pay raises (as opposed to toiling away from years with a 5% bump every year). I was offered an interview spot for a Leadership Executive Accelerated program and declined because I feel like you’d be pot committed at that point and stuck in a hierarchy of middle managers (a good thing according to days gone by and the author of the article) but in reality who wants to work in a bureaucratic environment and who wants to wait out a claw back period or have to have a company buy you out?

This is an amazing and thoughtful post. You must be an MBB guy.

Makes you wonder. If you had 50 bn dollars and could buy your way to being President for 49 bn, would you do it? I mean there have only been like, what maybe 38-40 men be President? There are lots of billionaires, being a President is more elite and exclusive and you'll be glorified and remembered for at least a couple of hundred of years more than the average man assuming the world doesn't end soon.

The article talks about what you are describing, the "Mail room to Corner office". I think the snap occurred because of many breaks in the old rubber-band, but mostly the mobility of the worker due to a rise in population and the demise of the corporate pension plan and unions. To your points about rewarding loyalty; I think the toothpaste is out of the tube with regards to corporate loyalty. Corporations (the rule, not the exception) don't want it and we don't want to give it, because doing so is usually a losing proposition in the long run. Overall I think the article did a better job when and of raising questions rather then when tried to land an answer. When the article went into lamentations for an era long passed when WWII boom artificially gave birth to a middle class and, ironically, a bloat of middle management which consist of people that carry a high, negative, fully-blended cost (benefits, insurance, taxes, salary, etc.) against the value they add. These middle managers we all make fun of and that we all think of as worthless and inefficient (until we read articles like this, and don't). Maybe it was the references to to "mid-century" and I kept thinking of Brady Bunch furniture, but It felt very nostalgic for even before WWII for a time when a Protestant work ethic and, an "honest days labor for an honest day's work" and other management strategies and practices from when business and management was first an area of study, were the rule of the day.

As a hardo who has been in-and-around consulting and private equity for a while, I'll reserve judgment until I read the article, but I will say that in my experience most people on the internet are pretty ignorant of management consulting and strategy (and banking/high finance) yet are quick to opine. If you are anti-capitalism (modern American capitalism, especially), then I get why you'd knee jerk to hating the profession from a political perspective however-- which I totally relate to and get it. ^^ Nice Guy Eddie beat me to it and it's one of the reasons I'm a huge Yang fan (No CR)

If you don't mind answering more personal questions; how has this affected your professional career/life? Is it harder to maintain work? Is it like the article about Jevan said where you would be impulsive and maybe just quit a job after one bad day? That is scary too outside of the personal stuff.

I don't understand your question? It was wood and something else that was chewed through and replaced with hardie board then some sort of siding

But also your post kinda sounds like “she’s like me, so I like her despite her flaws and problematic political behaviors. And if you drag her then you might be problematic because she is a high functioning trans after-all, as an FYI...”

Nothing on night two; and haven’t heard any scratching. Hired a roofer to repair a small hole in the siding near the edge of the roof we noticed a critter of some sort had gnawed (our backyard backs into a green belt and tons of wildlife abound) and so I’m hoping that fixes the issue.

Set a rat trap and killed either a mouse or a baby rat. Only one of the traps or glue strips had one so wonder what’s going on. Not hearing the scratching that started yesterday either.

I think I’m hearing one in my wall

If/when Donny Trump wriggles his way out of this, it won’t be a win because Republican absurdity and hypocrisy is on record as much as it will be a loss because of the moral hazard; GOP have pushed the line of the rules and what can be taken advantage of and get away with Scott free (and don’t give me any moral victory stuff about how being impeached by the House and having an asterisk next to his name means anything to anyone). This is all bad. The reason it is bad is because half the country are members of the Cyclops third eye clan from HBOs Watchmen and the other half are not and we have no Superhero’s.

I think it's a good thing, but I also think there are complexities too: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/13/20690266/seattle-minimum-wage-15-dollars The economists observed the impact of the hike in 2017 and found it had dramatic effects on the low-wage workforce and employment. Not all of them were good. They found that the policy “reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 6-7 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by 3 percent ... consequently, total payroll for such jobs decreased.” That means the total amount that employers paid to workers was less with the new minimum wage in place than projected payroll if the policy hadn’t gone into effect. The data, researcher Mark C. Long explained, suggested a “tipping point” between $11 and $13 “when it becomes less tenable to keep work in the city.” (Critics were quick to point out that this likely wasn’t solely due to the minimum wage policy — Seattle’s labor market continued to heat up during that period, reducing the number of low-wage jobs compared to high-wage jobs overall.) But a year later, the team published another paper that complicated their findings. They looked at the same time period and same wage increase, but this time broke down the actual take-home pay of workers. They found that workers who were already employed at the low end of the wage scale in Seattle “enjoyed significantly more rapid hourly wage growth,” following wage increases in 2015 and 2016. Those who were already working more hours before the wage increase saw “essentially all of the earnings increases,” while the workers who had fewer hours saw their hours go down, but wages go up enough so that their overall earnings didn’t really change. They theorized that a slowdown in new hiring for low-wage jobs could explain their earlier findings that overall payroll had gone down. Ultimately, workers already employed either saw their take-home pay go up or stay roughly the same while working fewer hours. Critics of the UW researchers have seized on Seattle’s uniqueness to discount the UW findings. Ben Zipperer of the liberal Economic Policy Institute wrote that the UW research is based on a “flawed comparison” between Seattle and the rest of the state. He argued that the decline in low wage jobs was due to a hot economy boosting low-wage jobs into high-wage jobs, not the new minimum wage. The data did show, Zipperer argued, that all of the workers they studied were “better off after the minimum wage increase” — higher-hour workers earned more with a higher wage while the low-hour workers got the same pay for less work. There are still questions about the policy’s impact that are harder to observe, such as new employees who may or may not have been hired had the minimum wage been lower. And of course, the question of whether this would work in any other city remains. “I take this research as a cautionary tale for other cities like Seattle,” Long said, noting that Seattle’s booming labor market, especially at the high end and in technology, “is a very particular thing.”

Watched the worst movie of 2019. Cringe worthy cannot even express the cheese and horribleness of the dialogue and plot: Gemini Man starring Will Smith