Interesting Links for 26-9-2011

[andrewducker]

• 
  UK firm unfairly dismissed employee for Facebook comments, Tribunal rules
  (tags: facebook business employment uk law)
• 
  The TMBG experience - when The Onion's AV Club got invited onstage. All of them.
  (tags: TheyMightBeGiants music TheOnion)
• 
  Greece's debt crisis, a handy flowchart of

Comments

[marrog]

The real monetary impact in pictures, that is. The potential impact on who has the guts to take on all that debt to go to school, on attitudes toward debt in general, on the ethical character of our country... rather handy that those don't go quite so easily on graphs and charts, I think?

Oh, reading the last paragraph, it looks like my point was made for me:

Labour's argument is that the poorest are put off by the fear of debt rather than the actuality, and it is this fear that the fee cut is intended to address.

[andrewducker]

So what's needed is some education for people, to show that unless they are very unusual there is no difference to them? So they can base their decisions on what will actually affect them, rather than baseless fears?

[marrog]

Sure, that settles point (a) of the three I list above. Better plan would be to not introduce a system that generated fictional debt that will never be repaid in preference to a progressively funded education system. Given that, as everyone in power and out of it keeps observing, it would make no functional difference in terms of what's actually paid out by govt vs students, why exactly does it matter so much that that debt is written to the student in the first place?

(BTW this would be a 'Labour was/is wrong too' argument, in case that isn't clear. But lower fees are still a lesser evil from the POV of the character of the scheme.)

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree that it's been badly done. It's _clearly_ actually a graduate tax for 95% of the people paying it, because they'll be paying a fixed percentage of their income for a fixed term after graduation. Why not, y'know, call it that instead?