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Comment by immigrantheart | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> What's the point of working hard? What's the point of making decisions, responsible decisions in my past, what's the point of studying day and nights, skipping parties, skipping fun, but working and studying to provide for my family?

So... your assumption is "if other people aren't forced to pay ridiculous amounts of money for education, that put that education out of reach of entire populations, then there's no point putting effort into anything"?

Working hard should be done for (a) personal growth and (b) to provide for others. It should not be done to pay off punishing costs that shouldn't exist in the first place. That's just what it's forced to be done for in our society, and that's what needs steps to fix.

You think this forgiveness helps those who need help the most? Seriously? How many poor people this helps instead of helping those middle class kids who spend $100 every other day to party? I know because I live in an expensive city and see these people on my circle.

Please look up the term "sampling bias". You have an inaccurate, biased understanding of why the majority of student loan debt happens. Your sample is too small and not representative of the country's overall population. Especially if you live in an expensive area, as you said, you are only seeing how "people who can afford to live in your expensive area" handle student loans.

If only Americans could be radicalized against the systemic inequities in their society and the suffering it causes to their fellow citizens, rather than be radicalized against attempts to correct them, because doing so is unfair to the privileged.

Ah well. Have fun becoming the Joker I guess.

This sort of ideological flamewar isn't allowed here, as you know. I don't want to have to ban you, so would you please clean up your act? Otherwise how are we supposed to tell other people it's not ok to post like this?

You made it impossible for me to ban the other account in this thread, even though it broke the site guidelines egregiously. That's not cool. Having been here a long time doesn't give an account free vandalism cards.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You banned my account downthread, so I have no clue whether you’ll see this or bother to respond, but I’m really curious how this follows:

> You made it impossible for me to ban the other account in this thread

So breaking rules is ok if someone bigger does it after you?

I wouldn't generalize from it - certainly not into some simple rule. And I'm a bit confused because I banned you but not immigrantheart or krapp, and my memory doesn't go back 3 days. Most likely I saw your post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32593415 in some other context (for example reviewing a list of flagged posts) and didn't realize it was from this thread.

It doesn't feel fair to ban you from this thread after posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32598207, so I'm going to unban you (even though that comment was about immigrantheart and not you).

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not posting things like "lay off the adderall dumbass" in the future, we'd appreciate it.

As for the question you were curious about: when two accounts are breaking the site guidelines badly in a spat, it's much easier to ban both accounts - people instinctively react like "well, I might not agree with him but at least he's being fair". If we only ban one account and leave the other unbanned even though they were breaking the site guidelines just as badly, the bar for community acceptance is much higher, because people instinctively feel like it's unfair and we're taking a side—even if there really is a good reason and it has nothing to do with taking a side.

I use the word "instinctively" on purpose because we all have these reactions, including small children, and of course they've been observed in other primates. It's a strong force and much easier to go with it than to fight it.

It does not follow that there's some sort of general rule about never banning just one account in an argument (we still do that often enough), and I would hope that if anyone tried to exploit the above as some sort of loophole, we'd eventually catch that and ban them for it.

One other thing to realize is that we mostly ban accounts for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, and most accounts that do that have a tendency to keep doing it. So if we don't ban them in one context, there will likely be another bannable offense soon enough—and if not, that's great anyhow and we don't need to ben them. We only ban accounts because of their expected future behavior.

I really can’t fathom your way of thinking. Evil, I don’t know what else to say other than this word. Evil.

You can't post like this here, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban you. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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