Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
It honestly took me a while to figure out why people were criticizing him. I read his remarks as a positive and didn’t realize he thinks having a work-life balance is a bad thing. Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired. “You work, I live. Things are balanced.”
Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired.
I’d suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.
CEOs sometimes think like this, but they seem to forget how much more they are paid when it comes up.
I’m on a business junket to [Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Jackson Hole, wherever] where I will [ski, drink, go to the beach, take a fishing boat, whatever] at an all-expensed resort or hotel, and have a couple meetings or attend a business conference, too. I’ll take a private jet and be there for a week. Everything is a business write-off. I’m getting paid while I’m doing this.
Next month will be another business trip.
Vs
Some family saved for years to visit Jackson Hole, take a hike, go fly fishing, and stay at a modest hotel or camp out. They’re not getting paid, everything is out of pocket, and they can’t write any of it off.
There’s a huge difference in not just pay but how their lives are structured financially. Tons more opportunities to write off and business expense things vs a normal person where everything is out of their personal money.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
