Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922539

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

No doubt the student body will learn this lesson, and in the future the number of students identified as having cheated will be near zero.

Of course, this kind of credit is _incredibly_ risky. People don't think of it this way, but a mortgage is essentially a massively leveraged bet on your local housing market. Which is already gives your risk profile an incredible lack of diversity. The most valuable thing you "own" in the time of your life when you buy a house is usually your future earnings potential, and your house will be the second most valuable thing you own. The thing is, both of these things are highly correlated with your local economy, so buying a house doubles down on your already high exposure to local economic conditions. People think of owning a home as a kind of boring, safe, low risk/low reward investment, but it's really exactly the opposite.

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236

GOLDSTEIN: China has not allowed more freedom of speech. Publications can still be shut down for criticizing the government. And yet, China has gotten richer. It started to develop its own financial center in Shanghai. Foreign money can now flow into China without going through Hong Kong, so the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Hong Kong as much as it used to.

This has led to more and more tension between people in Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government. In 2014, there was a fight over how to choose the government official who runs Hong Kong, and a million people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest. Just last month, the government official who runs Hong Kong wanted to pass a new law that would allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to China to stand trial. The people in Hong Kong said, we don't trust your mainland courts. Two million people protested in the streets, including, by the way, Jimmy Lai, who is now in his 70s.

What was it like? What was it like walking that day?

LAI: I was very excited - when you see so many people, you know, is fighting for a moral issue. We don't have guns. We don't have tanks. We don't have anything. The only thing we have the Chinese government don't is the moral authority we have, the moral courage we have.

GOLDSTEIN: The moral authority and courage, yeah.

LAI: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: A few weeks later, on July 1, on the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, protesters broke into the Hong Kong legislature buildings, smashed glass walls and spray-painted graffiti. Chinese leaders see these protesters and Jimmy Lai, for that matter, as agents for foreign influence - as, you know, basically latter-day colonialists. His house has been firebombed, and there was an assassination plot against him.

LAI: I stopped thinking about this because if I let the fear frighten me, I cannot go on, you know, because with what I have taken up, I have to sustain it. I will be the last to leave. That is like a captain who cannot jump the ship.

GOLDSTEIN: I mean, you're rich. You could leave if you wanted.

LAI: Yeah. If I'm rich but an a*hole...

GOLDSTEIN: (Laughter).

LAI: ...What my kids will think about me?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.

LAI: You know, being rich, you can be very poor...

GOLDSTEIN: Go on. Say more.

LAI: ...Because if you only have money, you lost the meaning, you lost the dignity, you lost everything as a human being. What else do you have?