Hey man, your thoughts are valid. I don't want you to feel bad about them just because I reacted to them with frustration. Let's not pretend my indignation is any more or less 'correct' than your wavefront of broke-student anger, it's just where we were when we wrote those comments! Sorry for being uncharitable to you, I know you better than to think you'd actually be insulting me. I think the 'point' got away from me, and the conversation went awry. But at its core, I agree with you - these people can't afford the small dreams that they want. This is, fundamentally, something that they're doing to themselves - their debt is an irresponsible, irrational thing that they're subjecting themselves to. At the same time, I get where Klein is coming from. People have relatively quaint dreams and it feels bad that they can't even have that. Maybe I'm being too sympathetic, though, because there's nothing wrong with waiting until middle age for New Car Smell? But their household income is twice the natural average, and it feels like I've been fed a line about how New Car Smell (tm) should be possible for People Who Did It Right (tm) at 28. And I guess there's some dissonance between that image and reality. Ah well. I've got some thinking to do. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to do so :)...what I meant to say in some kind of bad way that ended up just coming out as a wavefront of improperly expressed broke-student anger...