Morning Ed: Education {2017.05.01.M}

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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94 Responses

  1. LeeEsq says:

    The phenomenon of college degrees going to waste seems to be a result of two things. One of them is that many employers require you to have a college degree even if the job itself doesn’t need it, credentialism. We debate the origins of credentialism and what can be done about it a lot on this group. One solution, what Saul mentions is done in the United Kingdom, is simply making refusal to hire somebody because they lack a degree a form of discrimination. This is the United States though, so that isn’t going to happen. The American solution is going to place all the risk on the people who don’t go to college and hope employers stop requiring college degrees by crossing our collective fingers.

    Another reason why people with college degrees might be stuck in non-college jobs is that degrees are getting more and more specialized. A degree in forest resource management teaches you how to manage forest resources and that’s it. If circumstances require you to get a different job than it looks like your wasting your degree.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to LeeEsq says:

      @leeesq

      How do you do this for jobs that need education? Doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc?Report

      • fillyjonk in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        I just hope that if the “Let’s shut down all the universities and let society sort itself out” happens, it’s AFTER I’ve retired. (I have a doctor younger enough than I am that I think I could keep her through my normal lifespan….but yeah, in the coming higher-ed-pocalypse, I suspect finding qualified medical personnel 25-30 years in the future may become difficult)

        I’ve said before I don’t want the end of my life to be me sitting on an off-ramp somewhere with a sign saying, “Will teach t-tests for food”Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        You don’t do it for jobs that need an education but there are many jobs that might not need a college education but require it because the boss says so.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        @oscar-gordon

        I don’t think it is done for all jobs but I think it is done for a lot of jobs that would require a college degree here including a lot of business positions.

        I also think it is more about pay discrimination. You aren’t allowed to pay non-college grads less than you pay college grads for doing the same work . This kind of pay discrimination is legal in the States.Report

  2. James K says:

    That sunscreen story is really weird to me. Sunscreen is actively encouraged to the point of being basically compulsory in New Zealand schools. Admittedly, we do have the Ozone Hole to deal with.Report

    • fillyjonk in reply to James K says:

      I’m not too surprised; there have been cases in the schools here in the US of kids with asthma having to leave their “rescue inhalers” in the nurses office – so if they have an attack, they have to get themselves to the nurse’s office (and hope the nurse is in*) before they can use the inhaler.

      A lot of this has to do with the fear that kids can apparently turn anything into an illicit drug.

      (* I don’t know if it’s still the case but when I was in school, because of budget cuts, our district had ONE nurse who “floated” between the different schools. So if you had a problem on a day the nurse wasn’t in your school, you either had to hope a parent was at home or that your problem was severe enough to merit the paramedics. My mom actually got called in to treat an issue **I** had on a day the nurse was across town….)Report

    • Kimmi in reply to James K says:

      James,
      Sunscreen is liquid death and needs to be monitored appropriately. (Seriously, there’s a decent case to be made that sunscreen doesn’t stop sun cancer, and may actually exacerbate the issue by encouraging people to spend time outside when they otherwise wouldn’t).Report

    • Doctor Jay in reply to James K says:

      That’s not the only thing that’s weird about it. The other weird part is that it’s in Washington State, which is notorious for how cloudy it is. I’m very skeptical that this was an actual problem for much of anyone. Maybe for a few schools in Yakima or the Tri-Cities.

      This sounds to me like it’s the work of the sunscreen lobby or Alec or something.

      I mean, yeah, it’s a little silly. On the other hand, we are much stricter these days about who gets to even touch someone else’s child and for what reason.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to James K says:

      I believe the concern is children using a sunscreen that they ought not to. If Jimmy is passing around his bottle, kids who genuinely shouldn’t use it (for health reasons) or whose parents would rather they not (for various reasons, legitimate or otherwise) might end up slathering it on and the school risks liability.

      The rule isn’t that kids can’t use it. Only that they need a note. I fill out all sorts of forms okaying the boys’ daycares/schools what can and cannot be applied to their skin. Right or wrong, parents worry about what goes in or on their kids. Sunscreen has long been regulated (since before I entered the field over a decade ago) so this isn’t just very-recent fear mongering.Report

      • Troublesome Frog in reply to Kazzy says:

        I couldn’t figure out from the article–it is like other regulated drugs where you need a note *and* for the nurse to dole it out?

        This is also the type of thing that makes perfect sense for five year olds but probably not for seventeen year olds. “We know you’re old enough to drive a two-ton death machine through the streets around the school, but we’re concerned about your judgment when it comes to sunscreen, Bobby.”Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

          Agreed that the one-size-fits-all model is flawed.

          Administering varies, I think in part based on how a facility is classified. In some settings I’ve applied and in some I couldn’t and had to instruct kids how… with comedic results.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

          “it is like other regulated drugs where you need a note *and* for the nurse to dole it out? ”

          The reason that it has to be someone from the school and not just the kid is the assumption that kids are dumb and need the school to do everything for them. If you don’t do everything, then you run the risk that someone will decide you made the wrong decision about (thing) and sue the school.

          The reason that it has to be A Registered Nurse and not just a teacher is that if someone decides you did (thing) wrong and sues the school, the school wants to be able to point to all the Official Pieces Of Paper that objectively prove there was no possibility of (thing) being done wrong. A Registered Nurse has those pieces of paper, while a teacher does not.

          The reason that it has to be sunscreen is because if you don’t treat all (thing) identically–if you pick and choose which (thing) happens in the nurse’s office and which does not–then, again, you run the risk of someone deciding that you’re making the wrong choice and suing the school.Report

      • dragonfrog in reply to Kazzy says:

        That… I guess. Maybe it might make sense if I squint and cock my head.

        I mean, I don’t know how many pieces of paper I’ve signed for my kid’s school – permission to go on each field trips, consent for a dozen kinds of information sharing, commitment to the school’s conflict resolution practice; I’m positive her kindergarten application process was longer and more convoluted than my university application process.

        But I have not had to sign a permission to apply sunscreen. When there’s an outdoor field trip they just send out an email reminding us to send the kid with sunscreen and sensible footwear and a lunch that doesn’t need a microwave.Report

        • Kazzy in reply to dragonfrog says:

          Different states have different laws.

          And I’m not necessarily defending the rules but explaining them. @densityduck is right that the primary goal is CYA.Report

  3. Kolohe says:

    I’m surprised the post-degree residency requirement didn’t get more attention, though that might be why this proposal hasn’t been talked about much since it was unveiled.

    Like you say, it seems it’s going to be an enforcement nightmare. And do you have to live *and* work in NY, or just work there? And what if your job gets transfered to Jersey? How many people have the same job for 4 or 5 years right after college these days?Report

  4. Damon says:

    College Degrees: ” It could also mark a more permanent shift in employment that the Fed can’t fix ” I don’t know how anyone can write this statement knowing anything about the Fed. The Fed has basically one tool in it’s box, money supply. They’ve already flooded the market with trillions of dollars and that brought back a rousing recovery (sarcasm). What’s Bloomberg expect them to do, create another few trillion? As to the grads, maybe they should have taken degree programs that had a bit more financially lucrative possibilities, or not gotten into so much debt?

    Chicago Post Graduation High School: Looks like GED is the way to go!

    Sunscreen: Oh dear jeebus. And people wonder why I don’t have kids. If I did, I’d be spending all my time at the school telling the admins they are idiots over crap like this.Report

    • Kimmi in reply to Damon says:

      Sunscreen is bad because it’s hard to sweat through. Anyone putting it on without the teacher knowing about it is just asking for trouble. (I’m assuming sunscreen == gym class or recess, because really, when else are kids outside?) Were I a teacher, I’d want to monitor those kids carefully for signs of overheating.Report

  5. notme says:

    Times columnist blasted by ‘nasty left’ for climate change piece

    http://nypost.com/2017/04/28/times-columnist-blasted-by-nasty-left-for-climate-change-piece/

    The left can be nasty when you don’t display the proper orthodoxy.Report

    • Damon in reply to notme says:

      ““Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” Indeed.

      “But social media users didn’t care, with some — including several scientists — going so far as to order a subscription boycott of the Times on Friday.” God forbid someone suggest anything other than the current dogma. Burn the witch!Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to notme says:

      This is why I don’t talk much about climate science much, too many evangelicals dumping hold on everything.Report

  6. Richard Hershberger says:

    Rural lawyers: The linked article is basically useless. Is the program basically a job placement service? Then it needs to address whether those rural jobs pay enough to service the law school debt. If not, then this is merely a make-work program for the school’s administration (justifying, presumably, the tuition). If there is some actual teeth behind this, with, for example, debt forgiveness for newly minted lawyers willing to go out into the boonies, then this is something, but I would have expected the news release to trumpet this. My guess is that this is a nothingburger.

    Sun screen: I don’t see this as an FDA problem. It classifies sunscreen in a certain way for its purposes. The problem is that schools and/or legislatures then misapply this classification, using it for a different purpose it was never intended for. FWIW, with my kids there is a minor bit of extra paperwork, and I think they have to bring their own sunscreen. This is a hassle, but a very minor hassle compared with the big stuff like morning shoe location.Report

  7. Saul Degraw says:

    College degrees: The guy featured in the article was an odd choice. Forrest resources is a highly specific degree and one that is likely to need lots of government funding to exist. In some ways it seems less marketable than an English degree. I concur with Lee’s point above, the American system is just to hope the problem goes away instead of actively dealing with it because that would involve government doing something to business people.

    NY residency requirement: My guess is that this is going to prove unenforceable.

    Rural Lawyers: As Richard notes, this program is basically just begging people to work in really remote locations without any incentive. When are States going to realize that a lot of young people don’t want to live in rural locations anymore and deal accordingly.Report

    • …this program is basically just begging people to work in really remote locations without any incentive. When are States going to realize that a lot of young people don’t want to live in rural locations anymore and deal accordingly.

      Or even with incentives. A number of states have found that paying off their school debt is not enough to get new doctors to practice for a sustained period (five years, typically) in the most rural areas. I suspect they’ll find that’s true for new lawyers as well. Nebraska is having trouble finding qualified recruits for their state police due to fear that they will be assigned to the most rural western parts of the state.Report

      • For doctors, debt repayment isn’t a good incentive. It’s dicey whether or not you will actually recieve it, and you can likely pay it off sooner if you just go work at a money factory.

        With lawyers, at least, there is not the competition with opportunities elsewhere (for those that went to unimpressive law schools, at any rate). Report

        • I’ve occasionally wondered if that might not be the case for doctors, since a bunch of the loan-repayment programs perform poorly.

          In the most rural areas that I visit — Great Plains, where the population has been slowly retreating for 80 years — I am fairly sure that the big problem is there’s not enough business for a lawyer to make a living. “Not enough business” meaning a combination of lack of activity and fairly hard limits on the hourly rates the clients can afford.

          I often say that across much of the Great Plains the professional service economy has reached the state of positive feedback, ie, death spiral: not enough business to support a dentist, so the dentist leaves/retires, making it harder to attract people that would generate more business.Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to Will Truman says:

          For doctors, debt repayment isn’t a good incentive. It’s dicey whether or not you will actually recieve it, and you can likely pay it off sooner if you just go work at a money factory.

          It’s weird how many of these types of things (debt repayment contracts, sky miles from being bumped) fail because THEY ARE NOT ACTUAL MONEY. I have no idea what the advantage is in this case to saying, “We can’t give you $X more, but we’ll pay off $X in debt.” It’s not like sky miles where the airline actually saves money by giving them to you. Debt repayment is in money, but it’s attached to a weird contract that makes the recipients skeptical.

          Just give them the money. If that doesn’t work, you’re not paying enough and converting “not enough money” into “not enough money, but paid in chocolate vouchers” will not help.Report

    • Lyle in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Re forest management it depends where in the US you are. In areas with a significant commercial timber industry (SE and NW in particular) there are a lot of tree farms, which do require managment.
      Re the residency, It apparently works in some states. Actually in the case of NY the question is more did you file a NY state income tax return, and did the w2 show a NY state address, and/or did you have a New York Drivers license? Failing to have these would result in investigation.

      The third item relates more generally to the non corporate practice of law, I doubt that anywhere one can really re-coop the loans with a practice that handles issues such as wills traffic tickets and the like.Report

      • fillyjonk in reply to Lyle says:

        To link a couple of other comments, though: you have to really want to live where the timber-management jobs are: often rural, otherwise-economically-depressed areas. It’s good work, especially if you enjoy it, but it helps if your hobbies are hunting/fishing/tinkering around the house rather than going to the theater or to museums…

        Though really: in some ways it’s perhaps easier to work/live in a remote rural area now (with the Internet) than it was 30 years ago. I don’t have a bookstore in my town (other than the college bookstore) but I can get all the books I want and then some, quickly, via Powell’s or Amazon, or any number of specialty sellers. (Perhaps those rural jobs are better for people who are asocial introverts, though)Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to fillyjonk says:

          The federal government is one of the large consumers of forestry management people. In some ways it’s a frustrating job, as the national forests were badly mismanaged for the first half of the 20th century and mitigation funding has been entirely inadequate. Almost 90% of national forests by area are in rural areas west of the Great Plains. Internet access is often questionable. There’s a large degree of overlap between the national forests in the West and the white non-coverage areas on this map of Verizon’s data coverage.Report

          • fillyjonk in reply to Michael Cain says:

            You’re probably right on that for the West; I was thinking mainly of the Southeastern US and also areas like rural Michigan….

            I’m….not sure I’d consider a US-gov job at this point in time. (I know someone who was a USDA employee who had enough time in to retire, and he put in for retirement shortly after Trump’s election). Working for a corporation, I dunno.

            More and more, I think the ecologically-oriented jobs are a bit of a dead end right now. Maybe in the future things will pick up, but right now – academia is failing, museums and the like are closing, and a lot of the agency jobs are probably gonna dry up. There’s the Nature Conservancy, but the jobs I saw offered when I was a grad student were like “$500 a month and your choice of where to pitch your tent!”Report

        • Richard Hershberger in reply to fillyjonk says:

          A forestry degree seems an odd academic choice for those preferring an urban lifestyle. FWIW, I have lived rural, urban, and suburban. That last is the one that sucks. Sure, you probably have easy access to a decent supermarket, but otherwise it lacks most of the advantages of either urban or rural living, with the compensation being you get to mow a lawn and commute to work. I often see rural locales where my response is that I would love living there, were it not for the absence of any decent jobs. Forestry would seem an obvious solution: so obvious that I would first research the job market to find out how many people had figured this out before me.Report

          • A forestry degree seems an odd academic choice for those preferring an urban lifestyle.

            I don’t know how peculiar Denver is, but the city has a Forestry Office and City Forester, responsible for managing some 2.2M trees (the Denver Mountain Parks may account for a significant share of that). I suspect there are some number of people around the top of that organization with forestry or forest management degrees. I occasionally make lighthearted comments about living in the west suburban open forest; my suburb does have a forestry division within Parks & Recreation, though. There used to be a running joke about a fictitious Aurora Memorial Forest — Aurora is on the east side of the metro area, out onto the plains — that the annual report on the state of the forest was simply: “The tree is doing well.”Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Lyle says:

        @lyle

        There are traffic ticket lawyers who make good livings but it is a volume business and requires being in or near a major metro.

        I get calls from potential clients in rural areas of CA because of a lack of lawyers there.

        Though I did work with a woman whose first law job was being a public defender all the way north in Humboldt.Report

        • Richard Hershberger in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          I would have guessed that there would be a few practices in the county seats of even the most distant counties in California. I just googled “Alturas lawyer” on the theory that Modoc is about as boonies a county as you can get in California. Three names popped up. I tried the same thing with Valentine, Nebraska and got a couple of names.

          I assume these guys are generalists: fine for DUIs and routine real estate transactions, but you wouldn’t use them for anything complicated. For civil work you might have conflict of interest problems, what with everyone using the same three people. But these areas are not completely unserved.

          To put it another way, I sometimes have a summons that I need served in some place I don’t know. There are various ways to go about this. I could give it to my local guy and let him figure it out. He will find someone, but this takes the cost control out of my control. Or I can google and find a local process server, who probably is also a private investigator. But for some place really out in the boonies the closest guy I can find this way might be a hundred miles away. He’ll be happy to make the trip, but he’ll charge for it. If I had a summons to serve in Modoc County, I would cold call one of those local lawyers and ask who they use. I would fully expect them to happily cooperate as a professional courtesy. I don’t have to do this often, but it has never not worked.Report

          • Valentine — yes, I’ve been there — is an excellent example of the Great Plains point I made elsewhere. County seat of Cherry County, which is somewhat larger than Connecticut by area (a bit over 6,000 square miles), has a population a few hundred under 6,000, and the population has shrunk in every census since 1920. Digging into those law offices, you find people with deep roots in the area — one is the fourth generation of a family providing professional services there, another is clearly taking over his dad’s practice.

            Fooling around with the internet, I find there are a number of counties in Nebraska with populations in the hundreds where the county attorney’s official mailing address is one or two counties away.Report

          • Saul Degraw in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

            @richard-hershberger

            You don’t have to go too far out of SF to find more generalist practices. Sonoma and Napa have more of a generalist vibe (or wine lawyers) and there are plenty of people who commute from those areas into SF every day for work.Report

            • My impression is that outside of the major markets, generalists are more the rule. I live in a county seat about 45 minutes from downtown Baltimore if there is no traffic. (When I worked downtown I drove halfway and took the subway the other half, and gave it about an hour and a quarter.) The county is amply populous to support a substantial legal community, but based on their signs they are generalists. There may be some guys doing just real estate work, without prominent shingles. I once interviewed with a guy in a converted house the next town over who ultra-specialized in one specific type of visa, but that is different. He could have been anywhere. The guy I have been working for for the past seven years does mostly personal injury and workers comp. He has clients from a pretty wide swath of Maryland, running into DC and northern Virginia. It’s not quite a “could be anywhere” situation, but it isn’t too far from it. We aren’t in a major city, but we are centrally located to the Baltimore-DC corridor.

              What, apart from wine, does Napa have that would support a specialist? I think I have pretty well covered it: personal injury and routine real estate. Family law, I suppose, but my sense is that outside major cities those guys tend to be generalists, perhaps with an emphasis.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      “When are States going to realize that a lot of young people don’t want to live in rural locations anymore and deal accordingly.”

      There’s plenty of employers who haven’t figured that out either. “We have plenty of jobs here in Midlanowear! But we can’t get anyone qualified! I don’t understand, we definitely pay the market rate for this local area, that’s good money! Relocation benefits? Nobody around here does that, why would we?”Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to DensityDuck says:

        That’s why I always got a bit of chuckle whenever an article on how California is going to loose Silicon Valley because of the high taxes and some low tax state like Kansas will get it. Very few people involved in Tech 2.0 want to relocate to Kansas or a similar state. The owners and employees from top to bottom want to be in California or a similar metropolitan area. This is true for the young, middle aged, and old and the single or married with kids people.Report

          • I’m not sure that a pet food retailer with a good web site counts as tech nowadays. Back when Amazon was figuring out how to sell stuff this way, it was new and more defensibly “techie.” Nowadays it is pretty well understood how to do this stuff. Amazon has branched into other business lines, some of which clearly are tech. But setting up a warehouse and a website?Report

            • Kimmi in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

              if you defrag the warehouse, it’s tech.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

              Ok… so as high-tech becomes simple-tech it doesn’t need Silicon Valley, does it? Why would anyone spend the extra $$ in Silicon Valley to improve ecommerce?Report

              • Sure, but that’s not California losing Silicon Valley. That is older tech aging out. So long as it is replaced by newer tech, the Valley will do just fine.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

                Meh, not really suggesting that the Valley will disappear overnight… but the idea that tech work needs to be located in the special boroughs where it currently resides increasingly isn’t even pursued by Valley companies either. One could start to look at the ubiquity of money-making tech work and start to think that money-making tech work could be ubiquitous. Its more the blindspot that only cities of a certain type could possibly produce the environment suitable for tech work(ers).Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Marchmaine says:

                Tech workers are big on collaboration.

                But to some people, that “collaboration” looks like a bunch of men agreeing with each other that women don’t have any ideas worth a damn.Report

              • One reason is that today, that’s still where much of the tech venture capital is. And the venture people still prefer to put money into places in their own back yard.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Michael Cain says:

                Understood. There also happened to be an interesting NPR interview with Luis von Ahn inventor of Captcha, founder of re-Captcha and DuoLingo. He touched on that as he explained how he turned down Silicon Valley requirements that he relocate from Pittsburgh… so he took NYC money instead. *shrug* this is potentially good news for a 50-state Dem strategy… unless we really think those jobs can only be done by city dwellers?Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Marchmaine says:

                The problem with that is that the town makes the man. Once you own the house you live in (and no longer spend all day seeing people who sleep on the street) it’s a lot harder to convince yourself that everything is beyond your ability to control and the proper response is to give all your money to Big Sky Daddy who’ll fix all the problems for you.Report

              • Well, city for a certain value of city. I spoke recently with a guy who started out doing custom welding of well-site stuff for the oil and gas companies in rural NE Colorado. (Manifolds and such done accurately enough from the well-site measurements, each unique, that they could be trucked to the site and just bolted in place.) Word got around, and the next step was to add more staff and, for some of the companies working at higher pressures, x-ray machinery for weld inspections. So he relocated to the edge of the Denver metro area, because (a) he couldn’t hire enough welders in the rural area where he started and (b) at that rural location, the company servicing the x-ray gear would only promise same-week service, not same-day service.

                I have first-hand knowledge of a few people here along the Colorado Front Range who got Silicon Valley VC. They tell me that this is as far east as the SV people are willing to consider.Report

        • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

          You’re on some shaky ground when taking about married couple with kids.

          Also, it depends on whether we count SLC or Houston as “like Silicon Valley.”

          But for the most part SV will be fine. And other places will also be getting jobs from companies based out of there. Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to DensityDuck says:

        @densityduck

        I suspect that this is a deeply cultural divide and people have a hard time comprehending why people prefer opposite choices. The bosses probably love the location to the evil blue cities and don’t want to admit that they are on the losing end.Report

        • notme in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Those evil capitalist bosses want low taxes, cheap land, low utilities, and infrastructure to bring in raw materials and ship out the finished products. I’m not sure having a vibrant arts scene is all that important.Report

          • Michael Cain in reply to notme says:

            The last two Fortune 500 HQs that relocated to the Denver metro area appeared to be lifestyle choices. In one case, the new CEO made no bones about how much he preferred road and mountain biking in Colorado compared to Southern California. In the other, the western regional director was promoted to CEO and moved the HQ here rather than moving to Long Island. Both CEOs sit on the boards of things like the zoo and art museum.

            On a smaller scale, over the last couple of years smaller (but all rapidly growing) businesses have relocated HQs to the Denver metro area from California, Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Wichita, Virginia, and New York City. No one’s moving here because it’s cheap (in absolute terms).Report

            • Road Scholar in reply to Michael Cain says:

              Yeah, the DTC is a happening place. My daughter works for a smallish outfit there. They’re doing contract work for AT&T producing engineering drawings for fiber installs in California.

              Point being that in one respect location really doesn’t matter that much for a lot of tech work. Cities like Denver and SLC can sell themselves on the QOL for attracting talent.

              And more related to today’s education theme, she parlayed a degree in geography, where she got into GIS, with the Autocad she picked up in HS drafting to a pretty cool niche in tech. You don’t have to be a coder to be tech.Report

              • It’s insane. I live in an inner-ring suburb to the NW of Denver. Every time I’m down to the DTC and south, it’s frightening how many more construction cranes are running.

                When I was working for the legislature, and spent time with the folks in the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, the Front Range’s biggest selling point was its educated and skilled workforce. Colorado does only a so-so job of getting local kids through high school and college, but we are fantastic at getting other states’ college graduates to move here. Not just college graduates — when Vestas set up its wind turbine facilities here, they said they were amazed at the high quality of the production workers they were hiring.Report

            • Autolukos in reply to Michael Cain says:

              Not sure what costs look like for running a business, but as an individual currently relocating low cost of living compared to California is a huge draw to Denver (though both family reasons and a preference for Colorado’s amenities are similarly significant).Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Autolukos says:

                Nosy question (feel free to tell me it’s none of my business). I’ve done some preliminary fooling around with Census and IRS relocation data and cluster analysis, which suggests that the metro areas from Denver west are a cluster, linked more within the group than to metro areas farther east. How would you feel about relocating farther east than Denver?Report

              • Autolukos in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I’m an enthusiastic Westerner by choice, so relocating further east is not very attractive. I would consider somewhere close to my parents in Wisconsin, but otherwise would need quite a bit of convincing to go further east than I-25Report

      • Damon in reply to DensityDuck says:

        Well, I’m not that young, but I’d move. I’d love a few dozen acres of prime quail land even if I rarely hunted it. Or I could move to some of the southern states where 500K buys you 40 acres, the mule, and the house with a 2 car garage.

        I don’t need to be in such close proximity to everything, although it IS convenient. Of course, it’s also convenient that the crime, homelessness, congestion, and other negatives are with me as well. And the fact that I can’t own a tasty AR should I want one.

        We all make choices.Report

  8. notme says:

    Mayor Asking FBI For Help With Investigating City Crime, Rising Murder Rate

    http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2017/04/28/mayor-asking-fbi-for-help/

    Kudos to the mayor for asking for help. I’m sure some folks will say that the feds can’t do anything to help but I think that they are wrong.Report

  9. notme says:

    Obama makes $400K for speech at A&E event: report

    http://thehill.com/homenews/news/331309-obama-got-400k-to-speak-at-ae-event-report

    I certainly don’t begrudge him cashing in. I just don’t like lectured about how being a 1% is such a bad thing while he was in office if this is what is going to do now.Report

    • Kimmi in reply to notme says:

      And I don’t like being lectured about how virtuous I am for not paying taxes on money I made.
      (0% tax bracket. perfectly legal)Report

    • Francis in reply to notme says:

      notme: No one is lecturing you, at all.

      Various progressives / liberals are pointing out: a) this is terrible optics for a party that wants to reestablish its credibility with the middle class and b) this kind of soft corruption is one of the reasons why the interests of capital always do so much better in DC than the interests of labor.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Francis says:

        No one has lectured the top 1% of wage-earners?Report

        • gregiank in reply to Pinky says:

          One persons lecture is another persons well said speech. I’ve been lectured by conservatives for years. They thought they were just giving out common sense.Report

        • Troublesome Frog in reply to Pinky says:

          Lectured that it’s bad to be a top 1% earner? Not really. Definitely not Obama, as far as I can tell. “Lectured” about tax loopholes or other stuff? Probably, depending on how sensitive you are and what you’d call a “lecture.”

          Random side note: Making $400K for one speech doesn’t put you in the top 1% of households. You have to make another speech to get there.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Francis says:

        “No one is lecturing you,” he explained.Report

    • Troublesome Frog in reply to notme says:

      I certainly don’t begrudge him cashing in.

      I do. Or at least, I do when he’s cashing in from interests he had significant regulatory impact on. I can’t say I’d be more virtuous and not take the money–it’s an astounding amount of cash for doing basically nothing. I’d probably rationalize it and say, “I dealt with those guys fairly and this isn’t a payoff.” But at bare minimum, it’s extremely unseemly.

      If it was a speech to the Girl Scouts of America or something like that, fine. But if it’s to a lobbying group or a big company that lives and dies by government regulation that you were in charge of, that’s something worth avoiding. And if you can’t find highly paid speech gigs that aren’t underwritten by lobbyists or companies you’ve had a hand in regulating, you should wonder if that isn’t an indicator of how much of that money is really for the speech.

      I just don’t like lectured about how being a 1% is such a bad thing while he was in office if this is what is going to do now.

      I don’t think he ever actually did that. I would definitely see hypocrisy in it if he started to agitate for special tax breaks for speech money because speech money is the engine that creates jobs for the peons.Report

  10. Marchmaine says:

    Wow… Rahm Emanuel’s plan enter’s new areas of badness.

    By his standards, I might have graduated High School; but I’m pretty sure Notre Dame would still be holding my diploma, and my Father-in-law my wife.

    Is that an Onion article because there’s no way that’s not an ironic critique of the out-of-touchedness of the Mayor’s office.Report