The advice is very much appreciated. My wife and I are tentatively considering that depending on the financial outlook and what our student loan situation is when the time comes. Luckily we've still got plenty of time to think.
All of this focus on methodology and testing in education worries me more than a little. I've got my first born due in September. The stories some of my relatives and friends who have kids starting school tell me about heavy homework assignments in kindergarten and inscrutable approaches to problem solving make my stomach tie into knots.
Maybe I'm just being conservative but it all sounds so different than the Catholic school I went to I'm my early years. Discipline was pretty harshly enforced (including occasionally with the rod) but I don't recall pressure for particular results in tight timelines. I was able to read at the end of 1st grade which seemed in line with most of the other boys (girls on balance seemed to be a bit ahead). Some kids showed up already reading well and some stragglers took until the beginning of second grade but I don't recall that being cause for alarm.
My son isn't even born yet and I already have visions of teachers trying to get blood from a stone in order to meet an arbitrary mandate. I know it's kind of taboo to say in this country but I suspect that socio-economic factors will determine how most students perform, regardless of what magic wands we require teachers to wave.
I'm still not really connecting these dots. If you want me to say Trump is a buffoon who lies and references events that did not occur or characterizes events that did occur in extremely misleading ways I will (and I agree that he does). The fact that he does these things does not justify others doing it or jumping to extreme conclusions, facts (or lack thereof) be damned. I don't see anything controversial about that.
I guess I don't see what's fucked up about urging calm and waiting for evidence? I think I'm missing your point (not trying to be flip at all).
I feel like my life has turned into a mirror image of the moral panic that went on in the conservative ecosystem for much of Obama's first term. I don't like it.
I think your suggestion is the best way to handle these discussions but I do get Damon's frustrations. If we're going to roll our eyes at conservatives latching onto every wild-eyed story about Muslims or illegal aliens that falls apart under scrutiny we need to hold liberal voices to the same standard.
I just don't buy this. When we abandon reason and evidence for feelings and truthiness we all lose. People who continuously attach their credibility to dubious claims only have themselves to blame when they're no longer taken seriously.
There was a piece written by Richard Blow a couple years ago about the Rolling Stone UVA hoax where he talked about bias confirmation in media reporting. Sometimes I think public debate would be greatly improved if everyone was required to read the substance of that essay prior to viewing or discussing any other piece of writing not clearly marked as fiction.
Labeling it 'cultural genocide' is ridiculous and seems to be part of the academic trend of using terminology which is both outrageous and detached from the meaning of the words themselves. It's almost like people are afraid to analyze an argument on its own merits.
I guess I'm cool with these Texas folks doing this as long as we can all be in agreement not to care/justify it when a Texan is inevitably killed by a Palestinian. If they want to intervene on behalf of armed religious fanatics colonizing foreign territory and get caught in the crossfire of locals protecting themselves, well that's the risk they take, right?
The biggest thing that needs to change and the hardest to swallow politically is reforming sentencing guidelines. They're no longer mandatory but most judges still largely adhere to them. This blows up the population of incarcerated people in two ways.
First it makes more people accept plea bargains because the enhanced sentencing mechanisms allow for absurdly long sentences that defendants will not risk if they can avoid it, so you've got more people going in to begin with. Second they mandate irrationally lengthy sentences. We keep people in there for decades and decades, often due to conduct committed at a very young age. The cost outweighs any measurable benefit, unless we see being as severe as is constitutionally permissible as some sort of social good.
This. Plus there's the issue of whether or not there's really such a thing as a completely apolitical technocrat. At the very least they all have an interest in keeping their jobs, which itself is a political question.
That Addict Aide stunt is a joke. I'm all for taking addiction seriously but acting as though it can be diagnosed by social media and trying to shame people for 'liking' images of an attractive, scantily clad coed with drinks in her hand seems likely to have the opposite effect. The puritanical undertones are also embarrassingly absurd.
I think over time you're right but there was a little bit of a cult of personality in 2008. Remember the whole women fainting during his speeches thing?
I think it speaks to something deep in the human psyche. We don't have trolls or witches or other supernatural bogeymen to come take children and virgins anymore so we come up with these bizarre conspiracies. Of course it doesn't help that there's a salacious media driving moral panic and whole political/academic industry pushing the idea that there is an epidemic of sex crimes.
I kind of mentioned it in passing below but the way you'd have to start is by opening up Medicare Advantage and phasing out parts A and B over time. After that you'd start bringing in healthier working people on Medicaid, then finally dual eligibles who are the most expensive to cover. The various markets need to be consolidated. Once you've done that improving the incentices becomes easier. What I'm not sure is what would happen with employer backed plans. Maybe it would die out on its own but it would probably need to be regulated away which would be painful, and might never be possible politically.
Maybe there are some fundamental differences in the demand. Whenever applications decline for law schools they seem to just lower standards. Keeps the loan money rolling in.
Wouldn't even have to go that far. Opening Medicare Advantage to people under 65 and consolidating the state exchanges into a single national market is the next logical step. It'd even sort of be in line with his promises and might make imposing some cost controls less painful. You'd also get rid of these artificial member populations that are impossible to insure profitably in places like AZ.
@nevermoor I don't know enough about how medical school works to comment particularly intelligently on it. All I can say is that from an outsider's perspective the medical community seems to have been much more successful at keeping medicine a profession. We'll see if they can keep it up now that they're licensing NPs to do a lot of the stuff that was previously the realm of physicians only.
Outside of certain corners of the public sector law has been overtaken by the business aspect of it. There's nothing like residency and outside of small family owned practices a FYIGM attitude prevails, which is understandable given the economics of the situation.
@pinky you can still "read the law" in a tiny number of jurisdictions. Virginia is one, I'm not sure of others. There are also states that don't require graduation from an ABA accredited school to sit for the bar (I believe California is like this). Passage rates from these institutions tend to be abysmal but I'm not really sure they're to blame for the glut. There are plenty of accredited schools out there pumping out useless lawyers for whom there is no employment that actually requires the skill set.
And so the Republican coalition has been exposed as the undisciplined rabble it is. Of course it does suck that we will probably have to sit around at least another 4 years for a chance at fixing some of the major problems with the ACA, assuming none of the state markets fall into crisis beyond where they already are.
Part of me kind of wonders what a Trump presidency would look like with a Democratic majority in Congress. Not to be overly optimistic but maybe he'd sign a reasonable reform bill as long as he got a lot of the credit.
I actually don't really get the hand wringing over this and I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as I think possible. Amazon can sell or not sell whatever it wants. If there's a market for things they won't sell someone else will step in. They aren't a public institution, nor does their refusal to carry an item effectively remove it from the market. Wal-Mart refusing to sell albums with explicit lyrics back in the day did nothing to keep anyone from locating unedited versions.
I don't even see the negative societal implications I worry about with some of the calls for boycotts of various businesses as a response to the political views of an owner or officer. Now they of course are opening themselves up to charges of hypocracy depending on how they police this, and I think anyone who believes this has anything to do with morality and not marketing is a fool, but that's not my business.
I started law school in 2007. That first year even people who didn't do well seemed to get ok jobs at title companies and similar places where you could start building a legit resume and getting some useful skills. Then the next year it was like you said. No summer associates, no recruiting, previous offers rescinded.
There are some assholes out there in law, just like in any industry, and as I said above, there are certainly groups who are much more hard pressed than lawyers. However as usual in America, the popular narrative prefers to see the losers in structural market upheavals through the lense of a morality play.
Fully agree with the premise. People need to move on to the extent they can and there are no free lunches. But there are policies we could consider which might help that and avert similar crisis in the future for all people, not just law students. A good start might be putting some cost control requirements in place as a condition of institutions receiving federally backed loan money. Another good idea would be making it easier to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy (something that is virtually impossible under the current code).
Most of my court room experience involved an assembly line of people going through the motions (no pun intended) of accepting their plea deal, or asking the judge (again) for a body attachment on someone who hadn't shown up (again).
That's fair enough. Still for all my expectations about being an attorney that didn't come true I do find it a bit baffling that anyone would be surprised that it's an adversarial line of work. Even in its most romanticized form I don't think it's ever been seen as something for tea cups.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Reading Railroad”
The advice is very much appreciated. My wife and I are tentatively considering that depending on the financial outlook and what our student loan situation is when the time comes. Luckily we've still got plenty of time to think.
"
All of this focus on methodology and testing in education worries me more than a little. I've got my first born due in September. The stories some of my relatives and friends who have kids starting school tell me about heavy homework assignments in kindergarten and inscrutable approaches to problem solving make my stomach tie into knots.
Maybe I'm just being conservative but it all sounds so different than the Catholic school I went to I'm my early years. Discipline was pretty harshly enforced (including occasionally with the rod) but I don't recall pressure for particular results in tight timelines. I was able to read at the end of 1st grade which seemed in line with most of the other boys (girls on balance seemed to be a bit ahead). Some kids showed up already reading well and some stragglers took until the beginning of second grade but I don't recall that being cause for alarm.
My son isn't even born yet and I already have visions of teachers trying to get blood from a stone in order to meet an arbitrary mandate. I know it's kind of taboo to say in this country but I suspect that socio-economic factors will determine how most students perform, regardless of what magic wands we require teachers to wave.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.03.30.Th}”
I'm still not really connecting these dots. If you want me to say Trump is a buffoon who lies and references events that did not occur or characterizes events that did occur in extremely misleading ways I will (and I agree that he does). The fact that he does these things does not justify others doing it or jumping to extreme conclusions, facts (or lack thereof) be damned. I don't see anything controversial about that.
"
I guess I don't see what's fucked up about urging calm and waiting for evidence? I think I'm missing your point (not trying to be flip at all).
I feel like my life has turned into a mirror image of the moral panic that went on in the conservative ecosystem for much of Obama's first term. I don't like it.
"
I think your suggestion is the best way to handle these discussions but I do get Damon's frustrations. If we're going to roll our eyes at conservatives latching onto every wild-eyed story about Muslims or illegal aliens that falls apart under scrutiny we need to hold liberal voices to the same standard.
"
I just don't buy this. When we abandon reason and evidence for feelings and truthiness we all lose. People who continuously attach their credibility to dubious claims only have themselves to blame when they're no longer taken seriously.
"
There was a piece written by Richard Blow a couple years ago about the Rolling Stone UVA hoax where he talked about bias confirmation in media reporting. Sometimes I think public debate would be greatly improved if everyone was required to read the substance of that essay prior to viewing or discussing any other piece of writing not clearly marked as fiction.
"
It's as real as Finland.
"
Labeling it 'cultural genocide' is ridiculous and seems to be part of the academic trend of using terminology which is both outrageous and detached from the meaning of the words themselves. It's almost like people are afraid to analyze an argument on its own merits.
"
I guess I'm cool with these Texas folks doing this as long as we can all be in agreement not to care/justify it when a Texan is inevitably killed by a Palestinian. If they want to intervene on behalf of armed religious fanatics colonizing foreign territory and get caught in the crossfire of locals protecting themselves, well that's the risk they take, right?
On “Pitchfork Republic”
The biggest thing that needs to change and the hardest to swallow politically is reforming sentencing guidelines. They're no longer mandatory but most judges still largely adhere to them. This blows up the population of incarcerated people in two ways.
First it makes more people accept plea bargains because the enhanced sentencing mechanisms allow for absurdly long sentences that defendants will not risk if they can avoid it, so you've got more people going in to begin with. Second they mandate irrationally lengthy sentences. We keep people in there for decades and decades, often due to conduct committed at a very young age. The cost outweighs any measurable benefit, unless we see being as severe as is constitutionally permissible as some sort of social good.
On “Tim Harford: Some things are best left to the technocrats”
This. Plus there's the issue of whether or not there's really such a thing as a completely apolitical technocrat. At the very least they all have an interest in keeping their jobs, which itself is a political question.
On “Morning Ed: Health {2017.03.27.M}”
That Addict Aide stunt is a joke. I'm all for taking addiction seriously but acting as though it can be diagnosed by social media and trying to shame people for 'liking' images of an attractive, scantily clad coed with drinks in her hand seems likely to have the opposite effect. The puritanical undertones are also embarrassingly absurd.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2017.03.26.Su}”
I think over time you're right but there was a little bit of a cult of personality in 2008. Remember the whole women fainting during his speeches thing?
"
I think it speaks to something deep in the human psyche. We don't have trolls or witches or other supernatural bogeymen to come take children and virgins anymore so we come up with these bizarre conspiracies. Of course it doesn't help that there's a salacious media driving moral panic and whole political/academic industry pushing the idea that there is an epidemic of sex crimes.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
@michael-cain
I kind of mentioned it in passing below but the way you'd have to start is by opening up Medicare Advantage and phasing out parts A and B over time. After that you'd start bringing in healthier working people on Medicaid, then finally dual eligibles who are the most expensive to cover. The various markets need to be consolidated. Once you've done that improving the incentices becomes easier. What I'm not sure is what would happen with employer backed plans. Maybe it would die out on its own but it would probably need to be regulated away which would be painful, and might never be possible politically.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
Maybe there are some fundamental differences in the demand. Whenever applications decline for law schools they seem to just lower standards. Keeps the loan money rolling in.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
Wouldn't even have to go that far. Opening Medicare Advantage to people under 65 and consolidating the state exchanges into a single national market is the next logical step. It'd even sort of be in line with his promises and might make imposing some cost controls less painful. You'd also get rid of these artificial member populations that are impossible to insure profitably in places like AZ.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
@nevermoor I don't know enough about how medical school works to comment particularly intelligently on it. All I can say is that from an outsider's perspective the medical community seems to have been much more successful at keeping medicine a profession. We'll see if they can keep it up now that they're licensing NPs to do a lot of the stuff that was previously the realm of physicians only.
Outside of certain corners of the public sector law has been overtaken by the business aspect of it. There's nothing like residency and outside of small family owned practices a FYIGM attitude prevails, which is understandable given the economics of the situation.
@pinky you can still "read the law" in a tiny number of jurisdictions. Virginia is one, I'm not sure of others. There are also states that don't require graduation from an ABA accredited school to sit for the bar (I believe California is like this). Passage rates from these institutions tend to be abysmal but I'm not really sure they're to blame for the glut. There are plenty of accredited schools out there pumping out useless lawyers for whom there is no employment that actually requires the skill set.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
And so the Republican coalition has been exposed as the undisciplined rabble it is. Of course it does suck that we will probably have to sit around at least another 4 years for a chance at fixing some of the major problems with the ACA, assuming none of the state markets fall into crisis beyond where they already are.
Part of me kind of wonders what a Trump presidency would look like with a Democratic majority in Congress. Not to be overly optimistic but maybe he'd sign a reasonable reform bill as long as he got a lot of the credit.
On “The Hoover Hog: My “Open Letter” Concerning the Amazon Blacklist and Freedom of Speech”
I actually don't really get the hand wringing over this and I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as I think possible. Amazon can sell or not sell whatever it wants. If there's a market for things they won't sell someone else will step in. They aren't a public institution, nor does their refusal to carry an item effectively remove it from the market. Wal-Mart refusing to sell albums with explicit lyrics back in the day did nothing to keep anyone from locating unedited versions.
I don't even see the negative societal implications I worry about with some of the calls for boycotts of various businesses as a response to the political views of an owner or officer. Now they of course are opening themselves up to charges of hypocracy depending on how they police this, and I think anyone who believes this has anything to do with morality and not marketing is a fool, but that's not my business.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
@saul-degraw
I started law school in 2007. That first year even people who didn't do well seemed to get ok jobs at title companies and similar places where you could start building a legit resume and getting some useful skills. Then the next year it was like you said. No summer associates, no recruiting, previous offers rescinded.
There are some assholes out there in law, just like in any industry, and as I said above, there are certainly groups who are much more hard pressed than lawyers. However as usual in America, the popular narrative prefers to see the losers in structural market upheavals through the lense of a morality play.
"
Fully agree with the premise. People need to move on to the extent they can and there are no free lunches. But there are policies we could consider which might help that and avert similar crisis in the future for all people, not just law students. A good start might be putting some cost control requirements in place as a condition of institutions receiving federally backed loan money. Another good idea would be making it easier to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy (something that is virtually impossible under the current code).
"
Most of my court room experience involved an assembly line of people going through the motions (no pun intended) of accepting their plea deal, or asking the judge (again) for a body attachment on someone who hadn't shown up (again).
"
@saul-degraw
That's fair enough. Still for all my expectations about being an attorney that didn't come true I do find it a bit baffling that anyone would be surprised that it's an adversarial line of work. Even in its most romanticized form I don't think it's ever been seen as something for tea cups.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.