.
I've really tried to stay away from the Mueller beat. But everyone should realize that the leaks we're now getting about a deeply damaging report have a different standing from usual inside reporting: they have to be presumed true until proven false 1/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 4, 2019
And I truly hope that many media people are feeling chastened. From the beginning, every story should have said "Barr claims that Mueller report says …", not that "report says" – and in fact skepticism about Barr's portrayal should have been there from day one 3/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 4, 2019
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 4,755 times? Shame on me. What the heck were the media thinking? 5/ https://t.co/8rVuUHf6q3
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 4, 2019
Oh, and PS: Please don't report that Democrats "requested" Trump's tax returns, or anything like that. They demanded the returns, to which they are legally entitled. Failure to deliver them is just breaking the law 6/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 4, 2019
Good supplementary thread (click on a tweet to read the whole thread):
The crescendo of furious gaslighting following Barr's propaganda summary suggests a plan was place to exploit the gap between the submission of the report and public revelation of what's in it to delegitimize Mueller's actual findings and the ongoing investigations.
— Will Wilkinson ?? (@willwilkinson) March 25, 2019
Our idiot media still isn't capable of understanding how to not be co-opted by Trump's reality-bending propaganda machine, and continues to get played like a burgled Stradivarius.
— Will Wilkinson ?? (@willwilkinson) March 25, 2019
Major Major Major Major
Speaking of Democrats requesting tax returns, The Intercept today has a very, very, very gentle, hand-holding criticism of Sanders not releasing his returns that feels like it’s aimed at the man himself: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/05/bernie-sanders-tax-returns/
This gives me hope that he’ll actually do it.
Kay
Why don’t media companies want the report and go after it? Isn’t this part of why they exist? To get the information?
I guess they can link to it after Democrats do or don’t get it, but that’s not adding a whole lot of value.
I love the criticism that Democrats focused on Mueller so no one else looked into anything. Was someone stopping them from looking at other things? Isn’t The Intercept a journalistic enterprise? They slavishly take direction from Nancy Pelosi? “MUST FOCUS ON RUSSIA”
Investigate away. I don’t care what they look into. There’s a scandal a week with these crooks. Get cracking. Go your own way.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: As I pointed out yesterday, he released a good portion of his 2014 return, which is still available on-line (although no longer via the BS official site) and which is, frankly, pretty boring. His continuing refusal to release other returns can be for one or both of the following reasons: a) they are not boring, and contain something he doesn’t want to come out or b) he’s just an asshole.
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: the Intercept article thinks it’s b), and very patiently explains how Sanders can’t afford to be like that as a big boy candidate.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I suspect that there are plenty of reporters who are trying to get their hands on the Mueller report behind the scenes; it would be the scoop of a lifetime to get a copy before anyone else. They can’t talk about that too much, though, because it isn’t interesting unless their attempts pay off.
That said, I think it highlights the biggest single problem with the media today: they respond to people based on their position rather than their record. They’ll repeat anything somebody powerful says because they’re powerful and thus anything they say is inherently interesting, even if that person is a serial liar like Donald Trump. But they won’t repeat what an ordinary person says unless that person has video evidence to back up their point, and even then they’ll repeat the ridiculous official denials that are plainly contradicted by the video evidence. And unfortunately, they have all kinds of biases in who they see as sufficiently important. The classic case was John Kelley’s lies about Frederica Wilson, which were repeated even after she produced video evidence showing he was lying.
Chyron HR
So how is the GOP planning to investigate the Mueller report while simultaneously preventing anyone from seeing the Mueller report?
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
Or c) Both of the above.
Ruckus
@Chyron HR:
They use slight of mind.
Like slight of hand except that they think they have done something to distract you.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay:
Trump is one of the boys. Remember his show was on MSNBC.
Roger Moore
@Chyron HR:
They’ve already shown how: they’re trying to investigate the origins of the investigation. I guess the logic is that if the investigation was started without absolute proof of wrongdoing, it is somehow invalidated no matter how much evidence the investigators found to support their conclusions.
West of the Rockies
The Intercept… Isn’t that GG’s rag? And speaking of GG-related issues, has there been any further on that Assange About to Get the Boot from the Ecuadorian Embassy story?
germy
@West of the Rockies: It was just a fundraiser.
Major Major Major Major
@West of the Rockies: it *is* GG’s rag, which is why I found the piece noteworthy. It’s part of the Sanders left suggesting some nice face-saving explanations for not having released them so far, and then flattering reasons for why he should release them now.
chris
OT: Could we have a website thread? Asking from my phone because the desktop version is completely FUBAR
Major Major Major Major
@chris: the thread below is about the website rebuild…
jc
Trump’s “one weird trick” isn’t just lying constantly. It’s also working to make sure the public *doesn’t* see the truth. Like the payments to silence Stormy and Karen, or his tax returns. Or his college transcripts, or his health records, or his “wonderful” health care plan.
Mr. Trump, you sure work hard to hide the truth. You sure fight against the public knowing what you did to get elected. If you actually did what you’re suspected of — that’s treason. If you’re guilty of what you and AG Barr appear to be hiding — that’s a hanging offense.
chris
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks. Didn’t look because (panic!) desktop doesn’t scroll
germy
Roger Moore
@chris:
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not having any problem with the site. I suspect there’s something specific to your situation that’s causing problems rather than site being generally broken; that’s why there isn’t an outpouring of complaints about problems.
Mandalay
Well a couple of Guardian reporters have been doing some old fashioned grunt work into Stephen Moore (nominated by Trump for a seat on the board of the Federal Reserve). It saddens and troubles me greatly to report that they found yet more dirt on the vile fuckwit:
But wait! There’s more:
All fine and noble of course, except:
I used to think it helped to be a vile human being to get Trump’s approval for a job, but it’s deeper than that…it’s a pre-requisite for consideration.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore:
*You spelled oranges wrong.
chris
@Roger Moore: Yeah, I get that. I don’t even know what questions to ask at this point. Works on Android but not on Linux or Windows 10, chrome or Firefox.
And it’s the only website behaving this way.
**Wanders off, muttering**
Chyron HR
@Roger Moore:
Wiretaps of Russian agents receiving phone calls from Trump campaign staff?
Roger Moore
@chris:
Very odd. It’s working fine on my Linux box. Is your phone connected to the same network as your Linux and Windows boxes, or is it on the phone network? If it’s on a different network, it’s possible that the network is blocking some essential resource.
chris
@Roger Moore: I’ve tried both, Android just works. Checking for Russians now ?
boatboy_srq
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Trump used to be a Democrat until he discovered Republicans were easier to grift.
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
I take the “Ecuador totally sick of Assange” stories as quarterly installments of an endless series. He’s managed to outlast them all including Catgate, which must have even enraged even Wilmer fans.
debbie
@chris:
This site was totally f’ed on my aging iPad mini until I tried clearing cache and everything else except bookmarks and passwords. It made a real difference.
debbie
What is the “4,755” in KThug’s tweet?
Roger Moore
@debbie:
That’s the number of Trump falsehoods mentioned in the article he’s linking to.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
It’s got to be a weird life, holed-up in this place where probably most people dislike him, being mocked in the press for hygiene and creepiness… Pam Anderson shows up occasionally, I guess, for whatever reason.
Sab
It’s all about access. If you don’t report their lies as truth then the accessories won’t talk to you any more.
Me personally, I had a morally fraught first career. I chose to change careers. Most modern journalists in DC didn’t choose to change. That is who and what they are. Anything for the access and money.
chris
@debbie: Yeah, done that, still FUBAR
patrick II
@West of the Rockies:
I would be surprised if the U.S. gov led by a Trump presidency is putting any pressure on Ecuador to release Assagne, especially true now that Mueller is gone and Barr leading the Justice department. Would we even arrest him now? There is supposed to be a hidden indictment, but will it be enforced by this FBI? Will other countries go after him if we don’t? There will be a lot of political pressure not to if we don’t lead the way.
Origuy
There’s a young woman from India who plays the bagpipes on YouTube.. She calls herself The Snake Charmer. She recently released a video with her first original tune, a Persian influenced tune. The video is about a Nagini, a half-human, half-snake deity who is captured by a prince. It was shot in a gorgeous palace in Rajasthan. Link
Immanentize
@Gin & Tonic:
The fact that he singled out 2014 as the only year he agreed to release suggests c) both
The Dangerman
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Another article in local paper today that might be of interest. Also, you might want to think about KSBY (local NBC station … with a real meteorologist!) weather app.
trollhattan
@Origuy:
Have not had enough coffee to flesh it out, but there’s a limerick in there somewhere.
A bagpiping woman from India…
debbie
@Roger Moore:
I guess what I heard last week, that he’d passed 9,000, is bogus. Bummer.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
It depends on who’s doing the counting.
Buckeye
@Major Major Major Major:
And it’s written by Ryan Grim, who’s usually pro-Bernie.
Sanders just needs to release them, the way the news cycle is now we’ll have forgotten about what was (or wasn’t) in them in 24 hours.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Then there’s deciding what makes the list. “I’m a stable genius” while obviously false, could be off the list because he believes it? I was told there would be no math.
Immanentize
@Origuy:
Lord Voldemort’s horcrux
dr. luba
@Gin & Tonic: Keep in mind, too, that he didn’t release that one return until the primaries were essentially over (i.e. he couldn’t mathematically win).
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: Works fine on linux ubuntu chrome bionic amd64.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@The Dangerman: Thanks, one of the folk in my photog group is headed up today and is supposed to be at our shoot tomorrow at the Poppy Preserve in Lancaster. I’ll take a look at the weather link, from Weather Underground Tuesday and Wednesday look good, but it’s still pretty far out.
SiubhanDuinne
@trollhattan:
There once was a woman from India
Whose favourite flavor was ginger.
Her snake-charming skills
Gave everyone chills,
And she played the bagpipes like a ninja.
ETA: It rhymes if you read it in a posh English accent: INJAH, JINJAH.
germy
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
LOL! :-)
My kid’s a ginger and I’m trying out that pronunciation on her. A teen, she’ll have an opinion.
James E Powell
@SiubhanDuinne:
How long did this take you to do? You’ve got mad skills.
trollhattan
@germy:
This fucker is so dangerous and he’s played Trump like a harp. I hope those charges against him go somewhere because he really, really needs to get booted from office.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Scandal a day, Kay??
Major Major Major Major
@germy: blech.
germy
@trollhattan:
Is there someone more moderate than him waiting in the wings?
West of the Rockies
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s running like a dream on the ol’ Tandy 1000!
Tenar Arha
I like that Krugman is saying all of this, but by the iron law of “don’t diss the paper that employs you” he cannot critique the front page example of one of media’s worst. The obvious subtweet isn’t enough. It’s a real problem that no one at the “paper of record” is now allowed to criticize themselves under a byline, and that no one on their access beats had any corrections (AFAICT) for their terrible awful initial coverage appended to their stories.
prostratedragon
@debbie: Your version was probably freshly updated with last week’s tally.
SiubhanDuinne
@James E Powell:
Thanks. This one was quick, maybe two minutes. Others can take hours.
Years and years ago I wrote a series of about 20-25 limericks that told the entire story of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I was enormously proud of it, and it kills me that I can’t find it anywhere. Took me days.
West of the Rockies
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hmmm… Let’s go to the judges…
“Upon further review, the poem on the field is ruled…”
Major Major Major Major
@Buckeye: it is a pro-Bernie piece. He’s such a loveable curmudgeon who doesn’t play by the rules! However……
prostratedragon
@SiubhanDuinne:
Waah! I feel your pain, because I want to read it!
Bemused senior
The Washington Post list of lies has the higher number.
trollhattan
@germy:
Mike Pence
trnc
One of the responses to Krugman’s thread:
At some point, it’s appropriate to wonder if they’re really mistakes.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
I know it’s “tan, ready, and rested,” but in Mike’s case, I would say, “Mike is pale, doughy, and dense.”
Immanentize
@SiubhanDuinne: I would look on one of those 5″ floppies you have.
SiubhanDuinne
@Immanentize:
Oh, believe me, I have done that.
Immanentize
In Germany, Obama speaks to/for Balloon Juice:
Martin
Long post on the college admissions thing:
Caitlin Flanagan has what I’d consider a must-read about it.
I have thoughts. First, some background. I work at what is considered a public Ivy. The term is stupid but it mainly means that we’re fuck-all hard to get into. 120,000 applications per year, for 5,000 seats. That’s about 4x as many new students as say Harvard, from about 3x as many applications. My job is hella complex, but part of it involves choosing some subset of that group – usually much of the top subset. In a typical year I’ll read 2,000-3,000 applications. Median GPA to be admitted to my unit this year – 4.27 on a scale that maxes out at 4.4 assuming you did 8 semesters of AP/Honors and got nothing but ‘A’s everywhere, and having a recognizable last name gets you nothing, unlike Harvard. As soul-sucking as being a college counselor at a high school is, reading them is hugely rewarding. One reason is that we get a shit-ton of poor kids applying, because we’re a public with that reputation. Maybe every 5th application has a household income number low enough that it seems not possible for a person to survive on, let alone a family. The rich kids you just grind through because they’re boring – as if they all bought the same personal statement and list of activities (I swear the Special Olympics must have a million volunteers here), but the poor kid describing how she kept her straight-A average and place as captain of the cross country team while living in a car for 2 years, well, you just want to take them with both arms. Domestic violence, sexual assault, drugged out parents, abuse, poverty, foster homes, immigration stories. It’s heartbreaking and inspiring.
We aren’t as subject to what Caitlin describes as the Ivies, but for plenty of kids we’re their safety school to Stanford or MIT, so I do marvel at the sheer number of applications I read where the household income is in the high 6 figures and up. It’s a lot. Probably around 1 in 10. They fall in two categories – the parents that Caitlin describes, and the Chinese equivalent. And this is a CA public, so these are generally LA professionals – lawyers, finance folks, or Bay Areas tech households. In short, lots of white liberals that care about POC only until their affordable housing casts a shadow on their kids park, and then they can’t be bothered. In short, they support arbitrary tax dollars helping the non-rich, non-whites, but heaven help if they personally should be impacted. Shit gets real when it’s your own kid being affected. So, I’ll just validate Caitlins thesis here.
But let me talk about the institutional side of things, and my concerns around free college for all plans by Democrats. We have a few competing problems here that need to be solved before we get to free college. First, the student debt problem isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be. No CA resident graduates from my institution 6 figures in debt. The median debt load is $14K, and given that our degree should net you $14K in salary in your first year working, that’s an ROI that nobody should ever turn down. But, if you turned down your own states public university to come to mine, you can rack up that much. No state subsidy, no state grants means that you could have an aid package as high as $60K per year. But the choice to come here is yours. Every state has a public university system, and they’re all easier to get into than mine. Further, even in the state, we have cheaper options. The CSU system is massive – 500,000 students, and both cheaper, easier to get into, and likely closer to home. The states community college system is staggeringly large. 112 campuses, 3 million students, guaranteed admission, and really cheap. CSU is the size of Vermont, and the CCC system the size of Iowa. We don’t fuck around here.
So with nearly 4 million available subsidized university slots in the state, why are people cheating to get into UCLA? It’s the perception that the UCLA credential is key to future success. If you step back and look at how universities are ranked and regarded, none of it – nothing – is reflective of the quality of education you’ll receive. It’s purely about the perceived value of the credential you get at the end, and what doors you think that unlocks. Jared Kushner certainly isn’t helping to polish the academic reputation of Harvard or Trump of Wharton. If they’re representative of the quality of education there, send your kid off to Iowa State instead and maybe they’ll learn something of value. What that means is that the higher university tiers aren’t investing in education, because education is immaterial to their success. Yeah, it can’t suffer too much, and no doubt there are numerous individuals that care deeply and invest in it, sometimes at professional cost, but it’s not an institutional goal. I’ve never read a pedagogy study in my field that came out of an Ivy other than Stanford. The best work on education comes out of lower ranked publics and lower profile privates. I guarantee you’ll get a better education out of the Claremont colleges than you will out of an Ivy. And I can list dozens of other small publics and privates in that category. Nobody is paying 7 figures to get into Iowa State but it probably has the best creative writing program in the nation. That should count for something, but seemingly it doesn’t. And we have plenty of other examples of how this work. Nobody sitting on USSC graduated outside of the Ivies. I don’t doubt that Harvard law school is wonderful, but I do doubt that they can identify undergraduates with such accuracy that they hoover up every exceptional legal mind. Besides, Kavanaugh should put the lie to the quality of that process.
The cheating scandal is simply the flip side of a coin that academics don’t want to look at. We posit that higher education is where students go to learn and grow as a person, and it is, but not generally in the classroom. And we can’t admit that. Harvard is valuable more because of your roommate than your teacher. It’s about the connections you make, and the reputation that you get for no additional effort for having that degree. Trump brags about going to Wharton but will sue them if they make his grades known. That tells you a lot right there about what was actually earned. Parents understand the game, but the universities and the media deny it. If the thing universities are selling is a credential of a certain reputation, then why can’t it be bought? Owning a Ferrari carries a certain reputation with it, but it doesn’t mean you’re a good driver – just that you had the money and questionable taste to buy a Ferrari. Harvard believes the credential needs to be earned, but nobody else does. So ‘cheating’ doesn’t really register as cheating. Yes, it’s wrong and illegal, but then a lot of this system is wrong, just not illegal. Kavanaugh didn’t earn his way onto USSC. He cheated onto it. Trump cheated into the WH. Everyone knows this. So why should I subject my kids to a system where playing by the rules doesn’t seem to get you ahead? Higher education needs to come to terms with this. We need to end the ranking industry. We need to restructure ourselves from a system where the only thing a student walks away with is a token of what they potentially learned, rather than what they actually learned. Seriously, how many people have hired others, looked at their degrees and inferred that they learned something from that experience, without actually testing them on whether they learned anything?
And someone tell me how ‘free college for all’ changes any of this? Or does it just turbocharge the whole system? Instead of 120,000 students who can afford to come to my institution, will it be 200,000? But I’m supply constrained. I have way more qualified students than I can take, but I’m not allowed to take any more because the state won’t pay for any more, and I’m not allowed to charge CA residents higher tuition to make up for the missing subsidy. That’s why publics take out-of-state and foreign students. They don’t take away from in-state students – that’s a fixed number and we’re always higher than that number. But we have no mechanism to ask in-state students to pay out-of-state fees. That parent paying off UCLA to get their kid in should have moved their kid to an apartment in Vegas and applied as an out-of-state student. They probably would have gotten in just fine, and it would have been cheaper.
I don’t see how free college breaks the credential reputation problem such that the cheating goes away, and I don’t see how it hands me the 5,000 additional subsidies I need to get my unit to not look like Harvard. Free college is great, but it’ll just crank my 4.27 up to a 4.35 if a host of other dollars and institutional changes don’t come along with it. The volume of student-level cheating is already high. We know that. We’re a bit immune to the parent cheating because, frankly, we’re a bit too naive to believe we could get away with it internally. That requires a certain recognition that it can work, and we don’t really have that. The few cases where questionable admissions like that took place, they blew up badly. A good scam requires some evidence it can work, and where I work we lack that, at least for now. I suspect free college for all would change that, though, because it solves the debt problem but makes the access problem worse, at least as currently articulated.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Scans better.
Excellent work!
The Lodger
@Martin: Excellent points made here. This ought to be front-paged, if anyone’s listening.
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: It does seem like making public colleges free would necessitate building more public colleges — the same way that Medicare for All would necessitate building more medical practices. I’m also not entirely clear on whether what people want is more education for more people or less debt for the same number of people that already go.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
And she played the pipes like a ninja
vs.
And she played the bagpipes like a ninja.
Thanks. Either one works for me. (Both sides.)
MattF
OT but relevant research: Cats recognize their names but don’t give a shit.
BC in Illinois
@Origuy:
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Immanentize:
Check out her YouTube page.
It has everything from old-time Celtic, Titanic bagpipe music to Game of Thrones. And some of her collaborators will lead you to Korn on bagpipes. (There’s a Mettalica connection too, but I haven’t found it.)
ETA: the Mettalica tune is “Enter Sandman,” under the link marked “collaborators.”
debit
@MattF: Any cat owner could tell you that they know their names. Mine come running when I call. Usually because they expect food. Still! They respond.
ETA: I know you were joking, but I really worry about the common misconception that cats are cold, aloof animals. They are just as social and loving as dogs and develop strong emotional bonds to people, each other and other animals.
germy
@SiubhanDuinne:
Silently?
Immanentize
@MattF: @debit:
I asked my cat about this and he said he doesn’t care whether an article says he doesn’t care and that most of the time he really doesn’t care.
West of the Rockies
@Martin:
Thank you for a very edifying effort, Martin.
debit
@Immanentize: I would ask mine for their input, but they are currently engaged in a very important study about cuddling while sleeping and can’t be interrupted. It’s apparently at a critical stage.
BC in Illinois
@Origuy:
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Immanentize:
Check out her YouTube page.
It has everything from old-time Celtic, Titanic bagpipe music to Game of Thrones. And some of her collaborators will lead you to Korn on bagpipes. (There’s a Mettalica connection too, but I haven’t found it.)
ETA: the Mettalica tune is “Enter Sandman,” under the link marked “collaborators.”
ETA2: this comment went straight to moderation, so I am re-submitting it, without the links.
Immanentize
@debit: my cat just left to go outside do some cat surveillance of our property. He is very diligent.
Cowgirl in the Sandi
@Martin:
All this is so true! I taught at a CA Community College before I retired and we had transfer agreements with UC’s. Often students would come back and tell me about how shocked they were when they got there because the education they got at my college was much more personalized and much better. They felt the instructors cared about them and how/what they were learning. At a UC, there are just a number. Many were very disillusioned and disappointed.
laura
@Martin: Martin, I love your comment with every fiber of my being!
I will never forget that our Pat Brown’s Master Plan for Higher Education and it’s committment to the States’ CC, CSU and UC systems, and the guarantee to make a place for every student.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
The Federal Courthouse used to be on Spring, it’s now on 1st between Broadway and Hill. They moved about a year ago.
James E Powell
@trnc:
It was clear to me during the early days of the 2016 campaign that the press/media were determined to promote Trump. I do not know if they had decided, in the early days, to actually elect Trump, but they were promoting him, giving him free air time, celebrating his outrageous statements and conduct. And most of all, refusing to acknowledge let alone explore that the core of his support came from white supremacists. When HRC called them deplorable, the press/media went all out to attack her for telling the truth that they were working so hard to obscure.
For the press/media – and most especially for cable shows – Trump is the best thing that has happened to them since 9/11 and before that the OJ trial. As David Foster Wallace once observed, the only demand TV makes on the audience is that it continue watching. Trump – for people who hate him as much or more than for people who love him – is a reason to keep watching.
piratedan
@trnc: i really don’t enjoy engaging in the hyperbole, but imho, the faceless people driving the narratives that we never see (editors, news directors, etc) are the ones where someone somewhere needs to start checking accounts and receipts. It can’t all be just about “controversy is good for business” as a news model, when news (much like medicine) started to change from a public good to a means and method of revenue, all of this shit started to go off the rails. Could probably say the same for a certain element of “Christianity”.
profit is not the end all, be all, although you wouldn’t know it based on the choices that are not only being made, but being presented.
trollhattan
@Martin:
This should be front-paged.
Am riveted by the whole thing because my kid’s up next, literally since she’s 11th grade. Your august school isn’t on her list because while she “wants a big school” she doesn’t want one THAT BIG having visited the campus.
Kids.
Berkeley would be just fine, however, and is essentially just as competitive. The damning part you’ve already outlined: because every kid is competing against the best of the best for a scant resource and a perfect GPA and gaudy SAT–which she has–guarantee nothing.
J R in WV
@chris:
I’m using Linux, Ubuntu 18.04.0 and Firefox, uh, 66.0.2… thing seem to be OK, overall. I added a line to an ad-blocker tool filter, which kinda broke things, but then M^4 asked if I had blocked a file type that was just added to the filter.
So taking it back out fixed things.
SenyorDave
Last week, a couple in my synagogue took in a Guatemalan woman and her 6 year old son who amazingly qualified for asylum in the US. My wife met them when she brought over a box of my grandson’s clothing which he outgrew.. The woman had an abusive husband who was involved with a Guatemalan drug gang (apparently Central American gangs make US gangs look mild in comparison). She said the woman is scared that she will be sent back any day now.
This is what out POS POTUS said recently about asylum seekers:
Donald Trump had a unwelcoming message to those seeking political asylum in the United States: Don’t bother.
“Our country is full,” Trump said at an event in Calexico, Calif., to promote construction of a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. “Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around, that’s the way it is.”
The day he strokes out on the toilet is the day I go down to the bar and buy drinks for the house (two drinks if he becomes a drooling vegetable). One of the worst examples of humanity I’ve ever seen. I hate him with a passion I didn’t think possible. I still say I don’t care how bad Mike Pence is, I just want Trump, his cabal of racist advisors, and his crime family out of the White House asap. He is soiling the premises.
If there is a God, I hope she reincarnates Trump as an asylum seeker, although its not like he would ever learn a lesson.
rekoob
@Martin: Excellent points, all. In an earlier thread on this subject, I noted that many smaller institutions, such as the Claremont Colleges, would be well-suited for students who want a more personal experience and don’t have the same admissions pressure. I’m particularly fond of the 40-odd group of The Colleges That Change Lives, especially since I went to one of them. It prepared me for life and a graduate school education at one of the finest universities in the world. My alma mater would be happy to award scholarships to those you can’t admit and my graduate school would consider them strong candidates later on. There are many paths to success, after all.
CatFacts
@Martin: Thanks for this, Martin. Really thoughtful. I’ll be interested to see how Tennessee’s plan to fund tuition for two-year colleges pans out. Offhand, I think that would be a more effective use of public money than indiscriminately pushing everybody into four-year degrees, but there may be some potential drawbacks I’m not seeing.
J R in WV
@Martin:
Yes, it is long, but so relevant and so important. The educational system needs a huge boost before we could even start free education for all ~!!~
Agree this should be front-paged for all to see and learn from!!
Martin
@trollhattan:
And the part of the system that we don’t know how to convey to the public, because holy shit do people get mad, is that most publics now operate around geographic diversity. UCs focus is on taking the top 9% of every HS in the state. That creates some real conflicts for parents. You want to send your kid to Harvard-Westlake, because that really does increase their chance of getting into an Ivy, but it makes it MUCH harder to get into a UC, because you pretty much need to be in the top 9% of that school, which means whatever test prep you’re buying for your kid is being matched by even richer parents than you. If instead you send your kid to South Gate they’d have a much better chance of getting into a UC, but not an Ivy. The intent is to take away the incentive to funnel all of the education spending into a handful of elite schools, but instead people just get mad that the money they spent to move their kid into the better school district is kind of working against them (something poor parents never get to do, btw).
Martin
@CatFacts: Yeah, I completely support making 2 year degrees/certificates free. That’s a no-brainer. Funding college for all isn’t that expensive, actually, but the structural challenges need to be dealt with and they’re both hard and kind of boring.
Barbara
@Martin: I am not equipped to evaluate why someone would cheat to get into UCLA, but I can say that having read the attestation, I don’t actually agree that these particular parents were panicked about their children’s future success. That simply can’t explain the level of psychotic parenting involved or why people with enough money to set their kids up in business were so set on getting them into particular schools. These parents appear to have been in denial about who their children are, and what would be best for them. They were existentially disappointed in their children and couldn’t find a way to come to terms. I get Flanagan’s point about having to share the pie with more people and all of a sudden finding out that there is no such thing as good enough. I blame colleges for their failure to acknowledge the ouija board aspect of the admissions process, I think collegiate athletics are a monstrosity, but most of all it annoys me that anyone thinks you can go through life devaluing education and then act surprised when your kids don’t do well enough to get into the school of their choice. The disinvestment from education has occurred at all levels over the last 40 years in nearly every state. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do believe it would behoove us to think of someone we know who went to a “lesser” school and focus on the traits that they exhibited that correlate with actual achievement.
Shana
Since this is technically an open thread, I’m going to tell all DC-area Juicers, look for the tabloid-size Real Estate section in the Sunday WaPo. That’s my daughter on the cover for an article about what Amazon moving to the area is doing for real estate prices.
Ruckus
@trnc:
We are way, way past appropriate to wonder. They are not mistakes. The publisher works for the owner. They print what the owner wants in his newspaper or say it on his airtime.
chris
@J R in WV: I turned off the ad blocker. Currently have the top of the front page with no scroll bar.
Linux Mint Chrome and Firefox. Windows 10 Chrome
James E Powell
@Martin:
Any talk of “free college for all” should be preceded by a vigorous exploration of the question: should everyone go to college? And related to that: are the two-year and four-year programs still serving the needs of the students and society? And then a host of other questions about what we are trying to do and what we are really doing.
patrick II
@Immanentize:
I think an important difference is that while we may bitch about one candidate or another, most here agree that they will vote for the democratic nominee regardless. We will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good (after the primaries anyway).
piratedan
@James E Powell: well, it’s complicated, naturally anyone talking about solutions means that they have to get complicated too, trades are hurting is my understanding, plus the trades themselves are also getting “modernized” to some extent as well, so the skills are evolving, just like the jobs themselves but when you try and promote that amount of nuance, its difficult when the media wants to let their know-nothing reporter ramble on for two and a half minutes to set up a 10 second blurb from their subject of choice, who they’re looking for something punchy, pithy and can fit on a bumper sticker so they can hurry up and get to the local high school sports reports.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Pre Prop-13 California community colleges were tuition free. Would like to see us at least close to that again.
JPL
@piratedan: Someone needs to produce those robots, and operate them. I was going to say manage, but good luck with that.
Shana
@Cowgirl in the Sandi: The daughter of some friends of my parents’ went to the University of Chicago lab school when she was in middle and high school while her father taught at the Medical School and then went to Harvard as an undergrad. She reported, with some disgust, that the quality of student at Harvard was, on the whole, disappointing.
Martin
@Barbara: I don’t disagree. But let me offer some counter-thought here. Liberals generally favor giving people opportunities to succeed, which is really about making the pie bigger, not about redistributing the pie. These parents want poor refugees to get to go to UCLA, but that doesn’t mean they want their own kids to not go as a result (for whatever reason they want them to go). They want the ability to choose, as you choose with almost everything else in life. But college doesn’t work like that. You choose where to apply, we choose who to take, and you choose where to go. Your car dealer doesn’t have a step where they can say ‘sorry, we don’t think you’re deserving of this’. We want deterministic systems, and college admissions is decidedly non-deterministic.
Consider my job. It used to be finding students that were qualified. Now its choosing which qualified students to not admit. That requires a very different mindset and parents aren’t wrong about feeling it’s arbitrary. And we’re talking HIGHLY qualified students in many cases, students who were incredibly proud of what they achieved in HS, whose parents were proud as well, and who the fuck is this guy saying ‘sorry, that wasn’t good enough’. Parents ask ‘what GPA/SATs does my kid need’, and there’s no answer to that. I’ll take a 3.7 1100 SAT from Imperial County, which is poor as hell, but their kid was in the top 4% of the class, but turn down a 4.3/1400 SAT from an elite school where half the student body got that, and I’m okay with that because Imperial County residents pay taxes too and they deserve opportunities, but parents are mad, and I get that.
One of the better economic stories of the last 20 years is how we’ve moved from supply constrained products and services to demand driven ones. What that means is that provided you have the means to pay, you can participate. If that product you like isn’t available in your local store, get it at Amazon. And a lot of this can now be done online. But higher education hasn’t gone along with this for a host of reasons. UCLA is enrollment constrained because they are space and building constrained. So why not offer online classes and bypass those constraints? I could spend hours explaining why the institution doesn’t do that, but they don’t hold up as good reasons from the publics perspective. ASU has over 100,000 students now, and their growth has mainly come from online which both allows the institution to scale much more rapidly than can be done with building dorms and classrooms, and lowers the cost of attendance, because the dorms are generally 2x the cost of tuition for in-state students. So it really helps the debt issue as well as the access issue. It then allows the institution to start to be more demand driven. If 100,000 students are qualified to go to UCLA, why not let them? Literally every other part of our economy works this way now.
tobie
@Shana: Will the article be posted online? You must be mighty proud!
Shana
@tobie: It is posted online! I can never remember how to link though.
rikyrah
@Martin:
Thanks for this post??
KSinMA
@Martin: Great post! But, a quibble:
“get into Iowa State but it probably has the best creative writing program in the nation”
*ahem*
the University of Iowa
Go Hawks!
Martin
@James E Powell:
I don’t think a 4 year degree is the solution for everyone. I would like to see more trade/apprentice programs, but again, we have the reputation issue to deal with. How many parents out there are actively encouraging their kid to go to a trade school over a 4 year? Not many. So the demand side of the problem isn’t changing.
What’s more, I don’t think it’s our job to tell students not to go. I’m a big advocate for giving young people greater input and independence into their lives. But we have a system where we ask young people to game out who they think will accept them. I think that’s wrong today. It was necessary before computers, but surely we can give more control of this to students. We simply choose not to make those reforms, in part because the exclusivity is a feature to the institution.
Martin
@KSinMA: Apologies, you are correct.
JPL
@Shana: Is this it link
J R in WV
@chris:
NO clue what’s wrong. Maybe load updates to the OS and browsers? Maybe go steal a new Windows computer with high-test software? Spitballin’ here!
Shana
@JPL: Yep!
Bill Arnold
[comment in jail]
JPL
@Martin: A few days ago I read that N.J. public tech schools are quite difficult to get into. I assume it was in the Washington Post of the NYTimes, but google tells me that the state also has several technical colleges. Maybe a front pager will have you do a post about higher education, because your information is so timely.
tobie
@JPL: @Shana: Thanks for the link and confirmation! Shana, I hope your daughter doesn’t find herself so priced out that she has to have a long commute to work.
JPL
@Shana: You must be so proud.
Raven
@Martin: Do you know Mike Rose (Lives on the Boundary)”?
Kathleen
@trnc: It’s clear to me they are actively engaged in rodent fornication. Too many liberals are overly invested in the need to give the media propatainment pimps the benefit of the doubt.
JR
How about we stop blaming the “media” en masse, identify culprits and blackball them? I mean full blackout, no mentions even in the negative sense. We can start with our favorite Brazilian expat.
chris
@J R in WV: Spitballin’s all I got. Everything is updated and reset. All other websites are fine. BJ gods just fukin with me
ETA What file did you change?
Denali
@SiubhanDiunne,
I keep thinking that you could really come up with something wonderful using exonerate in the Modern Major Gentleman style.
Shana
@tobie: That’s what she’s hoping for. We’re looking at a place about a 5-10 minute drive from our house tomorrow that’s at the top of her price range. She’s currently renting a place about 15 minutes away. Both are fairly easy commutes to downtown Fairfax where she works. Fingers crossed.
jl
When I first saw this quote, I thought it was a twitter person doing a snarking riff on Trump immigration BS, then I heard Trump say it in a headline news blurb and realized it wasn’t satire but an actual quote. Hard to believe this idiotic lying horse’s ass could have stayed in office so long.
@kaitlancollins
The system is full. We can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, illegal immigration, we can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Areas full. Sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry.
https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1114287562275713025
Felanius Kootea
@James E Powell: I shake my head when people say that Clinton didn’t talk about the issues in 2016, when the news media was completely uninterested in the issues she did talk about except when they could be used to bash her – her comments about coal miners needing to be retrained because their old jobs weren’t coming back, the deplorables comment, etc. They gave Trump over a billion dollars in free advertising and are poised to do the same in 2020. They are giving Howard Schultz gobs of free advertising even though it’s not clear he has a constituency (I wished they’d given Lawrence Lessig the same amount of attention in 2016, he had the same likelihood of winning then as Schultz does now and much, much better ideas).
Sadly, the US media are also focused the same way when it comes to the Democratic primary, amplifying white male candidates’ voices above all others and rarely discussing their actual policy proposals. Maybe it’s because they are naturally drawn to candidates who look like them and have fallen into the lazy thinking that because of the electoral college, the only voters that matter are in the Midwest. Maybe it’s because they don’t know anyone *personally* who has been negatively affected by the Trump administration’s malice, cruelty and incompetence and the suffering of both documented and undocumented immigrants remains abstract. The cruelty towards undocumented immigrants has essentially become background noise, something shameful that the US tolerates because there’s always another scandal for the media to follow and sustained attention to a story is not the US media way. I have someone who reports to me who’s been waiting patiently for 13 months for his work visa to be processed; the government shutdown lengthened the processing time, he had to postpone his wedding plans in his home country, and he has to plan a quick move back to his home country if it all falls through, to leave on his own terms before his student visa runs out rather than be deported. I’ve seen up close the anguish and frustration, the helplessness from not knowing your fate and it isn’t a story that interests anyone in the media even though it’s affecting thousands of people. Maybe the most highly paid pundits and reporters’ stock portfolios have actually increased over the last two years and the tax cuts have been beneficial to them. Maybe they tow the line because deep down they believe that a handful of billionaires, especially those that own the media, are more important than the rest of us. Maybe they are secretly fascinated by the sheer awfulness of this administration and the amount of news it generates. Whatever else the Trump administration is, it is definitely not boring.
My top candidates for 2020 are Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. Warren especially on policies that would level the playing field. However I’m very much in favor of Julian Castro’s immigration policies. I’ve given to Warren, Harris and Castro and will continue to do so in the hopes that their ideas and policy proposals become the policy proposals of the eventual Dem nominee.
piratedan
@jl: obviously he hasn’t been to Wyoming or even big bend country in Texas, some of the most lonely land that’s I’ve ever seen.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
The local JC here provides the first year for free to local high school graduates. My daughter will take advantage. She wants to transfer to U of O in Eugene.
trollhattan
@Felanius Kootea:
Cannot be said often enough. She said everything that needed saying and for anybody who missed what she had to say on Topic Q, it was easily found and detailed on her website. If I had a nickle for every time I heard a reporter/interviewee/talking head proclaim “but why is she not talking about Topic Q” I’d have enough nickles to fill a sack big enough to club Trump into orbit.
It wasn’t just malpractice, it was goddamn intentional. The best possible explanation was, “I knew she’d win and did not want to appear impartial.”
catclub
@boatboy_srq:
trump in about 1999-2000 proposed a wealth tax – kinda like E Warren’s. maybe we should ask him about it.
Barbara
@Martin: I totally agree with your comment. The capacity constraints of public universities mean that people are less and less well-served by institutions they help to fund, where state population has increased significantly. In my own backyard, the legislature at least has tried to enhance the capacity of the “non-flagship” universities such that they now have a substantially better funding and reputations than they used to. And not only has capacity not been commensurate with population growth, but funding has actually been negative, which has led to the maddening phenomenon of getting a “leg up” as an out of state student with parents who can pay, such that, now, our public universities are actively seeking students from other states. I actually think geographic diversity is good, but it shouldn’t be something that you use primarily to make up for inadequate funding for in-state students who want to attend. Still, one thing the scandal also shows is how easy it is to game on-line coursework, and I am sure that has many people rethinking on-line degree programs. Back in the day, my sister went part-time to a satellite campus of Penn State, but to get her degree, she had to go live in State College for the final two years. This could be a model for on-line coursework as it is for satellite and community colleges.
One of the things that has been obvious to me for a while, with my own and other kids, is that many parents who succeeded based on a good education plus hard work, and gave their kids a much softer experience than they had as children, are fearful because their kids aren’t hungry enough — and they are seeking a credential mostly as a substitute for ambition and initiative.
But I cannot imagine paying someone to fabricate an SAT score or GPA for a student who is plainly not capable of getting into Cornell or USC, instead of hiring an educational counselor to really figure out where they might be happy. It’s a display of zero trust in their children, and zero competence as a parent. Many of these people have a net worth that is measured in millions of dollars, in some cases probably 10s of millions.
prostratedragon
@chris: How old is your linux? I had kludginess with a >5-yr-old installation, especially on this and other select sites, that has cleared up since I upgraded to last year’s opensuse (firefox, adblock plus, noscript). No problems, even though I reboot with the seasons.
raven
@Barbara: “how easy it is to game on-line coursework” Bah, it’s just as easy to “game” f2f.
jl
@Felanius Kootea: “They are giving Howard Schultz gobs of free advertising even though it’s not clear he has a constituency [or a single idea in his head]
Schultz does have a constituency, it is just the very wealthy and rich, and their near wealthy and rich flunkies in the corporate press. Most of the of the ordinary people in Schultz’ audiences may look at him with puzzlement (edit: around 96% last polling I saw), but the celeb news actors just love what he has to say.
They can think good thoughts, hope and pray that corporations will not act like criminals, even say a few things from time to time about how that is not a good thing. They can keep their money, their sponsors and bosses can keep their money. All will be well.
Some schlub dies because they can’t afford to afford treat their diabetes or congestive heart failure, private prisons kill some low priority inmates so they can make an extra penny, that is all very sad. Get a good sob human interest story out of it for the news show, up the Q-rating. But, I might be cynical.
catclub
@James E Powell:
Apparently I am not the target audience.
I was never much of a TV news watcher, but my radio news listening has gone down substantially the past two years.
jl
@trollhattan: “but why is she not talking about Topic Q”
I don’t think in 2016 most of the corporate media was interested in even getting to that question. They were obsessed with Topic Qs like ’emails’ ‘health rumors’, what dingbat thing will Trump say next and how can we milk it for ratings and clicks. When will another Trump empty lectern video op come up. Those were the burning issues of the day for the corporate media.
Steeplejack
@Martin:
Excellent post! Thanks for the illumination.
Kent
Europe and Latin America does the free college for all thing.
What you end up with is Universities with 100,000 students with massive classes and basically a lot of the non-academic aspects of the experience scrubbed out (athletics, sports centers, student unions, intramurals, etc.). And then the wealthy just cluster in elite private schools that are most definitely NOT free. Or they send their kids to the US.
Rather than aiming to make college free, I’d be more in favor of increased investments in public higher education to cut back on the tuition increases that are prevalent in many states. So that going to college is more like it was in the 60s and 70s where a good hard full timke summer job could get you well on the way to covering your tuition.
Unfortunately there are a lot of legacy issues related to the locations of public universities around the country. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have Eastern Oregon State College in LaGrande which is 3 hours from anywhere that any college grad would ever want to live. Also Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls which is another dying farm town in the middle of nowhere where no 21 year old would ever want to live. But pulling universities out of these sorts of places and putting them in the suburbs where people actually live would cause the rural folks to scream like stuck picks because the colleges are a cash cow for the local economy.
I’m a HS teacher and every year at graduation they do this thing where they ask all the kids who are going into the military to stand (for applause). Then all the kids who are going to college and have a scholarship (for applause) and all the rest of the kids stand up because who wants to be the loser kid who is still sitting. And they announce how many millions of scholarship dollars the graduating class earned (which is always a record). School newspaper does the same thing. At the end of the year they list every kid and what they are doing (military, college, etc.) and no one wants to put down “working at Wal-Mart” so they just put college and usually the local community college. There is a tremendous amount of pressue on kids to attend college and I’m not sure it is entirely healthy.
jl
OK, what are currently acceptable words for this stuff? I never used the ‘r’ word even before it was unacceptable. Are ‘moron’, ‘idiot’, still OK? ‘Fool’ and ‘ignoramus’ don’t seen strong enough.
I guess I’ll go back to ‘toxic vicious loon’. I was using that regularly for a while.
@joshtpm
This is hilarious moment. Trump starts asking how did “you” support Obama and the Democrats. Then folks in crowd starts saying, no we’re the Jewish Republicans. We’re the Jewish Republicans! Sort of the ‘Sir, this is an Arby’s’ of revisionist Zionism.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1114639096851456001
catclub
@jl: of course expanding h-2B visa numbers – harvesting crops? Kind of blows that ‘we’re full’ line to smithereens.
J R in WV
@chris:
I don’t remember, but it contained style sheets and Major^4 told me after I complained not to block that file type. somethingCXX.something. where I don’t remember the Xs, or any of it really.
but that isn’t an issue for you as you turned off your ad-blocker…
The minute I took the file out of the filter list it fixed everything…
dopey-o
Martin:
Don’t front-page your guide to becoming really educated. Write a ‘short’ book. Maybe 120 pages. Then fill it out with new chapters on the front page of a famous 1 of top 10,000 politcal blogs
New parents will start naming their children after you…….
Felanius Kootea
@Martin: Great comment. Perhaps we also need to look at how other countries regard a college education. It’s free (excluding room and board) in many countries because it’s recognized as an opportunity for a kid to have a materially better future than his or her parents.
In the US, for the longest time, a high school diploma was enough for success and many Americans are still stuck in that mindset, but the US and rest of the world are rapidly changing.
UCLA and UC Berkeley have the same cachet in some circles as Stanford or Harvard. CSU Dominguez Hills does not. I teach graduate students. I know of graduate programs that will take someone with a lower GPA from UCLA or Berkeley before someone with a 4.0 from a CSU. Is that right? Most definitely not, but here we are. When the entire society sees higher education or vocational training as a necessity, over time, the resources that flow in to bolster universities can level the playing field. Maybe instead of more people applying to your UC, more apply to a CSU or to a state school in their own state because those schools finally have the resources and the number of dedicated professors on board to compete. But student debt is still an issue for the student whose parents work the fields in the Central Valley or clean rich people’s homes in Beverley Hills or just aged out of the foster care system, even if they start in a community college and transfer to a CSU or UC. That debt, though smaller, can feel like a massive weight dragging you down. No other country saddles their young with it. I have a colleague who paid his way through UCLA back in the day, with a part time job and graduated on schedule. That is close to impossible today. What changed in this society to make people think that saddling the young with immense debt should be the new norm? It is unnecessary and short-sighted.
The US has relied in part on international students, especially in the sciences and engineering, coming to the US for graduate work and staying on, many becoming citizens and never returning to their home countries. In other words, the US benefits in many ways from the investments that other countries (some much poorer) have made in a high school education, particularly in the sciences. That has already begun to change because of this administration, with international student enrollment declining during 45’s term. This may not be on the whole a bad thing if it leads to the US doing a better job of providing funding and resources to all its high schools, not just those in affluent neighborhoods. I’m not hearing much of a conversation around that. Is there any other country in the world that funds public schools based on the property taxes raised in a neighborhood? Why not?
I got my PhD in the US in the engineering school of an Ivy league institution. There were no African Americans in the PhD program while I was there, no Latinos, two white American women, two African women (no men!), three Indian women, three Korean women, one woman from Hong Kong and over half of the students at the doctoral level were international students from China, Korea, India, Turkey, Greece, the UK. We used to joke that “Tinuade” (a Nigerian woman’s name) was a more common name in the PhD cohort than “Jenny.” I was tracked into the sciences in the equivalent of the 9th grade in Nigeria and knew I would excel at math and science because everyone around me expected it, so I expected it of myself. The Nigerian government subsidized my high school education, even though Nigeria is overall a pretty misogynistic society. When I moved to the US, I was tutoring my 11th grade classmates in math and chemistry because I was way ahead, I’d learned everything we were supposed to be learning and I didn’t even go to one of the poshest Nigerian federal secondary schools.
I hope your post gets front-paged and leads to a healthy discussion.
jl
@Kent: ‘ There is a tremendous amount of pressue on kids to attend college and I’m not sure it is entirely healthy. ‘
I think it is a mix of things. With advent of long jobless recoveries (most of the time since 2001 has been in those periods) since the bust of the 90s tech bubble, the desire to be over-credentialed was not just unhealthy cultural tick or status symbol, it was needed for people to fit into how business filtered job applicants. No college degree = no job or shitty job. Now with tighter job market, companies are abandoning that nonsense, and finding that HS or ‘some college’ folks are fine for a lot of jobs where they would not even have been considered several years ago.
The collapse of HS and post-HS vocational education is another. Many states in the US underwent a brutal de-industrialization from end of 2000 through beginning of recovery from Great Recession in 2009. The idea that it was just a continuation of long run trends is an illusion from aggregating large states like CA and NY with regional manufacturing centers. In places like MI, OH, and some southern states like AL, it was just brutal. Why bother with HS or post-HS vocational school when there are no vocations?
I think California does a very good job with its community college system. You can get a great two-year AA, do one or two years of prep work and transfer to a Cal State or UC campus and perform just as well as students there for four years, or you can do a vocational program, often getting a job offer and starting part time before you graduate. I don’t think of ‘college’ as being an unhealthy academic endeavor at all. You need enough seats, enough good teachers and enough flexibility to meet diverse needs of the local population. And you also need a healthy economy and labor market, otherwise any approach to education beyond bare three Rs will be frustrating. We are somewhat back to a healthy labor market, given the over all economy. I don’t think the overall economy is healthy at all for a normal healthy life, even if chances of a recession before 2020 are still only 50 to 60 percent. People can’t afford a place to live, just for one example, and the residential investment, construction and rehab market has been a mess since peak of the housing boom, and now under full bloom of Trumponomics, is performing more miserably than ever. Every week will be rent increase and housing shortage week for the time being. Another infrastructural story.
Chief Oshkosh
@Immanentize:
Really? Mine just said “Fuck you” and then farted for emphasis. But he’s like that – all sunshine and roses. I think I’ll have him stuffed when the time comes…
Another Scott
@chris: Does a “private browsing” window behave differently for you for B-J?
Chrome works fine for me here on macOS and Win10, using UBlock Origin.
Hope you get it figured out.
Cheers,
Scott.
chris
@prostratedragon: Mint 17.3 So about three years old and will be upgraded soon to 19.3. But I don’t think that’s it because there are no other problems. It’s just BJ
chris
@J R in WV: stackpathcdn? Site loads very slowly while it waits for that one
Left-handed compliment
A bagpiping girl from Bombay
Learned a sinuous style to play
She was a snake charmer
No cobra would harm her
Her piping just blew them away
chris
@Another Scott: It’s beyond weird at this point. Guess I’ll check in with the phone bytimes and wait for the new build
StringOnAStick
@catclub: I will listen to nice polite republicans in my biweekly commute to work but the second tRump comes in I just start swearing at him.
My favorite TV was Colbert report and TDS but we cut the cord right before the election and I just couldn’t watch political satire anymore. Now I catch Colbert occasionally on YouTube but that’s all. I used to love political humor but anymore it feels like fiddling while Rome burns.elected
TRump getting elected killed our early retirement plans because of the threat to remove guaranteed issue, and I’m still pissed about it.
Dan B
@Shana: Scary story from Seattle. All the tech companies located in the burbs, campus style HQ’s, for decades. Then the crime rate in the city dropped and Amazon located next to downtown.
The new tech workers bought in town. The commute into the city in the evening and to the burbs in the morning is now worse than the reverse. And housing prices skyrocketed. I bought my house in 1975 for $40,000. Sold it in 2009 (the W recession) for almost $700,000. Now its valued at $1.2 million. The big demand is for homes priced under a million. Taxes are nuts since we’ve got no income tax.
Amazon us currently threatening to move to Bellevue, on the other side of the lake, ie. the burbs, because we threatened to tax them to help pay for the homeless crisis they fueled. So they need a statewide solution but they’ll just move. Their problem is their employees don’t want to live in boring locations. But they move in and wreck the cool culture by making life unaffordable for the creative types.
D.C. is different because there are at least twice as many people in the metro area. Seattle metro is 3.5 million or so. Maybe you’ll do okay.
Another Scott
@jl: +1.
It goes for STEM PhDs as well. Who wants to go to school for 5-7 years after college to end up getting some adjunct or assistant professor job that pays $35k a year?? Or have to take 2 or more consecutive post-docs before finding a permanent position??
Also, life is much more complicated (in many ways) than it was 50-70 years ago when a high school education was “good enough” for a middle-class life. Finance decisions are everywhere – people need to understand compound interest. Our society depends on informed voters – people need to understand history and ways of argument and how our brains are susceptible to pretty words (that are lies) and stories of victimization (that are lies), etc. Our society needs to understand how we got to where we are – that Social Security and Medicare and the FDA and the Minimum Wage and the Income Tax were instituted for a reason, etc. Everyone these days needs more than 12 years of formal education. Whether that is in a classroom, or online, or at work, or at the union hall probably doesn’t matter as much as that it happens.
I think Martin makes a great case, but I’ll quibble with his (earlier stated) thesis that (roughly) “college is an investment so it doesn’t need to be free”. If (effectively) nearly-free college was good enough for my dad (Emory, Chicago) and people of his generation, then it’s good enough for kids these days. It’s an investment in our country’s future that will pay dividends for decades. Kids starting out in the labor force and trying to start a household don’t need a big education debt burden on top of that. And if that aid is available to every HS graduate, then one can’t make an argument that it is somehow unfair to do so.
(As Atrios argues at times – if you put restrictions on a program then you have to come up with all kinds of rules and regulations, and you need people to evaluate the evidence and make rulings, and people to hear appeals, and all the rest. It’s much simpler and more efficient to just make it open to everyone that qualified independent of income, etc. If you’re worried that the rich should pay their own way, then simply increase their overall taxes.)
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
@Another Scott: @Martin:
Can’t find the phrase below in any of Martin’s comments so will link to the first one.
“college is an investment so it doesn’t need to be free”.
Like medical care, education as an economic product has huge informational asymmetries and principal-agent problems. And, given recent job market history in the US, is just as important to people as a credential as the knowledge the credential supposedly credentials. So, I don’t see any reason to rely too much on rational market decision making wrt to educational investments guiding wise choices where 17 and 18 year olds are involved.
Also, California is a poor example for ease of decision making for average person in much of the rest of the country. Higher education in California now costs a mint compared to what it cost 60, 40, 20 years ago, but it’s still a bargain compared to much of the rest of the country. Shortage of seats compared to what there was decades ago, but a bonanza of supply compared to much of the rest of the country.
I can’t believe what some public and private (and by CA standards, low quality) community college educations cost in some parts of the country. Some states as good or better than California in terms of good, available, and affordable public post-HS education, but not many. Many are much much worse. So, Martin is describing problems in context of a system that is much more forgiving and humane than many parts of the US.
debbie
@StringOnAStick:
I have to say that Colbert’s late night show has saved me from the pits of despair. Twenty or so minutes of guffaws at the end of the day is great medicine.
Jay C
ndustrial-scale white-collar theft.
SATSQ: Said “idiot media” is PART of the propaganda machine: but can’t/won’t ever admit it….
Another Scott
@jl: See, e.g., this from 2016:
It sounds like he’s softened that view a little since then. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
moops
@Tenar Arha:
Yes, name names. The general “oh, the media is so failing” is a cop out. Who screwed up,? what did they screw up? It will never stop if the individuals that participate in this fraud are not personally shamed and driven from the temple.
Same with the generic “Chicago School” euphemism for specific individuals that should be stripped of their economic cred.
jl
@Another Scott: Thanks. Martin is correct on the long run net present value calculations. But been some big cash flow problems for a lot of new graduates since 2001, especially since they are effectively (and IMHO unconstitutionally) second class citizens wrt to educational debt.
And also too, I am one STEM person who does not agree that education should be reduced to a monetary net present value calculation from primary school up through as far as a person wants to go. I sell the importance of an well rounded education, including history, arts and language skills to my STEM students, and I sell it hard. Not sure what good it does.
Sometimes I think a lot of people obsessed with arguing for a cost-benefit case for education, and talking like STEM is all that is worth anything in education because of money payout have one big thing in common: they don’t know STEM from a cesspit. In fact, if they are banging STEM just for the bucks, they have same respect for STEM, just as they have the same respect for the humanities, as they do for a cesspit. Like parents with no books in the house and TV on all the time wondering why little Johnny and Jane don’t care about reading.
Crabby old mathematiker Carl Friedrich Gauss agrees with humble me. I think I mentioned before that when he was helping bail out the early German pension system in the 19th century, he burst out in frustration at all the crabby chiseling narrow minded people he was working for, and said that reducing life to economic cost-benefit analysis ruined the beauty and enjoyment of life, and damaged the ability to think clearly, and he was sick of them all. Which is weird, since Gauss has a reputation of being a crabby chiseling narrow minded person himself.
mapaghimagsik
@Sab:
They’re be at home with a certain California utility
Brachiator
@jl:
Coming late to the thread. I agree with you 1,000 percent.
Felanius Kootea
@jl: Second attempt at a reply – my last attempt got eaten :(. I think that in this era of great technological change, a STEM background is very important and I honestly believe that the US has failed many students by turning them off the sciences in grade school and high school. I am also a big believer in having a liberal arts degree. I enjoyed my undergraduate literature, French (had to take two years of a “foreign” language to graduate), history and sociology classes as much as my statistics, math, biology and computing classes. In graduate school, I always felt that my classmates who held liberal arts degrees were more thoughtful about the impact, ethics and potential consequences of technology than those who didn’t. They were definitely less likely to be libertarian, “I got mine, fuck everyone else” assholes and we had many of those in the school of engineering. It’s important to be well-rounded and that includes STEM in addition to other areas.
Amir Khalid
@Tenar Arha:
I don’t know if the point was aleady made, having skipped most of the thread, but I don’t think that Krugman is employed by the NYT; rather, that he is a contributor i.e. not on staff. Per Wikipedia, he is on the faculty at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Martin
@Raven: Familiar with him, but don’t know him. He’s relatively far outside of my circle.
Ramalama
@SiubhanDuinne: DAMN!
Martin
@raven:
In many ways online is harder to game, if you do it right. The problem with traditional assessment is that you’re constrained on the cost of assessors, so you do infrequent, high stakes testing. That’s among the easiest to game because hiring someone to take your test or write your paper is relatively cheap when you only need to do it infrequently, and because the credential is what matters, by the time anyone figures out you don’t know that stuff, it probably doesn’t matter. Go as Rick Perry who earned a ‘D’ in Meats, and is now running a government agency, how valuable the material he learned in class was.
But online testing can be continuous. Listen to a 15 minute lecture, take a 5 minute quiz, get the next lecture when you can pass the quiz. And by the way, there will still be summative assessments. What’s more, the next class you take will probably test you on the same material over again. You’ll probably get tested on a given topic 2 or 3 times. Questions get pulled randomly from a large library and are automatically graded. It doesn’t work well at small scale, but you get up to UKs Open University scale (170,000 students, all online) and it can work really well. I’ve implemented a few courses this way and the results have been great. It’s not a MOOC, but it’s self paced and students that are trying to use wikipedia to get through the course are obvious as hell, and we have a little intervention. Once students get it, and realize that they’ll all get perfect scores if they put in the time, their attitudes change completely.
The main problem I see in trying to convert to online courses is that there is this incredible stubbornness to simply try and reimplement a traditional classroom in an online space, and that doesn’t work.
Tenar Arha
@Amir Khalid: (And you @moops might be interested in this too). Krugman whether he’s employed there or not, if he writes something for them to publish won’t have any direct criticism of individuals or the organization they all contribute to. Either he can’t specify exactly who he is criticizing bc of a contract, or it’s an unwritten editorial rule. .
& once I started looking, apparently all the papers & magazines & networks do this, though it may not be written down anywhere. They won’t publish stuff that criticizes either their individual writers/reporters or the editors/bookers/owners of their publications directly. So NYT won’t criticize itself, & CNN won’t criticize itself…but even worse CNN will rarely criticize NYT & vice versa.
One of the more fact based examples that comes to mind right away is Bret Stephens bc, as he frequently does, he came to a conclusion before he had any facts & thus he was the wrongest. And he wrote a post-midterms column which contained multiple errors & needed multiple corrections over the next few days afterwards. Yet, he never retracted any of it, and NYT never published an analysis about why writing an election post-mortem before most of the votes had even been tallied in multiple races that were too close to call might have been an editorial mistake they’d take into consideration the next time they assigned any analysis like that again.
ETA I get better media criticism by comedians, via Twitter, or blogs than from the major media. It pushes my buttons they’re unable to do this openly, & apparently not internally either.
Martin
@jl:
My alums routinely tell me that the communications classes they take as part of our STEM program are the most valuable ones they took. So I don’t disagree with you.
That said, it cuts both ways. One of my first jobs out of college was working out a research project in the classics. They needed people that could code and understood classical greek. The couldn’t find many classicists (other than David Packard Jr – neat guy, btw) that fit that mold but they did find a programmer (me) who did – that was 30 years ago. Most of the linguistic jobs out there now are at Google and other machine learning companies. There are services coming up to do editorial writing work.
The ‘STEM’ argument is a recognition that programming and engineering are increasingly entering the humanities and social sciences turf. But I see programming becoming a commodity, and the traditional CS space not holding up well in the long term. The key is for all domain experts to have coding and engineering as part of their toolkit. Make that a practical part of the humanities curriculum, in much the same way engineering students learn CAD and welding and other key skills. Much of whats wrong with Silicon Valley is CS majors with insufficient social sciences experience tackling social sciences problems, but that’s a space the social sciences are ceding by not preparing their students for where these fields are going.
jl
@Tenar Arha: Krugman has, IMHO, said that he has to tread carefully in criticizing NYT editorial policy and other contributors, though not in so many words. When Krugman was first brought on the editorial page decades ago now, he seemed to have some opinions on economics that were more in line with NYT (and WaPo, etc.) editorial board and publisher fixed ideas on economics, especially fiscal policy and trade deals, than they are now. Krugman’s ideas have developed along with evidence, since Krugman at least tries to be an empirical scientist (to the extent economics is one of those). Many of NYT editorial boards have not. Krugman also has expressed how he has to be careful about editorial rules that forbid columnists from ID-ing, or even seeming to, with a political party. Krugman has blown through the spirit of that, though he periodically notes how he has to dot some i’s and cross some t’s. to stay on the safe side.
Edit: shorter, NYT thought they would get a permanent centrist deficit and debt scold, and die hard ‘free trader’ (in quotes since that is by now just a code word for advocate for corporate friendly trade deals).
jl
@Martin: I agree. You need some and respect for both domains. Quite a few very STEM-y econometric studies on macroeconomics and political economy are total junk because the very STEM-y authors couldn’t be bothered to hit a history book. One infamous example is a cottage industry showing that most New Deal infrastructure spending was driven by FDR’s worries about the electoral college in upcoming elections. They never bothered to check how many authorizations and how much spending started during the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. Boulder (now Hoover) Dam being one particularly important set of data points.
So, you need both, and it cuts both ways.
Edit: and STEM cut up into so many chunks, problems in communication even within that domain. Machine learning oopsies that show up in the news, like unbelievable old school biases in employment screening algorithms would be less likely if AI people could find time to take a few study design lectures for evaluating their training data.
Zinsky
Democrats really need to step up their non-violent resistance to this misogynistic pig over the next 18 months. Every place this orange-haired geriatric degenerate goes, there needs to be throngs of people screaming “Impeach Trump” and “Lock him up”, so loud his mindless minions can’t hear the pervert. Lay down in front of his motorcade and egg and rotten tomato his limousine everywhere it goes. The man is a monster who deserves nothing but mockery, embarrassment and contempt!