Welcome to Law School
Posted by happycon in law school on March 30th, 2009
I have been accepted to law school. Law school is that place you go when you have an undergraduate education sufficiently expensive and esoteric to render you a liability to the private sector. It’s not about helping people, whatever they say. It’s about paying down student loans.
I visited my law school and got to see a mock class. We talked about a case that came before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting gay sodomy. The appeal challenged the law under the equal protection clause.
I’m not a lawyer yet, and I’m certainly not a judge. But here’s what I gathered from the mock class:
O’Connor argued that they should strike down the law. Naturally, the legislature could simply outlaw all sodomy (treating everyone equally), similar to another law that the Court had allowed to stand. O’Connor thought that this wouldn’t work because all the straight people like anal sex too much.
The teacher let this hang in the air for awhile, and we all laughed. Nervously. Then she grabbed it from the air and swung it haymaker-style, beating us across the face with it.
All those years in academia and her insight was firmly within grasp of a teenage boy, and nearly as astute. As it were.
That’ll be fifty grand, thanks.
Screwing Our (Children)
Posted by happycon in Uncategorized on March 25th, 2009
I found this on Ace Of Spades, here.
I find this graph terrifying. I’m not a professional, but things do seem to be getting better despite, rather than because of, President Obama’s program.
Where is that money going to come from anyhow? Those are yearly deficits - not the cumulative debt. I also like this graph.
There’s an old story about Reagan. When his car was under assault from rowdy students screaming “We are the future!,” he responded by writing a note to them and holding it up to the window:
“I’ll sell my bonds.”
I’d be interested to hear some research on what will happen when the soaring debt of the Obamastration meets the sinking fertility rates of my generation, a group of narcissists more worried about hip living than creating a new generation to leave all that debt to. When we’re spending all my kid’s money, are we keeping track of our newly inverted family trees? A lot of the folks we’re borrowing from probably won’t ever exist in the first place.
Pretty freakin’ spooky, huh?
Investor’s Business Daily
Posted by happycon in conservative on March 25th, 2009
I’ve been reading a lot of WSJ’s lately (although my wife accuses me of saving them for fuel in case of the Obamacalypse). They subsidize the cost to students ($100/year) and deliver them at least twice as often as the Postal Service.
Unfortunately, their web content is not free for non-subscribers. For the cheapskates out there, try out the Investor’s Business Daily. While most of the stock picking content is subscriber only, the cartoons, editorials, and columns (”on the right” and “on the way right”) are all free. I’d never heard of it until I say a high ranking Missouri Republican reading one. They also have a cheap rate for students, but since it’s the middle of the semester you may want to hold off until next year.
Keeping Class Attendance - Lazy Professors No. 2
To expound on my lazy professor theory, I’m going to take just a little time to pick on classes that require/maintain a roster of attendance.
I think everyone should go to class. After all, that’s why we’re here. I can read books on my own; I pay so much to hear the professor lecture and to learn from him.
Why would a teacher maintain and require attendance? It clearly requires more work on their part to keep attendance than simply to lecture to whomever shows up. It must be because they worry no one will come to class if they don’t force them. While classes may not always and everywhere entertain, they should have some merit on their own. That’s why we pay professors.
If I don’t go to class, I face two possibilities:
- I miss something important to my education that I cannot gather from the assigned reading.
- I don’t miss anything.
Since I have more information about my ability to catch up on missed material and on my opportunity cost than anyone else, I should have the power to choose to skip class without an additional tax that applies equally regardless of ability. If the professor wants to raise the cost of missing class, he make his lecture more interesting. I should not be punished for skipping class to do something more important if the professor can’t manage to make attending lecture worthwhile. Keeping attendance is the last refuge of the inept lecturerer, a professor so boring or useless that no one will attend his class unless he docks their grades for absence.
Outside of Ecomp, I’ve run into this system rarely at Washu. Teachers here generally rely on the worth of the material and their skills as lecturers to draw students to class, certain that those who don’t attend will reap the punishment on the midterm and final exams. And if you can manage to get an A without going, they don’t punish your ability with classwide absence taxes.
Other universities frequently keep attendance, require attendance, and use pop quizzes to entice students to waste valuable time sitting in classes where the professor cares so little about his vocation that students could get good grades without attending. I pity those professors who have so little talent or inclination that they cannot keep students interested in the material, and I pity those students who are bullied into classes taught by such useless numbskulls.
The bottom line: students should be able to avoid classes whose lectures are not useful or interesting and should be willing and able to accept the consequences come exam time. Requiring attendance hurts able students who can score well without attending class and allows worthless professors to waste students’ time without putting forth effort or skill.
Objectivity in Journalism
Conservatives often (ad nauseum) complain about liberal bias in the press. This irks me. Of course the press is biased. The news isn’t math; we can’t express what happens in terms of symbols whose definitions are understood and undisputed. We have been blessed and cursed with a beautiful and vibrant language full of connotation and nuance.
Imagine a great fountain up in Newsland. Pristine news shoots out of the fountain twenty-four hours a day. We’re all busy, though, and we can’t go get our own news out of the fountain. We send other people to do it. We’d like them to keep their buckets perfectly clean, but they’re busy too. Their buckets have got some leftover news in them, some stuff that happened yesterday and last week and three months ago.
Not only that, but it’s a long walk from the fountain in Newsland to where we are. The people we send spill some news along the way, replacing it so that we don’t notice. Maybe they don’t even realize they’ve done it.
The point is not that the reporters are bad people, but that they are people just as we are. There is no magical conveyor belt from Newsland, and we can’t go ourselves. We send our people and hope for the best, knowing in advance that their buckets just aren’t that clean.
This cultural desire for fairness is a fairly recent invention. When anybody could start a paper, we didn’t care so much about objectivity. Newspapers were partisan, and that was just fine. We knew what to expect and simply didn’t read the papers we didn’t agree with. (To some extent, that happens now. I certainly avoid CNN if at all possible, and watch MSNBC only under threat of dismemberment. It’s not because the anchors are cuter elsewhere.)
But changes in technology brought on economies of scale in newspapers. Bigger newspapers could save on overhead and price below the cost of smaller papers, and we ended up with a single paper in every major market. Without competition, journalists began to create an air of objectivity and separation from the editorial staff. They failed then as now, but the promise of fairness made the paper appealing to the wider audience it now served.
Regulation of the airways gave us a similar situation in television and radio.
Lucky for us, the internet has once again created competition in news. We now have the option to avoid the print media altogether, or to buy news papers whose opinions with which we concur. Cable news broke the backs of the networks, and the internet has brought down the New York Times.
We’re really back to where we started, except that we have a legacy of reporters claiming to separate their feelings from the news. Let them throw down their affectation and come out of the tank. They should be free to voice their opinions so long as they truthfully report on the facts, and we know in advance their positions.* Let the market decide who shall provide the news, and let us quit whining when people behave as people will.
*Of course, NPR is the exception. NPR should be abolished, since it will never fall under the jurisdiction of the market and so will continue to provide taxpayer subsidized advertising for the ideological left. They should hate it anyway; it’s incredibly regressive.
Peer Reviews Are Theft
My next assignment in argumentation will be a peer-reviewed paper. I hate doing peer-reviewed papers.
First of all, I don’t pay fifty grand a year to listen to what other students think of my writing. Even if I were average, I’d be better than half of those people. But even the best writer in the group is still twenty-two with a brain full of mush and nonsense. They spend all their time writing about feedlots. And global warming. And how the world will be unjust until we’ve rid it of both.
But the second problem is perhaps more annoying. After all, my classmates are in the same boat I am. It’s not their fault that we’re all young and stupid. The real fault lies with the professor. This peer review will fill up four lectures. Tack on another four lectures for presentations at the end of the semester, and that’s eight out of twenty-seven classes that my professor will not have to prepare a lecture. The average student pays $185 per class to go here; the tab comes to nearly $1500 a person for the eight classes that we miss. That class has sixteen students, so the total bill comes to $23,680. $23,680 stolen from students by a professor. Will she declare that on her tax return?
And they say we need more money for education.
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