If a kid isn't interested in science by the time they hit freshman year of college, it isn't a failure of the college.

Get 'em when they are young.

Yes, LA is really fucked up. So is California in general. And so are my apocryphal firefighters and policemen.

The average pay for firefighters you linked me to doesn't account for benefits and pension, does it? That's just base salary. So, if the average pay for firefighters is just under $44k, then that's pretty much their taxable income because I cannot image what possible expenses they'd deduct, because they have zero financial risk being an employee. And I'd imagine his benefits alone would equal around $15k to $20k. And then of course their pension which is available when they retire at 55.

That's a pretty good deal. And they get women fawning over them and the vox populi calling them heros. Then there's the guy in the private sector, who's painted to look selfish and evil. People like me. But we don't have unions to protect us, give us great pensions and benefits, and we actually create jobs. I created two last year myself. That aside, the real problems with LA and CA are the unions. They were one thing when they protected proletariats from the bourgeoisie in Charles Dickens' England, but they're something entirely different today, especially when allowed to collude with government and legislators.

I grew up in a milltown in the South. You can't get more working class than that. I'm almost 40 and I'm still paying off my college loans, so suffice it to say no one helped me out. Being happy? I know what makes me happy. The same things you mentioned: not having to worry about rent, not having to worry about food, etc. But without getting too personal here, I can safely say some of that worries me right now because of what I owe to the taxman. And probably nine to eight years back I was in a really, really bad place, yet the taxman cometh. I tried to cash a honkey check, but apparently those don't exist. I guess being white only goes so far contrary to modern lib rhetoric.

What I find interesting is if someone like me bitches that the tax is too high, which it is, then some of you complain I'm selfish and refusing to pay my fair share. But isn't it you, the statists who believe in stealing my money to give to others, that are actually being selfish by laying the tax burden so heavy on the middle class? Specifically income tax.

In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
Okay, so LA has a problem. It's not a nationwide epidemic, the average pay for firefighters simply isn't that high. Members of congress get paid $174,000 a year, the President gets paid $400,000/yr. You probably shouldn't be paying the average firefighter more than a House freshman, and the Fire Chief more than the President.

As for your architect, I'm not surprised by that at all. If you want to tell that as a story about taxes, you're probably going to have to at least provide an example of how the math works out so that you make less owning your own business than working for someone else solely because of taxes. I bet it's mostly due to the fact that there's not really a big market for a mom & pop architect out there even in good times, and especially given the state of the real estate market right now. Running your own business isn't easy, and it's certainly not the way to get yourself a stable source of take home income in a depressed economy.

I'm of two minds about your last paragraph. Someday I think I'm going to write some big blog posts about my life, and how it shaped my political outlook. For now, I'll just say I did ultimately have a privileged life compared to most, but not by as much as you seem to assume. I'm no trust fund baby -- and I went to school with enough of those to know the difference. I have a shitload more in common with the poor working class people in the neighborhood I grew up in than I do with the trust fund set I went to school with.

The trust fund set generally felt like accumulation of wealth and status was the primary route to happiness. The more working class people in my neighborhood saw money as more of a means to an end. Happiness for them was being able to not have to worry about whether they could afford groceries, or worry about their car breaking down, or having to borrow to make rent/mortgage payments, or medicine for sick kids. They didn't really care about having the nicest clothes, a nice car, gourmet foods, or who had membership to the more prestigious country club. Those were things my rich friends talked about constantly.

I grew up constantly switching between class experiences. Over time it made me see pretty clearly that money isn't the key to real happiness. I saw lots of unhappy rich people, and lots of happy poor people. Their outlook on life had more to do with things other than money.

Anyways, it sounds like you think you're engaged in a class struggle to try to help the lower classes get a leg up on the rich. If so, great, you and I are on the same side then.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Dude, is it so hard to believe a public employee makes $12,000 a month? That's only $144,000 a year, not $1.4 million. It's possible. Especially since so many groups are unionized in this state.

[snip]

My CPA also told me a story of an architect who got tired of struggling as a small business and having to pay so much in taxes, so he quit the private sector to make more money working for the city. You wanna call BS on my apocryphal architect?

And I do care about the taxes I have to pay. I envy you that you don't. You must've had a great life as a lawyer's son. Always having more than you owe. I wish we all could come from there so we could also take the same sanctimonious positions you do. Only people of privilege seem to say things like, "money isn't everything." As if they scowl at the rest of us for wanting better for ourselves. Now excuse me while I go back to that mom of yours I was fucking when I told you this story.

Okay, so LA has a problem. It's not a nationwide epidemic, the average pay for firefighters simply isn't that high. Members of congress get paid $174,000 a year, the President gets paid $400,000/yr. You probably shouldn't be paying the average firefighter more than a House freshman, and the Fire Chief more than the President.

As for your architect, I'm not surprised by that at all. If you want to tell that as a story about taxes, you're probably going to have to at least provide an example of how the math works out so that you make less owning your own business than working for someone else solely because of taxes. I bet it's mostly due to the fact that there's not really a big market for a mom & pop architect out there even in good times, and especially given the state of the real estate market right now. Running your own business isn't easy, and it's certainly not the way to get yourself a stable source of take home income in a depressed economy.

I'm of two minds about your last paragraph. Someday I think I'm going to write some big blog posts about my life, and how it shaped my political outlook. For now, I'll just say I did ultimately have a privileged life compared to most, but not by as much as you seem to assume. I'm no trust fund baby -- and I went to school with enough of those to know the difference. I have a shitload more in common with the poor working class people in the neighborhood I grew up in than I do with the trust fund set I went to school with.

The trust fund set generally felt like accumulation of wealth and status was the primary route to happiness. The more working class people in my neighborhood saw money as more of a means to an end. Happiness for them was being able to not have to worry about whether they could afford groceries, or worry about their car breaking down, or having to borrow to make rent/mortgage payments, or medicine for sick kids. They didn't really care about having the nicest clothes, a nice car, gourmet foods, or who had membership to the more prestigious country club. Those were things my rich friends talked about constantly.

I grew up constantly switching between class experiences. Over time it made me see pretty clearly that money isn't the key to real happiness. I saw lots of unhappy rich people, and lots of happy poor people. Their outlook on life had more to do with things other than money.

Anyways, it sounds like you think you're engaged in a class struggle to try to help the lower classes get a leg up on the rich. If so, great, you and I are on the same side then.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Dude, is it so hard to believe a public employee makes $12,000 a month? That's only $144,000 a year, not $1.4 million. It's possible. Especially since so many groups are unionized in this state.

[snip]

My CPA also told me a story of an architect who got tired of struggling as a small business and having to pay so much in taxes, so he quit the private sector to make more money working for the city. You wanna call BS on my apocryphal architect?

And I do care about the taxes I have to pay. I envy you that you don't. You must've had a great life as a lawyer's son. Always having more than you owe. I wish we all could come from there so we could also take the same sanctimonious positions you do. Only people of privilege seem to say things like, "money isn't everything." As if they scowl at the rest of us for wanting better for ourselves. Now excuse me while I go back to that mom of yours I was fucking when I told you this story.

This segment is false in a lot of places, but not entirely misleading:

1. Harper tried to change the wording of the Radio Act (and the Television Act, and some other act that regulates satellite TV and the like) to allow false and misleading news broadcasts.

2. Harper wasn't going to launch Sun TV. His friends were, and he was helping them out. He's the Prime Minister. He can't launch TV networks. Think about it.

3. Sun TV was dubbed, "Fox News North"

Besides that, it was hilarious watching Anna, who has the debating chops of a high school freshman, trying to duke it out with Cenk. She completely missed his point that the Republicans would use the law to muzzle left wing media. Cenk left himself open when he said the government shouldn't decide what's misleading (that's what courts do, and they're government), and when he said he'd be happy if Fox News came out and admitted they're not a news organization (they're never going to do that, so why suggest it as an alternative to this law), but she went right back to her simplistic one line argument about needing a law to stop false news. Then he batted her around like a cat with an injured mouse.

Haha, I sort of did when walking to class and just woke up (half-asleep) in college as a freshman year. I didn't see the wet sidewalk. Oops.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

True - the GOP has certainly not won any points lately. I'll be very interested to see how the establishment GOP reacts to all these Tea Party winners come Wednesday. The Tea Party is all about fiscal responsibility, budget balance, and reducing government. If the freshman of the 2010 congress go there and just keep the Big Gummint bandwagon rolling then there's going to be a lot of very angry consituents.


You mean Lynching up Dem Negroes? Seriously though please leave.

True - the GOP has certainly not won any points lately. I'll be very interested to see how the establishment GOP reacts to all these Tea Party winners come Wednesday. The Tea Party is all about fiscal responsibility, budget balance, and reducing government. If the freshman of the 2010 congress go there and just keep the Big Gummint bandwagon rolling then there's going to be a lot of very angry consituents.

I shit you not - I went to high school with her. We were in Advanced Drama A together freshman year. Ani DiFranco's brother was a substitute teacher at our high school, as well.

Damn, cool song too. Very Bjork-esque.

I took a fair bit of bullying in High School just for being a fairly academic nerd, rather than being gay. I too felt instantly better and more accepted after graduating. However, I somewhat disagree with their "stick it out, it will get better" message, at least in some cases.

I stuck it out and graduated. I would be tempted to say that doing so "built character" or something, but honestly I think that is bullshit. After I graduated, a friend of mine that had finished her freshman year in HS and suffered from the same sort of bullying and crap decided to just drop out and get her GED. She had her head on straight so passing the GED was absolutely no problem, even at that age. From there, she was in essentially the same position that I was after graduating, and went to the same state college as me.

"Toughing it out" and finishing her last 3 years of HS would have done her no good. There is a certain stigma attached to being a GED graduate rather than a HS diploma holder, but it probably won't present any real problems for college acceptance unless you're shooting for a pretentious prestigious school, and once you have a college degree no employer is going to give 2 shits about what you were doing in HS.

In my case, sticking with it through HS graduation was OK; I had some good experiences to balance out the bad. But I think that if you are taking a lot of abuse in High School you might very well be better off just washing your hands of it and getting your GED.

I completely agree with the bathroom experience. I remember I learned to hold it rather than go to the bathroom because I was so afraid of the whole social aspect of it. Once as a freshman I had to go so bad and the teacher was being an angry troll about it but finally let me go, the toilettes had no doors so no privacy and I had to go number two so bad I just went. What did she do? She made one of the other kids not necessarily a bully but a popular one go check on me. Needless to say everyone knew my business and were laughing when I returned to class. These types of events affected me so bad that once I received my license I would rather skip school and go home to use the toilette than even think of using one at school.

I find it bizarre how many people are attached to a hyper-specific meaning for the word "irony". Irony is a very broad term, and very few of the important uses of irony in classic literature would hold to the ridiculous standard many people seem to want.

Many, if not all, of the things in Alanis's song are indeed ironic, not just according to some new-fangled weak definition, but according to the way "irony" has been used for centuries. If anything, I think people are much more gun shy about calling something ironic than they used to be, because so many people are so attached to their very narrow definition. That's not to say that "rain on your wedding day" is ironic, but a "death row pardon, 2 minutes too late"... that meets with how the term ironic has normally been used.

Sarzy, in fact, I'd argue that dramatic irony is such a general-ballpark kind of definition that really big coincidences...


Coincidence has very little to do with dramatic irony. Dramatic irony means that a character is acting or speaking based on a belief the audience knows is wrong. Almost all stories involve dramatic irony - and it isn't some "lesser" kind of irony or something, it's just a description for a very broad range of situations. The fact that it's broad shouldn't bother anyone, unless they have some emotional attachment to calling people out for false positives.

Irony is an extremely common literary device, and it isn't wrong to see irony in almost all dramatic works and most rhetorical ones. For some reason, many want to change this useful term to instead refer to such a narrow range of things that the term would be useless. I assume this comes from a misunderstanding in freshman English or something - believing that all instances of irony must fit the exact form of an example.

In my college days I knew of a guy who disassembled a large, bulky wheel clamp (much bigger than the one seen here) used by the campus police when it was placed on his car as a freshman. For the rest of his time at school he parked anywhere he wanted and simply slid the clamp into place, then slid it off when he wanted to leave.

He got away with it for more than 3 years.

At 23min the freshman does a good job of hitting Obama with question.

Obama, of course, does a good job answering these questions... pretty much... very minimal on details, though

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Spiritual-Machines-Computers-Intelligence/dp/0140282025/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262555071&sr=8-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines
I'm not sure if the wiki is accurate though... as it doesn't contain a summary of 2009 and instead include some of the predictions under 2019.

Had to read it for a course in freshman undergrad. I'll have to dig the book up somewhere and check again.

>> ^Enzoblue:
Not even upvoting this. "horrific chemo and radiation" is a huge industry. A cure now would guarantee our financial collapse here in America. And for what? To reverse the second largest population controller we've got? F that.


I guess if the chemo was focused exclusively on the crotch area, we'd have THE greatest population controller. Perhaps chemo should be *mandatory* to those in perfect health as well. Then the economy could rebound like an 19-year-old freshman just out of a long-term high school relationship. YOU, Sir, are brilliant. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.