Lebron James Is Going Back to Cleveland
Mother Jones
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Category Archives: Vintage
Does Financial Literacy Matter?
Mother Jones
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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.
Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.
But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?
Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.
Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.
Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.
Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.
Taken from:
Prior Experience Doesn’t Matter (Much)
Mother Jones
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Tyler Cowen points to yet another story today about how HR departments are using big data to hire and manage employees, and it’s fairly interesting throughout. However, my appreciation for the power of this approach was certainly enhanced when I read the following:
For Xerox this means putting prospective candidates for the company’s 55,000 call-centre positions through a screening test that covers a wide range of questions….The results are surprising. Some are quirky: employees who are members of one or two social networks were found to stay in their job for longer than those who belonged to four or more social networks (Xerox recruitment drives at gaming conventions were subsequently cancelled). Some findings, however, were much more fundamental: prior work experience in a similar role was not found to be a predictor of success.
This was something I always scratched my head about back when I was a hiring manager. Obviously you want someone with work experience that’s related to the job you’re trying to fill, but an awful lot of my fellow managers seemed pretty obsessed with finding candidates with almost identical experience. I understood the attraction of hiring someone who seemed like they could be slotted in immediately and hit the ground running, but it still seemed misplaced. Which would you rather hire? Someone fairly good with exactly the right experience, or someone really good who might take a month or two to learn some new things? I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.
On the other hand, I suppose valuing experience highly might be a good idea if you really had no faith in your ability to distinguish good from really good. And the truth is that most of us probably don’t. So maybe finding perfect fits makes more sense than I gave it credit for. After all, back in the Middle Ages we didn’t have access to Xerox’s whiz-bang big data.
Taken from:
We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for July 11, 2014
Mother Jones
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A group of US Marines, the Silver Eagles, say goodbye and prepare to deploy to the Western Pacific. (US Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Sarah Cherry.)
Link to article:
Was Iraq’s Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?
Mother Jones
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In early July, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the jihadist terror group now known as the Islamic State—formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS—preached on high in Mosul and declared himself the “Caliph Ibrahim” of a new fundamentalist Sunni state stretching from western and northern Iraq to northern Syria. This announcement came after months of fighting over territory and skirmishes with Iraqi forces, as ISIS invaded and captured dozens of Iraqi cities including Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown.
In short order, Baghdadi has become Iraq’s most prominent extremist leader. But for much of his adult life, Baghdadi did not have a reputations as a fiery, jihadist trailblazer. According to the Telegraph, members of his local mosque in Tobchi (a neighborhood in Baghdad) who knew him from around 1989 until 2004 (when he was between the ages of 18 and 33) considered Baghdadi a quiet, studious fellow and a talented soccer player. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Baghdadi was earning a degree in Islamic studies in Baghdad.
Read article here:
Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US
Mother Jones
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Preparing for his dangerous trip north, a Central American teen stops to pen a letter to his uncle in the United States. He writes that his mom is telling him to think hard about the risks: the gangs on the trains, the cartels that kidnap migrants, the days of walking through the desert. But those roadblocks, he writes, are worth it: “I see myself earning a bunch of money in the United States, and my mom here without any worries.”
More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.
70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?
What’s Next for the Children We Deport?
This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border
Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing
“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”
So begins a new public service announcement aimed at keeping Central American kids from joining the tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants who have been apprehended by US authorities in the last year. The PSA soon turns dark, though: After the teen says goodbye to his mother, and his uncle puts down the letter he’s been reading, the camera pulls back from a close-up of the boy, dead on the desert floor. A narrator urges viewers: “They’re our future. Let’s protect them.”
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) developed the TV ads, as well as posters and marimba-infused radio spots, as part of its million-dollar Dangers Awareness Campaign. Rolled out shortly after Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Guatemala in June, the campaign is an attempt to counter rumors that unaccompanied kids will be allowed to stay in the United States. The ads emphasize that the journey is extremely dangerous and that children won’t get legal status if they make it across the border.
The campaign will run for 11 weeks, CBP spokesman Jaime Ruiz told the Associated Press. “We want a relative that is about to send $5,000, $6,000 to a relative in El Salvador to see this message and say, ‘Oh my God, they’re saying that the journey is more dangerous,'” Ruiz said. “We try to counter the version of the smuggler.”
Here’s the other televised PSA, in which two silhouettes—a would-be migrant and a smuggler—discuss heading north, the smuggler turning increasingly aggressive and his shadow occasionally turning into that of a coyote, the slang word for a smuggler:
(Notably, CBP created slightly different versions of each of the stories for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the three countries that have sent the most unaccompanied minors to the US. Watch them all here.)
This type of campaign isn’t anything new. For years, the Mexican government has produced ads about the dangers of walking through the Arizona desert, and several years ago the Department of Homeland Security, as part of CBP’s Border Safety Initiative, distributed CDs to Latin American radio stations with sad songs aimed at slowing immigration from the south. With so many variables at play, it’s virtually impossible to measure their effect.
But with more than 57,000 unaccompanied kids apprehended in the United States since October—a situation that CBP head R. Gil Kerlikowske called “difficult and distressing on a lot of levels” when speaking to members of the Senate homeland security committee on Wednesday—the government seems willing to try anything.
Original article:
Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US
Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.
Mother Jones
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On Wednesday morning, conservatives were all atwitter over the fact that President Obama had been photographed playing pool and drinking a beer the previous night in Denver. A mere thousand miles away, there was a humanitarian crisis on the border! How out of touch can a guy get? Clearly this was Obama’s Katrina moment.
This combined two of the right’s favorite Obama-era tropes. First, it was about his millionth Katrina moment. Conservatives still can’t get it through their heads that George Bush’s Katrina moment was never really about those famous photographs of him mugging with a guitar while the levees were being breached in New Orleans and later staring moodily out an airplane window at the flooding below. It was about “heckuva job, Brownie.” It was about his casual near-destruction of FEMA over the previous four years. It was about the startling contrast between his laggard response to Katrina and his near-frenetic response to the Terry Schiavo panderfest just a few months earlier. But conservatives simply refuse to believe this. They’re convinced it was all about an unfair photographic comparison, and they’re determined to make a Democratic president suffer the same fate.
Second, it’s become practically a parlor game for conservatives to chastise Obama for engaging in some kind of social activity while there’s a serious crisis somewhere. This is an evergreen faux complaint. After all, there’s almost always something serious going on somewhere, which means you can always figure out an excuse to haul out this chestnut.
Now, to some extent none of this matters as long as it’s just a partisan response from the professional right. But yesterday it metastasized into something more over Obama’s answer to a question about why he wasn’t heading down to the border to see the refugee crisis for himself. “I’m not interested in photo-ops,” he said. “I’m interested in solving a problem.” This almost instantly turned into a misquote: “I don’t do photo-ops.” And with that, the mainstream press started piling on too.
This was, obviously, ridiculous. First of all, Obama didn’t say that he doesn’t do photo-ops. That would have been idiotic. What he very plainly said was that in this particular case he wasn’t interested in doing a photo-op. He had introduced a plan to address the crisis and he was in Texas to discuss it with state officials. That’s where he wanted to keep the focus.
And with that, as if to mock me, the whole thing exploded into a moronic national conversation about the optics of shooting pool in Denver but not going to the border to have his photograph taken with wistful-looking Latin American children. This came just a couple of days after I had defended the word optics against Jamison Foser, and plainly Foser had turned out to be right. The mere availability of the word seemed to change the whole tone of the coverage. As Dave Weigel put it, “The president is the star of most D.C. political stories, obviously, so many stories end up being about whether they help or hurt him. The problem is that the press can’t be sure if they will, or won’t.” So they just guess.
Now, I suppose I still have a feeble defense to offer. I did say there were good and bad uses of optics, and this just happened to be one of the bad ones. But the speed with which one photograph and one misquote saturated the punditocracy and morphed into an inane conversation about optics surely makes Foser’s case for him.
So I give up. There are still good uses of the word optics, but as long as the press remains so addicted to dumb uses that have such obvious roots in transparent partisan nonsense, it’s probably best to insist that they go cold turkey. No more optics, guys. Not until you demonstrate an ability to use the word like adults.
Link:
Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan
Mother Jones
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Three years ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a huge cheerleader for the controversial budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have partially privatized Medicare and slashed social spending programs. Now McConnell, who’s in a tough reelection fight, is backing away from his support and trying to suggest he was not an outright champion of this draconian budget measure.
In an ad released this week, McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, attacks the GOP senator for backing Ryan’s 2011 budget proposal, which would have essentially ended Medicare as a guaranteed federal program, slashed Medicaid, and repealed Obamacare. In the ad, an elderly Kentucky man named Don Disney asks why McConnell voted to raise his medical costs by thousands of dollars a year—referring to a provision in the Ryan budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would hike out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,000.
McConnell’s campaign fired back, pointing out that the senator did not vote for the proposal itself, but rather only voted in favor of bringing the measure to the Senate floor for a vote. “There is no way to speculate” what McConnell would have done regarding a final vote on the Ryan budget, his campaign insists.
But that’s cutting the legislative sausage rather thin. The vote on whether to bring the Ryan plan to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote was the key vote—and McConnell voted in favor of the proposal. It was only because the majority Democrats blocked the bill from reaching a final vote that McConnell did not have a chance to officially vote for passage of the budget proposal. But McConnell himself bragged about having “voted” for the Ryan budget. And he repeatedly praised the Ryan plan and expressed support for the measure.
In a speech on the Senate floor in April 2011, McConnell called Ryan’s budget a “serious and detailed plan for getting our nation’s fiscal house in order.” He maintained that it would “strengthen the social safety net.”
That month, he also called Ryan’s budget “a serious, good-faith effort to do something good and necessary for the future of our nation and…for the good of the nation,” according to Congressional Quarterly.
In May 2011, McConnell, appearing on Fox News, vowed to vote for Ryan’s proposal. He said Ryan’s plan was “a very sensible way to go to try to save Medicare.”
Even though the Senate never held a final vote on the Ryan budget, McConnell’s backing for the plan—which included large tax cuts for the wealthy—was full-throated and unambiguous. “He’s probably relieved that it never came to a final vote,” says Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.
In responding to the Grimes ad, McConnell’s campaign also took issue with the charge that he voted to raise medical costs for Kentucky seniors by $6,000 each. The campaign claimed that this figure is out of date because Ryan’s subsequent budget plans—which also were not passed by Congress—would raise Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs by much less. Yet Paul Van De Water, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says that the Grimes campaign “accurately” cited what the 2011 plan would have done.
Ryan’s 2011 budget would have slashed Medicare by $389 billion by raising the eligibility age and partly privatizing the program, dramatically increasing costs for new retirees. Under the same plan, funding for Medicaid would have been slashed by 35 percent over 10 years. The proposal additionally would have ended Obamacare, preventing millions from obtaining affordable health insurance. At the time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid warned the Ryan budget “would be one of the worst things that could happen in this country if it went into effect.”
As the McConnell-Grimes race—one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year—heats up, Grimes is attempting to tar McConnell with the extreme budget plan that he once embraced. McConnell, the veteran Capitol Hill wheeler-and-dealer, is trying to wiggle out of the trap through a legislative loophole—creating a false impression and distancing himself from his party’s policymaker-in-chief.
His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Original link:
Americans Are Surprisingly Stressed Out About News and Politics
Mother Jones
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Via Wonkblog, here’s a fascinating little chart courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They just released a survey about the causes of stress, and things like health and money problems are predictably the biggest sources. But how about all those niggling little daily causes of stress? What are the biggest routine things that send you into conniptions?
Well, it turns out that two of the biggest contributors to high blood pressure are watching the news and hearing about what politicians are up to. And boy howdy, does this beg for a follow-up. I really, really want to know what news sources cause the most stress. Is it listening to NPR? Watching Fox News? Getting your daily Limbaugh fix? Reading Kevin Drum’s blog?
Perhaps the mere act of making you think about this is, at this very moment, making you red in the face. Then again, maybe not. I want to know more. Who’s most stressed out by the news? Liberals? Conservatives? Everyone? And what outlets cause the most stress? Obviously my money is on the Drudge/Fox/Limbaugh axis, but maybe I’d be surprised. I want to hear more about this.
Originally from:
Americans Are Surprisingly Stressed Out About News and Politics
Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage
Tagged cause-the-most, kevin drum, king, news, politics, Pride, public, slideshows, transgender, venta
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Singer and Hardcore LGBT Rights Supporter Demi Lovato Made This Lovely Video for Marriage Equality
Mother Jones
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Singer and actress Demi Lovato is a strong supporter of LGBT rights. She played a lesbian character on Fox’s Glee, served as the Grand Marshal of the Los Angeles Pride Parade this year, and has spoken openly about her grandfather’s homosexuality. “I believe in gay marriage, I believe in equality,” Lovato told Cambio magazine. “I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy with religion…I just found that you can have your own relationship with God, and I still have a lot of faith.”
Now, she’s made a video (watch above) with the Human Rights Campaign in support of marriage equality. The video, released on Wednesday, is part of HRC’s recently re-launched Americans for Marriage Equality campaign, which includes messages from Hillary Clinton, Bryan Cranston, Mo’Nique, and Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman. Here is Lovato’s message:
Hey, guys, I’m Demi Lovato, and I’m an American for marriage equality. I believe that love comes in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. So whether you’re LGBT or straight, your love is valid, beautiful, and an incredible gift. So let’s protect love and strengthen the institution of marriage by allowing loving, caring, and committed same-sex couples to legally marry. Please join me and the majority of American citizens who support marriage equality.
“We reached out to her a couple months ago knowing what a supporter of LGBT equality she is, and thought she would be great for this campaign,” Charles Joughin, an HRC spokesman, told Mother Jones. He also mentioned that they have more Americans for Marriage Equality videos lined up featuring other big names, from pro-athletes and movie stars to politicians and civil rights leaders. HRC will likely be released one video a week over the coming months.
When asked if Lovato has any further plans to work with the LGBT civil rights group, Joughin said that nothing was discussed, but that they’d be more than happy to do so. “She certainly has done a lot for the larger movement…We haven’t taken it into consideration, but we’re such big fans of her we’d be thrilled to work with her in the future. Whether she’s doing work with HRC, or elsewhere, I am certain this is a cause she’s very committed to.”
Now check out this video about Lovato sticking it to Russian president Vladimir Putin (and his anti-gay policies) during her New York City gay pride performance this summer. During the show, two of Lovato’s male backup dancers shared a kiss; one of them appeared to be naked and was holding a picture of Putin’s face over his crotch:
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Singer and Hardcore LGBT Rights Supporter Demi Lovato Made This Lovely Video for Marriage Equality
Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage
Tagged americans, clinton, equality, gay rights, joughin, lovato, marriage, marriage-equality, mixed media, mother, singer
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