Tag Archives: violence

Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

by MarkoBurhop Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok passes along the chart on the right, which shows the default rate on student loans. What it shows is surprising at first glance: the highest default rates are among students with the lowest debt, not the highest.

But on second glance, this isn’t surprising at all. I’d suggest several good reasons to expect exactly this result:

The very lowest debt levels are associated with students who drop out after only a year or so. They have the worst of all worlds: only a high school diploma and a low-paying job, but student debt that’s fairly crushing for someone earning a low income.
The next tier of debt is likely associated with students at for-profit trade schools. These schools are notorious for high dropout rates and weak job prospects even for graduates.
The middle tier of debt levels is probably associated with graduates of community colleges and state universities. Graduates of these schools, in general, get lower-paying jobs than graduates of Harvard or Cal.
Conversely, high debt levels are associated with elite universities. Harvard and Cal probably have pretty high proportions of students who earn good incomes after graduation.
The highest debt levels are associated with advanced degrees. The $50,000+ debt levels probably belong mostly to doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and so forth, who command the highest pay upon graduation.

A commenter suggests yet another reason for high default levels at low levels of debt: it’s an artifact of “students” who are already deep in debt and are just looking for a way out: “The word is out if you have bad credit and are desperate for funds just go to a community college where tuition is low and borrow the maximum….Want the defaults to go down — stop lending to students that have a significant number of remedial courses their 1st and 2nd terms at a college where tuition is already low.”

If you’re likely to complete college, student loans are a good investment. But if you’re right on the cusp, you should think twice. There’s a good chance you’ll just end up dropping out and you’ll end up with a pile of student loans to pay back. If you’re in that position, think hard about attending a community college and keeping student loans to the minimum you can manage.

And try majoring in some field related to health care. Occupations in health care appear to have a pretty bright future.

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Chart of the Day: Here’s Who’s Defaulting on Student Debt

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Once Again: What’s the Deal With the Pretense That the Academy Awards Are Supposed to Last 3 Hours?

by EbonyCastles Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kelsey McKinney writes today about why Joan Rivers was left out of the “In Memoriam” segment at the Oscars last night:

The sequence, ultimately, only has so much room. Every year dozens of Academy Award nominees die, but there’s only room to memorialize about 30 of them in a show that almost always runs over time already.

Whoa. Hold on. The Academy Awards almost never run over time. They are, quite plainly, expected to last 3½ hours. For one thing, they always last 3½ hours.1 For another, there’s abundant evidence that show directors know exactly how long each bit is going to last. And there’s also the evidence of other awards shows, which demonstrates that directors can hit a scheduled end mark within a minute or two. Every time. So they know perfectly well that the Oscar telecast is going to last 3½ hours.

But for some reason, the publicly acknowledged length of the show is 3 hours. Why? I’ve asked this before. It can’t be too deep a secret since it’s so obviously planned this way and has been for years. But why?

1Actually this year they really did run long, a little over 3 hours and 35 minutes. But that’s unusual.

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Once Again: What’s the Deal With the Pretense That the Academy Awards Are Supposed to Last 3 Hours?

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Climate Change Deniers Take Yet Another Hit

by Damon40Dkvzh Posted on February 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Climate change deniers don’t have a lot of credible scientists who support their view. But they have a few, and one of the busiest and most prolific is Wei-Hock Soon, who insists that global warming is caused by variations in the sun’s output, not by anything humans are doing. Soon’s doctorate is in aerospace engineering, not atmospheric science or geophysics or some more relevant discipline, but he’s nonetheless an actual scientist and a reliable ally for the climate deniers.

Unfortunately, the New York Times reports a wee problem with Soon’s work:

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

Oops. But a friend of mine suggests that the real news is the way climate change was treated by the Times reporters who wrote the story. Here are a few snippets:

The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.

….Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change….“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose scientists focus largely on understanding distant stars and galaxies, routinely distances itself from Dr. Soon’s findings. The Smithsonian has also published a statement accepting the scientific consensus on climate change.

Etc.

There’s no he-said-she-said in this piece. No critics are quoted suggesting that there’s an honest controversy about human contributions to climate change. There’s no weaseling. It’s simply assumed that climate change is real and humans are a primary cause—the same way a similar article might assume that evolution or general relativity are true.

I haven’t followed the Times’ coverage of climate change in close enough detail to know if this represents an editorial change of direction or not. But whether it’s new or not, it’s nice to see. More please.

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Climate Change Deniers Take Yet Another Hit

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 February 2015

by DegaLockyer Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The quilts are back! This is Hopper peering down from the second story hallway and surveying her domain from between the quilts hanging over the railing. Amusingly, Hilbert saw her and immediately started fussing and mewling, trying to figure out to get up to her. He jumped on a bench, but that wasn’t high enough. He put his paws up on the wall, but plainly couldn’t climb up it. Finally, after about a minute of this nonsense, a neuron fired somewhere and he remembered that all he had to do was run up the stairs. So he did, and then immediately lost interest in whatever it was he thought he wanted. But it was touch and go there for a while.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 February 2015

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Will Stonewalling Work For Bill O’Reilly in Falklandsgate?

by ClintonSNUX Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at the mothership, David Corn and Daniel Schulman report that Bill O’Reilly might have a problem with the truth that’s surprisingly similar to Brian Williams’. Basically, they both seem to have a habit of exaggerating their war-reporting prowess. In Williams’ case, it was about a helicopter during the Iraq War. In O’Reilly’s case, he’s repeatedly said that he was “in a war zone in Argentina” during the Falklands war, but in fact he was never anywhere near the actual war. He was a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires:

O’Reilly did see some action in Argentina— just not war action. He writes in The No Spin Zone that shortly after he hit Buenos Aires—where CBS News had set up a large bureau in the Sheraton hotel—thousands of Argentines took to the streets, angry at the military junta for having yielded to the Brits.

As he tells it in his book, O’Reilly, then 32 years old, raced to cover the event: “A major riot ensued and many were killed. I was right in the middle of it and nearly died of a heart attack when a soldier, standing about ten feet away, pointed his automatic weapon directly at my head.” A television cameraman was trampled, journalists were banged up, and O’Reilly and others were teargassed. “After a couple of hours of this pandemonium,” he recalls, “I managed to make it back to the Sheraton with the best news footage I have ever seen. This was major violence up close and personal, and it was an important international story.”

Now, even this might be a bit of an exaggeration—click the link for details—but put that aside for the moment. It’s pretty obvious that a protest, even a violent protest, isn’t a war zone or anything close to it. O’Reilly can bob and weave all he wants, but no one is going to buy the idea that covering a protest in Buenos Aires is anything like reporting from a war zone.

Nonetheless, I suspect we’re about to witness an interesting phenomenon. In the case of Brian Williams, NBC caved in to pressure pretty quickly and suspended him for six months. It’s possible that his career is over. In O’Reilly’s case, the response so far has been (a) silence from Fox News and (b) a torrent of insults and abuse from O’Reilly. And my guess is that it will work. The Williams case generated a ton of commentary. So far, the O’Reilly case has generated very little. As long as both Fox and O’Reilly stonewall, it will probably stay that way. It will be a momentary squall and then it will blow over.

Stonewalling often works. We’re about to find out if it will work here.

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Will Stonewalling Work For Bill O’Reilly in Falklandsgate?

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Quote of the Day: The Surveys Will Continue Until Morale Improves

by Lenore38Gawtf Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

From a study of low morale in the Department of Homeland Security, explaining why the authors hadn’t made much progress in figuring out why morale was low:

“Other entities had already engaged employees in efforts to assess morale,” and as a result, DHS employees were developing “interview/survey fatigue.”

Survey fatigue! Otherwise known as stop screwing around with your endless damn assessments and just do something, OK?

But apparently more studies are in the works anyway. Will they improve morale? Stay tuned for next week’s exciting episode!

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Quote of the Day: The Surveys Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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Walmart’s Surprise Wage Increase Might Be Good News About the Economy

by BlairArdill Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is interesting news, especially in the wake of my earlier post about the dismal state of earnings growth in 2014. Walmart is raising wages:

The retail giant, which has been criticized for continuing to pay some employees the bare legal minimum, said that all of its United States workers would earn at least $9 an hour by April and $10 per hour by 2016. That would mean a raise for about 40 percent of its work force, to at least $1.75 above the federal minimum wage, the retailer said….Walmart’s move follows in the footsteps of retailers like Gap and Ikea, which both took steps last year to keep pay above federal minimum wage level, in an effort to lessen turnover and attract more lower-wage workers.

….In trying to address other major complaints from workers, Walmart said it would work to make scheduling easier and more predictable, and would also improve employee training.

Why is Walmart doing this? I hope Neil Irwin is right:

The best possible news would be if Walmart’s executives made this decision not out of a desire for good press or for a squishy sense of do-gooderism, but because coldhearted business strategy compelled it.

….The company’s sales and profits rose nicely between 2007 and 2014 while the company kept a lid on its payroll. Gains went to Walmart shareholders, not Walmart workers. So what has changed? The simple answer is that the world for employers is very different with a 5.7 percent unemployment rate (the January level) than it was five years ago, at 9.8 percent. Finding qualified workers is harder for employers now than it was then, and their workers are at risk of jumping ship if they don’t receive pay increases or other improvements. Apart from pay, Walmart executives said in their conference call with reporters that they were revising their employee scheduling policies so that workers could have more predictability in their work schedules and more easily get time off when they needed it, such as for a doctor’s appointment.

Megan McArdle highlights some recent changes in Walmart’s business strategy, such as a stronger focus on e-commerce, groceries, and better inventory control:

What a lot of these changes have in common is that you need good workers to execute them well. (Terrible things happen in the grocery business unless you have an absolutely passionate commitment to rooting out expired meat and past-it produce.) Keeping stock on the shelves doesn’t sound hard until you try to get resentful teenagers to actually do so. And so forth.

One way to get a more dedicated and experienced workforce is to pay workers more. They’ll stay longer, and they’ll be very eager to keep that job. Wal-Mart had clearly previously concluded that it didn’t need a dedicated and experienced workforce composed of people who were really eager to keep their jobs. Now the company seems to have changed its mind.

From any other retailer, this would just be an isolated bit of news. From Walmart, it’s potentially a big deal—thanks both to Walmart’s sheer size and its impact on other retailers. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a sign that the labor market really is starting to tighten.

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Walmart’s Surprise Wage Increase Might Be Good News About the Economy

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Giuliani’s Anti-Obama Rant Is a Big Opportunity for Jeb Bush

by MammieBvyicahzo Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Rudy Giuliani telling us how he really feels about President Obama during a private group dinner last night featuring Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Classy, as always. But I bring it up to make a particular point. It’s unlikely, I think, that Walker will repudiate Giuliani’s comments. But Jeb Bush could—and if he’s smart, he will.

Here’s why. It would cost him some support among the tea party set, but he’s not going to get a lot of support there anyway. What’s more, he doesn’t really need it. All Jeb has to do to win is follow the Romney strategy: sweep up all the votes of the Republican moderates while everyone else fights over scraps of the tea party vote. Taking a public stand against Giuliani would cement his position as the adult in the Republican field, a position that Mitt Romney rode to the GOP nomination in 2012.

But the Romney strategy only works if Jeb is the sole adult running. Walker is trying to straddle the line between mainstream and tea party, and if he can pull it off he’ll win. Jeb’s team has to make sure he can’t do that, and the best way to accomplish this is to take a few high-profile stands—like denouncing Giuliani’s views—that Walker isn’t willing to emulate. If Jeb can force Walker to make some moves early on that paint him as a pure tea party creature, that could permanently hurt him. And with Romney out and Chris Christie looking weak, Jeb could then have the centrist Republican vote all to himself. That could put him in the White House.

But he has to go big and go fast. Denounce Giuliani in terms strong enough to get some attention, and in a way that’s likely to push Walker into making a mistake. The race is on.

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Giuliani’s Anti-Obama Rant Is a Big Opportunity for Jeb Bush

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The American Public Is Becoming Ever More Rabid for War Against ISIS

by MerissaCpo Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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It sure isn’t hard to gin Americans into a war fever. President Obama isn’t even trying, but support for sending U.S. ground troops back into Iraq to fight ISIS continues to grow. According to a new CBS News poll, it now stands at 57 percent.

It’s not just conservatives, either. Democrats favor sending in ground troops by a margin of 50-43 percent. We’re only a few public beheadings away from two-thirds approval margins among all groups, which is something of a magic number. If we reach that point, President Obama and congressional Democrats might decide—reluctantly or otherwise—that they have to change course and send in a substantial ground force.

This would probably be a disaster. The most optimistic scenario is that Graeme Wood is right, and the ISIS folks are such nutters that they’d welcome a final, conventional showdown against the forces of the West:

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo….It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

….Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse….If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

That’s a battle we could pretty easily win. But if it turns out the leadership of ISIS isn’t quite as daft and millenarian as Wood says, then the only way to defeat ISIS would be in grisly house-to-house fighting in Sunni strongholds like Mosul. We already know that U.S. troops can’t do that effectively, and neither can the predominantly Shia troops controlled by Iraq. It would be a long, grinding, disaster of a war.

But apparently the American public hasn’t quite internalized that yet. They’re becoming more and more enraged about ISIS, and they want to do something. That’s a bad combination.

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The American Public Is Becoming Ever More Rabid for War Against ISIS

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 February 2015

by LindseyGleadow Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chemotherapy may be over, but I still have to go in to the infusion center once a month for a bone-strengthening treatment. Unlike chemo, which was a pretty quick procedure, this actually takes a while, and this month it happens to be scheduled for mid-morning today. So that means I’m checking out early. Sorry about that. On the bright side you get early catblogging out of the deal. Here are the sibs posing for their dual royal portrait, Hopper on the left and Hilbert on the right. Have a good weekend, everyone.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 February 2015

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