Help me out here; people accepted these loans, having access to the terms ahead of time, correct? They were adults, presumably, who made these commitments, right?
Why, then, should we be looking to forgive them for making bad choices? Stupid decisions should be painful, so as to teach people not to do them anymore.
I say this as someone who will be paying off his student loans for at least the next 20 years. I made a remarkably stupid decision and I'll own the consequences.
OK, I'll try to help you.
Adults who made these decisions should pay the painful consequences of their stupid decisions. That will teach people not to do it any more, and it will eliminate the stupid people from the economy.
You're only looking at one stupid guy, the student. I'm looking at the other stupid guy, the banker who issued the loan.
During the S&L crisis, one banker said, "Anybody can loan money. What makes you a banker is that you can get your money back again."
In other words, a banker is supposed to evaluate the creditworthiness of a loan, and decide whether the loan makes sense and whether the lender is likely to repay it. That's the skill of a banker. (Once, banks were part of the community. Bankers knew who worked hard, who drank, who was a good businessman and who had unrealistic dreams.)
A student should make a realistic financial plan before he takes a student loan. If it doesn't work, he shouldn't take the loan, because he knows it's going to lead to disaster.
But the banker should also make a realistic assessment of the loan, and if the student doesn't have a realistic likelihood of paying the loan back, he should deny the loan.
In law, when you have a contract, with a consumer who is the buyer, and a skilled professional who is the seller, the seller is held more responsible for the decision than the consumer. That's the way it should be, because the seller is at a great advantage over the buyer. "Buyer beware" went out with the consumer movement. The banker is the guy with more knowlege. The bank is also a big institution, which is in a better place to assume risk than the individual student.
I think that when some ordinary consumer bought a house with a $1 million loan, and then found out that his house was worth only $0.5 million after the S&L crash, he should have been able to settle with the bank for $0.5 million, and forgive the rest of the loan. They're the bank. They're in the business of taking risks.
What about all the poor banks that get stuck with bad loans? Well, they were obviously incompetent bankers and the economy would be more efficient without them. That's the free market. If all your loans are going bad, maybe you're in the wrong business. Maybe instead of banking, you should learn coding or something.
Similarly, I've read the original arguments for eliminating bankruptcy for student loans, and I think they're bullshit. The bank should be able to size up a student and decide whether he's good for the loan. If he's taking out $100,000 in loans to study acting, you should point to the average income of employed actors and tell him it's unrealistic. Maybe he should study coding or something.
If your loan customer is 10 years out of college, still making $10,000 a year, with his interest rising faster than his income on a $100,000 loan, it's time to face facts and realize the loan will never be paid off. We don't have indentured servants in America. It's time for bankruptcy. There's a reason why we've had bankruptcy since the 16th century.
I know that a lot of people were brought up to believe that their word was their bond, and they should always do the right thing. I remember a brother and sister who inherited their father's business (wholesale clothing, or something like that), and they went bankrupt. They spent years paying back every cent they owed to their creditors. After that, they had a reputation in the industry that was worth more than money. They cou
The Donnell Library in New York had a young adults collection that was the best collection of books for any teenager, or any adult trying to learn a new subject. I grew up in that library, from 1955 when it opened until Mayor Bloomberg destroyed it in 2008, in a botched attempt to sell the land to a developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What I appreciated the most was two sets of bookshelves in the 500s (math and science) and 600s (technology). I could stand in front of the bookcases and see every good science or math book I ever read, or wanted to read, displayed in a systematic order right in front of me. There were books I couldn't find in bookstores. My local bookstores (in Manhattan!) didn't have a copy of Arrowsmith* or Microbe Hunters. They didn't have The World of Mathematics. They didn't have Physics for Entertainment. But on the Donnell bookshelves, there they were.
The Donnell Library's Young Adult collection was built over 50 years by specialist librarians (with library training in addition to degrees in math, science, etc.) They started by ordering books from standard bibliographies for librarians (which are rapidly outdated), and then adjusted their collection with feedback from the students who came in, from math and science teachers who knew the best books, from reviews, and from experts in the field, using all kinds of tricks that librarians know (like citation analysis). Want to build a rocket? Look under Dewey Decimal 621.
The point is, they had a collection of about 1,000 or 2,000 (I'd guess) books, all of which were well-selected by the library users who read it. You could reach out and put your hand on a book that dozens or hundreds of other readers liked.
That's a display of well-selected, easily-accessible information. I challenge any computer interface designer to match it.
After the Donnell was destroyed, I tried to find another branch like that. The librarians directed me to the New York Public Library children's room. The room was run by a librarian who had no science training herself.
I looked at one of the shelves. It had 50 books on sharks. I know children's books https://www.swiny.org/2006/12/... , and I hate to put down a writer and illustrator who put their heart into a book. But some books on sharks are better than others. Under the influence of TV, publishers are cranking out books to meet the shark fad, without much difference between them. It's possible to write a book on sharks that will engage young readers and put them in a direction that will (sometimes) send them on a path for the rest of their lives. Some young adult/adult science books are great. Most of them are merely good enough. Librarians know the difference.
*I once went to a lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine, where a psychiatrist gave a lecture on evidence-based medicine, and randomized controlled trials, as applied to psychotherapy. He said that when he was in high school, he read one book that inspired him to have a career in science. He talked to his professional friends, and they had also read the same book, and it inspired them to a career in science too. I was astounded, because I had also read that book, and it inspired me to a career in science. That book was Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith. (The point he was making was that a critical part of the plot was the decision on whether to continue the randomized, controlled trial, or whether to give the treatment to everybody.) The Donnell Library had a copy of Arrowsmith. The NYPL children's/YA room, for all their shark books, didn't have Arrowsmith.
The point is that a library collection has to be compiled by the guiding intelligence of a librarian who knows the subject, knows the patrons, and knows what she's doing. A library collection compiled by the computer-generated library buying guides today is like a garbage dumpster full of books. Shark books. P
The best evaluations of schools are done by the National Assessment of Educational Progress https://nces.ed.gov/nationsrep... which is accepted by educators of all political views.
As far as I know, they're the only ones who have scientifically valid evaluations comparing a wide range of public and private schools. They compared public schools with charter schools, and the results were that charter schools had a wider range of test scores. The best charter schools were equal to the best public schools, but overall, charter schools were slightly worse. The one confident conclusion was that charter schools were not dramatically better. Some people do call them a panacea, and that's not supported by the evidence.
I think there were some other randomized controlled trials of public vs. private schools, but overall the results were about the same.
There are also very expensive private schools ($20,000/year or more) that are probably better than many public schools, but much of that is due to the students they select.
Diane Ravitch was secretary of education in the Bush and Clinton administration. She believed in privatized schools, high-stakes testing, and taking power away from the unions. She wrote many op-eds for the Wall Street Journal saying so. Then she looked at the data. She had a PhD, so she could understand experimental methods.
She found that privatization, testing, and unions didn't make any difference. The one factor that was most strongly associated with school performance was the student's family income. Schools with wealthy children have better test results. Schools with poor children have worse test results. The effect of teachers is insignificant compared to income.
As Carl Sagan said, it's not often that a scientist looks at the data and decides that he's wrong -- but it does happen.
New York City has many excellent public schools. The proof is that there are many informed parents trying to get their children into those schools. In Beacon High School, one of the parents was a very wealthy filmmaker, and he gave the school a donation of what he would have paid in a good private school. Bronx High School of Science, and Stuyversant, have a worldwide reputation for excellence, with long waiting lists. There are other neighborhood schools that are well-known for excellence, and are as good as any public school. In New York City, you can certainly find public schools as good as any private school -- in the judgment of parents.
Unfortunately there are some bad public schools. These are always in low-income neighborhoods. It's impossible to have top-quality schools attended by students who have all the problems of poverty. If you fix the poverty, the schools will get good results. The Catholic schools in those neighborhoods had extreme selection bias (since most parents could afford to pay, and they would quickly expel students with any difficulties). The first step in solving that problem is to eliminate poverty and inequality, at least to the level of European developed economies, or back to the level of equality that we had after WWII.
I took a course with Fred Hechinger, the education editor of the New York Times. He covered school districts in New York, in the region, and nationwide. He said that there are many small school districts in the region, run by school boards. In some districts, the school boards are committed to good education and do a good job. In some districts, it's all about whose brother-in-law can get a contract supplying bread to the school cafeteria. So the way to get a good public school is to live in a wealthy district where the parents are committed to education and active in their school board. Your choice is to move. If you're in a region where all the public schools suck, then you don't have a working democracy in that region.
Of course, if you send your kids to a private school, you also have to be active in the school management. My cousin teaches in a private school.
Public schools are inherently bad. There is no way to fix them. The government should not be teaching your children. You should be free to choose who teaches your children. There were schools before the government came along to fund them. Quite good schools too.
When I grew up, the largest non-public school was the Catholic schools. In fairness, there were some Jesuit schools that actually taught their students how to think, and how to look at both sides of the argument, although most of the time they didn't agree with me. But most of the Catholic schools were just propagandizing their students, against abortion, for example. They were a force for sexual repression (until they lost their credibiliy in the child abuse scandals). A friend of mine was teaching English in a Catholic school, and he left because if they found out he was gay they would have fired him. (And this was post-Stonewall.) If a female teacher got pregnant they would have fired her. And the Catholic schools supported government policies, like the Vietnam war, more strongly than the public school teachers did.
There were liberal Catholics, and a few liberal Catholic schools (which tended to be expensive). But most of the Catholic elementary and high schools were full of conservative indoctrination.
But they were better than the private segregation academies in the South.
(If you look outside the US, you see countries like Pakistan where there are no public schools, just religious schools, which are Wahhabi schools financed b y Saudi Arabia, which teach their students to memorize the Koran and fight jihad.)
That's the problem with abolishing public schools. Who's going to take their place? It's going to be mostly religious schools, often extremist, and a very few very expensive high-quality private schools.
Cops get paid a lot of money, considering their education level, retirement and lifetime health benefits.
Being a cop has an inherent risk. They're the police, not a wartime army. They have to take risks to protect innocent civilians. Maybe the suspect has a gun, and maybe he doesn't. Maybe the suspect is not following orders because he doesn't understand, or he's deaf, or doesn't speak English. They can't just blow away anybody who looks suspicious.
If cops don't want to take the risk of the job, there are lots of people lining up to take their place.
Mulford's legislation, which became known as the "Panthers Bill," passed with the support of the National Rifle Association, which apparently believed that the whole "good guy with a gun" thing didn't apply to black people. California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R), who would later campaign for president as a steadfast defender of the Second Amendment, signed the bill into law.
They're constantly talking about it, but I've never heard of an EEOC lawsuit against an organization for not hiring enough men in a traditionally female job, like childcare, teaching or nursing.
Unions cover a wide range of efficiency and inefficiency, corruption and honesty, etc. I believe that unions are corrupt in the same proportion as other American institutions.
For example the theater unions (SAG/AFTRA, etc.) are well run and provide a lot for their workers. Acting is certainly a creative profession far from the industrial assembly line. I know retirees from SAG/AFTRA who have better health insurance than I do, who are drawing a reasonable pension to supplement Social Security, and who are living in housing projects developed by the unions.
This adversarial relationship between business, government and workers (unions) is more of a modern thing. A lot of business leaders have turned into right-wing ideologues like the Koch brothers who aren't satisfied with their fair share -- they want it all. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were more likely to strike a cooperative balance. In the aircraft industry, the energy industry, and other profitable industries, they often worked together, for example in establishing safety standards. If a coal owner was ignoring safety (as many of them did), the unions and government were a backstop. That's when things are working at their best. There were also times when unions, business or government screwed things up. The free market isn't easy.
And according to that Forbes article (and other news stories), the German and Scandanavian unions are also much more cooperative.
So unions may not have fit into the IT culture when IT was a new, innovative, profitable industry, there was lots of money for everybody, employers could be generous, and IT people in the right position could make more money than doctors. (By specializing in a critical software, for example.)
But as IT matures, it's becoming more like a commodity and an assembly line. Companies can fire American workers and plug in HB-1s in their place.
Workers who join together and organize have a better negotiating position than workers who deal with their boss individually. Unions provide a useful structure (with legal protections) for workers to use when they organize. What's the alternative? Uber? Task Rabbit?
Do you want to compete on price with every third-world computer science graduate in the world? Or do you want to get a share of the American prosperity you're working for?
If you have a more reliable source than Forbes, I would be happy to see it.
(BTW, you seem to have assumed an 8-hour working day and a 12-month working year. Germans told me that they get a 1-month vacation every year, sometimes more. They also work fewer hours per year overall than the average European or American worker.)
"One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates."
I have to ask your data because I find it hard to believe.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr... How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much Frederick E. Allen 12/21/2011 In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany's big three car companies-BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen-are very profitable. How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that "the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race." There are "two overlapping sets of institutions" in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country's equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany's car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they "hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties," according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for "works councils" in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, "where you don't always wear your management pin or your union pin." Mund points out that this goes against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany. At Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org... A tale of two systems By Kevin C. Brown Remapping Debate Dec. 21, 2011 American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory - both in the public and private sectors - have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive.... But the case of German automakers - BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen - tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in "transplant" factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called "right-to-work" (anti-union) states.... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent "Tier 2" level for all new employees. Whereas incumbent "Tier 1" workers earn about $28 an hour, all new UAW hires at the GM, Ford, and Chrysler earn around $15 per hour.
There have been other stories about this in the New York Times, as I recall.
Anyway comparing US to EU unions is an apples-to-oranges exercise. In EU you don't have a union for a single company but more like a party across the cou
Easy fix: Move out of that area. There are plenty of jobs that pay well in other areas. Sure, they don't pay as much as silicon valley, but who cares? What good is a 100k salary when your cost of living well exceeds that? In Phoenix that much money is enough that you never need to worry about money at all. Hell, I make 20k less than that here and I don't even worry about money.
If you have a well-paying skill, and the only market for that skill is in a particular region, then you can't move out of the area.
In the example I used, of shipbuilding in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, if you had one of the many well-paid, needed skills used in shipbuilding, you might not find a job in Phoenix. I don't think there are many shipyards in Phoenix.
And then it becomes impossible to find a place to rent because artificial price controls ignored demand, and suddenly hiring skilled workers is not tenable because there's nowhere to live.
Supply and demand are real things that you can't make go away, no matter how much you donated to Bernie Sanders.
Actually, you can make supply and demand go away. During WWII, the shipyards needed housing for workers. No housing, no workers, no ships = lose war.
So the government built housing to meet the needs of workers, not the needs of landlords or investors in the free market. The free market can do all kinds of clever tricks, but it's not necessary.
Another solution is for the employers to provide housing.
It's not necessary to go through the free market to provide housing. If the government or companies want housing, they can build it directly.
In New York City, BTW, some of the best cheap housing today was built by unions for their members.
I know someone who came from the housing projects in Brooklyn.
He said that during WWII, they needed housing for the shipyard workers, so the federal government hired contractors (I think) to build the projects. It was good housing, and a good community built at a time where everybody was working at a good salary. After the war, the projects attracted a lot of middle-class working people, such as teachers and salesmen.
Then some politicians turned the projects into welfare housing. If the projects had 5% unemployment, the unemployed could plug into the network and get jobs. But if they had 50% unemployment, full of people on welfare, the projects would decline. Some projects are well-maintained and highly desirable with long waiting lists, while others are not.
There's also the question of just who is incompetent, and by what standard? Do you just fire people, or train them and develop competence?
There were lots of programmers in their 40s and 50s who worked on COBOL when their employers converted to %newlanguage%. They could have been retrained but their employer decided to just fire them and hire new (often cheaper) programmers.
In the 1980s, I think, there were a lot of age discrimination lawsuits with expert testimony and subpoenaed internal documents that examined the situation in great detail. The employees argued that they could have been retrained.
Older workers often have different skills. They remember organizational history and what worked before.
A lot of non-union corporations had policies of strong job security. If a worker was "incompetent," they figured out what was wrong and retrained him.
Suppose you looked around and saw that union wages were about 50% to 100% higher in your field for the same work. Would that justify the union dues?
One of the main functions of unions is negotiation. A large group can negotiate better terms than an individual. McDonald's can buy ketchup on better terms than Joe's restaurant on the corner.
It's too bad the conventional union system has nearly all the rot and inefficiency of government.
I'd like to see the data.
I don't know of any (non-anecdotal) evidence that unions generally or even government generally has rot and inefficiency. I think there are good and bad unions and government agencies.
First, government. I once did a study of nuclear power plants, in which I interviewed engineers and managers in the best-run nuclear power plants around the country. (Nuclear power plants have well-defined, clear-cut criteria for good management, starting with minimum down time and good safety.) Some power plants are run by the federal or local governments; others are run by private corporations. Some of the best-run plants were government (Tennessee Valley Authority), and others were private (Commonwealth Edison). There was no correlation between government/private ownership and good management. I found the same pattern in other industries. (Despite what the Koch brothers would like you to believe, the Veterans Health Affairs system has among the best outcomes for major diseases like heart disease, if you believe in peer-reviewed literature.)
Second, unions. There are good and bad unions throughout the U.S. I haven't studied them so I can't tell you definitively which ones are good. But the first goal of a union is to negotiate wages, and union wages are about 50% higher than non-union wages in comparable jobs. Unions also negotiate working conditions, such as job security and safety. (If somebody has published a study I'd like to see it.)
I think economists generally agree that middle-class wages have remained static or declined since about 1980, and one of the major factors was the loss of unions.
One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates.
In the 1950s, corporate management, government agencies, and unions cooperated in many industries, like the aircraft industry. This led to the greatest expansion in wealth and industry that the world has ever seen. It seemed to work.
To add to your J.S.Mill quote, frequently you will see ideas dismissed because they are socialist, or racist, or any reason other than that they are wrong In many cases, these ideas, on examination, are wrong. However, if you want to ferret out inconvenient truths and try to get away from society groupthink, look for ideas rejected on bogus grounds.
That's right. A journalism professor at NYU described newspaper coverage as a donut. In the center of the donut are ideas that everybody agrees with, so it's not even necessary to discuss them. Outside the donut are ideas that are "outside the bounds of reasonable discourse," so newspapers don't cover them because they're too far out. The discussion in newspapers consists of ideas that are inside the donut. The views of newspaper and broadcasting reporters and editors are remarkably similar. They come from the same social classes, and the same journalists move from one newspaper to another.
So for years, newspapers would report raids on gay bars, as if it was the most self-evident thing in the world that gay bars should be raided. That continued until the Stonewall riots. Advertisers often had something to do with it. Most of the women's magazines took dozens of pages of cigarette advertising, and most of them ignored smoking and health. The automobile industry was another major advertiser, and most newspapers ignored auto safety, at least until Ralph Nader came along. Today, newspapers like the NYT have long series on health care, but never mention single payer. I met Elisabeth Rosenthal, who wrote the NYT series, and asked her why not. She said that single payer was outside the bounds of reasonable discourse. Bernie Sanders may have changed that.
In the 1950s, a well-known reporter and war correspondent, George Seldes, published a newsletter that covered everything he was not allowed to write about in traditional newspapers -- union activity, the drug industry, cigarettes, etc. He had reporters around the country sending him stories that they couldn't print in their own papers.
I stopped reading the WSJ when they ran a news story on disability benefits. They searched federal records to find the judge in the US with the most generous records of approving Social Security Disability benefits. He was in West Virginia, which also has one of the worst economies in the US, and about the worst job prospects in the US.
Now SSD is a complicated subject. There's no precise medical or legal definition of "disability". It's pretty easy to say, "He hurt his back, so he can't work in any jobs that are locally available." In fact, there are no jobs locally available. To an extent, SSD is used as a substitute for welfare programs. That's because welfare programs have been cut back, and unlike other countries we have no support for workers displaced by technology and foreign trade deals. There are reasonable arguments on both sides.
Instead of giving the reasonable arguments on both sides, as the WSJ used to do (and as the NYT did in that example), this post-Murdoch hit piece was an attack on the disability judge.
In the old days, I would have thought, "Well, these are journalists I can trust, maybe they've got something here." Now I just think, "It's Murdoch's pro-Trump propaganda, I don't have time to check it out. https://twitter.com/ziobrando/...
Actually, with Al Jazeera you're ahead of the game.
Al Jazeera was founded by BBC reporters, with the Sultan of Qatar paying the bills. The Sultan was pretty tolerant of controversial coverage, but he did have limits.
So Al Jazeera has good western-style journalism, with fact-checking and getting all sides. They have lots of interviews with pro-Israel sources, for example.
Ironically, their greatest coverge was about the WSJ takeover attempt itself. During the Murdoch takeover, they had stories every day giving the background and details of Murdoch's journalism career, and the Bancroft family. They did it with their usual freedom to write about anything they thought was important, even if it meant airing the family secrets of the publishers.
It turned out that the reason why the WSJ was such a great newspaper was that the Bancroft family had a commitment to great journalism. It was quite profitable and they were willing to accept those profits. The next generation of Bancrofts weren't willing to accept those profits. After I read that series, I understood for the first time how a newspaper works. (Basically, rich publishers do whatever they want. If they want great journalism, they can get it.)
They also exposed Murdoch as an unethical, criminal scumbag. The worst thing he did was to agree to censor news of human rights violations in China, in return for getting his cable networks into China. They also catalogued the promises that he made and broke, in case anybody believed his promises to preserve the WSJ's editorial independence.
The WSJ didn't submit either of those series to the Pulitzer Prize competition.
I ask myself, "Does this news source give all viewpoints, including the ones I disagree with, including the unpopular ones?" I judge them first by the subjects that I'm most familiar with myself (primarily medicine and biology). Classroom example: Does a story about abortion give both (or all) sides? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02...
In my freshman year of college, even the engineering majors had to take a humanities course. The most valuable book they gave me was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Mill summarized it himself:
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
So I look for a news source that gives me as many ideas as possible, so I can evaluate them myself. A special case is the journalistic rule: Whenever you attack someone, you have an obligation to give him a chance to respond. I worked as a journalist myself, and any journalist can tell you that when you get the other side, it often turns the whole story around.
The one newspaper that did the best job (more than the New York Times) was the Wall Street Journal. For example, they did a story on a welfare work program in California, and interviewed everyone from the governor down to the welfare recipients. (It seemed clear to me that the program wasn't working, but you could come to your own conclusions.) Some of their best reporters were socialists. Their page 1 editor was gay, contracted AIDS, wrote about his treatement with AZT, and got a Pulitzer Prize for it. http://www.pulitzer.org/winner... They wrote about the successes and failures of the capitalist system. The WSJ made their reputation when GM told them to kill a story, threatened to cancel all their advertising if they didn't, and the WSJ told them to fuck off.
But best of all, they gave me ideas every morning that I disagreed with, and I had to figure out whether I was really right.
Then Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ and destroyed the best newspaper in the world, by placing right-wing political commissars over the editing process and censoring liberal ideas. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12....
So it's back to the New York Times, even though they have an annoying habit of pandering to their advertisers and to the neo-liberal establishment. (I noticed this when I was following auto safety engineering, and the NYT basically followed the auto industry line that seat belts and air bags were too expensive. The auto industry is in the top 2 or 3 newspaper advertisers.)
After that, the best news sources that I read are in the professional journals. Science magazine actually does get all sides. I also read the New England
Slashdot Mirror
Help me out here; people accepted these loans, having access to the terms ahead of time, correct? They were adults, presumably, who made these commitments, right?
Why, then, should we be looking to forgive them for making bad choices? Stupid decisions should be painful, so as to teach people not to do them anymore.
I say this as someone who will be paying off his student loans for at least the next 20 years. I made a remarkably stupid decision and I'll own the consequences.
OK, I'll try to help you.
Adults who made these decisions should pay the painful consequences of their stupid decisions. That will teach people not to do it any more, and it will eliminate the stupid people from the economy.
You're only looking at one stupid guy, the student. I'm looking at the other stupid guy, the banker who issued the loan.
During the S&L crisis, one banker said, "Anybody can loan money. What makes you a banker is that you can get your money back again."
In other words, a banker is supposed to evaluate the creditworthiness of a loan, and decide whether the loan makes sense and whether the lender is likely to repay it. That's the skill of a banker. (Once, banks were part of the community. Bankers knew who worked hard, who drank, who was a good businessman and who had unrealistic dreams.)
A student should make a realistic financial plan before he takes a student loan. If it doesn't work, he shouldn't take the loan, because he knows it's going to lead to disaster.
But the banker should also make a realistic assessment of the loan, and if the student doesn't have a realistic likelihood of paying the loan back, he should deny the loan.
In law, when you have a contract, with a consumer who is the buyer, and a skilled professional who is the seller, the seller is held more responsible for the decision than the consumer. That's the way it should be, because the seller is at a great advantage over the buyer. "Buyer beware" went out with the consumer movement. The banker is the guy with more knowlege. The bank is also a big institution, which is in a better place to assume risk than the individual student.
I think that when some ordinary consumer bought a house with a $1 million loan, and then found out that his house was worth only $0.5 million after the S&L crash, he should have been able to settle with the bank for $0.5 million, and forgive the rest of the loan. They're the bank. They're in the business of taking risks.
What about all the poor banks that get stuck with bad loans? Well, they were obviously incompetent bankers and the economy would be more efficient without them. That's the free market. If all your loans are going bad, maybe you're in the wrong business. Maybe instead of banking, you should learn coding or something.
Similarly, I've read the original arguments for eliminating bankruptcy for student loans, and I think they're bullshit. The bank should be able to size up a student and decide whether he's good for the loan. If he's taking out $100,000 in loans to study acting, you should point to the average income of employed actors and tell him it's unrealistic. Maybe he should study coding or something.
If your loan customer is 10 years out of college, still making $10,000 a year, with his interest rising faster than his income on a $100,000 loan, it's time to face facts and realize the loan will never be paid off. We don't have indentured servants in America. It's time for bankruptcy. There's a reason why we've had bankruptcy since the 16th century.
I know that a lot of people were brought up to believe that their word was their bond, and they should always do the right thing. I remember a brother and sister who inherited their father's business (wholesale clothing, or something like that), and they went bankrupt. They spent years paying back every cent they owed to their creditors. After that, they had a reputation in the industry that was worth more than money. They cou
The Donnell Library in New York had a young adults collection that was the best collection of books for any teenager, or any adult trying to learn a new subject. I grew up in that library, from 1955 when it opened until Mayor Bloomberg destroyed it in 2008, in a botched attempt to sell the land to a developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What I appreciated the most was two sets of bookshelves in the 500s (math and science) and 600s (technology). I could stand in front of the bookcases and see every good science or math book I ever read, or wanted to read, displayed in a systematic order right in front of me. There were books I couldn't find in bookstores. My local bookstores (in Manhattan!) didn't have a copy of Arrowsmith* or Microbe Hunters. They didn't have The World of Mathematics. They didn't have Physics for Entertainment. But on the Donnell bookshelves, there they were.
The Donnell Library's Young Adult collection was built over 50 years by specialist librarians (with library training in addition to degrees in math, science, etc.) They started by ordering books from standard bibliographies for librarians (which are rapidly outdated), and then adjusted their collection with feedback from the students who came in, from math and science teachers who knew the best books, from reviews, and from experts in the field, using all kinds of tricks that librarians know (like citation analysis). Want to build a rocket? Look under Dewey Decimal 621.
The point is, they had a collection of about 1,000 or 2,000 (I'd guess) books, all of which were well-selected by the library users who read it. You could reach out and put your hand on a book that dozens or hundreds of other readers liked.
That's a display of well-selected, easily-accessible information. I challenge any computer interface designer to match it.
After the Donnell was destroyed, I tried to find another branch like that. The librarians directed me to the New York Public Library children's room. The room was run by a librarian who had no science training herself.
I looked at one of the shelves. It had 50 books on sharks. I know children's books https://www.swiny.org/2006/12/... , and I hate to put down a writer and illustrator who put their heart into a book. But some books on sharks are better than others. Under the influence of TV, publishers are cranking out books to meet the shark fad, without much difference between them. It's possible to write a book on sharks that will engage young readers and put them in a direction that will (sometimes) send them on a path for the rest of their lives. Some young adult/adult science books are great. Most of them are merely good enough. Librarians know the difference.
*I once went to a lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine, where a psychiatrist gave a lecture on evidence-based medicine, and randomized controlled trials, as applied to psychotherapy. He said that when he was in high school, he read one book that inspired him to have a career in science. He talked to his professional friends, and they had also read the same book, and it inspired them to a career in science too. I was astounded, because I had also read that book, and it inspired me to a career in science. That book was Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith. (The point he was making was that a critical part of the plot was the decision on whether to continue the randomized, controlled trial, or whether to give the treatment to everybody.) The Donnell Library had a copy of Arrowsmith. The NYPL children's/YA room, for all their shark books, didn't have Arrowsmith.
The point is that a library collection has to be compiled by the guiding intelligence of a librarian who knows the subject, knows the patrons, and knows what she's doing. A library collection compiled by the computer-generated library buying guides today is like a garbage dumpster full of books. Shark books. P
The best evaluations of schools are done by the National Assessment of Educational Progress https://nces.ed.gov/nationsrep... which is accepted by educators of all political views.
As far as I know, they're the only ones who have scientifically valid evaluations comparing a wide range of public and private schools. They compared public schools with charter schools, and the results were that charter schools had a wider range of test scores. The best charter schools were equal to the best public schools, but overall, charter schools were slightly worse. The one confident conclusion was that charter schools were not dramatically better. Some people do call them a panacea, and that's not supported by the evidence.
I think there were some other randomized controlled trials of public vs. private schools, but overall the results were about the same.
There are also very expensive private schools ($20,000/year or more) that are probably better than many public schools, but much of that is due to the students they select.
Diane Ravitch was secretary of education in the Bush and Clinton administration. She believed in privatized schools, high-stakes testing, and taking power away from the unions. She wrote many op-eds for the Wall Street Journal saying so. Then she looked at the data. She had a PhD, so she could understand experimental methods.
She found that privatization, testing, and unions didn't make any difference. The one factor that was most strongly associated with school performance was the student's family income. Schools with wealthy children have better test results. Schools with poor children have worse test results. The effect of teachers is insignificant compared to income.
As Carl Sagan said, it's not often that a scientist looks at the data and decides that he's wrong -- but it does happen.
New York City has many excellent public schools. The proof is that there are many informed parents trying to get their children into those schools. In Beacon High School, one of the parents was a very wealthy filmmaker, and he gave the school a donation of what he would have paid in a good private school. Bronx High School of Science, and Stuyversant, have a worldwide reputation for excellence, with long waiting lists. There are other neighborhood schools that are well-known for excellence, and are as good as any public school. In New York City, you can certainly find public schools as good as any private school -- in the judgment of parents.
Unfortunately there are some bad public schools. These are always in low-income neighborhoods. It's impossible to have top-quality schools attended by students who have all the problems of poverty. If you fix the poverty, the schools will get good results. The Catholic schools in those neighborhoods had extreme selection bias (since most parents could afford to pay, and they would quickly expel students with any difficulties). The first step in solving that problem is to eliminate poverty and inequality, at least to the level of European developed economies, or back to the level of equality that we had after WWII.
I took a course with Fred Hechinger, the education editor of the New York Times. He covered school districts in New York, in the region, and nationwide. He said that there are many small school districts in the region, run by school boards. In some districts, the school boards are committed to good education and do a good job. In some districts, it's all about whose brother-in-law can get a contract supplying bread to the school cafeteria. So the way to get a good public school is to live in a wealthy district where the parents are committed to education and active in their school board. Your choice is to move. If you're in a region where all the public schools suck, then you don't have a working democracy in that region.
Of course, if you send your kids to a private school, you also have to be active in the school management. My cousin teaches in a private school.
Public schools are inherently bad. There is no way to fix them. The government should not be teaching your children. You should be free to choose who teaches your children. There were schools before the government came along to fund them. Quite good schools too.
When I grew up, the largest non-public school was the Catholic schools. In fairness, there were some Jesuit schools that actually taught their students how to think, and how to look at both sides of the argument, although most of the time they didn't agree with me. But most of the Catholic schools were just propagandizing their students, against abortion, for example. They were a force for sexual repression (until they lost their credibiliy in the child abuse scandals). A friend of mine was teaching English in a Catholic school, and he left because if they found out he was gay they would have fired him. (And this was post-Stonewall.) If a female teacher got pregnant they would have fired her. And the Catholic schools supported government policies, like the Vietnam war, more strongly than the public school teachers did.
There were liberal Catholics, and a few liberal Catholic schools (which tended to be expensive). But most of the Catholic elementary and high schools were full of conservative indoctrination.
But they were better than the private segregation academies in the South.
(If you look outside the US, you see countries like Pakistan where there are no public schools, just religious schools, which are Wahhabi schools financed b y Saudi Arabia, which teach their students to memorize the Koran and fight jihad.)
That's the problem with abolishing public schools. Who's going to take their place? It's going to be mostly religious schools, often extremist, and a very few very expensive high-quality private schools.
Cops get paid a lot of money, considering their education level, retirement and lifetime health benefits.
Being a cop has an inherent risk. They're the police, not a wartime army. They have to take risks to protect innocent civilians. Maybe the suspect has a gun, and maybe he doesn't. Maybe the suspect is not following orders because he doesn't understand, or he's deaf, or doesn't speak English. They can't just blow away anybody who looks suspicious.
If cops don't want to take the risk of the job, there are lots of people lining up to take their place.
Kansas City cops get a median of $52,000/year, and some of them get a lot more. https://www1.salary.com/MO/Kan... http://www.kansascity.com/news...
The best way to change white peoples' definition of a right to bear arms is for black people to bear arms:
Here's How The Nation Responded When A Black Militia Group Occupied A Government Building
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Mulford's legislation, which became known as the "Panthers Bill," passed with the support of the National Rifle Association, which apparently believed that the whole "good guy with a gun" thing didn't apply to black people. California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R), who would later campaign for president as a steadfast defender of the Second Amendment, signed the bill into law.
One of the most common triggers is poverty. Eliminate poverty and you've eliminated a lot of family violence.
They're constantly talking about it, but I've never heard of an EEOC lawsuit against an organization for not hiring enough men in a traditionally female job, like childcare, teaching or nursing.
Should I get anti-virus software that's pwned by Russia, or anti-virus software that's pwned by the US?
Is being an idiot now a pre-requisite for election to high office in the US?
Being an idiot is not a pre-requisite for misunderstanding statistics and the scientific method, but it does help.
Unions cover a wide range of efficiency and inefficiency, corruption and honesty, etc. I believe that unions are corrupt in the same proportion as other American institutions.
For example the theater unions (SAG/AFTRA, etc.) are well run and provide a lot for their workers. Acting is certainly a creative profession far from the industrial assembly line. I know retirees from SAG/AFTRA who have better health insurance than I do, who are drawing a reasonable pension to supplement Social Security, and who are living in housing projects developed by the unions.
This adversarial relationship between business, government and workers (unions) is more of a modern thing. A lot of business leaders have turned into right-wing ideologues like the Koch brothers who aren't satisfied with their fair share -- they want it all. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were more likely to strike a cooperative balance. In the aircraft industry, the energy industry, and other profitable industries, they often worked together, for example in establishing safety standards. If a coal owner was ignoring safety (as many of them did), the unions and government were a backstop. That's when things are working at their best. There were also times when unions, business or government screwed things up. The free market isn't easy.
And according to that Forbes article (and other news stories), the German and Scandanavian unions are also much more cooperative.
So unions may not have fit into the IT culture when IT was a new, innovative, profitable industry, there was lots of money for everybody, employers could be generous, and IT people in the right position could make more money than doctors. (By specializing in a critical software, for example.)
But as IT matures, it's becoming more like a commodity and an assembly line. Companies can fire American workers and plug in HB-1s in their place.
Workers who join together and organize have a better negotiating position than workers who deal with their boss individually. Unions provide a useful structure (with legal protections) for workers to use when they organize. What's the alternative? Uber? Task Rabbit?
Do you want to compete on price with every third-world computer science graduate in the world? Or do you want to get a share of the American prosperity you're working for?
If you have a more reliable source than Forbes, I would be happy to see it.
(BTW, you seem to have assumed an 8-hour working day and a 12-month working year. Germans told me that they get a 1-month vacation every year, sometimes more. They also work fewer hours per year overall than the average European or American worker.)
"One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates."
I have to ask your data because I find it hard to believe.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/fr...
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany's big three car companies-BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen-are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that "the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race."
There are "two overlapping sets of institutions" in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country's equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany's car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they "hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties," according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for "works councils" in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, "where you don't always wear your management pin or your union pin."
Mund points out that this goes against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org... ... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of a permanent "Tier 2" level for all new employees. Whereas incumbent "Tier 1" workers earn about $28 an hour, all new UAW hires at the GM, Ford, and Chrysler earn around $15 per hour.
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory - both in the public and private sectors - have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers - BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen - tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in "transplant" factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called "right-to-work" (anti-union) states.
There have been other stories about this in the New York Times, as I recall.
Anyway comparing US to EU unions is an apples-to-oranges exercise. In EU you don't have a union for a single company but more like a party across the cou
Easy fix: Move out of that area. There are plenty of jobs that pay well in other areas. Sure, they don't pay as much as silicon valley, but who cares? What good is a 100k salary when your cost of living well exceeds that? In Phoenix that much money is enough that you never need to worry about money at all. Hell, I make 20k less than that here and I don't even worry about money.
If you have a well-paying skill, and the only market for that skill is in a particular region, then you can't move out of the area.
In the example I used, of shipbuilding in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, if you had one of the many well-paid, needed skills used in shipbuilding, you might not find a job in Phoenix. I don't think there are many shipyards in Phoenix.
And then it becomes impossible to find a place to rent because artificial price controls ignored demand, and suddenly hiring skilled workers is not tenable because there's nowhere to live.
Supply and demand are real things that you can't make go away, no matter how much you donated to Bernie Sanders.
Actually, you can make supply and demand go away. During WWII, the shipyards needed housing for workers. No housing, no workers, no ships = lose war.
So the government built housing to meet the needs of workers, not the needs of landlords or investors in the free market. The free market can do all kinds of clever tricks, but it's not necessary.
Another solution is for the employers to provide housing.
It's not necessary to go through the free market to provide housing. If the government or companies want housing, they can build it directly.
In New York City, BTW, some of the best cheap housing today was built by unions for their members.
I know someone who came from the housing projects in Brooklyn.
He said that during WWII, they needed housing for the shipyard workers, so the federal government hired contractors (I think) to build the projects. It was good housing, and a good community built at a time where everybody was working at a good salary. After the war, the projects attracted a lot of middle-class working people, such as teachers and salesmen.
Then some politicians turned the projects into welfare housing. If the projects had 5% unemployment, the unemployed could plug into the network and get jobs. But if they had 50% unemployment, full of people on welfare, the projects would decline. Some projects are well-maintained and highly desirable with long waiting lists, while others are not.
There's also the question of just who is incompetent, and by what standard? Do you just fire people, or train them and develop competence?
There were lots of programmers in their 40s and 50s who worked on COBOL when their employers converted to %newlanguage%. They could have been retrained but their employer decided to just fire them and hire new (often cheaper) programmers.
In the 1980s, I think, there were a lot of age discrimination lawsuits with expert testimony and subpoenaed internal documents that examined the situation in great detail. The employees argued that they could have been retrained.
Older workers often have different skills. They remember organizational history and what worked before.
A lot of non-union corporations had policies of strong job security. If a worker was "incompetent," they figured out what was wrong and retrained him.
Suppose you looked around and saw that union wages were about 50% to 100% higher in your field for the same work. Would that justify the union dues?
One of the main functions of unions is negotiation. A large group can negotiate better terms than an individual. McDonald's can buy ketchup on better terms than Joe's restaurant on the corner.
It's too bad the conventional union system has nearly all the rot and inefficiency of government.
I'd like to see the data.
I don't know of any (non-anecdotal) evidence that unions generally or even government generally has rot and inefficiency. I think there are good and bad unions and government agencies.
First, government. I once did a study of nuclear power plants, in which I interviewed engineers and managers in the best-run nuclear power plants around the country. (Nuclear power plants have well-defined, clear-cut criteria for good management, starting with minimum down time and good safety.) Some power plants are run by the federal or local governments; others are run by private corporations. Some of the best-run plants were government (Tennessee Valley Authority), and others were private (Commonwealth Edison). There was no correlation between government/private ownership and good management. I found the same pattern in other industries. (Despite what the Koch brothers would like you to believe, the Veterans Health Affairs system has among the best outcomes for major diseases like heart disease, if you believe in peer-reviewed literature.)
Second, unions. There are good and bad unions throughout the U.S. I haven't studied them so I can't tell you definitively which ones are good. But the first goal of a union is to negotiate wages, and union wages are about 50% higher than non-union wages in comparable jobs. Unions also negotiate working conditions, such as job security and safety. (If somebody has published a study I'd like to see it.)
I think economists generally agree that middle-class wages have remained static or declined since about 1980, and one of the major factors was the loss of unions.
One of the interesting comparisons is between American non-union jobs and union jobs in Europe, particularly Germany and Scandanavia, where salaries are about twice U.S. rates.
In the 1950s, corporate management, government agencies, and unions cooperated in many industries, like the aircraft industry. This led to the greatest expansion in wealth and industry that the world has ever seen. It seemed to work.
To add to your J.S.Mill quote, frequently you will see ideas dismissed because they are socialist, or racist, or any reason other than that they are wrong In many cases, these ideas, on examination, are wrong. However, if you want to ferret out inconvenient truths and try to get away from society groupthink, look for ideas rejected on bogus grounds.
That's right. A journalism professor at NYU described newspaper coverage as a donut. In the center of the donut are ideas that everybody agrees with, so it's not even necessary to discuss them. Outside the donut are ideas that are "outside the bounds of reasonable discourse," so newspapers don't cover them because they're too far out. The discussion in newspapers consists of ideas that are inside the donut. The views of newspaper and broadcasting reporters and editors are remarkably similar. They come from the same social classes, and the same journalists move from one newspaper to another.
So for years, newspapers would report raids on gay bars, as if it was the most self-evident thing in the world that gay bars should be raided. That continued until the Stonewall riots. Advertisers often had something to do with it. Most of the women's magazines took dozens of pages of cigarette advertising, and most of them ignored smoking and health. The automobile industry was another major advertiser, and most newspapers ignored auto safety, at least until Ralph Nader came along. Today, newspapers like the NYT have long series on health care, but never mention single payer. I met Elisabeth Rosenthal, who wrote the NYT series, and asked her why not. She said that single payer was outside the bounds of reasonable discourse. Bernie Sanders may have changed that.
In the 1950s, a well-known reporter and war correspondent, George Seldes, published a newsletter that covered everything he was not allowed to write about in traditional newspapers -- union activity, the drug industry, cigarettes, etc. He had reporters around the country sending him stories that they couldn't print in their own papers.
Case in point. Trump just announced that he would cut disability benefits https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
I stopped reading the WSJ when they ran a news story on disability benefits. They searched federal records to find the judge in the US with the most generous records of approving Social Security Disability benefits. He was in West Virginia, which also has one of the worst economies in the US, and about the worst job prospects in the US.
Now SSD is a complicated subject. There's no precise medical or legal definition of "disability". It's pretty easy to say, "He hurt his back, so he can't work in any jobs that are locally available." In fact, there are no jobs locally available. To an extent, SSD is used as a substitute for welfare programs. That's because welfare programs have been cut back, and unlike other countries we have no support for workers displaced by technology and foreign trade deals. There are reasonable arguments on both sides.
Instead of giving the reasonable arguments on both sides, as the WSJ used to do (and as the NYT did in that example), this post-Murdoch hit piece was an attack on the disability judge.
In the old days, I would have thought, "Well, these are journalists I can trust, maybe they've got something here." Now I just think, "It's Murdoch's pro-Trump propaganda, I don't have time to check it out. https://twitter.com/ziobrando/...
Actually, with Al Jazeera you're ahead of the game.
Al Jazeera was founded by BBC reporters, with the Sultan of Qatar paying the bills. The Sultan was pretty tolerant of controversial coverage, but he did have limits.
So Al Jazeera has good western-style journalism, with fact-checking and getting all sides. They have lots of interviews with pro-Israel sources, for example.
As I wrote elsewhere here, I used to be a WSJ fan, until Rupert Murdoch bought them up. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
Ironically, their greatest coverge was about the WSJ takeover attempt itself. During the Murdoch takeover, they had stories every day giving the background and details of Murdoch's journalism career, and the Bancroft family. They did it with their usual freedom to write about anything they thought was important, even if it meant airing the family secrets of the publishers.
It turned out that the reason why the WSJ was such a great newspaper was that the Bancroft family had a commitment to great journalism. It was quite profitable and they were willing to accept those profits. The next generation of Bancrofts weren't willing to accept those profits. After I read that series, I understood for the first time how a newspaper works. (Basically, rich publishers do whatever they want. If they want great journalism, they can get it.)
They also exposed Murdoch as an unethical, criminal scumbag. The worst thing he did was to agree to censor news of human rights violations in China, in return for getting his cable networks into China. They also catalogued the promises that he made and broke, in case anybody believed his promises to preserve the WSJ's editorial independence.
The WSJ didn't submit either of those series to the Pulitzer Prize competition.
I ask myself, "Does this news source give all viewpoints, including the ones I disagree with, including the unpopular ones?" I judge them first by the subjects that I'm most familiar with myself (primarily medicine and biology). Classroom example: Does a story about abortion give both (or all) sides? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02...
In my freshman year of college, even the engineering majors had to take a humanities course. The most valuable book they gave me was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Mill summarized it himself:
So I look for a news source that gives me as many ideas as possible, so I can evaluate them myself. A special case is the journalistic rule: Whenever you attack someone, you have an obligation to give him a chance to respond. I worked as a journalist myself, and any journalist can tell you that when you get the other side, it often turns the whole story around.
The one newspaper that did the best job (more than the New York Times) was the Wall Street Journal. For example, they did a story on a welfare work program in California, and interviewed everyone from the governor down to the welfare recipients. (It seemed clear to me that the program wasn't working, but you could come to your own conclusions.) Some of their best reporters were socialists. Their page 1 editor was gay, contracted AIDS, wrote about his treatement with AZT, and got a Pulitzer Prize for it. http://www.pulitzer.org/winner... They wrote about the successes and failures of the capitalist system. The WSJ made their reputation when GM told them to kill a story, threatened to cancel all their advertising if they didn't, and the WSJ told them to fuck off.
But best of all, they gave me ideas every morning that I disagreed with, and I had to figure out whether I was really right.
Then Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ and destroyed the best newspaper in the world, by placing right-wing political commissars over the editing process and censoring liberal ideas. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12... .
So it's back to the New York Times, even though they have an annoying habit of pandering to their advertisers and to the neo-liberal establishment. (I noticed this when I was following auto safety engineering, and the NYT basically followed the auto industry line that seat belts and air bags were too expensive. The auto industry is in the top 2 or 3 newspaper advertisers.)
After that, the best news sources that I read are in the professional journals. Science magazine actually does get all sides. I also read the New England
Isn't it more dangerous to check a laptop and put it in the baggage compartment?
I thought the most likely hazard of a laptop on a plane is the battery catching fire due to a defective design.
People have had their laptops catch fire in the passenger compartment. That seems safer, because they can see it on fire and put the fire out.
If the laptop catches fire in the baggage compartment, isn't it more likely to burn without anybody noticing it and lead to a bigger fire?