I still believe in immunizing my kids, but I don't believe we should be doing it at the rate they're telling us to. And I don't believe that combining 3 or more immunizations into a single shot is always such a great idea.
And is there any actual evidence to support these beliefs, or is it more like a creationism thing?
It's the latest internet craze, but that doesn't mean it is essential by any means. It's a commodity pass-time, at best.
I disagree. It is, among other things, an online business card repository. Much of the benefit of going to a college or graduate school is the networking, and much of the networking happens via Facebook. Students do not carry around business cards; ask one for their contact info, and they'll likely direct you to Facebook. Certainly, there are degrees of necessity to be considered -- I don't think I'll fall over dead if I quit Facebook, for example -- but it's really not fair to claim that it is nothing more than an online diversion for which the likes of Tetris would be a decent substitute.
OR, you could stop using Facebook and move on to another social networking site.
That's not really a viable option. The facebook community is a network, and as such we are locked in because of network effects.
As an (exaggerated) example, imagine being pissed off that AT&T is handing all your private calling data to George W. Bush in exchange for friendly legislation. Okay, so switch carriers. But unfortunately AT&T is the only carrier that can serve your area or all the ones that can are similarly in the business of giving away your personal info whenever anyone with a government title asks nicely. Now imagine that I come in and helpfully tell you:
OR, you could stop using the telephone network and move on to another means of communication, such as email or the post office. If people still continue to use it, despite the blatant invasion of privacy, then the phone company will see it as a job well done. I ditched telephone service last summer when they made it clear their databases were open to the Bush Administration, and haven't looked back. Continued controversy simply amuses me.
Not exactly a useful bit of advice, is it?
When Friendster, MySpace, and all the others (1) have privacy policies that are enforceable and will prevent this kind of violation of privacy, and, crucially, when (2) they are all interoperable with Facebook, then your advice would be useful.
Well, first of all, you have my utmost sympathy. No one should have to endure what you're going through.
Also, I'm not well-versed in Crohn's disease, but I have to think from my perusal of online sources that your case is substantially worse than the typical case. I do not doubt that some people have it even worse than you, but based on what I've read and the few discussions I've had with my friend who has the disease, it seems to me that you're wedged far into the tail of the unenviable side of the bell curve on this score. It seems to me that the typical case involves a series of mild inconveniences: dietary restrictions, a drug regimen, and usually at most one bout of surgery.
But maybe Crohn's is a lot worse than I ever suspected, and maybe it was a bad choice for the example in my post. My point is that ED in particular is a serious condition that meaningfully affects the day-to-day quality of life of tens of millions of Americans. It is not as serious as many medical conditions, but it is also much, much more widespread than most. And yet people tend to deride it as a frivolous and undeserving avenue for medical research, in part because of society's prudish and irrational willingness to discount happiness to the extent that it is a product of sex.
At least give me this much: the fact that there exists a worse condition in the world is not by itself reason enough to divert research funds from every other condition until it is solved. Otherwise, only the very worst condition in the whole world, no matter how obscure, would receive 100% of the research budget, which clearly seems like an inefficient allocation of resources. ED would give up its funds in favor of diseases like Crohn's, but so too would Crohn's give up its funds for diseases like bone cancer. Even bone cancer would probably lose out to some obscure flesh-eating condition that affects one in a billion humans but is the most horrific thing, once contracted, that any of us can imagine.
"500,000 people suffering from a nasty but not life-threatening condition like that *is* more important than people with erectile dysfunction or getting women horny."
Sorry to pick on you, since this is a very common talking point, but why? Both conditions -- Crohn's and Erectile Dysfunction -- degrade the quality of life. It's not even clear to me that Crohn's degrades it more than ED. Imagine never being able to experience any kind of sexual pleasure. Most people would do an awful lot to avoid that. If I personally had to make the choice, I'd rather have intestinal surgery every few years than lose all ability to experience sexual pleasure for the rest of my life.
Now take into account that apparently FIFTY PERCENT of men will at some point suffer from ED. ( http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/0001722/49/ ) That's approximately 62.5 MILLION AMERICANS. For perspective, that's 125 TIMES the number of Americans who suffer from Crohn's.
In this case, it makes all the sense in the world to prioritize a cure for ED over Crohn's.
Is it possible that your willingness to dismiss ED cures as a frivolous or vain use of medical research is a product of repression or puritanism?
"As two others have already pointed out, Booker rendered all guidelines discretionary."
Well, it rendered the federal sentencing guidelines advisory -- that is true, and my bad for forgetting. Its general constitutional holding, though, invalidates only sentencing guidelines that are mandatory and hinge on factors found only by the judge. In other words, a legislature can correct the constitutional defect either by making the guidelines advisory or by insisting that all of its factors be proven to a jury. The Court corrected the Federal Sentencing Guidelines by the former route, but its reasoning for choosing that route was very much founded on a review of the legislative history of the Guidelines: it concluded that Congress would have preferred advisory guidelines to guidelines requiring proof by jury, and under the the Court's apparently complex severability jurisprudence, that required the result the Court reached.
Many states have retained mandatory sentencing guidelines, though, and far more criminal cases are tried under state law than under federal law. The state of Washington, for example, uses a binding sentencing grid, and provides a minimum and maximum sentence based on several factors that must be proved to the jury. So unless I've made a mistake, it is in fact incorrect to say that "Booker rendered all guidelines discretionary."
"As for appeal structure: it is not as simple as 'go through all the state courts, then the federal courts, then file habeas.' Most states do not have mandatory appeals after the trial level, and most of the time you will be unable to move to federal court."
Oh, certainly; but then again, most of the time you aren't being sentenced to death because of petty theft or whatever your example was. If you were, I guarantee you that pretty much every appeals court up the chain would be willing to take the case. My point remains: I find it significantly more likely for the democratically-accountable legislature to go overboard with sentencing and pass a reactionary statute that causes abuses of sentencing than for politically insulated judges themselves to do it without being overturned by a higher court.
"As for common law claims: they don't, except for a few stragglers, exist anymore. . . . The actual tradition of the American legal system is a move towards increasing codification of the law, period."
Again, granted. But your claim was that "without Congress telling the American Judiciary what is legal or illegal, the Judiciary would have nothing to do." That's wrong: without Congress telling the American judiciary what is legal or illegal, the judiciary would develop its own common law jurisprudence, and life would continue exactly as it had prior to the trend of statutification that you rightly recognize.
"Finally, you do nothing to address my actual point"
Correct. I have no quarrel with your actual point. I was arguing with a few of your supporting assertions. Remember, I am writing a reply on Slashdot, not filing a reply brief in court: I have no obligation to disagree with your ultimate conclusion.
"Your ignorance of law here is astounding, given the authority you seem to think you have. "
"Sentencing guidelines - which, by the way, are not mandatory"
Yes they are. They prescribe a range within which the court/jury has discretion (channeled through a list of legislatively-sanctioned factors), but they a mandatory range.
"It is philosophically unsound to pretend that the idea of a judiciary includes sole control over sentencing, unless you're willing to embrace judges choosing to impose incredible sentences (e.g. death, for theft) when they believe it fair."
Except that the judge is checked by a hierarchy of courts above him. The typical crime is tried in a low-level state court. From there, there are typically at least two levels of state appellate courts and the ability to appeal to three levels of federal courts on constitutional grounds (in this case, cruel and unusual punishment). Even if that fails and the judgment is finally affirmed, the prisoner can file for habeas relief, which starts a new examination of the relevant claim (cruel and unusual punishment) in federal court, with its three levels of court (district, appellate, supreme) review. There are enough checks on the ability of a judge to impose death for theft -- even without sentencing guidelines -- that it seems just as improbable for it to withstand the system as it does for a legislature to impose a disproportionate punishment.
"without Congress telling the American Judiciary what is legal or illegal, the Judiciary would have nothing to do."
Except, of course, for common law claims, which existed in the criminal domain until the legislature preempted them, and which still exist in tort.
Somehow I don't think MSFT shareholders will see intellectual property capable of generating $170 million in a single day as something to be sacrificed in the name of art. Somehow I think if you were in their position, you wouldn't either.
I have the good fortune to attend an excellent law school -- one of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford -- from which literally anyone in the class who wants to get a job that pays market rate can, and in the market of his choice. I agree that the calculation can be substantially different for lower-ranked law schools -- but it's also true that each year, probably ten thousand students or more gain entry to this law firm market tier. Granted, the cost of living is higher in New York and other primary markets, but nothing stops a law graduate from working in, say, Cleveland and making close to the same salary -- we're talking around $120-140k instead of $190k. The hours are also substantially less in those markets. It's really good money.
Since you mention MIT engineers, this site quotes a starting salary of low sixties for people with no work experience. I don't know if this is up to date or if it represents engineers generally, but my understanding is that engineers' salaries peak, for the very best of the profession, at or less than where big firm lawyers' salaries start. (Obviously this does not account for entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- but then, they were PhD students, and enjoyed a degree of success so rare as to be insubstantial from an ex ante point of view. Similarly, it does not account for engineers who move into management, since the skill sets are nearly disjoint and the engineering degree is probably a poor way to pursue that career path.)
You're also quoting 1999 salaries. Law firm starting salaries shot upwards during the dot-com bubble and never came back down. In the past two years alone, they climbed from $155k (including bonus) to $190k. It's a different profession now than it was even a decade ago: longer hours, yes, but also a lot more money.
Finally, your debt calculation needs serious work, at least in my case. First, I received about half of my law school education for free, because top law schools give out a fair amount of grant money and my family isn't all that wealthy. What remained, I covered with government loans. There was a loophole in the government loan laws that let you lock in low interest rates on Stafford loans by consolidating. I did so, and all $40k or so of my loans are locked in at an interest rate that is below 2% when you account for the reductions for on-time payments and automatic online payments. I am also going to drag repayment out over 30 years. Using a conservative rate of return of about 8% for an investment in an S&P 500 index fund, accounting for the way inflation (say, 2%) nearly perfectly counters the interest, the amount I will actually need to pay in 2007 dollars is $16,211.17, less than the price of a new Honda Civic.
Yes, I still spend three years in law school, but these are damn nice years, during which I probably work less than 30-35 hours per week and spend the rest of the time drinking/playing video games with friends, traveling to nearby state parks, and generally enjoying an awesome life. Also, I could not have gotten a high-paying job out of law school. Working long hours in a high cost-of-living city at a job with potential for advancement, I'd have been lucky to gross $40-50k per year. After all, I have no work experience and no marketable job skills. By comparison, last summer alone I worked 17 weeks at a law firm and grossed $52,700 -- more than the total cost of this year's tuition.
The fact is that I have an awesome deal. I'm not saying this to be smug, but to make the point that yes, it is very much in the economic interest of America's smartest college graduates to choose law over engineering or even medicine. Firms are throwing money at me in quantities that are obscene for a 24-year-old. It shouldn't be at all surprising if there is substantial brain drain in other disciplines with this as the alternative. For me, it was not an academic concern: I come from a family without a lot of money, and I was a math majo
...yes, I can confirm that is true. Market rate at top law firms these days is $160,000 plus a $30,000 bonus for a first-year associate. Three years of law school, heavily subsidized by government grants and payed with government loans locked in at a sub-3% interest rate via a loophole that has since closed, made it an exceptionally good deal for me. It would be a good deal even if I paid with credit card debt.
In short, I think that [the legislature's bad intent] is a basis for opposing the passage of such laws, not a question of Constitutionality.
Certainly it's not an issue of constitutionality, but it's also not really a ground on which to object the law -- only to the motivations of the legislature in passing it. Who cares what the intent was? It's the effect that matters.
As an analogy, the Sherman Antitrust Act was born of naked populism and was completely redistributionist in purpose. Nevertheless it's a good law, because (as enforced today) it serves the invaluable function of keeping goods priced at the cost of production and avoiding the massive deadweight loss associated with monopolistic pricing, which anyone should agree with regardless of whether they tend to side more with shareholders or consumers.
(Just to be clear: constitutionality can depend on the legislature's intent -- see Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Corp. for an example -- but we have already agreed that hate crime laws are constitutional.)
Again, I agree with your definition of free speech drawn to include so-called hate speech, and with your reading of the relevant caselaw.
To the extent that the argument against hate crimes is that it chills free speech, my skepticism persists. The only way for a hate crime statute to burden your right to hate speech is if you follow your hate speech with a violent crime against the group that you denounced with your hate speech. In other words, the argument seems to be that we should protect the right of violent criminals to deliver certain kinds of speech as they commit violent crimes, which I guess I don't see as a particularly important right. I guess if it were costless to support that right, we might as well, since hate speech is protected; but in fact it comes at the cost of being unable to punish more severely a class of crimes that cause more social harm.
If that were not admitted as a defense, then legislators would never legislate, because they could be punished at any later time potentially for any act they take as a legislator.
Do you really believe that? If they didn't legislate, their challengers would rightly label them a do-nothing senator and they'd be voted out of office. Because that would be a far more common occurrence than being punished for an unconstitutional law, they'd likely respond more to that incentive than to the competing one which you identify.
I still think the proposal is a bad idea, but it's more to do with notions of fundamental justice (as you say, we shouldn't punish someone for doing their job in good faith, and sometimes a law passed in good faith will be ruled unconstitutional) and a fear of upsetting the separation of powers. Jailing a legislator is a huge deal -- the stuff of which tyrannies are made -- and giving the Supreme Court and the Executive that power seems like a far costlier risk than the benefit it might bring.
But there are all kinds of conduct that are fine by themselves but become criminal when certain words are spoken.
* If you and your friend pull out a phone book and circle someone's name, no problem. If you first say that you want to kill them, then circling the name satisfies the elements of conspiracy to commit murder. * If your business raises prices at the same time as your competitor, no problem. If you discuss raising prices with your competitor first, then you're criminally liable for an antitrust violation.
This example is probably the most analogous to hate crime laws:
* If you run someone over in the street, you're probably liable for negligent homicide or manslaughter. But if you lean out your window and shout "This is for sleeping with my wife!" right before you hit the person, you're going to face charges of first or second degree murder.
I'm curious what you think of that last example. Is it punishing you for your speech? For your motivation? It doesn't purport to; in theory, your speech is evidence of your act, which is "killing someone with premeditation" as opposed to "killing someone negligently." Similarly, hate crimes use speech as evidence of the act, which is "selecting a victim and killing him for his race or sexual orientation" as opposed to "selecting a victim and killing him for reasons unrelated to his race or sexual orientation." Neither purports to punish the speech directly.
650 GB/mo seems like a perfectly reasonable limit for a personal, residential internet subscription. I'm glad there's a limit on it; that means excessive users will have to pay for the strain they put on the network, so that those of us who use it normally can get better bandwidth at the same cost.
You know, there is a solution to that: don't sign a long-term contract. You don't have to, after all. You won't get a free phone, of course, but they won't try to stop you.
No, asking them won't work, beause they'll reply with a bunch of words, and how do you know what those words mean? You'd be right back where you started.
Words have a shared meaning in society. Say "God" when you mean God; use something else to describe "the emergent beauty of the cosmos" or whatever else you intend.
"And that referent exists, at least in the person's own mind."
Sure. What I think you're saying is that God exists at least as a figment of religious peoples' imaginations. I don't think anyone will disagree with that, but it doesn't mean he exists in reality.
Yes, 100% justified. When someone says something bigoted, you are justified in calling them out on it.
I guess I'm not terribly impressed that you found someone else among slashdot's hundreds of thousands of readers who agrees with you. Between you, him, and the original poster, that's three in your coalition, a number you could probably find to support just about any proposition, no matter how radical or offensive.
If you're impressed by his logic as opposed to his rhetorical vote, keep in mind that his defense of the original post is that it implies that gay sex is more offensive than straight sex, but not necessarily that it is more offensive than bestiality. Okay: and would it be similarly innocuous to suggest that while a white person having sex with a black person is obviously more offensive than having sex with another white person, it isn't necessarily worse than having sex with farm animals? If someone said exactly that, casually, as if not even expecting disagreement, would you be a little outraged?
Maybe I'm not giving you enough credit. Maybe you would be outraged -- and are here, as well -- but would have the admirable self-restraint to channel your outrage into a didactic dialogue with the poster in an attempt to educate him and bring his opinion around. If so, that's certainly admirable, but not, I think, mandatory. That you have the patience of Mother Theresa does not make other reactions unjustified.
But what about sex? I'm not talking love, I'm talking pure, lustful, sex. What about double, or even triple penetration? What about people having sex with animals? We're all just animals anyway, right? And so what if that woman wants a combined three feet of throbbing man love in her? I mean, she's got that Right, to choose to do that, hasn't she? How about gay sex? . . . I think we must draw the line somewhere as a society.
It's surprising to me that you can see this as anything other than a slippery slope argument with gay sex at the bottom. It even closes with the classic society-must-draw-a-line rhetoric. I think it's fair to argue that my response was not strategically optimal, but it was definitely 100% justified.
Slashdot Mirror
And is there any actual evidence to support these beliefs, or is it more like a creationism thing?
That's not really a viable option. The facebook community is a network, and as such we are locked in because of network effects.
As an (exaggerated) example, imagine being pissed off that AT&T is handing all your private calling data to George W. Bush in exchange for friendly legislation. Okay, so switch carriers. But unfortunately AT&T is the only carrier that can serve your area or all the ones that can are similarly in the business of giving away your personal info whenever anyone with a government title asks nicely. Now imagine that I come in and helpfully tell you:
Not exactly a useful bit of advice, is it?
When Friendster, MySpace, and all the others (1) have privacy policies that are enforceable and will prevent this kind of violation of privacy, and, crucially, when (2) they are all interoperable with Facebook, then your advice would be useful.
Why do books have chapters?
Only if we get to call a tiered internet "Internet racism."
Spam is email that forces itself upon me -- that can be "Internet rape."
What Comcast is doing to bittorrent traffic: "Internet genocide."
And the projected brownouts as described by that other article on the front page right now: "Internet Alzheimer's."
These attention-grabbing headlines are so accurate and informative!
That shouldn't be a problem, since in high math, the abstract symbols do not represent real world quantities.
Well, first of all, you have my utmost sympathy. No one should have to endure what you're going through.
Also, I'm not well-versed in Crohn's disease, but I have to think from my perusal of online sources that your case is substantially worse than the typical case. I do not doubt that some people have it even worse than you, but based on what I've read and the few discussions I've had with my friend who has the disease, it seems to me that you're wedged far into the tail of the unenviable side of the bell curve on this score. It seems to me that the typical case involves a series of mild inconveniences: dietary restrictions, a drug regimen, and usually at most one bout of surgery.
But maybe Crohn's is a lot worse than I ever suspected, and maybe it was a bad choice for the example in my post. My point is that ED in particular is a serious condition that meaningfully affects the day-to-day quality of life of tens of millions of Americans. It is not as serious as many medical conditions, but it is also much, much more widespread than most. And yet people tend to deride it as a frivolous and undeserving avenue for medical research, in part because of society's prudish and irrational willingness to discount happiness to the extent that it is a product of sex.
At least give me this much: the fact that there exists a worse condition in the world is not by itself reason enough to divert research funds from every other condition until it is solved. Otherwise, only the very worst condition in the whole world, no matter how obscure, would receive 100% of the research budget, which clearly seems like an inefficient allocation of resources. ED would give up its funds in favor of diseases like Crohn's, but so too would Crohn's give up its funds for diseases like bone cancer. Even bone cancer would probably lose out to some obscure flesh-eating condition that affects one in a billion humans but is the most horrific thing, once contracted, that any of us can imagine.
"500,000 people suffering from a nasty but not life-threatening condition like that *is* more important than people with erectile dysfunction or getting women horny."
Sorry to pick on you, since this is a very common talking point, but why? Both conditions -- Crohn's and Erectile Dysfunction -- degrade the quality of life. It's not even clear to me that Crohn's degrades it more than ED. Imagine never being able to experience any kind of sexual pleasure. Most people would do an awful lot to avoid that. If I personally had to make the choice, I'd rather have intestinal surgery every few years than lose all ability to experience sexual pleasure for the rest of my life.
Now take into account that apparently FIFTY PERCENT of men will at some point suffer from ED. ( http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/0001722/49/ ) That's approximately 62.5 MILLION AMERICANS. For perspective, that's 125 TIMES the number of Americans who suffer from Crohn's.
In this case, it makes all the sense in the world to prioritize a cure for ED over Crohn's.
Is it possible that your willingness to dismiss ED cures as a frivolous or vain use of medical research is a product of repression or puritanism?
"As two others have already pointed out, Booker rendered all guidelines discretionary."
Well, it rendered the federal sentencing guidelines advisory -- that is true, and my bad for forgetting. Its general constitutional holding, though, invalidates only sentencing guidelines that are mandatory and hinge on factors found only by the judge. In other words, a legislature can correct the constitutional defect either by making the guidelines advisory or by insisting that all of its factors be proven to a jury. The Court corrected the Federal Sentencing Guidelines by the former route, but its reasoning for choosing that route was very much founded on a review of the legislative history of the Guidelines: it concluded that Congress would have preferred advisory guidelines to guidelines requiring proof by jury, and under the the Court's apparently complex severability jurisprudence, that required the result the Court reached.
Many states have retained mandatory sentencing guidelines, though, and far more criminal cases are tried under state law than under federal law. The state of Washington, for example, uses a binding sentencing grid, and provides a minimum and maximum sentence based on several factors that must be proved to the jury. So unless I've made a mistake, it is in fact incorrect to say that "Booker rendered all guidelines discretionary."
"As for appeal structure: it is not as simple as 'go through all the state courts, then the federal courts, then file habeas.' Most states do not have mandatory appeals after the trial level, and most of the time you will be unable to move to federal court."
Oh, certainly; but then again, most of the time you aren't being sentenced to death because of petty theft or whatever your example was. If you were, I guarantee you that pretty much every appeals court up the chain would be willing to take the case. My point remains: I find it significantly more likely for the democratically-accountable legislature to go overboard with sentencing and pass a reactionary statute that causes abuses of sentencing than for politically insulated judges themselves to do it without being overturned by a higher court.
"As for common law claims: they don't, except for a few stragglers, exist anymore. . . . The actual tradition of the American legal system is a move towards increasing codification of the law, period."
Again, granted. But your claim was that "without Congress telling the American Judiciary what is legal or illegal, the Judiciary would have nothing to do." That's wrong: without Congress telling the American judiciary what is legal or illegal, the judiciary would develop its own common law jurisprudence, and life would continue exactly as it had prior to the trend of statutification that you rightly recognize.
"Finally, you do nothing to address my actual point"
Correct. I have no quarrel with your actual point. I was arguing with a few of your supporting assertions. Remember, I am writing a reply on Slashdot, not filing a reply brief in court: I have no obligation to disagree with your ultimate conclusion.
"Your ignorance of law here is astounding, given the authority you seem to think you have. "
Rude.
"Sentencing guidelines - which, by the way, are not mandatory"
Yes they are. They prescribe a range within which the court/jury has discretion (channeled through a list of legislatively-sanctioned factors), but they a mandatory range.
"It is philosophically unsound to pretend that the idea of a judiciary includes sole control over sentencing, unless you're willing to embrace judges choosing to impose incredible sentences (e.g. death, for theft) when they believe it fair."
Except that the judge is checked by a hierarchy of courts above him. The typical crime is tried in a low-level state court. From there, there are typically at least two levels of state appellate courts and the ability to appeal to three levels of federal courts on constitutional grounds (in this case, cruel and unusual punishment). Even if that fails and the judgment is finally affirmed, the prisoner can file for habeas relief, which starts a new examination of the relevant claim (cruel and unusual punishment) in federal court, with its three levels of court (district, appellate, supreme) review. There are enough checks on the ability of a judge to impose death for theft -- even without sentencing guidelines -- that it seems just as improbable for it to withstand the system as it does for a legislature to impose a disproportionate punishment.
"without Congress telling the American Judiciary what is legal or illegal, the Judiciary would have nothing to do."
Except, of course, for common law claims, which existed in the criminal domain until the legislature preempted them, and which still exist in tort.
Somehow I don't think MSFT shareholders will see intellectual property capable of generating $170 million in a single day as something to be sacrificed in the name of art. Somehow I think if you were in their position, you wouldn't either.
I have the good fortune to attend an excellent law school -- one of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford -- from which literally anyone in the class who wants to get a job that pays market rate can, and in the market of his choice. I agree that the calculation can be substantially different for lower-ranked law schools -- but it's also true that each year, probably ten thousand students or more gain entry to this law firm market tier. Granted, the cost of living is higher in New York and other primary markets, but nothing stops a law graduate from working in, say, Cleveland and making close to the same salary -- we're talking around $120-140k instead of $190k. The hours are also substantially less in those markets. It's really good money.
Since you mention MIT engineers, this site quotes a starting salary of low sixties for people with no work experience. I don't know if this is up to date or if it represents engineers generally, but my understanding is that engineers' salaries peak, for the very best of the profession, at or less than where big firm lawyers' salaries start. (Obviously this does not account for entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- but then, they were PhD students, and enjoyed a degree of success so rare as to be insubstantial from an ex ante point of view. Similarly, it does not account for engineers who move into management, since the skill sets are nearly disjoint and the engineering degree is probably a poor way to pursue that career path.)
You're also quoting 1999 salaries. Law firm starting salaries shot upwards during the dot-com bubble and never came back down. In the past two years alone, they climbed from $155k (including bonus) to $190k. It's a different profession now than it was even a decade ago: longer hours, yes, but also a lot more money.
Finally, your debt calculation needs serious work, at least in my case. First, I received about half of my law school education for free, because top law schools give out a fair amount of grant money and my family isn't all that wealthy. What remained, I covered with government loans. There was a loophole in the government loan laws that let you lock in low interest rates on Stafford loans by consolidating. I did so, and all $40k or so of my loans are locked in at an interest rate that is below 2% when you account for the reductions for on-time payments and automatic online payments. I am also going to drag repayment out over 30 years. Using a conservative rate of return of about 8% for an investment in an S&P 500 index fund, accounting for the way inflation (say, 2%) nearly perfectly counters the interest, the amount I will actually need to pay in 2007 dollars is $16,211.17, less than the price of a new Honda Civic.
Yes, I still spend three years in law school, but these are damn nice years, during which I probably work less than 30-35 hours per week and spend the rest of the time drinking/playing video games with friends, traveling to nearby state parks, and generally enjoying an awesome life. Also, I could not have gotten a high-paying job out of law school. Working long hours in a high cost-of-living city at a job with potential for advancement, I'd have been lucky to gross $40-50k per year. After all, I have no work experience and no marketable job skills. By comparison, last summer alone I worked 17 weeks at a law firm and grossed $52,700 -- more than the total cost of this year's tuition.
The fact is that I have an awesome deal. I'm not saying this to be smug, but to make the point that yes, it is very much in the economic interest of America's smartest college graduates to choose law over engineering or even medicine. Firms are throwing money at me in quantities that are obscene for a 24-year-old. It shouldn't be at all surprising if there is substantial brain drain in other disciplines with this as the alternative. For me, it was not an academic concern: I come from a family without a lot of money, and I was a math majo
...yes, I can confirm that is true. Market rate at top law firms these days is $160,000 plus a $30,000 bonus for a first-year associate. Three years of law school, heavily subsidized by government grants and payed with government loans locked in at a sub-3% interest rate via a loophole that has since closed, made it an exceptionally good deal for me. It would be a good deal even if I paid with credit card debt.
Certainly it's not an issue of constitutionality, but it's also not really a ground on which to object the law -- only to the motivations of the legislature in passing it. Who cares what the intent was? It's the effect that matters.
As an analogy, the Sherman Antitrust Act was born of naked populism and was completely redistributionist in purpose. Nevertheless it's a good law, because (as enforced today) it serves the invaluable function of keeping goods priced at the cost of production and avoiding the massive deadweight loss associated with monopolistic pricing, which anyone should agree with regardless of whether they tend to side more with shareholders or consumers.
(Just to be clear: constitutionality can depend on the legislature's intent -- see Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Corp. for an example -- but we have already agreed that hate crime laws are constitutional.)
Again, I agree with your definition of free speech drawn to include so-called hate speech, and with your reading of the relevant caselaw.
To the extent that the argument against hate crimes is that it chills free speech, my skepticism persists. The only way for a hate crime statute to burden your right to hate speech is if you follow your hate speech with a violent crime against the group that you denounced with your hate speech. In other words, the argument seems to be that we should protect the right of violent criminals to deliver certain kinds of speech as they commit violent crimes, which I guess I don't see as a particularly important right. I guess if it were costless to support that right, we might as well, since hate speech is protected; but in fact it comes at the cost of being unable to punish more severely a class of crimes that cause more social harm.
Yes yes -- that's all a fine argument. But it is a different argument than that hate crimes are a bad idea because they "punish speech."
Do you really believe that? If they didn't legislate, their challengers would rightly label them a do-nothing senator and they'd be voted out of office. Because that would be a far more common occurrence than being punished for an unconstitutional law, they'd likely respond more to that incentive than to the competing one which you identify.
I still think the proposal is a bad idea, but it's more to do with notions of fundamental justice (as you say, we shouldn't punish someone for doing their job in good faith, and sometimes a law passed in good faith will be ruled unconstitutional) and a fear of upsetting the separation of powers. Jailing a legislator is a huge deal -- the stuff of which tyrannies are made -- and giving the Supreme Court and the Executive that power seems like a far costlier risk than the benefit it might bring.
But there are all kinds of conduct that are fine by themselves but become criminal when certain words are spoken.
* If you and your friend pull out a phone book and circle someone's name, no problem. If you first say that you want to kill them, then circling the name satisfies the elements of conspiracy to commit murder.
* If your business raises prices at the same time as your competitor, no problem. If you discuss raising prices with your competitor first, then you're criminally liable for an antitrust violation.
This example is probably the most analogous to hate crime laws:
* If you run someone over in the street, you're probably liable for negligent homicide or manslaughter. But if you lean out your window and shout "This is for sleeping with my wife!" right before you hit the person, you're going to face charges of first or second degree murder.
I'm curious what you think of that last example. Is it punishing you for your speech? For your motivation? It doesn't purport to; in theory, your speech is evidence of your act, which is "killing someone with premeditation" as opposed to "killing someone negligently." Similarly, hate crimes use speech as evidence of the act, which is "selecting a victim and killing him for his race or sexual orientation" as opposed to "selecting a victim and killing him for reasons unrelated to his race or sexual orientation." Neither purports to punish the speech directly.
650 GB/mo seems like a perfectly reasonable limit for a personal, residential internet subscription. I'm glad there's a limit on it; that means excessive users will have to pay for the strain they put on the network, so that those of us who use it normally can get better bandwidth at the same cost.
You know, there is a solution to that: don't sign a long-term contract. You don't have to, after all. You won't get a free phone, of course, but they won't try to stop you.
Words have a shared meaning in society. Say "God" when you mean God; use something else to describe "the emergent beauty of the cosmos" or whatever else you intend.
"And that referent exists, at least in the person's own mind."
Sure. What I think you're saying is that God exists at least as a figment of religious peoples' imaginations. I don't think anyone will disagree with that, but it doesn't mean he exists in reality.
Yes, 100% justified. When someone says something bigoted, you are justified in calling them out on it.
I guess I'm not terribly impressed that you found someone else among slashdot's hundreds of thousands of readers who agrees with you. Between you, him, and the original poster, that's three in your coalition, a number you could probably find to support just about any proposition, no matter how radical or offensive.
If you're impressed by his logic as opposed to his rhetorical vote, keep in mind that his defense of the original post is that it implies that gay sex is more offensive than straight sex, but not necessarily that it is more offensive than bestiality. Okay: and would it be similarly innocuous to suggest that while a white person having sex with a black person is obviously more offensive than having sex with another white person, it isn't necessarily worse than having sex with farm animals? If someone said exactly that, casually, as if not even expecting disagreement, would you be a little outraged?
Maybe I'm not giving you enough credit. Maybe you would be outraged -- and are here, as well -- but would have the admirable self-restraint to channel your outrage into a didactic dialogue with the poster in an attempt to educate him and bring his opinion around. If so, that's certainly admirable, but not, I think, mandatory. That you have the patience of Mother Theresa does not make other reactions unjustified.