JayB

Oops - health benefits included! Think the numbers are inflation adjusted.

Next: Longitudinal Data!

Same fellow taking a stage in the big race... http://www.usatoday.com/sports/cycling/tourdefrance/2011-07-04-Tour-de-France-Stage-3-Tyler-Farrar_n.htm

Here's a link to a PDF that covers where the Discovery Pass will/won't be required: http://www.discoverpass.wa.gov/exemptions/Do%20I%20need%20a%20Discover%20Pass.pdf

Now we're getting somewhere, at long last. And the connection between participating in a leisure activity that requires immense amounts of persistence, sacrifice, discipline, deferred gratification and getting into and completing college is...completely random? Something that happens only after someone sits in a lecture hall for X number of hours?

It's amazing to me that there was anyone running the show who believed that the unwillingness of institutions to lend to one another, etc was due to a 1930's style contraction of the money supply. Money wasn't the problem. There was plenty of money - but no one could tell who it was safe to loan money to. Ditto for the notion that spending over a trillion trying to prop home values inflated by a credit expansion was a good use for money even if it would work, much less that it would actually prevent home prices from mean-reverting. Just taking the entire sum expended on the stimulus/QE/housing-bailout and distributing it on a per-capita basis would have had the same effect on the money supply, and would have avoided all of the self-dealing that come along with funneling all of the cash through self-interested bureaucracies and financial institutions. Fail*10^n

Great News - see below! For all types of cancer among men, there were about 56 deaths per 100,000 for those with at least 16 years of education, compared with 148 deaths per 100,000 for those with no more than 12 years of school. For women, the rate was 59 per 100,000 for the most educated and 119 per 100,000 for the least educated. People with a high-school education or less died from lung cancer at a rate four to five times higher than those with at least four years of college education. More than a third of premature cancer deaths could have been avoided if everyone had a college degree, cancer-society officials estimated. Also noted elsewhere: the median income for iron-man level triathaletes is $126,000, and virtually all of them are college graduates. I'm sure that their rates of death from premature cancer are considerably lower as well. Want to graduate from college, earn a high income, and reduce your risk of dying prematurely from cancer even more than you would by simply attending college courses? Participate in triathalons. Post-hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Sickening and tragic, but all fairly predictable effects of making drugs illegal. Also not terribly different from the excess mortality caused by toxic substances making their way into alcohol during prohibition - which included a horribly ill conceived plan to scare people out of drinking by poisoning the stock of alcohol that bootleggers were likely to intercept and resell. Think the death toll from that experiment was something like 10,000. http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/ Seems like there'd be plenty of people willing to pay a comparable sum for something that got them just as high, they could buy easily and conveniently, and didn't result in their flesh rotting off. All in all a better outcome.

Lots of strange bedfellow action on this one: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130755883 Just legalize everything and be done with it.

There's also the folks who make a fortune selling the drug on the black market that find the status quo acceptable. Admittedly a small segment - but I'd suspect that reasonable fraction of the people who make a decent living selling weed on the black market look forward to competing with either RJ Reynolds, a state monopoly, or both. "Bootleggers and Baptists, is a model of politics in which opposite moral positions lead to the same vote. Specifically, preachers demand prohibition to make alcohol illegal while the criminal bootlegger wants it to stay illegal so he can stay in business." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

Vid [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/user/x0s0p0y#p/a/u/0/fzRhLs5GkYs

Insane. Incredible TR from an amazing journey. Seems to validate "the more harrowing the journey, the better the story" tagline.

+1. Everything is just fine the way it is! Conservatism at its finest. Sorry for spoiling this conversation by introducing data! Look at us! Down in the mud with...Sweden! Germany - uhhhh..Nevermind! Japan - Ditto! It's all about emotion. And then insulting the other side. Look, buddy. Greece has a higher percentage of college graduates than Germany - QED. Mexico has the same percentage of college graduates as Austria. Q.E. F'ing D.

+1. Everything is just fine the way it is! Conservatism at its finest. Sorry for spoiling this conversation by introducing data! Look at us! Down in the mud with...Sweden! Germany - uhhhh..Nevermind! Japan - Ditto!

I'd ask him: What do you like to do, what are you good at, and how important is earning a decent salary to you? If he said I love poetry and have a knack for languages and love to study, I am independently wealthy, and I don't care about making money than I'd recommend he go to the school with the best poetry program out there - irrespective of the cost, and continue with graduate study if possible. Again - irrespective of the cost. If he said I like to work with my hands, I've got a knack for fixing things, I find most of school boring and pointless and my family can't pay a dime for more education I'd recommend that he look into skilled trades where he can learn on the job and get paid while doing his training - and that college is something that he can always pursue later if his ideas about what he wants to do with his life change. Etc - basically what any non-retarded high-school guidance counselor would tell kids based on their interests, aptitudes, and level of motivation. You'd make a really inspiring counselor. "Shoot low, kid." I prefer my world just little less formulaic and deterministic, thanks. Most people going to college are 18 - they have not fucking clue what they want to do. Their 'levels of motivation' are far from set. College is a great way to mix it up and explore that. You act is if the system is forcing poor feckless kids who would really be happier in a MinuteLube bay go to Harvard instead ("how did I get under all this debt!!!???" Its yet another strawman to justify your fundamental douchery - you'd prefer to save a few bucks rather than give a fuck and help those who want to go to college get there. "But what if education ISN'T all its cracked up to be?" Typical Rfuck suck. You should sign on to an Rfuck campaign this time around - they need all the pineapple upside down messaging they can get. - "Formulaic and Deterministic" is equating going to college with "aiming high," and any other career path with "aiming low." -Ditto for assuming that you can't go from one path to another. I know plenty of people that figured out that they wanted to go to college after working in a trade for a while, and plenty of people who decided they'd rather work in a trade after going to college and finding the line of work they originally trained for unsatisfying. This is hardly news. Love the Dada-style ad hominems, BTW. "You'd rather cut through sheet of cornbread with a coping saw than play hacky sack with a mariachi band...."

I'd ask him: What do you like to do, what are you good at, and how important is earning a decent salary to you? If he said I love poetry and have a knack for languages and love to study, I am independently wealthy, and I don't care about making money than I'd recommend he go to the school with the best poetry program out there - irrespective of the cost, and continue with graduate study if possible. Again - irrespective of the cost. If he said I like to work with my hands, I've got a knack for fixing things, I find most of school boring and pointless and my family can't pay a dime for more education I'd recommend that he look into skilled trades where he can learn on the job and get paid while doing his training - and that college is something that he can always pursue later if his ideas about what he wants to do with his life change. Etc - basically what any non-retarded high-school guidance counselor would tell kids based on their interests, aptitudes, and level of motivation.

Homeopathics! a very lucrative area of private education, as i understand it. Most likely reaping a good living off the liberal arts, English, and art history graduates. Who are, at this very moment, busy saving you from your own ignorance and myopia, Mr. narrow horizons Guy.

Here's some help for the enlightened members of the cognitive elite the next time someone cites a statistical association between two variables: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

While I think that there should be more done to provide access to kids going the college I would argue just as much for impoved access to technical schools and apprenticeship programs. Shoot - my car mechanic has got to be the most well-read, well-educated person I know. AND he knows how to fix things, which most college grads seem to be afraid of. Plus, he works 4 days a week and likely matches or beats my salary. College is definately not the only alternative and certainly not the only way to develop critical thinking. Yes. Where is the head slamming into desk emoticon?

You also implied the 70% without a 4-year college degree were not diligent enough, hard-working enough, gratification delaying enough, ... because they'd rather engage in crack smoking, robbing convenience stores, ... all of this because you deny that income is a major factor in enabling access to higher education. Nobody claimed that that a college edu "garanteed" higher income, yet all stats show that most people with college degrees earn higher income. Borrowing too much is a bad idea, nothing new here, but you also deny that people had to borrow because of decreasing real earning and increasing costs. This is an amusing conversation to have with self-annointed members of the enlightened cognitive elite. My point was that if you want to determine a particular benefit of going to college, you have to compare the people who went to college with the people who are just like them in every other respect - but didn't go to college. How to do that? Find the people who got good grades in high school and then pursued some other kind of career training. Look at how they're doing compared to people who got equally high grades and went to college? Much better way to determine the effect of going to college on health, wealth, etc. Want to get more granular? Compare the jet-engine mechanics to the sociology majors, etc. The differences you find are much more likely to be attributable to having attended college. How is it that I am having to hammer remedial shit like correlation vs causation, confounding variables, etc to highly educated members of the enlightened cognitive elite? I knew this shit in junior high. My high-school graduate grandma could make these distinctions while cooking up an apple-pie and listening to a baseball game on the radio.....

This is kind of an ironic first sentence in the context of this thread - no? I have two basic points. The first is that borrowing more than you can repay is always a bad idea. This is true whether it's to finance a McMansion or a college education. If you've got to borrow to finance your education, it's probably worth trying to figure out whether the career that your education will prepare you for will allow you to repay the loan. The second is that a college education doesn't guarantee a high income. If your primary objective for going to college is to increase your earnings, there are lots of skilled trades that you can get into where you'll earn as much or more than a big chunk of college graduates do without spending as much time or money as going to college requires.

-The idea that people who haven't gone to college are collectively inferior citizens in some essential way, and their existence in the voting pool somehow jeopardizes democracy is a strange one for any "progressive" to adopt. It also seems strangely at odds with the historical record. Somehow - entire suites of legislation that I suspect that you find quite appealing - from the enfranchisement of women, to the repeal of prohibition, to the New Deal, to the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, etc were all passed when the number of college graduates was several times lower than it is today. How is society becoming "progressively more ignorant" while the percentage of people with degrees has been progressively increasing for decades? -The "reward" that the market confers upon college graduates is highly variable, and may not be sufficient to repay the cost of acquiring it. There are other options that may be much better for people who's primary objective for going to is to earn a living that they can acquire at a much lower cost than a four-year degree. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/college_bound/2011/05/new_study_tracks_lifetime_income_based_on_college_major.html http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth/ This doesn't matter much for people who come from families that can afford to put them through college, but it matters a great deal for people who will only be able to finance college by borrowing the money.

Correlation or Causality? No supporting data, so no problem! Typical Jay: muddy the waters, obfuscate the obvious, paralyze with pseudo-science and selective relativism. "Is education good, really? Have you considered the chicken and the egg? How can we ever really know anything, really?" They're creepy and they're kooky, Mysterious and spooky... It's nothing more than basic critical thinking. Causation. Correlation. Different. There are plenty of other examples - such as the fact that people on Medicaid tend to be in worse health and die younger than those with no coverage at all. One way to think about that would be that Medicaid coverage itself causes ill health and excess mortality relative to having no insurance. Another would be to consider the possibility that there are larger, more profound differences between the cohort enrolled in Medicaid and those who lack insurance that manifest themselves in the health metrics. Etc, etc, etc, etc. I find this quite amusing in the context of someone making claims about how attending college automatically increases one's capacity to engage in critical thinking. Clearly it does for some people in some courses of study - but the effect is far from universal. See below: "In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list." http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo10327226.html

Which people? In your work, don't you operate under the assumption that everyone should have equal protections under the law? Maybe I misunderstood you, but your statements on this board implied that you thought everyone should have access to health care. Maybe our fields of should are just more or less wide. As far as politics go, politics (when defined as a field of struggle over power) is all there is, I've never posted anything here that would suggest otherwise. Given you postings, I think we're talking about a difference in attitude, not viewpoint. We worship one thing here: Money, and we're paying the price for that on a very personal level. How do we turn America to a values based society? One issue at a time, I'd wager. Money will always be an important practicality, but it would be nice not to see American's sell their privacy, altruism, satisfaction, and health so cheaply. For example, I was at a fambly gathering this week and heard a tea bagger go on about how we should legalize drugs but allow insurance companies to charge them extra. Sounds really reasonable, right - until you get to the details, which, of course, would involve mandatory drug testing for all insured. Ie, to save a few bucks a year, this 'libertarian' was willing to give up a substantial aspect of his privacy - even down to his bodily fluids. Ever apply for a mortgage? Apply for a job? Submit to a credit check? Background check? Answer smoking or non on a life insurance form? These are all voluntary exchanges that come with a set of conditions that people can either agree to or refuse. Giving an employer consent to conduct a background check, for example, is vastly different than enacting legislation that grants the government or any other entity to do so without your knowledge or consent. The idea that anyone who is willing to disclose whether or not they smoke, drink, climb, or go cave diving in exchange for a private party selling them a life insurance policy can't have legitimate reasons for thinking that all of the above are none of the governments business is quite amusing coming from a self-described civil libertarian.