Tales of a Fourth-Tier Nothing

Law School vs. Clown College

2012-02-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

I had begun to refer to law school as "clown college," but I realized that it would be an insult to clowns.

Can you imagine? Say that you don't want to work for Ringling Bros. anymore. You can put a tip jar out on a street corner and start juggling bowling pins. People will watch for a few minutes and then leave you money.

It may not be much, but that spare change adds up over a few hours. I don't know how many attorneys were ever voluntarily paid anything, and even if accounts are settled full and proper, there is a bit of misery about it for the client, isn't there? Oops, there went $5,000 that could have gone to buying a new car, and it's been sunk on something they'd rather have never had to pay for in a million years.

Anyway, I'm intrigued by these lawsuits that are going after schools for employment statistics.

I think back to my own experience. Technically, at the nine month mark, I was employed in a job that had the potential salary of $50,000+ per year. I was hired that exact month after being unemployed since graduation. Then, I left the job in favor of a temp job in a non-legal field, if that tells you anything.

Now, I don't recall ever answering a survey. I don't recall if one was ever sent to me. Maybe they did send one. I recall some sort of email about alerting career services if you still hadn't found anything, so maybe it was a passive "we will only count the people who come forward and ask for help as unemployed and assume everyone else is employed."

Of course, if you have been trying to find a job for quite some time and saw a distinct pattern where career services wasn't working much magic, you are not very enthusiastic about telling them anything. It's a bit like waiting by the phone for the on-again-off-again boyfriend and you've gotten to that point where you're just sort of laying low and hoping he just drifts away and becomes somebody else's problem as opposed to giving you hope that things are going to be different.

Yes, career services! You told me a few months ago that things were different because you see that there are problems with how things were going. Then, I didn't hear from you for several months, and now you send me an email asking me if you would like to get together because you were busy but you were still thinking about me?

Then, you look around and see that your afternoons are filled with making your innards raw from coffee and reading a grade-C novel that you picked up on a whim at the used book store, and you are so desperate for cheap entertainment that you painfully turn through each page as you stare out the window every second paragraph.

Hmm.

Then you think, "Maybe I should take career services back. I swore I would never go back to them because they've been telling me this same story for two years now about how great things were going to be if I just reached out to them. Ha! My employed friends are tired of me showing up to their gatherings without a job and ask me about career services and what they've been up to recently. They look at me with a mixture of pity and doubt in their eyes when I tell them that career services is trying really hard, but they are short-staffed and are obviously very busy with OCI and they'll get back to me as soon as they can. In fact, career services told me to provide them with my class schedule in case a potential employer tried to get in contact with me but had to send them to track me down if my phone was not working and it was absolutely urgent that they speak to me right that moment because I am such an amazing candidate that they won't consider anyone else.

"But then, here I am, at the goddamn Starbucks on a Tuesday afternoon. If I were that amazing, maybe someone else would have expressed interest. Hmm. Maybe career services wasn't that bad. They did give me coffee and occasional donuts. And cake. Don't forget about cake. They were always very nice. And they had jovial font on the fliers in the hallways. Also, have you seen what else is out there? Craigslist? Law Crossing? Maybe they are simply dysfunctional and I should be the one to change. Maybe career services needs me to be more proactive. Maybe I am not expressing my needs adequately. People have told me that I am poor at communicating my needs. Maybe they were simply waiting for me to make a move all of this time, but they were shy about doing so because they didn't want to look like an obsessive freak. Really, I am a very cold individual. Maybe they are giving me another chance because I screwed something up and they have such strong feelings for me that they could not stay away. You know, I should really be more attentive to the needs of others. Here I am, blaming them for my own shortcomings when all they were doing was pining away with the desire to help me become more than what I am. Once again, my own cynicism about people got in the way, and I couldn't recognize that I simply just let it fall apart instead of expressing my needs. You know what? I'm going to show them that I still care about them and let them know that I understand that they are trying in their own way."

Thus, despite having my self esteem chipped away each time I went through this, the cycle would inevitably restart.

However, on this occasion, I don't think I bothered replying to them because I was in secret celebration that I had just found a job. Yes, I can just passively act like I never got their email and act surprised if I accidentally run into them at a school CLE event. After all, this was now the year 2010. Technology was so finicky that everything goes directly into the Spam box. Plus, only old people checked their email. It was nothing but text and Facebook, bay-bee!

Ah, but when I say that I changed jobs unexpectedly, I don't think my case was that unusual. I think there are more than a few of my classmates that had already made job changes within two years. This highlights the ever migratory world of legal employment. Just like circus carnies, many will dabble in a variety of trades and employers. Many fall off the hamster wheel they get tired enough, so it leaves this interesting picture of what true Darwinism looks like when seeing which people make it to the golden status of old geezer attorney. Most of the people who are hired at big firms are gone within a few short years and new room is made for another round of people who think they've struck it big.

So, what they really need when measuring law school statistics is basically the equivalent to the life cycle of a star sort of diagram.

Step 1: The non-attorney enters a ring of dark matter and is compressed for 3 years until nuclear reaction takes place.

Step 2: The new lawyer is launched from the nursery where they are humiliated by people with high school diplomas and 20 years experience in the field they are trying to work in.

Step 3: The new lawyer is tired of working for the jackass who is paying them nothing and keeping the rest of it for hookers and private planes. The new lawyer decides they too can have hookers and private planes.

Step 4: The new lawyer creates a new law firm. They may even "go in" with someone. Unbeknownst to new lawyer, the new partner is setting about in stealing their clients behind their back. The new venture falls apart and moving trucks are brought in during the middle of the night to haul away case files without a Dear John letter.

Step 5: Bitterness and alcohol ensues. Complaints to the state bar are made about your failure to keep the client apprised of their case. Somewhere along the way, you may need to make a stop at the special attorney AA meetings as recommended by the State bar and have your work overseen by another attorney as you are on "probation."

Step 6: Tort reform bills are passed. The business base dries up, and the lawyer seeks out a last minute certification to teach high school English. The student loans from years past are still hovering around like a goddamn horse fly that is determined as all hell to take away a yummy chunk of your arm if you would only hold still just long enough. Oddly, even though you've paid on them for nearly 10 years at this point, they are still nearly about the same size as the day you graduated from law school thanks to deferments and low income and such.

Yes, so only if we could get attorneys to write out their full bio, then people who are thinking about law school may understand because numerical statistics just don't cut it.

The Horrors of Public Bathrooms

2012-02-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that a lot of lawyer movies have a scene where the attorney is in a public bathroom at the courthouse?

I never really thought about it, but yeah, especially if you do spend a lot of time at the courthouse, you are subjected to the best and brightest of ancient public facilities. For example, one had fairly ample space between the slats that are supposed to shield you from the world. Instead of fixing the issue, some enterprising individual hung strategically placed toilet paper strips over those areas.

Yes, if only they looked as opulent as they do in the movies. I kept waiting to come down with some sort of dread disease.

I was provoked to write today because I can no longer handle my pet peeve. This is where we play:

What would you do if this happened to you?

You are at a sink in a public bathroom washing your hands. You have a choice between two trash cans that are equidistant from your position. In other words, you don't have to change position or strain to reach either one of them.

One trash can is a mostly empty waist basket with a large hole.

Another trash can is the small tin trash holder that is part of the paper napkin dispenser. There is about a 6 inch space between the area where the towels come out and the area where the napkins are thrown away.

After you dry your hands, where do you dispose your trash?

1. The waist basket where you can watch in satisfaction as the paper disappears down the wide, spacious hole to the bottom of the can?

2. The tiny tin located directly under the paper napkin towel dispenser, where you have to cram it in and which forces the next person to maneuver around your soggy wet trash to get a clean napkin to wipe their hands?

I seriously can't figure out why someone would have an aversion to throwing away trash in a giant trash can.

Go Back to Work?

2011-11-21T04:54:00.000-08:00

I don't understand these people who want the Occupy crowds to stop protesting and go back to work.

Do they seriously believe that many of those people are camped out day after day because they have jobs or even a home to go to? Or is the media inventing the 9% or higher unemployment statistics?

It's funny that the naysayers want to blame Obama for the continued high unemployment, but they also want to believe that the protesters are just a bunch of spoiled hippies who just happened to wander by the park on the way to buy some ganja from their supplier and decided to hold an impromptu party.

In fact, I find it particularly interesting that many of the initial hoards of unemployed after the financial meltdown no longer have unemployment benefits.

Finally, let me close by saying that we in America are trying to sell the concept of American-style democracy to the rest of the world--especially the Middle East. What example do we set when our cops randomly pepper spray people who are peaceably protesting?

They look at that and see that our way doesn't give them the freedoms that they desire.

Where Do Your Lottery Riches Go?

2011-11-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

The other day, I overheard some people hating on a young attorney for being "cheap" because he doesn't go crazy with spending. After all, this young attorney made so much money that he should be living like a king!

I'll pause here to let the chuckling die down.

After all, those of us "in the know" know that we don't get to keep all of those glorious riches. Haters usually don't take into account that attorneys not only have bills, but they have unique expenses.

I thought about it for a while, and decided that this is as good a time (as any) to discuss what happens to your money as a young attorney. For sake of argument, let's say that young attorney makes $50,000 a year.

The federal government takes a bigger cut.

Now, I know that people made fun of that law professor not long ago for not having enough left over to pay for undocumented workers to be paid in peanuts to cut his lawn if the Bush tax cuts went away. However, nobody really pays attention to what happens on a smaller scale for people who aren't making anywhere near that amount. If the attorney has taxable income of $50,000 per year, they pay a 25% tax rate on every dollar they make over $34,500. In contrast, people who have a taxable income between $8,500 and $34,500 pay a 15% tax rate on every dollar they make over $8,500. Not that I'm necessarily complaining about paying taxes since I like having services, but it is a fact that an additional 10% above $34,500 goes away.

Self Employment Taxes

For those not lucky enough to find work in a firm (or those unlucky to work in scummy firms who won't withhold your income tax), you get the privilege of paying self employment tax. This amount is double what an employed person earns. Of course, the upside is that it is that it is much easier to deduct expenses such as bar dues that would not otherwise count if you don't have enough to itemize.

Student Loan Debt

I don't know what it is, but people think that schools hand out law degrees for free. They think that if you pay $12,000 a year in student loan payments that you still get to keep that $12,000.

Ah, but don't they offer income based repayment?

Why sure! In that scenario, you can exchange living off of ramen noodles for 10 years to get rid of them for paying a "manageable" amount for the next 25+ years that you could have bought a house with the additional interest that you paid.

Donations to Campaigns

If you live in an area where the judges are not appointed, you are expected to donate money to election campaigns. Through donations and a combination of schmoozing at social events, the attorney helps, er, put their clients interests in a good light. Yeah, that's it....

Social Events

At the end of your workday, you don't simply go home a lot of the time. No. Marketing yourself is a 24 hour a day task. Whether you belong to the Junior League or the Masons, your lunches and evenings are spent at meetings.

And people don't simply expect you to show up to a meeting, nod your head in agreement, and go home. No, that is for losers. If you were very smart, you would put yourself in charge of a committee that spends months organizing a big event. That way, it makes you look like a responsible individual to people who don't know you that well.

If that wasn't enough, you are also supposed to attend silent auctions and charity events. Again, your attendance is not good enough. If they are selling a basket of bath soaps, you are supposed to bid on them and preferably win.

The Trick or Treat Syndrome

Do you remember how people round up their kids and drive them over to the "rich" neighborhoods to go trick or treating because they give out all of the "good" candy? One lady I know said that one year, she had over 500 trick or treaters come to their door because she lived in the "good" neighborhood.

When Christmas rolls around, you can't afford to cheap out with either your bosses or underlings and giving presents. A good present to your boss shows that you are thankful to have a job. A good present to your support staff is expected as a thank you for putting up with your bullshit all year. Also, donuts and fruit baskets to the court's support staff also helps because you're going to screw up and you're going to need them to remember you as the individual who brought them donuts last week in helping you fix the error so that you won't be sued by your client for malpractice.

This also extends outside of the office. People two floors down from your office somehow magically make their way in the door and expect you to buy candy bars for their kid's PTA, pledge for their walk to combat breast cancer, and buy candles, wrapping paper, and tickets for cook offs. Sure, you can use the excuse that you don't have any money or you are on a diet, but you don't know if you're burning the bridge with a potential client, do you?

This leads me too...

Keeping up Appearances

At one time, I used to laugh at the idea that a nice car and clothes were legitimate business expenses, but what do people think of attorneys that show up to court in a beater? They certainly don't think that the attorney is simply being reasonable and trying to keep the student loan people from harassing them.

Trust me, I've tried that conversation with people. They don't want to hear it. If you don't have the goodies, that is a red flag that there is something wrong with you.

I don't know if any of you have ever read the book The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, but there is a scene at a country club where the older lady is teaching the younger lady how she should act now that she had substantial money.

The older lady told her, "Don't talk loudly at the waiters. Make the waiters lean in to listen to you. They expect it."

Yes, its incredibly bitchy to treat the staff like that, but that exchange has a specific point that is echoed when some of the non-attorneys make merriment of your economic misfortune.

I will give this example:

My grandmother and grandpa lived in a house that was in such bad condition that you could hear rats in the attic at night. Eventually, she went to work in real estate to earn some extra income.

My grandma bought a Lincoln, wore diamonds, and bought clothes from the nice boutiques. Not only that, she did not screw over clients. She had a 30+ year career in real estate that survived the busts.

In contrast, the realtor that my parents used a few years ago drove a beater (that could stand to be cleaned) and always acted like he would rather be somewhere else. In fact, he once said that he had a nicer car, but used the junker for work because it was cheaper for liability purposes. For a couple of years after my parents bought their property, the realtor used to mail circulars to them to keep him in mind. After the real estate bust, the circulars mysteriously went away. I assume the guy is flipping burgers somewhere.

Not that my grandmother and grandfather ever moved out of the neighborhood, mind you. It ended up being an assurance that she still had a job.

Moral of the story: In a people business you can't afford to cheap out in the eyes of your clients. On one hand, people are annoyed that you are driving around in a Hummer while you ran off with their last dime. On the other hand, they want to hire the attorney who drives the Hummer because it means that this attorney is legitimate and can get their clients results.

So, yeah, the truth is that the nature of the business doesn't allow you to simply get 10 years of use out of your beat up old Civic even if you were perfectly happy with your old car.

Unemployment: It's Hard on the Body

2011-10-31T21:52:00.000-07:00

I exercise pretty regularly.

Even when I was unemployed, I normally went walking about two hours a day. I kinda watched what I ate, and I considered myself fairly fit.

However, my girth expanded a tad. True, I wasn't close to wearing Women's sizes, but there was a bit of a difference.

Ok. You realize that even if you go out walking about 2 hours a day that there is still the time that you sat around or slept in. Plus, you can eat things like vast quantities of spaghetti at lunch instead of making due with the portions in your TV dinner. But it wasn't merely weight gain.

My knees creaked and I walked around as stiff as all get out.

I'm not very old compared to the usual person who has this problem, but I had some problems with agility. And it didn't really happen gradually. It felt like it became noticeable during my unemployment.

I wasn't sure if I would get it back, or if this signaled the downhill slide that came with age. I used to use equipment at the school gym, and considering that I still made it a point to get exercise on a daily basis I didn't see much hope for returning to how things were when I was in my 20s.

It took a year of working out with Yoga and cardio exercises, but my knees felt "normal" again.

And I had never really done any of those exercises in any quantity before all of this happened.

It took a few months for the creaky feeling to go away. It took even longer for the stiffness to leave.

It's like I had to spend an entire year rebuilding myself from what I considered to be a very non-physically demanding lifestyle.

Back in My Day, We Had Fun Parties!

2011-10-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

If only I had a picture to contrast two representative Halloween parties.

Which one sounds more fun?

At one party, people are laughing, wearing fun costumes, eating interesting foods, and engaging in creative activities such as pumpkin carving.

At another party, people are sitting around and staring at their phones.

Who is in Charge Here?

2011-10-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

As pointed out by John Stewart, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have very similar agendas, but they are aimed and different people.

The Tea Party wants the government to back off because it blamed the government for this mess.

The Occupy Wall Street wants corporations to back off because they blamed the corporations for irresponsible and illegal activities upon the economic situation.

The Tea Party eventually became a relatively successful political movement with sympathizers being elected to office-holding positions in the Republican Party.

Do you think that the Democrats are going to respond in kind to Occupy Wall Street sympathizers, even though it is picking up steam across the nation?

I hear crickets chirping. The politicians are not going anywhere near that stuff.

That, my friends, tells you who is really running the show at the end of the day.

"Hi, I make $50,000 per year."

2011-10-07T05:23:00.000-07:00

I had an idea for a documentary or news story.

Someone should contrast the lives of at least two people who live in an area with the same cost of living and spending patterns who make about the same amount of money per year, have the same attitude towards spending, and who bought a house at the same stage of life (if possible).

HOWEVER, they should take someone who graduated from school about 15 years ago and compare them with someone who graduated about 5 years ago and compare how much money they have to spend on food, entertainment, and incidentals after they make their monthly student loan and mortgage/rent payment.

Sliding Back to Employment

2011-09-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

I watch the show Hoarders on a regular basis. One episode dealt with a former homeless lady. One of her friends made a seemingly innocuous statement about the lady's fortune, but it was the most understanding I've run across in a while.

(Paraphrasing) "She went from homeless to owning her own house in five years. That's pretty amazing!"

Indeed, it is amazing.

I have made the slide back into employment land. That shouldn't be interpreted by anyone to mean that things have improved as far as general job prospects. I hear reports from the front lines on occasion.

However, people think that when you start making your salary that you immediately go from 0 to 60.

They like to think of sports stars who run out and buy a brand new Porsche the minute they get signed to a big contract, and they think that it applies to you--the lawyer.

First of all, let me point out that athletes have a tendency to file for bankruptcy, even when people throw millions at them. Sadly, it's like a reenactment of the movie The Jerk where everyone with a "great investment idea" comes along to pray on people who--let's face it--had help graduating from high school.

Even so, I was a tad surprised at my own situation.

Over the years, I had grown accustomed to living off of air.

It wasn't merely cooking cheaply or learning to use every last scrap of something that I previously would have never considered using. It was about usage of time.

When a person has copious free time, they become skilled at filling the long, long day with cheap or no cost activities.

There's nothing like going to a coffee shop, ordering the cheapest coffee on the menu, and taking a book that I had sitting on my shelf for 2 years and finally forcing myself to read it--even after I had lost a bit of interest.

Why? Because the alternative required spending money on a new book. That seemed a tad bit scary because it all added up over months. Today, I may buy a new book, but what would I do tomorrow? See a movie? Buy a purse? All it needed is that one chink in the dam before I went crazy.

Such a person learns to live off of ramen noodles and imagines that it will be no sweat to simply keep doing the same after assuming employment.

Yet, things change. All of the clothes that you own are old and inappropriate for work. Some have a few permanent stains from who knows what and missing clasps. Dress shoes have such natty insoles that they stick to your feet. Bras have such poor elastic that you look like your grandma. You've deferred maintenance on your car and now its demanding your attention. People at work want you to donate to the party fund and bring goodies and gifts. You start buying "real" birthday and Christmas gifts for people after essentially giving construction paper colored with crayon for the past few years. You pay for bar-related expenses. Instead of eating spaghetti and sauce that you boiled at home for lunch, you are spending money on TV dinners and take out.

Suddenly, you realize how you lived so cheaply.

It's like someone soaked one of those little green horse things in water and watched as it expanded to 200 times its size.

Thankfully, other people who owe tributes to the student loan queen understand this. It's a bigger group than those who understand that people with law degrees can be unemployed for quite some time. The group feeling the effects of student loan debt come from all shapes, colors, and backgrounds. You can go to the University of Phoenix. You can go to Harvard. It doesn't matter. Someone wants money.

On a lighter note....

As I mentioned previously, being employed means that you suddenly realize that your wardrobe is very impoverished. However, having some income means that you are confronted with a bewildering choice. Before, I stuck with J.C. Penney's because it was better than big box stores, but was still affordable. I knew what I was getting. But when I made new friends, I was introduced to the concept of outlet malls.

Yeah, yeah, I knew the old criticisms against them. They were intentionally put in out of the way locales to encourage the shopper to not leave empty-handed. The items sold were not actually marked down, so they weren't a "deal."

Do I think that a shirt at JC Penney's that was marked as originally costing $40, but now costs $28 means that I got a $40 shirt for $28? Of course not! However, I knew I was getting a $28 shirt. It's not like paying $100 for a shirt and have it fall apart like a $4 shirt after three washes.

Even so, I felt like I was having a harder time finding clothes that I liked. Call it extreme pickiness, perfectionism, snobbery, or old ladyism: I felt like I was sifting through the racks and finding little that I wanted to wear.

Therefore, I became more intrigued at the prospect of shopping at outlets. It was new. It was different. It was part of my reinvention. Even if they weren't "deals" as in that they cost what you might pay for them elsewhere, they should still be quality wares, right?

This brings up another aspect of essentially being unemployed for four years: It's a bit like the Shawshank Redemption out there.

What I understood about the quality of outlet store wares is based upon knowledge procured in 1998. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that outlets used to carry the same merchandise as they did in the main store. Now, they have created a cottage industry where they find lesser quality items and price them in a way to make you think that its about the same thing you'd find in the retail store.

At first, I felt that my change in shopping habits were rewarded. I bought what I felt was an awesome pullover sweater that was made well and evoked the look of an English professor at Oxford. It's not authentic in look, but made me happy nonetheless.

However, I was a bit troubled at the price tag.

"Similar design, $___. ___. Your cost, $___.___."

So, what was the price tag telling me? That this is a knockoff of their own item?

When I realized this, I wasn't too bothered. I bought what I thought was a relatively nice item for a price I was willing to pay.

Yet, upon multiple returns to the stores and seeing what other people were buying, I became less impress over time.

I bought a couple of shirts from a particular place that had fairly thin material. I also noticed that the labels always suggested hand washing or line drying. Since I am not very educated on these matters, I wondered if this is how "nice" clothes are supposed to be treated. I couldn't help but think that if I had bought even "nicer" clothes that I would only be able to wash them in faerie dust soap powder and dried by the gentle wind generated by the wing beats of unicorns.

Despite hand washing or flat drying as recommended, they started getting fuzz balls.

Some people I knew showed up in dresses from one particular place and bragged that they got it on close out for $15, and I secretly thought to myself that they looked like $15 dresses.

In fact, when I went to that store and looked at the non-marked down dresses that were being sold for $70, I thought they looked like $15 dresses.

I realized that I could buy something nicer at J.C. Penney's.

And what can you say, really?

Sometimes, you go to these stores that sell purses and see women congregated around the close out section. They can't afford the "real" thing, and they can't afford the knock off at "full price" (assuming they know that it's a knockoff of the "real" thing, but they probably don't care since they're only there to purchase the name brand). None of this stops them from becoming way too excited about plastic-y looking things or items covered in visible scuffs that still cost over $100.

On that note, I wonder what the insides of some of these peoples' houses look like. Would I see rafters filled with scuffed items with the price tags still on them? Would I see a stack of credit card bills?

And that's where we come full circle.

It's hard to judge people's actions without knowing their motives.

The fact that a person would buy such an item has a back story that would probably rival that of the story of a person who wouldn't buy such an item.

Even if money management drove some of the decision, buying things after not having a job for so long is a bit scary. Not simply because I have to worry about whether I will need that $50 to eat should something happen to my job. Student loans play their own part in the equation. I simply can't walk away from debt loan like I could a mortgage. Most importantly, it is bewildering after a long period of austerity to know what to do. Some people buy houses, cars, or go off to Europe the second they get some cash. I'm still in the mindset of making due with very limited resources while acknowledging that things became neglected. It's weird. I have to tell myself it's ok to buy an outfit.

My Favorite Memories from Law School

2011-09-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

One of the things I used to love about law school is that they would make you feel like a rock star.

I don't know about your school, but mine would host receptions with chocolate fountains, free alcohol, food on toothpicks, and with judges that made their appearance as part of their never-ending reelection campaigns.

Two years later, I sit here and wonder where in the fuck all that went to. Because I miss it!

I don't know about you, my friends, but I thought that if I was getting that stuff as a mere student that there would be keys to the executive washroom after I passed the bar. Damnit, you know that when the event has a chocolate fountain that you're on the cusp of the big times. That was about as close as I'll ever get to the society pages of the newspaper, even if it was so uneventful that the school newspaper never showed up from what I could tell.

I'm sure it looked good in a brochure sent out the alumni.

I'm sure my law school meant well. They probably wished to host their own version of A Beautiful Mind and have a special tea room where the greatest minds come together and lay down their pens in front of the legal geniuses that were the right honorable judge of the county probate court and the alumni who retired 10 years ago at the pinnacle of his career as a political leader in the community and who was now replaced by the young, rising star from a better school who is only at the beginning of his career.

Now, I don't do anything quite so fun. All I'm left with is the memory of drinking wine out of plastic cups and eating cubes of cheese while applauding while they present some award or other.

Bipolar Disorder + Substance Abuse?

2011-08-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I wrote about the purpose of depression in society.

However, I was thrown off by bipolar disorder.

If you subscribe to the thinking of Neil deGrasse Tyson, then you acknowledge that our society owes something to the crazies who were willing to be the first one to bungee jump off of a sky scraper while all of the sane people hid out and protected the gene pool. Naturally, that sounds like something a manic person would do.

But you know something?

There are a whole lot of dysfunctional bipolar people out there who can't get the job done.

I read that about half of them are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

That's right. It's not enough that they drink socially or even drink heavily. They are addicted to the shit.

However, you have a hard time getting them to take their damn medicine that supposedly makes them "better." Many of them quit taking their meds and go back on the bottle.

I realized that there must be something deficient in bipolar medications that the brain needs. Otherwise, bipolar medications would be a perfectly good substitute, right? Hell, their brain should crave that stuff as if it were Meth if it filled the empty void. Instead, they'll go off of their meds and go straight for the booze.

Then, I began to wonder:

What if bipolar disorder is actually an evolutionary response to alcohol?

Think about it:

For quite some time, people consumed copious amounts of alcohol. That stuff naturally slows your brain doooowwwwnnn.

Yes, imagine a society filled with boozed up zombies. This is how it was during the middle ages because the water was not safe to drink.

What if bipolar people actually operate at "normal" speed while on booze?

What if the brain in some of these people "sped up" to compensate for the lack of functioning that one normally experiences with alcohol consumption?

What if the Bloggers Weren't That Successful After All?

2011-07-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

I know there have been articles suggesting that the scam blog movement is responsible for the decrease in applications for law school, but is that merely a simplistic explanation?

I'm sure the blogs probably convinced some people not to bother with it. However, there have been vocal complainers for a few years.

I think that what we've seen is an equivalent of a housing bubble. Too many factors compounded each other into a perfect storm. Essentially, the price point has risen to the point where demand is naturally going to slack off. It's just like if you had a Porsche for sale. Maybe everybody wants one, but only a minority can afford it. Law school has become the Porsche.

However, because of what law school is, people are only now just realizing that it is a Porsche.

I recall a few years ago now when I first considered applying to law school. It had been a few years between my undergraduate days and when I applied, so tuition had skyrocketed since then....for school in general.

I saw the hourly tuition rates and swallowed hard, but decided to do it because I felt that it was a good choice. When I told my friends how much the tuition rates were, they almost passed out! I too felt like I was crazy. But I did it.

Fast forward five years later. Tuition rates at these schools were now about a couple of hundred dollars more per hour than during the time that I started going to school.

However, undergraduate tuition also escalated. Those people are coming out of undergraduate school owing several thousand dollars more than someone did just a few short years before. So now, you have undergraduate students already saddled with a massive amount of debt being called upon to decide if it is worth paying another $100,000 on top of what they already owe.

The ones who can do math realize that it's simply become too expensive.

Even so, I'm willing to bet that the economy played its own part in continuing to jack up tuition. People used graduate school as a place to hide out while the economy improved. Yes, people simply borrowed the money and "hid out" at school and purposefully ignored the sticker cost. This probably accounted for the increased applications despite tuition costs.

However, since it is becoming apparent that nobody is finding jobs in any field, people are beginning to perceive that it is a waste of their time to go to school some more.

Yes, it has become so expensive that people are being forced to look at what they are paying.

Kids who already owe $100,000 in undergraduate debt are being confronted with whether they can take on the additional cost of more schooling. Having some idea about what their student loan payments are going to be like, they simply acknowledge that they can't afford that much debt. So, people who weren't die hard lovers of the idea of law school are simply dropping off.

Another Scenario for the Death of Cayle Anthony

2011-07-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

What if the death was accidental?

The problem in this case is that people assumed the death was intentional based, in part, upon the fact that this scenario of duct tape, chloroform, and driving around in a car for a month before dumping the remains in a swamp is something a crazy person would do.

I hate to break the news, but psychopaths see bodies as shells to be disposed of once the fun is done. Unless they are saving a souvenir, the body is the thing that ties them to the crime.

I propose that--if it is true that she drove around with the body in the trunk for a month--that it actually supports the theory that the death was unintentional.

It's not without precedent for people not to report a death because they can't accept the fact that their loved one is gone. I know that sounds bizarre, but is it really much different than say, people letting grandma live alone in her own filth and can barely cook her own meals because they can't accept the fact that she is no longer the strong vibrant mom that raised them as children? People sink into deep denial about things, and its possible that the need to hold onto the body outweighed any sense of justice that she might have.

And if she reported the child's death, they would take the body away. She would no longer see her child and she would have to be confronted with the stark reality that her child is dead.

Maybe she mummified the face with duct tape so she would not have to see the child's expressionless face.

And who knows? Maybe she disposed of the body in the swamp out of the same fear that they would take her away. She could have possibly wanted the body nearby to go visit when she liked, but hidden in a way that nobody should have been able to find it.

What bothers me is that psychopaths go back to doing their own thing as if nothing had happened. While she went out and partied, there were other signs that something just wasn't right. When people are under stress, they do odd things. And that's exactly what she did. She could have gone out and partied just to let people think that things were normal.

Look, Fred! Our Old Pal Stimpy is Back....

2011-06-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

This is an article extolling the imaginary benefits of starting your own practice fresh out of law school:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43442917/ns/business-personal_finance/t/law-grads-going-solo-loving-it/?fb_ref=story_header&fb_source=home_oneline
Solo Practice U will tell you what to do!

Before I say anything else, I would like to draw attention to a statistic located towards the bottom of the page:

About half of all practicing attorneys are sole practitioners.

Yes, because that's what all attorneys wanted. They wanted to go through the expense of making themselves more desirable to employers only to end up in a position where they are their own employer.

Maybe after 5-10 years of practice a sane person may consider it because people in the community might recognize our faces from the back of the milk carton. But let's face it: the reason why so many attorneys are sole practitioners is because not even WE want to work with ourselves! I wouldn't work with you, and almost all of you should not blame me for that. Considering some of the half-baked stories some of you come up with in law school about your awesome full ride scholarship from your 178 LSAT and the $300,000 per year starting salary job that you somehow managed to get while going to a fourth tier school, one can sense--just a teeny tiny bit--that this behavior is going to spill over into your practice.

Oh yes, you just signed up some client with a stubbed toe that permanently landed that person in a wheel chair, and you expect to get a half a million dollar fee out of it. Does anyone want to guess how long it will be before I look at the expense records and see that we are thousands in the hole because you blew the kitty on hookers?

That's why a lot of firms rely upon the army of drones approach. They placate their victims with the chance that they will one day be allowed to use the executive wash room.

But let's get back to this "I loves me some food stamps!" mentality driving this article. I could see where a person may be compelled to says "I loves me some sole practitioner work" just to get their name in the news somewhere. And, indeed, there are some people crazy enough that they want to hang their own shingle.

It even sounds glamorous to all of you 0Ls who are partying down with the alumni this summer before you load up your U-Hauls and drive straight to purgatory. You may have even cooked up the rationale that your life would be much better as a solo because you don't have a grubby old geezer running off with your money.

Yet, in this magical land of ice cream treats, you have a ready and waiting line of desperate clients who have been waiting for your services because:
A. You are awesome
B. There is a shortage of attorneys.

I'm not exactly sure how the person in this article is set to make $42,000 in their first year as a solo after expenses. Some might call it a tall tale. Some might call it nepotism. All I know is that, if this story is true, it is highly unusual. First year solos are notorious for starving. They don't have a ready set client list and it takes much longer for them to do anything because they still don't know the basics. Therefore, their volume of business is very small and they usually take cases nobody wants and have very low monetary value or receive misdemeanor court appointments.

So, if this person didn't supplement their income through temp attorney work, then I would guess copper wire theft, or drug mule. Considering how the article reads as an advertisement for Solo Practice University, they must have scrounged up an outlier to prove their point and shake down $700 for pointers that most of you could learn if you simply interned with a sole practitioner while in law school.

Yes, why not actually make a few dollars an hour while finding out where all of the offices in the courthouse are located instead of shelling out money to some service which is like the black letter law equivalent of legal practice?

Knowing the general rule against perpetuities may have helped you pass the bar, but it's no good for your locality. Same thing here. You would be much more successful at the end of the day if the judges saw your face while dragging rolling carts behind Lionel Hutz. However, I don't think people want to accept that reality because it means facing the sad, cold fact that we all have to start out somewhere. To me, a service like Solo Practice U allows the purchaser to maintain the illusion that they could simply skip all of that and go directly to being the bad ass who showed up and kicked ass on their first day in court.

If you think about it, it may very well be that $42,000 a year is being fed court appointments by a judge that he developed a special relationship with. It's like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they made "Good Will Hunting." The story is that they were a bunch of nobodies who realized their dream and won an Academy Award. The truth is that, they got help. Likewise, how a lot of people get their jobs in the legal industry is much more complex than simply purchasing Solo Practice U. They may have a cousin who is feeding them work. They may have done some grunt work for a friend on a large case as a favor and is paying them a flat fee if the case settles. The point is, I wouldn't necessarily see what these people do as a success in the way that we were raised to define success.

Depression as a Tool of Adaption?

2011-06-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

I know this is not law school related, but I felt like playing amateur scientist for this evening.

I am interested in the concept of evolution. Whatever trait we have originated because of a need in the past to help the species survive.

Now, people love to go on about "women be different than men!" jive, and only think about evolution as fast runners outstripping a pursuing lion, but there are all sorts of other traits that serve other purposes.

Before I explain the title of my piece, let me back up and give a back story.

A friend of mine told me that she was being treated for Vitamin D deficiency. I was curious about this condition, so I looked it up on the internet. I read that people of different races needed different amounts of Vitamin D, and that African-Americans needed much more than people of European descent, and that people in more northerly climates get most of what they need from eating sea food.

As you know, people in Norway and Iceland are pale and blond, so I began to wonder how those people effectively adapted to that environment. After all, it's not like the pale people from ancient Africa decided to go north one day. Something happened where they all eventually became that way.

Even with genetic mutation, how can one explain such uniformity in personal characteristics? Dark skin and dark eyes tend to be a dominant trait. If a person from Iceland has a child with a person with dark skin, that child is going to tend towards darker skin. It's not like you can simply breed it out of the population on that scale like lab rats.

...Or CAN you?

Now, we know that illnesses from lack of sun exposure do show up in the form of Ricketts, but, on the whole, illnesses of the body tend to be slow acting. If your family has a tendency towards heart disease, it's not going to be genetically bred out on its own because the illness is going to strike long after that person has popped out a multitude of children. As such, people in northerly climates were probably already eating a sizable amount of sea food and probably could have gotten by with some level of nutrition. They may not have lived a long, healthy life, but still would have survived long enough to have children.

So, then, my thoughts turned to this:

What part of the United States has the highest suicide rate in the entire country?

Seattle.

Seattle also has the most cloudy and rainy days of about any city in the nation.

Although everyone acknowledged the link between the two issues, I started looking at it differently. I then asked myself, "what if depression is a tool of adaptation to the surroundings?"

When one thinks about it, depression is not only a genetic issue where it tends to run in families. It can be triggered by the environment---particularly when a person is not adapting well to their surroundings. They lost a job. They lost a family member. They were rejected by the community for being different. They have run out of food. They are in the middle of a war. In response to their conditions, they either become lethargic and do nothing, or become restless and are spurred into running away from the situation.

Obviously, the people who did not commit suicide were better-tolerated to that environment, but it is a deeper issue than simply saying that people who were intolerant to the weather simply killed themselves. It can also be a passive act. It causes social isolation and lack of sexual drive, which obviously means fewer children.
But, the illness can also cause a group of angry malcontents who simply become tired of the situation and leave. If people are ill because of nutrition, it directly affects their mental abilities. The body, sensing that it is not getting what it needs, creates a depressed state in the mind to seek immediate change in environment. If that person simply stays in their current environment, they are less likely to socially participate and genetically contribute to the blood line. As opposed to physical illness from stress, such as diabetes and heart disease that generally will not kill people until well after they had children, depression is much more immediate in effect. Considering the fact that depression usually rears its head during the teenage years (the time when a person could start having children), it may simply be a necessary part of a person's makeup to ensure that they are well-motivated to try and find suitable surroundings in which to raise their children.

In essence, the depression from malnutrition is signalling the body that this is an inappropriate environment to have children.

Let's say, hypothetically, that in the case of a country like Iceland, a large group of people once settled there that once looked as dark as people in the Mediterranean. Illness from lack of sun and an inability to get everything that they need from nutrition would begin to scourge the population. Over the centuries, the people whose bodies could not adjust to the level of sunlight in the place engaged in self-destructive behaviors, had fewer children, or simply moved somewhere else, while the people who could better tolerate the environment stayed, had more children, and continued to thrive from the available resources.

Why Are the Unemployment Numbers So Low?

2011-06-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

Giggle at this headline, my friends, but I have a point.

The war on socialism is not new. I'm not sure why Glenn Beck thinks that it is related to Nazism, because we were definitely told that it was an off-shoot of communism. Get your history right, Glenn!

(Sheesh! Always getting in wrong!).

One way that they tried to sell us against the idea of socialism back in the day was telling us that our unemployment numbers were a lot better than all of the socialist countries like France.

One magazine article that stuck with me explained that because of our anti-regulatory policies and reduced social policies, that all of these little things combined together and made us more economically-competitive than Europe and resulted in much lower unemployment rates. In fact, the author likened it to a basketball team, where you cannot simply win with one star player, but had a multitude of talented players who each did their bit.

Sometimes I want to read everything I read, but I recall an article that I read when I was about 7 years old that said that animals such as dogs do not actually have emotions, and that they simply wagged their tales because they were confused about what to do when given choices to make. As such, the questionable reads stick with me.

However, I do not pretend to know how the unemployment system works. In a weird way, it is not really an objective factor. The problem is the definition of unemployment. If you have a bunch of stay at home parents in the country, then they do not count in that statistic.

Even with this economy, I am sure that there are beating the drums and telling people that we should be glad that our unemployment numbers are not like countries X and Y that have their uppity socialist views. With that in mind, I would like to point out other factors that contribute to "low unemployment rate numbers:"

The prison system.

Quick: Where are over two million of your fellow citizens sitting right now? Here's a hint: They are deciding whether to join the Mexican gang, the black gang, or the Aryan Brotherhood as we speak. They wear jumpsuits and have many new boyfriends in the bad kind of way. For you attorneys, they may be writing you a letter asking to represent them in a lawsuit to demand that fish be served in the cafeteria. And their numbers far outstrip the number incarcerated in any other country in the world.

Is it because we Americans are more poorly behaved than the rest of the world? Have we over-criminalized everything? Do we want to send every last minority to the pokey? Are other countries simply more lax?

If you ever hear about incarceration abroad, you know that most other countries suck in comparison as per their standards of living. Even so, we all know that there is a certain segment of the population who cannot help but draw attention from the police, no matter the circumstances. Maybe our society is run like CSI where we expect people to drop from the ceiling and take down a kid spray painting a wall. I can only speculate. However, those two million are gone from the work force.

University

Like it or not, everyone in the US is in college. Or, considering the fact that even the shitiest of places have a college or two taking up precious farm land, it's become easy for the unemployed or the people who are dissatisfied with life to decide that they need a degree in English and to write mass-market paperbacks. In many European countries, university is generally the pursuit of the young. It is treated as a stepping stone after they scored high enough on the examinations at the end of their high school years. You tend not to see 40 year olds who had washed out of one profession sharing the same space.

Maybe a large percentage in the US do not actually graduate with a degree, but a lot of those people are still out of the work force in that year or two that they decide that they cannot hack it before they drop out. On the other end of the spectrum, there are professional students who take way too long to graduate with their b.s. degree. They need to change their major at least three times while they "find themselves" and pick the absolute perfect career that is going to set them off on their path of glory. Then, after about 15 years when they finally get sick of that shit on their job, they go back to school and learn something else. This time, they breeze through the subject after figuring out that they will never reach spectacular heights in their career. While most simply opt for night classes, there are a few ringers who feel compelled to leave their lives behind and enroll full time--Especially if they get pissed that Joe gets paid more than them because Joe has a doctorate.

Kato Kaelins

Do not underestimate this segment of the population. I am sure there is no accurate way of counting them, but there are millions of them living underneath the floorboards.

Some of you may be aware of the phenomenon that I speak. While normal people go through a vetting process to see if they qualify to be let in someone's house, there are certain people who do not believe that this is an effective process. Some such stories are like when one responds to an ad on Craigslist and move directly into their new beloved's home two weeks later without ever having previously met in person.

And they are not running Hugh Hefner's palace. They live in something like the woodshed in the woods behind the Playboy Mansion.

As such, there is a multitude of people who effectively function as stray dogs. On the other end of the symbiotic relationship is the odd ball who picks up strays. Suddenly, the odd ball's house turns into a flop house and there are 12 people scattered around a one-bedroom apartment. Half of them were people they met at the bar, and others are just people they found at the bus stop or McDonald's that morning. The other hosts to these lecherous organisms are unfortunate people who married the individual. The wedding ring slips on and their feet prop up on the coffee table. They may occasionally work at a tire change place, but it never lasts for long before they become angry about something and go back to unemployment.

While the media portrays many of these people as governmental assistance leaches, the truth is that many find a suitable host and begin leaching off of an individual. They end up with someone rooted on their couch and staying up until 5am every night because they do not need a job now that they have a suitable host. Why get hassled by "the man" when he makes you fill out paperwork and prove that you have no income when you have the unquestioning symbiotic host willing to provide all of life's necessities without any effort? We make our unemployed jump through hoops while the so-called socialist countries appear to be more willing to give hand outs. As such, they probably have more people applying for benefits. The downside for us is that family members and random strangers end up taking the economic brunt of caring for our leaches, while in "socialist" countries, they spread the wealth and keep these people off other people's couches.

In sum....if you add all of this up together, our unemployment rate is not really that much different than anywhere else....

Ben Franklin Would Not Be Possible Today

2011-05-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

We all know that Benjamin Franklin is one of these amazing people that printed almanacs, made scientific findings, invented things that are still used today, and was a skilled diplomat.

Did he go to college?

No!

While schooling is great, isn't it a bit sad that the net effect is that it ends up pigeon holing a person into pursuit?

Today, Ben Franklin would have had to either:

1. Rot away in an engineering or science program for well over a decade. In the meantime, he would have to keep his head down and work as a minion on whatever the professors were researching before he was allowed to develop his own study for his final project.

2. Go to college, then apply to the State Department for the opportunity to become a diplomat and go through a series of objective tests and an intense background check before they sent him off to work as a low-level gopher in Sri Lanka so that he could "pay his dues" for a few years before being sent to a more important country.

3. Work as a columnist for a podunk paper and writing about the local corn festival because he didn't have the Ivy League education to get a job with CNN or the New York Times.

Then, of course, whatever career path he went in meant that everything else would be relegated to "hobby" status.

If he ended up being a scientist, he'd probably have a blog on the state of the world. If he was compelling enough, he might end up on the radio or on TV. Since he would have no direct ties to what was going on in Washington as he gave up his political pursuits to focus upon a scientific career, he might rise to the rank of "talking head nut ball" like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, or Michael Moore. If he was vocal in the wrong way, he may end up on the FBI watch list.

If he ended up being a politician, then surely nobody would come within 1,000 feet of whatever he invented. Seriously, can you think of anything in your home that you used that was personally invented by John F. Kennedy? If he had unveiled a machine that turned all garbage into usable potting soil within 30 minutes, how excited would you be to purchase such an item knowing that this was something he was tinkering around with on the weekends? Women copied his wife's fashion, but that's about as far as people are willing to go as far as putting their trust in politicians to improve their daily lives.

....and when you think about it, it's kind of weird that we don't use politician-made inventions. Think of all of the stuff invented in ancient Greece and Rome that were instituted by visionary leaders...or, at the very least, they had a good eye if someone came up with something good. Today, if President Obama published his recipe for Buffalo Wings, it would certainly not catch fire with the populace regardless of how tasty they turned out. It's almost like we expect a great level of incompetence from the people who lead the free world.

"I went to Harvard, was a Rhode's Scholar, and I helped come up with a peace plan for Eastern Europe."

"Nope, sorry. I will use a McCormick's seasoning packet before I use your recipe for four alarm chili."

Oh well. Here's to you, Ben Franklin!

These are the people who need to be helped

2011-05-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

Just the other day, a friend of a friend was telling me about said friend (we shall call her "amiga" for shorthand), that barely has a high school education and has not been in the workforce because she had been a stay at home mom. However, a question arose about whether this lady should go to school and become something like a dental hygienist. This person is otherwise screwed because they don't have any job skills and they can't rely upon nepotism. While large cities like NYC have a strata of incomes, most other places resemble a third world nation. You have a few people who have good jobs, while everyone else is busing tables at the Luby's. There are some in-between jobs like being a nurse's assistant that require some additional training that a person normally can't receive in high school. While those jobs offer some stability and full-time employment prospects, the trade off is that these people do not earn much more than a cashier (especially when you consider that they will now have student loan debt). This creates a quandary where they are perched precariously on a ledge, and one tiny slip could have the student loan ghosts haunting the fuck out of you for the rest of your life and eating away what financial benefit the person would have gained in even bothering to go to school.

I thought about it.

Honestly, we all know that you need some sort of training to have some job skills that don't involve being a cashier for the rest of eternity. But what options are there for the poor?

The jobs I'm thinking of require some training, but the wages aren't that amazing in spite of the fact that you forked out a few grand for schooling. Naturally, you would have to get a loan. However, we all know what happens the minute that something happens and you miss payments. Suddenly, that piddling amount of money balloons in a way that would make a loan shark in the Ukraine smile. Now, that debtor is turning tricks in a Turkish brothel and will be left paying the ever-expanding loan to their handlers until they are all clapped out and past menopause.

So, I seriously sat there and wondered if it would be worth the risk for such a person to go to school. Sure, they're going to make shit working as a cashier, but if they show up and do their job for a few months and act motivated, you'd think they'd at least be whisked off to Hamburger U and become a manager.

That's when I started to reflect upon how the school system is truly failing its students.

Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea into their noggin that high school should simply be a preparatory institution to go onto other schooling. In Europe, they divert students into one of two tracts. They'll either put them on the university tract, or they send them off to learn a trade.

People in the Oprah Winfrey age can't handle this. Saying that the child needs to learn a trade is like saying that this child is never going to be President. Somebody is telling that child "no," and by golly, we should know better than to tell that child "no!" We have irreparably crushed that child into thinking they are worthless if we don't demand that they take classes where they can read poetry.

They think that we can cram every last child into the few computer programming, doctor, lawyer, and teacher job, regardless of their abilities. However, what ends up happening instead is that the school system ends up prolonging the agony where they puke out an 18 year old who is incapable of simply walking into a dental hygienist job and now must find money that they don't have to pay for additional schooling.

How many more students would we keep in high school if the schools offered free training in a trade? How many students look around them and see that John, who dropped out of school in the 10th grade, is working the exact same job as Mark, who actually graduated with a diploma?

Nobody wants to actually sit down with these people and learn what is wrong. They're the same set that think that teenage pregnancy is being glorified because these women were placed in front of a camera--never mind that teenagers were popping out babies for centuries before this show came along. They're the same people who thought that keeping rap music off of the radio would make gangs go away.

The sheer fact that so many students don't finish high school should be a big enough clue that the current system isn't working. Yet, we continue to press onward in a fantasy that every single child will eventually graduate from college in the same way that we choose to believe that we can completely eradicate teenage sex and underage drinking.

Maybe Oprahfication is responsible for the lack of technical training. Sometimes, I wonder if its simply cheaper for the school to not offer technical training in the way way that its great business for law schools to pack as many people into a classroom and charge them out the wazoo. Instead, they can make the colleges happy by making sure that their territory isn't encroached upon. If that's the case, surely we can just bus the high school students over to the community college and let them take those same classes on the taxpayer dime.

Drug Addiction is not that Funny After All.

2011-04-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

Charlie Sheen performed his first "Torpedo of Truth" show in Detroit. I will refrain from using a pun on how he torpedoed his own show as I am not a hack.

It can only get better from here, Charlie.

I was curious as to how a white guy who got his break because of his family connections and who is now complaining that his employer asked him to curtail his substance use, would fly in Detroit.

It's a bit like being Tom Collichio when complaining that your rack of lamb was slightly overcooked when there are people digging in their couch cushions in order to buy something off of the dollar menu. Yet, he's taking his great tragedy on a nationwide tour.

I'm not sure what these people were thinking they were going to find when they decided to go to the show. God knows how many strung out people on the sidewalks they stepped over and fled from while going to the theater. Yet, they handed over their hard-earned cash to some guy that they already know is going to put it straight up his nose. Poor Golden Voice Guy got literally 15 minutes of fame before people figured out he wasn't just a cuddly, smiling, homeless guy. So, what is different? What motivated this audience to show up with actual expectations of actually seeing a professional show on the same level as Conan O'Brien?

The only thing I can think of is that they must view him as some sort of anti-hero. Just like how President George W. Bush won the election based upon the false belief created in people's minds that he is the President that the average person could have a beer with, Charlie Sheen must have tapped into that same mentality. He became their funny drunk friend with all of the bat shit stories.

"He's just the life of the party. Just like Ted. Ted's cool because he gets super wasted and always has the best stories of how he woke up in the bottom of the dumpster after he got his ass kicked by a tranny."

That, or the audience viewed him as the fellow creature who lost his job, but was in the position to actually say something about it. There is none of this keeping quiet out of fear that the next employer will think that they are a complainer or were let go for a real reason. No, by golly! This guy organized an entire tour and let the entire world know that it sucks to be trod on by the Man!

However, Charlie Sheen trots out there, and suddenly, the audience sees for themselves that he is not their anti-hero. In fact, his life isn't anything like theirs. He lives in Hollywood and never once had to hold a job like they've held one. He's had a string of marriages to beautiful women and lived a lifestyle that they cannot imagine. They had mistaken "Duh, winning!" for sheer stand-up comedic prowess on the level of George Carlin. All of the hopes and expectations of what this guy is instantly evaporated. They saw a person who was severely affected by his problems and who they absolutely cannot relate to.

Instead of acknowledging that they got what they paid for, they chose to boo him as if they got ripped off.

You knew he wasn't a standup comedian.

You knew he had a lot of problems in his life.

You paid to see a trainwreck, and now you are pissed because that's exactly what you got.

THE END.

This Week on Frontline....Something Unexpected

2011-02-27T00:21:00.000-08:00

I noted that there will be a repeat of the story about the for-profit schools.

College, inc.

Digging around on the website, I found a section documenting the response to the subject. I stumbled across a letter in which directors of homeless shelters railed about how the schools were deliberately recruiting students from the homeless ranks and sticking them with a worthless degree. That in itself is not news.

However, Frontline then revealed something a tiny bit odd about the origin of the letter through a link:

Down the rabbit hole we go...

To simplify, what they are saying is that there is a certain group of people who buy stocks in these companies with the expectation that the shares will drop in price so that they will short sell the stocks. What's more, they have gone as far as to engage the services of others to publicly trash these companies so that they can help increase the drop in price.

Now, I'm not saying that these schools that promise you a degree in basket weaving are noble heroes. What I want to know is why is this phenomenon not more widely known or taken into account in media coverage?

Sure, I can legitimately see this happening, so I'm not questioning the validity of the article. It's just that I can't see publicly traded universities being the only investment out there that is the target of special interest groups such as this.

It's a bit like the dot.com bubble all over again. Many of those companies raised capital fairly quickly and spent it down to nothing in the span of a year or more by wasting it on everything from salaries that were out of step with the market, high dollar advertisements, and fancy amenities. In the end, certain people cleanly walked away with some of that money. Yet, even though it was staring everyone in the face, it wasn't until these companies gasped their last breath and had their bones danced upon by the Feds that anybody really bothered to assess what was really going on during that time.

I personally find this sort of thing to be interesting because it adds another depth to the discussion. In essence, the very owners of these schools (stockholders are owners of corporations, n'est-ce pas?) are praying for their product's destruction. They are glad for every single one of those homeless people who come out saddled with $80,000 in debt and nothing to show for it beyond an associate's degree in polishing turds because those people only function as an argument for the stock price to be driven down.

I.B.R. vs. I Be Po'

2011-02-15T21:34:00.000-08:00

I am intrigued by Income Based Repayment and trying to figure out how it stacks up as an actual aid to borrowers, or if it leaves people paying more in the long run.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my understanding of how it works:

They take your loans and info about your income and personal circumstances. They run everything through a magic machine to determine what your monthly payments are. Every year, they dig through your earnings and adjust your payments accordingly. If your monthly payments are computed to be less than what you would pay on interest, the government picks up the difference for the first 3 years of repayment.

However, IF you start making too much money and your computed payments turn out to be more than what you would pay on standard repayment, then you make your payments at the standard repayment level.

If you work in public service and started paying your loans back in 2008, then the remainder of your loans are forgiven after making 10 years' worth of "qualifying payments" either at IBR level or at standard repayment level. No other repayment plan can be substituted as a qualifying payment.

If you work in a regular old job, then the balance of your loans is wiped clean after 25 years (if you meet all of their requirements).

Now, the latter one sounds like it would be difficult to actually achieve. I don't even want to know how much money someone is going to shell out in interest over the course of two decades. Barring that, let's say that at year 10 of repayment and you had a relatively small loan principal to begin with (about $100,000). And, because you came into the right financial circumstances, you are now paying what you would pay at standard repayment levels. Does that push up your repayment date? What I mean is, does the lender calculate your payments based upon the expectation that it will take you 30 years to repay your loan even if you are now paying more? Or, do they say, "based upon your monthly payments, you should have this loan paid off by year 20," which means that you'll never get to the magical 25 year mark?

I point out that it's usually better to pay things off sooner so that you aren't wasting money on unnecessary interest. However, if the latter is the case, I wonder how many people out there might have been motivated to pay extra every month just to get rid of their student loans and pay less in interest over the life of the loan instead of thinking that they'll get a big chunk of their debt wiped away.

Additionally, it seems like it would be very hard for for a borrower to be able to anticipate how this repayment plan will financially benefit the borrower the most.

If you owe $250,000 in student loan debt, and can see the writing on the wall that you will always have a $30,000 a year job and are never going to marry someone rich, it looks like more of a no-brainer that your loans might make it to the 25 year mark (even if it will make you cry how much money you spent on interest making it to that milestone).

As for public interest jobs, the question becomes slightly different. The quandary becomes this:

Would it be better to eat top ramen and pay off your loans in about 5-7 years, or should you just go ahead and ride the white lightening for the full 10 years?

Yes, I know the answer depends heavily upon how much you owe and the income you have over the next 10 years. But, once again, let's say that a person had a principal of less than $100,000, and they expected to make about $60,000 by the 4th year of their employment, is that person better off living in a shed and paying above the monthly amount? Or, should they just make the minimum payments on IBR for 10 years with the full expectation that they will always work in public service for that entire decade and wait to see what debt gets wiped away?

I know there are money gurus out there who could calculate this stuff faster than Rain Man, but they still can't calculate variables such as your promotional potential, whether you lose that job due to unforeseen circumstances, or if they give up on public service at year 7 of repayment, which would then presumably put them on the road to the "25 or die" track unless they go back to public service at some point in the future. Unless you owe a very large student loan debt, at which it is going to be hard to pay the full standard repayment amount regardless of what happens in your career, it seems like people who are right on the edge could end up paying more than what they had to should they make the wrong decision (whether it be to try to pay off the debt early or to do IBR for the full 10 years).

What do you think?

Waste that Money in a Way that Will Make You Happy

2011-02-13T23:31:00.000-08:00

I wish word would spread far and wide to the "if only I had a degree in X, I will be saved from my misery" crowd that another degree isn't going to save them.

I have your interests at heart, my friend, and it's time for some tough love. I may look like a hypocrite because I've got the letters "J.D." after my name, but if you were looking for buried IED's, and you sent Private Tim out there to find the bombs, and he hobbles back carrying his bloody limb, would you doubt his word that there were explosives buried beneath the road?

If you go into something like nursing or teaching about 10 years into your career, you actually stand a decent shot of beginning a new career without a lot of pain.

If you are going back to school because you think a MBA or some other degree is going to magically open a door to the riches you were denied, I have a better idea: Why don't you get a credit card with a $50,000 limit and use it to buy airline trips to Cancun, triple mocha lattes from Starbucks every day of the week, a brand new stereo system, a 3-D television, Prada clothing, and front row tickets to see the Rolling Stones?

Come on. You might as well put that money to actual use, and in a way that will make you happy. We all know that most of you tossing around the "maybe I'll get a M.B.A." aren't really that interested in business. If you were that interested in business, you would actually sit down with a few trade papers.

Still, you reply, "buying thousands of dollars worth of mocha lattes sounds like a complete waste of money! A business degree will help me make money!"

Will it?

Just like the law, the high-paying jobs are only available to the very few from the top schools, with special emphasis on the young.

And here you are. You've probably already established a family and are in a comfortable routine, even if you want more money or to get away from your dead-end situation. Yet, if you're going to school because you don't want to take one for the team and pick up and move yours stuff to another city where they might be more opportunity, I am not sure what you think additional schooling is going to bring.

If you graduate with an M.B.A., only to find out that the job market in your chosen city is bone dry, what will you do then?

You can become like a lot of other people and simply let that new degree gather dust on the shelf while you continue to work in the bull shit job you were working before-hand while secretly harboring hope that someone will respond to your resumes.

It is sort of like if a sous chef from a 3-star French restaurant decided to move to Boonie Lake, Arkansas and is surprised that they can't find any fancy restaurants to work in.

Even so, you might find jobs in your chosen abode. As so happens in many of these cases, you may also feel offended that these starter jobs pay so little. Now, you have a house, family, and student loan debt. You were counting upon the big salaries that you had read in a tiny blurb in U.S.A. Today, but as I said, those jobs went to a select few. Again, the degree gathers dust. This is especially true of those who were actually making good money before they went back to school. It never fully crosses their mind that employers aren't that excited about what they used to do. In fact, those people tend to be the biggest losers as it is only after they sunk all of that money and time into that degree that they are fully confronted by the reality that it didn't double their salary. They even discover to their horror that their salary noticeably shrank because that added income is now going to pay for student loans, and will be doing so for the next 10-30 years.

So, what I propose is that you actually enjoy that money with fabulous vacations to China and pay it off at a crippling interest rate instead of having years of your life being eaten up by boring subject matter and hours of study that have robbed you of time with friends and family and THEN paying a crippling interest rate. You get to go to China, have a constant caffeine high on the good stuff (instead of being relegated to Maxwell House), and dress well.

In fact, quit being a wuss and cut out the middle man and go ahead and start applying for jobs elsewhere with your current background because that is what is going to end up happening with the new degree.

Why More American't Don't Travel Abroad

2011-02-05T23:41:00.000-08:00

As this is a blog that also touches upon the prospects of education and upward mobility, I thought I would share this article from CNN:

Why American's Don't Travel Abroad

When explaining why only 30% of Americans hold a passport, the article boiled down the problem down this way:

Tourism experts and avid travelers attribute Americans' lack of interest in international travel to a few key factors, including: the United States' own rich cultural and geographic diversity, an American skepticism and/or ignorance about international destinations, a work culture that prevents Americans from taking long vacations abroad and the prohibitive cost and logistics of going overseas.

Yes, it is like someone from the Land of the Out of Touch had a baby with the NPR Junkie. Sort of like a Glenn Beck meets the Academic liberal.

"Why there is no such thing as rampant poverty, unemployment, and jobs that don't permit you to travel at will!    Nobody travels because they persist in their backwards, racist, hatred of foreigners!"

Once again, another American commits the crime of believing that foreigners do not engage in racism. Back in the 1960's, about 20 years after the holocaust, some European hotel let Sammy Davis Junior stay in the same room that other people would stay in. Now, they've gone from a land of genocide to being a post-racial utopia whose example we can all learn from.

Anyway, I think it was a bit too depressing for this travel expert to recall the exact number of people who live below the poverty line. In 2009, one in six in the U.S. experienced food scarcity at some point during the year.   A large portion of those people depended upon handouts to be able to eat, and many got into that position because they had issues with employment, because they were either unemployed or had to take a lower-paying job. Pray tell, where are those people supposed to find $3,000 to jaunt off to Europe and live off of authentic pizza from Napoli like Julia Roberts?

In spite of the fact that the actual author of Eat, Pray, Love paid with her trip with an advance from her publisher to write about the experience, what that book sells is only slightly different from what is said in the CNN article: You're supposed to "throw caution to the wind" and live abroad for a year to "find yourself" because the money is going to magically appear in your couch cushion.  Nevermind that you don't have money to eat and pay your bills.

Also, I wonder how many Americans out there who are gainfully employed, but who have had such a big chunk of their salary wiped out by student loans that they can't even think of going to Europe? Maybe they could have gone on the cheap about 10 years ago with that $30,000 a year salary because they owed much less in student loan debt.  Now, if you're sending about $600 a month to Sallie Mae, on top of paying more in health insurance premiums, rent, and gasoline, a $3,000 trip is much more extravagant. In fact, I know lots of people who would love to go to Europe, but the cost is too high in spite of what the jackal in the CNN article says. If people are living at home because they cannot afford to have their own apartment, it would be a tad irresponsible to even go on a "cheap" vacation to Ireland. If you are already barely making it to the end of the month as far as paying the bills, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you don't have any extra money to pay for a trip to Europe.

And if we're going to acknowledge that the majority of jobs don't pay enough for a luxury trip, then we can also point the finger at the fact that two weeks of vacation is not enough to live out those fantasies. That is, unless you want to work through the holidays without going home for Christmas, forego traveling to see your sister in Wisconsin during the summer, having any three day weekends to relax, or taking days off to run some necessary errands. Unless your family lives in town, you are single, have no children, and have a constitution of iron where you can go for months without taking a day off, and are lucky enough that you will never need to take a day off to meet with a repair person because of plumbing and cable issues, saving up enough vacation time to be able to go somewhere for an extended period of time is difficult.

...That is, if you are lucky enough to work in a place that offers paid vacation, and does not frown upon their employees taking several days off in a row.

Yes, so, in spite of this person's theory that America is so incredibly affluent that everybody should be spending months in Europe, the reality is that, even for the people who aren't too poor to travel, there are many more who can't simply because of logistics.

The Face of "Entitlement"

2011-01-29T21:42:00.000-08:00

What does the situation in Egypt mean in relation to the unemployed and underemployed in the U.S.?
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/28/young-educated-and-underemployed-the-face-of-the-arab-worlds-protesters/?hpt=T2

Are these people idealistic and are being set up for disappointment should things not change?

Why it is in Your Interest to Make School Affordable

2011-01-26T22:33:00.000-08:00

I recently overheard some people discussing those who are lobbying for reduced student loan debt.

Said, as one stared at her iPhone over lunch: "That wouldn't be fair! If they are making more money because they have a degree, then they should pay for it!"

I realized later on that there was a bit of irony in her statement.

Here this person is, holding a phone that was created by someone with the vision and technical know-how to combine a phone with a computer, eating a meal with ingredients that made their way across the country in a moving machine with turning wheels, sitting in a heated building created because someone figured out how to create heat and blow it into a building so they won't freeze, and all they can think about is that one of the many thousands of people who makes all of these things possible should be asked to shoulder a ghastly economic burden for the next 10-30 years of their lives.

There are those who think the economy is capable of adequately compensating those who make these things happen. Yes, Steve Jobs has more money than God. I love his presentations. I don't really watch them. I marvel at what they signify. This slightly deformed super-mind emerges from his lair and tells you exactly how its going to be. He truly is '1984.'

The President can't even pull that off. If you want to know why those Russians who were deported last year were engaged in corporate espionage as opposed to wasting their time with spying on the government, this is why. The government itself is old hat. There is no need to spend years building contacts in a foreign country in hopes that they might take a bit of cash based upon a hope that they can steal the recipe for the White House Tiramisu if you have the skill to hack directly into their databases and steal it instantaneously.

And so, when you go to a university and see a high number of foreign students in a program, do you think:

A. That they are returning to their homeland saddled with massive student loan debt.
B. That they seriously wish to find a hot American spouse and marry them for their citizenship because they enjoy the fact that we have bountiful supplies of toilet paper and Lean Cuisines on our shelves
C. They will be hired away by a US corporation to do our bidding?

Yes, which one is it?

Believe it or not, if you still think B&C are viable options, you are a bit outdated and optimistic.

Those of us who remember the tale of Mikhail Baryshnikov may optimistically hold onto the Pollyanna view that everyone believes that the US is the greatest nation in the world that everybody is trying to clamor their way into. Yes, thank you, Mexico, for making us feel like the hot college chick who is constantly fending off the bald guy with the beer gut. You make us feel desirable. Yet, to use an analogy, Mexico is George Costanza, the U.S. is Anna Nicole Smith, and Sweden is Christian Bale...and Christian Bale ain't hitting on us because he's already got Katy Perry, Beyonce, and Julia Roberts to choose from. But we're too strung out to notice that we don't look like we once did a few years ago.

Yes, think about it: Twenty years ago, we had people from countries with fairly respectable infrastructure fighting their way to get in. Now, the only people we hear about trying to fight their way in are those with life choices that involve either being a mule for a drug cartel or cutting shrubs for whitey.

That aside, many of those people are going home after receiving top training at many of our universities and helping to create a better nation...yes, a better homeland nation, not a better U.S.

I'm not saying we should deny spots in universities to foreigners. What I'm saying is that if you fail to fund the education system from preschool up, then who are you cultivating to be the next Steve Jobs?

And it shouldn't just be the Steve Jobs that we're talking about. Steve Jobs does not work alone, by the way. He has a team of people that sit around all day and come up with these things. In turn, they direct an army of highly skilled employees through the technicalities of getting it to work. We need a base of people who can read and understand the purpose of all of those schematics and designs so that we can have a workforce capable of creating these objects. Even if they hold nothing but the status of lab flunky, that person is creating your medicines, analyzing crime laboratory results, making fuel efficient cars, creating weapons to blow up terrorists, and making the next generation of iPhones.

If we were truly such a "fend for yourself" country, and we had to truly rely upon everything we personally create to get by, most of us would still be in the stone ages. You might be able to fashion a house out of logs, hunt a few wild game, and create a few novel, simple tools to make your day easier, but if you were personally dependent upon yourself to build an iPhone based upon your 8th grade level of science knowledge, then you would be screwed. You are already denied the centuries of knowledge that have been accumulated in order to understand what you even need to start accomplishing the task.

Quick, what metals would you use? How would you build a carrying case? How can you fit an antenna inside of the phone?

Yes, once upon a time, someone shrunk those clunky old cell phones down into what you are carrying in your hands, but right now, you don't even have the skill and knowledge to make the clunky old phone.

The people visiting here from other nations learning how to make these things are most likely being funded by their governments to come here and study because their governments understand exactly how important this knowledge is to their future. Yet, here in the U.S., all we can think about is the short-term benefit. Our society has stopped seeing our children and college graduates as the people who are going to keep this nation going, and instead, only thinks of them as people who are wrongly tooling around in nice cars while Joe Schmoe tax payer lives in a hut and shoulders the cost of their education.

Yes, maybe you live in a hut, but your hut is filled with technologies and your life is prolonged by advanced medicines that these people created. Why does it make sense that you, a person who decided not to take that bullet and spend a sizable portion of your adult life in school, should receive the windfall of this brainpower and work, yet, you want to stick them with the bill of making this magic happen?

Labor Department Cracks Down on Unpaid Internships

2010-12-30T15:34:00.000-08:00

According to this article, the Labor Department is going after people who can't even be bothered to pay someone minimum wage for their work!

Finally!

I personally don't like the tone of how the article is written myself. IMHO, it comes off a bit, "those dastardly feds are going to misunderstand your good intentions if you aren't careful, you poor, poor struggling businessman who only wanted to help that sorry unemployed person gain some valuable experience in their field!"

Yes, because a for-profit business who refuses to pay any sort of wage really does have a heart of gold. Even Ebenezer Scrooge paid Bob Cratchit something for the work he did. After all, we were treated to a scene where Bob went to the butcher's and used the meager wages he had to buy the sorriest goose to bring home to his family for Christmas dinner. Imagine this scene in 2010 where Bob Cratchit doesn't even have the moth-eaten 5 bob note to buy dinner with!

Hooray for cracking down on this mess! As bad as unemployment is at the moment, you can't tell me that a chunk of it comes from employers who are sponging off of free labor.

And this is where their arguments about entitlements fail miserably. They all say that they want people to get up off of it and find a paying job because people should take care of themselves. Yet, here they are, helping to create a system where they get free labor while the government and charitable organizations pick up the cost of that person's salary and health care.

It's not like that person working for free in that office can march on over to the unemployment office and tell them to stop their benefits because they are making a grand total of zero dollars working for Scum & Lord, P.C. It's not like this person can walk into a clinic for a minor cold instead of wasting space in an emergency room where they will be treated for free.

Yet, those people doing a lot of the bitching and moaning don't want to put their money where their mouths are. If you think that a person should be rewarded for getting up at 5am every morning and slogging through traffic to help you turn a profit as opposed to getting food stamps and welfare, then you should actually realize that utopia by paying that person a wage and providing them with health insurance. You can't expect people to work for free and then shake your finger at them for having the nerve to find a way to pay for groceries and utilities. People aren't robots that live on air. Unless they are planning on living in a shack in the woods like the unabomber and foraging for berries, then they will need money.

Film School Inflates the Numbers

2010-12-11T23:00:00.000-08:00

While a degree from just about any film school around the country can be considered as ranking alongside degrees in Renaissance literature as being one of those "No shit? You seriously can't find a job in your field?" learning pursuits, there are some schools out there who haven't yet figured out that they don't need to artificially inflate their employment stats.

Take this from tidbit about the Los Angles Film School and the Los Angeles Recording School. They got students to take jobs with The Guitar Center and Apple and got them to fib in their surveys about these jobs being "relevant" to their degree:

It's not just the University of Phoenix, baby!

First of all, I don't know why this school needed to lie about their stats. Surely, there are plenty of burnouts, sheltered 18 year olds, and manic-depressives who woke up yesterday morning and decided that it makes complete sense to throw $20,000 at something that calls itself a "film school."

And when you think about it, should these people be fingered for doing something that many accredited universities also engage in? And I don't mean "inflating the numbers." What I mean is, creating a charade that someone in New York is going to look at a resume of a potential production team member and say, "Hmm....filmed two episodes of a television show set in a dorm for public access television....but wait, film school at the University of Iowa? And a bachelor of science in this field to boot? Why hell! Let's bring in young Ted and let him direct the next 'Spider-Man' sequel! And good thing he didn't go to that stupid Los Angeles School of Film. Those extra classes in gender studies that he used to fill the 120 hour requirement means that he's going to be extra-sensitive to gender stereotyping in the script. We trust that he will avoid turning the Arabs in this story into one-dimensional stereotypes. I mean...Thank God this guy applied! Could you imagine the alternative?"

Blockbuster Syndrome

2010-12-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

You may remember shopping here:

Do you notice anything odd about this picture?

Look closely. Through the window. What do you see?

If you said, "there are people inside that store!" then drive down to the local Sonic and purchase yourself a sundae in celebration, because you are right!

I'm waiting for the day these people finally teeter into bankruptcy and never emerge.

And it will happen.

Yeah, I know that almost all businesses will one day cease to be due to the passage of time, but Blockbuster will cease to exist long before the demand for movie rentals ceases to exist.

I think of Blockbuster the same way I think of AT&T and Dell. Blockbuster had a product everybody wanted, and grew to need. But they didn't win by being the first to rent videos. They did it by seeing what local video stores were doing, and created a monstrosity that was guaranteed to kill off the existing competition.

And how could the local stores compete? Why, Blockbuster had 50 copies of "Drop Dead Fred" on the shelves! You were practically guaranteed that you would find the movie you wanted, because, if they didn't have "Drop Dead Fred," then they had "Ishtar" and "Soap Dish" that you had thought about watching, but now had an excuse to pick up a copy because you were already in the store.
However, as the patrons began to use Blockbuster, they began to discover a few annoying things about it.

"Ted promised to drop off the movie last night, but left it in his car and Blockbuster is charging me an arm and a leg in late fees."

"I swear I dropped this movie off, but Blockbuster says that it is missing and now they're charging me a lost tape fee."

On top of that, they had the disappearing deals.

"If you come to the store and we don't have 'Three Kings,' we will give you a free rental of that movie!"

"No more late fees!"

They made these deals sound permanent, but it wasn't long until they quietly disappeared and left perplexed renters standing at the counters wondering "what happened?"

Maybe it was legitimate protectionism that Blockbuster was engaged in, but it became a bit of a hydra. It wasn't quite as bad as AT&T, who would suddenly do away with a long distance plan that you signed up for 3 months ago, notify you of this on page 7 of your bill, and start charging you the flat 10 cent per minute rate so that you would be surprised with a large bill the following month. Nevertheless, Blockbuster started to amass the bad will of the public in the same way that school yard bullies can beat you up for your lunch money: you were forced by law to attend school, and so it meant your choices at recess were to either hide in the bathroom the entire period and have no friends and be laughed at as the weirdo who hid in the bathroom the entire recess period, or you can take your chances in trying to use the playground equipment.

Blockbuster knew how to seclude themselves off in the Ivory Tower and beat back the barbarian hordes.

Then, one magical day, Netflix arrived.

There were no late fees! The prices were reasonable! I can ask for a movie and actually get it instead of playing roulette with what is on the shelves!

AND

They aren't complete bastards!

Netflix, combined with Redbox, were like the barbarian tribes who steamrolled over Rome in its last days. Blockbuster was worried about combining forces with those up and comers called Radio Shack because they got it in their head that their customers actually want to shop for a $300-$1,000 piece of technology while picking up a copy of "In Her Shoes" for date night, and have only the teeny tiny selection buried in the back of a video store to choose from.

Sadly, there were not enough hoarders and bipolar impulse buyers to keep that venture going, so it folded. Netflix pushed forward and looked ahead to what people would be doing within a few years, and their business grew. Soon, people were freed of the schoolyard and finally had somewhere else to go.

And why do I mention that?

It's because its what happened to the legal profession.

Legalzoom and form books helped kill off a lot of our business because it was a monopoly. Even if people don't understand where the money is going, they see that they're written a check with money that could have paid bills or bought a car and watched as some burnout who hadn't returned their calls over the last month, roll into court and put on a half-assed display.

And maybe its the system in general that wears the attorney down. Day after day of craziness. Sometimes, the legal system can be a bit Dickensian in how it dispenses justice. So, even if the attorney had the best intentions and things still turned out shitty just because of other factors, it still plants the seed in people's minds as to why they are paying us to do anything.

Free Labor

2010-12-07T21:11:00.000-08:00

Do you need a job upon graduation? Internships and Networking are the answer. And don't forget perseverence. You'll finally be marketable by the time you finish that 11th internship.

PBS Does a Story on Underemployment

2010-12-07T20:42:00.000-08:00

Per PBS Newshour, half of college graduates under age 25 are working in a job that requires a college degree.

In the Spirit of "Stuff White People Like."

2010-11-28T13:25:00.000-08:00

A Newsweek story about What Food Says About Class in America, tells us that the problem of obesity in America can be placed mostly upon the lower-class who ruin their bodies with fast food and pre-packaged groceries because of social policy that makes farmer's market foods too expensive to be purchased by the underprivileged.

(To fully understand what Newsweek is trying to say, see Stuff White People Like categories #132, #119, #112, #94, #90, #63, #59, #48, #6, #5, #1).

Why would I write something about eating habits in a blog about the law?

Well, many of the people who hang around these blogs are on public assistance, or those who come home after a day of work and shove that Little Debbie chocolate round into their guzzle before watching some TV and surfing dating websites for their latest 3-month long relationship (it takes some people that long to figure out that you are neither a millionaire, nor that simply changing what area of law you want to practice is going to turn you into a millionaire. Some might take longer to dump you and the relationship will last until shortly after you start meeting their family and the feedback from Aunt Sally start flowing in as she can't figure out why their niece is dating an attorney that drives a beater), I felt I would share my big "what the f**K?" reaction that I got from reading the content of the article.

I have to give a hand to the author of the article. They go for the kill and start with the absolute first thing on the list of "Stuff White People Like" in less than 10 words into the blog.

That's right. Coffee. And not just coffee. Cappucino. It's the kind of coffee-based beverage that normally needs a $700 machine that snobs insist is absolutely essential to bring out the "true" flavor of the bean. However, in this case, the author settles for a $200 Alessi Pot which apparently works just fine for a morning cup o'joe.

As this author describes the world, the Maxwell House krewe, who are denied Quinoa and macrobiotic cooking classes, are forced to either choose between the stinking, rotten piles of fruit foisted upon them by Walmart, or must go to McDonald's. Apparently, inner city grocery stores only take the reject fruit that is "too good" for its other customers and do not have a frozen food aisle. Therefore, the solution is to bring farmer's markets to the inner city, as their 9am-1pm hours on every other Saturday morning are convenient for all, and will provide enough sustenance to get the hapless through the next two weeks.

Ok, I might be hung for bagging on a good idea. Yes, to give everyone access to locally-grown organic materials is wonderful, but its the faulty logic of the article that gets to me.

In essence, the article says, "We can save [certain people] from themselves by trucking in organic bananas, and suggesting in a sensitive, but non-controlling, way that they should stop eating at McDonald's and start eating like the high-minded Europeans."

Yes, that's right. Obesity will be a thing of the past if only we brought farmer's markets to the inner city.

There is something interesting missing from this article.

Some of you who watch The Travel Channel or the Food Network might know what's missing in this article.

Yes, turn on either of those channels and see shows to see smiling faces hovered over two-foot long hot dogs from Mel's Greasy Spoon that are filled with a 1/2 lb weiner, chili, 4 kinds of cheese, and onion rings that are coated in Panko, deep fried in bacon grease, then coated in graham crackers and topped with marshmallows and chocolate. To make it a meal, you can ask for a bloom onion that is coated in honey barbeque sauce and served with blue cheese and ranch dipping sauce, and a the superfunkalicious malted milk shake, specially poured so that there are layers of caramel and whipped cream between layers of homemade ice cream.

Competing for bragging rights are chain restaurants. Yes, drink a soda or couple of mixed drinks to wash down about half of a loaf of bread and a plate of fried pickles and cheese sticks before the 1,000 calorie main entree rolls out.

Yes, hold up a McDonald's cheeseburger and marvel at the cracker-thin wafer of a patty held between buns smaller than a dwarf's ass, and ask yourself, "is this truly the cause of obesity?"

Yet, nobody bags on chain restaurants. Why is that?

Is it because this food perceived as "special occasion food" earned by a d a privileged and deserving group who worked hard all week? Is it because it's owned by Mr. and Mrs. Geezer and not a faceless corporation? Is it because those sorts of places conjure up good memories for the target demographic where they spent many afternoons or evenings going with their friends at least twice a week and seeing other faces like theirs around the restaurant that were bespecaled by black rims and that were hashing out "serious" topics like why aren't there more dog parks in the neighborhood?

You'll never see McDonald's on an episode of "Man vs. Food" because, chances are, the portion is still small enough that the majority of people could finish it, and that its cheap enough that you won't feel as bad leaving half of your french fries on the tray. It's not like spending $12 on a sandwhich that will, at best, only remain half-eaten by a reasonable person who will be in pain for the rest of the eveningm, or will cause gawps of disbelief at those with guts huge enough to hold the entire monstrosity.

Yes, in spite of the fact that fast food restaurants were brow-beaten into giving up frying things in lard or super-sizing french fries and drinks because of one too many news segments showing exhausted 30 year olds lugging their massive, jiggly bellies covered in sweatsuits and muu-muu's down the street, it is a bit curious that barbeque huts and diners are absolutely ignored when applying this standard because asking them to make healthier choices such as cutting portion size or doing away with the 7 lb quintuple meat barbeque sandwich smothered in Swiss and topped with beer battered jalapenos, and served with an over-flowing plate of steak fries and a 10 scoop of Kahlua ice cream banana split that measures a foot tall robs the consumer of an "authentic" eating experience.

Ok, maybe you're not exactly convinced that there are just some really bad eating habits out there, so let's forget restaurants for a minute. If you went to a Thanksgiving potluck, did you see many dishes that consisted of just "plain old" green beans, or "plain old" vegetables? No. That dish was magically morphed with the aid of Velveeta, mushroom soup, and a stick of butter into a magical dish that friends smacked their lips over.

Not that I'm any better when it comes to cooking habits, but it makes the point of the pointlessness of why San Francisco feels the need to remove toys from Happy Meals. Even if you watched Super Size Me, and rightfully feel that over-consumption of McDonald's can destroy your liver, would Morgan Spurlock's argument carry the same weight if he decided to go on a 30 day food bender of renowned dives across the US that had "infamous dishes" on their menu?

It's easy to hold your nose in the air when it's a place you already don't go to, and is associated with clientele that you tend not to hold in high regard. The fact that a city like San Francisco thinks it is their business to eliminate toys from Happy Meals implicitly says something about the way they think about the people they think they are trying to protect.

However, it is an admittedly complex issue because we all end up paying for our food choices. If a person has to get thousands of dollars in health care because of knee surgeries, complications of diabetes, and heart attacks, that cost is spread amongst everyone, whether it be private insurance or Medicaid or Medicare. Admittedly, there is a temptation to go through the restaurants and make them cull their menu of nasty offenders because its hard to watch sluggish people who don't have any energy because of obesity lug around. But what can you do? Nutrition classes?

Merry Christmas! And a Highly-Indebted 30 Years!

2010-11-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

This lucky lady is going to have to pay back $200,000 for an undergraduate degree!

What $200,000 in Student Loans Looks Like.

She's asking for donations from the public. Ummmm....yeah. I can't get that excited over sending someone a dime for an undergraduate degree. Is Northeastern University worth that much? Even if it was OK, something tells me that I would be sending money to cover the cost of 4+ years of jello shots and pizza. It's a lot easier to manage your costs for undergraduate degrees simply because that person can knock out course credits at community college or arrange their schedule so they can work.

Put Your Hands Down, Fools!

2010-10-20T22:47:00.000-07:00

It was bad enough in law school having to sit through "intellectual exercises" thrust upon us by overly-zealous students who think they are now qualified to teach the class. However, you could understand their zeal just a little bit because they drank the same Koolaid as the rest of us and thought that there was still time left to work their way up the ladder and get that letter of recommendation from Professor Ascot that will give them a prestigious clerkship with Federal Judge Senior Status.

What I don't understand is attorneys who are well-established shit law attorneys who think that shooting their hand up and asking bizarro pseudo-intellectual tangent questions during CLE being given by the one Cooley Grad who wasn't working as the parking lot attendant at the hotel is going to finally get them places.

S**t Rolls Out the Door

2010-10-15T23:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I was reminded what a terrible, terrible place shit law can be.

And sometimes, the shit overfloweth so much that it needs to be swept out of the door.

Literally.

An ex-paralegal shared a story of one firm that she worked at for several years. As is typical with the power structure of a sizable percentage of shitlaw firms, the firm is helmed by Dickensian misers who earned their money -- not from their vast and impressive legal knowledge that set the wrongly accused free and set new precedent that left the Supreme Court stripping themselves down to their tighty whiteys and 18 hour support bras -- but by selling a large volume of services with reduced overhead costs and a sizable markup.

One weekend, the gods didn't feel like there was enough shit law being created in the office. To fill the quota that made the difference between whether the boss would go to Cancun or to New Zealand on the latest biannual vacation, Osiris thundered from beneath, causing the sewer to back up and create a mess in the hall and kitchen.

When the mess was discovered the following Monday, it was not a special cleaning crew with rubber suits and special chemicals that were called to remove the biohazard that lurked in the hallway. It wasn't even the managing partners that threw themselves upon that stink bomb of a grenade while chivalrously saving the ladies from harm. Yes, mes amis, why on Earth would you call a professional and unnecessarily pay more money to clean out shit you are already paying a support staff $10 an hour who are already pros at taking your shit and shoveling it out the door onto unsuspecting clients? Yes, why not? The office staff comes properly equipped for the job of sewage removal since they each have two working arms to work mops and brooms. Women are genetically engineered to clean sewage because they have cooked and cleaned since caveman days. They also have special E. Coli-resistent high heeled shoes that will provide the backs of their legs a two inch separation from the waste even though their leather-covered tippy-toes dance so tantalizingly close to that corn and peanut riddled graveyard of feasts from days gone by.

Ah, but only if we had the ability to shovel a pile of this effluent and trot it before a room full of aspiring 0 L's! It's time for them to see the physical evidence of what most of their working careers are going to look like. Maybe 5 members of their little group will be running about the halls of Congress or taking a break in the firm gym at 3am when they are in between writing their 8th summary judgment for the day. The rest of them will receive the honor of working in portable buildings or offices that look like they are the waiting rooms of 3rd world physicians.

That is, if they find a job at all.

"Sirs and madams. Do you see this bucket of pallid water with what looks like coffee grinds in the bottom? This is what the staff of a law firm actually cleaned off of the floor of their office after the sewer decided to make a deposit and the lead partners decided that hiring a professional crew of cleaners was not in the budget. They were given the choice of finding another job or taking a mop in hand and getting to work. The good news is that their mopping activity meant that they got to delay going to the dry cleaner's to pick up the boss's suits for a little bit. And before you tell yourselves that you need to shovel a little shit at the beginning of your career to 'make it' within the law and that you have to do this sort of thing to prove your worth as a valuable employee, stand not amazed when a contributor to the clean up effort quit at some point in the future when they found another job and were replaced by somebody who agreed to work $3 an hour less than they were making. Have a nice day."

Keeping Up with the Joneses

2010-09-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

Legal Dollar and BIDER have shared with us this commentary from a University of Chicago Law Professor regarding his poverty in spite of being above the $250,000 bracket:

Read here for the full text.

I liked this passage in particular:

The problem with the president’s plan is that the super rich don’t pay taxes – they hide in the Cayman Islands or use fancy investment vehicles to shelter their income. We aren’t rich enough to afford this – I use Turbo Tax. But we are rich enough to be hurt by the president’s plan. The next time the president comes home to Chicago, he has a standing invitation to come to my house (two blocks from his) and judge for himself whether the Xxxxxxxxxs are as rich as he thinks.

The irony is that this professor specializes in economics, security regulation, and other subjects that should touch upon the tax code at one of the top law schools in the country....yet, he has absolutely no idea how to hide his money and needs freaking Turbo Tax to tell him what to do!

Wow. If that isn't a damnation of law school.

I heard that at the University of Phoenix, someone from higher up outlined the entire curriculum, while they hired an adequately-credentialed talking head to purvey the information. I can't help but think there are many law school professors who got stuck teaching a subject that they don't know anything about.

Imagine if a Medical School were run like this:

"Can you teach me about dysfunctions of the adrenal gland?"

"That's not really my area of specialty, but I read something about it in a book once. Here's a link to WebMD. By the way, here's the bill for $250,000 for having me and my ilk grace you with our presence."

But why is that?

In spite of the Tier System cooked up by U.S. News and World Reports, schools ultimately "teach to the test." It also helps the bottom line of lesser schools if they can take the emphasis off of recruiting professors with real world experience and basically hire anybody who is capable of using a textbook to teach the U.C.C. The irony is that this professor's academic credentials are impressive overall, but they don't actually have any insight to contribute into the body of law that they've been recruited to teach.

And, if we are going into the whole "are you being paid what you're worth?" argument, it is kind of ironic that his job as a talking head could be done by an adjunct for a fraction of the cost, but his salary and work schedule are artificially regulated by the ABA (and to an extent, by U.S. News and World Reports).

Yes, what a sad gnat who is being pummeled by the establishment while everyone else sails off to the Cayman and has their masseuse rub them with oil-soaked $100 bills. If only he had actual knowledge of economics and the tax code, then he might not have gotten into this predicament.

He also states that his money is better spent on a nanny, gardener, and housekeeper rather than sending it to Washington because he has direct control over how the money is spent and that it is better for these people to earn a wage rather than be on welfare.

All of his hires are recent immigrants. Is it a mere coincidence that he hired recent arrivals from Mexico and Poland because he loves the American dream? Or is it because they work for the least amount of money?

The irony is that it is fairly likely that none of his employees have health insurance, and if they were sent by an agency, the likelihood that they are covered by worker's comp is fairly small. The minute Pedro cuts his hand on the lawnmower blade, he will be dumped at the emergency room where the taxpayers will pick up the tab. If Marie the housekeeper becomes ill with the flu, she will probably not be paid sick leave and will probably show up at his house and spread the disease to the inhabitants before she becomes so run down that she acquires secondary infections like pneumonia. She will then visit the local emergency room and receive free treatment from county services. She will probably also need handouts from charitable organizations to help pay rent, food, and medical bills.

In the end, it's hard to become too excited that Professor Henderson is doing his part to keep the economy going. Yes, he spent $300 that month to keep somebody employed, but he also used the cheapest services and avoided paying many of the necessary costs to keep these people housed, fed, and healthy and conveniently spread the rest of the cost onto the taxpayer.

More Blood Money

2010-09-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

After writing my last blog entry in which I calculated how much more a person would pay for their law degree thanks to a 1-2 punch of rise in tuition and student loan interest rates, I decided to take a visit to my alma mater's website to see what they were charging the poor people who signed up for the once in a lifetime opportunity to be an attorney.

The incoming class is now paying $200+ more than I did in my first year! And I started school in 2006!

Seriously? After an entire year of hearing about the crummy jobs (or no jobs) many alumni have scrounged up! This is how the school responds?

Where does it stop? Where will tuition be in 5 years? Will it be $1200 per semester hour? Right now, they are clocking in at owing nearly $90,000 in tuition and books alone!

And I can see why they needed to increase tuition. Those podiums the professors use are so out of date! And those copies of 1934 real estate form books... Why, it's about time that students will have access to form books that don't contain language about making it illegal to sell houses to the colored people. And let's not forget that tragic moment when career service's fax machine broke. That event completely shot OCI all to hell. They were left scrambling and the only employers they could manage to invite to OCI were the legal aid office. Poor kids. They certainly would have been scooped up by the understaffed top 250 law firms.

Buy Your Law Degree Now Before the Cost Rises Another $50,000

2010-09-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

9/16 Update: Correction of Numbers using proper amortization calculator

In my mind, people go to law school in the same way that people bought all of those houses during the bubble. Were the houses as expensive as hell? Yes. Were the mortgage payments overwhelming? Yes. But goddamn if it wasn't your own personal piggy bank!

Entire neighborhoods in foreclosure do not suggest that a group of people teamed up and decided to be stupid together.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Personal piggy banks.

People who attend law school generally think that an attorney job is their own personal piggy bank. It's easy money. It's a place where you sit out 3 years of your life and pop out on other side with great earning potential.

Student loans don't even make you feel the gravity of your investment. You got the paperwork in the mail showing what your monthly payments will look like, but you don't actually look at them. For one thing, you can't do much to control how much your monthly payments will be. Even if you lived cheaply, there is still the question of both tuition and the interest rate on those loans. What was the lending rate just a few short years ago for graduate students? It hovered somewhere around 3-4% (the same rate applying to all students regardless of being a graduate or undergraduate) And not only that, tuition skyrocketed over the past few years. Together, the interest rate and tuition have made law school tens of thousands of dollars more expensive for the average borrower. Even if your tuition "only" went up a measly $200 a semester hour over the course of your stint in law school, thanks to 6.8% interest rates, you will end up paying substantially more for your education over the following 10 years than somebody who graduated about 5 years ago (in 2005).

Let's say that you borrowed $100,000 at 6.8% and paid it off over 10 years. According to calculators, you will have paid a grand total of $138,100 at the end of your loan.

If you borrowed $100,000 at 3.6% (which is an average of the interest rates between 2002-2005), you will have paid a grand total of $119,225.99 at the end of 10 years.

As you can see, you are paying an extra $19,000 for borrowing the same amount of money over the next ten years for interest alone!

Yes, that presumes that tuition was exactly the same as it was 5 years ago. Now, you will have to borrow even more money to buy the same product.

Let's pretend that tuition is now (when averaged over 3 years) is about $150 a semester hour more than what a 2005 graduate had to pay. Let's also say that a 2005 graduate paid $700 a semester hour while a 2009 graduate paid $850.

$700 X 90 hours = $ 63,000
$850 X 90 hours = $76,500

Subtracting the difference:

$150 X 90 semester hours = $13,500.

Yes, the recent graduate paid an extra $13,500 in interest-free tuition.

Of course, that presumes that the student paid cash up front.

If the student borrowed money, at my chosen interest rates, here is what it would look like:

$700 X 90 hours X 3.6% interest over 10 years = $89730.09

$850 X 90 hours X 6.8 % interest over 10 years = $147697.78

By the time that the loans have been paid off, the new graduate has actually paid $57,967 more for their schooling than the 2005 graduate!

No, wait. That isn't right. That figure is actually too low!

Granted, I simplified things and didn't calculate for the fact that you obviously won't borrow the full 90 hour amount in the same year, and I didn't calculate for the fact that interest begins accruing on Unsubsidized Stafford Loans and private loans while you are in school!

But the figure is obviously on the cheap side as I presumed that all of the tuition expenses would be fully covered by Stafford loans, which is a lower interest rate than private loans. When tuition is cheaper, more of it can be covered by government subsidized loans as opposed to having to borrow more money in expensive private loans with interest rates at 8%+ (depending upon your credit score. I've heard of cases where the interest was 12%). If you are capped at $22,500 per year when borrowing federal loans, tuition is $850 a semester hour, and you want to borrow the entire tuition amount of $25,500, then you will need to take out an additional $3,000 in private loans just to cover the shortfall (at $700 per semester hour, the cost would have been $21,000 per semester, which would leave $1500 of federal loans before being maxed out)....never mind that you will need to take out money just to cover books for class, living expenses, suits for work, food, and the occasional social activity. All of that money will be borrowed at private loan rates.

So, what, exactly, are the totals for a year of schooling for a 2005 graduate vs a 2010 graduate (without counting for the accrued interest while the student is in school)?

2005 Graduate
$21,000 X 3.6% Stafford Loan over 10 years of repayment
=
$29910.03 per year.

2010 Graduate
($22,500 X 6.8% Stafford Loan over 10 year repayment) + ($3,000 X 8.5% PLUS loan at 10 years repayment)
which reduces to:
$43440.52 + $6782.95
=
$50,222 per year.

That is a difference of $20,300+ per year!

Multiply that number by 3 years of law school, and you actually end up paying $60,000+ more than a 2005 graduate from the start of your repayment!

Ok, the addition of PLUS loans 'only' tacked on an additional $3,000 in interest, but still...

(Naturally, this number balloons if you have to defer your loans, go on Income Based Repayment, or any other graduated repayment option because interest continues to compound on top of your owed amount!

______

Yes, you get the picture.

On top of that, chances are fairly slim that you'll acquire any employment in law school that will lessen your need for borrowing money. Remember: the rules state that you CANNOT work in your first year, and chances are, unless you got a job waiting tables at Chili's, the chances are small that you're going to see very little income from any of your clerkships. You're either going to be working for free in an internship, or making $10 an hour working for a solo. Depending upon which school you get into and your grades and connections, you MAY land one of those BIGLAW jobs where you clear 5 digits over the course of the summer.

Obviously, people don't think about the interest rate and loan repayment because they have it in their heads that nobody would charge that kind of tuition or interest if you can pay it back. A big part of the draw of law school is that people view it as an "easy" way to start making good money. To them, it's like purchasing an annuity at 15% interest. "I may pay you $100,000 for my education, but my income will not only cover the amount of the loan, it will be significantly enough to completely increase my standard of living over what it would have been had I not attended law school."

(I'll save "how many hours/days/years you need to work to pay off $100,000" for another time).

And without further adieu, this is where I proudly introduce (for your own reading and my own vindication) a blog that I have just found:

Shit Law Jobs.

Yes, reading over these tasty morsels of actual jobs makes any person want to fork out that extra $30,000 over the next 10 years....let alone $100,000, or $200,000.

These are not outliers or starting salaries, people! After a year of fruitless job search, I am now a proud expert in the "there ain't no jobs out there" field. I can tell you that these are the jobs that most of you will be LUCKY to get.

And that additional $60,000 that you paid over a 2005 graduate? That is if you are on standard repayment. At $35,000 per year, if you want to eat, you will probably have to find alternative payment options. Imagine that $60,000 compounded over an additional 20 years (my calculator just broke at hearing that) if you switch to a 30 year repayment plan or a graduated payment option. Or the interest that accrues if you can't pay because of economic hardship. I'll let your imagination run wild with what you could be paying, which is probably the sensible thing because nobody can foresee what life is going to be like for you. Whether you become ill and go broke because you have no health insurance, your employer runs out of work and has to let you go, or you work for somebody who decides after two years that they can hire a new graduate for much cheaper, it's hard to say. All I know is that, on the whole, there are a lot of hard luck stories, and that you either really need to be an opportunist or know how to take advantage of that one opening if you really want to get anywhere.

Gone, Baby, Gone!

2010-09-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

These past few days, I have taken to sorting through all of my garbage and cleaned out most of my law school papers.

Admittedly, I'm a bit of a pack rat, but I felt a particular need to keep the wonderful lecture notes, note cards, supplements, and even unsold textbooks because I had bought into a crazy concept that all of these notes would be useful in my future law practice. After all, juicy tidbits of law that were previously chewed, semi-digested, and regurgitated by great legal minds for the nourishment of younglings in the nest sounded like a goldmine.

It especially sounded good whenever professors would encourage us to call them with questions during our subsequent law practices about the actual law. It sounded better than any court on this land. They got a ruling from Professor Schmidt on non-conforming use, which is like waving a cross at a vampire on the opposing side.

Well...

The funny thing about calling up professors with questions to basic legal concepts after you've passed the bar is that it demonstrates the worthlessness of law school if they can't even spend more than a semester teaching you how to research, or that more than a few non-gifted people slip through the net who are either too lazy or just don't have the ability to spot a basic issue (or just don't have access to a thesaurus if their favored search terms aren't working). If you don't know how to schmooze with a judge or make your filings conform with the local rules, you obviously need the help of another attorney since it is all the unwritten social context that nobody wants to really admit exists. If you're 3 years out of Property I, and still need to call Professor Dumbledore because you still can't figure out Google enough to explain a basic legal concept....

Wow.

"So, there is like this thing where some guy didn't mean to cause an accident, but he wasn't paying attention to the road because he was reading a magazine and drinking a beer while he was driving, and he forced my client off the road and into a ditch. Can you help me out? I tried searching Westlaw for terms like 'all over the road,' 'ditch,' and 'magazine' but I just can't find any case law that explains to me if my client has a good case. I don't think the courts have tackled this issue yet, so this one might be turned into a movie like Amistad."

The funny thing about calling the professor is that sometimes it could backfire. You never know if the professor you are seeking to talk to is actually the expert witness for the other side.

So, I cursorily looked at my notes. Not only can I not tell you what I had written anywhere (which would make my search that much more difficult than just typing the phrase in Google), I realized that cobbled bits of law from God knows where do not make the current law in my state. They might make a general concept, sort of like how high school teaches you "standardized" German and Spanish, but it's nothing I can cite to any court.

Yes, see My Stack of Old Torts Lectures on Contributory Negligence that I condensed into flashcards, Fall 2006.

Besides, after taking BarBri, I began to realize that law school made the law much more difficult than what it is. I guess they had to do something to explain why we were in law school for 3 years instead of 6 weeks.

When you look at what law school accomplishes, why not make it a 6 week program? All the core curriculum of law school does is teach towards the bar anyway. Sometimes, the school is successful in brainwashing the students into believing that this method is in their best interest and they shouldn't burn any of those precious 90 hours taking clinic and instead use that time to take a random class that will consist of a grand total of 1/2 of an essay on the bar exam. You may not know how to go to court and are hobbled out of the starting gate, but you really overkilled that Secured Transactions question that an examiner spent 30 second reading.

I can fault many programs for taking the approach of making the coursework "cost effective" to the point of being useless by using outdated equipment and methods that aren't actually helpful in the working world. However, law school is so much more expensive and the practice of law carry many more demands on the employees

I'm sure that about 1/4 of my notes have question marks written beside them. In my first year, the question mark was a result of a genuine "WTF?" because the way they teach law, it is sort of like bringing an elephant into a darkened room and you having to guess that it's an elephant from touching its tail. In my second and third years, the question marks appear in the margins because my mind wandered and I snapped back into focus somewhere around prong 3 of a 4 prong set.

The good old days of memorizing "three prong tests." It's funny that I had to learn that stuff when judges were constantly misapplying the standards even with a book open in front of them.

Anyway...

Tons of paper is in the recycling bin. In a few short months, somebody will be wearing a paper hat made from my old law notes. There will be a smile upon the face of an innocent child as he plays with his origami giraffe made with UCC notes. I had a brief spike in hope that companies were still making toilet paper made from recycled paper like they did years ago, but that brief hiccup of caring for The Last Rain Forest has passed quietly away in the dead of night somewhere around 1994. Damn. No more biodegradable trash bags or paper towels made of recycled paper and their brown, course texture wiping away pizza sauce that you spilled on the counter. Back in the day, it could have been possible that somebody was going to literally wipe their bottom with "last shot doctrine" lecture notes. Yes, that was their last shot at being useful for anything.

Sallie Mae, I Can't Wait Until You are in my Rear View Mirror

2010-08-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm a person who has been fairly successful at paying my bills over the years. Maybe I've forgotten to pay my phone bill once or twice, but I've never had problems with a system where I was actually trying to pay my bills.

I have not consolidated my loans, and I was in that weird transition period where some of my loans are still with Sallie Mae and some are with Direct Loan. In just the past few months, I've had a false belief that I had hit the "confirm" button on my payment. The button was buried at the bottom of the screen, so I forgot that even though I told them to pay a certain amount, that I still had to confirm that I wanted to pay that amount.
This problem got me into the habit of paying early enough so that I could revisit the website in a few days to see if I could catch problems before they turned into issues.

This system is paying off....slightly.

Earlier this month, I had typed in the dollar amount to pay. I looked on my bank account, noticed that it had actually posted, but went back to see if the payment actually took.

For some reason, both my Stafford and Plus loan on that one website were a few dollars short! According to them, I still owed about $17 for the month. I felt that was weird, but I compared what went through the bank to confirm that they didn't take out the full amount, but lost $17 in the process. Seeing that the dollar amounts matched, I went back, added in the extra money, and then went back and made sure that the dollar amounts actually read zero. I'm not sure what happened, but since it's a computer, it's hard for me to argue that I typed in the right dollar amount, even if it is fishy that the payments I made for both loans were just a few dollars too low.

As I feel the annoyance, all I can think is that I'm looking years into the future and having these problems haunt my every step. All I'm doing is very base line activities. I can't imagine what a mess it is for people who fall behind. Seriously, people, you can't even effectively tell your computer how to remove the set amount of money that I owe from my bank! All I need are these jokers trying to ruin my credit.

I can't wait until I become employed. I'm going to live in a tent and eat bread and beans until I get rid of you people.

Work Smarter; Not Harder

2010-08-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

I caught this gem of a story that covers the fact that the United States is slipping in the world rankings for churning out college graduates:

We are now ranked 12th in the world for creating college graduates.

Yes, in spite of the rise of for-profit schools, it appears that people aren't bothering to finish their degrees!

The math of this article is fairly simple: College Degree = Success.

And, as usual, southerners are blamed for dragging down this great nation.

Quote:

Nowhere is that trend more apparent than in Arkansas, a state of deeply entrenched poverty, where just over 40 percent of students finish college with bachelor’s degrees in six years or less. Arkansas is one of several southern states that have seen college enrollment rates increase, even as college completion rates remain stubbornly low. The contradiction has frustrated education officials and prompted calls for action at the highest levels of state government.

Hmm. Maybe we should be giving them a medal for doing their part in not contributing to the number of people filing for bankruptcy. If you're in Arkansas, and your job options include being a pig farmer and running the General Store, I don't think that racking up $30,000 in student loans is going to help your situation that much.

People in large metropolitan areas are used to having a wide variety of careers to choose from. Chances are, you can do something with that Economics and Advertising degree. In many areas that are relatively sparsely populated, the food chain looks like this: Doctor, Lawyer, Business Owner, Health Care Professional, Realtor, Cop, Home Construction/Repair, Low-Level Bureaucrat, Car Sales, Auto Repair, Retail Worker, Bus Boy.

Yes, identify which of these lines of work needs a college degree to successfully complete the job. Either you completely bite the bullet and give nearly 10 years of your life to rotting in college and graduate school, or you take a couple of semesters at the community college before the light bulb pops on that Intro to British Literature has nothing to do with selling houses or taking drivers license photos at the DMV.

You can't really blame some 18 year old Arkansan who was the first in their family to proudly go off to college to suddenly give up when they see that it is a road to nowhere. Not only are they already leery of the amount of debt they will have to take on thanks to skyrocketing tuition, they have seen for themselves that their older friends who have already graduated are moving back home and have resumed their former jobs at the local Sonic. Other than a few degree fields like nursing, there is very little opportunity that makes relocation a viable option.

If there were recruiting fairs or stories about how their friends had jobs lined up from the beginning of their senior year, there would see a lot more interest from the students in actually finishing their degrees. Instead, they get a year or two in their studies, figure out that they aren't Rhodes Scholar material, know that the job banks are nearly empty, and realize the remaining two years of their degree is a waste. In some ways, they end up being more marketable by simply giving up on their degree rather than being branded as a graduate who will probably try to leave the minute a "good" job opens up.

It is also not surprising that students would quit going to college since many of the jobs that created the economic base that funded their schooling have moved out of the country. If mom and dad's job at the sock factory is now in China, and the rules require that parents become partially responsible for repaying many of the loans that their children are taking out, it is fairly likely that there have been many serious talks where mom and dad have had to break the news to their children that they can no longer afford to pay to send them to college.

So where is the incentive to actually finish?

Unfortunately, it is too expensive for the average person to be educated just for education's sake. When the expense of an education can't be parlayed into an economic benefit, it simply becomes a luxury that many people can't afford. We can't simply make it a goal to have a better-educated society simply for its own sake if we are going to turn around and crush the students who step up to the plate with ungodly debt and no prospects for paying their bills.

Don't Let the Salaries Fool You

2010-08-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

The other day, I read a very entertaining article which suggested that we do away with the bar exam.

Everybody has their opinion on the bar. I waffle too much to even address if we should have a bar exam, so that will be left for another day.

I'm going to address a side point that the author raised about attorney salaries.

Quote:

More importantly, I think that the high salaries of lawyers combined with the high cost of even very basic legal services show that we have too few lawyers rather than too many, and that the best way to determine the “right” number of lawyers is through market competition, not government mandate.

I clicked on the bio of this writer. Surprise, surprise, they are in academia! And instead of using personal anecdotes, or even questioning why this urban legend of thousands of unemployed attorneys exists, they reach for NALP numbers.

The professor/blogger says this bon mot in another blog entry:

I should note that the NALP and Labor Department data do not account for lawyers who are unemployed. Unfortunately, neither these sources nor others I have looked at have shown anything approaching a good estimate of the unemployment rate among lawyers. However, it seems unlikely that there is large Marxian “reserve army” of unemployed lawyers out there. If there were, one would expect lawyer salaries to drop substantially as competition from the unemployed drives down the pay of those who have jobs, especially at the lower ends of the distribution (e.g. — the 10th and 25th percentiles noted in the post).

According to this professor/blogger's theory, absolutely nobody should have been an unemployed attorney working the perfume counter at Macy's. Third year law students should have not had to even think about finding a job once they graduated. They should have their pick of desperate employers long before they were measured for their tams. They should have been begged to start work early by those who are swamped with work. Even if BIGLAW was making a few cuts, it doesn't mean that there aren't severely understaffed areas like small firms or public interest groups who have had to turn away cases because they just don't have the labor resources to take them.

I thought an actual clue that there are many unemployed attorneys would be hearing that there were well over 100 applicants for the same low-paying jobs that I had been applying for, but apparently not. Those numbers can be apparently explained away by assuming that there are over 100+ attorneys out there who are unhappy with their current employment and who have decided to lateral over into something that pays less than $40,000 per year.

But let's not stop there: Let's define non-saturation. If the professor wishes to talk about salaries, then we should also speak of what is missing in the compensation packages. If the legal profession were not overly saturated, a good majority of employees would get compensation packages that includes:

Signing bonuses
Paid moving expenses
Company housing
Paid vacations
Health insurance
Offers to pay for travel expenses for interviews
Week-long wooing sessions where they take you (the POTENTIAL employee, not the ACTUAL employee) and your spouse out to 4 star restaurants and Broadway productions
Retirement plans
Reimbursement on your student loans

AND

The biggest sign of non-saturation?

THE ABILITY TO NEGOTIATE YOUR SALARY.

I don't think anybody who has been on a job hunt recently can claim that they were engaged in skillful negotiations to get a great salary. All I've heard about is people who were in a take-it-or-leave-it position who chose to walk away. To me, that doesn't sound like a desperate employer who absolutely can't anybody for the job. It sounds more like an employer who has a large stack of resumes on their desk from people who were just as competent as the person they were offering the job.

It's Too Soon.

2010-07-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I link articles that seem relevant to the unemployed-attorney plight. Today, truth is stranger than fiction, so I included a link to a job-hunting article on "The Onion."

It's not quite as funny as that sitcom "Outsourced," but a chortle in itself.

And speaking of "Outsourced", does anybody find this premise funny?

Do the networks view this as the same kind of funny-haha that people experience when watching home videos of some guy getting racked in the nuts by a 2X4?

Is this supposed to be like "Hogan's Heroes" where the audience at home finds comic relief in watching prisoners of war trying to escape the Germans?

I'm sure that John McCain enjoys his box set with a few tall ones on those nights he can't quite go to sleep.

While watching somebody get racked in the nuts is funny, we know that the pain is temporary and the guy will be up and walking again tomorrow. There isn't a Detroit-sort of outcome where the guy is going to go on unemployment, develop a drinking problem, and then wind up in prison after assaulting the neighbor.

Somebody will point out that I haven't "seen" the show. That's true. But it sounds vaguely racist in that many of its chortles come from watching the Indians try to learn American culture. Maybe they see it is a modern "Perfect Strangers" where they figure Americans are resentful enough in this climate that we'll have a bit of joy poking fun at the new equivalents of Russian yokels. Still, it's still a bit like making a sitcom about 9/11 or mortgage foreclosures.

"Coming this fall on NBC, a new comedy called 'Life Savings.' Watch as the residents of Barstow engage in humorous antics to delay the repo man for yet another week as Dave Johns, who was laid off 16 months ago after the State went bankrupt, tries to get his cupcake mobile business off the ground."

Fun Reading for 0L's: What, Exactly, is a Personal Injury Mill?

2010-07-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

Dear 0L:

I know you are currently investigating which kind of law you would "like to go into" once you graduate from law school.

If you go to a lower-tier school and don't end up in the top 5% and law journal, your best bet at employment is a mill.

And there are many kinds of mills. There aren't just the personal injury mills who run their ads on television during Jerry Springer. You also have divorce mills and real property mills (they will search title and sell you title insurance).

What they all have in common: Phone numbers you can spell out (1-800-AMPUTEE), television advertisements during Judge Judy, and a staff filled with new graduates who are being worked 10-12 hour days for little pay.

Read more about mill structures here if you think you still think you will be able to "practice law" when you graduate.

If Medical Schools Didn't Have to Find Residencies for Their Students, it Would Resemble the Legal Profession

2010-06-22T23:25:00.000-07:00

Upon graduation, the medical student and newly christened Dr. Don, one in a class of 300 students, ranked 47% of his class, was one of 80% of his class without a job and saddled with $250,000 in debt. He began to wonder how he would repay his loans because the search for a residency was not going well.

After initially believing that he was one of "the chosen ones" (or one of the "lucky bastards") for getting into medical school, his search for a residency was quickly sucking the life out of him. He sent his resumes to OCI, but nobody offered to even interview him. Career services had spammed his inbox every semester and assured everybody that even somebody in the 99% once got a job interview so nobody should "worry" because they will all find jobs eventually. However, at graduation, only 8 members of his class had landed residencies with "prestigious" medical facilities. Another 23 landed something at the free clinic. Another 27 were still planning to work at their old internships and hoped that the newest batch of resumes that they were mailing out would land them "something." Another 15 had taken various positions such as food sample presenter at the grocery store and perfume counter assistant at Macy's. Another 19 were going to get their business degree.

Months later, his bills becoming due, one deferment down, and the latest batch of 230 resumes being ignored, Dr. Don decided to create his own residency.

It's what people told him to do. Why, he was now a doctor who had graduated from medical school. Plus, it was his own fault that he couldn't find a residency. He should have "tried harder" while in medical school to get into the top 10% of his class. Besides that, he should have "tried harder" to get a residency. It isn't enough that he sent out 300 or even 500 or 1,000 resumes and chased down every last residency position in a mall in the bad part of town in the middle of Butt Feck Idaho. (Actually, he let that one go and didn't apply for it because it was clear across the country. Now, he wonders if he's completely missed his one opportunity to ever have a residency). He needed to call and harass these employers to see if they got his resume, otherwise they wouldn't know that he really wanted this job and he wasn't just simply spamming them. He needed to redo the margins on his resume and properly space the dates because the employers would automatically throw it in the garbage can if they figured out that he wasn't insanely dedicated to detail. He needed to qualify his "interests" section and specify where he liked to travel because its not enough just to say that he liked to travel. He needed to write the name of his medical school organizations on his resume in bold and italics, otherwise, the employer who was absentmindedly scanning his resume for the exactly two seconds they dedicate to each individual resume might miss that he was "involved" while in school and was simply a loser who went home and took a nap after class. He needed better "Thank You" notes, otherwise, they will think he is insincere about wanting the job. He needed to fold his hands in a particular way during the interview because if he gestured too much, he would look a bit threatening and maybe like he didn't even want the job. He needed to go to more medical conferences and meet other practicing doctors because nobody likes to hire people who they've never met. He needed to show up at happy hour with the local medical association because he needed to pass out business cards like candy. He needed to shine his shoes because dirty shoes suggest disorganization and inability to take his image as a successful attorney seriously.

This guy was a complete failure because he only did about half of it.

Where he went to school and the sheer lack of residency positions had nothing to do with his unemployment. He was just a creep. A loser. What in the hell is he doing here? He doesn't belong here. And if he can't dedicate every breathing second to making himself the perfect candidate in the way that Nicole Kidman should have tried harder to be a Stepford Wife (for even if she was a Stepford Wife, she obviously still wasn't Stepford-y enough). If it means slapping on a little rouge and pretending like he watches Boston Red Sox games, it didn't hurt a damn thing because he would be a complete moron if he didn't do it. This is a competition, my friends. Perfect resume margins said everything that the employer needed to know about Dr. Don's ability to diagnose cancer. If he didn't correct those margins, the employer would take notice and draw an immediate conclusion that Dr. Don was just the kind of guy that missed those subtle symptoms that House would catch.

He also wasn't applying for nursing positions. Or jobs for orderlies, medical billing, or lab technicians. He was told by the nay sayers, "Hey, you have a medical degree, which allows the possessor to pursue a wide range of employment because it is still a science degree. They would appreciate your medical skills and ability to 'think like a doctor.'"

But it wasn't reality.

An employer looking to fill a $10 an hour job will be weirded out by having a medical doctor on the staff. He knew it. But he applied to those nursing assistant positions anyway. It didn't hurt because there were many days that there were no doctor positions posted on the job boards. It was better to apply to A job rather than NO job.

Tired of hearing criticism and feeling like he wasn't doing "enough," Don created his own residency position out of the bedroom in his apartment.

He would be the head of his residency. For the next four years, he would train himself to diagnose and treat patients. Who cares if most of his experience has come from cutting on cadavers while in medical school? This shouldn't be too bad. He put in a few hours as a volunteer at the clinic where he was treating V.D. and ear infections. He would simply open up his very own V.D. and minor respiratory infection practice. He would then work his way into more complex diseases at some point.

Dr. Don visited the Office Max where he purchased stacks of generic billing receipts and card stock to print his business cards (he discovered to his delight that they now make special printing paper that doesn't leave perforated edges).

He went home and purchased medical supplies off of Ebay for $15.73. They were slightly used and came from an estate sale from the untimely death of Dr. Geezer McGee. Dr. McGee did things the "old" way, so the supplies were slightly dated, but they would do the job. Dr. Don would have purchased better supplies, but he is severely in debt and had to go for what would do the job.

Dr. Don went home and set up his home office. He couldn't yet afford an office because he was in a Catch-22 where he needed income in order to afford an office. He thought about running a virtual office with an answering service and where he would either meet patients at their homes, in the hallways of the hospitals, or in the special office that he could rent by the hour like he was in Hollywood and Vine. He contacted a guy who graduated two years ahead of him for advice who then put him in touch with Dr. Louise. Dr. Louise has practiced medicine for 15 years and frequently allows new doctors to use her office to meet patients in exchange for free help from the new doctor in diagnosing the occasional cold when she was backed up.

Dr. Don picked up his first case.

He went down to the hospital and waited in the lobby. He saw many of his old classmates hanging around in their JC Penney suits. Their entire conversations revolved around which emergency rooms were filled with the most uninsured people. They were all giving each other tips on what forms to fill out and what time they needed to show up in order to hit the rush just right.

Dr. Don saw a guy who was bleeding out of his ear, high as a kite, and who had no health insurance. He tripped over his other classmates who clamored for the work and found a social worker who offered to get the state to pay $200 to diagnose and treat the crackhead.

Dr. Don took the crackhead back to his "office." It turned out that the crackhead had gotten into a knife fight and had a cut in his earlobe that required stitches. He got right to work sewing on the ear.

Due to his inexperience and the adrenaline rush, Dr. Don not only forgot to clean the wound, but mistakenly prescribed an antibiotic that only works on pneumonia. The crackhead got a major infection where he lost part of his ear.

Dr. Don was then sued for medical malpractice by the crackhead who would have otherwise been tossed out of the hospital that day for not having health insurance. He lost and his premiums skyrocketed thanks, in part, to the fact that he also failed to miss tell-tale signs of an obvious heart attack in another patient, and spinal meningitis in another.

Discussion: Frontline Episode About For Profit Schools

2010-05-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, PBS's "Frontline" aired an episode about for-profit schools like The University of Phoenix.

Not Quite Ave Maria, but Getting There.

(Ironically, I could not watch it when it first aired. I was working at a temp job, and all I have is a VCR when it comes to recording television. I'm still miles away from getting a DVR, and am probably further from having a DVR in my lifetime thanks to the debt of advanced schooling).

Frankly, I'm not sure what compels people to choose University of Phoenix over the local university or community college, although its not as mysterious as people who would choose ITT Tech over a community college.

I knew a person who went to ITT Tech nearly two decades ago. He couldn't find the promised "good job" with the amazing "skills" that they taught him. He defaulted on his student loans. The government garnished his wages, and it was no small cry of victory when he finally paid off his loans.

One of the more interesting parts of the "Frontline" piece is the explanation about how schools hide the default rates on loans. Schools like University of Phoenix boast a repayment rate of 90%. According to one interviewee, the schools lobbied Congress to define a default as failure to pay WITHIN two years of going into repayment.

That means if you get in trouble four years after you went into repayment, you don't count as a statistic. Therefore, the populace at large is led to believe that college is still a great investment. Otherwise, how else would everybody get the money to make those payments of hundreds of dollars per month?

It is interesting, isn't it? I keep hearing statistics that over 40% of student loans are currently not being paid for some reason or other, but I'll bet the vast majority of schools boast a 90%+ repayment rate just like University of Phoenix.

I suppose a scenario can play out like this:

When you reach the end of your six month grace period, you will probably not have a job. You can ask for a deferment which will give you another six months to look for a job. In the meantime, hundreds of dollars continue to pile on your unpaid loans. At that point, you will probably find something menial and start repayment....which, in your mind, is OK because you are new in the job market and you're young which means that you don't have major expenses like a house or family. A few years later, you morph into a true adult with obligations. The car breaks down. You have a child. Your rent increases.

Your salary, however, stagnates. You might get a cost of living raise, but it only covers inflation of what you were already buying. The "upward mobility" that you thought was going to come thanks to your college degree doesn't exist. Your superiors are holding onto their jobs because there is nowhere to go, and there are cuts everywhere else. Those two years you spent working as a receptionist in a doctor's office is not going to count for crap in jumping careers to "what you majored in" because they can already find somebody with years of relevant job experience to fill that spot. Your salary won't increase to take into account for the fact that you need to feed others in the household.

That is...IF you get to keep your job. They may run you off from your job, and that point, if you slip up and miss a payment in the melee, you can't defer your loans unless you are in "good standing."

But then, the first payment you miss won't count as a default. You will be "delinquent" for a while. I'm not sure where the magical threshold appears, but the chances are, this shit storm won't hit until well after the two year "statistic" period is over. You'll try to keep up as much as you can in the beginning because you have heard how the Student Loan People are just like King John's tax collectors in the newest "Robin Hood" movie where they go through the countrysides and pillage their own citizens for their last penny. After a while, it's too overwhelming for most of those people to keep up with and that's when they shut down.

More than a few of those people become so embittered for being sold a shit sandwich that they just quit paying.

Not that I advocate not paying, but what does it truly say about this great country when the education machine is trying desperately hard to hide the fact that student loans are being defaulted upon at an incredible rate?

"Oh, we don't need changes in the bankruptcy laws! See the statistics? Over 90% repayment rate! YOU are the only one who can't pay back your loans! And why is that? YOU are a deadbeat! You should try something like getting a roommate and stop eating as much. Try remaining sedentary as you may hurt yourself and need medical attention (which is expensive) and avoid expenses like the occasional cup of coffee from Starbucks. We know that you went to school to 'better' your standard of living, but seriously....coffee? WTF? As a side note, schools do not charge unconscionable rates of tuition because the students are obviously doing well if they can take on a loan payment of a few hundred dollars and still live not live in a cardboard box."

What I want to know is, how did the schools sell this to Congress?

"Hey, could you limit your statistics on student loan defaults to the first couple of years or so after repayment?"

"That's a weird request. Why?"

"No particular reason."

"Come on! There must be some reason."

"Defaults that happen later on are obviously for some other reason than the cost of tuition. Instead of remaining childless and living in a bad neighborhood and working three jobs to pay us back, that person obviously chose to have a life, which is highly irresponsible."

"Sounds reasonable."

Stories Wanted: Asking For Your Old Job Back

2010-05-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

Since there are many people kicking around here who had established careers before law school, I'm interested to know who went back to their "old" line of work and how they handled questions about why they went to law school.

I knew a few people in law school who were non-traditional and had other lines of work. Mostly, they did stuff like consulting, running their own business, or were involved in the health field where they could pull the occasional shift on nights or weekends while they were in law school. I haven't really run into anybody who had a mediocre past where they could say, "well, at least I could get my old job being a receptionist back."

Advice? How does one get document review gigs?

2010-05-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to join your ranks. Not because I'm hoping for matching decoder rings and to be invited to your weddings, but because I discovered places in my hometown that have document review gigs.

I interviewed with a staffing agency a month ago. I sent another email to follow up, but I haven't heard anything else even though I saw stuff posted on Craigslist from them.

Is there a particular way to handle these agencies so that I get jobs? Do I have to call them on a regular basis? I'm trying not to annoy them or anything.