I once violently up-chucked on over-cooked Goose and Rice…and I feel it coming on again.
Former Boston slugger Jim Rice is often asked to talk about the Red Sox. After all, he does serve as the pre- and post-game analyst for some of the games on the New England Sports Network.
It’s pretty clear, however, despite his continued association with the game, he’s no longer all that enamored with it.
...“The game is still the same (but) the players have changed. There are no fundamentals in the game anymore,” Rice said. “That’s why I really enjoyed the game was because of the fundamentals. We had to do fundamentals. If you didn’t know the fundamentals, you weren’t playing.”
It’s one of the reasons why Rice, who played for the Sox from 1974-89, is not still in a baseball uniform as a coach. He did try his hand at it from 1992-94 as a roving batting coach for the Red Sox organization, and then was the hitting instructor for the big league team from 1995-2000.
Don’t expect him to be back in the dugout anytime soon, however.
“I don’t want to do it because guys are not subject to change,” Rice said. “If you went back to giving guys one- or two-year contracts, it’s a different story. When you give guys five-, six-, seven-, 10-year contracts, they don’t have to change. Their money is in the bank. And if the thing doesn’t go right, who do they blame?”
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Isn't some of this on professors though? My wife and I were both pretty shocked at how lax the standards were in our different Masters programs. Homework is turned in late - no big deal. Grades can be changed as long as you have a conversation with the professor. Students ask for all of the things you list because professors will accommodate them, so why not ask for the moon? And why work hard when they kid sleeping next to you will likely get a passing grade because professors are loathe to flunk kids out?
This. I agree there are lots of stupid kids uncurious about the world. There are also a lot of stupid, uncurious people YOUR age and MY age. Just turn on any cable news network to find evidence of that.
It's not just the parents. A few years ago I taught legal writing at a top-tier law school, where we were required to grade on a curve centered on B+: out of a class of 12, I was allowed to give two A/A- grades. The expressions on these kids' faces when I explained all that - and the subsequent whining and grade-grubbing - were just pathetic. Especially once I saw their (general lack of) writing skills put into action. A couple of them worked hard and genuinely improved over the semester, but mostly they seemed to believe that Mommy's Perfect Little Snowflake was already just fine and would like a top grade right now, please.
EDIT: as an adjunct, I didn't have an office at the school, but at the end of every class I reminded the students that they had my email & phone number, and should contact me if they wanted to arrange a meeting or discuss an assignment - before class, after class, weekends, whenever. Not one of them ever took me up on it, although several did find time to complain in evaluations about me being "unavailable" outside class hours.
The operative words there are "paying attention", and they apply just as well to adults. The problem now is that there are so many mindless but entertaining things to divert our attention and prevent our minds from focusing.
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Things may have been different for people of Harveys generation, where you either were married with a job by the age of 14 or you died of tuberculosis,
Or more likely, wound up on a March of Dimes poster stamp. If cellphones had existed in the days before the Salk vaccine, every circuit in New York City would have broken down from the calls between anxious mothers and their children in upstate Summer camps.
Spending one's entire life in a continuously networked world is the new generation gap. Definitely Future Shock-y where things change before we have a chance to understand impact and best practices of them.
This continuous-network generation is also a generation that grew up with constrained civil liberties and indefinite war. I don't know how that bodes.
How about things changing before I've had the chance to absorb the previous change? :(
A friend and I made some gunpowder when we were 13 or so; we were going to make a cannon out of some old galvanized pipe. Gunpowder (at least our version of it) was easy enough to make; we just ground up some charcoal briquets and purchased the other two ingredients, sulfur and potassium nitrate, at the local drug store. What we didn't realize was that gunpowder needs to be compressed in order to explode, otherwise it just burns rather slowly. We decided to burn the gunpowder we made to see what would happen. As I recall we put a bunch of it on a tree stump in my backyard, lit the fuse and hid behind the garage. What happened was the gunpowder did burn and created a huge amount of noxious smoke. What also happened was that my mother got extremely angry at me for filling the house with smoke. Youth, what a concept.
This comment is funny because the thread was making me think about a NYT article that appeared a year or two ago about how summer camps deal with the age of the helicopter parent. Many now have a fulltime employee whose job is just to deal with nervous and angry parents, a position which never existed before. The kids are usually supposed to have a clean break from their parents - no phone calls, no computers, just letters. And kids learning to deal with problems on their own is sort of the point of summer camp ... there's a bully? You're scared of the dark? Can't run to mommy. Deal with it kid.
But many parents encourage and enable their children to break the rules by sneaking them extra cellphones (literally giving a kid two phones so one suspicion is lifted after the first is found) and then that leads to the parents learning about these problems and getting all up in the business of the camp - calling to demand that their child is moved to another cabin, or whatever. It sounds like a nightmare for the camp administrators.
I was a camper and then counselor in the 90s, just before the cellphone and email booms were able to make a dent in the life of our camp. But we did have other modern problems - the parents who decided that summer camp was a great opportunity to take their kid off of Ritalin, for example.
I used to. It just changed the question to "you're reading in a bar? Really?"
I love my Nook. I don't have the color one just the regular E-Ink version and it's wonderful. The best part of it is when I go on vacation rather than bringing 7-8 books with me I just bring the device, it makes life so much easier and as you note it does feel roughly like a real book in terms of size.
Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?
It all went downhill after Jack Morris retired.
I haven't darkened the door of a bar in ages (as I've whined before, Crohn's means that I haven't been able to drink even a coke in years, much less anything alcoholic), but the last time I remember being in one, about 11 years ago in Mobile, I had a really good read along ... something from the library (which is to say I have no idea whatsoever of what the title might've been) about the early days of paleontology. I'm pretty sure I had a much better time with my book than the people I was with the ambiance & clientele, since they gave the place -- which had been talked up by our hosts as the greatest! place! ever! -- extremely withering reviews.
Some people like to people watch and being in a room all the time can get claustrophobic or if you've got a couple of hours to kill and want to nurse a beer or two instead of drinking coffee.
Jim Rice had 5 successful sacrifice bunts in his career, perfectly matching his 5 unsuccessful sac bunts.
I live alone so as much as I enjoy my solitude sometimes I just like ambient noise and social activity. The funny thing is I rarely drink, I usually get a diet coke and something to eat but I always tip very well and go to places regularly so bartenders don't seem to mind.
The other thing is when I'm at a bar I'm able to relax a bit differently. At home I'm always thinking I should do some laundry or organize my file cabinet or some such thing. If I'm at the bar I'm out and can just relax and do my thing.
Sure, some professors aid and abet this. But my wife regularly flunks (or they drop the class) up to 40% of her intro Chem students. They still don't study. The ones who've failed before, and are repeating, don't do the work either. Somehow they think they'll learn by osmosis. Lots of them then take the class in summer school at another college (thinking it's the prof's fault); they fail there too.
EDIT: as an adjunct, I didn't have an office at the school, but at the end of every class I reminded the students that they had my email & phone number, and should contact me if they wanted to arrange a meeting or discuss an assignment - before class, after class, weekends, whenever. Not one of them ever took me up on it, although several did find time to complain in evaluations about me being "unavailable" outside class hours.
My wife gets exactly the same crap. She has 6 hours of office hours every week, and is available after class. Students don't show up. They make appointments and then still don't show up. But, the day before the exam, they want he to come in on her one off-day to tutor them.
Mine isn't but I've got a little battery-powered reading light that works quite nicely.
The other thing is when I'm at a bar I'm able to relax a bit differently. At home I'm always thinking I should do some laundry or organize my file cabinet or some such thing. If I'm at the bar I'm out and can just relax and do my thing.
I get that, but, why a bar and not a coffee shop, diner or restaurant?
Q: Does the school administration then support the prof?
A: Yes, to precisely the extent that the prof pays the administrators' salaries.
Restaurants don't work because I still feel isolated sitting at a table alone. No real reason for not a coffee shop. I think the proximity to people I get in a bar is probably part of the appeal. Sit there, read my book, watch a game and let the conversation go on and if I wind up chatting, so be it.
A: Yes, to precisely the extent that the prof pays the administrators' salaries.
She's never had any problem with the Administration, and now she has tenure.
I'm just shocked at how the students don't learn. I mean, you don't do the homework or pay attention, and you get 30% on the first test. Do they come for help? Do they start turning in the homework? Nope, they think it'll magically turn around. They repeat this for the whole semester, get an F, and then rinse and repeat in summer school, or the next Fall.
I don't think this has anything to do with society comma the breakdown of. It's just that 19-year-olds are 19 years old. That's not new.
I don't think this has anything to do with society, the breakdown of. It's just that 19-year-olds are 19 years old. That's not new.
Except that I'm talking to teachers who've been at it between 8 and 25 years, and they say it's getting much worse.
I eat at restaurants alone occasionally, but I never eat alone at a table. Only at the bar. Where, again, a book can come in handy.
Raise the standards of admission, cut the amount of kids to gain entrance to school, and remove subsidized school loans and suddenly you'll see colleges become the home of the best and brightest. Nothing will have really changed other than the deadweight was removed.
EDIT: To put some further words on it, there is a strong tendency among humans to believe that the latest generation is a moral disaster and society is breaking down. Change often reads as decline to people who aren't the agents of that change. I tend to doubt it's a good reading.
I'm just shocked at how the students don't learn. I mean, you don't do the homework or pay attention, and you get 30% on the first test. Do they come for help? Do they start turning in the homework? Nope, they think it'll magically turn around. They repeat this for the whole semester, get an F, and then rinse and repeat in summer school, or the next Fall.
That's because, fundamentally, colleges and universities have been taken over by the MBAs and the marketers like everything else over the past roughly three decades. And because, concomitantly, no institution can be discussed anymore other than through the lens and in the lingo of the marketer and the MBA.
Thus, the university is no longer a unique institution where less experienced and less knowledgable, still impressionable people go to learn things from wiser, more experienced people -- with the hard work and built-in "power" relationship and "imbalance" inherent to the enterprise -- but instead a place to be "branded" and marketed, and where the students are first and foremost not students, but instead "consumers."
The same thing has happened in law and health care and, assuredly, other things.
(*) The more "empowered," the better.
So do I, but someday the change might actually be decline and the reading might be right.
The decline really isn't in the latest generation anyway, but in more adult generations.
* Even if they increasingly have the modern issues of not understanding non-Wikipedia research and such.
I actually doubt the first part.
They are "more accomplished" b/c schools now demand fancy resumes, so HS students focus on "accomplishments" that are usually mostly window dressing.
I'm probably among the last generation that could get into Ivy league and equivalent schools based on pure academics. All I had going for me was GPA/SAT/GRE.
Now that the emphasis is on 63 clubs/sports and made-up charities, and how you're saving the world, you will automatically get more "accomplished" students (i.e. students who play the game and burnish their resumes) and fewer really bright students who rather be reading, or solving equations, or in the lab, than joining clubs and starting charity drive that hit up their parents friends.
If I ran Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/etc., I'd return to the admission exam as the sole determinant of admission. It would be self-designed and administered. 3 Parts, weeding down the applicant pool: 1) multiple choice general aptitude and subject knowledge (SAT/GRE-esque) to get me to ~15,000, 2) Essay exam to get me to 5,000, 3) oral exam to get me my 2000 offers.
Yes, the relationship of the student to the school has changed, become more of a customer/service provider dynamic, and largely due to the actions of the schools themselves. Granted young people are lazy and feckless and lack respect for all that was good and right when we were kids, but I think the fact that colleges are so absurdly expensive combined with the devaluation of a college degree have put tremendous pressure on college kids to distinguish themselves through good grades. But earning good grades takes work, so the kids do what anybody who's paying a boatload for a service that's not making them happy does; complain loudly until the service provider makes you happy.
The interesting thing is that the increased cost of college is almost entirely driven by administration. In the last 30 years, the number of faculty per student hasn't risen, faculty pay hasn't exceeded inflation, and endowments have grown.
What has gone up is the number of highly paid administrators. One article I saw is that the administrator:faculty ratio has gone from ~1:5 to 1:1. And the administrators usually make much more than average faculty do.
This comment is funny because the thread was making me think about a NYT article that appeared a year or two ago about how summer camps deal with the age of the helicopter parent. Many now have a fulltime employee whose job is just to deal with nervous and angry parents, a position which never existed before. The kids are usually supposed to have a clean break from their parents - no phone calls, no computers, just letters. And kids learning to deal with problems on their own is sort of the point of summer camp ... there's a bully? You're scared of the dark? Can't run to mommy. Deal with it kid.
Yeah, that is kind of pathetic, but in the case I was referring to there actually were polio epidemics that broke out in those camps every Summer, not in every one of them but enough to give city parents cause to freak out. When I was five, one broke out in the only Summer camp I ever went to, and my Mom was up there on the first train to get me the hell out of there and back to Manhattan. Turned out I never even had so much as a fever, but when you've actually seen friends your age in braces, you can begin to understand your parents' reaction.
The change is real, it's annoying in many ways, but it will still take some time to know whether it's a disaster. The good students are still there, and to this point, having the not so good students around doesn't seem to be keeping them from learning, developing, and achieving, or at least I hope it isn't. I haven't taught for a couple of years, but I always had three or four students who seemed really bright and motivated and so forth. The rest weren't very motivated, which is sort of understandable since it wasn't a major class, and I could tell that some of them were smart and some of them weren't. The ones who were smart did okay and the ones who weren't didn't. There are still fabulous young scholars emerging, but of course the youngest of them were undergraduates about when I was, and things were quite a bit different when I was an undergraduate than they are now. On the other hand, I went to a relatively small northeastern school (though it was a state school), so maybe that's why things were different. It's hard to say whether we paid attention in class, did our reading, and spent serious time on our homework for cultural reasons or technological reasons. There was no wireless internet, and very few students were carrying laptops around. But there was also a low student-to-faculty ratio, and for that and other reasons, it did seem more like an education than a product. I'm not sure I could say the same thing about the atmosphere at other places I've seen. As well as good young scholars, there are a lot of what I would call "educated idiots" emerging, but I don't expect that's a new development--in fact, I'm absolutely sure it isn't.
Then you must have attended the only elite school without legacy admissions or favoritism towards athletes or applicants from underrepresented geographic regions. If such a school has ever existed, I'd sure like to know about it. I know damn well that Duke has never been one of them, certainly not for the past 89 years since it got its foundation money and became Big Time.
Yep. Many universities have spent lavishly on various construction projects as well, but administrative bloat is where a great deal of those high tuitions wind up. I hesistate to call it a driver, since I'm not 100% on the causation, but it's certainly where a lot of the money is going.
I attended Harvard. I had no legacy, was from suburban NY, had no sports beyond JV baseball, and a trivial number of clubs/activities (most of which I joined junior year for resume padding).
At that time, I would guess that ~40% of the class was there on pure academics.
It's the driver. Those are the people that run the schools, the system is run for their benefit. If Mr. Dean of Students now has 8 Asst. Deans under him making $100-$150K, well then by Jove he needs to make $300K for his vast managerial expertise.
One of the "other reasons" in the antipenultimate line of my post is the fact that the facilities at my school ranged from relatively old to downright ancient. It made it feel like a school, damn it, not a resort. They've built a bunch of stuff since I was there, naturally.
My take is that the money comes first, and then you have the question of how to distribute it - to administration, to faculty, to non-faculty workers, to students, to building projects and endowment growth. And the administration are the ones who actually get to make those decisions. The faculty have some structural power, unlike non-faculty workers and students, but the administrators generally see themselves as directly opposed to faculty in a small-scale class conflict, so the faculty gets overrun. And then pretty much all the money goes to the administration, as well as to building projects and endowment growth, which enhance the status of the university and the administration without giving money to other competing groups.
Some of the tuition growth is driven by the administration seeing they can arrogate even more money to themselves, but I think that's more secondary.
Yeah, but most colleges are non-for-profits and state institutions. They didn't have any imperative to respond to increased demand by raising costs. They could have just expanded enrollment, or become more selective.
The only reason to raise tuition was to enrich administrators. As you rightly note, the faculty got bupkus.
In a way, it's very similar to the governance problem you have in corporate America. Except at tightly held companies, CEOs and top-execs run corporations almost exclusively for their own benefit; shareholders, employees and customers are an after-thought. They are so insulated from hostile takeovers, that they have similarly unchecked power, and have responded exactly the same way.
I think there's an overlapping issue here in that administrators started seeing themselves as market actors in this way. There has been a cultural change in universities toward seeing the university as a business selling a good to consumers, and this has been driven mostly at the administration level. I don't think they believe this hypocritically, just in order to enhance their own wealth. They also see it as what a university is or should be. It happens, like so many ideologies, to correlate rather nicely with policies that expand the wealth and power of administrators.
My situation was quite similar to Snapper's. I had slightly more on my "resume", but I strained to fill out the Ivy applications. MIT (and especially CalTech) applications, on the other hand, seemed to be written with me in mind. In the end I decided to go to an Ivy league school
I could have gone to Harvard or any Ivy League school if it wasn't for the vicious discrimination against students due to arbitrary things like "grades" and "lack of tuition money". Those were cruel times. Thank God for Meridian JC.
I think the biggest driver is easy access to student loans. A college degree has been desirable for a long time, since before WWII by far, but often people couldn't afford to go. Now, almost any idiot can get student loans if they want them, which freed the universities to jack up their prices.
I generally agree with this.
Not sure I agree with this. It might have been the case 20-30 years ago when they were first figuring out that they could keep raising their prices because they were floating on a huge pile of easy financing, but once they figured it out, you'd have to assume that university administrators are better people than other humans for it to be true. I don't believe that they are.
Did gov't support really go down, or did the schools just decide they needed a whole bunch more "operations"?
My sense is that gov't support has risen continuously, just not at the rate that schools were expanding expenses.
The only reason to raise tuition was to enrich administrators. As you rightly note, the faculty got bupkus.
That isn't true. It is almost impossible to stay the same once you've decided to not change. These colleges and universities are competing with other schools for employees and for students as well. A college can say we only want 500 students and we want those students to be of X quality but if the school doesn't have the faculty that the students consider to be of proper quality nor have the facilities that prospective students deem to be acceptable then that school isn't going to get students of X quality. So to simply maintain one's standards one needs to grow with the times. One needs to buy and build the facilities that are necessary for top notch education or middle of the road or whatever level it is you want to be.
Then you must have attended the only elite school without legacy admissions or favoritism towards athletes or applicants from underrepresented geographic regions. If such a school has ever existed, I'd sure like to know about it. I know damn well that Duke has never been one of them, certainly not for the past 89 years since it got its foundation money and became Big Time.
I attended Harvard. I had no legacy, was from suburban NY, had no sports beyond JV baseball, and a trivial number of clubs/activities (most of which I joined junior year for resume padding).
At that time, I would guess that ~40% of the class was there on pure academics.
Based on my classmates at Duke, I'd tend to say that sounds about right. But that wasn't what I was reading into your initial comment.
And the reason that "pure academics" can't get you into an Ivy or Duke nowadays is because the application pool is so much deeper than it was then. I went to what at the time was rated one of the top public schools in the country (Wilson in D.C.), and I doubt if we had more than at most two dozen grads from my class attending Ivies or their then sister schools (Radcliffe, Pembroke, Barnard, etc.). Second level schools like Duke got another couple of dozen, but even when you added the ones who went to elite undergrad colleges like Swarthmore and the best state universities (Berkeley, Cal Tech, Michigan) it probably didn't add up to more than about a sixth of the class. Something like 98% of them wound up in one college or another, but the majority of them went to schools like Maryland, AU and GW, which at the time at least were considered nothing but party schools that were virtually open admissions to anyone with the tuition money.
And the reason for the explosion in applications to the elite schools is obvious: People---parents---are obsessed with the thought that you need a degree from one of them to get a job that will enable you to achieve a decent standard of living. With cookie cutter 1 or 2 bedroom "luxury" apartments going for $3,000 a month in cities like Washington---triple or more what they were in constant dollars since the 70's---it's hard to blame either the applicants or their parents from being cold bloodedly realistic about their futures. Anyone who doesn't think that would-be middle class jobseekers aren't being squeezed on both ends these days by a combination of the tight job market and housing costs is simply being in denial.
And maybe none of this applies to young people in Iowa or Kansas City, but that isn't where they're gravitating to these days. Blame this sad development on any scapegoat you want, from selfish Baby Boomers to illegal immigrants to affirmative action, but it ain't making the problem go away.
But, I don't think facilities are the cost driver. Most facilities are funded through fund raising campaigns, not through operating income.
And anyone who thinks taking on massive debt for a degree of questionable value is a solution is insane.
An expensive college degree is practically worthless to someone of average intelligence (if they even graduate, which is probably less than 50:50). They can never compete with the oodles of bright people with the exact same degrees for the truly high-end jobs.
JonesesHarvards and the Stanfords if you want to keep your degree properly branded.Went to Eastern Market and bought 3 kinds of protein. A whole chicken ($7.50), a NY Strip ($15.00), and two Pork Porterhouses ($11.50). A vegetable stalls I bought shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, green beans, parsnips, carrots, red potatoes, yukon gold potatoes, brussel sprouts, onions, and shallots. Picked up some chicken stock and beef stock as well as had some leftover herbs and citrus fruits in my fridge.
Saturday featured a roasted whole chicken stuffed with sage, rosemary, thyme, garlic, and citrus fruits, wrapped in bacon. Served with brussel sprouts, raisins, and bacon (from the roasted chicken), rosemary roasted potatoes, and a mustard sauce. Drank a bottle of Steele Pinot Noir with it.
Was so full from that that I decided to postpone my steak dinner until tonight. So yesterday I had pulled chicken tacos for lunch and then ate the rest of the leftovers for dinner.
This morning featured a scallion and stewed tomato omelet with avocado and monterey jack cheese. Tonight will be the NY Strip steak with a mushroom red wine jus, smashed yukon gold potatoes with sour cream and scallions, and sauteed green beans and shallots. I've got a 2004 Simi Alexander Valley Cab I think I'll try with it.
Tomorrow will be pork porterhouses with mango salsa, roasted parsnips and carrots, and black beans and rice with roasted peppers.
Not counting the wine I think I spent less than 70 dollars on what will probably amount to 7 or so meals.
And anyone who thinks taking on massive debt for a degree of questionable value is a solution is insane.
Perhaps so, but then you and I were lucky enough not to be entering college in a time when such debts were necessary to take on. The total tuition and housing cost at Duke when I was there was $16,000 a year in 2012 dollars. That's still a steep chunk of change, but it's a third of what it is at the Duke of today.
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But, I don't think facilities are the cost driver. Most facilities are funded through fund raising campaigns, not through operating income.
As are those administrative costs. There's no magic bullet that can scare the genie back into the bottle.
Do you have a citation on that? I would be careful, it's easy for the administration to hide admin expenses under other categories.
I'm mostly taking people's word for it. I don't know the actual answer to this question. My understanding is that government support for most state universities has gone down in inflation-adjusted dollars, but I haven't personally researched any figures.
Do you have a citation on that?
Sure. It's not that these costs aren't rising and aren't bloated, it's that they're not disproportionately so any more than they've been in previous eras.
I would be careful, it's easy for the administration to hide admin expenses under other categories.
No doubt, but what aspects of university life or government / corporate life does this insight not also apply to? The athletic facilities at Michigan or LSU? The Department of Health and Human Services? The Pentagon? The tax returns of the Fortune 500?
The funny thing is, many "working class" jobs are hiring, for very handsome salaries. My wife made more her first year of nursing than I ever have in one year, and I'm ten years out of law school. I have a friend who runs a manufacturing company, and he has guys in his shop just a few years out of high school, with no college education, making $75,000 as machinists. But our parents generation poo-poohed working with your hands because in their days, those jobs didn't pay as well (or have the prestige) as lawyers or bankers or academics.
SABERMETRICS ARE TO BLAME, MR. PRESIDENT
That all sounds wonderful. I've recently started doing weight watchers (down 30 pounds!) and one of the unexpected benefits has been the amount of food I'm making for myself. Not only am I eating about 8 zillion times healthier but I love to cook and preparing meals for myself has been boatloads of fun.
Link doesn't work, but I'll take your word for it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html
This link says that:
It may be true that Admin cost is only 20-30% of total costs, but if it used to be 10%, then it could still be the disproportionate driver of the increase.
No doubt, but what aspects of university life or government / corporate life does this insight not also apply to? The athletic facilities at Michigan or LSU? The Department of Health and Human Services? The Pentagon? The tax returns of the Fortune 500?
Everywhere. Our society has become very corrupt. The culture has shifted perceptibly to individual achievement and rights, and away from collective bonds and responsibility.
The funny thing, is that even the collectivists have become more individualistic.
I guess this is supposed to be a low dollar total? Granted, your food is a lot classier than mine, but right now I'm living on ~$45 per week for total food.
Compared to going to a restaurant it is. It could have been significantly cheaper if I decided on different proteins and didn't shop at Eastern Market for the protein and vegetables. The pork cost me something like $4.89 a pound, the steak $19 a pound and the chicken $2 a pound. I could have gone to Safeway and paid $2 a pound for the pork, $1.29 a pound for the chicken, a $3.99 a pound for top round. Vegetables would have cost me something like 25 to 30% less as well.
I probably consume more calories when I make my own own food as compared to going out and eating.
Well, maybe it's parents' "obsession" per se. I don't think so, though. I think it is about trying to improve the odds for their kids. I am in corporate America, and as part of my job, I have been involved in on-campus recruiting for many years, for two different companies. My companies can't go to all campuses for recruiting, nor do we need to in order to hire enough people for the openings we have. We will go to the schools where we will get the best ROI on our dollar invested. The school selectivity aids us--it is simply easier to fill an interviewer's schedule with qualified students at a top school than at an average school.
The qualified students do EXIST at other large universities, but it's very hard to a) reach them with marketing in a pool of tens of thousands and b) assuming you do get a lot of resumes, conduct a low-yield process to sift through all them to find the right ones.
If you were to look at the caliber of employment opportunites available through on-campus recruiting at various schools, I have little doubt that it would be highly correlated with the school's long-term reputation as an elite institution (which I would posit has some grounding in merit). I think you'd find the same thing in terms of grad-school opportunities offered to a given undergrad school's students.
My own kids aren't college-age yet, but I will definitely encourage them to go to the most selective school they can get into, that also offers a degree in the fields they want to study.
Full disclosure: I fit Snapper's self-description (thank goodness for grants and student loans):
And....I ALSO met my wife in a Chicago bar. Perhaps the problems people have with bars isn't the bars, it's the city.
McCoy is a better cook than I am, but in the past two days I took four scrawny rainbow trout a friend gave me and made a huge vat of stock, made oyster chowder out of half the stock, froze the other half, and just ate fish tacos with the poached trout. Four people are eating for 2 days on that exercise.
And reading in bars = yes. I never go into bars unless I am traveling, but when I do, I bring a book. They are impersonal spaces full of white noise, and reading with a good drink at one's elbow is a great pleasure of life. For that matter, I bring books to ballgames and read between innings or during other commercial breaks. I am getting too old to care whether this is cool or not. Before the game, or during a rain delay, I like to sit in a bar at the Ballpark and read. So there.
I started laughing so hard that I cried around #60 or 70.
(Well, to be fair, finding out TFA wasn't an Onion piece re: Rice & fundamentals made it an easy trip to Laugh Street.
Now known as LOL Street?)
I have to txt my friends and tell them to read this thread.
I'm sure there is. Like I said, I wasn't deploring that generation (never remotely suggested it, afaict). Outside my family the 17-25 cohort doesn't seem any more or less bright than they ever were. I remember at that age being appalled at what a lot of my cohort was into. The only difference, now versus then, seems to be in attention spans.
Also, I tend to date women 20 to 30 years younger than I am, and there's no shortage of bright, quirky, interesting women out there.
I don't think we're too far from a future where an expensive college degree is worthless to many people of above-average intelligence. With an increase in the availability of high-quality open-learning environments, I suspect self-education will become more compelling and recognized by employers.
Maybe I'm a little too technology-centric, but I think the ability for the talented to demonstrate their skill to a large number of potential employers has never been higher.
Foul!
I'm from the NE and when I was working on my master's thesis all but lived in bars and coffee shops (the latter which, w/o alcohol, you'd have to think is a tougher place to socialize than a bar), and conversations with strangers who became anything from friendly acquaintances to good friends and gf wasn't at all unusual. It all depends on your attitude (and coming across as the right kind of friendly--open, but not too open; not needy or overeager; enjoy listening but not to your detriment...), but it's not hard at all to strike up conversations. As for the poster who mentioned women, that's easy enough. If she looks interesting and smiles at you twice, go talk to her and see what she's about.
??
I made no claim for anything beyond the very small number of people I mentioned in post 28. Since when does describing a handful of individuals involve "pointing fingers"?
Well, sure. Nothing whatever to do with what I wrote, though.
Well, sure, but I was talking about eight people specifically, none of whom take an interest in anything meaningful. The one thing I can extract from this is that the BTF generation is unable to read in context when there are straw men to be whupped.
What's weird about this is that my young nieces, nephews, and cousins know how to manipulate the digital world for the sake of entertainment, but not to research, or study, or engage the world. People have always found ways to piss their lives away on trivial pursuits (like making rude cave paintings, rereading dime novels, or posting on baseball sites) but it just seems more completely what their lives are about. None of them act like work can ever be something genuinely rewarding. It's just something you have to do until the next Hobbit movie comes out.
Does it count that I only have one to keep my evil sister at bay? I refuse to give her my home number any longer, and this way I can claim I only get reception when I go into town about once a week.
What?
This implies that art is inherently 'artsy-fartsy'. What is there to say to that? I also mentioned things as simple and satisfying as cooking a meal. One doesn't have to be interested in art, science, literature, the meaning of life, interrelatedness, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, the nature of love, the role of government, the question of extraterrestrial life, Bracewell probes, or making short films in order to take a little pride in knowing how to make a good cassoulet for company. Or, just see McCoy's posts for the obvious pleasure he takes in preparing interesting, enjoyable meals.
"As an intellectual 25-year-old man, I am interested in any and all early-20s intellectual nieces who need a trophy husband with a JD but no employment prospects."
I have another one in that age range who graduated with honors from the Manhattan School of Visual Arts. At least she make a fine cartoon of your predicament, and she is cool as hell.
also one who is an enviro college student, another who is in nursing honors fast track, and another who is sassier than Mackey Sasser.....
Don't see that happening anytime soon. As someone else already mentioned businesses like respected colleges because it concentrates the talent pool into easy to reach/low risk centers. If you move away from that to self education then the risks to businesses go up as well as costs as they now have to spend much more time, money, and energy finding qualified applicants.
After 4 days of eating massive amounts of proteins and carbs while doing little moving around I simply did not have the stomach for a 1 pound pork porterhouse tonight. So I stuck them in the freezer and settled on pulled pork tacos.
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