> College admissions could really do with some sort of objective criteria
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.
> If your work harder than anyone else you'll still not get recognized because you're not claimed to be smart, cultured, pretty or interesting enough.
Err, that's not at all what she said or even implied.
That's the point: they didn't work harder than anyone else applying to Harvard. They can't make decisions based on GPA/ACT/SAT scores, because everyone has the same top scores.
Hypothetically, and probably not that far off: So you have 10,000 applicants for a class of 2,000 and 8,000 of those applicants are valedictorians with extremely high SAT/ACT scores and they've managed to check all the regular boxes (played sports, instruments, etc.). How are you going to cull 6,000 applicants?
It was a similar story in Seattle. Frequently you'd call both yellow cab and orange cab (the two major cab companies) because you only expected one of them to show up within a reasonable time frame (which of course only exacerbated the problem).
> Post teens were adults with adult incomes but not adult responsibilities, like kids, for quite a few years, usually.
Hmm, not sure I agree with that really.
I agree with most of your sentiment about elimination of entry-level jobs and extended education, but I think the natural response (and the response we see) is for women to have children at older ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age).
It used to be the case that you'd graduate high school and start having children in your early 20s, so I'm not sure I agree that there was ever a time when it was "socially acceptable" to be an adult with an adult income and no children for several years.
IIRC the federal government really doesn't offer plea bargains, right? And federal sentencing is pretty rigid, so he probably would have served ~80 years.
That's correct the USSG pretty much makes plea agreements non-viable because it doesn't allow the prosecutor to offer any substantial leniency on sentencing, mandatory minimums on pretty much every federal crime also make plea agreements pointless.
On the local level plea agreements are used to make prosecuting people cheaper, if you don't agree to it they'll pretty much fuck you up intentionally just to prove a point which is probably even worse than not having the ability to offer them in the first place.
> That's correct the USSG pretty much makes plea agreements non-viable because it doesn't allow the prosecutor to offer any substantial leniency on sentencing, mandatory minimums on pretty much every federal crime also make plea agreements pointless.
You are very wrong.
First of all, the majority of federal crimes do not have mandatory minimums. http://famm.org/Repository/Files/Chart%20All%20Fed%20MMs%202... is an exhaustive list of federal crimes with mandatory minimums. It's only a fraction of the total number of federal crimes.
More importantly, the effect of the Sentencing Guidelines was that it removed sentencing discretion from judges and gave it to prosecutors. That's because the sentencing range given by the guidelines is influenced by what charges the prosecutor brings, and the details of those charges such as quantity of drugs or amount of property damage. This gives the prosecutor enormous influence over the sentence.[1] (Edited to add: In the same way the prosecutor can influence whether a statutory minimum is triggered.)
Consequentially, the plea bargain rate in federal cases is about 97% whereas in states it is somewhat less.
[1] Technically, since U.S. v. Booker in 2005, the sentencing guidelines are only "advisory" so the judge can ignore them, but judges still mostly sentence according to the guidelines.
There's some real interesting ones in that mandatory minimum doc. For example, "Refusal to operate railroad or telegraph lines " which was created in 1888. You know there's an interesting story behind that one.
Walking sucks in the winter. It's never ridiculously cold (certainly not midwest or Canada cold), but windchill is frequent and kinda nasty if you have literally any skin exposed.
Especially in the outer boroughs (not so much in Manhattan), snow doesn't get cleaned up very quickly either. Walking can definitely be a bit of an obstacle course - ice, snow banks blocking the sidewalk, etc.
Anyway blah blah blah first world problems, just my perspective on it.
As a canadian, I find that unconvincing. For the last few years up until this July, my commute involved a 900m walk to the nearest subway stop (which I considered nice and short!) year-round. And yes, it took twice as long when there was 8-12" of fresh snow, which happened ib average every other week in winter.
Yeah, that sucks. If it takes you 12 minutes normally to walk 1 km (assuming 5 km/h, which is a normal walking speed), now it takes you 24 minutes to and from the station in the winter.
So you're spending 45 minutes a day just walking to and from the station. If the rest of your commute is 30 minutes (train + walking to work from train), you're commuting for nearly two hours (1:48) every day vs. 1:24 during the summer.
That's assuming you don't also walk slower from the train station to work, which would make it even more of a timesink.
If you lived right near the station, it would be 60 minutes every day, winter or summer.
I mean yeah, it's only an extra 30-60 minutes a day (and your point was really only about winter so we'll be fair and say 30 minutes a day), but shit, I'm not going to turn my nose up at that. I'd definitely pay a small premium to get that time back every single weekday.
In Montreal, I can count on the sidewalks being cleared well enough within 48 hours of a big storm and sort of cleared within 8h (< 2" snow, at least 16-20" wide path, basically one pass of the sidewalk plows.)
As I mentioned above, that's definitely not the case in the outer boroughs of New York (Manhattan in some cases too, depending on where you are, though I don't know that for certain).
There have been weeks at a time where I've had to walk in the street because the sidewalks were just inaccessible or sheets of ice, which makes proximity to the train station all the more important.
NYC gets a different kind of snow than Montreal. Plows just breeze through powder that hasn't been refrozen. Atlantic seaboard snow is a PITA to deal with.
> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals
Ehh, I mostly agree with your first point but I think it's kind of a pipe dream to think it could be otherwise. Go visit a public school in a place like Greenwich, CT and then go visit a public school in the Bronx. Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other.
Sure, Bill Gates's kids aren't going to public school probably even in Greenwich. Still, let's not pretend that the elite only go to private schools, or that they wouldn't congregate in wealthy areas to make public schools essentially private.
Inequalities will always exist as long as people can use their assets to gain advantages for themselves/their families, and trying to force it otherwise against an unwilling populace is likely to just exacerbate the problem in other ways (see: Suburban flight).
Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other.
Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one. There are other factors, of course, but are there any other industrialized nations where public funding of education is directly tied to parental wealth?
> Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one
Though if it wasn't for that it would be through a local school levy, or a fundraiser, or any number of other seemingly harmless methods of transferring money from parents to the school.
Even dumb ideas off the top of my head like "Wealthy parent A purchases 300 textbooks and donates them to the school so the school can spend that money on higher salaries for teachers" are probably legal ways for wealthy parents to supplement their local school.
Like a wise princess once said, "The more you tighten your grip, the more [wealthy parents] will slip through your fingers."
The US is not homogeneous in that regard. Many states give more funding to schools in poor towns than rich towns, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district in NJ. Hasn't had a measurable impact on reducing the performance disparity.
The real problems, whatever they are, run much deeper than local funding of schools. Focusing on funding is a red herring.
Yep. The problem with schools in poor neighborhoods is the students have to go to school with other poor kids. If money were the problem, D.C. public schools would be the best in the nation.
I don't think the problem is the government funding per se but the government operation, and the tying of attendance rights to location of residence. You could have a much better system while keeping government funding: "money follows the student". That is, you can send your kid to any school meeting the government's criteria, and that gets your subsidy.
Why won't we switch to that? Well, most homes owe a significant portion of their value to "being in a good school district" and most such homeowners have made a leveraged bet of most of their net worth in that home. Such reform would mean destroying that.
It would also mean schools trying to apply the same resegregation filters most parents want, at which point governments would have to adapt their criteria to stop that, and the arms races continues.
There was a statewide measure in Colorado in the last election that would (somewhat) equalize funding across school districts, taking money from rich areas and giving more to poor areas (meaning more than they get under the current system, not more money in aggregate).
This is, IMO, a very progressive idea, and I totally expected it to fail. What I didn't expect was how badly it failed in the one of the most progressive/liberal towns in the state: Boulder.
It seems that, while the people in Boulder talk about helping others, when it comes to potentially reducing the (granted, excellent) quality of the schools in their own back yard, they vote selfishly along with the rest.
Oh god, please don't do this. This is worse than "We decided to go a different direction," because at least that takes less time to read.
If you're not going to provide substantive feedback ("we felt like your performance on the nearest-neighbor problem was pretty rough and were looking for a more optimized solution") then just give the one liner and be done with it.
We get it: you're hamstrung because of legal liabilities. That's fine. Don't make it worse by making us read a paragraph that isn't going to be helpful for the future.
Ouch, this is clearly meant to be (at least somewhat) tongue-in-cheek. Calling it "drug abuse" is a little extreme unless you're familiar personally with the author.
It doesn't seem like it's affecting his life in an incredibly detrimental way, supposing that at some point when the hoopla of a book release dies down he stops drinking every night (and even then, the quantity consumed is an incredibly important component).
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.