But, but, the Tea Party is all about limiting government and getting back to Constitutional principles! Just like Clinton was impeached for lying, not getting a blowjob or being a Democrat.

Further proof that nothing pisses off the Right Wing more than the idea that poor people somehow just aren’t poor enough.  And, as always, their examples of Decadent Poor People always sound like something cooked up by Grandpa Simpson.

Uff, Taibbi sometimes makes some good points, but, as with Bill Maher, it’s overshadowed by his history of horrible misogyny…the following is from his book “The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia”:

[TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT]

“Then she broke down and told us what she really thought.

“We’d never given her any respect or credit.  We were glory hogs and obnoxious jerks.  Worst of all was our sexism.  Our sexism and sexual harassment of the Rissian female staff, as well as the sexism in our newspaper, was too much for her.  Watching us harass the young female staff had to be the most painful part—because we’d never, in a million years, have thought of harassing her.

“‘You know I’m not PC.  But there’s a limit.  You go too far.  You’re always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blow jobs.  It’s not funny.  They don’t think it’s funny,’ Kara complained.

“‘But…it IS funny,’ Matt said.

“We have been pretty rough on our girls.  We’d ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us.  We’d tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to perform unprotected anal sex with us.  Nearly every day, we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex.  That was a fixation of ours.  ‘Can I fuck you in the ass?  Huh?  I mean, without a rubber?  Is that okay?’  It was all part of the fun.  Fun that Kara was no part of.”

...and there’s a whole chapter on how bad American women have it in Russia because they’re so feminist and undesirable compared to Russian women:

“In order to survive, American women in Moscow try to adapt—at least those who want to keep a foot in the Darwinian lottery.  Some start pouring on makeup and dressing like the local sluts, but somehow that makes them even more pathetic.  Most get looser, much looser.”

Sure, that’s from a while ago, but to this day Taibbi often trashes male political figures he doesn’t like by comparing them to women: they’re pussies, they don’t have balls, etc.  Ick.

“We as Republicans need to realize that you can’t just cut off the welfare queen and balance the budget,” says Rand Paul, a Senate candidate in Kentucky….

What a god damned asshole. Seriously.

Racial and class resentments?  Massive logic fail?  Amorphous and incoherent resentments packaged into an amorphous and incoherent political movement?  Plastic grass roots?  A non-partisan political movement made up almost entirely of Republicans and Republicans-Who-Tell-People-They’re-Libertarians?  Multicultural rallies consisting of entitled white people from all over the US, some of whom like “soda”, some who like “pop”, and some who like “soda pop”?  People who like both kinds of music, Country and Western?  People who are attempting to correct the incredible wrongs committed against them by a Black President when he cut their taxes, worked to improve their healthcare, and kept the American Economy from becoming a full-fledged, all stops pulled out, depression?

It’s all good, as long as they Keep Fear Alive...

Ugh, ADHD is very very bad for writing… I’ve got this stack of story ideas in my head but at this rate the only way I’m ever going to get them written is using a ghost writers and a copy of Oblique Strategies…

Further evidence that the “Big Tent” Republican metaphor is the place they keep their enemies, not their friends.  The Big Tent is for all of the libruls and minorities - the real Republicans stay at the country club up the hill.

Lots of details in those emails from “Doctors.”

http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/urbanlegends/ht/urbanlegends.htm#

Urban legends usually toe a fine line between outlandishness and plausibility. Does the story seem a little suspect, yet believable? Was it told to you AS IF it’s true? Often the teller of an urban legend will even begin with the statement, ‘This is a true story…’

Look for statements like ‘This really happened to a friend of a friend’ (or ‘I heard this from the wife of a co-worker,’ or ‘You won’t believe what happened to my brother’s housekeeper’s son,’ etc.).

Have you heard the same story more than once from different sources, possibly even with different names and details? If you’ve heard more than one version, it’s probably an urban legend.

Just sayin’...

And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman’s health care?

Nope, our Congress expects us to pay for your Lexus. Or are you taking care of Medicaid patients for free?

And those rat bastards in Congress then have the absolute temerity to force us to pay a socialist police force to keep poor people from killing you and taking your Lexus that we paid for.

I’d like to think this letter is a fake solely due to a mistaken belief that no qualified physician could ever be this monumentally dim. Alas, I’ve known too many doctors.

ritalin will end blogging haha. i also suffer from pretty bad add and i actually am perscribed the stuff. it hasnt really stopped me from blog hopping haha. i enjoyed reading your blog tho. very humerous. or maybe its just funny to me because i have done a lot of the same things to keep myself focused.

Seriously, if I want to just buckle down and read something, I often just put physical obstacles between myself and jumping around—-like bring a book on the subway, where there isn’t any wifi access anyway.  Or lay down in the living room with a cat firmly placed on my lap so I can’t reach for anything but my book or magazine.

Same here, except it’s a pair of dogs and not a cat. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I didn’t used to be this bad.  Does the internet make it worse??

A Facebook friend of mine posted that doctor rant.  He (whoever the writer really is) hangs on, by his fingernails, to plausible deniability that it’s not about race until he can’t resist mentioning the “R&B;ringtone”. *ptui*

@3: yeah, that’s revolting all right.  Too bad.  I liked his Tea Cracker piece.

P.S. Not to dwell on Taibbi, but the book I quoted above is obviously a piece of writing he’s still proud of, as he recently assaulted a Vanity Fair reporter—threw coffee in his face and stormed out of a restaurant—for saying he (the reporter) didn’t like it.  Of course, he hates being called out on his sexism, too.

OT, but am I the only who noticed the ad for Pat Robertson U. on the main page just now? I mean, I know automated ad servers can produce ridiculous juxtapositions, but still…

Many of the ideas I get from blogging are due strictly to what is probably a low-grade, undiagnosed form of ADD.

You’re not the only one, I was actually diagnosed with it as a child (brought out by a huge disconnect between my testing performance and my grades) and probably still have a mild strain of the adult for though I am currently unmedicated. There’s no way I would have finished college without ritalin, though.

evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B;tune for a ringtone.

Christ, why don’t they just say a"n***er! I had to treat a n***er! using Mah Tax Dollahz(tm)” and be done with it? Do they really think we’re so stupid we can’t tell what they’re doing when they say stuff like this?

Speaking of Rand Paul, Conway is now tied up with Paul. He’s gained 15 points in under a month! Give money if, like me, there’s no senate race in your home state. We can’t allow Paul to be a US Senator. If you think Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are bad…just wait and see if we had Paul. Plus Conway is genuinely a pretty good Democrat, especially for a place like Kentucky.

And since when is having a cell phone a luxury item? Even the homeless have those disposable, pre-paid ones now. What year are they living in, 1997?

like the racism you attribute to the tea crackers (btw isn’t that racist?)

No. This is has been another edition of SATSQ.

cynickal, if any part of my post inclined you to believe that I think that story is true, my sincere apologies.  It’s so obviously an urban legend that I thought it went without saying.

Mezosub—-

It wasn’t too long ago that being a doctor WAS a service profession. It was seen as more along the lines of being a teacher or cop than being a lawyer. For example, when Howard Dean told his waspy, country club family he would become a doctor rather than go to Wall St., they were downright horrified at the idea.

I got bingo!

Shorter Paul Salata: “Stop saying we’re racist motherfuckers just because we’re racist motherfuckers!”

I saw that letter on facebook and couldn’t believe how ignorant it was on multiple levels. Obviously racist, and also there are no tennis shoes that cost more than 6 months of health insurance or one ER visit, as you said. I got there from a repost by the sister of an in-law, too loose of a connection to chastise for being an idiot, alas.

Ben D:

It shouldn’t be surprising that doctors’ salaries have been rising at the same time that reported job satisfaction keeps going down. There’s a lot of dealing with stupid administrative sh*t that fuels the resentment some doctors need to feel justified in charging huge piles of money. (And then, as salaries go up, you get the people who went into medicine purely for the money and shouldn’t really be doctors in the first place…)

But I think the Dean story doesn’t need any evolution in the status of medicine. That’s more about the insularity of new york finance families and the fact that the highest rung of a doctor’s pay is roughly the same as the lowest rung of an investment banker’s.

cynickal, if any part of my post inclined you to believe that I think that story is true, my sincere apologies.  It’s so obviously an urban legend that I thought it went without saying.

Comment #19: Amanda Marcotte

Don’t applogize, I’m being Captain Obvious here.  Or Captain Oblivious, that I thought it needed to be spelled out.  I just get in the habit of sending that section to relatives.

@Paul:

True about New York finance families. But my great-grandpa (who did practice in western Maryland/West Virginia, granted) was a doctor and at that time again they were on the same level as teachers and other public servants. Maybe a high school principal if you lived in a big city.

I think some of this has to do with school costs, too. If I had to get into the kind of debt it requires to go to medical school and spend the better part of my 20s in school, I’d want to be well-compensated, too,.

@ #3 Wow.  That is so fucking putridly disgusting.  I won’t be able to read that asshole again.

I have to say, as someone who was recently (as an adult) diagnosed with ADD and started taking stimulant medication, if anything it makes me more likely to blog because I can focus on writing. Without it, I just do the jumping around the internet reading part, and can’t get my brain together enough to distill anything intelligent out of what I’ve read.

Actually, stimulant meds seem to make me more likely to hyperfocus on writing, in that time-goes-away sense. This can be bad when I spend the entire afternoon carefully crafting a blog comment in which I analyze the differences in business strategy between Blockbuster and Netflix in order to show that Apple’s movie rental model isn’t likely to succeed, instead of doing the work I am supposed to be doing. But if it were the work I was supposed to be doing, I’d be golden.

Ben D:

It shouldn’t be surprising that doctors’ salaries have been rising at the same time that reported job satisfaction keeps going down. There’s a lot of dealing with stupid administrative sh*t that fuels the resentment some doctors need to feel justified in charging huge piles of money
Comment #25: paul

That’s an error of Economic of Numbers.  Serve more people with a lower overhead and you can not only make a profit, but you have a greater insulation from elasticity of demand.  By maintaining a high gross because one aspect of the chain is burdensome is a set up for financial instability as outside forces cause fluctuations in the market.

Which is why you should never listen to a doctor about economic policies.

I’m gonna have to go with Ben D. on this. That there is some “right” to high pay is silly. But when we require people to get almost all A’s in difficult undergrad classes, kill the MCAT, pay an insane amount for med school, complete a 100hr a week residency, and end up getting actual pay at 30 with 300k debt…I can understand the frustration. I fully understand why one of my straight A top percentile MCAT roommates decided he would live a better life as a ski instructor.

bright kids from economically disadvantaged backgrounds could have a chance to study medicine, instead of reserving that knowledge only for rich people’s children

If one is particularly bright, for not-so-well-off families, focusing on going to med school is considered the best way for a child to bring his family up the class ladder. You can pay off those loans with the money you make: plus those families tend to hold doctors in higher esteem than more upper middle class and higher families. Rich people’s children go into finance or “follow their dreams” and try to make it as an actor or otherwise do something involving a move to Williamsburg before applying to law school or marrying well. Irony, of course is that those kids came from rich families because one of the parents was a successful doctor.

But other than that, your rant was pretty righteous.

I guess my position would be: don’t think doctors should be compensated so well for something that is essentially a public service? Don’t want people going into it for the money? I can agree with that, but first medical school needs to cost much less than it does.

Also, who the hell says “cellular telephone” and still thinks having a custom ringtone is a sign of flashy wealth? Have we gone back to the early 90s and nobody told me? Because I’m pretty sure that here in 2010, I can buy a new prepaid “cellular telephone” for $20 at Kroger, and could get a custom ringtone for a buck or two.

(And if we’ve gone back to the early 90s, do you think we could get a do-over on the 2000 election?)

Also, being a doctor is a lot more difficult and is a more value-added profession than it was in the beginning of the 20th century. That’s one reason it pays more.

Plus, if I had to deal with thousands of different people over the course of a year, I’d probably start to develop a loathing for humanity as well. Good people don’t leave much of an impression in the service sector. The bad people suck up your time and make your life difficult, and those are the ones you remember. The patient who listens to your advice is the one that you stop seeing because he gets his act together. The one who doesn’t listen is the one who comes back again and again and again for the same problem. Which patient are you going to remember more? Doctors aren’t moral superheroes. They’re just people who can be as dickish as most other people.

Also, who the hell says “cellular telephone” and still thinks having a custom ringtone is a sign of flashy wealth?

Old people. More specifically, old, bitter people.

I’m pretty sure that here in 2010, I can buy a new prepaid “cellular telephone” for $20 at Kroger, and could get a custom ringtone for a buck or two.

But that is a buck or two that could have paid for, like, 50 aspirins! WHY MUST I FINANCE YOUR MEDICAL IRRESPONSIBILITY I ASK YOU

This guy is probably a cousin of that asshole that passed on the ‘true story’ about how Katrina refugees trashed planes, trains, and automobiles on their way out of NOLA.  People want to believe that poor people deserve to be poor.  How dare those people have cell phones! And ring tones!

  Ugh. I hope people come into this dude’s ER and ask for another doctor.

I’d have to disagree on the value added.  Much of being a doc today is done by checking out the desk reference.  Real diagnosis skills or exam skills aren’t even being taught at some med schools. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129931999

Actually, stimulant meds seem to make me more likely to hyperfocus on writing, in that time-goes-away sense. This can be bad when I spend the entire afternoon carefully crafting a blog comment in which I analyze the differences in business strategy between Blockbuster and Netflix in order to show that Apple’s movie rental model isn’t likely to succeed, instead of doing the work I am supposed to be doing. But if it were the work I was supposed to be doing, I’d be golden.

Tell me about it. :(

PAULSALATA:

You know most of us around here actually heard your dogwhistles, right?

Besides, “cracker” tends to imply much the same thing as “redneck”—it isn’t so much as who you are as how you act. Michael Vick? Total redneck. But hey, I’d expect subtlety to be lost on you… so in conclusion, keep fucking that pig.

The doctor may be real but dollars to donuts the story is made-up.

The doctor probably didn’t mention the medical emergency or anything medical because that would turn a stereotype into a real person - a real IDENTIFIABLE person.  That identifiable person who had her medical data breached by the e-mail and its details would then have solid grounds for a lawsuit, and the hospital would have grounds for disciplinary action and termination of his sorry entitled cracker arse.

He didn’t mention the condition because this person he treated most likely doesn’t exist. Reagan used to make shit up like this in his speeches about “welfare queens”.

I’m gonna have to go with Ben D. on this. That there is some “right” to high pay is silly. But when we require people to get almost all A’s in difficult undergrad classes, kill the MCAT, pay an insane amount for med school, complete a 100hr a week residency, and end up getting actual pay at 30 with 300k debt…I can understand the frustration. I fully understand why one of my straight A top percentile MCAT roommates decided he would live a better life as a ski instructor.

Add to that the fact competition to get into med school has gotten so stiff that even if you make almost all As at topflight “pre-med factories” and kill the MCATs, you may still end up being rejected 3-5 times in a row before you get into any med school period.  Had a few dozen friends and acquaintances who went through this…..and then suddenly got admitted to some topflight med schools like UChicago, BU, Columbia, etc. 

This past weekend, just hung out with one high school friend who is now an MD after being rejected 5 years in a row despite graduating with a 3.85 GPA from a SUNY pre-med factory, breaking into the 40s/45 on the MCATs, and tons of medically relevant volunteering experience. 

After going through all that crap, add on the insane hours and more cutthroat evaluation as a medical intern and resident…..and I can see why they develop this insane entitlement complex….especially after having a glimpse of their lifestyle as a roommate to 3 med interns/residents for 5 years.  They wished they had the hours of an i-banker or a biglaw attorney. 

Moreover, in some school and family environments…including my urban public magnet, those who went off to med school or PhD programs were considered the smartest and most intelligent students because of the extreme admission requirements and the long unforgiving evaluation process.  They were certainly seen as a cut above those who went into engineering, business, finance, and law as the admissions, schooling, and evaluation process are a cakewalk in comparison. 

Unfortunately, one reason why so many people enter the medical profession for the wrong reasons(MONEY or SO I CAN ENHANCE MY OVERSIZED EGO.) is precisely because the admissions process has gotten so cutthroat, expensive, and unforgiving that it actually ends up screening out many who are actually in it to help others in favor of those who are doing it for money or to enhance their “God complex” over people’s health/lives. 

As I heard from one pre-med advisor’s own mouth and confirmed by every pre-med I’ve talked to…..if you failed to maintain a minimum of an -A in all courses….especially the pre-med science core…forget about med school. 

It says a lot when someone with a 3.3-3.6…even from a topflight undergrad has a great shot at getting into a topflight B-school or law school program whereas they’d be considered extreme “shoot for the moon” longshots for med school admissions…

Good points Exholt. I choose the much easier law route, and aside from some stress over the relatively easy LSAT, my path has been an absolute cake walk compared to my med school friends*. Add to that the fact that, at 25, I can start seriously paying off my debt. Those poor guys have a loooong road ahead of them.

*though, from what I understand, most any US MD program is great. Unlike law and business, where anything outside of the top 10 (top 5 in this economy) is considered a very risky decision.

I’d have to disagree on the value added

Well, 100 years ago, there really was not that much a doctor could do. Now, especially in the big-money specialties, you can solve a lot more serious, difficult problems. How were you going to fix that heart murmur in 1900? He could set a broken bone, do some stitching, amputate if something was mangled, or suggest one of a few medications that weren’t snake oil. And your primary care doctor isn’t making huge amounts of money in the first place.

Also, exholt: an MCAT score of 40 puts you in the 99% percentile. Now, since medical schools aren’t turning away 99% of their applicants, your claims that 40+ MCAT scorers are getting turned away from admission to ANY med school aren’t really that credible.

Try $9 for my last Virgin Mobile cell phone.

My $9 Virgin Mobile cell (bought in 7-11, by the way) has lots of bells and whistles, including some I don’t use like texting, and maybe even some web stuff.

YOu can also get 10 cents a minute, pre-paid plans for this (although I’ve bought into the $50 unlimited minutes and text plan.)

I’ve never paid more than $20 for my last several Virgin Mobile cells.

No wonder the homeless have cell phones, they’re cheaper than pay phones—which are rapidly disappearing, in any case.

Also, exholt: an MCAT score of 40 puts you in the 99% percentile. Now, since medical schools aren’t turning away 99% of their applicants, your claims that 40+ MCAT scorers are getting turned away from admission to ANY med school aren’t really that credible.

Keep in mind that the med school application process has gotten so stiffly competitive that according to many med school graduates….including a couple who have worked med school admissions at a mid-ranked school in NY, people who fail to score a minimum of a 32-33 which is in the high 80 percentiles often voluntarily opt out of the med school applicant pool because the competition is so stiff. 

Hence, the range of MCAT scores they see tend to range from a high of 40’s down to the low of 32-33.  Rarely do they see scores below 32…much less below 30.  Moreover, unless those on the extreme low end have a stratospheric GPA by pre-med standards, groundbreaking medically-related undergrad research, or something in that vein, those scorers are almost always tossed in the “reject” pile.

Even if the shoes was an added detail, it still irks me that it was invoked. I can’t help recalling the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Economy. (Sam Vimes is a character from Pratchett’s Discworld.) He notes that as a poor person, he spent more on shoes than he did as a rich duke. This was because he could only afford to buy at any given point the cheapest version of a necessity. He wore it until it wore out, as it shortly did, because it was of inferior quality but it was all he could afford AND it was a necessity. Whereas the rich of his acquaintance could afford to buy quality and in the long run, they paid less for their needs.

The cell phone is another often used pointer for somebody obviously wasting their food stamps or somebody who isn’t Poor Enough to deserve your charity. Never mind that in this day and age, you need SOME way for potential employers to get ahold of you. Nevermind that the ringtone could have been purchased for a whopping 99 cents. It’s still stigmatized as a luxury. BLECH.

One thing I’ve been thinking about that irks me about conservatives, that is illustrated in this letter: they seem more concerned about punishing people who take advantage of the system than helping those truly in need.

If, for every 100 people who use Medicaid, let’s say 10 were using it fraudulently or made “poor decisions”, if the other 90 truly needed it I think the money spent would be WELL worth it, while wingnuts would foam at the mouth about the other 10%.

It used to be that School Teachers and Nurses were held in high social esteem, and kids (especially girls) were encouraged to go into those professions.  They also had the advantage that the nurse or teacher did not automatically have to quit her job when she married; the job was considered that important.

My conservative brother was griping about some “Poor looking” black people (in traffic court I think) wearing expensive clothes & the latest Nikes or some such shoes.  I told him that chances are a genuinely Poor Person™ wearing expensive looking clothes & accessories, is probably wearing knockoffs, or purchased the items with an extremely high-interest credit card.  Either way, being ripped off. (I have a tiny bit of insight having lived in the poor part of Oakland CA, the only White Person in the Apt. building or riding the bus, usually). Brother laughed nastily and said “... or they stole them!”  It’s so depressing, some times.

Re shoes again:  Even expensive brands sometimes have a few pretty economically priced models.  If I was poor, well, poorer than I am, such that this was a crucial problem for me, I believe I would go for the least expensive of a big-name brand, on the theory that it probably was still built to the same quality standards.

And the person wearing expensive looking clothes may well have bought them at a resale shop, which I have observed to be a pretty common type of business in the less affluent communities in the area in which I live.  In this case, not necessarily being ripped off, but certainly not being well off.

Oh by the way, Kwillow, if these black people were wearing nice looking clothes and shoes, how exactly did they “look poor”?  Did your brother explain?

Tyro and exholt, the point is taken about how competitive medical school is, but we’re still not talking about WHY that is so.

I maintain that the admissions requirements are unnecessarily stringent and the price of medical school is artificially inflated, in order to keep physicians’ compensation high.

In short, there’s no reason for medical training to be so expensive, and there’s no reason for entrance to such training to be so competitive.  Public medical schools would solve all that, and would graduate plenty of doctors capable of handling routine stuff like general emergency medicine and family practice without having to put medical students so deeply in debt that their only chance of paying off school loans is to go into some private specialty practice that pays well, rather than taking a lesser-paying position where they get to actually help people.

Again, Europe.

Doing comparisons with Europe is a bit apples and oranges for the following reasons:

1. In many European countries, while universities are low-cost or free, university education is not open to all.  Unless one excelled well enough to be placed on the academic track in junior high or high school at the latest…one is often precluded from attending university.  It is one reason why I saw so many European students at American colleges…..other than those who wanted to come to the US were students who were shut out of their European countries’ higher ed systems because they didn’t excel sufficiently to be placed on the academic track in junior high which was the only route to higher ed access.  Interestingly…this is a system that has been embraced and taken to greater extremes in many East Asian countries.  In short, Europe and Asian restrict undergrad university access to the academic excellers…and separate them out in junior high whereas in the US…everyone is given the opportunity to attend university….even if they have not graduated from high school or in some cases, even received their GED.  Personally, I feel that we need to take the best from both systems…...make high ed free as in Europe while maintaining relatively open flexible access as we have it here so students who are late bloomers are not penalized for the rest of their lives. 

2. One possible reason US med school admission requirements are so stringent is because US K-12 education…especially the in the sciences is so woefully inadequate that they need to be sure US undergrads have demonstrated a high level of proficiency in foundational math and science courses to ensure they can hack it as med students and later…as doctors.  Heck, I heard from several med school graduates that med schools end up RETEACHING pre-med core science course content in the first year of med school because they don’t feel US colleges are teaching them thoroughly enough because of the perception Profs have to “dumb down” the courses because most first-year undergrads are so unprepared for the rigors of a university education.

Also, exholt: an MCAT score of 40 puts you in the 99% percentile. Now, since medical schools aren’t turning away 99% of their applicants, your claims that 40+ MCAT scorers are getting turned away from admission to ANY med school aren’t really that credible.

Tyro, then you really know nothing about med school admissions. Been there, done that. Gave up after I realized there was no chance I could get in.

John joel glanton @ #47, if i had it to do over again, i’d have considered medicine before law.  have you ever met someone with an MD who couldn’t find a job so they had to work retail?

If that’s from the same article I read, the JD retail clerk graduated from Pace University Law school….a law school ranked far below the second-tier. 

His case would actually strengthen the case of those who are refusing demands from the greater public to open up more US med schools and reduce admission requirements as I’ve heard grumblings from most lawyer friends and relatives that one reason for this phenomenon is that the ABA has been too loose by allowing far too many law schools with lower standards to be opened and accredited. 

Not only do they flood the market, but they also sell their students an extremely expensive false bill of goods as experienced by that retail clerk and several friends who graduated from lower ranked law schools with little more than a diploma and 100k-200k+ in law school loans with no feasible option to pay them off. 

It also doesn’t help matters that some law schools below the second-tier have had serious issues with bar exam passage rates as the case of one New York area law school has shown when in one year, only half of its graduating class passed.

Oh by the way, Kwillow, if these black people were wearing nice looking clothes and shoes, how exactly did they “look poor”?  Did your brother explain?

Duh, he said they were black didn’t he?

/sarcasm

...I just depressed myself.

More seriously, re. Mezosub’s various comments… I realize that it’s fun to hate on doctors, and that many people have been ‘done wrong’ by the medical profession (including, well, most actual medical professionals) but can we please try to move away from the myth that doctors and scientists live in some giant ivory tower where they don’t follow politics or pay taxes or get to have opinions about things? Doctors are allowed to worry about how we’re gonna pay for people’s medical care just as much as any other citizen, yeah? (And sure, that doctor is clearly a racist ass, but an M.D. or Ph.D. doesn’t actually disqualify one from thinking about things besides curing cancer all day.)

  “Also, exholt: an MCAT score of 40 puts you in the 99% percentile. Now, since medical schools aren’t turning away 99% of their applicants, your claims that 40+ MCAT scorers are getting turned away from admission to ANY med school aren’t really that credible. “

Tyro, then you really know nothing about med school admissions. Been there, done that. Gave up after I realized there was no chance I could get in.

Also, MCAT percentile does not == percentage of med school applicants.  After all, few who scored below the high 80s percentile bothered to apply to the med school my friends were doing admissions for…..most with lower percentiles realized it would be an expensive futile quest. 

Would you expect someone who scored at or below the 50th percentile to even bother applying to med school considering so many who scored well above the 90 percentile failed to attain admission to any school despite having stratospheric GPAs and credentials because the competition is that stiff? 

Also, living with 3 med school interns/residents for 5 years has confirmed my reasons for why I refused to consider a medical career in the face of urgings from older relatives. 

Considering the crazy schedule changes, continuing cutthroat evaluation process, the fear one tiny mistake may end or permanently impair the life of a patient, and long hours which dwarfed those kept by i-bankers and biglaw lawyers…....no thank you.

would graduate plenty of doctors capable of handling routine stuff like general emergency medicine and family practice

I think that’s what you call a nurse.  Incompetent LPNs are a dime a dozen.

“We as Republicans need to realize that you can’t just cut off the welfare queen and balance the budget,” says Rand Paul, a Senate candidate in Kentucky…. “

I hate these people. I’d love to transport them for a month to live out the life of your average welfare/working poor person.

pitbullgirl65,
I’d rather transport them to Somalia or Haiti or some other small government no-taxes paradise.

There’s an excellent book called “The Myth of the Welfare Queen” which takes on, well, that myth with particular attention to detail. 

  Republicans really hate it when those peons actually get an idea that they might be able to claw their way out of the pit that Repubs have dug for them.  (Or had their servants and patsies dig.)  Don’t they know they’re supposed to stay down there and provide cannon fodder and cheap labor? And as Kwillow’s brother demonstrated,  there’s a fear that poverty is contagious.

I know I am gonna get myself flamed here (I would have flamed myself a year ago for saying this) but there most definitely ARE people who are smart but lazy and great at working the public assistance system to make an extremely comfortable life for themselves and their kids using public assistance in combination with a part-time or otherwise low-ish paying job.

If you make sure that your income is just low enough to be eligible for every type of public assistance you can think of and apply for every single one (food stamps, section 8 housing, medical assistance, daycare assistance, energy assistance etc), your out-of-pocket living expenses are incredibly low and the money you earn is pretty much yours to spend on things like expensive shoes and elaborate tattoos and trips Hawaii.  Not to mention that all of that public assistance isn’t counted as part of your end of the year taxes, so people who paid nothing during the year are getting multiple thousands “back” and then they have that to spend on further luxuries.

I’m not making this up, I KNOW THIS PERSON and she didn’t invent this way of life herself.  She learned it from her mom and so did her cousins and friends.  People do this stuff and it DOES make me cranky because I have 3 jobs and my husband has 2 and no kids but we’re broke all the damn time, while this girl I work with has 3 kids, is up to her ears in public assistance, and owns 10 purses that cost over $400 dollars each and takes a yearly vacation to places I sure as hell can’t afford to go and wouldn’t have the time to go even if I could. 

My dyed-in-the-wool liberal self knows that most of the considerable taxes I pay on all my paychecks go toward all kinds of objectionable s**t like the war machine and Wall Street bailouts, and plenty of non-objectionable stuff like roads and police and social security and public assistance for people who use it as it is meant to be used, but one would have to be a bigger saint than me to not see red when this girl in the next cube talks about buying herself YET ANOTHER gucci purse, or where she is gonna take her yearly tropical vacation at tax time, which for her is like winning the damn lottery, as she gets “back” an amount about 60% of what she actually even earned during the year, at the very same time that my broke, exhausted ass is cashing out my 401k to to try to cover the tax bill that is still remaining even after all the deductions from our paychecks all year.

Anyway, my point is that we don’t help our case in favor of the existence of public assistance by pretending that there are not people out there who are using the system inappropriately, because there really ARE people like that.  I think it is a much stronger argument to say “yeah any system can be gamed by a person who is smart and unethical, but what kind of asshole pulls the rug out from under the majority of genuinely needy people and their innocent children just for the satisfaction of sticking it to the lady with the Gucci purse that she shouldn’t be able to afford?”  I find that I argue this out with conservatives BETTER now that I have had a considerable dose of that resentment that conservatives allow to totally consume them on this issue.

chareth cutestory # 58

I agree wholeheartedly. I got in before things got REALLY bad. Luckily I landed the right sort of job (what a crapshoot) so I’ll be okay. Would I recommend it to a friend? Not likely. Unless we are talking HYS. And even then…

Sorry if it appeared I was saying “choose law over medicine.” Definitely not.

I’m primarily addressing gp’s and familydocs, Tyro.  Thought that was pretty obvious.  You might want to read the article I linked to.

so, what are your thoughts on the medical school situation—do we relax admissions standards to fill gaps in needed areas, like primary care physicians or do we think the risk of market saturation is too big?

1. Wholesale reform of K-12 so by the time kids graduate from high school….ANY high school, they are ready to tackle standard and even intermediate college level courses at a minimum….especially those in STEM fields.  This IMHO is a big white elephant no one seems to be willing to talk about.  If done well….med schools may no longer feel the need to reteach core pre-med science courses in the first year and they may even be able to shorten the program/include advanced materials now covered in medical internship/residency.

2. Institute a massive public service scholarship program where med school is free regardless of the med school attended in exchange for working in under-served geographic areas and/or specialties like primary care for a minimum of 10-20 years. 

3. Reduce the horrendously long hours worked by medical doctors in practice…especially in the internship/residency stage per week and minimize crazy schedule changes.  This will not only enable more opportunities for medical employment…but also reduce the toll of sleep deprivation which does not facilitate good medicine and patient care.

If you don’t like it, go into private practice and refuse to accept Medicaid patients.  Run it like your own little feudal estate, where you can scream at the radiologist and phlebotomist whenever you’re cranky.

A lot of physicians have started to do just that. A couple I’ve talked to say they lose money on each Medicaid case. Per Tyro’s comments, our society won’t be well served waiting for the medical profession as a whole to develop an overriding sense of justice (well beyond the piece of shit brought up in Amanda’s post).

Single payer all the way, or we’re just going to keep seeing more of the same.

@ #72 I have been to an actual md like once in the past decade because I had strep throat and had to go to the emergency room. For every other one of my medical needs I have either gone to a nurse practitioner or, more rarely, a physician’s assistant. You don’t actually need to see a doctor for most of what doctors do.

So i just finished my undergrad and having a hell of a time getting a job. I was thinking law school, but apparently that’s a shit option too. I am so fucked!

So i just finished my undergrad and having a hell of a time getting a job. I was thinking law school, but apparently that’s a shit option too.

Go ahead and get teaching certification, especially if you had a science or math major. It isn’t sexy but it’s secure and has good benefits, especially if you go to a unionized state.

Poor people were a liberal invention that was invented by liberal hippies in the ‘60s.  Rich people were a conservative invention that was invented by conservative Real Americans™ in the ‘90s.  The 1890s.  You goddam Jesus and Capitalism hatin’, dirty, tree-huggin’, colored-an-messican-lovin’ hippies, git yer shit straight…

Go ahead and get teaching certification, especially if you had a science or math major. It isn’t sexy but it’s secure and has good benefits, especially if you go to a unionized state.

That may not necessarily be a feasible option as teachers…including those with STEM majors are being cut left and right because of budgetary constraints/politics. 

Seeing it in NYC with several friends who have been cut.  Doesn’t help that across the river in New Jersey…..Chris Christie seems to have it in for teachers even though they have staffing shortages….

Hey!  knuterockne/JohnMcKay is back!  (Not like we missed him or anything, but his stupidity also results in some fun replies…) 

The repubs did not dig the hole democrats did and they do their damndest to keep it filled.

Too bad the Republicans kept pointing at that hole and their half-assed attempts at shoveling it in with cheap immigrant laborers to avoid driving the country into the ditch they created.

/whiny glass-half-full troll-feeder

*instead of trying to avoid

Complete sentences are our friends.

Thanks Ben

I actually started as a math major, but switched to polisci because I am a dumbshit. If only I had a math degree, than I could actually work at those policy jobs I want, but the minor doesn’t seem to help much. I am considering going back to either get a stats or econ degree, but I don’t know if it would help.

Exholt—are you trying to push me over the edge

than should be then—obviously I didn’t study english.

Thanks Ben

I actually started as a math major, but switched to polisci because I am a dumbshit. If only I had a math degree, than I could actually work at those policy jobs I want, but the minor doesn’t seem to help much. I am considering going back to either get a stats or econ degree, but I don’t know if it would help.

Exholt—are you trying to push me over the edge :p

According to an aunt who is a statistician for a major banking corporation, there’s a shortage in her field because there are not enough people willing to pursue that field and/or have the mathematical foundation to attain the required credentials. 

As for an econ masters, you will need to complete the equivalent of a math major alongside an econ major to be competitive for most econ grad programs…including masters according to a TA in one econ course I took after college.  A reason why nearly everyone I knew who was pursuing an econ Masters or PhD were former STEM majors, not econ majors.

I’m primarily addressing gp’s and familydocs, Tyro.  Thought that was pretty obvious.  You might want to read the article I linked to.

I read the article, and I ended making the valid point that gps and family docs aren’t pulling down tons of money: it’s a decent “service profession,” though in many ways not that great because of the low margins. The doctors making lots of money are the ones doing the very, very high “value added” procedures that country doctors back in 1900 couldn’t do, which is why those specialties aren’t considered/paid as “middle class professions.”

stick—I actually haven’t been applying for jobs as a nanny or picking fruit. I am far too useless and lazy to be competing with immigrants for jobs.

Ignore the idiot who thought that the army of the British Empire was “almost exclusively” staffed with white males. His comments will be scrubbed shortly.

He’s not really there, and soon he won’t be.

you’re right. sorry.

I think it would be funny if Amanda could “cave” the troll. Make his responses readable by him, but nobody else. Sticky would come here day after day and make inane comments and just wait...

Public medical schools would solve all that, and would graduate plenty of doctors capable of handling routine stuff like general emergency medicine and family practice without having to put medical students so deeply in debt that their only chance of paying off school loans is to go into some private specialty practice that pays well, rather than taking a lesser-paying position where they get to actually help people.

I do think that we should open more med schools (and we are, believe it or not). But what you discuss is being taken care of by Physician’s Assistants and Nurse Practitioners (who aren’t cheap, themselves). Last time I went to the ER, I didn’t even have a doctor look at me: the physician’s assistant took care of it all.

As to why med school is expensive: various reasons, one of which being that university tuition is ridiculously expensive, and then in addition to that the fact being that professors and overhead/equipment is a heckuva lot more expensive. Med school is ridiculously expensive because post-secondary education is ridiculously expensive. Of course, neither of those things is good for our society. The other big bottleneck is residency programs. If there were more residency programs, then we could bring in more foreign doctors, but to practice in the US, they need to train in an American residency program, and THOSE have limited spots.

Would you expect someone who scored at or below the 50th percentile to even bother applying to med school considering so many who scored well above the 90 percentile failed to attain admission to any school despite having stratospheric GPAs and credentials because the competition is that stiff?

It’s not that hard to look up acceptance rates as correlated to MCAT score. Looking at these statistics, as you can see, regardless of GPA, an MCAT score between 39-45 will give you at least a 50% chance of getting accepted to medical school. If your GPA is at least a 3.4, that rises to 85% (and that last 15% is because the students didn’t properly choose a “safety” school). A 3.0 average and an MCAT score in the mid-30s will give you a 40% chance of getting in somewhere. I don’t know where you’re getting your claims, exholt, but the reality does not bear them out.

exholt @ #76, sounds good to me.

i’ll vote for you to get that done if you vote for me to completely dismantle law school and start from the ground up smile

I’d say you have an easier solution as I think closing down the bottom two tiers of law schools will do a lot to ameliorate this issue….especially when I know of some whose admissions standards are as low as top 5 grad education programs (i.e. 3.0 GPA >).  Kind of weird to me considering many entry-level jobs even during boom times would reject college grads with sub-3.0 GPAs….even in STEM fields as one cousin found to his dismay back in the late 1980’s. 

I hear that a possibility of a bill to ban legal outsourcing may be in the works as others have expressed concerns that this may pose serious issues with client confidentiality, data security, good legal practice, and hearing from those in the computer/engineering field that the cost savings: work quality from outsourcing may not be as great as they had thought.

I agree with exholt on law schools. Admissions standards are there for a reason.

Though (and this ties back in with my first post) what about people who have a 2.8 but totally ace the LSAT?

Care to tantalize us with your general geographic location, Stik Rewl?

Comment #101: Tropes on the Run on 09/30 at 09:43 PM

Again, he’ll be deleted soon. Nobody responds, and he’s effectively caved.

Refer to him in the third person only.

BTW exholt do you teach in academia?

I monitor this site with several different IPs, that would never work.

What a sad little loser you are.

Keep on wasting your time, fool.

i think part of the problem here also lies with the student loan industry.

Very true.

One of the overlooked aspects of the health care reform bill, btw, was some much-needed student loan reform. I hope we can take it further before it turns into the next bubble.

I still get mail from the two previous people who lived in my apartment. Half of it is mail saying they defaulted on their student loan payments!

It’s sad, though I did know students at my undergraduate school who were really dumb about how they handled loan money—using it to take a spring break trip to Mexico, for example. But then again we should probably have much better counseling on how to handle that money. When you’re 18 you don’t always make the best decisions.

I’ll add the ones that were the most irresponsible with how they spent their student loans were also the least likely to graduate, which means they’re fucked two times over.

I agree with exholt on law schools

This is America. Everyone has a constitutional right to be licensed to practice law and try to “make it” as a lawyer. If you want to close law schools, possibly preventing people from achieving their Dream of getting a law degree, no matter how unqualified they are and no matter how lacking a need we have for lawyers, then you Hate America. And are forcing a bunch of law professors to have to find jobs as lawyers.

But, yeah, as chareth points out, the student loan industry (and the law schools themselves) have no skin in the game: they both make money off the students whether they succeed or fail or find a job, ever, so the schools don’t have to worry about whether lawyers get jobs at all. And since there is a surplus of lawyers, there are always more lawyers who would want to teach law school, so there’s a demand to open more law schools, and so on.

It’s not that hard to look up acceptance rates as correlated to MCAT score. Looking at these statistics, as you can see, regardless of GPA, an MCAT score between 39-45 will give you at least a 50% chance of getting accepted to medical school. If your GPA is at least a 3.4, that rises to 85% (and that last 15% is because the students didn’t properly choose a “safety” school). A 3.0 average and an MCAT score in the mid-30s will give you a 40% chance of getting in somewhere. I don’t know where you’re getting your claims, exholt, but the reality does not bear them out.

This leads me to believe that those stats may include students who attended sketchy med schools of last resort outside the US such as the ones in the Caribbean which may not be fully accredited and whose graduates have an uphill battle to fight to gain entry into US intern/residency programs. 

Nearly every halfway savvy pre-med, pre-med adviser, med school student, and med school graduate would not count them among medical schools to be given serious consideration by pre-meds because of that sketchy reputation and the fact graduates from that program tend to be stigmatized during the intern/residency stage.  In short….going to such programs is a horrifically bad investment of time and finances considering the employment possibilities available upon graduation. 

It may also include others such as a few New York area pre-med graduates who took advantage of a free-ride to Cuba’s Latin America School of medicine located here.

Maybe they should make it that the student lenders/law schools only get paid money if they student finds a job related to law. That would probably cut down on the number of people they lend to and the law schools in exitence. Just like mortages and car loans, it should be tied to risk.

exholt, if those statistics aren’t enough for you, then you can just look at the average MCAT scores of admitted students that med schools publish: they’re fairly unexceptional (low 30s is generally the median score of an admitted student)

Generally, as long as your MCATs are in the 30s, you’ll probably get in somewhere in the USA. Wayne State University Med School isn’t limiting their admissions to Rhodes Scholars.

Heck, some (many? most?) Caribbean schools frequented by American students do their last two clinical years of med school in the United States which makes their transition to residency programs fairly straightforward.

Really don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but you’re hammering it pretty hard, and I don’t know why, particularly given that the raw, published numbers simply don’t bear it out.

agree with exholt on law schools. Admissions standards are there for a reason.

Though (and this ties back in with my first post) what about people who have a 2.8 but totally ace the LSAT?

Unless the applicant has a great essay, resume, came from a disadvantaged background, had understandable difficulties in undergrad s(he) can explain, and/or substantial volunteering work with the local community, I’m not sure. 

Especially considering that anyone with several hundreds/thousands of dollars laying around can improve their score substantially by being coached….

BTW exholt do you teach in academia?

No. 

But I do know dozens of people who are currently in academia whether as grad students or professors.  Closest I’ve been to academia other than undergrad was to take some grad classes at an Ivy and substitute taught two 1 hour sessions of a Western Civ course at a community college for a grad school friend who had to take a day off for family for which I was paid.

If the humanities/social science PhD market isn’t as horrendous as it currently is, I’d love to pursue a PhD and teach East Asian history and/or politics at the college level.  Unfortunately…it doesn’t seem to be in the cards atm. 

As for my knowledge of med school…that mainly comes from dozens of high school classmates going pre-med in college, some dozens going into med school and becoming doctors, rooming with 3 medical interns/residents, and 2 friends who have worked med school admissions. 

Maybe they should make it that the student lenders/law schools only get paid money if they student finds a job related to law. That would probably cut down on the number of people they lend to and the law schools in exitence. Just like mortages and car loans, it should be tied to risk.

Actually, read there’s a bill in the works to ban providing federal aid for any college/vocational program in which less than 50% of the graduates failed to attain promised gainful employment in the field studied.

If the humanities/social science PhD market isn’t as horrendous as it currently is, I’d love to pursue a PhD and teach East Asian history and/or politics at the college level.  Unfortunately…it doesn’t seem to be in the cards atm.

Whats fucked up is we probably need more academics well-versed in East Asian politics and history given what’s happening in the world, and doubt we have enough in this country.

Antigone—

Is the economy in ND as good as everyone says it is? Don’t y’all have something like 4% unemployment?

Ben—no one lives in ND unless they have a good reason.

One of my friends scored in the top 2% of pre-med students.

He couldn’t get accepted to a single med school in America for his graduate studies.

After a year of searching, he looked outside the US… And got accepted at the top medical university (and oldest) in Europe.  So he’s studying there instead.

Yes, it’s an anecdote.  But it’s true - there are too few slots in US medical schools.

Antigone has a very good point. Places like UND (or, if you prefer gorgeous states, U of Montana) do serve a necessary purpose. And, if you are fine with living in one of those place (small practice in Bozeman sounds nice) it is a good deal. But places like Cooley? Total scams.

And yes, everyone has a right to pursue a law degree. Not everyone has a right to 160k at 25 yrs old.

And the best and the brightest go to Yale ; )

No, the most well placed go to Yale.  Some of the best and brightest, too.  But you can’t tell which from their degree… Sometimes you get W. Bush.

It’s sad, though I did know students at my undergraduate school who were really dumb about how they handled loan money—using it to take a spring break trip to Mexico, for example. But then again we should probably have much better counseling on how to handle that money. When you’re 18 you don’t always make the best decisions.

I’ll add the ones that were the most irresponsible with how they spent their student loans were also the least likely to graduate, which means they’re fucked two times over.

I was fortunate enough to learn real early how even loans taken out responsibly can really screw individuals and families if a series of economic and other mishaps add up in a horrific combination.  A reason which scared me off from taking out educational loans when I could have….which was quite fortunate considering what happened to high school classmates and colleagues who ended up being continuously chained to the banks after graduation. 

I’m less concerned about restricting the number of new lawyers than I am about law students getting in over their heads in debt and other sunk costs before realizing they’re attending a school that will provide a credential of dubious vocational or educational value.  Those schools should be handled the same way for-profit diploma mills should be handled.

But scarcity of practitioners is a different matter entirely.  The way we’ve set up our government in the U.S., there are lots of people who need basic legal services and many of those people can’t afford lawyers.  Adding more lawyers won’t solve the problem because the time needed to address even these basic legal issues limits economies of scale.* The solutions I see are either making everyone rich enough to afford a lawyer or subsidizing legal services for the poor to a greater extent than we already do.

Both/and.  In addition to the onerous debt load is the fact that there are enough law schools in the lower-two tiers which do provide a credential of dubious value in both areas that it has become a serious issue…even for the graduates who passed. 

This was certainly the case of one New York area law school where in one year, only 50% of the graduates passed the bar….an atrociously low number when even a pass rate in the high 80’s% is considered a great cause of concern by many lawyers and law school students I’ve known/worked with. 

It also doesn’t help that there’s a commonplace perception IME among lawyers…especially those in biglaw that schools which accept students with low GPAs(Below 3.0) and low LSAT scores (Below 160) are minting lawyers who don’t have the work ethic or intellectual acumen necessary to be good lawyers.  Granted, this may just be a regional New York/Boston attitude among those who graduated from the Top-25. 

i think part of the problem here also lies with the student loan industry.  while student loans obviously democratize education, they’re also handed out like subprime mortgages, as private lenders stand very little to lose.  the fed govt will reimburse them for most of the amount of the loan in the event of default, so they’re taking very little risk.  pulling back on this would at least force joe’s school of law and nail design to charge a lot less than NYU.

Heh.  Don’t get me started on how NYU undergrad and its miserly financial aid policies which ended up saddling several high school classmates and dozens of high school friends with debt they’re still paying off…some even after 10+ years.

Tyro, you haven’t explained why we should be throwing away 15% of white male med students that got the top score in the MCAT, either.  Not to mention the 50% of those who merely did well on the test.

@#69

I fail to see the problem with what this woman is doing.  I’m not kidding-I really don’t see any problem with it.  She was raised in poverty, probably had no real opportunity to escape it, and found a way to game the system so that she can live a comfortable life instead of scraping by to try to live.  She’s not even hurting anyone, like the people who get the majority of your tax dollars do with their bombs and their corporate raiding, or the Congressmen who spend the time we pay them for to gut our government services and position themselves for lobbying jobs.  Is she just not suffering enough for your tastes, for someone who’s getting public assistance?  She gets what, I’ll guess twenty grand a year in total or whatever?  We could support 835,000-that’s eight hundred, thirty five thousand- people like her just with the money Goldman Sachs put aside for bonuses in the first 9 months of 2009.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.  If poor people are supposed to just suffer in silence and give a good “please sir, can I have some more?’” while groveling for food, why the fuck should poor people go along with that?

As for whatever the fuck he’s calling himself now, I have little to say.

exholt - i can also say that law is a competitive profession and i’m guilty of law school snobbery myself from time to time.  ideally i would revamp the entire system from the ground up.  law schools need to teach students how to think like lawyers, yes, but they also should teach something about actually BEING a lawyer, which they currently do a miserable job at.  i think law school should either be two years instead of three OR there should be some kind of mandatory apprentice program while in school—say one semester of class, one semester of working for the last two years.  students win because they gain practical experience, employers gain free student labor, schools don’t care if they’re getting the tuition for the credit-internships.  the only people who lose out here of course are law professors, who will fight tooth and nail to keep their precious lucrative (mostly bullshit) jobs.

3 questions:

1. What about the summer associateships/legal internships?

2. Is it true that the higher ranked law schools…especially those in the top 5 tend to be worse in teaching about “being a lawyer” than lower ranked schools?

3. What types of students in terms of undergrad background, personality, etc should law schools/legal profession should be preferring for admission? 

As for night/part-time law programs, they should be encouraged but top ranked law schools with a few exceptions decline to offer them as a way to screen out more applicants and to avoid potential hits to their rankings since night/part-time programs tend to have applicants with less impressive grades and LSAT scores compared to the day program. 

also, do you have a link to anything about that proposed bill restricting lenders?  i think that is a capital idea and want to read more about it.

http://www.citytowninfo.com/career-and-education-news/articles/department-of-education-puts-restrictions-on-for-profit-college-student-debt-10072601

That “letter” was burning up my Facebook friend’s list a while ago… I think it was attributed to some sort of message board for doctors.
The sad thing is that quite a few people just bought it hook line and sinker as a “reason” why “Obama care won’t work” then got angry with me for pointing out the obvious racism in it.
I mean the douche who wrote it really *wants* to come right out and say the N word but uses all the right wing dog whistles possible just to make sure that we know he’s talking about “those people”.
It really helped me clear up just who on my friend’s list really doesn’t think or read tht kind of crap before they forward it on.
One of the people (a mother of a child herself) didn’t have any defense, just indignant insistence that she “had a gun” and wasn’t afraid to use it. Which really, given who nothing in what we were discussing discussed a gun was quite disturbing.
I just don’t get what the eff is going on somedays. Where in the shit is sanity these days?

Paulsata, just ‘cause you can regurgitate 40 year-old disproved racist propaganda doesn’t mean you can either think or write.

No one is responding to your provocation for good reason: they make no sense but in your poor jumbled head.

Danica: The point is to Not Be Sane.  That’s the big conversation we’ve been needing to have since 1980—are people going to be okay with living in a country where they hate, actually deeply and totally hate, a majority of its inhabitants?

@GumbyAnne, why aren’t you taking notes?  Surely there are lower-key versions of what she is doing which will allow you some relief without the fraud she’s engaged in.  And, separately, why the hell aren’t you gaming the system?  Do you think the folks who are doing well aren’t?

PAULSALATA: Welfare is a liberal invention created by the democrats in the 60’s.

As a matter of fact, that’s untrue.  I was alive and paying attention all through the 1960s.  For me to read something like this is like reading “automobiles were invented in the 1960s, prior to which all Americans got around in horse-drawn carriages.”  On the plus side, it means that rather than trying to think about with anything else you write, I can blow it off instead, because all you’re good for is talking out your ass.  Ignorant twerps these days, sheesh!

Welfare is a liberal invention created by the democrats in the 60’s.

Prior to the invention of color television, the world itself existed in black and white.

Is the economy in ND as good as everyone says it is? Don’t y’all have something like 4% unemployment?

The other day, I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio. They had a report about the release of Census community survey income data. North Dakota was the only state that saw in increase in media income in 2009.

We’re in the middle of an oil boom. ND is now fourth in the US in terms of oil production. We passed Louisiana this or last year.  Oil money is driving a lot of things.

Can I play?

Prior to the invention of the slicing machine in the 60s, people had to tear bread apart.  It hasn’t been as good since.

Racism is a liberal invention created by the democrats in the 60s.  Before then, people didn’t know they were black.

I’m sure I could come up with more….

Freedom of speech, and of the press, was a liberal invention* created by the Democrat party in the 1960s.  Prior to that you could be jailed, exiled or shot for indecency, blasphemy or sedition.**

* That part is quite true.

** More true than we’d like to imagine….

“That may not necessarily be a feasible option as teachers…including those with STEM majors are being cut left and right because of budgetary constraints/politics.”

Yeah, but a lot of times the trick, at least here in Michigan where unions are still powerful enough to scare politicians into not totally trampling on labor rights, is to fire experienced teachers and replace them with new ones, because pay is mostly senority-based.

Tedious PAUL is tedious.

MAJeff—

I ask because I’ve heard a lot of stuff like that and being somewhat mobile at my age (no kids, no mortgage) I’m tepted to move there for economic reasons. I have a job now but I’d feel much more secure having a job in a state where the economy is like 1999. I just don’t know if I could stand the politics or the weather out there.

@137,

But BrianX (or brainx, as the case may be), he said that he had sex with your mother!  In his world, that’s like the ultimate burn—right up there with calling one of our resident gay Pandogonians a fag, as if that were the worst insult in the world. 

Seriously, the quality of our trolls gets worse all the time.

@Captain Bathrobe (and BrianX/BrainX, which IMO suits you fine)

Why wouldn’t tedious be an appropriate response to the troll’s sex life as well as to his commenting style?

(Apologies to BrianX’s mother, who shouldn’t have to deal with tedious sex at all.)

@124 and 130

This woman was not raised in poverty, she was raised in the same state subsidized comfort that her children are currently being raised in, so don’t feel too sorry for her.  There is a lot of space between “please sir may I have some more gruel” and “I’m gonna go out this weekend and buy another purse that costs more than a lot of people’s cars.”  I don’t want to see anybody go without food or housing or medical care, but yes, I’m willing to say that people who are taking that much public assistance should not be able to afford luxury items that no working middle-class person can afford.

Here is the thing: I believe in public assistance existing to help people who fall on hard times, not people who chose “hard times” as their lifestyle.  I AM “taking notes” and I know exactly what I would need to do to get where she is: I’d have to give birth to a few kids I can’t afford, divorce my husband and quit 80% of my employment.  But that would be unethical and socially irresponsible and too many people doing that would lead to the collapse of the entire safety net and I strongly believe that the safety net should continue to exist, so no, I can’t do that or encourage others to do it.

It pretty much DOES all come down to “hate the player or hate the game” and while the republicans “hate the game” and say that the whole system should be dismantled so that everybody, worthy or not, can just find adequate income or die of exposure, I would be more inclined to “hate that player” and say that some individuals abuse the system and I wish they wouldn’t do that.  Because it DOES put an undue burden on working taxpayers and makes it more difficult for liberals like us to defend the existence of the system entirely.  I don’t think that liberals going around acting like poor people can do no wrong really helps our case, because opportunistic assholes exist at every strata of society and we look like fools or liars when we pretend like that isn’t the case.

@141:

Good point.  I would imagine that the troll’s sex life is largely hypothetical, in any event.

@ GumbyAnne

Now she has children on welfare and buys fancy designer purses?  Neither of those details appear in Dr. Jones’s letter.  His caricature of this woman—who is in all likelihood a composite of multiple patients he’s seen—is very telling.  For one thing, it tells us that when he brings up a mental image of exactly who is beneath his attention as a physician, he sees a woman of color.  And I have a whole host of issues to take with him on that front.

@GumbyAnne: I’m not sure exactly what is unethical, I guess.  My in-laws dodge more in taxes using their accounting tricks than this lady will ever get in benefits.

I’d imagine that more waste occurs as a result of providers committing Medicaid fraud than any amount of gaming the system committed by individuals.

Wow, Gumby Anne apprently belongs to the Rush Limbaugh school of compassion. 

  Meanwhile, yeah, I know plenty of self righteous assholes who are positively obsessed with the thought that the poor might not be living in cardboard boxes like they should, dammit.

Pretty much, Cap Bath.  Hundreds of millions of dollars.

1) summer jobs and internships are crucial—i learned more there about actually being a lawyer day-to-day than i ever did in the classroom. but they’re too short and spaced out and oftentimes too filed with make-work and coddling to be all that useful.  especially with big firms, the quality of work given to summers may be pretty bad and then they take them wine-tasting and to baseball games so they think it’s superawesomefuntime to work there.  basically too short and too filled with fluff.  i think if students spent a school year working part-time and going to class part time, or even doing a semester full-time versus a summer, they’d get more exposure to real life and be able to see projects through and feel less like tourists.  it might also open up more spots for more students to work at a given firm.  also, big firm summer jobs pay a ton and some kids who are strapped for cash take them even when they’d rather be doing something else, say, externing for a judge or working in public interest, but the student loan dollars don’t cover summers, so they have to take paying jobs.  with some other structure in place that integrated work and class, these students might not have to make such a choice.

Good point.  Worked with two associates who ended up quitting less than 2 years from a biglaw firm because they were fed up with the long hours and “not having a life”.  Though I somewhat sympathized because they did work 70-80 hour workweeks…...it’s a cakewalk compared to the hours my 3 medical intern/resident roommates were pulling. 

Heck, they’d be clamoring to exchange their sudden shift switches(i.e. night to day with no rest period in between) and working at least 120+ hours/week.  Sometimes i wouldn’t see them for 3+ weeks at a stretch because our sleep/work schedules are so off….or they’d be catching what little sleep they had in between shifts at their hospital.

So your answer is that yes, she’s just not suffering enough for someone who is on public assistance.

Perhaps I was too hasty in removing the “fuck you very much” from my original post.

as for what the schools should look for, i think overall analytic and critical thinking abilities and writing skills—yes i know a lot of science majors become lawyers and i don’t want to shut them out, but lawyers write a LOT and many of them do it so poorly, are the most important.

Sadly enough, the lack of decent writing skills is not necessarily limited to those in the STEM fields IME and lower ranked undergrads.  I’ve encountered plenty of humanities/social science majors from Ivy/Ivy-level universities and topflight SLACs who squandered chances to optimize their critical thinking/analysis and writing skills during their college years. 

One is a boarding school educated social science major college classmate who is currently struggling in grad school because he somehow managed to go through 4 years at our SLAC without picking up those very skills which I thought were presented in nearly every course at my college…including a few advanced courses we took together.  How he managed to miss all that is beyond me considering how it was so blitheringly obvious.

Comment #142: GumbyAnne

It’s easily imaginable to see a person living off of government assistance affording nice things once-in-awhile, cuz I do.

I’m on disability and make the same amount of money I made when I worked: $800 a month. (Boy I wish I could have been one of those so put upon hardworking taxpayers, I even had a bachelor’s which actually is as good as a GED anyway) Now even though I have gigantic monthly prescription bills I don’t get assistance for, I’m not paying just to go to work like I used too, which cost more per month than my prescriptions now do.

So I scrounge like I did when I worked but now I can buy nice things like photoshop or a college class with a few months savings.

But yeah, I’m poor and very sick so I’m being bad by saving up and buying things that I’ll enjoy, get a lot of use out of, and increase my productivity. I’m supposed to be, no not miserable as I am that, but in the deepest voids of the blackest depression and agony you’ve probably never felt.

You know what? I’m going to get my angry on because you’re more irksome then the photophiliac insects that are attracted to my computer monitor at night.

Do you want to know who puts an undue burden on hard working tax payers? The rich that play games with everyones’ money, destroy jobs, deliberately include systemic unemployment in their economic ideologies (read fucking Milton Friedman, we’ve been living his wet dream), start wars, crash the economy, need our money so they don’t get hurt by the messes they made and then blame the ones hurt the most while they start making their pre fuck-up levels of money again all the while figuring out how to make everyone else hurt even more.

But oh no there’s “opportunistic assholes at every strata of society.” Okay, then which ones do the most harm?!

Trying to act like there’s some equivocation of responsibility between the ones who wind up in some certain systemic greyzones of society and the ones who made things bad enough for these greyzones to exist is the nasally re-uptaken bullshit your brain uses to create it’s neutral buoyancy.

I mean GOD-FUCKING-DAMMIT!

You are so lucky the 20mg of oxycodone I just took kicked in, I fucking swear.

Oh, and if you’re going to be blaming certain people who are being rational actors by staying on welfare then you must be a dirty-commie-traitor-of-the-free-world-america-hater.

Reagen would have put you up against a wall.

R.T.:

Substitute “corporate feeding trough” for “staying on welfare” and you have the single biggest piece of evidence Ayn Rand didn’t know shit from shinola about capitalism. Her “collectivist” companies that were supposed to be the bad guys were doing exactly what real world capitalists do; if Atlas Shrugged had even the slightest hint of realism, John Galt would have been a piker, an irrelevant little cult leader (and there would have been no book). (Anyway, there’s also a reason I prefer the car wash near my house to any other—can’t argue with a clean car and a free lottery ticket. Sometimes I think I need to get the car washed more than once a month )

I’m dependent on MassHealth to keep my sanity; I give back to society doing volunteer work for a public access TV station. A little indirect, but it’s my own little contribution.

@BrianX

If there’s anything that really burns me after having read Milton Friedman and learning about Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher is when conservatives or libertarians say people need to “contribute to society.”

Why this sounds positively socialistic and yet it’s coming from people who claim societies don’t exist and that we’re all just economically rational individuals. :p

I’ve always wanted to help give back to my society and when I’m well enough to work again I’ll start applying for state or city jobs… like I was doing before I got sick.

I do try to help at the moment by donating what I can spare to pan handlers or patronize local businesses under the pretense of buying something but I’m just trying to give them money. Oh no I’m redistributing wealth. ::home alone face::

@R.T.

I do try to help at the moment by donating what I can spare to pan handlers or patronize local businesses under the pretense of buying something but I’m just trying to give them money. Oh no I’m redistributing wealth. ::home alone face::

And presumably buying things!  Only Republican Party donors and judgmental assholes are allowed to have things!!

Paul:

The English language does not have enough
synonyms for the word “lame” for me to describe what a worthless waste of DNA you are. There are not bridges nor billygoats enough to give you the dismissal you so richly deserve. Also, it can be objectively shown that liberals, socialists, and communists are more patriotic Americans than your weasly, bullying, self-absorbed, willfully stupid lot by virtue of accepting everyone as equals and giving them a chance to prove it rather than throwing them to the wolves and declaring them worthless when they get eaten. All the bluster in the world won’t make you any less a judgemental, oblivious, subhuman piece of shit not worthy to be used as compost after your Double Down-hastened death. You and your lot are an egregious and sickening insult to everything you claim to hold dear, wiping your asses with the Bible and the Constitution any chance you get, self-importantly tearing down our civilization and laying the blame on anyone but yourselves, all the while refusing to admit that you’re patsies to the big money boys who think of you as cheap labor at best and useful idiots at worst.

You are intellectually vapid, mindlessly bullying, willfully wrong about everything you’ve said in this thread, and on top of that you’re just boring. Hell, this flame is just for my own entertainment because I know it’ll be wasted on a moron like you. In conclusion, keep fucking that pig.

true, i don’t mean to imply STEM majors are the only ones prone to poor verbal skills.

i definitely couldn’t have stuck it out through the medical internship craziness.  why is it like that?  all i know about medical internships i learned from grey’s anatomy so i assume everyone is sexily disheveled, despite the lack of sleep and has plenty of opportunity to bone the other hot interns/doctors/nurses/patients/etc—it can’t be that bad, right?  kidding.  but yeah, why do they make them work these crazy shifts in the first place?  is it some kind of hazing ritual?  is there a legitimate need for it?

One medical resident roommate did try to justify the long hours and abrupt schedule changes by saying there was so much information and experience medical doctors needed to learn after medical school that cutting hours even to that seen at biglaw would undermine this “education process”. 

However, from listening to other medical interns/residents and from reading about the history of medical education, I’m thinking it is most likely a form of traditional hazing to see how much the medical interns/residents can take it before they crumble or end up “better for the experience”. 

As for grey’s anatomy…that’s certainly not the life my 3 medical intern/resident roommates were living while working ridiculously long hours.  Heck, their entire lives were structured very simply….work insanely long hours, eat quickly, sleep….rinse and repeat until the end of residency.  If they had any free time, the first thing they tended to do is sleep as much as they can.  Though a few had long-term relationships…....the respective SOs either were extremely tolerant/understanding of their not having much “together time”* or were quite bitter about the entire situation.

Don’t know about Grey’s Anatomy…..maybe things are a little easier in Seattle compared to the Boston area.  Incidentally, the latter was almost always the #1 choice for medical internships/residency for the most ambitious med school students/graduates. 

* Reminds me of one 19 year old undergrad who said she’d hesitate to date PhD students because their studies are so intense and all-consuming that they wouldn’t have any meaningful time for her.  If she thought that’s bad….she should see the life of your average med student/intern/resident.

Isn’t it cute how they try to avoid admitting they’ve been curbstomped by hyperfocusing on one little detail? It’s like they don’t know how to come up with a counterargument that isn’t a qoutemine. Oh wait, that’s how they’re taught to think…

In any case, PaulyIsACracker, I wasn’t refuting you anyway. Just heaping on abuse on someone too dumb to be taught.

I… don’t think he’s all that concerned about black families. I’m just not feeling the love.

However, from listening to other medical interns/residents and from reading about the history of medical education, I’m thinking it is most likely a form of traditional hazing to see how much the medical interns/residents can take it before they crumble or end up “better for the experience”.

It’s a medically proven fact that sleep deprivation doesn’t increase, but decrease learning in the human organism, but somehow that is overlooked, and the other excuse is “That’s the way we did it and I survived”, which of course dodges the point entirely.

I went to graduate school at a medical school. I had a low GPA compared to the medical students I attended the classes with, but I passed all the classes except for having to retake anatomy, which I did with other medical students who had failed it during a summer session at a medical school in a nearby state.

The Medical Wives club had a flyer for the spouses of students that said it all:  “Know what it’s like to be the wife of a minor deity.”

I tend to favor the opinion of my late teacher of the Intro to Philosophy class I took, a German rabbi whose specialty was Kant that a more proper term would be ‘medicine men’.

Selena:

Of course not. And now he’s tone trolling. He must be a Very Serious Person. Still content-free though.

why do they make them work these crazy shifts in the first place?  is it some kind of hazing ritual?  is there a legitimate need for it?

It is hazing to a degree, but also, once you’re an actual physician, you are going to be forced to making critical decisions in the middle of the night with very little sleep, so they feel it’s necessary to train you to deal with that reality. If you’ve only been forced to make good decisions when you are well rested, then that’s the only time you’re going to be comfortable making those decisions.

If I am wheeled into the ER with a serious injury or sickness and a doctor needs to be called up at home in the middle of the night to deal with my problem, I want the doctor who’s been in this sort of situation a million times before, not the guy who normally only sees patients after 8 hours of sleep and a nice breakfast.

Besides, it’s normally something that just goes on during training. What else did you have to do from the ages of 26-30 that was so darn important, anyway?

It’s a medically proven fact that sleep deprivation doesn’t increase, but decrease learning in the human organism, but somehow that is overlooked, and the other excuse is “That’s the way we did it and I survived”, which of course dodges the point entirely.

Yep.  The interns/residents I’ve met had plenty of stories of mistakes arising to the level of malpractice if caught and even a few deaths arising from cumulative sleep deprivation.  A reason why one cardiologist who finished his residency gave the following advice: “Whatever you do, DON’T get sick in July.” 

According to him, July is when the vast majority of the experienced fellows and senior doctors go on vacation and green interns fresh from medical school arrive to take their hospital positions.  The latter group tend to be the majority of doctors providing medical care under the supervision of a tiny handful of senior doctors/fellows who didn’t get to take July off.

The interns/residents I’ve met had plenty of stories of mistakes arising to the level of malpractice if caught and even a few deaths arising from cumulative sleep deprivation.  A reason why one cardiologist who finished his residency gave the following advice: “Whatever you do, DON’T get sick in July.”

This is a non-sequitur to the point Dark Avenger was making—the reason not to go to the ER in July is because the interns and residents who will be treating you are brand new, not because of the sleep deprivation, which will be just as true in June as in July. If someone sleep-deprived is going to treat me in the middle of the night, I want someone who’s used to treating patients while sleep deprived, not a bunch of people doing it for the first time under those conditions.

Chet: But then, it’s even easier to advocate for shutting it down entirely. “See, even they admit they have a problem with abuses that are so widespread, prevention alone has increased the cost threefold! Perhaps social entitlements for the poor have outlived their usefulness.” Voila, third world-sized starving peasant class that can be subsequently used as poster children for why minimum wage should be eliminated and churches should be given government money to provide services for the poor. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If someone sleep-deprived is going to treat me in the middle of the night, I want someone who’s used to treating patients while sleep deprived, not a bunch of people doing it for the first time under those conditions.

Unfortunately those stories about serious mistakes arising to malpractice and even deaths are not exclusive to green interns….but also doctors at all levels of the profession…including those with plenty of experience. 

A reason why many actually feel that there should not only be a reduction in maximum number of hours worked in a week/weird shift changes, but also that such limits be seriously enforced for the sake of better medical practice and patient care.

Sleep deprivation can adversely affect the brain and cognitive function.[18] A 2000 study, by the UCSD School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System in San Diego, used functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to monitor activity in the brains of sleep-deprived subjects performing simple verbal learning tasks.[19] The study showed that regions of the brain’s prefrontal cortex displayed more activity in sleepier subjects. Depending on the task at hand, the brain would sometimes attempt to compensate for the adverse effects caused by lack of sleep.

The temporal lobe, which is a brain region involved in language processing, was activated during verbal learning in rested subjects but not in sleep deprived subjects. The parietal lobe, not activated in rested subjects during the verbal exercise, was more active when the subjects were deprived of sleep. Although memory performance was less efficient with sleep deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.

A 2001 study at Chicago Medical Institute suggested that sleep deprivation may be linked to serious diseases, such as heart disease and mental illnesses including psychosis and bipolar disorder.[20] The link between sleep deprivation and psychosis was further documented in 2007 through a study at Harvard Medical School and the University of California at Berkeley. The study revealed, using MRI scans, that lack of sleep causes the brain to become incapable of putting an emotional event into the proper perspective and incapable of making a controlled, suitable response to the event.

A noted 2002 University of California animal study indicated that non-rapid eye movement sleep is necessary for turning off neurotransmitters and allowing their receptors to “rest” and regain sensitivity which allows monoamines (norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine) to be effective at naturally produced levels. This leads to improved regulation of mood and increased learning ability. The study also found that REM sleep deprivation may alleviate clinical depression because it mimics selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). This is because the natural decrease in monoamines during REM is not allowed to occur, which causes the concentration of neurotransmitters in the brain, that are depleted in clinically depressed persons, to increase. Sleep outside of the REM phase may allow enzymes to repair brain cell damage caused by free radicals. High metabolic activity while awake damages the enzymes themselves preventing efficient repair. This study observed the first evidence of brain damage in rats as a direct result of sleep deprivation.[21]

Animal studies suggest that sleep deprivation increases stress hormones, which may reduce new cell production in adult brains.[22]

Effects on growth

A 1999 study[23] found that sleep deprivation resulted in reduced cortisol secretion the next day, driven by increased subsequent slow-wave sleep. Sleep deprivation was found to enhance activity on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (which controls reactions to stress and regulates body functions such as digestion, the immune system, mood, sex, or energy usage) while suppressing growth hormones. The results supported previous studies, which observed adrenal insufficiency in idiopathic hypersomnia..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation