HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Elie Mystal writes: “If President Obama thinks education is so important, then why is he hell bent on financially crippling those who seek education? Seriously, why can’t he understand that making education affordable for everybody is not achieved simply by giving everybody the opportunity to take out loans that they cannot pay back? . . . I want somebody to explain to me why this president — one who has enjoyed overwhelming support from the young and college-educated — has a blind spot when it comes to the cost of student loans. . . . Forget about the lawyers for a second. Think about the years doctors will spend accruing interest while they study. Think about a mathematics Ph.D candidate who might start grad school when he’s 22 and have nearly a decade of interest waiting for him when he graduates into professorial market. This plan will make it harder for thousands of the very people Obama says we need more of to achieve financial security before they’re eligible for (soon to be non-existent) Social Security.” Yeah, it’s like he doesn’t really care about their well-being at all.
Archive for 2011
February 15, 2011
ABA YOUNG LAWYERS DIVISION ADOPTS “Truth In Legal Education” Resolution. “The division on Saturday adopted the Truth in Law School Education resolution: a six-point resolution urging law schools to beef up the availability and accuracy of information on the cost of legal education and the job and salaries of graduates.”
MY EARLIER ADVICE ON HOOKING UP A BIG UPS to power your modem/wireless router is criticized by reader Erik Carlseen, who emails:
Argh!!!!! (Sorry, I see this bad advice followed all over the place). El-cheapo UPSs like this usually give you very little time to work with, then their batteries go bad within a few years and then at that point they’re basically just a very large and heavy surge suppressor. The unit you linked – even when brand new – will give about 10-15 minutes of run-time under a typical home office load (a bit more if a notebook is used instead of a desktop). Most of the time, people plug them in and forget about them, and then when they’re actually needed they don’t do much good.
The following advice is for people who have actual value for their time and data…
You’re better off putting on the correctly-sized, expandable UPS and then adding external battery packs to suit your needs. Buying a “bigger” UPS just oversizes the electronics far, wasting budget dollars on purchasing them and battery power when they’re in use. The value is in the additional run-time, so put your money there instead. Something like this.
Pricier, but the quality is excellent, it’s got more battery (about twice the run-time), less wasted capacity, and it recharges almost three times faster. I typically get 8-12 years of use out of models from this manufacturer, changing the batteries out every 4 years.
You can also slap on up to five of these external battery packs (for a total of about 12 hours of runtime with a typical desktop PC, 40 hours of notebook+cable modem & router).
See the chart here for more info.
Yes, it’s expensive, but if the data and uptime are actually important they get the job done. Figuring out one’s cost and likelihood of downtime combined with the flexibility of one’s time (can I do something else now and catch up on work later?) and making the appropriate trade-offs is left as an exercise for the reader :-)
If you need to power multiple computers (say, for a small office), then size up the electronics (leaving appropriate room for growth), and add battery packs to taste.
I appreciate the advice, but my 1500VA APC Back-UPS unit has run my cable modem / wireless setup for most of a day with lots of power left. I’m sure this stuff’s better, but I’m not sure it’s worth if for most people. Now I’ve got a similar setup backing up the PJTV studio, but maybe that would be worth expanding on. Then again, my power doesn’t go out much.
Meanwhile, several readers suggest getting a big, or a medium-sized, power inverter. Unless you buy a pretty expensive one, though, the power those put out is kind of iffy for some electronics. Of course, if you’re really serious you can go with something like this.
FRAGMENT OF HUMAN DNA found in gonorrhea genome. No word if it’s Charlie Sheen’s.
PEOPLE WHO REGULARLY EAT BERRIES are less likely to get Parkinson’s Disease.
KEITH HENNESSEY: The President’s Budget: Whistling Past The Graveyard. “The President is choosing both a policy path and a campaign strategy. He is betting that having no proposal to address the looming fiscal crisis is better for his reelection prospects than having one.” And the well-being of the country can go hang.
Related: Kick The Can Kid Down The Road. “After all, it’s our kids – not cans – that will feel the boot as multiplying debt forces future taxpayers to do even more with even less.”
I WAS TALKING TO A COLLEAGUE ABOUT this article on “nonconsensual insemination,” and it reminded me of this, er, seminal piece on pregnancy deception by Tracy Quan: Conception by deception: Why do women get away with “accidentally” getting pregnant — when if a man tried to pull the same manipulative stunt, he’d be Bobbitted?
In fact, in today’s New York Times, male efforts to sabotage birth control are called abuse. Women, on the other hand, are just making use of a “gift.” All those people deploying “scope of consent” arguments in the Julian Assange rape case need to address this double standard.
Then there’s the whole needing a wife’s consent for a vasectomy thing. What are these “reproductive rights” I keep hearing about?
UPDATE: Reader Shelly North writes:
I am the oldest of four children and my mother did not want to talk to my two younger brothers about sex and so she asked me (their older sister) to handle things. This was in the 80’s in a small town in west Texas. I believe that my conversation with them went something like this.
“I am a girl and I know this to be true, Girls LIE about birth control. You have to take responsibility for yourself. I also know the girls in your class who are putting out (an advantage of a small town) and I know for a fact that none of them are on birth control. No Glove No Love. If you are too embarrassed to buy them I will buy them for you.”
I didn’t have any nieces or nephews until after my brother was married. I knew too many girls who planned their pregnancies around what they wanted. It is a horrible thing to say but it is still true today “Girls lie about birth control.”
Indeed.
SOLAR SAILS fly from science-fiction into reality.
VIDEO: Obama’s Presser On The Budget: “Needless to say, Barack Obama faced a great deal of skepticism when he took the podium today for his press conference on the budget proposal. Speaking to reporters for just over an hour, Obama attempted to convince the nation that he took deficit reduction seriously, but at least from the initial response, Obama didn’t appear to convince the reporters.” Well, but that’s the press, which is famous for its skepticism toward this President.
PROF. JACOBSON: Dissecting Shirley Sherrod’s Complaint Against Breitbart. “The point of this post is that the Sherrod complaint is weak as a legal document, and the underlying merits appear even weaker when subject to scrutiny. Sherrod’s lawyer has done a good job of creating a document to minimize the weaknesses of the claim, but the weaknesses are right there, on Page One.” I look forward to seeing what the discovery turns up.
SHOCKING RACISM at AlterNet. “One might have thought that the days of calling African-Americans ‘monkeys’ were over. Not, however, among liberals.”
More here.
THE ANCHORESS ON THE DANGERS OF OVERREACH.
AT LEAST HE DIDN’T SACRIFICE THE HOBO’S SOUL TO HIS MASTER, SATAN: Girl Talk: About That Time I Accidentally Went On A Date With A Hobo Killer. Though lots of perfectly nice people do that, I’m told.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: From San Francisco to Sarajevo.
WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): CBS Poll: Americans Unconvinced Economy on Rebound.
IN THE MAIL: From Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir.
PROF. BAINBRIDGE: Memo To Washington: Get Out Of The Insurance Biz.
F.A. HAYEK’S Top 10 Dos And Don’ts In A Recession.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, federal authorities would be taking down websites that offended the Administration’s cronies. And they were right!
HOW DEEP ARE THOSE PROPOSED SPENDING CUTS? NOT VERY. “The next time you hear howls of anguish over deep, tough, painful cuts in the federal budget, you might want to ask yourself how you’d feel if you had 7 percent more to spend next year than you did last year.”
And among the accompanying graphics, the one on spending as a percentage of GDP should undercut any claims that Obama is just continuing Bush’s big-spending ways. Bush spent big. Obama is spending disastrously big.
Related: This budget is no way to Win The Future. Depends on who you’re winning it for, I guess.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: What We Can Learn From Thucydides. “We worry about the end of the world. The Greeks worried about seeing their city burned, the men killed, the women and children forced into slavery. Their culture, their identity, their dignity, their rights: gone with the wind. Our fear seems detached from daily life; theirs was part of it. We watch our enemies hurl threats on TV; they watched besieging armies from their city walls.”
And, of course, we see the Greeks’ enemies as fellow Greeks, and wonder why they didn’t stick together against the barbarians, and the Persians, rather than constantly fighting among themselves. Mead is discussing Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War.
AT AMAZON, top deals in electronics.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Cynical And Unrealistic White House Budget. “This was supposed to be the moment we were all waiting for. After three years of historic deficits that have added almost $4.5 trillion to the national debt, President Obama was finally going to get serious about fiscal discipline. Instead, what landed on Congress’s doorstep on Monday was a White House budget that increases deficits above the spending baseline for the next two years. Hosni Mubarak was more in touch with reality last Thursday night.”
CHANCES UP for federal shutdown.