Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Erm when you get to the miners strike that is where I am from and roughly around when I was born. I hope that evil witch is burning right now.
Political Discussion
- Thread starter David A.
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Erm when you get to the miners strike that is where I am from and roughly around when I was born. I hope that evil witch is burning right now.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
Im not sure if they get to that. Right now it is the tiff over South African sanctions.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
If they go through the 80s without covering the miners strike then that is an odd editorial decision. That said historical accuracy is absolutely not a virtue of that show.
panino
Well-Known Member
i believe the Troubles and the hunger strike are not much in focus either.....
so, historic accuracy is definitely not the primary focus of the series
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Yep the troubles are Mountbatten getting blown up from what I gather and the British soldiers are wonderful. No proper mention of Bloody Sunday the decade before or the hunger strikes.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
There was a speech played that mentioned Bloody Sunday, but yea the glossed over the Irish position. They did mention the labor prescribed that led to the coal slide in Whales though.
why wasn’t there the same opposition to English rule in Scotland?
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Scotland and Wales both voluntarily joined the union. Scotland in particular was a very prominent partner in the union until very recently. Ireland did not join voluntarily. The majority of the Irish population never accepted the 800 years of British occupation. The usual British bodge job of partition to create a subjugated majority worked as well as it did in India and Israel/Palestine.
And what kills me about all this debt creation is that we substitute the availability of easy credit and predatory loans for actual increased in wages that keep up with the real inflation rate, not the one the federal bank is keeping low artificially. But what happens when so much of your society is underwater in debt that they are either unable to pay the debt back (like what is going on in bankruptcy courts every day) or they are unable to secure more debt to meet their needs--presumably after bankruptcy court. GDP calculations do not have a term for debt burden in the society, and I think that's really short sighted, especially now that credit is so common that even financial experts tell us to put our bills on our credit cards for the perks. I just wonder how we can have any sort of sustained growth in our economy over the next 10 years if the majority of Americans are saddled with debt, especially medical debt. I think we need to re-evaluate our entire calculation since our GDP is dependent on Americans spending to also include a term for debt burden as it will inevitably effect the amount of money a person has left over to purchase things.
After working for a program that provided medical and psychiatric care to a juvenile correction facility, I can absolutely say that the justice system is and will always be all the justice you can pay for. We were having an issue with one of our psychiatric evaluations. Mainly, our population was 80% black but if you were white, you were 7 times more likely to screen for a serious mental issue. After doing a simple chi square and then (for my capstone) doing a full Rasch analysis, I found that the test, though slightly biased on a couple measures, was selecting children properly regardless of race. This means that if you are white, only the most disturbed children get put into a correction facility, but if you were black, they would throw you in for a lot less. If you don't have money for an attorney, don't expect any justice from our justice system, which is an incredibly racist institution--though there is a lot of interplay of systemic poverty with systemic racism.
The problem here is that we don't really teach financial lessons. We don't learn home economics any more. We don't know how to balance a checkbook and we definitely don't teach financial literacy in schools. We have a tough time imparting mathematic principles to kids with this new common core math, which educators are finding are creating gaps for special needs students more than anyone. So we don't teach kids about credit unless we do this at home, but how can someone who is not financially literate teach their kids about any of this?
When I started college waaaaaaayy back in 1997, this was during peak credit card predatory practices. They had people signing up college kids for credit with the promise of something as stupid as a t-shirt. Looking back, I realize that these companies were extending five figure credit limits to college kids for the expressed purpose of putting them in debt even before they were able to draw an income. If you look at the employee hand books of paycheck loans, it is a system designed for the person to never get out of debt. People use the argument that an 18 y/o doesn't fully understand the implications of the debt they are taking on. I think we should all understand that to say that given the current predatory debt system where we are all pushed to take on debt (even by financial experts) without really understanding that many of these companies engage in predatory practices that we are not privy to--regardless of age. Here's where I think we need to really focus. Why is it okay to let companies participate in predatory lending schemes that they intentionally trick consumers with?
LeSamourai
Well-Known Member
I am coming up on ten years as a federal civilian employee (since I've been getting paid, I feel awkward calling it "service"), and part of what they offered me when I was applying was that if I still had loans after ten years in there was a program that would cancel the rest of my student debt. I felt pretty dumb some years later when I learned that very few people actually get approved to use that program (I don't think my initial supervisors were aware that the program doesn't really work for most people). I've been making all my loan payments in the meantime, but a combination of not always being the best with money, serious health emergencies, and living in an expensive place means I haven't been making the bigger payments I told myself I would.
So, I have to admit I won't feel too guilty if I have some or all of my federal student loan debt wiped out. I'll still feel guilty, just not as much.
So, I have to admit I won't feel too guilty if I have some or all of my federal student loan debt wiped out. I'll still feel guilty, just not as much.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
this happens in the school system also and is primarily the reason for the removal by law the willful defiance suspension rules in CA.
i will say that because the district I work for has some areas where lawyers are present during IEP meeting there have been a number of lawsuits. It has noticeably raised the bar for all students.
My wife took a part time job in the district my son goes to. It has been a pretty bad experience and explains a lot of policy and problems we had with service providers when he first started receiving services. Additionally, my wife was told that they do not provides dis counseling services for social emotional support or social skills at the district. Yea the AUT kids don’t get and social skill support. This is illegal.
at the beginning of the year my kids service provider said that because he was alone in a group and it was the pandemic he would only be receiving 15 minutes instead of a 1/2 hour for speech. I promptly sent her an email pointing out that that was not was on the IEP. Most parent probably went along with the policy. They are owed those minutes. It is andvantage to have educated parents.
More than once, I have brought up issues with the school that I think they should change, not necessarily just for my kid, but for every child in that special needs classroom. My friend actually did sue the school system for services and the availability and level of services improved, but she had means and was able to hire a lawyer privately. What happens when people can't afford lawyers?
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
There are advocates that work for free. I’m thinking of doing this when I retire. The problem is that there is no outside group that puts enough pressure in the district to make changes for every student.
Oh yes! I want to be a parent advocate once my kids are older.
bettim84
Well-Known Member
I'm not even going to pretend I can be objective about student loans and what I think the government should do about them. All I have to peddle is my story.
I was lucky to finish my undergrad without any loans. This was due to several factors (first two years in a community college; a few years off to save money to finish my degree; never lived at a college/university campus). Unfortunately, my reward for all that was a generic, unemployable liberal arts major.
Even worse, I graduated in the spring of 2008. You may have heard stories about what happened to the U.S. economy around that time. Jobs were scarce, even if I had a more useful major (which I did not). I ended up working as an AmeriCorps volunteer for a couple of years. The stipend was meager (under $10K per year) but they did offer an extra $5k or so to go toward grad school.
Of course, you all know what happened next: I went to law school and in that process I amassed approximately $100,000 in debt. Then I passed the bar exam and started looking for work. I ended up at a small firm that offered base compensation of around $20,000, plus bonuses that never materialized.
A couple of small things broke my way. First, I never took out private loans. As a result, I qualify for income-based repayment plans. The upside is that my loan payments are limited to certain percentage of my income. The downside (there's always a downside!) is that over the past 7 years since I finished law school, my student loan payments covered less than the amount of interest that accrues on those loans. My balance is now closer to $130,000 and growing, even though I've never missed a payment. There is effectively no chance that I will ever, ever, ever pay off what I owe.
Another benefit of only having government loans is that I may eventually qualify for PSLF (public service loan forgiveness) as long as I work full-time for a qualifying employer (usually a government entity or a nonprofit organization) for a period of 10 years. I am working my way towards that but still have 7-plus years to go.
If the nonprofit route fails, then I may still qualify for loan "forgiveness" after 20 years of timely payments. In this case, however, there is a reason for the quotation marks: the amount "forgiven" would be computed as taxable income, which could result in a tax bill in the tens of thousands of dollars (not exactly the kind of savings that rural nonprofit attorneys have).
To a certain extent, I get @Tys1's point that my individual choices are what led me to this situation. On the other hand, I certainly did not expect, nor did anyone I spoke with ever mention, that there was a real likelihood that I would still be getting paid less than $40,000/year (after tax, but indulge me here) more than 7 years after graduation. And that's because the people who were advising me were themselves either private law school recruiters or out-of-touch boomers who had a much easier career path (lower education costs, comparatively higher pay... someone shared a cool graph several pages ago that illustrates this point perfectly).
In the end I feel both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky that I fell into a systemic trap; lucky that I at least got an education out of it, and now have a nonprofit job that makes a positive difference on other people's lives. I'll also tell you what I will not feel: not even the slightest sense of guilt if/when my loans are eventually forgiven.
I was lucky to finish my undergrad without any loans. This was due to several factors (first two years in a community college; a few years off to save money to finish my degree; never lived at a college/university campus). Unfortunately, my reward for all that was a generic, unemployable liberal arts major.
Even worse, I graduated in the spring of 2008. You may have heard stories about what happened to the U.S. economy around that time. Jobs were scarce, even if I had a more useful major (which I did not). I ended up working as an AmeriCorps volunteer for a couple of years. The stipend was meager (under $10K per year) but they did offer an extra $5k or so to go toward grad school.
Of course, you all know what happened next: I went to law school and in that process I amassed approximately $100,000 in debt. Then I passed the bar exam and started looking for work. I ended up at a small firm that offered base compensation of around $20,000, plus bonuses that never materialized.
A couple of small things broke my way. First, I never took out private loans. As a result, I qualify for income-based repayment plans. The upside is that my loan payments are limited to certain percentage of my income. The downside (there's always a downside!) is that over the past 7 years since I finished law school, my student loan payments covered less than the amount of interest that accrues on those loans. My balance is now closer to $130,000 and growing, even though I've never missed a payment. There is effectively no chance that I will ever, ever, ever pay off what I owe.
Another benefit of only having government loans is that I may eventually qualify for PSLF (public service loan forgiveness) as long as I work full-time for a qualifying employer (usually a government entity or a nonprofit organization) for a period of 10 years. I am working my way towards that but still have 7-plus years to go.
If the nonprofit route fails, then I may still qualify for loan "forgiveness" after 20 years of timely payments. In this case, however, there is a reason for the quotation marks: the amount "forgiven" would be computed as taxable income, which could result in a tax bill in the tens of thousands of dollars (not exactly the kind of savings that rural nonprofit attorneys have).
To a certain extent, I get @Tys1's point that my individual choices are what led me to this situation. On the other hand, I certainly did not expect, nor did anyone I spoke with ever mention, that there was a real likelihood that I would still be getting paid less than $40,000/year (after tax, but indulge me here) more than 7 years after graduation. And that's because the people who were advising me were themselves either private law school recruiters or out-of-touch boomers who had a much easier career path (lower education costs, comparatively higher pay... someone shared a cool graph several pages ago that illustrates this point perfectly).
In the end I feel both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky that I fell into a systemic trap; lucky that I at least got an education out of it, and now have a nonprofit job that makes a positive difference on other people's lives. I'll also tell you what I will not feel: not even the slightest sense of guilt if/when my loans are eventually forgiven.
Tys1
Well-Known Member
Great story that sheds some light and real perspective on the issue, thanks for sharing. I didn’t know attorneys made so little, especially with 7 years experience. I assumed the average starting salary would be around $80k on the low end.
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
As the father of 3, 1 out of college, 1 in her last year and 1 still to go..........a degree isn't all it's cracked up to be anymore. This coming from a, my least favorite descriptor, boomer. I have this conversation with all my kids, and while there was a time that a degree carried some heft to it, all it seems to carry now a days is a huge bill to pay. We want to educate and enable our children and our future population, work force, and families, but we're enslaving them to debt right out of the gate, debt has become the "American Dream" replacing the white picked fenced house..........and too many people are ok with that. That being said, really look at our country, we live in access, we "NEED" things that we really don't, we have an overly entitled mentality, we live way beyond our means...........even if the "means" should be adjusted and raised across the board.
Yes, you make your choices, but the rules and outcomes of those choices are constantly being "bent" to better the institutions and business' of the world, not the people, students and or consumers.
Yes, you make your choices, but the rules and outcomes of those choices are constantly being "bent" to better the institutions and business' of the world, not the people, students and or consumers.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
No a bachelors exists only as a gateway to allow you to be admitted to do further qualifications now. I know. I’m on advanced diploma 1 after bachelors, bachelors level diploma and a professional legal qualification. And even that’s not “enough” any more. And I’m lucky to be in a country where third level education is “affordable” and in a job where I can claim a significant portion of fees for courses relevant to my employment from my employer. The problem is. What’s the alternative? If you don’t go to college what is waiting for you? It’s not even that a bachelor’s isn’t enough anymore, it’s also that not going to college doesn’t leave you with any real option either. It’s just all so sad what kinda life we’re consigning our young people to.
Yeeeep, the only thing my undergrad qualified me for was grad school.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
bettim84
Well-Known Member
It's understandable you'd think that, because that's the mean range. The problem is that we arrive at that mean through something called a "bimodal salary distribution curve." Basically there are two peaks of salary range, one for Big Law attorneys and another for everyone else. This is the Class of 2014 salary distribution (I couldn't find one for my graduation year but this is close enough):
Lawyer Salaries Are Weird – Biglaw Investor
Now you all know why I lowball people when I make offers on records.