Here’s an unusual Property/T&E problem: what happens to the Rule Against Perpetuities in a comic-book (or future) world populated by immortals? Enter the ‘Law and the Multiverse’ blog to consider the issue in Immortality and the law.
(Spotted via Slashdot.)
Over the years I have accumulated about a hundred and fifty draft blog posts, a discovery that startled me as I was preparing the blog for its move. Many were unfinished, even more were outdated. But a couple dozen seemed fine, and in some cases I couldn’t figure out why they had remained only a step from the scrap heap. Maybe they weren’t my best work, but it seemed in retrospect they weren’t all that bad either.
So over the next few days, I’ll be publishing some of these zombie posts for your amusement, occasionally with a comment or update appended.
As you can see (if you are not reading this via the RSS feed), things have changed around here. I’m now on WordPress, and the blog has a totally different and I think much better more modern look. The old template was more or less hand-coded by yours truly back in the day when just having a unique template was an achievement. If all goes according to plan, not that it ever does, there will be more changes over the next week or two as I work out any bugs, and then, once the dust settles, maybe play around a bit.
Please be patient with me if things go funny from time to time. The new system is much more complex and (I hope) flexible than the old.
Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Incidentally, I should mention that right now the comments are set very restrictively, and just as a temporary measure I have to approve the first comment by every poster before it goes online; once you have had the first one approved subsequent comments should appear automatically. As soon as things are a bit more organized, I’ll change that, probably to a system that lets logged in users post more freely than drive-by commentators. (Currently the option to become a logged-in user is disabled. One thing at a time.)
One major difference between WordPress and Movable Type is that WP wants to build a page for every visitor, while MT builds a static page whenever new content is created, then serves that page up to visitors. Obviously, static pages are much faster. So WP users throw in a cache, which speeds up pages. I’ve got one, but it remains to be seen how well it performs and whether this cheapo shared server is up to the job.
So here too, please be patient while things get sorted out.
UPDATE (12/8/2010): I’ve switched to a much simpler theme. Perhaps not as elegant, but so far easier to live with.
Just sent this to the NPR ombudsman:
This morning on the news, an NPR reporter referred to the debate in DC as (I'm paraphrasing, but it's close) between a “tax cut for those who make under $250,000” and a competing proposal that also would also offer tax cuts to the higher-income group. That's pretty much how most media report it. And it is not factually accurate.
If you look at the actual tax cut bill that is supposedly for those under $250,000, you would see that the benefits in that bill also flow to people making more. There is no income limit for benefiting from the middle-class tax cut. All that is limited is how much you get — in the Democratic proposal, people making $5million get the same sized tax cut as those making $250,000, in the Republican the more you make, the greater your benefit (at the expense of the deficit, of course).
So in fact the debate is not whether wealthier tax payers should get a tax cut — both plans, every plan, on the table give them a tax cut. Rather the debate is over whether people making over $250K should get additional, higher tax cuts in some ratio to their earnings, in addition to the base tax cut they would get anyway under the first plan.
NPR should explain this correctly, not go with the lazy explanation even if (almost) everyone else does.
Of course this particular error is everywhere, so much so that when I first encountered the truth it seemed unlikely. This represents such a catastrophic failure of White House and Democratic leadership messaging as to make one believe that they never seriously contemplated not having the extra-large tax cuts for millionaires, even though my children will be paying for it for years. Yes, that's the tax cut financed by the same deficit spending that is too horrible to contemplate for extending unemployment benefits to people who have been out of work for over a year due in large part to the actions of some of those self-same millionaires.
Hypothesis: It's all kabuki. We are going to tax the future poor to benefit the present rich again, just like we did when so much of the bailout money — our future taxes — ended up in Wall Street bonuses. And that was the plan in the White House and much of the Senate and even Congressional leadership from day one.
A couple of years ago — spurred by the helpful questions of a commentator on this blog — I tried to figure out whether the University of Miami School of Law was reporting starting salary data about its graduates in a full, fair, and honest manner. I thought now would be a good time to revisit that question, using the law school's presentation of new data on last year's class, a group suffering the worst legal hiring recession since the Great Depression.
Two years ago, the short answer to my question about whether the data was presented accurately turned out to be yes, but only if you read the data very, very carefully, more carefully than one would expect of even a reasonably prudent law applicant not trained in statistics.
The slightly longer version of the old answer was that then and now UM complies with external reporting standards set by the ABA and NALP and that these reporting standards tend to mask some realities about starting salaries. UM nonetheless adheres to them because a failure to do so would (1) Mean our numbers were reported with an asterisk, making it look like we have something to hide; (2) Make the UM numbers no longer comparable with other schools' numbers; (3) Put UM at a terrible competitive disadvantage.
The even longer version of the old answer (skip down if you want the new stuff) was this, lifted from More About Starting Salaries:
According to Career Development Office, the reason why the both the $104,500 number [for average starting salary for those employed by firms] and the more detailed but somewhat different pie charts accompanying it [which, based on firm size, suggested a lower number] are accurate has to do with response rates, differing data sets, and national reporting standards.
Not everyone who responded to the law school's survey about what they were doing immediately after graduation chose to disclose their salary. Thus, the charts about firm size, for example, are based on a bigger data pool than the salary number. In 2007 we had 378 JDs. Of that group, 346 had replied to our survey at the time the Viewbook was produced. Of that 346, however, not all worked for firms — and of the group that worked for firms only about 46% gave us salary data. So the average salary number of $104,500 is based on the data provided by that 46%.
Since firm size and starting salary are related, you might reasonably object — as I did — that it would be more reasonable to pro-rate the responses of the people who gave salary data on the assumption that the people who didn't fill in that part of the survey earned similar amounts by comparable firm size. And I still think there's something to that. But I'm told by the Career Office — and I believe them — that the average salary data is presented the way it is because that's how all law schools do it and the goal is to provide prospective students with numbers that can fairly be compared to what is provided by other law schools.
The Career Development Office avers that it collects the data and reports it in accordance with ABA and NALP guidelines, using the same methods that every other accredited law school in the country uses. Were the law school to do something else, the administration notes, it would no longer be reporting to students in the way it reports to the ABA and NALP. That would mean our data would have an asterisk. And even if we were doing it in order to provide better data the inevitable conclusion that most people would draw is that we were trying to hide something. So the Catch-22 is that we have to do it this way, possibly sacrificing some statistical excellence and even accuracy, or else we'll look like we're engaged in some sort of cover-up. And, of course, in addition to having an asterisk, we'd be harming our competitive position since we'd have gone to some trouble to calculate and report a lower number which would harm marketing and recruiting.
Well, here we are now in a very bad legal hiring year, and U.M has again provided some employment data for 2009 graduates that, on first blush, looks somewhat cheery:
A very helpful guide for those Trying to Make Sense of the Comcast / Level 3 Dispute over at Freedom to Tinker.
I don't write about this stuff, but it's important.
Jotwell Blenderlaw