zooropop40
Refugee
Cramer is going to be on the Daily Show tonight.
I know! I cant wait
Cramer is going to be on the Daily Show tonight.
What is your idea of a good business news outlet? And who owns it?
the best one i can think of would probably be The Economist.
however, i think predicting the markets is like predicting the weather, and when we're tantalized by the promise of near-instant riches, American men in particular seem to want to deify whomever appears to know more than the average schmo.
one of the best things to come out of this period of economic instability will be the virtual death of the worshiping of the markets and the Masters of the Universe.
i think that one of the worst things i've seen in my generation (i'm 31) has been the elevation and adulation of things like the MBA or going to Wall Street immediately after graduation. it was the fast-track to an instant 6 figure (or more) salary, and the money is what lured many of the best-and-brightest in the under-40 crowd to these financial institutions and they used their brain power not to cure cancer or build space shuttles but to buy and sell NINA loans.
This interview is unreal. I thought it was going to be a joke. Stewart is going for the kill. I'm stunned.
I remember being at a banking conference a few years ago and the guy moderating the discussion at the table I was sitting at was giving some background as to his career trajectory, basically saying he had studied psychics at a good university, ended up with a PHD, but after a few years he thought he had given the field of science everything he could, and, uh, so he decided to go and work for a bank. I thought, that's odd. You decided you had given the world of science everything you could, so you became a banker. You had a qualifcation that is only one in a million could ever get, and you go into a profession which you're probably way overqualified for. Banking isn't really rocket science, frankly. The fallacy of the last few years is to try to turn it into rocket science. Truth is, this guy probably made more money in banking and that's the real reason he left science.
Cramer was DESTROYED by stewart. I kind of felt sorry for him, he looked so uncomfortable.
Is it me or did Cramer appear at times that he was about to cry? His voice sounded like it was quivering at times. I enjoyed the interview and think Jon Stewart raised his creditability last night.
Why did you choose corporate law instead of another area of law which might have offered more potential for tie-in with your background and experience in biology research? Not asking to be confrontational nor to imply that you "should've" chosen something else, just curious.The number of grad students in science is staggering compared to prior years. The rate of success in biological sciences for a person who completes a PhD to get a tenure-track position and their own research lab is about 2%. Do you understand how low this is? So now you have the vast majority of these people ending up either in industry, or editing for research publications, or working as research associates on non-tenure track, etc. That person pretty much HAS contributed all that he or she can to science because they have no independence, they don't decide what grants to apply for and they don't dictate the direction of their lab. Sure, banking or law also happen to be more financially rewarding, but don't mistake it as the only or even the primary driving force behind this kind of switch.
It is also a hell of a lot easier to go get a 3-year JD or a 2-year MBA and go into finance or corporate law than it is to do a 7-year PhD and then a 3-year postdoc and gamble on whether you'll be tenured. It used to be that you could get a PhD in science in 3 years, that was common with all of the older tenured profs. Now it's basically unheard of to do it in anything less than 5 years, and my own head of the department said he didn't remember anyone in the last 10 years who had done it in less than 6 years. Plus the mandatory postdoc on top of that....remember that research-based science PhDs are nothing like PhDs in say, English, which are considerably shorter, considerably cheaper. Although those can be even worse since there are more students getting them.
Why did you choose corporate law instead of another area of law which might have offered more potential for tie-in with your background and experience in biology research? Not asking to be confrontational nor to imply that you "should've" chosen something else, just curious.
A colleague of mine in English standardly advises any of his undergrads who mention an interest in grad school NOT to do it unless they can get a fellowship which would leave them mostly debt-free, because the chances of landing a job that will enable them to pay off their debts in a reasonable amount of time (not to mention to publish and attend conferences and win grants and all the other stuff they'd presumably want to do) are so small.
I can also really see where Irvine is coming from, though. So many times since I've started teaching, I've had former grad students drop by to say hello, whereupon they inform me that they're going back to get an MBA or a law degree because, as more than one explicitly put it, "I feel like a loser" making "only" ~$40,000 when all their fellow class valedictorians from high school and undergrad seem to be making six-figure incomes, all their siblings from the upper-class families they grew up in have bigger houses and more cars than they do, etc. And in many cases these were young people who'd been doing what I'd consider very exciting and important work--serving as translators at the UN, or journalists in DC, or liaisons for human rights NGOs working within the US and abroad. Yet they feel like "losers" because this work doesn't bring them a good salary. Obviously people are free to make their own career choices and it's not my place to tell anyone how they "should" feel about the work they've been doing, but I do find something very sad in all that. The devaluation of work which is socially important and valuable, just because it doesn't come with the sort of paycheck that someone with their background of academic success "should" have been aiming for.
For example, the mortgage and debt securities were, in reality, junk bonds but they were traded as triple A.