Jenksismyhero

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 12:42 PM) Yes, Walmart is the answer to the problems of impoverished areas. LOL. If you had heard the 9th ward alderman this morning on the radio I bet you'd change your mind. His ward has the biggest "food desert" in the city, 40% unemployment, the most crime in the city, the worst health in the city, ZERO hope. You have a huge company offering to pay MORE than minimum wage for jobs (1 BILLION to the city). They've signed a neighborhood benefit agreements (requiring them to hire locals) and they've signed a public works agreements (promised to use unions to build the stores). There's not a single argument against them at this point. It's politics, and the poorest of poor in the city are being hurt by it.

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 12:00 PM) People do buy it. I know, I lived there. I had the choice between a supermarket in my neighborhood which stank of rotting produce and sold basic produce in poor quality for high prices (which, btw, people bought constantly) or spending 45 minutes getting there by subway, or walking three miles to get to a supermarket that had a decent supply of produce in reasonably good quality and a reasonable price. Truth is that in poorer neighborhoods in urban areas, food prices tend to be higher and the quality lower. Which is why those areas should allow Wal-mart to come in, but at least here in Chicago, they can't, because the unions suck.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 12:05 PM) If you were a VP at a major corporation, and you and your cohort VP's were quoted in the paper saying these things about your CEO to a person you knew to be reporting on it, you'd be fired. And should be. That's fair. I was arguing against this ridiculous statement:

Please. I complain about my bosses all the time. That doesn't change how I perform my job duties.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 09:30 AM) By the way, it's worth noting that McCrystal apparently still hasn't learned how to say "no comment" to the press when there's a situation that requires a no comment. Yeah, but I don't care. I prefer guys that speak their mind. That's why I love guys like Ozzie in baseball. Is he the most professional all the time? No. Does he say stupid things on occasion? Yes. But he's not a robot, he's a human, just like the rest of us. I'm fine with people critizicing this guy for what he said. It wasn't very smart. But let's look at the situation from a neutral position. It's a guy stuck in an airport or base, talking to a Rolling Stone writer (liberal, clear anti-war bias) while drinking a few beers. He's just speaking his mind and it gets recorded. He's not giving a professional press conference. Again, stupid, but it's not the greatest sin in the world. Deserving of being fired? Eh. I could go either way really.

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 09:19 AM) Were you a summer associate anywhere? I would say about 95% of the time we hire our summers the following year, when they graduate. They'll work for a little while and then take the bar. Now we merged with a larger Firm last year, so I'm not exactly sure how they do things here with regard to summers, but that's definitely how you get your foot in the door and make some contacts. No, I wasn't. That's how the big firms handle it. I did not go through the process. You have to have really good grades and/or be really active in the school to get those. I had a really nice paying gig in a professional services firm at the time that I thought would lead to a long term position. Unfortunately that didn't work out and I had to quit and get a s***ty part time clerk job just to gain experience. But yeah, that's the preferred way of getting a job out of school.

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 08:14 AM) I'm way more important than a lawyer. I'm in IT. Lol, ah I see.

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 04:28 PM) Out of curiosity, how do you see the job market for the smaller firms? I applied to law schools last fall and recently deferred my admission at U. of Illinois one year thinking that maybe law was not the right thing for me. I have been working at a sports marketing agency and realize hours here are just as bad as the law field with less pay, so I am back on maybe-go-to-law-school path. But I wouldn’t want to work at Jenner & Block, Baker & McKenzie, DLA Piper, etc. Too many hours, stress and hate for your life. I would rather do what apparently you do, work at a smaller firm, enjoy life with a still-good paycheck. I also would have in-roads at a sports agency so that if I went to Illinois, I could practice law and do a sports agent gig as well (granted for now, it would be UFL/CFL talent). So back to my question, how plentiful do you see thee small-firm jobs for the future? How best do you obtain those jobs? Thanks! I graduated in 2007, passed the bar in 2008, and didn't get this gig until Fall of 2009. It took FOREVER. I worked as a solo guys b**** (glorified clerk/new attorney) during that time. I randomely found the posting on craigslist and just happened to find a place with a good fit with my experience and personality. Over that year and a half, I probably went on 12-15 interviews, but nearly every one ended up being "you know, in a normal market I'd hire you, but as it is I'm getting people with twice the amount of experience as you willing to work for less money." That was the same whether it was a small, medium or large firm. I'm guessing the situation is the same now. There's a crazy amount of new attorneys each year, and while most will find a job, others will have to wait a while. So I guess my answer depends on your grades. If you're a law review/dean's list kind of student, go for it, because you'll have an easier time finding a job. If you're a 3.5ish gpa kind of student like me, competing with a bunch of other people right in the same area (i.e., no discernible difference), you're going to have a more difficult time. And really, I'm finding that the small firm route is actually kind of tough to get. Normally they're run by partners at bigger firms that decided to leave and start up their own thing. They hire clerks from law schools who eventually become associates, or they hire other colleagues they've known for years. I think my situation was unique in that they sought out an associate with 1-2 years experience. Lol, so in the end, I have no advice. Just know that it's possible you'll be waiting a while, unless you have the credentials/experience to land something. But that's probably the same situation in any field.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 08:46 AM) CNN is running that a Pentagon source expects he will in fact have his resignation accepted and the Obama admin has asked the Pentagon to suggest replacements. I see your CNN story, and raise you an MSNBC story with direct quotes:

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 23, 2010 -> 06:22 AM) Basically, the entire RS article would have to be a fabrication for kap's point to make sense. Oh, and we'd need a reason why he immediately offered resignation instead of denying the allegations. And why Obama would want a headline story about top military doubting him and his administration. He apparently is denying that he ever offered his resignation.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 09:32 PM) the RS article was all directly quoted. Shockingly, in modern day, news travels faster than the trains, in addition to the fact that reporters contact a range of sources, and likely the white house. Shocking! It's amazing this computer of mine is typing what keys my fingers are pushing in. What the hell is obama doing to my computer? Did you actually read the article? I didn't see any direct quotes from McChrystal relating to those comments about Obama, Biden, etc. I saw a whole lot of "an aide said" or "a top military strategist said."

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 04:47 PM) If I was an insurance company, I think I would be tempted to toss out some rate increases and blame the upcoming changes. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10971283

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 02:23 PM) Do you think he would suffer gender discrimination? In my 11 years at this law firm I have seen 1 male paralegal come through here and he didn't last more than a couple months. I think there is a reluctance by male attorneys to work with male paralegals. Any thoughts? Also, lawyers are some of the most difficult people to work for. Their job is very demanding, hence they are very demanding. Eh, discrimination in the sense that more would be expected of a male probably, at least from old school lawyers like in my firm. I'm downtown Beast. We only have the female paralegal, and I know the prior paralegal was also a female. I think for a "career" paralegal you're probably going to get mostly women. Most of the male paralegals are law students. But like everything else, if you know how to do the job and you do it well it shouldn't matter who/what you are. A "needy" personality isn't a good fit within a firm though, especially a litigation firm. You have to be proactive and live with the fact that everything you do will be questioned and everything that you didn't do/forgot to do you should have done 2 weeks ago. Or maybe that's just my experience! CC what kind of law do you practice?

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 03:41 PM) For those looking for a depressing afternoon read. Ugh Pssh. That's nothing compared to this new study.

QUOTE (The Beast @ Jun 22, 2010 -> 12:56 AM) My question would be, do I have to go get an associate's degree to be a paralegal or do they hire and retrain people with bachelor's degrees? I have research and writing skills in my background so I don't know what else they want me to know...but if she says it is a good job, I'll take her word for it - it pays decently for what its worth. Too bad I don't wish to meet the pre-reqs for PT or OT. I though I read somewhere that techs also make good money in health care. You can, but most of the "professional" firms require a paralegal certificate. But really, at least as an attorney, I love working in the small firm without the office politics. Pay isn't as good, but value of life is immensely better (actual contributing member to the firm versus bring a grunt working 80 hrs a week). I'm sure it's the same feeling for our paralegal.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 01:28 PM) Ultimately, BP voluntarily agreed to this fund and this manner of fund oversight. Think of it like arbitration to avoid protracted legal battles. It's a moot point, I agree. But I don't think it was voluntary at all. They had no choice. They couldn't take the PR hit, and they couldn't take the US revoking its licenses/permits.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 01:18 PM) Actually, no they haven't, they're going to build up the escrow account by suspending dividend payments for the next year, because they have no where close to the cash-on-hand available to fill up that escrow account right now. If they weren't forced to suspend that dividend, then they'd be paying out the money to shareholders (including me) that would need to go to paying for the destruction of the gulf. Fine. But there's still an economic impact of having to do that right now versus over time (in manner that makes the most business sense for them).

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 01:19 PM) So you'd be willing/ able to wait 3+ years for compensation for your job, local economy and environment being destroyed? You're describing the first phases of what Exxon did. Make an appearance of paying out claims while the story is still hot, but once the relief wells are drilled and the spill is controlled, it will be much easier to back off without a serious PR backlash. You don't have a choice. If a natural disaster hit they'd still have to wait. That's life man. s*** happens. It sucks, but it happens. They should be compensated, but it happens. I don't think the entire system should be flipped on its head just to speed things up. I think you have to respect the rights of all parties involved, including the party that f***ed up in the first place. And making an appearance. GMAFB. What more should they do right now besides hand the people of the Gulf a blank check and say "we trust you to fill in the amount based on your actual damages." This situation is entirely different than Exxon's. It's not Alaska, it's the Gulf. It deals with Florida, where tons of old people (voters) live. That on top of the fact that the news cycle is radically different. Not the same situation at all.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 01:10 PM) Wow, a Republican arguing that it's a great thing for hundreds of millions of dollars to be dumped into legal fees. Remarkable. Anyway...there would be 2 problems with this being tied up in the courts. First, time. If you don't escrow funds, BP has every reason to drag it out as long as it can, as the longer they drag it out, even if nothing changes, the less their settlement will be relative to their company. Second, BP doesn't have enough cash on hand right now to cover the size of the fine the Federal Government is required by law to give them, not even counting the costs of cleanup and the destruction of the livelihood of a couple million people. So quite literally, bankruptcy avoidance here is a major issue. If BP winds up facing costs on the order of several tens of billions of dollars, and they don't have that money, they have every right to use bankruptcy protection from their creditors (aka...the people who's lives they've destroyed). There's a reason BP's stock price went up 10% on the day that the escrow fund was announced...it helps keep the company solvent. Of course the flipside of that is that you've just taken 20 billion of operating capital out of their coffers, and forced them to pay that money today, versus paying out claims slowly over time so they have more of a chance to recover.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 01:02 PM) And the courts is exactly the issue here. Going to the courts for the victims of Exxon took 20 years. Exxon spent $500 million on attorney fees, and it wound up saving them on the order of $3 billion. Victims who wound up losing their whole livelihoods wound up with about $8000. Hell, even in a much, much, much smaller case, the Texas refinery explosion, BP spent 3 years litigating before reaching final settlements with injured workers and 4 years later BP was still litigating over an OSHA fine for $87 million. ANd in that case, they set up a $2.1 billion escrow account, so that was years of litigating with a much smaller case even though BP had put money aside to pay for claims. Fair enough. You've proven to me the court system is a joke. Let's give the President the power to take over companies and pay out claims as he/she sees fit. Done. Edit: In all seriousness, as an attorney, those dates mean nothing. Lawsuits take years for a reason. There's a lot of wasted time, no doubt, but 3 years for injury claims? That's not bad at all. And I'm still not swayed by the Exxon example. So those guys were a bunch of pricks (believing everything you say. I'll reserve the option to go read and find out why it took so long). That doesn't mean these guys were/are/will be. They've paid out claims. Regardless of how much, or of how much running in circles claimants have to do, they're still paying those out. Hell, just setting up the claim system means they've already moved on from that. And with or without Czar Obama's 20 billion escrow fund, they knew they couldn't take the additional PR hit of putting it off.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 12:43 PM) That's a strawman of the arguments, not the actual arguments. The driving logic behind both arguments is getting out ahead of future problems and attempting to prevent them instead of waiting for disaster to strike. Regulation reform has worked in the past, and so it is unreasonable to conclude that it will fail if tried here. And it doesn't assume that BP will follow the rules, it assumes that you will have to force them to follow the rules with stringent oversight. If the rules are broken, severe penalties and revocation of drilling rights stop operations before disaster strikes. Moratoriums on operations can be put in place if the company elects to fight the charges so that the situation doesn't worsen while legal battles are fought. For the second argument, in just about every case* of an corporation-caused environmental disaster, the response has been to pay claims initially while the story is still in the headlines, but change tactics in the following months and years to denying and delaying as much as possible. Penalties and fees after the fact and having it drug through the courts doesn't put a moratorium on damage already caused. You can't delay the damages done to the ecology and to the millions of people who have had their livelihood affected by this. You can't reverse a bankruptcy of the company or various other means of masking liabilities in the future. Going back and cleaning up the legal mess afterwards is far worse than making sure the mess doesn't happen in the first place. *I can't think of any cases where the offending company didn't try to snake their way out of responsibility, but please cite examples if you know of any. Moreover, if your argument is that regulation will simply not work, then the only alternative is to stop all Gulf drilling and all other drilling with substantial risk of severe environmental impact. Strawman. Shifting goal posts. Seriously though, as to the bold, didn't this situation just prove to you that it's meaningless unless all parties do their job? Here the governmenet failed to inspect a rig that was clearly dangerous. Had that been done, this wouldn't be an issue. So there's no need for MORE regulation, why not just expect the government to do its job the first time around? And just about every case. GMAFB. You hear about the bad ones, not the ones that just follow the rules. I love how you guys are actually arguing that the courts in a situation like this are a bad thing, but giving all that power to one guy is a good thing. Christ has our country changed political philisophies quickly.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 12:31 PM) The way to fix that then is to make the rules foolproof. Like, for example, you require the relief well to be drilled at the time you drill the first hole. Or, you just get the country off of oil. And in 30 years when a company skips over some regulation regarding that relief well, we'll pass more regulation so that there's TWO relief wells, just in case the first doesn't work, then three, then 4 and on and on. In the meantime you've just increased the price of doing business for the other XX amount of companies that are doing things the right way. But hell, they're big companies, so they have tons of extra money to spend right?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 12:29 PM) Link. It's not like these are hard to find. Remember, BP will pay all "LEGITIMATE" claims. There's reality, and then there's some idealistic world that you think exists wherein every company should just assume liability of any claim ever brought to its doorstep. I'm not ignoring the fact that big companies screw with the little guy all the time, but there's recourse for that kind of behavior.......the courts. But I know. Big bad corporation = evil white guys in a board room lighting their cigars with money.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 11:06 AM) I'm not arguing the strawman versions of those positions that you're building, no. I guess I don't see how its a strawman. That's the logic in both arguments. On the one hand you assume BP will follow the rules, on the other you claim you know they won't follow the rules.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 21, 2010 -> 10:25 AM) see: kap's avatar Are you not advocating both positions? Haven't you argued that we need more regulations, and that BP can't be trusted? I fail to see how my point is wrong. You think BP or other similiar companies will simply follow the rules (as if they haven't broken them before) and that the government will enforce them adequately (as if they haven't failed to before), yet you don't trust BP to pay out claims and act responsibly because of their negligence (despite no evidence to the contrary).