Recent Comments

1. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   My daughter started singing that in middle school. I don’t think I heard it before then. Any idea where it comes from?

2. 2 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   The Atlantic has an excellent article in the latest edition (available now on the web) in which the author notices that in all the “inspirational, aspirational” videos on Instagram and YouTube featuring billionaires or wanna-be billionaires waking up, exercising, taking a cold plunge, showering, having a kale smoothie, meditating and “diarying”, the same thing is missing from every single one: another person.

3. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   That’s exactly what I had with the engineering intern. The school calls it a “co-op program,” and the company calls them interns or co-ops, but “regular” people are familiar with “intern”. I try not to use jargon non-ironically.

4. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   I know for sure that engineering interns are paid because I had one on my team about 20 years ago, and I have heard recently that the school still has that intern program. A very good friend is a CPA with an intern currently on her team.

   In both cases, the interns are/were paid more than half of what they would expect as a starting salary on graduation.

5. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   In STEM fields, internships are very often paid, just less than a “regular” employee, regardless that there is academic credit involved. There are some exceptions like rotations in PA school.

6. 3 days ago on Working Daze

   “Anger Management” isn’t graded, and there’s no test. It’s what teachers call “seat time”: you get credit for sitting through it.

   (There’s no-one, in my experience, more cynical about education than public school teachers. My theory is it’s because in the U.S., their own education is so uniquely bad. Full disclosure: I took several graduate courses in the school of Education at a university well-regarded for its education. Most were taught at the same level as the 6th grade in the (pretty good) public school I attended in the early 70s.)

7. 3 days ago on Overboard

   I was thinking the same thing. Even “nose-to-tail” restaurants throw out plenty of stuff that’s edible for dogs. Bones, sinews, and some other stuff I won’t mention by name since some people might read this with breakfast. And most vegetables have an inedible stem, or place where the greens meet the root, that a dog might enjoy.

8. 3 days ago on Doonesbury

   > …he might delete…

   I have no intention of deleting my plea for civility. And FWIW, I didn’t vote for the Cheeto-elect. I only point out when people attack him unfairly. I mean, seriously: it’s so easy to attack him with things that are true, and he would agree that they happened (or at least that the video of it is genuine), why do so many feel the need to embellish and make predictions that are approximately guaranteed to be wrong (by the nature of political predictions)?

   If you really paid attention (I would wonder if you did), you’d notice I try to correct people when they go overboard attacking Harris and Biden, though of course that’s less frequent in this forum, because normally someone else has already done it by the time I join the discussion. (And, yes, name-calling is permitted, in my rulebook, when the person being called the name is a politician; they set themselves up for it and painted the target on their own back. And, for sure, by now, Trump is absolutely a politician, even if he doesn’t speak like one.)

   I understand that most people live in an algorithm-enforced information bubble, and that this is one of the very few spaces in which that’s not the case. So please forgive me for trying, however feebly and unwanted, to pop the bubble.

9. 3 days ago on Doonesbury

   In many professions, interns do get paid, somewhere around half “regular” employees. Engineering and accounting are just two I know for sure. Many students in those pay for much or all of their college tuition by doing internships, then have a job waiting for them when they graduate, which takes a little longer.

10. 4 days ago on Doonesbury

    > I said buy not conquer.

    But that’s how armies usually work. They’re like guns: 95% of the time, they are used as a persuasion tool. As in: “agree to my terms, or I’ll get my army involved.” Or, “give me your wallet, or I’ll shoot you,” or “give up your idea of robbing me, or I’ll shoot you.” In none of those cases, is the army engaged, or the gun fired. But they do make people a lot more agreeable, by their mere presence.

    You know who has the best army in Europe? The Swiss. You know how many times they have been invaded? Zero, the same as the number of times they have invaded a neighbor. Even the Nazis though better of getting on their wrong side.