lbaskin

It's not only TSA personnel (who are, on the whole, so incompetent I wouldn't hire most of the ones I meet to do ANYTHING), it's policy itself. Security policy in much of the world today is reactive and shortsighted - shoe bomber? take off your shoes, Underwear bomber, let's x-ray everyone, etc. etc. - all just to be able to say they "did something," whether or not is effective or efficient in any way at all.

I remember several years back when the shoe-removal policy has just been relatively new, and I was flying out of Israel. The security personnel there had someone devoted solely to going around telling people NOT to remove their shoes, in order to make sure the lines keep moving.

TSA just could not care less whether people actually make their flights, or whether terrorists get through, as long as they don't get blamed for missing something they should have caught.

Your point may stand in the event of negative interest rates, but generally, it seems like you're assuming that what Americans are doing is finding investing avenues that offer greater returns than prevailing interest rates, which does not appear to be the case. Saving money will, by definition, leave you with more money than spending (not investing) it, even if the ROI is near 0.

Exactly. This is an extreme - and ever more prevalent - illustration of why I don't use air dryers in public restrooms. It also bothers when they says it's done to help the environment. Even if that's true (unlikely, but it saves money and generates good PR), it just makes the environment and those in it dirtier, which probably doesn't help most people.

"What is needed, in some ways, is a return to this more flexible, broader way of thinking." Well, if the courts and the White House (as inhabited by Democrats AND Republicans) wouldn't keep moving power from the states to the federal executive, then maybe there would be more flexibility. Instead, what we have is a slow and constant undermining of the idea that states should serve as laboratories of democracy,[1] and a steady disappearance of the federal nature of the system in the U.S.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

(edited to correct a typo)

"out that of America’s 350 major metro areas, the cities with more than three million people have rebounded far better from the financial crisis." I assume the writer means metro areas with over 3 million people, but the lack of clarity is confusing at best. Who knows, maybe some readers will assume there are more than 2-3 cities (i.e., not metro areas) in the U.S. with populations of that size.

Assuming this is a positive development, I wonder where else xHamster is also blocking access - what about large parts of the Middle East and Africa?

As far as I see, he only really taught some fluff courses on "rights, race and gender." [1] Not quite what comes to the minds of most lawyers and law students when someone says "con law professor."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/politics/30law.html?pag...

While he was somewhat of an originalist, Scalia was foremost a textualist - much more than an originalist (the latter term better describes Thomas).

I'm surprised this is news.

If only because of the massive anti-(cigarette)-smoking campaign of the past several years, combined with the massive pro-marijuana-legalization campaign. Good or bad, that sends a pretty clear message to students that tobacco bad, marijuana good.

Exactly. While this may be true for some - as you said "not having enough money is a good reason not to be happy." Status alone isn't the question - it's what "enough money" means. For some, that may mean enough to lord it over all of your friends - and for many it may mean enough to support your family and not ever worry about putting food on the table (along with a vacation and buying most of what you want, mostly whenever you want) - and for others it means enough money being able to do whatever they want whenever they want to do it, period. But saying it's just status alone is just crap.

And much does. Does that also not constitute sex work in your eyes?

I generally agree, but Monday didn't have to be a complete non-event. If the market has just gone down sharply, that looks like a buying opportunity to me - even if it continues to decline for some time afterwards.

> "If these kids didn't listen (weren't forced by the State to listen) to older men telling them horror stories about the 'enemy', they would just hang out, drink and party together."

I'm sorry, but that shows a complete misunderstanding of human nature. It's the same kind of "everyone is the same and wants exactly the same things as we do" attitude that led to the belief that we need to bring democracy to the Middle East, leading to the Arab (nuclear?) Winter there is now.

People fight wars. Always have and always will. And they don't stay out of wars in order to drink and party together - they stay out when the perceived costs are greater than the perceived benefits.

> " We conclude that parents and offspring tend to resemble each other for genetic reasons, and not due to cultural transmission."

Interesting, but not earth-shattering. Reminded me of studies such as those referenced here (http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/11/economics-and-genetics-of...), finding that "with a few exceptions, adoption and twin researchers find that nature overpowers nurture, especially in the long-run."

> "Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for taking the bar exams"

Really? When and where? In fact, the opposite is true. Traditionally, law school classes have little to no relation to the actual bar exam (or to the actual practice of law, for that matter - unless you do constitutional appellate litigation).

In recent years, some (many?) school have begun teaching to the bar, so to speak - so as to raise their bar passage rate. This has happened primarily post-crash (and the resultant contraction in the market of high-paying legal jobs), to (1) help their students look somewhat more marketable and (2) just as important to them, make the schools look better (both to prospective students and prospective employers).

Subsequently, "here has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching." But I don't think the same people who disapprove of teaching to the bar are those behind the movement to teach more real lawyering (workshops, etc.) - I think those who dislike the trend are professors and other legal academics who refuse to admit that they are teachers in (what should be) a vocational school - not philosophers.

All too many law professors are wannabe PhD's of economics, policy and/or philosophy who believe they missed their true calling.

1. In case I wasn't clear, I meant being on-call nearly all the time - not that I have actual work all the time. You generally get a fair amount of weekends off, but it makes planning difficult, etc. 2. This is reality for a LOT of white-collar jobs today (wall st., lawyers, consultants, etc.).

Exactly. But it was only when I entered the workforce full-time that I truly appreciated Shabbat. Especially in a world when I am expected to be on-call 24 hours a day, I honestly cannot understand how people do without a real break once a week. On a personal level, it can't be healthy to constantly be on, 24/7, practically 365 days/year - and translated to a musing of more general applicability, that might lead to better / more productive business. Perhaps a worthy subject for experimentation by businesses (more than what some banks have done recently for summer interns and junior analysts).

Interesting. Very different from Israel, which is in a part of the world that has long suffered from chronic droughts - the culture is very much that water needs to be preserved and not wasted (e.g., by taking long showers, etc). And I would say this is true even after Israel "beat" the drought with desalination plants (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/world/middleeast/water-...).

> People attempting to lose weight should not be swayed by the "popular theory about how low-carb diets offer a specific metabolic advantage for body fat loss," says Hall. "Our study has demonstrated that this theory is probably not true."

> "The study involved 19 participants who were kept as in-patients for two two-week blocks and their diet strictly controlled."

Only 19 participants on diets that were only two weeks long (at a time)? I'm skeptical.

Which suburbs? An hour sounds rather optimistic. It's at least an hour to midtown from Westchester, Long Island, and the NJ suburbs that aren't on the PATH.

I feel the same way about NYC. I can see why early-stage companies want to be in the city, but all these Fortune 500 companies, big law firms, and banks wouldn't even have to move very far. Instead, I'm stuck on the subway every day for over an hour (each way) with a few thousand of my nearest and dearest.

The statute may seem like it's drafted that way, but it's not up to her (or her boss, i.e., the Pres) discretion. There are rules and regulations that determine what is and is not authorized "unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material." See, for example, Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual (http://www.law.com/sites/jamesching/2015/03/09/hdr22clintone...).

Yep, same here - paper classes were a real pain and always made the end of a semester rather unpleasant with deadlines looming. Just saying that system is a bit extreme, and I don't think it's universally applicable.

Disagree. While I did well in the same system in law school, most people I know hated the one-and-done testing system. That said, you do have a point in situations where testing is practically constant (and affects the final grade) - there's probably a happy medium to be found somewhere...

At the very least, Title 18, Section 1924 of the U.S. Code: "Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material"

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1924

http://jonathanturley.org/2015/07/24/state-department-and-in...

Other possible violations here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/03/16/hilary-clin...

Because not everyone follows the law. And not everyone reports it when it happens. If you're trying to get home and the first cabbie says no - and you don't insist - you'll probably forget about it once you get in another cab taking you home.

You're assuming that your self-driving car will not be slower than today's human-driven cars, but until all (or practically all) vehicles on the road are auto-driven, such cars are unlikely to be configured to exceed the speed limit (in addition to the intense legal pressure - internal (lawyers) and external (lawmakers) - to make sure speeding self-driving cars don't exist (I can already see that phrase "speeding self-driving cars" being used by the media to scare the unaware among the public).

Apologies, corrected.

Graph paper is still commonly required for math class in Israel (at least in elementary school). (E.g., supplies list for 2015-16 school year (word doc) http://www.yigalalon.org.il/uploadfiles/igalalon/%D7%A8%D7%A...).

See also "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) from just a few months ago.