A tier 1 college (as per US News and World Report) will get one hired essentially anywhere... (T)here is no such thing as an unemployed attorney unless they get disbarred.

This would be really good news for me if it were actually true. Honors Tier 1 grad, like 16 months since I passed the bar in the state where the school is located, still no work. Have the resume entries and professional references to boot- after all, I'm an actual adult previously shown to be capable of handling associate work hours, social drinking, business development, etc. Maybe there's something wrong with me that absolutely everyone on the planet is too polite to acknowledge.

That, or you can graduate at exactly the wrong time and there's no accuracy to your observations.

When the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter sixteen years ago, scientists all over the world were prepared: instruments on board the space probes Voyager 2, Galileo and Ulysses documented every detail of this rare incident.

That's funny, because my back-of-the-napkin estimate is that at the time, Voyager 2 was 3 billion miles further away from Jupiter than the Earth is. Wonder what they thought they were gonna see with 15-year-old technology that they weren't going to see with, say, the Hubble telescope, new ground-based instruments, or hell, even the naked eye that was 3 billion miles closer to the event.

From actually attending the typical 4th of July parade / festival with the military worship and praises to America, not freedom.

By the same logic, Labor Day celebrates military strength and totalitarianism (see USSR) rather than promoting the economic, social, and political achievements of workers or the labor movement. Shoot, the Russians still do a huge military parade.

Myself, I think Labor Day has more to do with the eight-hour workday than militaristic nationalism. But maybe I just choose my 'typical' gatherings a little more carefully.

The American Bar Association reported on this mere 17 months ago. I think it's less remarkable that some California firm got bilked as much as they got swindled while ignorant of a direct warning from their prime industry trade journal.

A more compelling version of the scam, to me, is overpayment of retainer fees as a new client. Fortunately, only idiot California firms are vulnerable as the ABA has warned about this variation as well. Interestingly, though, the tab appears to have been $500K in that one.

No, they're high because it's a service where productivity can't increase very much. We pay a higher and higher comparative amount for education because you still need a scholar standing at the front of the room, and lab space on a per-student basis and the like. Other prices moderate (by comparison) in the economy because you can capture productivity gains. On the manufacturing end, labor costs, raw material costs, input costs go down as we become more efficient. But you can't make a college professor teach 3% more students next year as well as before, which would be necessary to match the overall economy's productivity gain and keep prices from comparatively inflating. More to the point, supply and demand wouldn't really seem to be relevant to pricing when so much of the system is public university and community college. If your state's making money at its institutions, please have them contact mine so we can resolve our huge current deficit.

More on Internet drops avg IQ Thus explosive growth MySpace etc now Twitter Relevant in 140 chars? Twtr Tolstoy reads: sh*t happens 2 peeps There, fixed that for you. Sorry to make you counter your own argument.