You mock this with a personal experience of your own, but then say this in the same post.
Shame on you Joe.

I'm afraid I'll need you to translate that for me, or at least provide some clarification.

Both sets of experiences were drawn from personal experience. The only part where I enhanced the truth was when I said "Costco." I've never had a Costco membership so I have no first-hand experience with what goes on in one. But I've heard a lot of co-workers talk about it, so I assume that they're quite popular, and probably not a great deal different from a Wal-Mart in terms of the degree of social interaction which occurs therein.

In just saying that you mock the author of that horrible article with your own personal opinion. You're doing the same thing he did.

If you could live in my shoes for a month I can assure you it would be much different than you described your experiences have been. Much like if the author of the article lived in your shoes for a month he may get a better taste of what city living Is like.

​​​​​​

And that might be.

I'm well aware of the fact that there are still places like Mayberry around, where you can walk to the local grocer / post-office combo, chat with Doris, have a cup o' Joe at the diner and shoot the bull with the locals, etc.

But that's no longer the reality for the majority of Americans. Economic forces (proximity high-paying jobs, ability to afford larger homes and multiple cars) combined with a changing view of the American Dream (3 bed / 2 bath house with a picket fence around the big back yard), have caused a dramatic shift in the non-urban landscape since WWII, with more and more families electing to move into suburban areas in which life closely resembles the narrative I gave.

I lived in Mason / Maineville, OH (suburb of Cincinnati) from 2000-2004, Carlsbad, CA (suburb of San Diego) from 2005-2008 and 2010-2013), and Beacon, NY (extremely distant suburb of NYC) from 2014-2015. All three of those were car-to-work-to-car-to-Walmart-to-car-to-home experiences entirely.

Contrast that to Hoboken, NYC, and (to a lesser extent) Chicago, and there's just no comparison.

The worst part about living where i do.
At the age of 25 and one speeding ticket for under 10mph. I can not get(halfway decent) car insurance for less than $1,000 - 6/mo(combined NA and NB). I can get the bare minimum for like $900-960.

:nuts:

F that dude.... Who do you have?

Esurance

I pay something like $1200 every 6 months for car insurance. I have 4-5 cars on it at any given time, and about the highest amount of coverage values for everything. You sir are getting screwed for just 2 cars.

No kidding. It's because I'm in the 313. If I was in the 248 or 734 it would be way cheaper.

You realize how many things affect the cost of your insurance, right?

And then when you look at the BIG insurers (State Farm, AllState, etc) many quarters they lose money on premiums but make their profits by investing your premiums.

​​​​​​​I am well aware of how many thing can affect the cost. Moving from the zip code I was originally in here in SC to where my house is and my insurance went up $40 a month. I just think it is crazy for it to be that expensive for 2 cars where he lives. I know I could have mine for less then $100 a month if I dropped down to 2 cars instead of the several I have. I also have USAA so they tend to be decent price wise. I also don't live in shitty ass detroit.

Car insurance is weird...

Last year, I owned a 2004 Mazda Miata, which was parked in Wappingers Falls, NY, a small semi-rural town about 10 miles south of Poughkeepsie. I had comprehensive & collision coverage, with a 300/500 liability limit. I paid $370 / 6mo with Geico.

Last month, I moved to Chicago. Not the 'burbs, but Chicago proper, where the traffic is horrible and crime is non-trivial. My policy here, same car, same company, is $256 / 6 mo, despite the fact that I upped the liability to 1M/1M.

Car insurance is weird.

Yes, it is.

Here in OK (thanks to our insane weather that includes strong winds and hail regularly throughout the year) it's one of the most expensive states in which to insure a home or automobile in the country.

Betcha a big part of it is due to differences in state insurance regulations. Insurance is a heavily regulated industry.

True. As far as vehicle/homeowners, basically all they do is mandate what the MINIMUM provided coverage has to be. Whether you choose to buy additional Coverage A/B for a home or liability/unisured for your vehicle is up to the consumer. And you're particular insurance company may offer more than the minimum for a higher cost as well because their actuaries have determined that is what's most profitable for their business model.

(Ex-State Farm claim rep here)

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

As status-seeking managers multiply, they pervert the university's core mission, Alan Ryan laments

December 1, 2011

Benjamin Ginsberg is a very angry man, and with good reason. The university that he joined in the early 1970s, which was a place where decisions were largely made by academics in the interests of teaching and research, has become a place where decisions are made by administrators. And on his account of things, those decisions are largely made with a view to enhancing the pay, prestige and numbers of administrators. Ginsberg is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and is uninhibited in his criticism of his own institution, but the phenomenon he describes is system-wide, both in the US and in the UK.

The figures tell the story. In the two decades from 1985 to 2005, student enrolment in the US rose by 56 per cent, faculty numbers increased by 50 per cent, degree-granting institutions expanded by 50 per cent, degrees granted grew by 47 per cent, administrators rocketed by 85 per cent and their attendant staff by a whopping 240 per cent. The obvious question is - why? Have students become so needy that a university needs not only a "dean of student life" but several associate deans, assistant deans and a plethora of deanlets - Ginsberg's coinage of the term "deanlet" is wonderfully offensive - to cater to their whims and shield them from the temptations of booze, drugs and illicit sex? Have we become so trapped by information technology that we need an IT officer apiece in order to function?

A common explanation of the growth in administrative numbers, both in the US and the UK, is that government demands for information and an increasingly complicated regulatory environment make it impossible to manage with fewer administrative staff than institutions actually employ. Ginsberg doesn't deny that some growth in numbers could be accounted for in this way, but he argues, I think rightly, that most cannot.

Because the US has a genuinely private and a genuinely public higher education sphere, it's possible to compare administrative growth across the sectors; and because public universities and colleges are vastly more tightly regulated than private universities and colleges, it ought to be the case that they have added far more administrators. In the 30 years from 1975 to 2005, the reverse was true. Administrative and managerial staff grew by 66 per cent in the state sector against 135 per cent in the private sector.

Ginsberg's view is Malthusian. Administrators breed unless checked. The process is familiar, and both Peter Oppenheimer at the University of Oxford and Iain Pears at King's College London have had something to say on the subject in a British context. Academic prestige comes from publishing, winning awards for excellent teaching, getting research grants and doing interesting research. Administrative prestige is measured by the number of "reports" an administrator has, which is to say, how many people report to them. Deans need associate deans, assistant deans, deanlets and a bevy of secretarial staff, less to achieve anything truly useful than to enhance their prestige - and their salaries, because one's pay goes up in proportion to the number of staff one directs.

It would be bad enough if the administrators were simply unproductive. As Ginsberg says, given the high cost of tuition and board and lodging in US universities, wasting money is a sin against students and their parents who foot the bills. But The Fall of the Faculty regards many presidents, provosts, deans and their underlings as positively dangerous to the academic enterprise of teaching and research. Because he has had a very good time digging for dirt, he doesn't perhaps distinguish as carefully as he might between what goes wrong when administrators engage in criminal behaviour and what goes wrong when they behave impeccably. So far as the first goes, lying on a resume is the most common offence, followed by misappropriating funds and buying real estate on the university's penny. Assorted sexual peccadilloes have been in the news lately, but Ginsberg doesn't stray into News of the World territory. He hardly needs to, as there are plenty of non-prurient but jaw-droppingly awful tales to tell.

The real unhappiness of The Fall of the Faculty is over what the "administrative university" will look like. What administrators hanker after is a university run like any other business. That leads them to view the rambunctiousness of faculty with deep suspicion: a Ford worker who bad-mouthed his boss would be sacked, so why should faculty be able to criticise their department chair's views on the curriculum, the dean of the faculty's views on hiring, or anything else? There goes academic freedom. Since academic freedom is essential for innovation in research or teaching, there goes the core mission of the university. Lip service will be paid to academic freedom, but deanlets and deanlings are everywhere drawing up codes of civility and respect so that administrators can squash any real resistance to their decisions.

The difficulty is not that resistance is futile, but that the real remedy is for universities and colleges to be self-governing communities where academics themselves do most of the administrative chores. And anyone who has had to twist his colleagues' arms to help with such things knows that our own unwillingness to take back the institutions that employ us is one of the major reasons for the deanlets' population explosion.


https://www.timeshighereducation.com...418285.article

Wow. College degrees are much more expensive now, so it is mostly administrative bloat causing a lot of it? And they are devalued by the dumbing down of our curriculum in both HS and college. I had a conversation with someone last year who worked in a large corporation. He said that a liberal arts degree was the new HS diploma. Unless you had a B of S, it wasn't worth the money. He said having a HS diploma was nearly as prestigious as being a dropout, lol.

Bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. Bloat creates bloat. Middle management creates middle management, and so on.

I think a lot of the problem with the misguided importance of xx degree, outside of a technical degree, comes as people rise in any organization the likelyhood of them considering someone with a "lower" degree for a position is less.

So, over time the basis point for a degree rises until you get to the stage where if a candidate doesn't have that advanced degree he/she can't be qualified because the hiring person needs to justify his/her degree at least inwardly.

Another trend I see, especially in bigger institutions including public companies is the need to make people feel more important by calling them some sort of "manager". Maybe that stems from the "everyones a winner" mentality.

A lot of the cost increase came when schools realized parents would basically write blank checks and loans were super easy to get.

The county college I go to, for the basic classes and even some of the higher level classes, is just as good as anywhere else and total costs come to $3000 or so per semester if you are taking a full course load. But for some reason, at a state college, that will run you $6000-8000, and a private one is going to be even more?

Banks will often have 4 to 8 vice presidents at each location. Titles don't mean anything but customers feel more important and feel like they get special service if they are being handled by a VP, or at least that's what I was told was the reason.