That other stuff wasn’t there when I started typing. But I claim points for providing an actual useful link.
Around here (Katrinaland), sheetrock is almost an obsolete term. Now it is just rock. As in “I spent all day hanging rock”. And floating it. You can always tell a newbie when he says he has been floating his own rock :).
Floating-applying spackling mud to the seams of sheetrock walls, is a skill only learned through lots of practice. Doing it yourself is a major newbie mistake.
TheLoadedDog writes:
> Yeah, but it’s not the fact of the buses’ existence that bothers me (I rode the
> school bus for years myself) but the way the system works. In this part of the
> world, the school has a contract with the local bus company, so rather than getting
> a yellow school bus you’ll get a regular “Joe’s Bus Lines” or “State Transit
> Authority” bus with a professional driver employed by that company. The state
> government reimburses the bus company with a bulk periodic payment, and the
> kids just flash a “bus pass” at the driver for free travel. The bus and driver can
> spend the rest of the day carting old ladies to the mall or what-have-you, and the
> education system only has to pay for the time used, rather than buying its own
> vehicles which might sit idle 22 hours of the day.
Let’s go over this again slowly. Within the school district where I grew up, there were three towns with several hundred people each and a lot of farms. There was nothing else. There were no stores in the towns, let alone a mall. There were only a couple lousy restaurants (and no bars, of course). There were no doctors or dentists, let alone a hospital. There were no movie theaters. There were a few churches and a couple of grain elevators. If you wanted to go to a store, a doctor, a restaurant, or pretty much anything else, you had to drive to the county seat 15 miles away. And even in that city there wasn’t much to do. If you really wanted to go to a moderately big city, you had to drive 55 miles to the nearest big city (and, yes, you had to own and drive a car or you couldn’t get anything done). There was simply no reason for anybody to take a bus to anyplace else within the school district. There was nothing to do there.
And I grew up in rural northwest Ohio, which is not remotely the most desolate area in the U.S. In the Great Plains, there are areas where the school districts take in huge areas where again, the buses have nothing to do except take the kids to schools (and students may live 25 miles from their school). These huge areas have nothing within them that anyone would want to go to. A commercial bus system simply wouldn’t work.
There’s different issues here, being conflated.
In Britain, a child has an entitlement to transport to school if they are deemed to not be in walking distance. Thankfully, funding to local councils does accomodate this, otherwise some kids would be expected to walk on water (there’s children in Scotland who are given accomodation during the week, and travel back to their islands at weekends)
Maybe that’s hinted on what Wendell Wagner was so irate about? Why should each school district be expected to fend for themselves?
I am not following now. Our school districts have to provide reasonable transportation to and from school for virtually all kids in the U.S. Our educational system is generally governed at the state level although there are some systems in New England that base it on the town tax base which can lead to big discrpencies.
Still, your comment puzzles me. School districts don’t fend for themselves any more than building a cafeteria and hiring teachers is fending for themselves. Having a fleet bright, cheery yellow buses to pick up kids is part of their job.
There are some rather odd exceptions if you look around however. My home state of Louisiana lets the drivers own and maintain regulation school buses at least in the very rural area that I grew up in. The school district was 40 miles wide in places and had the rare distinction of being a partially dual-state (Louisiana/Texas) public school which is almost unheard of. Letting the drivers take care of things themselves and then get them inspected gave them extra money and an incentive to keep costs lower in total while complying with safety measures.
However, it is possible for kids to be in an area of the U.S. that is so remote that buses aren’t feasible. My cousins grew up in the Rockies in the 1980’s and it was 60 mountainous miles to the nearest school. It couldn’t be done with regularity so the school district had a teacher guide them via radio and they got their materials delivered when they needed them.
You should note, though, that school districts are independent government entities that levy their own taxes (at least outside large cities) and determine their own policies. This also leads to endless curriculum controversies, especially regarding Biology.
GorillaMan writes:
> Maybe that’s hinted on what Wendell Wagner was so irate about?
I was irate? I wasn’t trying to make any point about how expensive it is for a school district to run their own bus system. I was just saying that it was clear that it wasn’t possible to replace it in many places with a commercial bus system and bus passes for students.
Shagnasty writes:
> It couldn’t be done with regularity so the school district had a teacher guide them
> via radio and they got their materials delivered when they needed them.
When I visited Alice Springs in the Australian outback, I went on a tour of the School of the Air there where they teach students in the outback mostly by radio. They also have the Flying Doctor Service there. You can call in your medical problems by radio and get medical advice the same way. If you need to be taken (by “ambulance”) to a hospital, they send out a plane to pick you up.
That is mainly true in the Northeast but in most other states, the state or county/parish gives the school district money to run. It is rather common for that to be a high percentage of the base for the district but have the town supplement money through additional taxes.
My hometown kept voting down building a new school even though ours was built in 1923 and never really updated. Over half of the annex building were condemned so we just moved from building to building as classrooms got condemned. Our school colors were purple and gold but the giant curtains in the auditorium had faded to pink and off white. It was those very curtains that someone set fire to my senior year and the whole place was fully engulfed in flames 15 minutes after the call came in and flames shot several hundred feet in the air with an occasional special effect when the ancient chemicals in the chemistry lab got incinerated. The fire woke me and my mother up five miles away at about midnight as it did other people. We drove there and had to sit more than a quarter mile away because the blaze was so hot. The main building collapsed about 2 hours later.
We got a new school a year or so later and there wasn’t much that anyone could do about it. They got the money from somewhere. I think it was either a parish or local automatic tax.
I have no idea what the point of this story is accept a common dream really happened to me. School districts often get money from several sources.
In Australia it survives in the form of “two bob”. We decimalised in '66, and a shilling became 10c, and a two shilling (Florin) coin became 20c. Other denominations all had weird nicknames like “zac” and “deener” (older Aussies, correct my spelling as needed), but only “two bob” survived decimalisation, but even that is dying out now and you’d probably need to be over fifty to use it. You occasionally hear somebody described as “cheap as a two bob watch”, or “He’s not worth two bob”, “I wouldn’t give you two bob for 'im”.
Not necessarily scams, but my second job in the US (that is, the first one that was for a normal company and not for a university) offered several 401Ks and investment options. The company did a partial match; there was a limit on how much you were allowed to invest*.
After a couple months with the company, I received a call from a nice lady in HR who was worried because I hadn’t signed up for any of the retirement or investment options. I explained that it was because with the fees the managing company charged, the limits, etc, I would have needed the investments to pay 11% interest in order to break even. Not taking inflation into account.
She couldn’t believe it. I happened to have all the data in an Excel spreadsheet I’d used to calculate it; after walking her through one of the cases, she started “ohmygoding”, I offered to give her the sheet.
I don’t have the data any more, of course, but if you signed up you had to put in the same amount from each check. The maximum I could put in was very close to 100; there was a 5 fixed fee for each operation… 5$ that got taken out every time you made a payment. Add other % fees, yearly fees, monthly fees and well, I could see why being a funds management firm is profitable!
- I find the notion of being told how much I’m allowed to save quite insulting, but maybe that’s me.
And this puzzles me! The idea of a school district spending all that money on a fleet of buses just seems bizarre to me. But then, as already pointed out, there may not be an alternative (are there really that many more bus & coach hire firms in Britain?!) (And for comparison, my high school had a catchment area which was 20 miles across, and that’s far from the least populous part of the country)
At Oxford and Cambridge, each student (including graduate students) and each faculty member are members both of the University and of their own college. An important part of the “Oxbridge system” is the tutorial, in which small groups (1, 2, or 3) of undergraduates will meet weekly with their college tutor (a full faculty member – not a graduate student or postdoc) and go through papers that they have written for him/her. This is done entirely at the college level, not University-wide, although smaller colleges may outsource some tutorials to other colleges (e.g. for an undergraduate in Chemistry, a smaller college may only have a Physical Chemistry Fellow and an Organic Chemistry Fellow, so will have to outsource Inorganic Chemistry tutorials to a Fellow from another college).
Each college has its own library that contains most of the materials needed by undergraduates (at least to begin with). The university libraries are much larger of course.
Colleges compete against each other in sports: most colleges have their own boathouses for rowing, rugby / soccer / cricket pitches, and tennis & squash courts, although there again smaller colleges may share facilities. There are also University-level sports facilities.
Lectures (as opposed to tutorials) are carried out at the University level, so students from all colleges will be in attendance. The science laboratories are university facilities, so all labwork in each field is carried out in the same location by undergraduates from all of the colleges. The important exams are university-wide, although colleges also set their own exams – usually at the start of term for undergraduates returning from the vacations, to scare them by showing how much they’ve forgotten ;). Degrees, as you say, are awarded by the University (based on University-wide exams).
Although Rice and UC Santa Cruz are often compared to the Oxbridge system, there are major differences. The earliest colleges preceded the formation of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. In that sense, there’s a similarity between Oxbridge and the USA: some functions are at the university level and some at the college level (think federal vs state control), but outsiders tend to think of the smaller particle as simply an administrative subdivision of the larger one (people unfamiliar with the US federal/state model tend to underestimate the power held by the individual States). At Rice and UCSC, the Universities were founded with a certain model in mind and there’s a top-down hierarchy of administrative control. At Oxford and Cambridge, the colleges are independent institutions – some of which pre-date their respective University – that happen to benefit from sharing educational ideals and several resources, but the Universities don’t “control” them in any way.
[It seems as though every few weeks there’s a thread where people announce that “In country X, the term ‘college’ means Y”. Maybe we need a sticky on this subject, since it’s always more complicated than that.]
Yes. In the States they’re virtually nonexistant.
Public and semipublic transportation is in quite a sorry state in most of the US, in my experience and no-I-haven’t-visited-the-whole-country. I was able to live without owning a car in Philly, but only because I’d found an apartment 6 blocks from the office. Any time I went anywere, I had to rent a car.
Even in urban areas that have public transportation, the times between buses can easily be - one hour! That’s what they were in Miami when I lived there. I explain this to people from Barcelona who are complaining that the bus hasn’t arrived in five minutes. Apparently I look like I’m not making it up, because they usually ask a few questions and then reach the conclussion that “I’m not complaining again!”
My mother and brother were quite amazed at the state of Philly taxis. We took two; the second one was ok (it was clean, the picture in the ID matched the driver’s face, most seatbelts worked) but the first one had a hole in the floor among other defects.
Nitpick - There’s also Livingston FC, the former Meadowbank Thistle, in Scotland, which moved about 15 miles from Edinburgh to the new town of Livingston in 1995.
Good point. And Wikipedia mentions a couple of other cases: Relocation of professional sports teams - Wikipedia
However, the Wimbledon affair was by far the biggest, both in terms of the prestige of the club involved, and the ambition of the move’s backers.
YMDefinitelyVaries. My 401k has no fees, the limit you are allowed to contribute is decided by fed reguations, not the company, and my YTD return on my various investments is anywhere from 6% to 56%.
I think you had a sucky program.
Not all of them. Generally, the cheaper ones do, but it’s rare to find one that comes with furniture.
Oh, I know, sorry if I wasn’t more clear. My point was that you need to check the information on those like it was written by your worst enemy and never assume that just because it’s called a “benefit” it’s any good.
Same re. insurance policies.
How confident are you of this? Or do you mean that your company pays all the fees? I have never heard of a 401(k) that has no fees.
At minimum, there will be administration fees, albeit they are usually paid by the company.
All the funds in the 401(k) will have expenses, and those expenses are often much higher than if you buy the same or equivalent fund direct. Example: my 401(k) offers the Vanguard 2025 Fund. Bought direct from Vanguard this has 0.2% expenses. Through my 401(k) it is 0.86% This difference in cost is a direct cost to me - the company cannot pay that.
And on top of that the 401(k) firm takes a small slice out of my fund every month for fees. Most plans do this and the fees can typically be an annual 0.2 - 1% (or even higher for small plans). Some companies pay this fee, others let it be taken from the individual’s account.
It may be the company pays the fees. It may be because I work for such a huge conglomerate the fees are waived. Either way, I have never seen a line that says “fees” or something similiar on my statements.