No, you chose to be a lawyer - at least some outside factors caused you to be employed.
I find it interesting how you have chosen not to respond to my post about top law firms rescinding offers to graduating law students.
Tell me, if somneone posted here that they are are on law review at a top law school, and have just lost their job before they even started and are now chucked in the heap with the rest of us plebs, what would you tell them they should have done differently?
I know. And I made the statement that this question makes you look like an idiot. And then I asked whose fault do you think it was that that post made you look like an idiot.
OK then - can you educate this idiot as to why? Maybe you could answer the question to really show how much of an idiot I am?
I have already explaoined this a hundred times. I have never said (and do not believe) that a person is responsible for every little thing that happens in their lives. If a piano falls on your head on the way to lunch today, I won’t get all up in your obituary thread about how you essentially committed suicide ny failing to take proper precautions against falling pianos.
However, i do believe that, in general and over the long haul, people are responsible for their outcomes. Sure there are those that life just keeps handing shit but they are such a tiny minority thaty they can be igbnored in the grand scheme as rounding error.
I think the charge of “attention whore” implies that the pattern you laid out was my intent. That is not the case.
Sure Rand Rover is technically correct that to a certain extent, you have to be in control of your destiny. Doing things like going to college or building relationships helps increase your chances of getting ahead as well as recovering from unforseen adversity.
But there are a lot of factors that are outside of a persons control. For example, I can control going to business school and getting an MBA. My decision to join a fraternity at a relatively prestigeous undergrad school led to me getting a job with one of the top management consulting firms in the country (but I also had the qualifications and experience). I had no control over a girder from the World Trade Center crashing through our building on 9/11. Or that for the entire 2 years I worked there, the entire practice would be at about 40% utilization. Still we were a lot better of than Arthur Andersen that year.
Likewise, there are a lot of first year investment banking analysts and associates right out of business school who joined an investment bank the past year thinking they “made all the right decisions”. And now a lot of them are out of work with not a lot of experience and because of the economy, will probably be forced to take jobs that may not be as prestigeous or lucrative because that is what is available.
Anyhow there is a fine line between kicking someone in the ass to make them realize they need to take whatever measure of control they can of a situation and coming across asa self-righteous jerk.
Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned. Rand Rover may work in a highly paid specialized field. If for some reason, he loses his job (which, as I pointed out, is never out of the question), he is looking for a much smaller pool of jobs that are probably highly competetive. Also, I’m sure his monthly expenses are much higher than the guy applying for day laborer jobs. So he has that much more pressure to find a similarly lucrative job.
Then why do you continue to refuse to take responsibility for yours? You behaved like an ass. This was not the fevered imagination of one person. You continue to attempt to evade responsibility for that action. Show some integrity for once.
Thank you for this post. I think this is the entire crux of my troubles here. I just want to motivate people to take responsibility for themselves, and some people think that is jerky enough in and of itself, and then in some jokey posts I play to that perception because I find it amusing, and other people take the jokey posts seriously.
For anyone who’s interested, I work in the same field as Rand Rover, in a tier 1 firm. I just wanted to clear a few things up:
Anyone who says that tax lawyers are immune to recessions is out of his fucking gourd. Tax planning is expensive and unlikely to pay off the investment for years. That, together with the fact that tax is a cost center for our clients, and that our clients are being hit by the recession, means that we’ve slowed down considerably. The slow down is worse in the big cities. On the east coast a good percentage of potential clients are in the financial services sector, which has been hit hard. On the west coast a good percentage of potential clients are in the tech industry (e.g., silicone valley), which has been hit just as hard.
A very large tier 1 consulting firm here in my city just let go of 15% of their people (both accountants and tax lawyers). Tax planning is a fairly small field (at most 1 degree of separation between everyone in the field), so everyone who was let go was known to people in my firm. Some of them, as you might expect, were dead wood, but others had good reputations as top performers. Our firm considered picking one of them up, but decided not to–given that we’re slow too, we didn’t want to hire anyone with only a few years experience (which, if my guess is correct, would describe Rand Rover pretty well).
From what I’ve heard, everyone who was laid-off found jobs, but not necessarily in tier 1 firms. For those who aren’t familiar with the industry, once you’re out of the tier 1 firms you never get back in.
What that means is that tier 1 employees, who were known to be top performers, got laid off and couldn’t find comparable jobs. Recessions hurt everyone, and being a high performer in a top tier firm won’t save you.
You “figured my dumb ass out?” Really, me telling you explicitly why I was asking wasn’t enough? Way to go Sherlock. To quote myself:
And again:
And again:
And again:
It took you three pages round and round of me explicitly telling you why I was asking before you “figured my dumb ass out.” But you’re right that my inquiries are irrelevant if you believe that outside factors can affect one’s options in life.
Why would I ever think you held such an absurd view?
The **Quartz **thread is just one example. Note that several people in that thread characterized your position as outside factors not affecting people’s fate (e.g. Jane_Newyll’s post). And why did people conclude that was your position? Because the advice you offer boils down to “choose to be in a more secure job.” That is silly advice to give when you know absolutely nothing about Quartz. You don’t know why he’s in his field, or how he ended up there, or what factors have led to that. Right out of the gate you assume **Quartz ** (among others) had other options which he chose to forego, and that he has the ability to simply choose a new profession.
And it is a sentiment other posters have expressed about your posts on a number of occasions. AFAICT, you’ve never seen fit to disabuse them of this notion until now.
So as I stated earlier, I’m glad that you now agree that both personal choice and outside factors are relevant. I trust that next time someone reports something bad happening, you won’t jump to the conclusion that they made bad choices? Or am I wrong in thinking that?
Are you a tax lawyer or a tax accountant?
I don’t disagree with you, but I want to point out a couple of things. First, I never said tax lawyers (or tax pros in general) are immune from the recession). I just said that I don’t compete for jobs with 2000 applicants. Second, I am not a cost center for many of my clients because lots of my clients are funds, so they need my advice to raide money and can pass the costs to investors. Just saying that to clear up some misconceptions in your post.
My insight was regarding your motivation for the initial line of questioning, which all occurred before the posts you quoted, none of which were on point.
You are misunderstanding my post to Quartz. He asked (admittedly rhetorically) how he was supposed to compete wiÞh 2000 applicants. My answer: don’t.
I have never said that one’s choices 100 percent explain their outcomes. That is a (IMHO deliberate) misinterpretation of my position. I have also explained this in threads before this one and the Quartz thread. Also, it is ridiculous to think I shpould explain every possible misinterpretartion of every one of my pists–those with a political agenda anti-thetical to my own lovew to misinterpret ehat I am saying and there’s no way I can stop that. It’s ridiculous to think tha I have to defend myself against every baseless chage thrown my way.
One of us is confused. I think it’s you, but I don’t really care. Nor do I really care about whether we were being reasonable in interpreting your position. I think we were. You disagree. Whoop-dee-doo.
What interests me is whether we’re on the same page now. You agree that it is wrong to assume, without more, that one’s economic problems are the result of bad choices that person has made?
Point 1, for the love of gods who may or may not exist stop posting off your “Blackberry” or whatever make of cellphone you have. It is getting harder and harder to read your posts when so many words get fat-fingered.
Point 2, quit beating the “they hate me because I’m right” dead horse. If your political and social points were so obviously and clearly right, you’d be able to argue without trotting out that logical fallacy, or more to the point without acting like the eponymous ass. Even the libertarians we got in here like msmith and Liberal think you’re politically cracked; even the lawyers we got in here like EvilEconomist and anu-la and Muffin and a cast of thousands think you’re an embarrassment.
There’s another lawyer on this place, Bricker, who once quoted an old Russian proverb when he was on the wrong side of a bunch of people here who questioned his bad attitude*: When everyone is telling you you’re drunk, the least you can do is lie down for a while. I daresay Bricker is more experienced, wiser, and thicker-skinned than you, and I daresay his advice applies.
*I think in the end Bricker figured there was a disconnect between “beliefs” and “how you put them forward,” and changed the latter. Full respect to him.
Ayn Rand wouldn’t get so potty-mouthed…
Well, maybe if she was drunk.
Duke I swear you get stupider with every post. I said that people misinterpret my posts because they disagree with my views, and I didn’t say that my views were right. So, I never said “they hate me because I am right.”. I just said they misinterpret my posts because they disagree politically.
No. Again it is not about disagreeing with your views. It is about the way you treat others. I can only assume you are ignoring everyone who has pointed this out because you are terrified of admitting you were wrong.
Len Liggio, a professor and old colleague of Ayn Rand whom I met at an Institute of Humane Studies conference, did admit that Rand “sometimes” drank a bit. I’m not sure whether that anecdote is amusing or troubling.
As an aside…I had no idea Professor Liggio was still alive. I honestly thought he was in his eighties when I met him in 1995.
I’ve been over this in this very thread. I think that people’s choices put them in a general category of possible outcomes and then circumstances pare that down to what actually happens. Stated another way, one’s outcomes on the micro level are influenced by but are not a direct result of their choices, but that switches as we move to outcomes on the macro level.
So which of your views are wrong, if you’re not saying they’re right?