Broom of the System
The Lottery
The best way to do this would be in conjunction with other universities. Chad Adelman of the think tank Education Sector has proposed adopting the system used to match medical residents to hospitals. High school seniors would apply to a single admissions body and list their school preferences in order. Schools would set a minimum SAT score and high school GPA so that they do not admit students who truly cannot handle the work, but, otherwise, schools are randomly matched with students who list them as a preference.
SNAP, Crackle, Starve
The people conducting the midnight runs are not just poor, but poor enough that even waiting until morning would leave them without needed food. "If you really think about it,” Bill S. Simon, President and CEO of Wal-Mart U.S., explained to Bustillo, “The only reason someone gets out there in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they have been waiting for it.” These are workers for whom even living paycheck-to-paycheck isn’t enough to keep food coming in regularly. And with food stamp rolls increasing from 26 million in 2007 to 41 million this year (and still growing), these midnight rushes are only going to become more popular in the foreseeable future.
Always Wanting More
Suffice it to say, if you’re making over $250,000 a year, you have not been hit harder than the millions of workers who’ve run out of unemployment benefits or the tens of thousands of families who have been forced into homeless shelters over the past two years. And if you’re making that much and still inclined to deny your place among the rich, stop. Just stop. Just 2.1 percent of households earn over $250,000 a year. They earned almost five times the income–$52,029–of the median household in 2008. As writer Daniel Gross says, “You’re rich. Get over it.”
Call Me Phone Snatcher
Given that Chen likely used at least some of these devices to arrange payment for the iPhone, they are certainly relevant to any investigation into both the initial theft and Chen’s purchase of the stolen goods—a crime punishable by a year’s jail time in California. But rather than accept that people who commit felonies tend to get search warrants exercised against them, activists and media outlets reacted to the search by leaping to Chen’s and Gizmodo’s defense. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a generally admirable civil libertarian group focused on protecting rights online, declared the search warrant illegal, agreeing with Gizmodo’s belief that California’s shield laws intended to protect journalists meant that police could not seize computers containing Chen’s notes and data. A representative of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the search “an incredibly clear violation of state and federal law.” Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” even got in on the act, mocking the police for giving Chen the “meth lab in the basement treatment” and implicitly referring to Apple’s lawyers as “Appholes.” On both a legal and moral level, the reaction is bizarre.
Party Down
The use of “partisan” as an epithet is rooted in two impulses. The first is the common perception that the electorate finds partisanship unsavory; the second is that it prevents Congress from getting things done. As President Obama put it to a House Republican retreat in January, “I don’t think [the American people] want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship,” with the connection between the two left unexamined.
