American's billion dollar baby scam

Keeping with the theme of Saturday afternoon infographics that I've found on the internets, here's another one close to HillcrestBlogger's heart.  I'm pleased to say that our family has not succumbed to many of the ill-advised aspects of this type of expensive Babynomics, but its always there, lurking behind every purchase :)



Source: frugaldad.com

Thursday's running update

Was dead tired yesterday so didn't get a post up but I did take off from work this morning to, among other errands and responsibilities, complete my 5K training run.  Inching closer and closer...covered 2.52 miles in 36 minutes, which was a 5 minute warm-up walk, 26 minute run, and 5 minute cool down.  I was still pretty sore from Tuesday morning's run and stupidly did not eat anything before hitting the path this morning, so I guess that's the reason it felt like a crappy run.  At least the weather was pretty great.  I think I'll wait until Sunday to do my next one, giving myself an extra day of recovery, since I do not have a soccer game that day. 

Anyway, a better post tomorrow as well as some music clips. 

Running update

Eighteen days out from the Riverfest Rock n' Stroll 5K and I think I'm on schedule with my training to make a solid go of completing it in its entirety.  Today I took an extra hour at lunch and completed Week Seven, Day One of my couch-to-5K training, which consisted of a 5-minute warm-up walk, a 20-minute run, a 3-minute walk, another 5-minute run, and then a 5-minute cool-down walk.  This covered 2.6 miles in 38 minutes.  And while I was certainly tired and some of my muscles started to tighten up toward the end (mainly my lower back and quads today), my pulse and breathing were still pretty strong.  I think I could have muscled out another 10 minutes of running, which would have put me in the run-close-to-5K range.  But, since this is a regimented training schedule, I didn't want to get ahead of myself and risk injury or a pulled muscle.

My next run will be a 26-minutes-straight run, with 5-minute warm-up/cool-down walks on either end.  I ran in the neighborhood today, but I think I'll go down to the Arkansas River running path to knock that out  Thursday morning.

Oh, and if you are interested in what was on my playlist, here are the songs that I queued up today, in order:

Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More by Mudhoney
You Know You're Right by Nirvana
The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden
Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
Locomotive by Guns N' Roses
Too Young to Fall In Love by Motley Crue
Color Me Impressed by The Replacements
Turn on the News by Husker Du (cool-down started during this song)
I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones

Yep, all metal, hardcore, punk, and early 90's alternative rock.  What, you expected Chris Isaak's Wicked Game or something? ;)

A follow-up post to the one earlier in the evening

A follow-up post to the one earlier in the evening about the cost of law school.  I actually took pen to paper and accessed my personal account ledger to figure out, to the cent, how much I'll have paid toward my law school students loans from the first payment to the last*.

Drum roll...

My $42,000 juris doctor student loan is going to end up costing me $84,249.69.  Yep, almost double.  Ouch.  The five years I didn't pay a dime toward them while they were on forbearance from May 1998 until February 2004 sure came back to haunt me, as those loans' interest rates really did their trick.  Oh well, live and learn.  It would be easy to get angry about the costs of higher education and the cost of my loan in particular, but I did sign on the dotted line and I have no one to blame but myself for going five years without making a payment.  At least my initial loans were reasonable enough to enable me to pay them off in less than ten years (of the first payment).  That, and I was able to enter the legal profession during a period of economic growth and be fully entrenched in the legal community, with experience and connections, by the time the economy went into the toilet in 2008, so I never had to sweat being unemployed.  People nowadays will have neither and come out of law school with a much more onerous student-loan repayment future.  A bleak future, to say the least, if those loans are piggybacking them from now until the End Times.

Oh, one more thing to consider when I talk about the "cost" of my law degree.  Its what the scam-bloggers (AKA those folks who blog about the law school "scam") refer to as "opportunity cost."  Essentially, the missed salary I should compute from 1995 to 1998, when I was in school, not earning a living.  I really have no idea what my 1995 BA in English would have been worth on the open market back then and what type of job I was even qualified for, but I think it reasonable to estimate that an average 1995 college graduate in Arkansas could command $20,000 per year starting out.  Hell, that may be too low.  But its a nice round number.  So, at the risk of throwing my "true cost" accuracy out the window by using arbitrary numbers, let's say that I missed out on salary from June 1995 until October 1998 (when I got my first attorney job).  That's 40 months.  At $20,000 per year, that's a gross of $66,666.00.  Take 20% of the top for taxes and that leaves a post-tax net of $53,332.00.  So, yeah, I could have expected to have $53,000 in my pocket from June 1995 through October 1998.  And, mind you, I graduated college with ZERO debt.  No credit cards, nothing.

So, while it is true that my law degree likely over the long haul of my career will result in a higher earning potential, the sunk costs are staggering.  $53K in lost initial earnings and $84K in loan payments.  $137,000 total outlay for the privilege of calling myself a lawyer.  Staggering.


* Although I have not paid them off entirely, I was able to accurately determine how much my final bill will be.  You'll just have to trust me on the figures.  They should be fully paid off by this time next year :)

The law school scam...

...at least that's what some people on the internet call it.  And, I think they are right.  Basically, the cost of going to law school has gotten so expensive and the job market has so cratered that it literally is an unwise investment of time, energy, and -- most importantly to most people -- MONEY, to take that career route.

Which is sad, really.  My law degree, earned in 1998, has served me well, even though the degree itself likely cost me somewhere around $70,000 to earn (not to mention the three years of salary I did not earn while pursuing my degree).  Still, even with that big fat debtload, I will have paid if off within nine years (my first student loan payment was February of 2004, five and 1/2 years after graduation) and without it totally crippling my lifestyle and budget.  Not so with today's graduates.  Just take a look here to see what it costs nowadays and just imagine what the resulting student loan payments would do to your budget, dear reader.  That is, if you can even find legal work in this crappy market!

I've come to the conclusion that its just not worth the money to go to law school unless 1) you or whoever is footing the bill is independently wealthy or you get a substantial scholarship.  That's it.  That's the only reason. 

Look at the costs of UALR's law school.  You're looking at about $38,000 in tuition alone to go three years toward a JD.  You know what that equals in repayment-of-loan terms?  Well, if you knock them out in ten years, this calculator suggests that it'll run you at least $54,000, with a starting monthly payment of $455/month.  Again, this is TUITION ALONE.  That means living at home with the parents and eating their food and not needing to take out any additional loan for rent, utilities, groceries, beer money, etc.  If you need to take out another $8,000 in living expenses ($500/month rent over 12 months is $6,000 by itself, remember), you're looking at the cost of a JD at UALR rising to $94,000 to be paid out over ten years at $783/month.  That's almost $10,000/year in student loan repayments, right out of the gate and every year for ten years.

You still think its worth it?  Let's say a recent UALR grad does well for herself and gets a deputy prosecuting attorney gig here in Pulaski County, and say that she starts out at $40,000/year, which I'd guesstimate is about right for a brand-new lawyer.  Well, take 25% of the top for taxes and then the requisite $10,000 in student loan payments a year and all of a sudden she's got to spread $20,000 over the next 12 months, which is $1,666.00 a month, which is ALL she has left per month -- rent/mortgage, utilities, food, clothing, car payment, gasoline, shoes, beer money, credit card payments, whatever.  Its not exactly poverty level, but for a person with a juris doctor degree, its dangerously close, especially if you are supporting a spouse or a family.

If you are taking loans out to go to law school nowadays, you are a fool.  That is sad, but it is the truth. 

Beef 101

Here's another infographic that I thought was worth sharing, especially considering that my own diet is so protein-heavy:



Source: FrugalDad

RIP Adam Yauch

The fact that 1/3 of the Beastie Boys is now deceased makes me feel very old and very sad.

Rock on, MCA.

Should I even *think* about a THIRD most anticipated movie of the summer?

Let's defy the odds and all conventional wisdom here and -- just bear with me -- assume that I've got Prometheus and Safety Not Guaranteed in the 'ol seen-it movie bank already this summer and the genie in the bottle has granted me a third wish to see yet ANOTHER movie this summer.  I know, far fetched, right?  Well, if lightning were in fact striking for the third time in the same place, I'd see this one, called Looper.  It looks freaking awesome.

Favorite vidoes of the '80's, part III

I owned the cassette for Seven and the Ragged Tiger and listened to it nonstop on my walkman one summer when my family drove down to Disneyworld in, I believe, 1984.  My favorite song on the album at the time was "The Seventh Stranger," but there is no video for that.  But there was one for "The Reflex" and it was awesome.

Oh, what the hell, here's a clip of "The Seventh Stranger" live from 1984:

Homework

Dear readers, you might have wondered why, of all the widgets I could have put on this page, I have three gasoline-price trackers.  Well, the truth is, peak oil is one of my very favorite topics to think and/or write about (although I have not written on the subject in some time), so I like to track the price of oil on its inevitable, ruinous, and irreversible climb upward.  Now, you may be asking yourself, "why should I care about this in the least (aside from the obvious drain on my checking account)?" 

That's where the "homework" referenced in the blog post's header comes in.  Instead of me explaining it to you, why don't I let YouTube do the work for me? 

Watch these movies/clips and all will be revealed...

The foregoing is just ONE of the infinite reasons why Hillcrest is the best neighborhood in Little Rock.  Walkable, mixed-use, close to the city center, close to the Arkansas River, dense housing.  Would you rather weather the Peak Oil Storm in Hillcrest or in Maumelle?  Or Cabot?  Or Bryant?  Or West Little Rock? 

Quote of the Day

"You don't really have a [brown] recluse problem here [Hillcrest] or fire ants, really.  All the things that bite and sting are out in West Little Rock."

-- Tammy, the best Terminix person in the state, explaining to yours truly about the general lack of spider problems in the neighborhood.  It is unknown whether or not she was aware of the spot-on double entendre of her statement :)

Favorite videos of the 80's, part 2

Because of the dwarf, naturally.

Actually, I had always heard that "The Safety Dance" was about anti-nuclear weapons proliferation, which I thought was puzzling unless it was part of a bomb-you-back-to-midieval-times conceit.  Turns out my puzzlement was well-placed, if you believe the song's entry on Wikipedia:

The writer/performer, Ivan Doroschuk, has explained that "The Safety Dance" is a protest against bouncers stopping dancers pogoing to 1980s New Wave music in clubs when disco was dying and New Wave was up and coming. New Wave dancing, especially pogoing, was different from disco dancing, because it was done individually instead of with partners and involved holding the torso rigid and thrashing about. To uninformed bystanders this could look dangerous, especially if pogoers accidentally bounced into one another (the more deliberately violent evolution of pogoing is slam dancing). The bouncers did not like pogoing so they would tell pogoers to stop or be kicked out of the club. Thus, the song is a protest and a call for freedom of expression. Other lyrics in the song include references to the way pogoing looked to bouncers, especially "And you can act real rude and totally removed/And I can act like an imbecile".

Doroschuk disagrees with two common interpretations of the song. Firstly, he notes it is not a call for safe sex. Doroschuk says that is reading too much into the lyrics. Secondly, he explained that it is not an anti-nuclear protest despite the nuclear imagery at the end of the video. Doroschuk says that he considers Men Without Hats "a punk band with one hit song" and that as such they were "anti-everything".

So there you go.  Anyway, bring on the midieval dwarf!

The case against airlines

If you believe Christopher Steiner, air travel is going to eventually become even more and more expensive even as the numbers of carriers dwindles under the sheer weight of their unsustainable business models.  This, thanks to the theory known as peak oil and the inevitable rise in fuel and gasoline costs.  But check out this infographic and note that we're still in the very early stages of the fallout from peak oil.



Source: http://frugaldad.com

My favorite music videos of the 80's, part 1

80's nostalgia has been overdone by just about every pop-culture media outlet since the decade ended over twenty years ago.  But not on HillcrestBlog!  So here you go, just because :)

My first exposure to MTV was when I visited my grandparents house in Oklahoma City back in 1983 and there was this *new* cable TeeVee channel that played music videos that we didn't have in Hot Springs, Arkansas.  I'm not sure if "Photograph" was the very first video I saw, but if it wasn't, I *know* I saw it that first night I watched the channel.  Awesome then, awesome now.

SECOND most anticipated movie of this summer

...behind Prometheus, of course.  I figure that out of the three-month summer movie season, I can safely say that all the stars will align with a babysitter, and willing spouse, to see Prometheus.  A second summer movie outing is less than guaranteed (much like safety...in this movie, apparently).  But if it did occur -- ie babysitter, the movie playing at the right time, in the right theater, and all that -- I would want to see this movie. 

The incredible soccer booze ban

Today Manchester City is hosting Manchester United in the English Premier League.  For the uninitiated, that's soccer.  Basically, the title likely hinges upon who wins this match between these two cross-town rivals.  It is a HUGE game, not only in England, but in all of worldwide professional soccer (I think I heard 650 million people will be watching).  But nowhere is it bigger than in the city of Manchester.  How big, you ask?

The city of Manchester is banning alcohol sales prior to the match. 

Can you imagine a Razorback game so freaking HUGE that the city of Little Rock would ban alcohol sales or consumption at the War Memorial Stadium golf course?  That's a scenario I simply cannot fathom.

And, on top of that, I was in Germany with my wife at the 2006 World Cup and partied with some English in Cologne.  Booze and English football go hand-in-glove.  I remember seeing media reports that the cities where the English were playing in were very literally running out of beer.  Like, the taps and kegs were running dry and the German tourism industry was kinda freaking out because they wanted to make sure there was enough beer for everyone else -- including themselves.  So, I guess my point is, the fact that Manchester has banned alcohol sales prior to the match is pretty freaking remarkable.

We're all unhealthy fatties now

Myself included, although after topping out at 272 pounds last June 20, I'm down to 244.6 as of this morning. I think with newly dedicating myself to diet and exercise recently that I can get down to 230 by June of this year, which I think would be quite the accomplishment, but still only halfway to what I need to lose from my June 20, 2011, total.


Source: frugaldad.com

The case for beer

I saw this on another site and it fit so well with the ethos of HillcrestBlog that I had to report it here :)


Source: FrugalDad.com

Saturday music videos - Mother Love Bone

I guess we'll just consider this a Grunge Week, why don't we, capping it off with what might be the most influential band of the scene, Mother Love Bone, which was apparently poised to make the big time before the singer, Andrew Wood's, unfortunate death at the hands of heroin (which was likewise unfortunately to be repeated a couple of more times to some well-known tragic figures in the Seattle music scene).  From the ashes of MLB of course sprang Pearl Jam and the one-off, primarily Chris Cornell solo record Temple of the Dog. 

It is interesting to think what would have happened had Wood not died and if Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had not made contact with San Diego surfer Edward Vedder, because MLB had some chops and Wood certainly knew how to control a stage.  That being said, we still have this to look back on and enjoy...

Friday music featuring Green River

Keeping with the Grunge theme...

Green River was one of those bands who's influence on the nascent grunge scene likely has to do more with the band's eventual spawn (Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam) than the band's output itself, which is saying a lot about the bands that were to come because Green River held their own with some quality output.  Hear for yourself (disclaimer - YouTube doesn't have any old live clips, so these are unfortunately reunion shows):