To LeCastor

"By 'financial elitism' do you mean that they are expensive?"

In brief, I suppose I'd have to say, "Yes."

To expand, I guess I might have said instead of "financial elitism" that very expensive schools are prohibitively expensive for many, many people and that such cost makes them avaiable mostly to a small set of wealthy people, hence "elite." I know that Bryn Mawr or Harvard isn't simply fleecing its students (not to say that schools of all kinds don't engage in some fleecing) and that $40k/year represents lots of operational costs.

And to reieterate: my quarrel isn't with elite, by whatever definition, private and/or liberal arts schools; it's with WM's rankings, as I've posted above.

-- SSA

I agree with you that the rankings are kinda stupid and very subjective.

As for how much school costs, yes, it's expensive, but (1) i think it's an investment that pays off, (2) there are ways to make it cheaper. My parents, very luckily, paid for my undergrad, but they refused to pay for room & board and all that, since we lived 8 miles from the college anyway, so I lived at home, so it was more like $26k per year than $40k. Yes, you can't always get what you want -- if you don't have resources and no one gave you a scholarship, maybe living across the country in Bowdoin or Bates or Williams isn't for you, there are good schools all over the country. Now i'm in law school, and i'm taking out enough loans that in post places in this country could get you a really nice house. Again, ways to make it cheaper -- i'm still on my parents' health insurance plan, i don't live in the usually overpriced dorms or by myself, i cook a lot at home, etc. And i'm sittin ghere, contemplating a credit card offer for no interest until September 2007. Which isn't really a way to make it cheaper, just a way to defer costs until i have money.

People, I can't believe so many of you are advocating that the accountant report the boss.

(1) Those of you advocating this don't seem to understand the separation between personal accounts and company accounts, or accountants' professional responsibility rules. If it's not this accountant's job to prepare personal tax returns, just because he has seen them doesn't necessarily mean he has to report any illegal activity. it DOES matter how he gained access to them.

(2) More importantly, is this the kind of society we want to live in, where citizens snitch to the government about each other's transgressions? It's especially bad when it's motivated by revenge. Do you want to live in a country where you should be paranoid that absolutely everyone is could be spying on you and reporting you to the government? I don't. This is a feature of totalitarian regimes -- in the USSR, if you wanted to get rid of your boss, or just a neighbor or aquiantance you didn't like, you could simply report them to the KGB on some fabricated charges, and depending on whether you did this during Stalin's rein, or Perestroika, the minimum your subject would get is a few very uncomfortable and intimidating hours spent at Lubyanka, and the maximum, disappearance forever into the archipelago. maybe this kind of whisteblowing is justified in cases like Enron, where thousands' of people's retirement funds, savings, jobs, etc. are at stake, but in this case, i really think the accountant should mind his own business.

Maybe in this case, the guy really is cheating on his taxes, and deserves to be punished, but next time, someone could report you for no reason at all, and you would still probably have to go through an audit, and have many months of anxiety and problems for no reason at all. So for the sake of living in a free society that is not always watching you, i don't think this accountant should report the boss.

the reason no one is responding to this is:

(1) even the worst trolls and the most hardline feminists agree on this.

(2) it's no surprise that this is happening.

(3) what can be done? saying "i support afghani women" doesn't actually help them.

It's thoroughly depressing.

Chimpy seems aggressive, on the defensive, evasive, and he keeps touching Lauer. WTF is that?! has he never heard of personal space?

What an embarrassment.

since when was telling the truth against lawbreakers a bad thing to do?

Drug dealers call witnesses snitches, usually before they kill them to keep them from testifying.

Alas, telling the truth is extinct and those who still feel honor are laughed at and called "snitches."

-- cosmic mojo

In the USSR, it was against the law to criticize the government. A person who went to the KGB and told them that his neighbor was criticizing the government was very possibly telling the truth, and reporting someone breaking the law. But, he was a snitch. Now, i'm not saying that paying taxes and tax laws are the same thing, certainly not, what i'm saying is that if everyone who ever witnessed unlawful behavior went to the police and reported it, we'd all be criminals, and such a culture would allow the police to control our every move, and we would all become paranoid.