And here's the problem: An underage prostitute who is even below the age necessary to legally consent to sex in the state where she has been pressured into prostitution CAN STILL BE ARRESTED FOR PROSTITUTION.

What. The. Hell.

Children and adolescences who are forced or coerced into prostitution are victims. Victims. Why does the law in most areas of the country not recognize this?

Middle-aged guy picks up a 14-year-old prostitute in a bad part of town. He gets caught and arrested. He gets a little public shaming but goes free. The girl is also arrested, scolded for her part in the act, punished as a criminal, maybe if she's lucky she'll get released to a rehabilitation program instead... but that's only if she's lucky.

Middle-aged guy has sex with his 14-year-old stepdaughter. He gets caught and arrested. By the above standard, his stepdaughter ought to be arrested for being an accessory to his criminal activity. She should be publicly shamed in a courtroom and put in jail with all the other girls who so shamefully drive men to abuse them.

We get that this isn't okay, right? The latter case would never happen in our modern society, I would hope. Why does the former?

$16/hour. That's our bar, is it?

Hi. I'm an educated professional. I have a master's degree. I work in an ordinary office.

I make $16/hour with no benefits.

Where's my union? Oh, sorry, I'm the wrong type of employee for that. The landscape of the working class has changed. A worker in the right area of organized "labor" may now live on a comfortably middle class income with reasonably good benefits, while a clerical employee sitting at a desk all day gets barely above minimum wage, no health insurance, and the threat of being fired if they miss a day of work.

Liberalism cannot exist without the poor and working class. It can and will continue to exist and prosper whether or not the few remaining major labor unions support liberal or conservative causes. If unions want continued relevance within the discussion of the course of the Democratic party, they would do well to start branching out into activities which benefit more than just small sectors of the working class.

I wish we could get past this.

There is no solution. This is why competitive sports are inherently stupid. People talk about how it's about training! And effort! And teamwork! Training and effort and teamwork help. In the long run, the ones who compete at the world level are not there because of training and effort and teamwork.

They're there because they're genetically blessed.

Most times, the particular genetic blessings which happen to be advantageous in sports that were popularized by men... are things that men tend to have more than women. But they aren't actually about whether your sex chromosomes are XX or XY. They aren't about the shape and configuration of your genitals. They aren't about how you dress or talk or act.

They're about considerably muddier things like hormones. Certain hormonal configurations may be more common to XX individuals than XY, or vice versa, but that does not mean that it is inherently "unfair" for someone who is XY to compete against someone who is XX. The "women's" class of these sports at this level is not populated by XX individuals with typically female bodies. All of them are, to some degree or another, atypical.

There's no way to judge fair here. An XY individual with CAIS is not at a competitive advantage to an XX individual with a more typically masculine skeletal and muscular development. Neither of those people are cheating. They're just competing with the bodies they were given.

If we celebrated people performing to their personal best, this wouldn't be an issue. As long as we laud all of these people for the inborn abilities their bodies have, we're going to be stuck making stupid, arbitrary calls about which classes of inborn abilities ought to be grouped together for competition purposes. It's utterly artificial.

That she can't find a job is not especially surprising to me, given her lack of writing skills, poor GPA and so on, plus the economy.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I'd go a long way from saying she deserves all her tuition back, but I agree that the marketing for some of these for-profit universities is sleazy at best.

Unfortunately, even my first reaction was to think, you know, two years ago, I finished a graduate degree in accounting with a 3.7. I started my job hunt long before I actually graduated, but the time from my actual last day in class to when I finally got an offer was about five months. I nearly ended up bankrupt. And that was in a field often touted as recession-proof, I just happened to live in the wrong geographic area.

Playing poor-me here is just doomed to failure. There are too many people more qualified and worse off. But that doesn't mean that the promises many schools make in their marketing materials can't be seriously unethical.