That's a good situation where a slowdown is appropriate.

How many times do you actually see that happen though? Magistrates aren't required to grant marriage licenses to 14 year olds, only allowed to. Plus parental consent is required under 16, at least here in NC.

You're right. I do not know everything, and God willing I will never be cursed to know everything. You may well be older and wiser than I, but only I can make decisions about my own actions and I must always do so with whatever limited information I have available.

Most people can only afford a home by taking a mortgage under the current equilibrium state. If home prices had only kept pace with inflation in the wage market since the day my grandparents bought their home 50 years ago, most people would likely save up and buy a home out of pocket.

Basically, I believe Mortgages cause significantly more social harm than good and should be outlawed. The following short bullet points:

If you did it two decades ago, you made a great choice. If you made the same choice today, without the scholarship(congrats on your highschool grades/extracurriculars, btw) I would not be able to respect that decision.

My anecdata is the only anecdata I have to make recommendations from. You're right, it's not better than anyone else's. It's probably worse, and I have one hell of a confirmation bias to boot.

If it were not so expensive and not marketed so frequently as a job farm, I might not make the assumption that it is intended to be a perverse sorting hat for haves and have nots.

It seems pretty rational to me. I take a look at the past, current and projected job markets, then I take a look at the rising cost of going to college, then I read all of HamNo's posts about how crushing student loan debt can be if you're in the huge percentage of people who remain unemployed for quite some time…

Personality is important, job experience is important, cost to hire is important, likelihood of retaining the employee is important.

You're conflating a lot of things here, mate.

I advise people not to hire those with degrees.

Age discrimination actually only kicks in as a protected category at when the discriminated against hits 40 in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discr…

Slavery filled the same need that illegal immigration fills today: cheap, cheap labor. For the last 6000 years of documented history, only the last 200 or so have not had slavery actively endorsed by major world powers. Even within current lifetimes, we've had outright legally second class citizens in every nation…

20 years ago, a college degree was a differentiator that said you were a hard worker and could handle the job. Then somebody decided everyone should go to college, based on statistics like your education lifetime salary link. The new demand for degrees ballooned the price of college, but at the same time, the higher…

I don't personally hire anybody, but I always tell those who do hire that if everything else is equal they should take a just a high school diploma over a BA/MA. Science degrees I'll take wholeheartedly.

A degree meant something else 20 years ago, that's just a fact. But people deciding to earn degrees have been making a steadily worse decision for the last 20 years. Now a degree tells me you're really, really good at going to school and really bad at understanding consequences.

If you work in IT, your degree almost certainly led to you having writing skills just slightly above what remembering to use spellcheck produces. However, that's the only benefit. Colleges don't know enough about running an IT shop to teach anybody how to function in one and only technical trade schools teach the…

Exactly. And that's why I always advise employers against hiring those who have degrees earned in the last 20 years. It's the surest sign that an individual doesn't make rational risk/reward decisions.

I'd imagine it has some chance of poisoning the jury pool. I seem to remember a few high profile cases that got mistrials because of media coverage pre-trial