I wouldn't trade jobs with a CHP officer either but I do have to wonder about the skill level. I'm sure it's harder than I think but the job still boils down to parking on the side of the freeway, spotting violators, chasing them for about a minute and then writing them a ticket. Is that really worth $48+ an hour?
Because that seems to be around the average pay (The CHP has a very powerful union so their base pay hours are capped at an average 40 per week). I'm not for big cuts but cut $20,000 a year off each salary and they're still making $80,000 a year which is pretty respectable
Actually, the skill level is fairly high. The CHP academy is around 7 months long. Training is similar to boot camp. They train physically, high speed and safe driving techniques, weapons training, and of course they have to learn the vehicle code (it's a LOT bigger than you might think), and how to write reports. Getting into the academy is fairly difficult, and many cadets washout before finishing.
There are so many laws about what police can and cannot do and how they have to do things, that it's actually quite complicated and has a steep learning curve. They also work long hours (12 hour shifts).
I'm a bit biased since I have brothers in the CHP, but it's definitely a tough job.
I pulled my first pay stub from the Marines (2001-2005). $350 bi-weekly after taxes. 4-years/4-promotions later, I was sitting around $650 bi-weekly when I left to head to college.
We're both trained for completely different purposes. Without a doubt, sending a CHP officer into Marine Corps boot camp would be quite the whirl wind for the guy/gal.
The poster's point was that having a tough boot camp does not justify the highway police salaries, since marines do a similar camp and earn a lot less. Thus saying that CHP bootcamp is a breeze for ex-military does not make that argument not matter, it reinforces it.
I have no doubt the training is difficult and perhaps it is a tough field to break into, but neither of those facts can justify near 100% pay increases over 2 years.
They are very obviously gaming the system in their last year before retirement to award themselves unreasonable large pensions.
If you check the base salary, the year-over-year increase was between 4% and 7%, which is more than I get for a yearly raise, but not entirely unreasonable. Don't forget that the "Other" category is most benefits that aren't necessary paid out as real dollars to the employee, though it could be paid-out vacation time saved up over many years.
Of course this is the code that the law presumes that every driver knows. It would be unfair to punish someone for doing what they didn't know is illegal.
Do so many highway stops involve those skills that all officers must have them? Seems like highways should have a "parking enforcer" level instead/too sometimes.
It obviously can be dangerous at times but considering how many people want to be police officers this pay level seems corrupt.
This is just anecdotal but I've met far more people who want to be police officers / fireman than engineers or doctors; surely there is a large supply of eligible candidates, I can't believe that there is any shortage of capable labor to justify this almost CEO level of pay.
Are there any numbers on that? Sure, there are lots of people who want to be police officers, but that's not the same as being qualified. As far as I can find, unemployment rates among officers are extremely low, there are many unfilled positions, and officers who moved have little difficulty finding new jobs. That all usually indicates a tight labor market.
It's possible police academy is unnecessarily hard or something, but I suppose you could say that in any field (perhaps Google's hiring standards are too high, or med school is too hard).
Entry level police positions are typically very competitive. In some jurisdictions (in my area in NJ specifically), you simply cannot get hired without having connections to existing or retired officers. Getting fired is virtually unheard of. Local Colleges are filled with criminal justice majors will who never make it to an academy. The benefits, pay, power, and perks make it the ultimate job, if you can get it.
It's not to do with shortage of labor. Their salaries are high because being a cop is a life-threatening and potentially psychologically damaging profession. Some go their entire careers unscathed, some get killed, almost all have close calls every now and then. Most of them have families that care about them and know the sacrifice they might have to make one day. They deserve good salaries for their service.
Believe you me, I have many gripes about the quality (or lack thereof) of law enforcement in this country. But how much they are paid isn't one of them.
When I see news reports about IEDs on California highways I will support you wholeheartedly. Until then, I think they're way overpaid in relation to the armed forces.
It also includes being a first responder to accidents. And watching over the cleanup of said accidents. People burned alive in cars. Children strewn across highways.
And knowing every violation stop is a potential end to your life. Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?
Do I want the job? No thanks. They're more than welcome to those salaries for what they deal with.
And knowing every violation stop is a potential end to your life. Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?
According to Wolfram Alpha, 633,000 people are employed as police officers. From the Office Down Memorial Page, I found that 127 officers died in the line of duty in the United States in 2009. This gives us a death rate of 20 per 100,000. Of those 127 deaths, 60 were classified as the result of gunfire, during pursuit, or as the result of an assault. If we're generous and treat all of these incidents as homicides, we get a homicide rate of 9.5 per 100,000.
The 2008 murder rate in Detroit was 40.6 per 100,000. East St. Louis, 101.9 per 100,000! The murder rate across the entire United States at the same time was 5.4 per 100,000. The death rate of fishermen is 112 per 100,000.
We could dig into the numbers more and look at where these officers were killed and get an adjusted risk of homicide for police. Anyway, here's my point: The actual threat posed to police is small compared to the public perception of a threat.
Pay is not determined by the difficulty or unpleasantness of the job, or at least, not directly. It is determined by the balance of supply and demand. How many people are ready and willing to be police officers at some level of pay, and how many police officers are needed?
Policing isn't trivial, but you know what? Neither are most other jobs. There are many, many people with the capability of being police officers; supply is high. Demand is not actually all that high compared to supply. There's even more supply than may initially meet the eye because many people not physically strong enough to be police officers right this instant could bring themselves up to spec if needed. The difficulty or unpleasantness of the job factors into the supply but I think you'd find a lot of people who would take that job; it's hard, but there's a lot of hard jobs about that people do for much less than that amount of money. (After all, first responding is hard from one point of view, but it is uniquely rewarding too; how many lives have you saved in the course of your work? It's not all good but it's not all bad either.)
You argue that they are valuable, and this is true, but the value of an employee is not what determines their pay... it is what caps it; long term, anyhow. You can't be paid more than what you are worth, you can't even be paid exactly what you are worth, you in fact inevitably must be paid less than what you are "worth" for the whole arrangement to work. Governments aren't immune to this. They must run at a net profit or they'll bring their society down. Measurement of profit is somewhat different than a private company, but profit they must; they must be extracting more value from their employees than they are paying their employees or the society is running the government at a net loss, which can only be tolerated to a finite degree as determined by what other surpluses the society is running elsewhere. What governments can do that private industry can't is put off the pain until much later before the fact they are paying people more than the value they are actually bringing bites them.
Pay is not determined by the difficulty or unpleasantness of the job, or at least, not directly. It is determined by the balance of supply and demand.
That's true, but the market is ridiculously deformed on both sides of that equation. On the supply side, there are many who would like to be cops but the requirements bar them entry (most often for legitimate reasons, but I suspect not always). On the demand side, America's constant quest for new crimes to be defined and new police powers creates an artificial demand. I mean, most people I know don't see a demand for policing those smoking marijuana, but legislation forces it.
You can't be paid more than what you are worth
That depends on the definition of "worth". If you determine it rigorously as an economist would -- how much less money would the organization make without this employee -- then you're right. But if you define it in terms of the employee's productive contribution, it's a different story. Again, regulations cause some of that different (the need to have a figurehead owner who is a state resident, in some jurisdictions, is just deadweight but a requirement for doing business); in other cases it's contractual obligations (i.e., to be certified to sell some Cisco product you must have on staff one Cisco-certified engineer, even though you're not using his services as such).
I think you misunderstood when I said you can't be paid more than you are worth; I don't mean that you can't overpay someone, ever, I'm saying that nobody, government or otherwise, can persistently over the long haul pay its employees more than they are worth. I'd say any definition of "value" or "worth" that does permit that is so broken as to be useless. It's simply impossible; a system simply can not have more value flowing out of it than the sum total of the value it generates, the value it takes in, and the value it has on hand, and imbalances in income vs. outflow tend to be able to rapidly deplete the stored value.
That the market is "ridiculously deformed" here is sort of my point, along with the fact that such deformations can not be sustained.
I don't think this pay is rooted in the laws of economics. The number of people applying for police officer jobs is huge - but that doesn't mean the pay gets lowered for anyone. The contracts are negotiated by the veterans in the force, and the people with criminal justice degrees waiting in the wings who would gladly take less money are not stake holders in contract negotiations.
Nothing stops people from being paid more than they are worth. Doctors in the US are a classic example of an industry that captures regulations which enables them to artificially limit supply and over charge for their services.
It is determined by the balance of supply and demand
That's not actually true - here in the UK they are turning away applicants for the Met, even cancelling start dates. The supply of police officers far outstrips the demand. The same is true of the fire brigade.
To be fair, police have to deal with a wider range of psychological issues than jobs in rescue. Not only are police exposed to most things that rescue jobs are exposed to, they also have to deal with domestic violence, hostage situations, exploitation of minors and other disadvantaged groups, threats from organized crime, and sometimes actually pulling the trigger themselves. Hell, just the fact that police officers have to enforce laws they might not personally agree with is a pretty big emotional strain. My naive intuition is that rescue jobs are far less in a grey area emotionally.
I'm not saying this to quibble about whose job is more important or serious. It's just that I would volunteer as a firefighter or an EMT in a second, but I would have to think very carefully about how working in law enforcement would affect me.
True, but is that a problem with police salaries, or with military ones? I have a number of acquaintances in the military, many of whom have served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a taxpayer and (putative) beneficiary of their service, I'm personally embarrassed by how little they get paid.
They get the population median income. Without having to have acquired any skills before joining, all training and living costs are paid for after enlistement. Base pay is still far higher than minimum wage work. I'd say the problem in this specific context is undeniably CHP salaries being artificially super inflated above the national median income in a market inefficient manner that does not reflect supply of people capable of performing the work.
quote: "Despite perceived dangers, policing has never been listed among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. In terms of deaths per capita, driver-sales work such as pizza delivery is a more dangerous profession than being a police officer." (see reference in footnote)
Edit: I did say "less than the populace at large" ; will try to find a specific link to back this up, not just one that shows being a police officer is not as dangerous as other jobs.
By that concept, army infantry should be some of the highest paid people out there. A rather dangerous job in many of the places we deploy. Yet, their pay is nowhere near this level.
"... but I do have to wonder about the skill level. I'm sure it's harder than I think but the job still boils down to parking on the side of the freeway, spotting violators, chasing them for about a minute and then writing them a ticket. Is that really worth $48+ an hour? ..."
Non verbals, body language, dealing with highly charged emotional people - all these skills aren't readily acknowledged but required to police effectively.
Sometimes I wish we could just delete extremely violent emotion from the genetic code. People living their lives rationally as well as emotionally would make for a much better world.
I don’t think it’s a concern of most startups but it’s definitely one of most VCs. I think most VCs were either active as VCs or working in the industry back in the late 90s when Microsoft entering a market meant the death knell for any other company in that market. So that fear has carried over into today with Google taking Microsoft’s place as the dominant company in the industry.
The fact that Google hasn’t been near as successful at entering new markets doesn't seem to have entered the equation.
It's pretty far ahead right now but I think this trend is going to start to reverse pretty soon. The combination of Apple loosening their restrictions, technology like Appcelerator getting better and Android's success will make it hard for Objective-C to continue its rapid growth.
The episode in question finished 3rd (of 4) in the 18-49 demo and 4th (of 4) in Total Viewers so I'd say they could use some attention. I think a lot of people gave up on the Simpsons around Season 10 and have never bothered to look back.
But just because you saw this on Hulu or Youtube, does that mean you'll go back to watching The Simpsons? Awareness marketing doesn't help The Simpsons because everyone's already aware of it. And this doesn't accomplish much more than that. If anything, it's awareness marketing for Banksy.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. If you think the Simpsons has become formulaic (which it had in some of those middle seasons) this might be enough to convince you they're taking risks again. Which MIGHT get you to tune in.
I'm not saying it's super effective but it's positive attention and that's worth something.
I honestly think that should be the headline of the post since I find that a lot more interesting. I've had the feeling for some time that the early adopter market is shifting from Firefox to Chrome and this provides some anecdotal evidence for that conclusion.
Same here. I almost gave up on Firefox and went back to IE. I downloaded Chrome the day it was first released and have used it ever since. Chrome had some nasty bugs and shortcomings early on, and I almost gave up on it, too, but subsequent versions have kept me (mostly) satisfied.
I don't think it's hidden at all. He says in the Drugs section...
"The problem is that our drugs, on the whole, cost about 50% more. For name brand pharmaceuticals, we pay about 77% more. Why? Some will say that it’s because we’re wealthier and need to subsidize for the rest of the world. But even if we paid more based on our relative wealth, it would come to about a 30% premium, not the 77% we do pay."
So the problem is obvious. The issue is how to fix it. We in the U.S. can either enforce our own price controls which will break the system or we can force U.S. companies to charge more to other countries and take the chance of denying medicine to sick people because foreign governments won't accept the higher prices.
Not an attractive choice no matter how you slice it.
Okay, I understand how it would be possible (not agreeing) to "enforce our own price controls", but how can the U.S force it's companies to charge more to other countries?
If we placed an export tariff on these pharmaceuticals, I fail to see how that could decrease pharmaceutical prices in the US.
Japanese car companies moved production here, why couldn't big pharma do the same?
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.
Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.
> Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.
Of course it will "work", but are you sure that you'll be happy with the result?
Some other countries have said exactly that, the result being that folks in those countries are paying production costs but not R&D costs. If the drug companies can't recover R&D costs in the US, how do you think that the R&D costs will be paid?
If they don't think that they'll be able to recover R&D costs, what do you think that they'll do?
If you think that they can charge less and recover their costs, why don't you do so and drive them out of biz?
It's an interesting read and worth bookmarking if you can't get through right now (the page was going in and out as I read it).
It's kind of depressing though in that his point boils down to neither side's solution being all that effective at solving the problem. Moreover his meta point seems to be that it's too complicated a problem for politicians to solve based on their need to boil things down to a sound bite solution.
Politicians don't solve based on the sound bytes. They win power with sound bites. There's no shortage of evidence of sound bites being blissfully ignored, by politicians of any stripe, moments after an election victory.
Politicians 'solve' based on lobbying efforts. And that's why they can't fix anything. Lobbying favors the entrenched and they like things nice and wasteful and anti-competitive.
Firstly, I was referring to the resulting citizen-facing services being anti-competitive.
Secondly, I disagree. A small handful of would-be suitors is preferable. But a large field would only be possible if the firms were each smaller, which means they have less money for lobbying efforts in general. Which simultaneously means less graft up-front and a less-lucrative position as a lobbyist when your term is up.
The great thing about blogging is anyone can write and even if they don't write well they can probably convey the idea they're trying to get across. So it's a lowest common denominator communication media.
Video is a skill in itself. Put your average blogger in front of a camera and it will more than likely turn out badly because most people aren't skilled orators with the ability to manipulate their own body language.
This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:
"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article"
"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize"
What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?
Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.
It's not that non-university students are immoral or stupid. The article says nothing of the sort. Plagiarism is a basic lesson of university students on day one. You're being too sensitive.
The unsaid connection the author is making is that universities have honor codes that get drilled into you from freshman year. Those honor codes have very specific definitions of plagiarism, usually with examples. Only an idiot, lazy, or jackoff university student would plagiarize word-for-word thinking that a font change is good enough. That makes the university student 100x "stupid-er" than a non-university student that figured out what plagiarism is through intuition. :)
The idea is not that those who haven't gone to university don't know better, but that going through university (which is assumed to have and take seriously an academic integrity policy) would teach them (even though many would already know better). To say that something is typically true of members of a group does not mean that it is typically not true of non-members.
Yes, this. There isn't really a single avenue of study at University you can choose where you shouldn't encounter this. Unless you can make it through a degree without writing a single paper. The idea that you can plagiarize anything in any context at all is basically anathema in almost all academic circles. Not that it doesn't happen, but most people that even attempt it are smart enough to do more than change the font size to hide it.
I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the top of the code.
Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around the automated plagiarism detection tool.
As someone who did go to college, every class in which we had to write papers stressed strongly the concept of academic integrity, and that plagiarism was unacceptable. I've seen people fail classes because they didn't properly cite their sources, etc.
Nothing to do with morals, so relax. It's just the fact that you cannot make it through college without hearing at least once that you cannot copy other people's work.
Where I went to university, plagiarism would result in suspension or expelling, not just failing the class. There were always a few cases a year, and that info was always published so everyone at the university got to know when it happened. I went to an engineering university so the amount of papers to write was pretty light, but even if you managed to avoid courses with it, you couldn't avoid the news about it. It was just very strongly drilled into everyone that plagiarising is something you Do Not Do.
Summary and analysis of a topic based on reference materials is a prerequisite for any academic research, hence University students are given this kind of exercise all the time.
Any University graduate should have learned that cut+paste = failing grade.
As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.
http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/?agency=CALIFORNIA+HIGHWAY+PA...